Now, gals, if you at parties show,
And in de dance would shake de toe,
Not like balloons but ladies go:
Hoop de dooden doo.
You tink de Crinnylean de ting,
But your partners it to grief do bring,
It bruise dere leg, it break dere shin –
Di Hoop de dooden doo.81
The hoop joke seems less funny to us now than it apparently did to many Victorians, who enjoyed hearing variations of the ballad throughout the spring and summer of 1858 as part of an entertainment put on in various packed halls, including St James’s. The American blackface troupe the Christy Minstrels sang and danced to it as they ‘capered’ and ‘spooned’ their ‘sentimental airs’, as the Illustrated Times noted in its review on 26 June.82
The crinoline era was a relatively long one in the history of fashion. Women of all classes were keen to get hold of the item. By 1864 many were becoming tired of it, among them Jane Carlyle, though she noted in a letter to her husband in September of that year that her own maids were still going around in ‘abominably large Crinolines’.83
More marriage troubles
Covent Garden Theatre was not the only building which accommodated the crinoline. Moor Park, Edward Lane’s elegant hydropathic establishment in the rolling Surrey hills, was lavishly decorated with pastoral scenes; it had French windows looking out upon a fountain, a river with an island in the middle, and a summerhouse; and it also boasted a ‘crinoline staircase’, sweeping and curving with iron railings ballooning like a lady’s skirts.84 Lane ran a successful business, attracting wealthy patients, to whom he gave individual care and attention. Darwin was one of them. He sought relief at Moor Park from his chronic nausea, vomiting, headaches, boils, and flatulence, and from working too hard on his ‘everlasting species-Book’, as he told Charles Lyell.85 His first visit to Moor Park took place in April 1857. He had already tried the long-established water cure of Dr James Gully in Malvern without success, and he disapproved of Gully’s belief in clairvoyance. He was hoping for a better outcome under Dr Lane’s care.
At first Darwin thought he had found respite from his chronic ailments. He told Hooker that, after only a week at Moor Park, he could ‘walk & eat like a hearty Christian; & even my nights are good’, adding humorously that though he had no idea how hydropathy works, ‘it dulls one’s brain splendidly. I have not thought about a single species of any kind, since leaving home.’86 To W.D. Fox he wrote even more cheerfully:
I had got very much below par at home, & it is really quite astonishing & utterly unaccountable the good this one week has done me. I like Dr Lane & his wife & her mother, who are the proprietors of this establishment very much. Dr L is too young – that is his only fault – but he is a gentleman & very well read man. And in one respect I like him better than Dr Gully, viz that he does not believe in all the rubbish which Dr G does; nor does he pretend to explain much, which neither he [n]or any doctor can explain … I really think I shall make a point of coming here for a fortnight occasionally, as the country is very pleasant for walking … I am well convinced that the only thing for Chronic cases is the water-cure.87
He visited again several times, despite his disappointment that within a week of getting home in May 1857, ‘all the wonderful good which Moor Park did me at the time’ had ‘gone all away like a flash of lightening [sic]’, now that he was back at work again.88
Edward Lane was thirty-four when Darwin met him for the first time. He had moved south from Edinburgh three years earlier to start his water-cure business, having studied medicine alongside the older of two remarkable brothers, George and Charles Drysdale, in the Scottish capital. The Lane and Drysdale families were neighbours there, and Edward married the brothers’ sister Mary in 1847. When he moved to Surrey in March 1854, Mary, their two sons, and Mary’s mother, the wealthy Lady Drysdale, came with him.89
George and Charles Drysdale often stayed at Moor Park. Both were medical practitioners, though Charles, the younger of the two, had trained first as an engineer and worked for a time on Brunel’s Great Eastern while employed by John Scott Russell’s company in Millwall.90 The brothers were freethinkers in religion and held unorthodox views in medicine. Charles worked among the poor, supported the movement for medical education for women, and in 1877 helped to found the Malthusian League, an organisation which advocated the use of contraceptives to limit family size on economic, social and medical grounds.91 He was also, in 1878, one of the first doctors to warn that tobacco was both addictive and dangerous to health.92
George, having scooped all the prizes as a student in Edinburgh, in 1855 published, anonymously, Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion, by a Student of Medicine, a frank discussion of sexuality and health, in which he deplores the general public’s ignorance of the workings of the body, including the sexual organs, and offers ‘a short sketch of these organs and the function of reproduction’.93 Drysdale’s pioneering attempt to educate his readers about sexuality and birth control was clearly welcome, for his book, under the less explosive title Elements of Social Science, went through thirty-five editions in the next fifty years, selling 80,000 copies by the end of the century.94
Since Drysdale never publicly acknowledged his authorship of this philanthropic but shocking book, it is unlikely that Darwin knew it was his. But Edward Lane and a group of unorthodox Edinburgh friends almost certainly did. Among these were Robert Chambers, the publisher and, like Drysdale, the anonymous author of a notorious book (in his case Vestiges of Creation), and his friend George Combe, the leading British advocate of phrenology, the science of reading character through the contours of the head. Combe was consulted by Prince Albert about the education of his unbiddable oldest son, the prince of Wales; in 1850 Albert sent his secretary and son’s tutor, Dr Ernest Becker, to Edinburgh to study phrenology with Combe in the hope of learning how to correct the boy’s ‘violent & selfish dispositions’.95 Combe was a regular visitor to the water cure at Moor Park. He had befriended not only Edward Lane in Edinburgh, but also the woman who nearly brought Lane to ruin in 1858, Isabella Robinson.
Isabella was an excitable woman, fond of reading poetry and inclined to fall for, and flirt with, younger men, including John Thom, the tutor she engaged for her three sons in 1854.96 She had been widowed as a young woman and had remarried in 1844, aged thirty-one. Her husband, Henry Robinson, was six years older. He and his brothers were engineers who ran an iron works building steam-powered ships at Millwall. The Robinsons went into business with John Scott Russell in 1848, separating from him four years later. Henry had two illegitimate daughters, and was a mean and inattentive husband, often away on business; Isabella was bored and unhappy.97 Like Emma Bovary, flawed heroine of Flaubert’s notorious novel of 1857, she turned in her boredom to reading romantic literature, dreamed of exciting lovers, and engaged in sexual flirtation outside her disappointing marriage. Isabella kept a journal full of steamy thoughts, and when she began in 1854 to frequent Moor Park as a friend of the Lanes and Drysdales, and a ‘patient’ – in the rather vague sense of suffering from loneliness and ennui and needing stimulating company – she focused her emotional and sexual needs on Dr Lane, who was ten years her junior. It was her journal which constituted the bulk of the ‘evidence’ in the divorce suit Henry Robinson brought against her in the summer of 1858.
The case became headline news from its first day, 14 June 1858. It stood out in two respects. Firstly, Henry, having found Isabella’s secret journal in 1856 and read in it of her hatred of him, her passion for Lane, and Lane’s reciprocation – as she represented it – of her love, had applied in December 1857 to the Ecclesiastical Court for a judicial separation a mensa et thoro. The sleepy old court in Doctors’ Commons granted him his separation, as one of the final acts of its existence. Isabella, who had not contested the proceedings, lived apart from Henry from then on. He kept two of their sons with him (along with his illegitimate daughters).98 When the new Divorce Act came
into force in January 1858, Henry decided to apply for a full divorce, which would allow him to marry again. The new proceedings meant that he had to prove adultery against Isabella and to name her co-respondent, in this case Edward Lane. The evidence he brought was the journal and the testimony of one former servant of the Lane household. The second remarkable feature of the case was that it proved to be unresolvable by the new act as it stood in the early days, since the co-defendant, Lane, was also – or should have been – a witness, inasmuch as he was the medical attendant on Isabella Robinson, whose physical and mental health were to form a large part of the proceedings, and the chief person who could testify about the contents of the journal as they related to him and his movements. The law as it stood did not allow for Lane to give evidence.
Cresswell, Cockburn, and Wightman presided. Henry Robinson, Isabella, and Edward Lane were each represented by a different counsel. None of the three protagonists was to appear in the witness box, Isabella and Lane being prohibited under the new Divorce Act. Henry’s counsel declared that he would prove Isabella’s guilt by reference to her journal, but he also said he was ‘bound to confess that I entertain some doubt whether your Lordships will consider it sufficient as against Dr Lane’.99 He meant that in law the journal could be used as evidence of a confession of guilt by Isabella but not as an accusation against Dr Lane unless he could give evidence in his own defence or there was sufficient evidence in addition to the journal to prove the case against him. Lane’s lawyer wished to have the journal ruled out as inadmissible evidence, but this was turned down by the court after the judges had conferred. Isabella’s counsel, who had also been hoping that the journal would be dismissed, changed his plan and set about using the journal to prove that his client was a fantasist who filled her diary with imagined sexual encounters, that she was, in short, mentally ill, suffering from the kind of instability associated in many doctors’ minds with the menopause. It was a dangerous strategy, and one which Isabella only intermittently agreed to him using. Little wonder that the case became the first in the new Divorce Court to attract widespread public attention.
The case for Henry Robinson soon came to depend on the journal, since his main ‘witness’ of unseemly goings on between Isabella and Dr Lane, a former stable boy at Moor Park, was shown to be unreliable. In Edward Lane’s defence a number of Moor Park’s paying guests were brought in to say that though they had often seen Lane and Isabella walking together in the grounds, they had also seen the doctor walking with other female patients in the same way. Lady Drysdale was called on the second day of the trial, 15 June. The Times reported her testimony the following day: ‘Lady Drysdale, the mother of Mrs Lane, said there had been great intimacy between the families of Dr Lane and Mr Robinson. There was nothing in the conduct of Dr Lane towards Mrs Robinson at all different to his conduct towards other ladies.’100
Isabella’s counsel Robert Phillimore followed, ‘dwelling upon the weakness of the oral evidence’ brought against Isabella and Lane, and insisting on the ‘fallacious character of journals, as compared with other confessions’. ‘This journal had evidently been written by a woman of so flighty, extravagant, excitable, romantic, and irritable a mind as almost to amount to insanity.’ It had been written ‘under the influence of a disease peculiar to women’ – especially menopausal women – ‘which had the effect of producing the most extraordinary delusions upon the mind of the patients, and frequently caused them to accuse themselves of the most horrible crimes’.101 He read out extracts from the journal (which most of the newspapers declined to print verbatim, though they summarised them fairly fully); these were self-accusatory and also referred to Isabella’s physical suffering. Her doctor, asked to describe her state of mind, talked of ‘morbid depression’. Other medical men renowned for their expertise in female complaints, or insanity, or both, were called to give their opinions, though none had met, let alone examined, Isabella.102 Phillimore requested leave to examine the co-respondent, Dr Lane, but the judges declared that under the terms of the new act ‘no party to a suit in cases of adultery could be examined’.
However, they saw that this was problematic in Dr Lane’s case, and adjourned until the next day, Wednesday, 16 June, in order to decide whether he could be called. They were troubled enough to state on that day that they needed to discuss further whether to take the unprecedented step of dismissing Lane as a co-respondent and admitting him as a witness instead. The court was adjourned until Monday, 21 June.103 In the meantime, the weekend newspapers enjoyed speculating on the outcome. On Saturday, 19 June the People’s Paper quoted liberally from Isabella’s diary as read out in court in an article under the loaded and presumptuous title ‘An Unfaithful Wife – A Lady’s Extraordinary Diary’.104 The Era for Sunday, 20 June gave its report on the case the enticing title ‘Crim. Con. and Hydropathic Love: Exposure of a Lady’s Diary’; like the People’s Paper, it was bold enough to quote from Isabella’s journal, including a relatively explicit passage about her relations with Dr Lane during the drive from Moor Park to the local railway station.105
When proceedings resumed on the Monday, Cockburn announced that five of the six judges authorised to sit in the Divorce Court had decided that they were unable to dismiss Lane from the suit in order to allow him to be a witness. Mr Justice Wightman alone thought that there was nothing in the wording of the new act to stop them from doing so. Given the majority opinion, Cockburn continued with the case, asking the barristers to sum up. More quotations from the journal were read out to prove that Isabella was fantasising when she wrote of embraces – and more – in the gardens, on coach journeys, and in Edward Lane’s study at Moor Park. The journal was the sole ‘evidence’ of such encounters. The case was further adjourned until Saturday, 3 July for judgment to be pronounced.106
The journal entries which were read out to the court related to Isabella’s visit to Moor Park in September and October 1854. In them she describes intense discussions with Lane about poetry and philosophy as they walked in the grounds, followed by ‘passionate kisses, whispered words, confessions of the past’. One evening they sat alone together in the study, where they enjoyed ‘passionate excitement, long and clinging kisses, and nervous sensations’. Fearing interruption, they parted, she having ‘smoothed my tumbled hair’. On her final evening at Moor Park, she and Edward were together in the cab taking them to the station, while her 13-year-old son Alfred sat on top with the driver. ‘I never spent so blessed an hour as the one that followed’, she wrote in the passage quoted by the Era. ‘I shall not relate ALL that passed, suffice it to say I leaned back at last in silent joy in those arms I had so often dreamed of and kissed the curls and smooth face, so radiant with beauty, that had dazzled my outward and inward vision’ at their first meeting in 1850.107
The newspapers mostly accepted that these were the ravings of an insane, or at least deluded, woman. The Daily News diagnosed ‘passionate sentimentalism’ in the style of Rousseau and declared Mrs Robinson ‘a crazy woman, not far off fifty’, who looked likely to ‘ruin the rising prospects of this young and meritorious man’.108 According to the Saturday Review of 26 June, the diary ‘stands self-convicted of insanity’. While several of the serious papers saw that the case was important for the legal questions it threw up in matters of divorce, the medical journals quickly realised that doctors were especially vulnerable to accusations of impropriety with female patients. Though Lane was a hydropath, and therefore on the unorthodox spectrum often despised by the medical establishment, he was properly qualified and by no means a quack. Indeed, he had been careful to draw attention to his medical qualifications in the first advertisement for Moor Park issued under his management. Having taken over from another prominent hydropathic doctor, Thomas Smethurst, editor of the Water-Cure Journal, Lane stressed his credentials in his advertisement in The Times in May 1854: ‘moor-park medical and hydropathic establishment, near Farnham, Surrey. This institution is now open for the reception of patients, under the supe
rintendence of Dr Edward W. Lane, A.M., M.D., Edin.’109
Edinburgh University had long been famous for the high quality of its medical education. Here, and also in the short work on hydropathy which Lane published in October 1858, he was at pains to point out that he was properly educated in medicine, and was able to add to his hydropathic measures any orthodox treatment he might think appropriate.
The profession’s leading periodical, the British Medical Journal, while not able to approve of Lane’s methods of treatment, was aware of the risk to the profession in general and argued for fair play in Lane’s case:
Of course we cannot be expected to sympathise with hydropaths particularly, but his case may be our own any day. Any of our associates with ‘curls and smooth face’, and less favoured ones for that matter, may some day find themselves plunged from domestic happiness and pecuniary prosperity into utter ruin … The Times has come forth very nobly to champion Dr Lane in this crisis of his fortunes … It would indeed be cruel to him to defer his acquittal of the heavy charges brought against him until the legislature has repaired the bungling, by which at present an innocent man is not allowed to give evidence in his own defence.110
The presumption of Lane’s innocence was widespread in the press, partly because of the medical testimony at the trial and the obvious exaggeration and embellishment, at the very least, in Isabella’s journal, and partly because Lane had powerful friends who could influence the press, from The Times to various provincial newspapers. George Combe, who corresponded with Lane and Isabella in the weeks leading up to the court case, lobbied acquaintances on The Times and got Robert Chambers to help too. Lane asked Combe to intervene with the Scotsman on his behalf, and he could be sure of support from the Examiner, since its editor, Marmion Savage, was a frequent visitor to Moor Park.111 Combe advised Isabella in letters sent to her early in 1858, after the separation had been granted by the Ecclesiastical Court and when it was becoming clear that Henry Robinson was intent on taking his case to the new Divorce Court. Realising that she felt guilty about the potential effect of the journal on Lane’s marriage and career, he pointed out on 23 February: ‘If your Journal contains the descriptions now mentioned, & be true, Dr Lane is ruined as a professional man; for no woman of reputation could venture under his roof, with such a stain attaching to him. His poor wife is robbed of his affections, & Lady Drysdale, in her old age, sees the dearest objects of her affections disgraced & ruined.’112
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