Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady

by Kate Summerscale

  Mrs Suckling stepped down, and Forsyth summoned Lady Drysdale to the witness box. Edward, as the co-respondent, was not entitled to testify in court; nor, as his wife, was Mary. But Lady Drysdale was able to appear as a witness in her son-in-law’s defence.

  In answer to Forsyth’s questions, Elizabeth Drysdale told the court that she had lived with her daughter and Edward Lane ever since their marriage. The Lanes, she said, had long been very intimate with the Robinson family. Forsyth asked her about Dr Lane’s behaviour towards Mrs Robinson.

  ‘His conduct was always exactly the same to Mrs Robinson as to the other ladies in the house,’ Lady Drysdale said. ‘I often urged Dr Lane to pay kind attention to Mrs Robinson.’

  Why was that? asked Forsyth.

  ‘Because I thought that Mrs Robinson’s home was an unhappy one,’ she replied.

  Forsyth asked Lady Drysdale whether she was aware of the doctor’s walks with Mrs Robinson.

  ‘Mrs Lane and I always knew when the doctor drove or walked out with Mrs Robinson,’ she said. ‘He was accustomed to walk about the grounds with different ladies living in the establishment.’

  Did she ever notice any improper familiarities pass between Dr Lane and Mrs Robinson?

  No, said Lady Drysdale, she did not.

  Forsyth had no further questions.

  Jesse Addams, who was assisting Montagu Chambers with Henry’s case, rose to cross-examine Lady Drysdale.

  Dr Addams had represented Henry the previous December when he had secured his judicial separation in the Consistory Court. Isabella, too, brought with her to the new court her representative from December’s trial, Dr Phillimore, while a James Deane had been assigned to Edward Lane’s defence. As former practitioners in Doctors’ Commons, they were Doctors of Civil Law, and as Queen’s Counsel they were also qualified to practise in the new court.

  Addams asked Lady Drysdale to describe Mary Lane’s temperament.

  ‘My daughter is a very sweet-tempered person,’ said Lady Drysdale.

  And how old was she at the time of the alleged affair?

  ‘About twenty-seven years of age,’ said Lady Drysdale.

  ‘And very unsuspicious?’ asked Addams.

  ‘She had no suspicions of her husband,’ said Lady Drysdale. ‘She had no cause.’

  The barrister asked her the age of Mrs Robinson.

  ‘The age of most of the lady patients is about fifty,’ replied Lady Drysdale, ‘or perhaps fifty-five. I should say that Mrs Robinson was fifty-five but I am afraid of saying too much.’ At this, some of the spectators in the courtroom laughed.

  Isabella had in fact been forty-one at the time of the alleged adultery. Even if Lady Drysdale did not know this, she surely knew that her own daughter, Mary, was thirty-one rather than twenty-seven when her husband was said to have strayed.

  One of the judges asked Lady Drysdale how the Robinsons and the Lanes had become so close.

  ‘Mrs Robinson was remarkably kind to Dr Lane’s children, my little grandchildren,’ said Lady Drysdale, ‘and that led to the intimacy.’

  Lady Drysdale was dismissed. Her account of the mutual confidence that existed between her son-in-law, her daughter and herself, said The Morning Post, had been ‘most effective and touching’.

  Forsyth’s next witness was Mr Reed, a surveyor, who produced a plan of the Moor Park grounds. He pointed out on the plan the location of a summerhouse. He testified that a person standing in the position that Levi Warren had described could not have seen into the summerhouse at all, let alone have observed Dr Lane’s arm encircling Mrs Robinson’s waist.

  The last witness for Edward Lane was Dr Mark Richardson, a former surgeon in the Bengal Army, who had been at Moor Park when Mrs Robinson visited in 1856. Like all the Moor Park patients before him, he testified that Dr Lane had behaved towards her in exactly the same way as towards the other female guests.

  For the summing-up, Forsyth handed over to his junior, John Duke Coleridge, a great-nephew of the poet. Coleridge repeated to the court that there was no evidence to inculpate Edward Lane.

  Phillimore then rose to put forward Isabella’s case. It seemed a tall order, not least because he had offered no defence at all when he represented her in Doctors’ Commons. But the rules had changed – in particular the rule that required the petitioner to publicly identify his wife’s alleged lover.

  ‘This is one of the most remarkable cases I have ever heard of,’ said Phillimore. ‘It seems admitted that the case against Dr Lane rests on nothing but Mrs Robinson’s diary, which can not be admitted against him; and it might, therefore, happen that Dr Lane will be dismissed on the ground that no adultery was proved against him; and Mrs Robinson will be divorced on the ground that her adultery with Dr Lane has been proved. I need hardly say what a state of jurisprudence such a state of things would represent.’ To find Mrs Robinson guilty and Dr Lane innocent, as he pointed out, would render the moment of their intimacy at once real and unreal, a fact and a fiction. She might be proven to have had sexual intercourse with him, while he was cleared of having had sexual intercourse with her.

  The jowly, confident Robert Phillimore had more than fifteen years’ experience in both church and common law: through the church courts he had acquired a deep knowledge of the precedents of marital law; and he was equally familiar with the procedures and personalities of the secular system. He was well connected and well liked: a former MP, the son and brother of eminent academic lawyers, and a good friend of the former Chancellor (and future Prime Minister) William Gladstone. Phillimore was probably unaware that Gladstone kept a private diary in the 1850s in which he recorded his ‘rescue work’ with prostitutes and his subsequent episodes of repentant self-flagellation.

  Cockburn took issue with Phillimore’s argument that the Robinson case had become absurd. Suppose a wife had confessed to adultery, the judge said, but concealed her lover’s identity by substituting someone else’s name for his – the court could not convict the man whom she had falsely accused, but it could still convict her. He asked: ‘You would not compel a husband to keep such a wife?’

  ‘Mr Robinson must stand or fall by his own plea,’ replied Phillimore. ‘He has not charged his wife with adultery with any “person unknown”, or with any of the other individuals of whom in her monstrous journal she has spoken with such levity. He has charged her specifically with adultery with Dr Lane; and therefore, if the adultery with Dr Lane cannot be proved, the plea altogether fails. By Dr Lane’s innocence or guilt she must stand or fall.’

  Phillimore moved to his next stratagem: an attack on the diary’s veracity. ‘Here is a case in which there is no proximate act leading up to adultery of any sort or kind proved,’ he said. ‘Then we must fall back on what is called the confession of the wife, and that confession, it must be admitted, presents itself in an entirely novel shape – a confession to be gathered from certain expressions in a diary kept by the lady. Journals are proverbially untrue. Everybody associated with literature knows that Horace Walpole, for instance, deliberately put down in his diary things which were false.’ Walpole’s mid-eighteenth-century diaries about the courts of George II and George III had been published in the 1840s.

  ‘Things false and disgraceful to himself?’ asked Cresswell.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Phillimore admitted, ‘he generally sought to give a good colouring to his own acts. But instances are not wanting of persons who have a morbid disposition to write evil of themselves as well as good. I might, for instance, mention the Confessions of Rousseau, in which many things were recorded which were most disgraceful to the writer.’ The ‘disgraceful’ elements in the autobiography of Jean Jacques Rousseau, published four years after the author’s death in 1782, included his admissions that he had fathered several illegitimate children and that he masturbated.

  ‘Yes,’ said Cockburn, ‘but we must not assume that they were untrue.’

  ‘I might also instance the entry in Pepys’s diary,’ Phillimore perseve
red: ‘“Have made £500 this year by cheating. God forgive me therefore.”’

  ‘I am afraid we must not say that that was untrue,’ repeated Cockburn, provoking laughter in the courtroom. Samuel Pepys’s diary was famous for its frankness. The edition of 1848 omitted many passages that were, the editor explained, ‘of so indelicate a character that no one with a well-regulated mind will regret their loss’. Pepys had been edited not for falsehood but for excessive honesty.

  To establish that Isabella’s diary dealt in distortions, Phillimore drew the court’s attention to its frequent allusions to her vivid dreams. ‘All day I could not forget it or hardly realise how much of it was true and how much false’, she wrote, and, ‘Good God! What puppets of the imagination are we?’ Phillimore invited the court to adopt Isabella’s scepticism about her perceptions as its own. In the diary, he suggested, she was tapping into a region of sexual and imaginative anarchy, giving herself over to mirage and hallucination. According to Henry Holland’s Chapters on Mental Physiology (1852), dreams were close cousins of insanity: both displayed ‘the loss, partial or complete, of power to distinguish between unreal images created within the sensorium and the actual perceptions drawn from the external senses, thereby giving to the former the semblance and influence of realities’.

  Phillimore argued that it was not Isabella and Edward who had transgressed; rather, it was the diary that had crossed a boundary, and mutated into fiction. ‘I must contend,’ he said, ‘that the diary is not corroborated by one tittle of positive evidence. The passages relied on by the other side are not a narrative of anything that really occurred, but they are the merest illusions.’

  No one could read the diary, he said, without the impression that it was ‘the product of extravagance, of excitement, and of irritability, bordering on, if not actually in, the domain of madness. There never was a document which bore on the face of it the marks of so flighty, extravagant, excitable, romantic, irritable, foolish and disordered a mind as this diary of Mrs Robinson.’

  If Phillimore, who himself kept a diary, had struggled to find examples of false confessions in journals, it may have been because his reading was limited to the journals of famous men. But he was touching upon an incipient, barely articulated sense of unease about diaries in mid-nineteenth-century England. Of all the written life stories that fascinated the Victorians – biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, journals of health and travel and politics – the personal diary was the most subjective and raw, the most revealing of the problems of writing and reading about the self.

  Although people had kept records of their domestic and spiritual lives for hundreds of years, the practice spread dramatically in the early-nineteenth century. Before then, most journals had been household books, private to the family rather than to the individual, and secret thoughts were enclosed in letters to trusted friends. The fashion for private diaries was fuelled by the popularity of Romantic poetry, which prized introspection, and by the first publications of personal journals: the seventeenth-century diaries of John Evelyn originally appeared in 1818 and those of Pepys in 1825. The number of diaries published each year doubled in the 1820s, and in the 1830s reached a peak that was maintained into the 1850s. In most cases, the authors of these journals had not imagined that their words would one day be read by strangers. An eighteenth-century diary by Isabella’s ancestor Samuel Curwen, whose branch of the family had emigrated to the United States from Cumberland, was published in 1842. The preface quoted Curwen’s plea: ‘may [these papers] prove an entertainment to my friends, to whom I commend them, requesting their care to keep them from the inspection of all others, they being negligently written and but for the eye of candor and friendship’. The promise of openness drew in the reader, while the editor insisted that publication of Curwen’s diary was ‘in no wise a violation of his injunction’, but ‘due to his memory’.

  Made-up diaries had also become commonplace by the 1850s. The epistolary novel of the eighteenth century, in which a story was told through letters, had gradually given way to the diary novel, in which the heroine wrote missives to herself. The beginnings of this shift could be traced to Samuel Richardson’s hugely popular Pamela (1740), in which the narrator’s letters to her parents are replaced, as she becomes more isolated, with something closer to a journal. In Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, Extracted from her Own Journal (1761) the heroine writes a series of letters to a confidante, but the terms in which she describes her enterprise anticipate the deeper secrecy of the private diarist: ‘to you only, my second self … to you I am bound by solemn promise, and reciprocal confidence, to disclose the inmost secrets of my soul, and with you they are as safe as in my own breast’.

  Some of the first diary novels of the nineteenth century purported to be real. The Diary of an Ennuyée, published anonymously in 1826, was described by its publisher as a journal discovered among the effects of a young woman who had died of tuberculosis. Soon afterwards it was exposed as a fictional work by Anna Brownell Jameson. In a preface to a subsequent edition, Mrs Jameson apologised for having pretended that the journal was genuine: ‘the intention was not to create an illusion, by giving to fiction the appearance of truth; but, in fact, to conceal truth by throwing over it the veil of fiction’. Also originally taken to be authentic was So much of the Diary of Lady Willoughby, as Relates to Her Domestic History, and to the Eventful Period of the Reign of Charles the First, published in 1844 in mock-seventeenth-century trappings: the text was printed in antique type on wide, creamy, ribbed leaves of paper, their gilded edges indented with a pattern of diamonds. The author, Hannah Mary Rathbone, published Some Further Portions … from the same imaginary work in 1848, with a preface in which she admitted to ‘personating’ a historical figure. The success of her pastiche inspired a string of imitations through the 1850s, novels in the guise of newly discovered journals by forgotten women, most of them only lightly masquerading as fact. These published diaries, real and imaginary, exploited the idea that the diary was the purest of literary narratives; and simultaneously undermined it.

  Both Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights (1847) and her sister Anne in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall used journals as the scaffolds for the plots of their novels. Dinah Mulock, a regular at Moor Park, in 1852 wrote a novel in the shape of the secret journal of a governess, and Wilkie Collins in 1856 published two tales in the guise of journals by women. By now, the Athenaeum observed: ‘The Diary seems to have superseded Letters as the means by which persons are made to relate their own stories.’ The thrill of the form lay precisely in its verisimilitude, its semblance of reality. The reader of a diary could feel the naughty pleasure of scanning pages not meant for her eyes; or accept the role of the trusted friend for whom the narrator longed. Whether as a spy or a confidante, or both, she experienced a sharp sensation of proximity.

  To cash in on the craze for writing as well as reading journals, the publisher John Letts printed the first large formatted diaries in the 1820s. By 1850 the Letts company was selling several thousand diaries a year, in dozens of different formats. These were the books in which Isabella wrote; they came bound in cloth or in red Russian calf hide, which gave off a faint scent of birch bark, and could be fitted with protective covers and spring locks. ‘Use your diary with the utmost familiarity and confidence,’ Letts counselled the novice diarist, ‘conceal nothing from its pages nor suffer any other eye than your own to scan them.’ The word ‘diarist’ was first recorded in 1818 and ‘diarise’ in 1842 (these were equivalents to the more established ‘journaliser’ or ‘journalist’, for someone who kept a journal, and ‘journalising’ or ‘journalism’, for the activity of keeping it).

  Women, in particular, took to diarising with a passion. Punch magazine satirised the trend in 1849 in its column ‘My Wife’s Diary’, which affected to be a series of excerpts from a lady’s diary that an outraged husband had read, transcribed, and secretly submitted to the editor of the magazine. The wife’s concerns are mer
cenary and banal: she plots to hide the port from her husband and to sweet-talk him into giving her pretty shawls and sewing boxes. He ‘contradicted me about the horse-radish’, she complains, ‘when I knew I was right’. Diaries were often dismissed as receptacles for women’s silliness: ‘the young lady may get a bound volume of any size to hold her twelvemonth’s superfluity of thought,’ observed a review of Letts diaries in the Examiner in 1856, ‘bound neatly and printed on good paper’.

  Yet even ladies’ diaries were finding their way into print. At the time that Isabella began her journal, the most recent published diaries by a woman were those of the novelist Fanny Burney, which appeared in three volumes after her death in 1840. Following her example, an ambitious female diarist might hope that she was composing her journal as a form of apprenticeship, a rehearsal for novel-writing; and she might even wonder whether the journal itself would one day find an audience. Burney’s diary illuminated the artful artlessness of the best journals: they could aim for complete honesty (‘a Journal in which I must confess my every thought must open my whole Heart!’) while also aspiring to dramatic excitement (‘Alas, alas! My poor Journal! – how dull, unentertaining, uninteresting thou art! – oh what would I give for some adventure worth reciting – for something which would surprise – astonish you!)’ To satisfy a diary’s hunger for stories, its author might be driven to live more interestingly; or to imagine doing so. Burney had edited her journals for publication, and then destroyed the originals.

  Diaries (from the Latin dies) and journals (from the French jour) were by definition daily records, yet their air of immediacy could be misleading. Isabella’s entries were often written up a day or more after the events they described. A diary could only approximate real time, as it could only shadow and catch at the feelings that it sought to pin down. It worked upon its author, tending to intensify her emotions and alter her perceptions. Jane Carlyle, the wife of the historian Thomas Carlyle, described this process in an entry in her private diary of 21 October 1855: ‘Your journal all about feelings aggravates whatever is factitious and morbid in you; that I have made experience of.’ The act of diary-keeping honoured many of the values of Victorian society – self-reliance, autonomy, the capacity to keep secrets. But if taken too far, these same virtues could turn to vices. Self-reliance could become a radical disconnection from society, its codes and rules and restraints; secrecy could curdle into deceit; self-monitoring into solipsism; and introspection into monomania.