Henry’s appropriations of Isabella’s money did not stop there, she said. When her father died at the end of 1847, leaving her an additional £1,000, Henry immediately withdrew the whole amount with one of the blank cheques that Isabella had signed, and invested it in his own name in London & North Western Railway stock. Though he arranged for the interest to be paid into Isabella’s account – to which he in any case had sole access – he kept the capital. Isabella claimed that Henry also tried to suppress the surname of his stepson, Alfred Dansey, in order to make himself the heir to his legacy, and annexed £2,000 of the boy’s settled property. In the face of Henry’s greed, Isabella said, she was ‘irresolute’: ‘chafing; yet still passive’. ‘With every knowledge that my partner was mean & grasping,’ she wrote, ‘I made no stand against his encroachments, but suffered him to take from me one thing after another.’
In February 1849, Isabella gave birth to her third and last child, Alexander Stanley. At the time of his birth she was staying in a terrace in the seaside resort of Brighton, Sussex, two hours from London by the fastest train. She had probably taken lodgings there for the sake of her health. That year she tipped into a deep depression of spirits, accompanied by severe headaches and menstrual problems, and Dr Joseph Kidd in Blackheath identified her ailments as signs of ‘uterine disease’. Henry was away on business in North America for six months in 1849. Isabella began to keep a diary: a friend in loneliness and in sickness, a companion and confidant.
‘I know not where to turn for help,’ she told her diary, ‘and a dull load of dejection and nameless oppression weighs down my very soul. I have no sympathy, no love, for I do not deserve it. My darling boys are the only ray of comfort I possess.’ Though she sometimes behaved badly towards her sons – striking them in anger, favouring Doatie over the others – her love for them rescued her from the darkest moods. She said that she shared with them a bond ‘of no common strength’.
Isabella, like many nineteenth-century women, used her journal as a place in which to confess her weakness, her sadness and her sins. In its pages she audited her behaviour and her thoughts; she grappled with her errors and tried to plot out a path to virtue. Yet by channelling her strong and unruly feelings into this book, Isabella also created a record and a memory of those feelings. She found herself telling a story, a serial in daily parts, in which she was the wronged and desperate heroine.
The Robinsons chose to move to Edinburgh after Henry’s return from America because the city was renowned for its liberal and moderately priced schools. Here, their boys could be well educated without having to board away from home. Henry rented a six-storey granite house for his family at 11 Moray Place, at a cost of about £150 a year. Moray Place was the most lavish development in the New Town, a twelve-sided circus of houses built on tilting ground; just to the north, the land sheered down to the Water of Leith, through pleasure gardens planted with rhododendrons and hazel. The heavy grandeur of Moray Place was not to all tastes. ‘It has been objected,’ noted Black’s Guide Through Edinburgh in 1851, ‘that the simplicity of style and massiveness of structure which particularly distinguish these buildings, impart an aspect of solemnity and gloom repugnant to the character of domestic architecture.’ The Robinsons kept four servants: a manservant, a cook, a maid and a nurse.
Inside 11 Moray Place, a broad staircase led to the reception rooms on the first floor and to the bedrooms above. The living rooms were wide, deep and panelled, with large windows that afforded views of a round, green park to the front of the house and a triangular garden to the back. At the top of the stairwell, a stucco frieze adorned a domed skylight: some of the cherubs in the frieze cavorted among the stylised foliage; others perched primly on the leaves, reading books.
A narrower staircase continued up to the children’s rooms on the top floor. From the back windows of her sons’ bedrooms, Isabella could see the roof of 8 Royal Circus, and past it the tower of St Stephen’s, the church in which three years earlier Edward Lane had married Lady Drysdale’s daughter Mary.
Isabella became a frequent visitor to the Lanes and Drysdales’ home. Their house lay a quarter of a mile northeast of her own, a journey of a few minutes on foot or by carriage. She was invited to the family’s parties – on one evening in Isabella’s first year in the city Lady Drysdale held a huge children’s party, on another a ‘strawberry feast’ – and she became acquainted with others in their circle: successful lady novelists such as Susan Stirling and influential thinkers such as the phrenologist George Combe. Lady Drysdale was ‘a great patroness of everything scientific and literary’, according to Charles Piazzi Smyth, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland. Another friend, the art critic Elizabeth Rigby, described her as ‘unique in my estimation in the act of diffusing happiness … I never met with so warm-hearted and unselfish a woman.’ Lady Drysdale was a keen philanthropist who loved to take the dispossessed into her fold – Italian revolutionaries, Polish refugees, and now Isabella, an exile from her own marriage.
Isabella had never loved her husband; by the time they moved to Edinburgh, she despised him. A photograph of Henry in this period conforms to her description of him as narrow and haughty; he sits stiff and upright in a jacket, waistcoat, shirt and cravat, clutching a silver-topped cane in his right hand; he is skinny-chested, tight-waisted, a sure-looking man with a long nose in a long face. Isabella said that she tried not to pry into Henry’s private life, but by now she had discovered that he had a mistress and two illegitimate daughters. She had come to believe that he had married her only for her money.
Within months, Isabella was visiting the Lanes and the Drysdales almost every day. She talked to Edward Lane about poetry and philosophy, debating new ideas and encouraging him to write essays for publication. Henry, by contrast, had no interest in literature, Isabella complained in a letter to a friend; he was quite unable ‘to parse & interpret any line of poetry I might have quoted – either of my own or other people’s!’. She used to invite the Lanes’ eldest boy, Arthur, to play with her sons, especially after Mary Lane gave birth to a second child, William, early in 1851. Edward, in turn, often invited Isabella and her sons to accompany him and Arthur on drives to the coast – ‘Atty’ was a delicate boy, and Edward tried to strengthen him with regular rides to the sea in a phaeton, a fast, open carriage with a springy body and four high wheels. By the beach at Granton, a few miles north-west of the city, Isabella and Edward sat discussing poetry while they watched the children play on the rocks and sand.
In the grey afternoon of Sunday 14 March 1852, Isabella took a turn through the New Town on foot. The three-year-old Stanley probably stayed home with the nursemaid, an Irishwoman called Eliza Power, but Otway and Alfred, aged seven and eleven, accompanied their mother. The group climbed the hill from Moray Place and carried on over the summit and down to Princes Street, a wide avenue on the southern edge of the New Town. A terrace of houses ran along one side of the street. The facing pavement was reined in only by an iron railing, beyond which lay a steep drop and a far view over the dip of the ravine to the blackened tenements of the Old Town on the hill beyond: ‘the city, dimly visible, lay before us’, wrote Isabella in her diary, ‘spires, monuments, streets, the port of Leith, the Frith, and in the front ground small unventilated dwellings, and houses of ten-storeys high’.
Isabella was gazing across a gulf from rich to poor, from the sparse, clear streets of modern Edinburgh to the busy, vertical slums of the old. The area between the New and Old towns had been drained and levelled at the beginning of the century, and in 1842 a railway line had been laid into the gorge. Though a few shops had set up along Princes Street, there was a lonely luxury to the thoroughfares along which Isabella walked with her sons. On a Sunday, the area was desolate. The shops were shut up and the blinds of the houses drawn. Isabella wished that she could enter the secret warren across the tracks. ‘Oh, thought I, each of these roofs conceals human life with all its mysterious joys and sorrows. Doubtless, many a sojourner in these dwe
llings has a private history, thrilling, exciting, strange. If I knew them, some of them might make me feel less sad, less lonely. There might be hearts as much discontented with their lots as mine; few, I think, more weary of life.
‘I walked home with my boys,’ she continued. ‘At heart I love and value them, and were it not that my darling Otway would be taken from me I would leave my husband for ever.’ If she and Henry were to part, she would retain custody of Alfred, the child of her first husband, and perhaps of Stanley – the Custody of Infants Act of 1839 for the first time allowed a separated woman to petition for custody of any of her children who were under seven, as long as she was of good character. Doatie, though, would be certain to remain with his father.
Isabella reached her house at half past five, and tried to calm her troubled spirits: ‘played psalms, wrote Journal, read, smoked cigar; boys with me till nine. Felt rather less sad’. To read, to play the piano and to spend time with children were conventional pastimes for a middle-class Victorian woman; to smoke a cigar, though, was a distinctly rebellious, unfeminine act.
On Saturday 27 March 1852, Isabella organised an outing for herself and her children. She invited Edward to accompany them, and hired a carriage and driver to pick up both families after lunch. Henry was away.
The morning was cold and bright. ‘Resolved to get ready early for the drive,’ Isabella wrote, ‘to which I could not help looking forward with pleasure, not unmixed with a dread that something seemed to mar the pleasure I had promised myself, as it nearly always does with me.’ The day started badly: she got up late, which meant that she missed an appointment, and a glass of sherry before lunch gave her ‘a confused headache’. She became annoyed by her sons’ rude behaviour in the garden. ‘I dined in haste,’ she told her diary, ‘and left home immediately, not to lose the fairness of the day.’
On reaching 8 Royal Circus, Isabella discovered that her dread had been justified: ‘after some delay and confusion, I found Mrs L— was to go too, and I knew well that all hope of a pleasant tête-à-tête was over for that day. I could hardly bid her and Atty welcome, or affect good humour, much less gaiety.’ Isabella had become used to having Edward to herself.
The two families set out by carriage, with the three boys outside on the box and the three adults inside. They headed north towards the sea and then west along the coast, passing the new harbour at Granton. Inside the carriage, ‘the talk was formal and confused. Mr L— read scraps from Coleridge and Tennyson.’ They discussed an essay by Edward ‘on the error of sudden judgments unfounded on knowledge’, written at Isabella’s suggestion, which had appeared in that morning’s number of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. Five miles on, the carriage drew up near a line of whitewashed cottages in the seaside village of Cramond, at the mouth of the River Almond, where the party scaled a steep path to a sheltered sunny corner on the bank. There they laid out their books and their plaids. To the north lay the rocky grassland of Cramond Island, to which day-trippers could walk at low tide across the sandy flats.
Mary Lane took the boys off to gather gorse, leaving Isabella and Edward alone, but ‘no real cheerfulness came to my heart’, said Isabella. She and Edward talked – ‘of life, of Cana, of property, of riches, and of birth … of dejection, education, poverty, etc.’ – and read out ‘a few disjointed passages from our poets’, including, Isabella remembered, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’. The poem described a mood that resembled her own: a ‘smothering weight’, ‘A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,/ A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief’.
‘We rose to go when the sun got low,’ wrote Isabella. ‘Got into the carriage and kept up a conversation … wholly without interest on my part; duly admiring the views which were fine.’
Back in the city, the carriage dropped the Lanes at Royal Circus, where Isabella’s ‘starved boys’ climbed off the box and got inside. They arrived back at Moray Place at half past six, with Isabella feeling ‘as much vexed, dispirited, chagrined, and cast down as I ever remember to have been’.
Isabella remonstrated with herself for leaving a bad impression on the Lanes. ‘Mrs Lane looked several times cold and puzzled,’ she wrote; ‘he was constrained; the child was tired; no one was obliged or pleased.’ She usually presented a composed front to her friends, and unburdened herself to her diary, but on this day her dissatisfaction had been all too visible. ‘I had spent 8 shillings for worse than nothing,’ she wrote, caught between self-pity and self-disgust. ‘Good God! Why is it everything I plan or wish for is turned to such bitterness? Surely it must be my own fault. I long for things I ought not to prize. I find it impossible to love where I ought, or to keep from loving where I ought not.
‘My mind is a chaos,’ she confessed, ‘a confused mingling of good and evil. I weary of my very self, yet cannot die.’
Isabella then received a note – a ‘cold line’ – from Edward. She had intended to accompany his family the next morning to hear a sermon by the Rev. Dr Thomas Guthrie, one of the leaders of the Free Church of Scotland; but Edward told her that the service had been cancelled. Isabella retired at midnight ‘to a sad and lonely couch, sick and low at heart’. The diary, at least, offered her solace, salvaging something from the ruins of her expedition: ‘Felt a sad relief in thus writing the history of a lost day.’ By putting words to her discontent, she felt it lifted from her. The diarist heroine of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a novel of 1848, notices the same phenomenon: ‘I have found relief describing the very circumstances that have destroyed my peace.’
A fortnight after the outing to Cramond, Isabella was again tormented by her feelings for Edward Lane. ‘Very fine, clear, agreeable day,’ she recorded on Wednesday 7 April. ‘Miserably and unusually depressed.’
Isabella got up late. Henry was bad-tempered and rude, and she wrote a letter to her mother complaining about him. She then called on Mary Lane at Royal Circus. ‘Mrs L— very kind; she is a sweet, amiable temper, and shines when there is any sorrow to be soothed.’ Upon joining the rest of the family, though, Isabella was wounded by Edward’s seeming indifference. He ‘chatted with every one in the room, and was more gay and talking than usual’ but ‘careless in manner, and hardly looked at me’. The Lanes saw her home in a fly. ‘I was wretched; and as I got out of the fly at my house and shook hands with them with a hand cold as marble, I felt that I was not fit for their society.’ She stole in to the house and up to her room, avoiding Henry. Like many upper-middle-class couples of the time, she and he had separate bedrooms. Isabella heard from the nursemaid, Eliza, that the boys were all well, and then ‘retired to rest thoroughly mortified’.
After such disappointment, the renewal of Edward Lane’s attentions only thrilled Isabella the more. She rose at eleven on 13 April, a fine, warm Tuesday morning, and sat in the garden reading a book by one of the Schlegel brothers, the founders of German Romanticism and advocates of love and freedom. Alfred was at school, but Otway was unwell and had been kept at home with Stanley. At four o’clock, Isabella went shopping and at five she picked up Atty Lane from Royal Circus and took him to her house. ‘Children played in garden,’ she wrote. ‘St— very quarrelsome; his temper is excitable and passionate.’ She returned Atty to Lady Drysdale at eight in the evening, and then went with Edward, Mary and ‘Miss R’, another friend, to a lecture on Homer. This was one of a series of talks given that April at the Philosophical Institution in Queen Street by John Stuart Blackie, Edinburgh University’s new Professor of Greek. Professor Blackie, by his own account, could be an ‘elastic and buoyant’ public speaker, inducing in his audience ‘a state not merely of delighted attention but of manifest exhilaration and glee’. In the lecture hall, Isabella sat on one side of Edward and Mary on the other. The professor’s talk was ‘amusing and original’, wrote Isabella. She and Edward chatted before and after the lecture. ‘We talked of nicknames and of grave characters, and I was merry, much excited by his presence. We laughed much.’
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nbsp; They continued to talk on the ten-minute walk back to their houses. ‘Mrs L— and Miss R— walked on in front out of hearing. We spoke of weather, quoted poetry on the subject, discussed Homer, Shakespeare, talent, etc.’ Isabella reached home in a state of high and agitated pleasure. ‘These dark walks are very exciting,’ she wrote, ‘and on retiring to my lonely bed, I was too much roused to sleep, and tossed about for hours.’
At the party at Royal Circus on 15 November 1850 Isabella had also met the publisher and writer Robert Chambers, a bear-like man with swathes of wavy hair. They were neighbours: the back windows of the Robinsons’ house overlooked the back windows of Robert and Anne Chambers’s house in Doune Terrace. Robert was one of the city’s leading literary men; he and his brother William ran the popular progressive magazine Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, which sold more than 80,000 copies a week. Within two months of meeting the Robinsons, Chambers had twice dined with them at Moray Place, and the Robinsons had twice attended parties at Doune Terrace. The next May, while Henry was away, Isabella went to a dinner party at the Chambers’ house at which the other guests included the bestselling author Catherine Crowe, another near neighbour, and the young actress Isabella Glyn. At about this time Isabella Robinson began to submit poems to Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.
Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady Page 2