Edward’s brothers-in-law were similarly sceptical about traditional medicine. John, the homeopath, was expelled from the Liverpool Medical Institute in 1849 because of his insistence on administering homeopathic remedies to cholera victims – with, he claimed, great success. George had discovered for himself that medical interventions failed to cure onanism; only the natural cure of sexual intercourse had saved him. He abandoned university again in 1851, this time to start work on a clandestine project, his book about sex.
Like George Drysdale, Isabella Robinson was excitable and depressive, ambitious and anxious. Like him, she was disturbed by her sexual appetites. Her lust, she believed, had hastened her into two bad marriages and was now snaring her in longing for Edward Lane. He was not the only object of her affections: another – unidentified – married gentleman in their circle claimed that Isabella besieged him with letters in an attempt to seduce him, and that he eventually disentangled himself by begging his wife never to let her in their house again. In Edinburgh, Isabella at least found a new way of thinking about her erotic urges. Her teacher was George Combe, a luminary of the Drysdales’ circle and the pioneer of phrenology in Britain. The sixty-two-year-old Mr Combe was a thin, tall man, with a wide mouth, strong cheekbones and a huge, high forehead. He lived in the New Town with his wife, Cecilia, a daughter of the actress Sarah Siddons.
When Isabella met Combe in 1850 she adopted him as a surrogate father – her regard for him, she said, was ‘quite filial in its character’. She believed him to be ‘the exponent of a clearer, & more spiritual creed, than any yet preached to man’. Mrs Combe’s cousin Fanny Kemble agreed that he was ‘a man of singular integrity, uprightness, and purity of mind and character, and of great justice and impartiality of judgment; he was extremely benevolent and humane, and one of the most reasonable human beings I have ever known’. Marian Evans, later to become famous as a novelist under the pseudonym George Eliot, was also a friend and an admirer: ‘I often think of you,’ she wrote to him, ‘when I want some one to whom I could confess all my difficulties and struggles with my own nature’.
Combe’s book The Constitution of Man in Relation to External Objects (1828) had sold 90,000 copies by 1851, most of them in an edition published by Robert Chambers. An enormously controversial work, it proposed that man should accept his subjection to the laws of nature; the secrets of health and happiness, it implied, lay in science rather than religion. In A System of Phrenology (1843), Combe argued specifically that people’s feelings were located in their heads, that their characters could be deduced from the contours of their skulls. The bump-reading aspect of phrenology was often ridiculed, but the principles of the new science were radical and influential: Combe insisted that the mind was located in the brain, that the mind and body were indivisible, that different parts of the brain had different functions and that human nature was based in matter rather than spirit. The defining image of the theory – a brain split into numbered segments – was a model for a new science of the mind.
Soon after they met in Edinburgh, Combe examined Isabella’s skull. He informed her that she had an unusually large cerebellum, an organ found just above the hollow at the nape of the neck. The cerebellum, he explained, was the seat of Amativeness, or sexual love – men typically had larger cerebella than women, discernible in their thicker necks, just as highly sexed animals such as rams, bulls and pigeons had fatter necks than other creatures. Another of Combe’s subjects, the nine-year-old Prince of Wales, had a similarly shaped skull: when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert consulted the phrenologist about the upbringing of their children, he observed that the young prince’s ‘Amativeness is large and I suspect will soon give trouble’. Combe’s own amative region, he said, was small – he had not known the ‘wild freshness of morning’, even in his youth.
Josef Franz Gall, the Viennese physician who invented phrenology in about 1800, claimed to have identified the amative region while attending a nymphomaniac widow. ‘In the violence of a paroxysm,’ explained George Combe in A System of Phrenology, ‘he supported her head, and was struck with the great heat and size of the neck.’ Combe declined to go into further detail on the subject in his book for the general reader, but he pointed ‘medical students’ to his translation of Gall’s On the Functions of the Cerebellum (1838), in which he elaborated on the story of the quivering widow: ‘she fell to the ground in a state of rigidity to such an extent that the nape of her neck and vertebral column were strongly drawn backwards. The crisis inevitably ended with an evacuation [an orgasmic emission], accompanied by a convulsive voluptuousness and a veritable ecstasy.’ The cerebellum had since become the most established of the phrenological faculties. In On the Management and Disorders of Infancy and Childhood (1853), a mainstream medical manual, Thomas John Graham asserted: ‘The appetite of love is seated in the cerebellum, at the base of the brain; and when excited by any cause, it does, under certain circumstances, if not indulged, become greater and greater, until it induces derangement of various functions, and hence hypochondriasis, convulsions, hysteria, and even insanity may be the result.’
Combe pointed out that Isabella’s large Amativeness was made the more dangerous by her small faculties of Cautiousness and Secretiveness, positioned just above the ears on the sides of the skull; these suggested that she was liable to be impulsive and indiscreet. Perhaps most worryingly of all, she had a small organ of Veneration: the crown of her head was depressed, which suggested that she lacked reverence for earthly and heavenly authority. Isabella was not only sexually enthusiastic, then, but she was also indifferent to law, religion and morality.
Yet Combe identified two areas of Isabella’s head that indicated a craving for the good opinion of others: her Love of Approbation and her Adhesiveness were both over-sized. The Love of Approbation was visible in the full, broad undulations of the back of her upper skull. Combe claimed that this faculty was often large in women and in French people, as well as in dogs, mules and monkeys. It suggested that Isabella was eager to please, and needed to guard against vanity, ambition, a hunger for praise. Her well-developed Adhesiveness – just below her Love of Approbation, and also typically larger in women than men – indicated her inclination to form strong attachments, sometimes to unsuitable objects or people. To illuminate the qualities of this part of the brain, Combe cited a piece of verse by Thomas Moore:
The heart, like a tendril accustomed to cling,
Let it grow where it will, cannot flourish alone;
But will lean to the nearest and loveliest thing
It can twine with itself, and make closely its own
Phrenology taught Isabella that the conflicting chambers of her brain accounted for the turbulence of her nature – her surges of desire and collapses into despair. It offered her a scientific explanation for her emotional difficulties, and a project for her own reform. Josef Gall had promised that his new science would ‘explain the double man within you, and the reason why your propensities and your intellect … are so often opposed to each other’. By decoding her constitution, Isabella hoped to adjust it, enlisting the higher faculties – the intellectual and moral sentiments – to contain and control the unruly parts of her brain. She resolved to free herself from the ‘self-love’ instilled in her in youth and to become ‘reasonable, moderate, self-possessed’.
‘I could only wish and strive to amend,’ Isabella wrote in her diary in February 1852, although she admitted that ‘with ardent feelings, with love of approbation beyond the common, with an ill-balanced mind, and the early misfortune of a bad education’ she found this ‘unusually difficult’. On the one hand, phrenology suggested that people had the capacity to manage their wayward selves; and on the other that they were powerless animal organisms, at the mercy of their physiology. Isabella often felt in thrall to her misshapen brain. ‘I know not how I can make myself anywise different,’ she wrote. ‘My heart clings to those that cannot help me, and rejects those whom I ought to love. God help me! How useless an
d hapless is my life; how much am I discontented with myself, and yet I persist in evil.’
The novelists Anne and Charlotte Brontë shared Isabella’s belief in phrenology. The heroine of Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall notices that her promiscuous, dipsomaniac husband has a dip at the crown of his skull, where the organ of Veneration should lie: ‘The head looked right enough, but when he placed my hand on the top of it, it sunk in a bed of curls, rather alarmingly low, especially in the middle.’ The heroine of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre: an Autobiography (1848) argues that all human beings ‘need exercise for their faculties’. Like Isabella, Jane is driven by passion. ‘Who blames me?’ she asks. ‘Many no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it. The restlessness was in my nature; and it agitated me to pain sometimes.’
Phrenologists, unlike most scientific thinkers, believed that men and women’s emotions and compulsions were essentially similar. ‘Women are supposed to be very calm generally,’ says Jane Eyre; ‘but women feel just as men feel.’
George Drysdale and Edward Lane remained intimate while Isabella was living in Edinburgh. They took walks in the city or to the sea, by themselves or in the company of their friend Robert Chambers. All three sailed from Hull to Sweden in the summer of 1851, during a violent storm, in order to witness a total eclipse of the sun. ‘It was a ghastly spectacle to behold,’ reported one of their party, ‘a black sun surrounded by a pallid halo of light, and suspended in a sky of sombre leaden hue.’ Edward Lane measured the exact duration of the eclipse with a box chronometer; the darkness was so complete that he had to light a candle to read the time.
The friends shared a keen interest in scientific phenomena. Robert Chambers, as well as being a successful publisher and journalist, was the anonymous author of the bestselling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a proto-evolutionary, daringly materialist account of the Earth’s formation. Vestiges was condemned by many: its author, raged the Edinburgh Review, ‘believes … that mind and soul … are all a dream – that material organs are all in all – that he can weigh the mind as a butcher does a joint … He believes that the human family may be … of many species, and all sprung from apes.’
The authorship of Vestiges had been the subject of speculation ever since it was published in 1844. George Combe, as the most famous of their group, came under suspicion of having written the book, as did Catherine Crowe, whose The Night Side of Nature (1848) attempted to find physical explanations for apparently supernatural phenomena. Mrs Crowe was known to participate in outré scientific experiments, exploring the links between the mind and the body, visible and invisible forces. Hans Christian Andersen saw her inhaling ether at the house of Dr Simpson in 1847. ‘Miss [sic] Crowe and one other poetess drank ether; I had the feeling of being with two mad creatures – they smiled with open dead eyes.’
George Combe’s phrenology, Edward Lane’s theory of medicine, Robert Chambers’s geology, Catherine Crowe’s psychical research and George Drysdale’s sexual philosophy all came from the same basket. They dealt in the idea that the world and its inhabitants were not fixed but dynamic, that they were ruled by natural rather than supernatural laws and that they changed over time.
In his journal of 1839, Combe described how he put his hand to the pulsing brain of an eight-year-old girl in New York, the victim of an accident that four years earlier had cracked open her skull and exposed its contents to the air. When he provoked various emotions in the child – bashfulness, pride, pleasure – Combe felt the different faculties swell beneath his palm, giving him ‘a sensation in the hand when placed on the integuments, as if one were feeling, through a silk handkerchief, the motions of a confined leech’. It was as if he were touching the child’s thoughts, feeling her feeling, as if her emotional world had been made flesh.
Combe’s attempts to probe the skull for clues to the life it enclosed were akin to Isabella’s attempts to decipher her life by recording her experiences in a diary. Like the economist and philosopher Herbert Spencer, who described his memoirs as ‘a natural history of myself’, she was charting her personal evolution. By writing and reading her journal, Isabella hoped to understand her alienated, conflicting self from the outside in, to get inside her own head and under her own skin.
See Notes on Chapter 2
3
THE SILENT SPIDER
Berkshire, 1852–54
A crisis in Henry Robinson’s business affairs compelled the family to leave Edinburgh in the spring of 1852, taking Isabella far from the friends who had sustained her. Albert and Richard Robinson were pulling out of the London iron yard, and Henry was forced to accept part of his share of the company in machinery and to surrender the rest. On top of this, it fell to him to pay their father the £3,000 that he had put in to the business. To recoup his losses, Henry set up in an office in Moorgate Street, in the City of London, negotiating the sale of sugar mills to colonial plantations.
Henry’s father, James, had patented his first mill in 1840. His advertising material promised plantation owners that the mills would crush and boil sugarcane more efficiently than the ‘careless’ ‘attendant blacks’, who pushed in the stalks ‘intermittingly and in unstratified bunches, now too little and then too much’. Since the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s, planters had become keen to find alternatives to paid labour. The Robinson mills were exported to Java, Cuba, Mauritius, Bourbon, Barbados, Bermuda and Natal; in Tirhoot, India, the workers nicknamed their three massive machines Rattletrap, Blowhard and Goliath of Gath. Henry refined his father’s device. In 1844, the year that he married Isabella, he was granted a patent on a design to fix the parts of a mill on to an iron base plate, increase the number of rollers that squeezed the juice out of shredded cane, and tighten the seal on the vacuum pan that converted the juice to syrup.
For three months in 1852, while Henry worked to establish an independent business in London, Isabella and her sons moved from place to place. They toured the Scottish Highlands and stayed for a while in a hotel in Scarborough, a fashionable resort on the Yorkshire coast. Isabella liked to be near seas and rivers. She preferred the Highlands to the ‘bold and beautiful’ valleys of South Wales, she told Combe in a letter, because of ‘the general absence of water in the Welsh landscapes’.
Isabella and the boys visited her family home in Shropshire, which she gave out to her Scottish friends as her address for correspondence. A railway station had opened in April at Ashford Bowdler, less than a mile from Ashford Carbonel, making it easy for the family and their visitors to come and go. The household at Ashford Court was much depleted. Two of Isabella’s younger siblings – Caroline and Henry – had died in the 1830s; her older brother, John, had emigrated to Tasmania in the early 1840s; and her sister Julia had moved to London upon her marriage to Henry Robinson’s younger brother Albert in 1849. The widowed Bridget, at sixty-three, now shared her home in Shropshire with her sons Christian and Frederick, aged twenty and twenty-nine. Frederick had qualified as a barrister in November 1847, but when his father died a month later he had been obliged – as the eldest son still in England – to take over the management of the estate.
Early in the summer, Isabella recorded in her diary a day on which the Lanes were staying as her guests at a house in the country. The house may have been Ashford Court, since Isabella seemed to take a proprietorial pride in showing her visitors the grounds and surrounding country. But she made no mention in the diary entry of her mother or brothers, so it is possible that the Lanes were visiting her in a rented property elsewhere. Henry, as usual, was absent.
At eleven in the morning of 30 May – Whit Sunday – Mary and her children came into Isabella’s bedroom. Mrs Lane was ‘very kind’, wrote Isabella, ‘and as the little group (joined by her pet spaniel) visited my bed, I felt how charming was their happy, affectionate spirit, and longed to love and enjoy life as they did’. The Lanes had decided to skip church that day. Edward was in his room, writing, but later in the m
orning he and his family headed out of doors. Isabella rose at noon and joined them in the garden, where she ‘answered their humorous condolences on my not being well’. She seemed to have been suffering from a hangover, given her friends’ teasing sympathies and the conversation that ensued: ‘chatted on selfishness, indulgences, and habits’.
While the boys played, Isabella took Edward and Mary to see a ‘flowery mound’ in the garden, which they admired. Then they sat and talked about ‘great men’ such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Combe. They discussed the issues that Edward had addressed in his article in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal the previous March: ‘pliancy of character, decided opinions, legal caution, mental reservation, and both sides of any question’. In his essay he had urged his readers to listen carefully to all versions of a story. ‘There is so much bias from self-love,’ he wrote, ‘so much recklessness about truth in general, and so much of even a sincere faithlessness of narration, that no partial account of anything is to be trusted.’ People could fool even themselves, he pointed out; they could be sincere in their misapprehensions.
‘Mr L was not in the buoyant spirits of the day before,’ observed Isabella, ‘but he was very gentle and charming. We went round by road after a little scramble, and round into steep meadow above. Here we paused to admire the lovely view.’
They soon went back to the house, where Edward read Isabella a passage from an essay on the imagination by Percy Bysshe Shelley – a new edition of the poet’s prose had been published that year. Isabella was not convinced by the essay’s argument; ‘as a phrenologist’, she told her diary, she had a different account of human psychology. When Mary came in with the boys, they convened for dinner. Many upper-middle-class families by now had luncheon at midday, tea in the afternoon and dinner in the evening, but the Robinsons adhered to the older convention of having a large meal in the afternoon and tea at night. Sunday dinner was a particularly lavish affair, and Isabella was pleased with the food prepared by her servants – beef, pigeon-pie (plucked pigeons laid on a bed of beef steak and baked in puff pastry), dumplings (boiled balls of suet and flour) and vegetables. They finished with coffee and eau-de-vie, a clear fruit brandy. ‘The only drawback,’ Isabella said, ‘was Atty’s bad conduct, and he annoyed us all day. At last we all went out.’
Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady Page 4