Robert Chambers felt obliged to justify his decision to publish such views. He added a postscript to the essay: ‘Our contributor, while perhaps more than sufficiently earnest in depicting what we must believe an exceptive case, is right in looking for a remedy … it may in time appear that much less risk is incurred than is now generally supposed, by ruling that a wretched woman may go away with her children from an intolerable husband.’
In the summer of 1853, Edward, Mary and Lady Drysdale visited the Robinsons at Ripon Lodge. Henry was still busy with his sugar mills. He had recently been granted a patent on a coupling disc that could yoke together a new engine and an older mill: the end of the engine’s gear shaft was driven into one groove on the iron disc, and the tongue of the mill’s top roller into another. Edward had just qualified as a physician – a gentleman doctor, expert in diagnosis rather than surgery – and he and his family were passing through Berkshire on their way to the Continent, where they planned to spend a month’s holiday. They asked Isabella, who had been so kind to their children in Edinburgh, if they could leave their sons with her while they were abroad. Arthur and William were five and two. Mary Lane had by now had another son, Sydney Edward Hamilton, born in 1852, who was dark where his brothers were fair; it may have been in honour of Isabella that he was christened ‘Hamilton’, as she and Alfred both bore this middle name.
The Lanes and Lady Drysdale travelled to the spa town of Baden in Germany, from which Edward sent several letters to Isabella. He had already visited a hydropathy spa in Scotland and the Bagni di Lucca hot springs in Italy – in a piece he wrote for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in 1851 he praised the Tuscan resort for its ‘shady lanes’ and ‘murmuring river’. Now that he was ready to practise as a doctor, he was making plans for a water-cure retreat of his own, an airy world of glass, water, lawns and sunlight.
On their return to England, Edward Lane and his family stopped at Ripon Lodge to collect the boys, and stayed with the Robinsons for a day and a night.
‘I long to know if he thought of me and ever missed me,’ Isabella confided in an undated diary entry, ‘though in my serious moments I do not at all believe that he does.’ She admonished herself: ‘How can any one so busy, so beloved, and so admired spare one thought on a plain, awkward-mannered, and distant friend? Good God! I could coin my life’s drops if that were possible for his advantage, and ask only to be loved while dying; and he – why should this disparity in affection exist? – he only thinks of me as a quondam acquaintance. Alas!’ In moods like this, she valued herself as lowly as she set him high – she was unattractive and graceless, she lamented, where he was loved and prized by all. Her wish to coin her ‘life’s drops’ for Edward was a wish to turn her blood to gold for his gain, to offer herself up for him.
The Robinsons themselves took a trip to Europe in the foggy winter of 1853 – ‘cheating November of its gloom’, as Henry described it in a letter to Combe. For six or seven weeks the family toured the northern French towns of Calais, St Omer, Lille and Boulogne. ‘Our stay was chiefly at the last,’ wrote Henry, ‘which Mrs Robinson likes very much.’
The family was back in Ripon Lodge by the end of the year. On the first day of 1854, Isabella got up early (at a quarter to eight), did the accounts, finished her journal for 1853 and began a fresh volume. She strove to be patient and practical with her moody husband and sons. ‘This day was cold, frosty, with east wind,’ she noted, ‘sunny till noon, and cheering. Not well in night, but better on rising, and felt cheerful. Restored good humour to Henry by my sunshine, and greeted the children affectionately, though they seemed rather gloomy.’
Henry had started to build a house for the family at Caversham, a suburb four miles north of Ripon Lodge, and over breakfast he and Isabella discussed what to name it. The two of them then read with the boys. Afterwards, in private, Isabella counted up her letters of the previous year: ‘189 received, and 26 notes; 214 written, and 54 notes’. As she made a tally of her correspondence, she also drew up a list of the acquaintances and relatives who had died, among them her first husband’s brother, George Dansey, ‘once a friend but recently a stranger and alienated’; two aunts on her mother’s side; and two sons of her eldest brother, John, who lived with his family in Tasmania. This annual stock-taking, which was common in diaries of the time, inspired Isabella at least to try to pray: ‘May the Great Author of the being of all beings here on Earth direct our steps, and lead us to acknowledge and perceive the presence of good and order in the midst of seeming contradiction, pain, and sorrow.’
At half past one Isabella took a walk with Alfred and Stanley. To begin with, her eldest boy was ‘dull and out of sorts’, she said, but all their spirits were lifted by the cold air and the sight of the snowy hills. On their return, Isabella was brought down again by Henry. ‘Dinner good, but Henry sulky and determined to find fault.’ Since she was in charge of the household, his criticisms of the meal were directed at her. ‘Read to children after dinner, and then had a long discussion with him as to the causes of his discontent. He railed at the servants, wanted a man-servant (with whom he would disagree in a month); wanted a study; wished I was a more active housekeeper; complained of cold, and planned how to spend less of his time here and more in London.’ She responded calmly to his attacks on her domestic management, and to his determination to spend as little time as possible with his family. ‘I said all I could think of to bring him to some degree of reason; remarked on the selfishness of complaints, the reasonableness of making the best of things, and pointed out several small things that might be done to make matters better.’
Isabella’s behaviour that day seemed designed as a message to herself, a new year’s resolution in action. She was trying to act in accordance with such conduct books as Sarah Stickney Ellis’s The Wives of England (1843), which argued that a woman’s mission was to submit to her husband and devote herself to creating a comfortable and serene home. It was, Mrs Ellis wrote, ‘unquestionably the inalienable right of all men, whether ill or well, rich or poor, wise or foolish, to be treated with deference, and made much of in their own houses’. To bring a man happiness was a wife’s gift and privilege. As Coventry Patmore observed in his narrative poem The Angel in the House (1854), ‘Man must be pleased, but him to please/ Is woman’s pleasure.’
Isabella did her best to suffer Henry’s rudeness and bad temper in silence, to wait lovingly for the cloud of his discontent to pass. She stayed with him until he was less vexed, and then went out for another walk with Alfred: ‘The wind had sunk, and it was agreeable.’ They came in for tea at eight o’clock, after which she and Henry spent another hour discussing the name of their new house. At half past nine she wrote her journal, and completed some exercises in Latin – though no longer able to attend lectures and classes as she had in Edinburgh, she was still trying to correct the deficiencies of her education. By eleven Isabella was in bed: ‘and so closed the first day of the year,’ she told her diary, ‘not unpleasantly, though in some measure spoiled by Henry’s ill-humour’. She had been left ‘wearied and ruffled’, she wrote, by the ‘thorough unamiableness of his disposition’.
See Notes on Chapter 3
4
MY IMAGINATION HEATED AS
THOUGH WITH REALITIES
Berkshire & Moor Park, 1854
In 1854 a new man entered Isabella’s life and the pages of her journal: John Pringle Thom, a Scot of about twenty-four, employed by Henry to be the first teacher at the day school that he planned to set up in Berkshire. Henry’s school had not yet got off the ground – he was finding little support for his progressive project among the conservative residents of the district and he was in any case preoccupied by his business in London. In the meantime, John Thom took lodgings in Reading and acted as an English tutor to the Robinson boys.
Thom arrived at Ripon Lodge at half past nine in the morning of 24 March 1854, a dry, cold, gusty day. He gave a lesson to Otway, now nine, while Isabella supervised the studies of Alfre
d, thirteen, and Stanley, who had just turned five. Until her sons went to school, she was in charge of their education. After Otway’s class, she chatted to Thom. ‘I was really sorry for the young man,’ she wrote in her diary; ‘he was lifeless, dispirited, and lonely. Mr Robinson had brought him to Reading and now seemed [to be] deserting him. I resolved to show him that I was conscious of his situation.’ She too felt abandoned by Henry to a barren provincial life.
Over the next three months, Isabella’s compassionate attachment to her sons’ tutor became febrile and needy. She was by turns caught in a ‘storm of passion and excitement’ and cast into a ‘languid and sorrowful’ decline, always hoping that the next encounter with him might answer her desires.
She anticipated her appointments with Thom as anxiously as if he had been her lover. ‘My thoughts went often and with somewhat of terror to my planned meeting with Mr Thom,’ she wrote in an undated entry, ‘and yet an unutterable yearning drove me onward. Tried all I could to reason myself calm, but in vain.’ To her dismay, he did not turn up to this meeting. ‘Had he possessed or returned a tithe of my real interest in him, he had not so lightly set at nought my invitation. I was crushed, humbled, as I had often been on other occasions, and really cursed the excitable nervousness and clinging emptiness of my heart.
‘If I could only live alone,’ she wrote, ‘if I could only banish all longing for companionship and participation of mental pleasures, I might get on tolerably. As it is, my life is one tissue of excitement, of suffering, of inconsistency. What shall I do?’
Isabella’s attraction to Thom had not dispelled her feelings for Edward Lane, to whom she sent a flurry of notes and letters. ‘Mr Lane still silent,’ ran an undated entry, ‘did not even reply to my query, would he like to hear from me? Felt indignant and surprised. I supposed that his personal presence (which is all that is courteous and gracious), is all that his friends can have from him. Absent, they are forgotten.’ It seemed not to have occurred to her that Edward’s silence might have been deliberate, an attempt to separate himself from an infatuated friend. Once he and Isabella were apart, his prudence reasserted itself. His letters, when they came, were necessarily cautious: he later said that Mary read every word that he and Isabella exchanged.
Isabella did, bleakly, allow that Edward might not reciprocate her feelings. ‘Looked at Mr Lane’s last two letters,’ ran one entry. ‘That written at Christmas gave me much pleasure, it is so fresh and clever. But whenever I look at them I feel how widely different is the tame friendship he feels and professes for me and the absorbing regard I feel for him. Would it were otherwise.’ This realism did little to stop her daydreams: ‘In loneliness and in enjoyment,’ she wrote, ‘his voice, his look, come freshly back, and I long for his society. I fear time, which takes from my power of attraction, takes away nothing from passionate and uncontrollable feelings.’
In sleep, Isabella was besieged by sensual fantasies, reveries far richer and more beguiling than her dull, empty days. ‘Had confused dreams of Mr Lane in night,’ she wrote on 24 March 1854, ‘and woke with my imagination heated as though with realities. I thought of the subjects that had occupied my sleeping moments all day. I was alternately depressed and excited, and the day was desultory.’
Phrenologists believed that dreams issued from regions of the brain that broke free while reason slept. They ‘proceed from some parts of the brain being less at rest than the others,’ wrote Catherine Crowe in The Night Side of Nature; ‘so that, assuming phrenology to be fact, one organ is not in a state to correct the impressions of the other.’ Sometimes this correction did not take place even when the dreamer woke. In Sleep and Dreams (1851), John Addington Symons explained how, in such cases, a person upon waking ‘looks out on a new world projected from his own inner being. By a melancholy power, a fatal gift, of appropriating and assimilating the real objects perceived by his senses, he takes possession of them, nay, disembodies them, and fuses them into his imaginary creation.’
In one dream, Isabella found herself taking flight at night with Edward Lane and her older sons, Alfred and Otway. Mary Lane pursued and overtook them, halting Edward’s escape; Isabella, chased by Henry and a figure identified only as ‘C’, carried on running. ‘I never had any dream which took such entire possession of my soul,’ she wrote. ‘I hurried to finish my morning’s avocations, that I might write it down in the form of a story; and all day I could not forget it or hardly realise how much of it was true and how much false. Good God! What puppets of the imagination are we?’ She was disturbed and excited by the way that her dreams leaked into her days. The night visions were fragments from an alternate world, intimations of freedom. ‘Dreaming all night of absent friends, romantic situations, and Mr Lane,’ ran another entry. ‘Oh! Why are dreams more blest than waking life?’
Florence Nightingale, in an essay written in the early 1850s, described ‘the accumulation of nervous energy’ that built up in women such as herself and ‘makes them feel … when they go to bed, as if they are going mad’. She ascribed the intensity of her dreams to her ‘passional nature’ – marriage, she thought, might ‘at least secure me from the evil of dreaming’. Isabella’s dreams, too, were driven by erotic yearnings; and they seemed, in turn, to fire her literary ambitions, waking her in the morning with the urge to set it all down on paper. Her craving for physical contact spilled over into a wish to write. ‘Strange, romantic dream at dawn till I rose,’ Isabella wrote. ‘I have often the plot and groundwork of a novel in my mind during sleep, with names, scenes, and all perfect, yet quite unconnected with aught that has occurred to myself, and I long for the pen of a ready writer to note all down at the time.’
That year, one of the novelists whom Isabella had met in Scotland seemed to cross completely into a world of fantasy. In late February, the sixty-four-year-old Catherine Crowe, who had long since separated from her husband, was found wandering naked through the streets near her home in Darnaway Street, off Moray Place. Charles Dickens reported on Mrs Crowe’s strange turn in a letter of 7 March 1854: she ‘had gone stark mad – and stark naked … She was found t’other day in the street, clothed only in her chastity, a pocket-handkerchief and a visiting-card. She had been informed, it appeared, by the spirits, that if she went in that trim she would be invisible. She is now in a madhouse, and, I fear, hopelessly insane.’
Catherine Crowe was treated briefly at a private asylum in Highgate, just north of London, by the famous alienist – or ‘mad doctor’ – John Conolly. ‘When she came here, her delusions had passed away like a dream,’ Dr Conolly told her friend George Combe. ‘Is there not some Epidemic influence raging, affecting the brains of multitudes with vain belief, as in the Middle Ages with a propensity to perpetual dancing?’ Mrs Crowe moved on from Highgate to the hydropathic spa at Malvern, to take the water cure. In a letter published in the Daily News of 29 April, she denied that she was mad, but acknowledged that she had been ill in February with a ‘chronic gastric inflammation’, and during a period of unconsciousness had fancied that spirits were guiding her.
The story of Mrs Crowe’s naked ramble was confirmed by Robert Chambers, who in a letter of 4 March 1854 explained how the novelist’s friends, finding her unclothed near her house, had rescued her from her ‘terrible condition of mad exposure’. She had thought herself invisible, but had ended up stripped of all dignity and reason, her delusions laid bare to the world.
At the end of May, Henry abandoned his plans to start a school and gave John Thom notice to leave his post as tutor. Isabella was distraught. On Saturday 3 June – a fair day, with gleams of sunlight and a fresh, northerly wind – she sent Alfred to fetch Thom from his lodgings in the London Road, on the eastern edge of Reading. She had not seen the young man in a week, and was engulfed by worry when he did not come at once: ‘depressed, anxious, miserable, restless, tears in eyes’. She dressed and ordered dinner, still hoping that he would turn up. At last he came: ‘At 12 I heard his voice with boys, but was too much agita
ted to see him, and ran to room as pale as a ghost, but, recovering a little, descended and saw him in my room.’ He seemed as wan and anxious as she. ‘He was looking thin, pale, worn, agitated, hopeless. I never saw any one so sadly changed in a week; his great eyes seemed like pale violets, shaded with heavy, drooping lids; his cheeks were hollow, and there was a look of intense dejection about his whole person. He said he had been ill, and in despair at so abrupt a dismissal.’ Where he was emptied out, Isabella became over-full with answering emotion, brimming with tears, suffused with heat. ‘I could hardly command myself to talk, and had a wretched headache; my cheeks flushed, tears came every second to my eyes, and my voice was choked.’
When she regained her composure, they talked ‘long and earnestly’. Isabella criticised Henry for his ‘pride and tenacity’ in sacking John Thom so suddenly. Thom confessed that he did not know what he could do next. ‘He detailed his sufferings, his wretched sufferings; drudgery in Scotland; exclusion from everything, owing to not being an University man.’ She sympathised with his plight – like her, he was under-educated, shut out from power, condemned to tedious tasks – and she tried to cheer him with ideas for the future: ‘we named plans, most if not all hopeless’.