The only published verse that can be identified as hers, ‘Lines Addressed to a Miniature, By a Lady’, appeared under the initials ‘IHR’ in the number of 2 August 1851. The poem describes a woman’s secret longing for a man who belongs to another. Unable to gaze openly upon the man himself, she dwells instead on a miniature portrait of him. Unable to disclose her feelings to him, she confesses herself to his image. She tells the picture: ‘In vain I met, I knew, approved, and loved/ Him whose most truthful likeness thou dost bear.’ For all the poem’s high romance, there is no mistaking the narrator’s physical yearning for this man: ‘How sweetly on those closed and manly lips/Firmness and love together hold their sway!/ Thy form I see, with strength and courage braced./ Thy glance with all its native energy!’ Her beloved, like the miniature painting, is innocent of her desire for him – ‘calm and unmoved, unconscious of my eye’ – and she burns with jealousy of the woman he has chosen over her. ‘My heart is rent,’ writes the love-struck lady, ‘my inmost spirit seared.’
Isabella’s journal was the equivalent of this miniature, a memento of the man she loved, a place where she spoke privately in order to keep her public silence. The lady in the poem vows to conceal her feelings – ‘prayer and silence shall alone be mine’ – though by putting words to her thoughts she has already half-broken her pledge. The diary, like the poem, exposed as well as buried Isabella’s secrets. But she insisted on her privacy: ‘Here I may gaze and dream, and fear no blame,’ her poem says. ‘This I may love and prize unseen – alone.’
See Notes on Chapter 1
2
POOR DEAR DODDY
Edinburgh, 1840–52
Edward Wickstead Lane, the object of Isabella’s love, was born in 1823 into a Presbyterian family on the French-speaking island of Terrebonne, Quebec. Soon after his birth the family moved to the neighbouring city of Montreal, where his father, Elisha, found work as a clerk to a Scottish-born wholesaler. When Edward was nine, his mother died, leaving him and his four-year-old brother Arthur in their father’s care. Elisha Lane and his boss built up a business importing liquor, meat and grain to Montreal and by the late 1830s Elisha was rich enough to send his sons to Edinburgh to be educated. Within a decade his company had assets valued at £70,000.
The Lane boys lodged with a family in the New Town and attended the renowned Edinburgh Academy, where Edward became a close friend of Elizabeth Drysdale’s son George. While Edward was a sociable boy, George Drysdale was intense and self-conscious. Both were outstanding pupils. In 1840 Edward was named ‘Dux of the Academy’ – the highest honour in the school – and the title passed the next year to George. Edward won prizes for his achievements in French and English, both as a writer and as a speaker, George for Latin, English, French, mathematics and arithmetic. Afterwards George read Classics at Glasgow, where he won six prizes in his first year. Edward read Law at Edinburgh University, where he continued to be praised for his eloquence and was elected in 1842 to the celebrated Speculative Society debating club. As a student, Edward took rooms at 30 Royal Circus, a few doors along from the house that the Drysdales had occupied since it was built in the early 1820s. He became intimate with several members of the family: George’s parents, Sir William and Lady Drysdale, his younger brother, Charles, and – especially – his elder sister, Mary.
Mary was a small, sensitive young woman, clever, affectionate and trusting. She appears frequently in Isabella Robinson’s diary as an innocent figure, seemingly oblivious to her friend’s passionate interest in her husband. But Mary and Edward were bound together by shared sufferings that Isabella, in her anxious self-attention, may have failed to catch. These concerned George, Mary’s beloved brother and Edward’s best friend, and they began in 1843, when he was nineteen.
George was at university in Glasgow when his father, Sir William, died of cholera in June 1843; two weeks later, George’s older half-brother William Drysdale died of the same disease in India. George suffered a breakdown, abandoned his studies and returned to his mother’s house in Royal Circus.
The family and their friends rallied round. To help George recover his strength and spirits, his brother Charles and his friend Edward, who had just taken his law degree, accompanied him in 1844 on a walking tour of Europe. But while they were staying in Vienna, George disappeared. Charles and Edward’s desperate search for him ended only with the discovery of George’s clothes lying on the banks of the River Danube. His body was not recovered and his companions returned to Scotland with the news of his death. ‘The deceased’s mother and friends were in the deepest distress,’ reported Lord Cockburn, an eminent Edinburgh judge who lived in Royal Circus; George, he said, was ‘the ablest and the most amiable boy I almost ever knew.’ The newspapers announced that George had died while bathing in the Danube, and his tragic end became the subject of prize poems that year by students at the Edinburgh Academy.
Just under two years later, in March 1846, George reappeared. He begged his family’s forgiveness. He had faked his death, he confessed, in lieu of taking his life. Lord Cockburn, in a letter to a friend, reported that George had been ‘in a state of grievous despair of fulfilling the kindly expectations he had excited, and thought it would be less grievous to his friends to lament his death than his failure; and that therefore he had combined this with avoiding suicide, by pretending to be drowned’. Wolfgang von Goethe’s late-eighteenth-century novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had supposedly inspired a spate of suicides by young men anxious to emulate its hero, and Cockburn speculated that George had been afflicted by ‘a sudden Germanising of the noddle’. But he was baffled that such a beloved boy could have behaved so irrationally, and cruelly: ‘the heartlessness of his conduct is the incomprehensible part of it’. The Drysdales’ ‘horror of his resurrection’, claimed Cockburn, was ‘perhaps greater than their grief for his death’.
George had tried to achieve a strange kind of annihilation in which, instead of ending his life, he shed his identity and his past. Amid their joy at his return, his mother and his siblings must have experienced some of the confusion and hurt that Cockburn attributed to them. But Mary, in a letter to a friend in Tasmania, expressed only compassion for her lost little brother: ‘our dearest, our idolised boy did not perish in the Danube, but is alive and well & at present with us, having reached us only last Thursday … Poor poor fellow, dear Doddy, he has suffered much since we parted both in mind and body, but now through the mercy of the Almighty Father he has been conducted safe back to his happy family.’ Although not yet quite well, she said, he was getting much better, and his mind was ‘purified, humbled, yet strengthened by the trials he has undergone’.
John James Drysdale, Sir William’s son by a previous marriage, came from Liverpool to see George. John, at forty, was one of the leading homeopaths in Britain, the editor of both the homeopathic manual Materia Medica and the British Journal of Homeopathy. The theory of his chosen branch of medicine – which was contentious even among the liberal medics of Edinburgh – was that solutions of medicinal substances, diluted so as to be almost undetectable, would effect cures. After examining his half-brother, John Drysdale diagnosed a nervous collapse brought on by overwork and instructed the family to keep George clear of books.
Mary reported to her friend that over the previous two years, George had ‘suffered under a temporary pressure on the brain, occasioned by overstudy, which rendered impossible to him any reflection on the step he was taking, & impelled alone by a feeling of suffering, he travelled to Hungary, where he has ever since been living, acting as teacher of English to the only son of a nobleman there, & treated by the family with the greatest kindness, nay even affection and confidence’. Eventually, the pressure on George’s brain subsided ‘& then he could not rest till he shd see us all once more’.
The family was dazed with delight at seeing George again. ‘We cannot gaze at him nor listen to him sufficiently, poor fellow,’ wrote Mary; ‘the past seems to him & to us like a fearful dream, from wh
. we have just awakened to know what happiness & thankfulness are.’ She found him gentler, kinder, more warm-hearted than ever. ‘Our dear Mama looks with happiness many years younger since our darling one has returned, & dear Charlie’s sad face has cleared up, & we all feel so very happy that we would not exchange places with any human being.’ Their homeopath brother John reassured them that George’s health would improve and that one day he might even be able to take up a profession. In the meantime, they were to ‘guard him well from any temptation to study’.
The Drysdale family and Edward Lane must have known something of the truth. George’s condition stemmed not so much from intellectual stress as from what he called his ‘secret shame’: a sexual neurosis. In an anonymous work he later published, he described himself as having been a young man ‘of active, studious, and erotic disposition, but of almost feminine bashfulness’. ‘In Scotland,’ he explained, ‘where there is a stricter sexual code than in perhaps any other country, and where the lusts of the flesh, as they are called, are stigmatised and controlled as much as possible, sexual shyness and timidity constitute a great national disease, and cause more unhappiness among young people, than can well be conceived.’ At fifteen he accidentally discovered masturbation, and found that the practice offered an ‘easy mode of satisfying his passions, which had long been the source of unrest and torment to his vivid imagination’. For about a year, George masturbated two or three times a day. As he moved on to university in Glasgow, at the age of seventeen, he began to discharge semen involuntarily at night: he became terrified that his compulsion had started to control him, to sap his strength and to push him towards madness. It was at this point that his father and his half-brother died and he returned home in distress.
On his trip to Europe with Edward and Charles in 1844, George found that he was still a slave to his vice. This so disturbed him that he decided to stage his own death. Afterwards, while living secretly in Hungary, he underwent a series of operations to cauterise his penis – that is, to deaden or destroy its nerve endings by inserting into the urethra a thin metal rod coated in a caustic substance. He submitted himself to this procedure seven or eight times.
Even in 1846, having returned to his family in Scotland, George continued to seek a cure. In May, he travelled to the Continent for treatment. That summer Mary wrote a letter to the publisher John Murray, who knew the family, entreating him to help George; her brother was alone in Paris, she explained, waiting to consult the French doctor Claude François Lallemand. She did not mention that Lallemand had recently published a work that identified compulsive masturbatory urges as marks of a dangerous illness. In his study of involuntary ejaculation, printed in French in 1842 and in English in 1847, the doctor argued that both body and mind were corrupted by the excessive discharge of semen. The work of Lallemand and other French researchers set off a moral and medical panic about onanism that was to continue throughout the century. Masturbation was the dark corollary of the individualism so prized by Victorian society, an embodiment of the dangers of privacy and self-reliance: a man like George Drysdale might lose himself in books and dreams, folding inwards into a dissolute imaginary realm.
Mary explained to Murray that Edward Lane had travelled to France with George but had ‘been obliged to hurry home’. She asked that Murray encourage a friend in Paris to call on George at his hotel, and so ‘prevent him from feeling so lonely as he does at present poor fellow’. She and her family dreaded ‘the evil effects so much solitude may produce on dear George’s spirits and health’. Her reference to the ‘evil effects’ of solitude may have been an allusion to the suicidal impulses to which George was prey; or perhaps Murray was aware of George’s sexual compulsions. Mary added a postscript in which she appealed to the publisher to be discreet: ‘pray do not mention to your friend any circumstances connected with his past history as we are anxious he should himself forget it poor fellow’.
Edward Lane’s sudden flight from Paris that summer was probably occasioned by a tragedy in his own family. His younger brother Arthur had graduated from the Edinburgh Academy in 1845, and returned to their father’s home in Canada. On 26 June 1846 he went to Quebec’s Theatre Royal to watch a chemical diorama – a show in which scenes painted on huge sheets of linen were lit and layered in ways that made them seem magically to alter and dissolve. As the curtain fell at the end of the evening, it brushed against the flame of an overturned camphene lamp and almost instantly the stage and then the auditorium were alight. The audience rushed to the exit but the passage was narrow and the fire too fast: within minutes, forty-six men, women and children were dead. A bystander saw the eighteen-year-old Arthur in his final moments, ‘overturned, in a half-recumbent position, with both feet firmly wedged in the mass of writhing humanity under it’. He ‘appeared to struggle hard; soon the surrounding flames hid him from sight’.
A year after Arthur Lane’s death and George Drysdale’s resurrection, Edward Lane and Mary Drysdale were married. The ceremony took place in June 1847, when both bride and groom were twenty-four. George came to the wedding in Edinburgh, but then made for Europe again, and Edward and Mary met up with him while they were on honeymoon in Strasbourg. Mary said that she had never seen her brother look better: ‘he was in high spirits’, ‘quite overjoyed’ at seeing her, ‘for by that time he had become quite tired of solitude’. In the book that he later published, George explained that he had taken Lallemand’s advice to try coition, with astonishing success. Intercourse with prostitutes, he discovered, quite cured his urge to masturbate.
Outwardly, George remained awkward and reserved. He was later remembered by a young woman of his acquaintance as ‘kind but shy, gentle but oppressive; he had a hard, Scottish face, and was silent, grave, serious, learned, a moral and mental impregnability like a vast mountain or a granite wall’. After the crisis his family kept close by him. Though Edward completed his legal training and was admitted to the prestigious Faculty of Advocates in 1847, he and the Drysdale family moved that year to Dublin, where George had decided to study medicine. Charles Drysdale, having spent one year studying mathematics in Edinburgh (where he came top of his class) and another in Cambridge, enrolled at Trinity College Dublin to train as an engineer. It was a strange time to move to the city: Ireland was in the throes of a great famine, triggered by a potato blight, and hundreds of thousands of Irish were dying of hunger and disease or fleeing the country.
Mary became pregnant in Dublin, and Lady Drysdale asked her Edinburgh friend James Young Simpson to recommend a local doctor who could administer chloroform during her daughter’s labour; Simpson had discovered the anaesthetic properties of the gas that year in an experiment conducted in his house in the New Town. In Dublin in 1848, Mary Lane gave birth to a boy. She and Edward named him Arthur George, in tribute to their two brothers.
The family moved back to Edinburgh in 1849. Edward, having lost his own mother when he was nine, submitted gladly to Lady Drysdale’s benign dominion at 8 Royal Circus. He decided to abandon the profession for which he had spent the previous seven years preparing, and instead to follow George into medicine. Perhaps the sufferings of his brother-in-law inspired him to take up doctoring, as well as his interest in the new sciences. A medical degree was then the only scientific education available in Britain, and the Edinburgh course was known to provide a practical as well as an intellectually rigorous training. Both young men enrolled at the university in the autumn of 1849.
As a medical student, Edward worked at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, which drew most of its patients from the working classes. He was dismayed by what he saw on the wards and became convinced that conventional medical interventions – with leeches and enemas, laxatives and mercury – were usually useless and sometimes actively damaging to health. The Royal Infirmary, as he pointed out in his final thesis, even exposed the sick to infection by putting contagious patients in general wards; he said that he knew of two people who had died as a result of this practice. Though he did not deta
il the ineffective and painful treatments administered by the infirmary’s physicians, he witnessed plenty. One patient – a seaman in his thirties – was admitted with an abdominal aneurism in 1849, and for the next four years was bled, cupped and stuck with leeches (up to fourteen at a time) until eventually he put himself out of his misery with an overdose of aconite.
Edward noticed ‘the total dearth of books of every description’ on the wards of the Royal Infirmary and deplored ‘the perfect mental blank’ this inflicted on the patients: ‘The effect on the spirits, it is clear, is as bad as possible … and the depression of spirits does its work on the health.’ To combat this evil, he asked Charles Dickens to supply the hospital with free copies of his weekly magazine Household Words and Robert Chambers to provide Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. Both agreed. The new bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, was also popular with the patients.
During his time on the wards, Edward began to conceive of more humane and natural ways of treating illness, methods of healing the mind and the body in unison. He became convinced that environment could transform a patient’s prospects of recovery. The sick were much more likely to get better, he argued in his thesis, if housed in hospitals in the suburbs or the countryside, where they could exercise gently in daylight and pure air, surrounded by the sights and sounds and smells of nature. The inmates of the Royal Infirmary had access only to ‘the prison-gloom of a damp back-green, overgrown on every side with rank grass, and shut out from the rattle of a busy thoroughfare by a dingy wall’. He asked his fellow doctors to recognise ‘the immense resources possessed and wielded by nature towards her self-cure, as compared with the pigmy, tentative, and too often only hap-hazard means, which the very best human skill can furnish’.
Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady Page 3