‘I propose,’ said Chambers, ‘to put in evidence certain diaries written by Mrs Robinson. They will establish Mrs Robinson’s guilt, but I am bound to confess that I entertain some doubt whether your Lordships will consider it sufficient as against Dr Lane.’
At this, Edward Lane’s counsel, William Forsyth QC, got to his feet. He said that he objected to the admission of the diaries as evidence against either of the respondents. ‘If Mrs Robinson is found guilty of adultery, it can only be with Dr Lane,’ argued Forsyth, a long-faced Scot of forty-five, ‘but her admissions or confessions, if the diary is so taken, can be no evidence against him, and therefore ought not to be used at all.’
The issue of the diary’s status as evidence was to vex the court throughout the trial. The rules suggested that it could be used against Mrs Robinson (as a confession) but not against Dr Lane (as an accusation).
The judges conferred, and announced that they considered the diaries admissible, against her if not him. Cresswell explained: ‘If several persons are indicted for burglary or conspiracy, and one of them makes a confession inculpating the rest, against whom there is no other evidence, it is quite true that his statement would not be evidence against anybody else, but could not the man himself be convicted?’
‘No,’ said Forsyth.
In moments of impatience, Cresswell twiddled his spectacles on their stick. Before delivering a crushing put-down he often adopted an expression of unusually attentive politeness. He addressed Forsyth: ‘I would be glad to see any authority for that statement from the learned counsel.’
Forsyth took his point no further and Isabella’s counsel, Dr Robert Phillimore, quickly abandoned his own plan to contest the introduction of the diary. He rose to say that he had been about to object to it on Mrs Robinson’s behalf, ‘but after the expression of opinion I have just heard from the court I will not proceed’. The defence lawyers’ first strategy – to destroy the main evidence against their clients by eliminating the diary – had collapsed.
Chambers called for Isabella’s journals to be produced for the court. He asked the clerk to read from them, but first warned that their contents might embarrass innocent parties. ‘The diary contains the names of two young men whom Mrs Robinson apparently endeavoured to corrupt,’ he said, deftly introducing an image of his client’s wife as a predatory and ageing seductress. ‘My impression is that her endeavours did not prove successful, although I will admit that it is quite possible they did. She accused them of coldness and restraint, and a desire to escape from her; and therefore I will not, if I can avoid it, introduce their names, especially as they seem to have been young men.’
With this, Chambers indicated to the clerk of the court the relevant passages in the three volumes of the diary dating from 1850, 1854 and 1855. At a long table just below the judges’ bench, the clerk read aloud a short extract about Isabella Robinson’s first encounter with Edward Lane in 1850, another about a poem that she had written under the title of ‘Spirit Discord’, and another about the ‘preponderance of Amativeness’ that she identified in her character.
Then he turned to the entries on which Henry’s case rested. The first was that of 7 October 1854, in which Isabella and Edward first kissed among the ferns: ‘Oh, God! I had never hoped to see this hour, or to have any part of my part of love returned. But so it was.’ The clerk moved on to the extract of 10 October, which described the ‘bliss’ Isabella experienced with Edward in a carriage taking her from Moor Park to Ash railway station. ‘I leaned back at last in silent joy,’ read the clerk, ‘in those arms I had so often dreamed of.’ The final words from this entry, about the doctor’s ‘unselfish’ love-making, were omitted. Since the passage was read out at the behest of Henry’s lawyers, perhaps it was Henry who chose to delete this last clause, which implied that his own sexual technique was less satisfactory than that of Edward Lane. There may have been a limit to how far he would humiliate himself in his efforts to get rid of his wife.
The last entry the clerk read that day was from 14 October (in fact, the passage was written in October 1855, though this was not made clear in court) and described how Edward seduced Isabella in the house at Moor Park. ‘The doctor … caressed me, and tempted me, and finally, after some delay, we adjourned to the next room and spent a quarter of an hour in blissful excitement.’ This entry included the line in which Edward advised Isabella to ‘try to obviate consequences’, a suggestion that had moved her to tears.
The Sunday newspaper the Observer declined to publish the diary extracts, not just because they were lewd, but also because they were written vividly enough to excite a reader: ‘it would be quite improper to print them in a family newspaper’, explained the editor. ‘They contain admissions in all but the plainest terms of the criminality imputed to the unfortunate lady in question, and they are moreover penned with a degree of descriptive ability which renders them most dangerous reading. Under such circumstances it has been considered the wiser course to omit them altogether.’ The idea that certain kinds of writing were dangerous – especially to young women – was commonplace: usually the culprits were French novels, but Isabella Robinson’s diary showed that a middle-class Englishwoman could assault her own decency in prose.
The Divorce Court investigated adultery from the perspective of the injured party, giving the spectators in the courtroom and the readers of newspapers a cuckold’s quick glimpses of a woman’s forbidden liaisons. But Isabella’s diary complicated the perspective: to hear of Henry’s discovery of the journal may have put the court in the position of the horrified husband; yet to hear the diary extracts was to inhabit his wife’s consciousness, to imagine adultery as an adulteress.
Once the readings were over, Chambers took the floor again. ‘I am really quite at a loss,’ he said, ‘to know what will be the defence set up on the other side. I have been given to understand that it will be contended that what this lady wrote were mere hallucinations, and have no reference to facts.’ Chambers claimed that his witnesses would confirm the diary’s accuracy: ‘the parole evidence I will call before your Lordships will be found to corroborate the diary in many important particulars, and to show what she had written was not unlikely to have occurred.’
Henry Robinson had gathered seven witnesses to testify on his behalf: his father, his brother-in-law, a nursemaid to his sons, and a guest and three servants from Moor Park. They waited to be called in the great vault of Westminster Hall, a fourteenth-century law court that now served as an extravagant antechamber to the newer courtrooms along its west flank. The witnesses stood beneath a high hammer-beam roof, the finest of its kind in England, in which each oak beam tapered to a carving of an angel clutching a shield.
Chambers called James Jay to the witness box. Mr Jay, a forty-nine-year-old magistrate and alderman who was married to Henry Robinson’s sister Sarah, made his way into the courtroom through the furthest arched doorway on the right-hand side of Westminster Hall. He walked over to the bench and climbed the steps to a railed pen alongside the judges. After taking the oath, he confirmed that in February 1844 he had been present at Henry and Isabella’s wedding in St Peter’s, Hereford, a medieval church at the end of the Jays’ street. He testified that when Henry married Isabella, she was a widow with one child. For several years after the marriage, he said, the Robinsons lived at Blackheath, and when he had visited them there they always seemed to be on good terms. Henry, in his view, was a kind and affectionate husband.
James Jay was shown the three relevant volumes of the journal, and was asked whether they were written in Isabella’s hand. He said that they were.
Forsyth asked Jay whether he knew Mrs Robinson’s age. Jay replied that he did not – she looked about fifty, he said. This completed his evidence.
The next witness was Henry’s father, who had moved to London with his wife and sons in the late 1830s. An usher led the seventy-two-year-old James Robinson to the bench, where he took the oath. He simply testified that Henry and Isabella s
eemed to live on good terms.
Then came Eliza Power, now in her late forties, the Irish-born nurse who had looked after the Robinson children for eight years. She confirmed that Henry was kind to his wife and that when the family lived in Edinburgh his business engagements had sometimes taken him away from home.
The law required that a husband petitioning for divorce on the grounds of adultery establish that he had taken care of his wife and treated her with propriety. Henry’s first three witnesses had testified to this effect.
The next to be called was Frances Brown, an Edinburgh resident of about forty-four. An usher led her to the witness box. She climbed the steps, and he let down the rail.
In reply to Chambers’s questions, Miss Brown explained that she had become acquainted with Mr and Mrs Robinson in Edinburgh towards the end of 1850, and that she and her sister frequently met them at social events. In 1854 the sisters took the water cure together at Dr Lane’s establishment in Surrey.
‘I stayed with Dr and Mrs Lane at Moor Park in October 1854,’ she said, ‘and was there when Mrs Robinson came on a visit of about three days that month.’
Were Dr Lane and Mrs Robinson intimate? asked Chambers.
‘They had been intimate from the time I knew them,’ said Miss Brown, ‘but I did not notice that they were then more intimate than on former occasions.’
Chambers asked her about the incident described in the diary in which Edward and Isabella, returning to the house after an amorous tryst on 7 October 1854, stopped to talk to the Brown sisters. Miss Brown confirmed all the incidents in which she played a part. ‘One Sunday afternoon, pretty late, my sister and I met Dr Lane and Mrs Robinson coming from a walk. They seemed to be coming from the moors. The ground in the neighbourhood of Moor Park was thinly wooded. They approached and talked to us.’
Chambers asked whether she remembered telling a ghost story to one of Mrs Robinson’s sons that evening, as mentioned in the diary. She said that she did. He asked whether she remembered the manner of Mrs Robinson’s departure from Moor Park, which in the diary was the occasion of the sexual encounter in the carriage.
‘When Mrs Robinson left Moor Park, she went in a carriage at night,’ said Miss Brown, ‘and Dr Lane went with her to the station.’
Under cross-examination, Miss Brown agreed that Dr Lane ‘paid great attention to all the ladies under his care’ at the Moor Park hydropathic establishment. Had it ever occurred to her that there was an improper attachment between the doctor and Mrs Robinson? No, she said, it had not. How many married ladies were staying at Moor Park that October, asked the defence lawyer, and did Dr Lane walk in the grounds with any of them?
‘I can remember seven ladies there,’ said Miss Brown, ‘some married, some single. Dr Lane was in the habit of walking out with different ladies in the grounds.’
She answered a series of questions about the landscape around the house at Moor Park: there were many trees nearby, she confirmed; the moorland was about a mile away. She was asked whether Mrs Robinson took her eldest son, Alfred, with her when she drove off to the station with Dr Lane. Yes, said Miss Brown, she probably did.
Miss Brown was dismissed, and in her place the clerk of the court summoned Levi Warren, a stable boy who had been employed by Dr Lane at Moor Park in 1854. Warren agreed that Mrs Robinson usually came to Moor Park with her son ‘Master Alfred’ and that she and Dr Lane often walked together in the grounds. Then he dropped his bombshell.
‘I have also seen them in the summerhouse,’ said Warren; ‘him sitting with his arm around her waist.’ The summerhouse, he added, was on an island on the river running through Moor Park, and he had seen the two of them alone there more than once.
Warren was the first witness to allege anything improper between Edward and Isabella. In legal terms, the scene that he described was a ‘proximate act’, an event that fell short of catching a couple in flagrante but was strongly suggestive of an improper liaison. Proximate acts might include a married lady keeping a secret correspondence with a gentleman; or visiting a single man at his house, and closing the shutters; or letting a man into her house at night in a clandestine fashion – or, as in this case, sitting in a summerhouse with a man’s hand at her waist.
When cross-examined, though, Levi Warren revealed his bias. It emerged that the stable boy had a long association with Henry Robinson, on whose behalf he was testifying. He had worked for him in 1851 and had secured the position at Moor Park on his recommendation. When he subsequently left Dr Lane’s employ (he found the place ‘hard’, he said; he ‘did not like it’) Henry again helped out, recommending him for another job.
The defence lawyers, led by Phillimore and Forsyth, established that Henry had interviewed Warren about the events at Moor Park with the help of a private investigator, the former police detective Charles Frederick Field. Charley Field was a cheerful, astute fellow, plump and unscrupulous – the inspiration for Inspector Bucket in Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) – who since leaving the police force had been frequently employed by men seeking to gather evidence of their wives’ adultery. The lawyers asked Warren whether it was true that after this meeting with ex-Inspector Field he had confessed to the butler at Moor Park that he had in fact not seen Dr Lane with his arm around Mrs Robinson. They insinuated that Warren had lied to the court, having been bribed by Henry’s agent to give false evidence.
Warren denied it. He said that he had talked to the Moor Park butler about meeting Mr Field and Mr Robinson, but had not confided any intention to lie about what he had seen in the summerhouse.
Divorce suits often hinged on the evidence of servants and hotel staff, they being the likeliest witnesses to acts of illicit intimacy among the middle and upper classes, but judges were on their guard against corrupt or vengeful employees. ‘The testimony of discarded domestics should be received with great caution, and the most sifting,’ warned a legal handbook, ‘otherwise our position is fearful, our tables and beds would be surrounded with snares, and our comforts converted into instruments of terror and alarm.’
Two further Moor Park servants were called. John Thomas Jenkins testified that he thought that Dr Lane used to pay more attention to Mrs Robinson than to any of the other ladies.
Did he ever see any familiarity between them? asked a defence lawyer.
No, conceded John Jenkins, he did not.
Sarah Burmingham, the sister of the Moor Park gardener who corresponded with Darwin, gave similar evidence about the closeness between Dr Lane and Mrs Robinson. She added that Mrs Robinson had spoken to her of the doctor as a ‘very handsome’ and ‘fascinating’ person.
The court heard testimony – the newspaper reports did not specify from which servant – that Dr Lane had been seen emerging from Mrs Robinson’s room; that she had been seen in his study; and that they whispered together at the dinner table.
The petitioner’s case, said Chambers, rested here.
It now fell to counsel for Edward and Isabella to present the case for the defence. But when Isabella’s counsel, Dr Phillimore, began to outline his arguments, Cockburn stopped him. In his clear, melodious voice, the Chief Justice said that the material being introduced was unfit for the ears of ladies. He suggested that the court adjourn for a short time, and that on its reassembly all women should be excluded from the room. The other judges agreed. On the same grounds, it seems that the reporters in the courtroom were discouraged or forbidden from printing the exchanges that ensued, as no further details of that day’s hearing appeared in the press.
Most of the petitioners to the divorce court, which had opened in January, were men accusing their wives of adultery. The new law stipulated that to secure a divorce, a husband needed to establish just his wife’s infidelity, whereas a woman needed to prove that her husband was not only unfaithful but also guilty of desertion, cruelty, bigamy, incest, rape, sodomy or bestiality. This double standard was based on the social danger posed by the adulteress. Because she might bear her husband another man’s
child, the unfaithful wife threatened certainties about paternity, kinship, succession and inheritance, the underpinnings of bourgeois society. The archetypal English adulteress was Queen Guinevere, a woman whose infidelity ushered in the ruin of her husband’s realm. ‘The shadow of another cleaves to me,’ says Guinevere in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859), ‘And makes me one pollution.’
The most notorious adulteress in contemporary literature was Madame Bovary, the bored provincial wife in Flaubert’s novel of 1857. Emma Bovary is restless, sensual, melancholic, steeped in romantic fiction – one of her favourite books is St Pierre’s Paul and Virginia, the novel that Isabella quoted to Edward in October 1854. She becomes infatuated with a young clerk, whom she plies with presents, and in the book’s most scandalous episode – edited out of the original serialisation but reinstated by Flaubert in the published novel – she and he commit adultery in a carriage.
Though not published in English for many years, the novel immediately provoked comment in the British press. An essay in the Saturday Review in 1857 described Emma Bovary as ‘one of the most essentially disgusting’ characters in literature; the essayist claimed that women of her kind threatened to destroy society from within. He reassured his readers that there was no danger that ‘our novelists’ would outrage public decency as Flaubert had done, but he warned that English propriety carried its own risks. The national reticence about sex might end by inflaming desire: ‘a light literature entirely based upon love, and absolutely and systematically silent as to one most important side of it,’ he observed, might ‘have some tendency to stimulate passions to which it is far too proper ever to allude.’
Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady Page 12