‘some lines of mine about …’. Letter IHR to GC, 26 Feb 1858.
‘A Woman and Her Master’ … See Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, Vol. 19 (1853).
a work of ‘deep & thoughtful philosophy’. Letter IHR to GC, 11 Dec 1852, referring to Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics; or, The Conditions Essential to Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (1851).
‘the degradation … atmosphere of command’. See first edition of Social Statics, published in 1851. That year Marian Evans met and fell in love with Herbert Spencer. He rejected her, and by the summer of 1852, Evans felt herself doomed to spinsterhood: ‘You know how sad one feels when a great procession has swept by one,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘and the last notes of its music have died away, leaving one alone with the fields and the sky.’ Spencer subsequently repudiated his proto-feminist ideas, and erased them almost completely from the edition of Social Statics published in 1856. See Nancy Paxton’s George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender (1991).
He had recently been granted a patent … Patent sealed on 8 Apr 1853, and described in Newton’s London Journal of Arts & Sciences in 1854.
was dark where his brothers were fair … GC’s journal, 30 Aug 1856. Combe examined the heads of the Lane boys, noting that Arthur had large organs of Benevolence, Adhesiveness, Conscientiousness and Wonder; William, who his parents thought ‘soft and dull’, had large Philoprogenitiveness and Adhesiveness; while Sydney had ‘large, enormous Wonder’ and a small faculty of Conscientiousness: ‘He will have a difficulty in keeping to truth’, Combe concluded.
from which Edward sent several letters to Isabella. EWL’s testimony to Divorce Court, 23 Nov 1858.
its ‘shady lanes’ and ‘murmuring river’. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 3 Apr 1851 (EWL identified as author in authors’ ledger, RC papers, NLS).
On their return … Robinsons for a day and a night. EWL’s testimony to Divorce Court, 23 Nov 1858.
‘cheating November of its gloom … likes very much.’ Letter HOR to GC, 25 Dec 1853.
her first husband’s brother. George Dansey and his wife had lived a couple of houses down the hill from Edward and Isabella in Ludlow in 1841, according to the census returns.
who lived with his family in Tasmania. John Walker was accountant to a bank in Derwent, where he was trying to establish himself as a teacher.
It was, Mrs Ellis wrote … own houses’. Sarah Ellis’s husband was the educational reformer William Ellis, a friend of Combe. The Combes and the Ellises toured south Wales together in the summer of 1852, despite the fact that disquieting rumours about Ellis had reached Combe in Edinburgh: he was said to be ‘viciously licentious in his conduct in respect to women’, Combe wrote to a friend in 1850; ‘he had even communicated disease to his wife’. Letter GC to M. B. Sampson, Jul 1850.
CHAPTER 4: MY IMAGINATION HEATED AS THOUGH WITH REALITIES
In 1854 a new man … John Thom had been previously employed as a teacher in Germany and Edinburgh. Letter IHR to GC, 28 Feb 1854.
His letters … Isabella exchanged. In a conversation reported in a letter from GC to Sir James Clark, 4 Jan 1858.
They ‘proceed from … impressions of the other.’ Catherine Crowe, The Night Side of Nature (1848), p. 42. ‘One faculty, or more than one, bursts asunder the bonds which enthralled it,’ wrote Robert Macnish in The Philosophy of Sleep (1830), ‘while its fellows continue chained in sleep … and thereby indulges in the maddest and most extravagant thoughts.’
‘Dreaming all night … and Mr Lane.’ The entries refer to Edward as ‘Mr Lane’ rather than ‘Dr Lane’, which should suggest that they were written before he qualified in the summer of 1853; but Isabella seems not to have started to call him ‘Dr’ until seeing him in situ at his water-cure spa in the summer of 1854.
‘the accumulation … going mad’. From ‘Cassandra’, written in 1852 but not published during its author’s lifetime; quoted in Mark Bostridge’s Florence Nightingale (2008), p. 372.
‘passional nature … evil of dreaming’. In a note made on 24 Dec 1850, quoted in Bostridge’s Florence Nightingale, p. 127.
The story of Mrs Crowe’s … to the world. Catherine Crowe Collection, Kent University, F191882; The Letters of Charles Dickens and RC papers, NLS. The episode is investigated in ‘Naked as nature intended? Catherine Crowe in Edinburgh, Feb 1854’, a blog posted by Mike Dash on www.aforteaninthearchives.wordpress.com on 29 Sep 2010. The Catherine Crowe Collection also contains a letter about the episode from Marian Evans to GC, which expresses sympathy for Mrs Crowe and her great friends, the Combes.
At the end of May, Henry abandoned … Isabella said that the school failed to win support because of local opposition to social and religious liberalism; and also because Henry was too busy in London. Letter IHR to GC, 25 Sep 1854.
When Thom left the Robinsons’ … By the mid-nineteenth century, the neighbourhood’s cachet had declined a little, chiefly because of the ugly new military camp at Aldershot, and it had become affordable to entrepreneurs such as Smethurst and Lane. Smethurst set up his establishment at Moor Park in 1851, when he took out advertisements in The Lancet and The Critic. He was later to be tried for bigamy and murder.
Thom accepted Isabella’s suggestion … Letter from Mary Butler to CD, Dec 1862. For this and subsequent letters to and from Charles Darwin, see Darwin’s correspondence database online at www.darwinproject.ac.uk.
The consultation fee … Information from ‘Moor Park Hydropathic Establishment [a Prospectus]’ (1856) Combe Collection, NLS; and letter CD to William Fox, 10 Apr 1859.
and Atty continued to be prone … The six-year-old boy was ‘in a precarious state’, in the autumn of 1854, Isabella told GC in a letter of 25 Sep 1854.
The theory was that immersion … See, for example, E. S. Turner’s Taking the Cure (1967); J. Bradley’s Taking the Watercure (1997); and Alastair Durie’s essay in Repositioning Victorian Sciences (2006).
Edward Lane said that many … Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Confessions of a Water Patient (1846) noted that hydropathy spas were frequented by those who lived ‘hard and high, wine-drinkers, spirit-bibbers’.
his ‘everlasting species-Book’ … Letter CD to Charles Lyell, 13 Apr 1857.
‘I have seen many cases … distressingly great.’ Letter of 1882 from EWL to Dr B. W. Richardson, read out at a lecture in St George’s Hall, Langham Place, 22 Oct 1882. Information on Darwin at Moor Park from Ralph Colp’s Darwin’s Illness (2008) and from Darwin’s correspondence.
Edward said that … he had to ‘struggle …‘To the minds of a large number of persons,’ wrote Lane, ‘a water-cure establishment is a country retreat for patients, where a kind of merry inquisition goes on from morning to night, a jocular torture in sport. The patients are pictured as everlastingly gibbering in cold and wet sheets, in a state, it must be presumed, of the highest discomfort, to say the least, and only tolerable to poor deluded mortals who have well-nigh parted with their senses.’ Lane’s Hydropathy (1857).
She caught a train from Reading … his own pace’. Description of the house and the grounds at Moor Park in this and the following chapter from Marianne Young’s Aldershot, and All About It (1857); ‘Moor Park, As It Was and Is’, an anonymous piece in the New Monthly Magazine, May 1855; Black’s Guide to Surrey (1861); Charles T. Tallent-Bateman’s A Home Historical: Moor Park, Surrey (1885); Sketches of the Camp at Aldershot (anon, 1858); Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The History of England from the Accession of James II (1848); Richard John King’s A Handbook for Travellers in Surrey, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight (1865); Egerton Brydges’ The Autobiography, Times, Opinions, and Contemporaries of Sir Egerton Brydges (1834); Dinah Mulock’s ‘The Water-Cure’ (1855) and A Life for a Life (1860); and personal observation.
To the right of the terrace … Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park includes a reference to ‘a Moor Park’, a strain of apricot cultivated by Sir William Temple.
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?She who is faithfully … romance.’ Cited in Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: a Political History of the Novel (1987), p. 274.
The plot on which Henry was building … Particulars and plan in Balmore House estate sale catalogues (1861 and 1865), Local Studies Dept, Reading Central Library.
The next month, Thom took a post … Letter IHR to GC, 25 Sep 1854. Thom ‘finds the office an interesting and satisfactory one,’ Isabella told Combe. Information on Duleep Singh (1838–93) from Amandeep Singh Madra’s entry in ODNB.
he ‘clings to my heartstrings … his image.’ Quoted in Cockburn’s judgment on the case, 2 Mar 1859.
In the summer of 1854 Henry checked … HOR’s answer to IHR’s Bill of Complaint in the Court of Chancery, 17 Apr 1858, NA, C15/550/R24.
They argued – … HOR’s response of 1 Feb 1862, Divorce Court file, NA, J77/44/R4; IHR’s reply of 4 Mar 1862; and letter IHR to GC, 26 Feb 1858.
Though he had refused the £15 … HOR’s answer to IHR’s Bill of Complaint in the Court of Chancery, 17 Apr 1858, NA, C15/550/R24.
Albert now lived in Westminster … Census returns of 1851, The Daily News of 2 Dec 1852 (on the flotation of shares in the Eastern Steam Navigation Company) and The Morning Chronicle of 27 Jun 1853 (on the schooner Dolphin’s trip to Greenland).
Albert refused to pay Henry … See The Daily News, 3 Aug 1854.
CHAPTER 5: AND I KNEW THAT I WAS WATCHED
Isabella twice visited … Divorce Court file, NA, J77/44/R4.
Elizabeth Drysdale … of the great establishment’. In Henrietta Litchfield’s Emma Darwin, Wife of Charles Darwin: Vol. II (1904).
‘Dr Lane & wife … Letter CD to J. D. Hooker, 25 Jun 1857.
He did not subscribe … can explain’. Letter CD to W. D. Fox, 30 Apr 1857.
George Combe agreed … good nature & frankness’. Letter GC to M. B. Sampson, 11 Jan 1858.
Combe remarked … depended on women’. Letter GC to Sir James Clark, 19 Dec 1857.
‘Benevolence and Love … their kindness.’ Letter GC to M. B. Sampson, 11 Jan 1858.
Good company … his own ailments’. Lane’s Hydropathy (1857).
‘There are few pleasures … fellow creatures.’ Letter EWL to GC, 23 Aug 1857.
‘very … agreeable, Society’. GC’s journal, 28 Aug 1856.
‘kindness and attention’ of his hosts … Alexander Bain, Autobiography (1904); it was he who recommended the establishment to Darwin.
All the residents ate together … at seven) … EWL’s evidence, 23 Nov 1858.
‘I have been playing … splendid strokes!’ Letter CD to W. E. Darwin, 3 May 1858.
‘The physician has his patients …’ Lane’s Hydropathy (1857).
‘I strolled a little … had been formed.’ Letter CD to Emma Darwin, 28 Apr 1858.
‘what a play of forces … becomes extinct.’ Letter CD to J. D. Hooker, 3 Jun 1857.
‘I had such a piece … Master’s nests.’ Letter CD to J. D. Hooker, 6 May 1858. The slave-makers were Formica sanguinea and their slaves Formica nigra.
‘thare whare a grate many eggs …’ Letter from J. Burmingham to CD, 10 Sep 1858.
Darwin took … part of the body). Letter CD to W. D. Fox, 30 Apr 1857.
For dyspeptics … directed at the pelvis. See Rachel P. Maines’s The Technology of Orgasm (1999).
To take Edward’s hot air bath … GC’s journal, 29 Aug 1856.
Another enthusiast … as an ostrich’. See Captain J. K. Lukis’s The Common Sense of the Water Cure (1862). The sitz-bath – which resembled a sixteen-foot-wide washing tub – was recommended by Lane’s predecessor, Smethurst, as a treatment for diseases of the womb, as well as constipation: the patient should sit in the tub and rub his or her stomach for ten or fifteen minutes a day, he suggested. William Temple’s Of Health and Long Life (1701, edited by Jonathan Swift) also recommended hot bathing: it ‘opens the pores, provokes Sweat, and thereby allays Heat; supples the joints and sinews’. Friction, wrote Temple, ‘is the best way of all forced Perspiration … I have heard of Persons, who were said to cure several Diseases by stroaking’.
When taking the water … the actual hour’. See Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Confessions of a Water-Patient (1845).
The illnesses … hypochondriasis and hysteria. According to Lane’s predecessor at Moor Park, Thomas Smethurst, in his Hydrotherapia (1843).
conditions thought … body and the mind. See Jane Wood’s Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (2001).
The novelist Dinah Mulock … and an easy mind’. See her novel A Life for a Life (1860). For hypochondria, including an account of Darwin’s illness, see Brian Dillon’s Tormented Hope:Nine Hypochondriac Lives (2009).
In an influential work … to conceal them’. See Robert Brudenell Carter’s On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria (1853).
‘I am afraid it cannot … the monomania’. Dinah Mulock in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, Vol. 7 (1857), reprinted in A Woman’s Thoughts About Women (1858).
‘My object here … read much novels.’ Letter CD to Charles Lyell, 26 Apr 1858.
‘Mrs Lane agrees … written by a man!’ Letter CD to Emma Darwin, 25 Apr 1858. ‘Beneath’ the Surface is Darwin’s error – Below the Surface is the correct title.
the novelist and poet Marguerite Agnes Power … See Adrian Room’s Dictionary of Pseudonyms: 13,000 Assumed Names and their Origins (fifth edition, 2010).
‘I like Miss Craik … – on every subject? Letter CD to Emma Darwin, 28 Apr 1858, and footnote.
‘never was anyone more genial … and animated.’ Letter of 1882, EWL to Dr B. W. Richardson, read out at a lecture in St George’s Hall, Langham Place, 22 Oct 1882.
A water-cure spa … A census return that records the guests at Lane’s hydropathic spa (from 1861, by which time it had relocated to Richmond) lists eight unmarried men and four unmarried women aged between twenty and forty-one, as well as three adolescent girls (two of them unaccompanied) and a married couple with two daughters. About twelve servants, including bath attendants, catered to them and the Lane family.
Occasionally … ‘disgusted’ her. Cited in letter from GC to EWL, 23 Feb 1858.
In 1855, Miss Mulock published … Dinah Mulock’s ‘The Water-Cure’ appeared in the Dublin University Magazine, Apr 1855, and was collected in Nothing New:Tales (1857).
A lawyer from Lincoln’s … I call it divine.’ See ‘Moor Park, As It Was and Is’, New Monthly Magazine, May 1855.
In this cave … Temple’s housekeeper. Victorian commentators were disapproving of Swift’s libertinism and his ruthless treatment of Esther and the other women he wooed: see, for instance, William Howitt’s Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (1857), which accused him of a tendency to ‘pluck and torture’ the hearts of women.
‘The meadows interlaced … taller woods.’ Swift’s ‘A Description of Mother Ludwell’s Cave’ (1692–93), reproduced in Collected Poems by Jonathan Swift (1958), ed. Joseph Horrell.
Goethe’s most famous novel … The urgent intimacy with which Isabella spoke to her diary – the exclamations and apostrophes – was similar in style to that of the introspective, despairing, love-struck Werther: ‘My only consolation is: She may have turned to look back at me! Perhaps! Good night! Oh, what a child am I!’, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1787).
‘we spoke of his early age, thirty-one … Isabella did not mention that it was Edward’s birthday, although the reference to his age may have been prompted by that fact. If he was thirty-one, he was born in 1823; but he was later to argue that his date of birth was 10 Oct 1822, which would have made him twenty-one in Feb 1844, old enough to be assigned part of his father’s estate. This became crucial in 1864, when the estate was divided upon Elisha Lane’s death, and the children of his second wife (whom he had married in Montreal in 1848) tried to claim it all as their own – see The Lower Canada Jurist, Vol. VIII (1864).
The late-eighteenth-century guide … coach cushions altogethe
r. Harris’s List was published in 1788; quoted in Stone’s Road to Divorce (1990), p. 110.
CHAPTER 6: THE FUTURE HORRIBLE
At Boulogne harbour … For Boulogne, see Charles Dickens, ‘Our French Watering-place’, Household Words, 4 Nov 1854; A. C. G. Jobert’s The French-Pronouncing Hand-Book for Tourists and Travellers (1853); and John Murray’s HandBook for Travellers in France (1854).
‘We have established ourselves … town.’ Letter IHR to GC, 17 Nov 1854.
Now they joined … The school was unusual in refraining from the use of corporal punishment, according to Henry Melville Merridew’s Visitor’s Guide to Boulogne (1864).
More than 7,000 British … Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in France (1854).
‘It is a bright, airy, pleasant … bonnes in snow-white caps.’ Dickens’s ‘Our French Watering-place’.
That November … See The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Slingsby Duncombe: late MP for Finsbury, Vol. 2 (1868).
When Henry visited Boulogne … Letter IHR to GC, 28 Feb 1855.
‘unhappy turn of mind … delusions’. Quoted in Cockburn’s judgment, 2 Mar 1859.
she had ‘nothing bright … information, or reproof.’ Letter IHR to GC, 17 Nov 1854.
Combe wrote back … act out our love in good deeds.’ Letter GC to IHR, 7 Dec 1854.
‘Nature alone cures … act upon him.’ Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing (1860).
On 10 October … in early November. In spite of her new vocation, Nightingale continued to be plagued by ill health and nervous conditions, for which she sought help at the hydropathic clinic at Malvern in 1857 and 1858. She was mildly scornful about hydropathy – ‘a highly popular amusement … amongst athletic invalids who have felt the tedium vitae and those indefinite diseases which a large income and unbounded leisure are so well calculated to produce’ – but she admitted that her spell at Malvern did her good. See Bostridge’s Florence Nightingale, p. 125.