His distress distracted her from her own: ‘We strolled for half an hour in the garden and I became better, and then dined most cheerfully; but the wretched pallor never left his face.’ They sat in her room afterwards, discussing sculpture, painting and Italy. Isabella offered Thom some coffee and whisky, which he accepted, and he became ‘animated’ enough to walk alongside her and her sons when they took a ride on their horses in the afternoon. Alfred went to Thom’s lodgings – for ‘Dickens, etc.’, she wrote; he may have been collecting some books – and then the young man accompanied Isabella and the boys on horseback to Whiteknights Park. They sat by the lake with their books, but ‘talked too much to read’. Isabella offered Thom a present of £15, which he turned down, and she made a note of his mother’s address, promising that she would write. ‘It was nearly our last interview,’ wrote Isabella, ‘and our feelings were acute though not altogether sad. He was glad, he said, he ever came to Reading; so was I.’ They stayed at the park until it was about to close for the day, when they were asked to leave.
Isabella and the boys returned to Ripon Lodge. Henry reached home in time for tea, and was ‘civil’, Isabella said. They ate together. She wrote for the rest of the evening and went to bed at midnight.
When Thom left the Robinsons’ employ that month, Isabella urged him to visit Edward Lane’s new water-cure establishment at Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey, which lay twenty miles south of Reading. The Lanes and Lady Drysdale had moved down from Edinburgh in March to take over the spa from the well-known hydropathist Dr Thomas Smethurst. Thom accepted Isabella’s suggestion, hoping that a spell at Moor Park might lessen his dependence on tobacco, alcohol and opium. Edward, as a favour to Isabella, may have agreed to treat the impoverished tutor at a reduced rate.
Moor Park was the health retreat of which Edward had dreamed. He advertised his new clinic among his friends in Scotland and in the classified columns of publications such as the Athenaeum, The Morning Post and The Times. Each Tuesday he went to London to interview prospective patients between 10.30 a.m. and 12.30 p.m. at an office in Mayfair. The consultation fee was a guinea and the basic charge for treatment at the spa was three or four guineas a week, with an extra charge of four shillings for those who wanted a bath attendant to wash and rub them, and five for a fire in the bedroom. Edward hoped that he and his family would themselves benefit from the move to a salubrious site in the south. The doctor was ‘always delicate as to health’, said Isabella (he suffered from dyspepsia) and Atty continued to be prone to chest complaints.
Hydropathy, which was introduced to Scotland and England in the 1840s, was becoming a popular treatment for the vague, anxiety-related sicknesses of the mid-nineteenth century. Invalids had long ‘taken the waters’ at spas such as Bath and Buxton, but the new version of the water cure, invented in Silesia by Vincent Priessnitz in the 1830s, aspired to be more scientific and systematic. The theory was that immersion in hot and cold baths and showers could restore health to an unbalanced body. Edward Lane said that many of his patients were the victims of mania, whether an obsession with work (the ‘over-toil of the lawyer, the statesman or the mechanic’) or with drugs and alcohol (‘the suicidal indulgences of the man of fashion’). Charles Darwin sought help from Dr Lane because he was overwhelmed by anxiety about his ‘everlasting species-Book’, the work that would become On the Origin of Species; he suffered from terrible fits of flatulence, as well as nausea, headaches and outbreaks of eczema and boils. ‘I have seen many cases of violent indigestion,’ said Edward, ‘but I cannot recall any where the pain was so truly poignant as in his. When the worst attacks were on he seemed almost crushed with agony, the nervous system being severely shaken and the temporary depression resulting distressingly great.’
Though popular among the intellectual classes, hydropathy was ridiculed in the mainstream press as faddish, comical and self-indulgent. Edward said that, as a hydropath, he had to ‘struggle against the whole banded conservatism of the medical profession’ in his efforts to be taken seriously. The word ‘hydropathy’, he argued, was actually a misnomer: Priessnitz had failed to notice how much the success of his treatment owed to diet and environment. Edward preferred to describe his method as the ‘nature cure’. Like the hydropath in Charles Reade’s novel It is Never too Late to Mend (1856), he ‘patted Nature on the back’ where ‘others hit her over the head with bludgeons and brickbats’.
On Tuesday 4 July, a month after her parting from John Thom, Isabella visited Moor Park in the hope of seeing both him and Edward Lane. She caught a train from Reading to the village of Ash, a forty-five-minute journey, and from there a fly took her the last few miles to Moor Park. At 10.30 a.m. she alighted on a gravel drive in front of a wide white house, three storeys high. Above the front door was a plaque bearing the coat of arms of Sir William Temple, the celebrated diplomat and essayist who had lived there in the late-seventeenth century. Temple had bought the 450-acre estate in the 1680s, half a century after the house was built, seeking an escape ‘into the ease and freedom of a private scene, where a man may go his own way and his own pace’.
Isabella was greeted by Lady Drysdale, Mary Lane and some of their guests. The doctor was out, but she ran into Thom early in the morning. ‘The meeting was a very constrained one,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I coloured much, and the eyes of the party were keenly fixed on me. Mr Th— stood about without daring to speak much, and I became nearly silent.’
Inside the house, a billiard table stood to one side of the hall, and a library to the other. Beyond these rose a crinoline staircase, the glory of the building, with iron railings that ballooned out like the skirts of the lady guests. The surrounding walls were decorated with stucco lyres and angels, and illuminated by an oval skylight. Past the stairwell, a door led to the dining room. On one side of this room was a wooden fireplace carved with pastoral figures – a shepherd playing his flute to a shepherdess surrounded by her flock – and on the other side three French windows offered a view down the lawn to a fountain, two canals, and the River Wey. On an island in the river, a summerhouse and a ruined bower nestled in a thicket of trees.
To the right of the terrace outside the dining room were a vinery, an orangery and a greenhouse, and next to those a walled garden, in which gooseberries, raspberries and blackcurrants ripened in the summer. To the left of the terrace a huge cedar spread its boughs over the grass, and a sundial marked the spot at which Sir William Temple’s heart, in a silver casket, had been interred after his death. Also beneath the lawn was a deep store room packed with ice that had been harvested in the winter from the canals and river; another icehouse was sunk into the hillside opposite the front door.
It was a warm, intermittently showery day. During a clear, fair spell in the late morning, Isabella walked in the garden with Atty, who was now about six, and a fellow guest, described in her diary as ‘Captain D’. Isabella was sharply aware of John Thom, who was strolling on the other side of a hedge with a ‘Mr B’ (possibly Robert Bell, a Moor Park patient who later gave Mr Thom a job). She exchanged a few words with the gentlemen, but got the impression that Thom was keeping his distance. ‘I rather wondered that he avoided me,’ wrote Isabella, ‘or rather did not seek me.’
Back in the house she changed for dinner, and took her place at the table at about half past one. She sat near two other guests, ‘Mrs O’ and ‘Mrs K’: ‘Mr T opposite, and never once spoke or looked at me.’
After dinner she spent some time in Lady Drysdale’s room, and then went out to the garden, passing Thom at the billiard table. He ‘instantly left his game,’ she wrote, ‘and seeing I was alone, came eagerly out with me. Went to greenhouse, as it rained; sat awhile, and chatted earnestly.’ They moved on to the orangery: ‘he got me a chair and sat down, but at great distance. We talked very earnestly, but rather hurriedly and confusedly, and not of the things which were uppermost.’ They walked out to the garden. ‘I do not know whether he is really more silent than usual,’ she wrote, ‘but he
was certainly strangely quiet; nevertheless, the knowledge that I was understood, and that he really liked to be with me, gave me much interest in the walk.’
When they went back to the house, Isabella learnt that Edward had returned but had already had tea and gone out again. She took her tea with the other guests, and soon afterwards the doctor appeared outside the dining room. He ‘came bounding in through the open window to greet me’, wrote Isabella, ‘with more warmth than I even expected. Very warmly he shook hands; very cordially he sat down quite near me, and asked many questions as to my welfare.’ Now she could imagine Thom watching her admirer as well as her, witnessing her gay and easy intimacy with the handsome doctor. Again, she thrilled to the idea that her friendship with Edward Lane might inspire jealousy in others. ‘Mr Th— sat opposite,’ she wrote, ‘and seemed to be reading, but I know watched all that passed.’
Later, the guests gathered in the drawing room on the first floor. ‘Dr Lane was in the highest spirits; seated himself on the sofa I had chosen near the piano, and only left me to sing occasionally, and to speak a few words to his guests; but his eyes, his whole attention, his talk, was all mine … We spoke of love, of poetry, of his age, and I told him he had never looked better, though he declared he felt quite old; we spoke of music and his songs; he sang sweetly and with enjoyment both a French and a comic song, and several others, including one I asked for, “Oh, the heart is a free and fetterless thing”.’
Thom ‘had been sitting not far from us all the evening, but had hardly moved, or spoken, or looked up’, wrote Isabella, ‘and yet I knew that he watched us and felt our presence’. His apparent indifference, she hinted, was a disguise for desire. Only once he came over to her, at first kneeling beside her while they talked – ‘as Mr L had just been doing’. They discussed a school that he proposed to set up in Sydenham, a smart London suburb that had seen a surge of business since the Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition, had been reconstructed on Sydenham Hill in 1852. Isabella advised him to write circulars to advertise his plans. ‘He looked bright and happy while I spoke,’ she wrote. Thom left the house at ten to accompany a clergyman and two other visitors to their homes in the neighbourhood. ‘On coming back later in the evening,’ said Isabella, ‘he seated himself near the door, and was pale, wan, and spiritless as before.’
The company continued to talk and sing into the night. After listening to the refrain of Eurydice in Gluck’s opera Orphée, Isabella asked Edward to read out Alexander Pope’s ‘Ode on St Cecilia’s Day’, ‘which he did the last thing, very sweetly, to my no small delight’. Both Gluck’s opera and Pope’s poem drew on the Greek myth in which Orpheus loses his beloved Eurydice because he cannot resist turning to look at her as they step out of the Underworld.
After the songs and readings, ‘and a few more jokes and compliments’, the party broke up for the night. ‘I know not that I ever more enjoyed an evening,’ wrote Isabella. ‘All headache was gone, all sense of sorrow; the old enchantment in that fascinating society was coming back upon me, and I felt that no one could compete in attraction with the handsome, graceful, lively, charming L.’
Mary – ‘his little wife’, ‘so sweet, so kind, so unsuspicious’ – took Isabella up the billowing staircase to her bedroom, and Edward soon followed: ‘and then they left me, but not to sleep; the bed was hard, and my spirits were far too much excited for sleep. I laid and turned till morning, and then it was late.’
As much as Isabella’s journal was a place to pledge herself to virtue, it was also a haven for the parts of her that were not accommodated by married life. ‘She who is faithfully employed in discharging the various duties of a wife and daughter, a mother and a friend,’ according to Thomas Broadhurst’s popular manual Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of the Mind and Conduct of Life (1810), ‘is far more usefully occupied than one who, to the culpable neglect of the most important obligations, is daily absorbed by philosophic and literary speculations, or soaring aloft amidst the enchanted regions of fiction and romance.’ In diary entries such as this one, Isabella strayed and soared into the regions that the conduct books condemned.
Back at Ripon Lodge, Isabella rose at seven on Tuesday 11 July to find that it had rained overnight. She had been low since the visit to Moor Park the previous week, but on this morning, she said, she felt ‘rather less sad’. After breakfast Henry went to Caversham, where he had chosen a 25-acre hillside site on which to build a house. A ‘Miss S’ looked after the boys, while Isabella occupied herself with domestic chores. She told the butcher that he had made a mistake in his calculations, and once he had corrected the bill she paid him. At one o’clock she followed Henry to Caversham, where the house was already taking shape. The plot on which Henry was building commanded panoramic views to the south, an aspect that ensured ‘extreme healthfulness’, according to the estate agents’ particulars, but Isabella could muster no enthusiasm. ‘Much wearied and did not enjoy it,’ she wrote. ‘Sat and mused sadly in house. Back after 7. Unpacked and attended to affairs. Henry cross, both then and later.’
A letter from John Thom was waiting for her at home, having been delivered by the carrier at two o’clock. Isabella opened and read it. Thom’s purpose in writing, she recorded in her diary, was ‘to express his deep regret at my altered looks and illness, and to tell me that he was getting well and had hopes of Sydenham. It was short and somewhat unsatisfactory; not a remark about any former letters of mine; not an acknowledgment for anything. Each letter breathed less interest than the last.’ She had imagined, when she visited Moor Park, that the young man stole yearning glimpses of her; but now he claimed only to have noticed that she looked sick. She added, with a hint of martyred pride, ‘It was well. I must learn to let him too join the company who could live without me; he would make and find friends, and would never be lonely again.’ She envied Thom his freedom.
‘It was cool friendship now on his part,’ she wrote. ‘Had it ever been more? I thought not; and was thus again punished, as oft before, for over-adhesiveness, for love of approbation and excitability. When shall I be calm, cold, tranquil, praiseworthy? Never.’
The next month, Thom took a post as tutor to the fifteen-year-old Maharajah Duleep Singh, with whom he was to travel in Scotland. The Sikh prince was a ward of the East India Company, which had removed him from the Punjabi throne in 1849, and a favourite of Queen Victoria, to whom he had presented the Koh-i-Noor diamond in 1850.
Four days after receiving Thom’s letter, Isabella sat in the garden at Ripon Lodge with the latest number of the literary journal the Athenaeum, to which the family subscribed. The issue of Saturday 15 July carried an advertisement for Moor Park and pieces about Alexander Pope and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had published an account of her travels in England (she was ‘wholly the heroine of her own book’, said the reviewer).
‘Wrote out passages from Athenaeum,’ Isabella noted in her diary, ‘and read it at 1 in the garden, under that tree that I never see without thinking of my escapade with Mr Thom.’ The nature of the escapade went unexplained.
A month later, Isabella was still dwelling on Thom: he ‘clings to my heartstrings’, she wrote; ‘I cannot divest myself of his image.’
In the summer of 1854, Henry checked Isabella’s household accounts and discovered discrepancies that she would not explain. They argued – she resentful of his distrust and surveillance, he angered by her laxity and disobedience. Isabella did not admit that she had been spending money on John Thom. Though he had refused the £15 that she tried to press on him as a leaving gift, she had persuaded him to accept about £55 that year, in money and goods – this amounted to more than a twentieth of the family’s expenditure. Isabella believed that Henry had treated Thom shabbily, and she was making up for it. Given her contribution to the household finances, she probably felt entitled to dispense some of the money as she pleased.
That summer Henry also went after his younger brother Albert, demanding reimbursement of the £3,00
0 that he had repaid their father in 1852. Albert now lived in Westminster with Isabella’s sister Julia and their infant daughter, and he was investing in ambitious ventures, among them an expedition to Greenland to discover minerals and a project to build huge steamships to designs by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Albert refused to pay Henry, claiming that the debt was not his alone, and Henry sued him. When the case came to court in August, the jury found in Henry’s favour and Albert was ordered to pay his older brother £3,335.
Isabella said that Henry revelled in the financial misfortunes of others. ‘He hates all merit,’ she later wrote to Combe, ‘he envies all success. I have known him to go into a Bankruptcy court on purpose to feast his eyes upon the spectacle of some once-prosperous man in distress.’
See Notes on Chapter 4
5
AND I KNEW THAT I WAS WATCHED
Moor Park, October 1854
Isabella twice visited Moor Park with her sons in the autumn of 1854, once in September and once in October. Alfred was now thirteen, Otway nine and Stanley five. She came partly to take the water cure, partly as a friend of the family. Her passion for Edward was revived in all its intensity.
Lady Drysdale and Edward and Mary Lane conducted a kind of restorative house party at their retreat in the Surrey woodlands. Elizabeth Drysdale, in lace collars and black brocade, ‘made the charm of Moor Park’, recalled Charles Darwin’s daughter Henrietta, who visited in the 1850s. Lady Drysdale’s hearing was failing, but her other faculties were undimmed by age. She was ‘very Scotch, full of life and character’, said Henrietta Darwin, ‘and with a most racy twinkle in her eyes before she burst into a hearty peal of laughter; overflowing with kindness and hospitality; so that all waifs were taken under her protection; a great reader, a great whist-player, and the active capable housekeeper of the great establishment’. Charles Darwin was enchanted by the whole family: ‘Dr Lane & wife & mother-in-law Lady Drysdale are some of the nicest people I have ever met.’ The doctor, he said, ‘is too young – that is his only fault – but he is a gentleman & very well-read man’. He commended Lane for his common sense and modesty. He did not subscribe to ‘all the rubbish’ spouted by other hydropaths; ‘nor does he pretend to explain much, which neither he or any doctor can explain’.