When Edward Lane first read the diary, this entry in particular drew his anger and scorn: ‘The address to the Reader!’ he wrote to Combe. ‘Who is the Reader? Was this precious journal, then, intended for publication, or if not quite so bad as that, was it meant for an heirloom for her family? On either supposition, I say there is clear madness here – and if there were not another passage in the whole farrago to warrant that view, to my mind this one alone wd be sufficient.’
Yet Isabella’s address to an imagined reader might, on the contrary, point to the clearest explanation of all for why she kept her diary. Part of her, at least, wanted to be heard. She harboured a hope that somebody considering her words after her death would hesitate before damning her; that her story might one day be met with compassion, even love. In the absence of a spiritual afterlife, we were the only future she had.
‘Good night,’ she ended, with a desolate blessing: ‘May you be more happy!’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to the staff of the British Library, the London Library, the National Archives and the Wellcome Library in London; to the staff of the local record offices in Hereford, Reading, Shrewsbury and Whitehaven; to Pauline Dunne at the National Archives in Dublin and to Alison Metcalfe at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. For permission to quote from their archives, thanks to the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, to the Cumbria Archive & Local Studies Centre (Whitehaven) and to the Tairawhiti Museum in Gisborne, New Zealand. Many thanks to Meg Vivers for sharing her excellent research into the Robinson family; to Mark Robinson for his information about his great-great-grandfather; and to Phyllis Ray and Ruth Walker for passing on their knowledge of the Walkers. For arranging for me to look round some of the houses in which Isabella Robinson and her friends lived, I am grateful to Clynt Wellington in Surrey; to Ann and Freddy Johnston in Ludlow; and to Florence Shanks and Lucinda Miller in Edinburgh.
Thanks to all the friends and family who have helped me with this book, among them Lorna Bradbury, Alex Clark, Toby Clements, Will Cohu, Tamsin Currey, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Claudia FitzHerbert, Miranda Fricker, Stephen Grosz, Victoria Lane, Ruth Metzstein, Sinclair McKay, Daniel Nogués, Marina Nogués, Tasio Nogués, Stephen O’Connell, Kathy O’Shaughnessy, Robert Randall, John Ridding, Wycliffe Stutchbury, Ben Summerscale, Juliet Summerscale, the late Peter Summerscale, Lydia Syson, Frances Wilson, Keith Wilson, the mothers who meet at the Coffee Cup in Hampstead and the writers who meet at the Novel History Salon in Bloomsbury. Thank you especially to my son, Sam.
A big thank you to my agent, David Miller, as ever; to his colleagues at Rogers, Coleridge & White, including Stephen Edwards, Alex Goodwin and Laurence Laluyaux; and to Julia Kreitman of The Agency in London and Melanie Jackson in New York. My thanks to Richard Rose for his excellent suggestions and advice. Thank you to everyone at Bloomsbury in London for making the publication process such a pleasure, among them Geraldine Beare, Richard Charkin, Jude Drake, Sarah-Jane Forder, Alexa von Hirschberg, Nick Humphrey, Kate Johnson, David Mann, Paul Nash, Anya Rosenberg, Alice Shortland, Anna Simpson and – particularly – my editor, Alexandra Pringle, whose guidance has been invaluable. Many thanks also to the other publishers who have supported this project: George Gibson and the rest of Bloomsbury in New York, Ann-Catherine Geuder in Berlin, Dominique Bourgois in Paris, Ludmila Kuznetsova in Moscow, Andrea Canobbio in Turin, Sofia Ribeiro in Lisbon and Henk ter Borg in Amsterdam.
FAMILY TREES
THE ROBINSONS
THE LANES
LIST OF LAWYERS IN THE
ROBINSON DIVORCE TRIAL
THE JUDGES
Sir Alexander Cockburn, Bt, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas
Sir Cresswell Cresswell, Judge Ordinary of the Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes
Sir William Wightman
THE BARRISTERS
For Henry Robinson
Montagu Chambers QC
Jesse Addams QC, DCL
John Karslake
For Isabella Robinson
Robert Phillimore QC, DCL
John Duke Coleridge
For Edward Lane
William Forsyth QC
William Bovill QC
James Deane QC, DCL
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
UNPUBLISHED SOURCES:
Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes file J77/44/R4, containing papers on the Robinson divorce, NA
Court of Chancery file C15/550/R24, Robinson v Robinson, NA
George Combe’s journals for 1856, 1857 and 1858 (MS 7431), NLS
Journal of Robert Chambers (Deps 341/30 and 341/33) and authors’ ledger (Dep 341/289), NLS
Journals and letters of Henry Robinson’s sister Helena Waters and her family, WG Papers
Letters from Mary Drysdale to Jane Williams, in the Clyde Company Papers at the State Library of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Letters of Charles and Bridget Walker and Henry Curwen in Curwen family archives (refs DCu/3/31, DCu/3/81 and 3/7), Cumbria Record Office and Library, Whitehaven, Cumbria
Letters of William Copland and Mary Drysdale to John Murray, John Murray archive, NLS
Letters to and copybook of George Combe between 1850 and 1858: letters by GC from 1850 to April 1854 are in MS 7392; from April 1854 to June 1858 in MS 7393. Letters to GC cited in this book are in MS 7350, MS 7365 and MSS 7369–7374, Combe Collection, NLS
Letters to and from Catherine Crowe in the Catherine Crowe Collection, Templeman Library, Kent University, Canterbury, Kent
Parish records for Ashford Carbonel, Hereford Record Office, Hereford, Herefordshire
Parish records for Ludlow, Salop Record Office, Shrewsbury, Shropshire
Parish records for St Pancras, London Metropolitan Archives, London
Records of the House of Lords, HO/PO/JO/9/9/382–448 (17 June 1859 to 13 June 1861); papers relating to the appeal against the Divorce Court verdict, HLA
PUBLISHED SOURCES:
Newspaper reports relating to the Robinson trial and other divorce cases, June 1858–March 1859: Caledonian Mercury, Daily News, Daily Telegraph, The Era, Examiner, Liverpool Mercury, Manchester Times, Morning Chronicle, Morning Post, Nottinghamshire Guardian, Observer, Reynolds’s Newspaper, The Times
Acton, William, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in the Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations (London, 1857)
Allan, Janice M., ‘Mrs Robinson’s “Day-Book of Iniquity”: Reading Bodies of/and Evidence in the Context of the 1858 Medical Reform Act’, The Female Body in Medicine and Literature, ed. Andrew Mangan and Greta Depledge (Liverpool, 2011)
The Annual Register 1858 (London, 1859)
Anon., A Handy Book on the New Law of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes (London and Dublin, 1860)
—————‘Moor Park, As It Was and Is’, New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 104 (May 1855)
—————‘Moor Park Hydropathic Establishment [a Prospectus]’ (1856)
—————[Charles Dickens], ‘Our French Watering-place’, in Household Words, Vol. 10, No 12 (4 November 1854)
—————[Marianne Young], Sketches of the Camp at Aldershot: also Farnham, Waverley Abbey, Moor Park (Aldershot, 1858)
—————‘The Working of the New Divorce Bill’, The English Woman’s Journal 1 (1858); ‘Act to Amend the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of Last Session’; and ‘Matrimonial Divorce Act’, The English Woman’s Journal 2 (1859)
—————‘The Divorce Court at Work’, Saturday Review (31 December 1858); and ‘A Month in the Divorce Court’, Saturday Review (8 January 1859)
—————‘Divorce a Vinculo; or, the Terrors of Sir Cresswell Cresswell’, Once a Week (six-part series beginning 25 February 1860)
Anonyma, The Serpent on the Hearth: a Mystery of the New Divorce Court (London, 1861)
Arnold, A. J., Iron Shipbuilding on the Thames, 1832–1915: an Economic an
d Business History (Aldershot, 2000)
Auerbach, Nina, ‘The Rise of the Fallen Woman’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 35, No 1 (June 1980)
Baxter, R. D., National Income (London, 1868)
Beizer, Janet, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 1994)
Bell, Acton [Anne Brontë], The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (London, 1848)
Bell, Currer [Charlotte Brontë], Jane Eyre: an Autobiography (London, 1848)
Benn, J. Miriam, Predicaments of Love (London, 1992)
Bennet, J. H., A Practical Treatise on Inflammation of the Uterus, Its Cervix, and Appendages, and on Its Connection with Uterine Disease (third edition, London, 1853)
Berrios, G. E., and Kennedy, N., ‘Erotomania: a Conceptual History’, History of Psychiatry, Vol. 13, No 52 (December 2002)
Black, Adam, and Black, Charles, Black’s Guide Through Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1851)
Blodgett, Harriet, Centuries of Private Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries (New Brunswick, 1989)
—————‘Capacious Hold-All’: an Anthology of Englishwomen’s Diary Writings (Charlottesville, 1991)
Bostridge, Mark, Florence Nightingale: the Woman and Her Legend (London, 2008)
Boyle, Thomas, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism (New York, 1989)
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, The Doctor’s Wife (London, 1864)
Bradley, James, Dupree, Margaret, and Durie, Alastair, ‘Taking the Water-Cure: the Hydropathic Movement in Scotland, 1840–1940’, Business and Economic History, Vol. 26, No 2 (1997)
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, Confessions of a Water Patient (London, 1845)
Bunkers, Suzanne L., and Huff, Cynthia A. (eds), Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Amherst, 1996)
Carter, Kathryn, ‘The Cultural Work of Diaries in Mid-Century Victorian Britain’, Victorian Review, Vol. 23, No 2 (1997)
Carter, Robert Brudenell, On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria (London, 1853)
Chase, Karen, and Levenson, Michael, The Spectacle of Intimacy: a Public Life for the Victorian Family (Princeton, 2000)
Collins, Wilkie, ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’, Household Words, Vol. 14, Nos 330–31 (19–26 July 1856)
—————The Woman in White (London, 1860)
—————Armadale (London, 1866)
Colp Jr, Ralph, Darwin’s Illness (Florida, 2008)
—————‘Charles Darwin, Dr Edward Lane, and the “Singular Trial” of Robinson v Robinson & Lane’, Journal of the History of Medicine, Vol. 36, No 2 (April 1981)
Combe, Andrew, Observations on Mental Derangement: Being an Application of the Principles of Phrenology to the Elucidation of the Causes, Symptoms, Nature and Treatment of Insanity (Edinburgh and London, 1831)
Combe, George, The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects (Edinburgh and London, 1828)
—————Translation from the French of Josef Franz Gall’s On the Functions of the Cerebellum (Edinburgh and London, 1838)
—————A System of Phrenology (fifth edition, Edinburgh and London, 1843)
—————Life and Correspondence of Andrew Combe, MD (Edinburgh, 1850)
—————The Relation between Science and Religion (Edinburgh and London, 1857)
Craik, Georgiana, My First Journal (Cambridge and London, 1860)
Creaton, Heather, ed., Victorian Diaries: the Daily Lives of Victorian Men and Women (London, 2001)
Crowe, Catherine, The Night Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers (London, 1848)
Curwen, John F., A History of the Ancient House of Curwen of Workington in Cumberland (Kendal, 1928)
Dallas, Eneas Sweetland, The Gay Science (London, 1866)
Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London, 1859)
Dawson, Gowan, Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge, 2007)
Delafield, Catherine, Women’s Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Farnham, 2009)
Dickens, Charles, and Lemon, Mark, Mr Nightingale’s Diary: a Farce in One Act (Boston, 1877)
Dillon, Brian, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Dublin, 2009)
Durie, Alastair J., ‘“The Drugs, the Blister and the Lancet are all Laid Aside” – Hydropathy and Medical Orthodoxy in Scotland, 1840– 1900’, Repositioning Victorian Sciences: Shifting Centres in Nineteenth-Century Thinking, eds David Clifford, Elizabeth Wadge, Alexandra Warwick and David Willis (Cambridge, 2006)
Emmerson, George, John Scott Russell (London, 1977)
Esquirol, J. E. D., Mental Maladies: a Treatise on Insanity, trans. E. K. Hunt (New York and London, 1845)
Fenn, Henry Edwin, Thirty-five Years in the Divorce Court (London, 1911)
Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary: Moeurs de province (Paris, 1857); trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling as Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners (London, 1886)
Flint, Kate, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford, 1993)
Foss, Edward, Biographia Juridica: a Biographical Dictionary of the Judges of England from the Conquest to the Present Time (London, 1870)
Fothergill, Robert, Private Chronicles: a Study of English Diaries (Oxford, 1974)
Gay, Peter, Education of the Senses: the Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, Vol. I (Oxford, 1984)
General Medical Council, The Medical Register (London, 1859– 95)
Gibbon, Charles, The Life of George Combe, the Author of ‘The Constitution of Man’ (London, 1878)
Groneman, Carol, ‘Nymphomania: the Historical Construction of Female Sexuality’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 19, No 2 (Winter 1994)
Hager, Kelly, Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: the Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition (Farnham and Burlington, 2010)
Healy, David, Mania: a Short History of Bipolar Disorder (Baltimore, 2008)
Holmes, Ann Sumner, ‘The Double Standard in the English Divorce Laws, 1857–1923’, Law and Social Inquiry, Vol. 20, No 2 (spring 1995)
Hoppen, K. Theodore, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998)
Horstman, Allen, Victorian Divorce (London, 1985)
House, Madeline, Storey, Graham and Tillotson, Kathleen, eds, The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, Vols 6–9, 1850–61 (Oxford, 1988)
Hughes, Edward, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. II: Cumberland and Westmorland, 1700–1830 (Oxford, 1965)
Huff, Cynthia, British Women’s Diaries: a Descriptive Bibliography of Selected Nineteenth-Century Manuscripts (New York, 1985)
Humpherys, Anne, ‘Coming Apart: the British Newspaper Press and the Divorce Court’, Defining Centres: Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, eds Laurel Brake, William Bell and David Finkelstein (London, 2000)
Jameson, Anna Brownell, The Diary of an Ennuyée (London, 1834), originally published as Anon, A Lady’s Diary (London, 1826)
Lane, Edward Wickstead, Hydropathy; or, the Natural System of Medical Treatment: an Explanatory Essay (London, 1857)
—————‘Thesis: Notes on Medical Subjects, Comprising Remarks on the Constitution and Management of British Hospitals, etc.’ (Edinburgh, 1853)
—————Medicine Old and New (London, 1873)
—————‘Letter read by Dr B. W. Richardson FRS at his lecture on Charles Darwin FRS in St George’s Hall, Langham Place, 22 October 1882’ (privately published)
—————Hygienic Medicine: the Teachings of Physiology and Common Sense (London, 1885)
Laqueur, Thomas, Solitary Sex: a Cultural History of Masturbation (New York, 2003)
Leckie, Barbara, Culture and Adultery: the Novel, the Newspaper and the Law, 1857–1914 (Philadelphia, 1999)
Maclaren, Angus, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1978)
Macqueen, John Fraser, A Pra
ctical Treatise on Divorce and Matrimonial Jurisdiction Under the Act of 1857 and New Orders (London, 1858)
Marcus, Stephen, The Other Victorians: a Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York, 1966)
Martens, Lorna, The Diary Novel (Cambridge, 2009)
Martin, Philip W., Mad Women in Romantic Writing (Brighton, 1987)
Mason, Michael, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, 1994)
Mulock, Dinah, ‘The Water Cure’, Dublin University Magazine (April 1855)
—————A Woman’s Thoughts about Women (London, 1858)
—————A Life for a Life (London, 1859)
Munro, J. Forbes, Maritime Enterprise and Empire (Woodbridge, 2003)
Nead, Lynda, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1988)
Norton, Caroline, A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cran-worth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill (London, 1855)
Overton, Bill, The Novel of Female Adultery, 1830–1900 (Basingstoke and London, 1996) The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004)
Phillimore, John George, The Divorce Court: its Evils and the Remedy (London, 1859)
Poovey, Mary, Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988)
Ray, Phyllis M., Ashford Carbonel: a Peculiar Parish; A Brief History (Ludlow, 1998)
Richards, Graham, Mental Machinery: The Origins and Consequences of Psychological Ideas, Part 1: 1600–1850 (London, 1992)
Robertson, Thomas William, My Wife’s Diary (London, circa 1854), an adaptation of a French play by Adolphe d’Ennery, first performed in England under the title The Wife’s Journal
Rose, Phyllis, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (New York, 1983)
Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk, Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience (Ithaca, 2003)
Russett, Cynthia Eagle, Sexual Science: the Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Harvard, 1989)
Sato, Tomoko, ‘E. W. Lane’s Hydropathic Establishment at Moor Park’, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, Vol. 10, No 1 (April 1978)