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

by Kate Summerscale

  He told Isabella that he was perplexed by the diary entries that had been described to him. He could not believe that they were factual, as it was impossible to imagine that she would have been reckless enough to keep a record of her sins. ‘You knew that you were mortal, & might be killed in a railway train, drowned in a storm, or die of spasm of the heart or apoplexy in a moment, or as actually happened fall ill of fever and become delirious. In any one of such cases your records of your own shame & your friend’s destruction would be certain to see the light. I tell you freely, therefore, that all my knowledge of human nature is baffled to account for your conduct in writing down such descriptions if they were true.’

  He suggested that Isabella could dismiss the diary entries as ‘a safety valve to an excited brain’, ‘the wildest speculations on all subjects sacred & profane, & the most fervid and passionate longings’. Yet he told her that Robert Chambers, who had read the diary, had scoffed at the idea that the incriminating entries were fantasies. The difficulty, Combe said, lay in the journal’s realism: ‘your antics, as described to me, are not of fancies & speculations, but of downright facts, with places, dates, & all the adjuncts of reality’. To illustrate the problem he fabricated a diary entry of his own. ‘Suppose that I should enter in my Journal “21st Feby 1854, I called on Mrs Robinson in Moray Place; we sat on the sofa together, & talked of many topics in philosophy & religion. On looking to know the hour, I found my watch gone. I had looked at it when I entered, having only half an hour to spare, & nobody but she could have taken it. I charged her with the theft, & she gave me back the watch, saying that she had taken it as a joke.” Suppose this entry to have fallen into the hands of my wife or my executors, would it be possible for them to believe that in making this entry I was merely disporting my fancy?’ He summed up: how was it possible to account for the diary entries so as ‘to enable minds of ordinary sagacity and experience to believe them to be fictions?’.

  By pointing out to her how incredible the diary seemed, Combe was hinting, opaquely, at how Isabella could explain it away: since to keep the journal was an act verging on madness, the contents of the journal could be ascribed to madness too. Perhaps the entries were so precise because they were not dreams but hallucinations.

  Combe told Isabella that he was glad of the opportunity to ‘lay the case this clearly before you, in the earnest hope that you will be able to clear up the mystery in a way that will vindicate yourself & Dr Lane’. On the same day he wrote a letter to the doctor in which he more directly named the solution to which he was pointing Isabella: she ‘writes like a very clever woman’, he said, but ‘the only explanation is insanity’. In a letter to Henry Robinson, Combe had also observed: ‘It looks like insanity.’ To Sir James Clark he wrote: ‘The woman was not mad in the usual sense’, but ‘she must have been labouring under excitement of the sexual propensity, & finding no outlet for it de facto, for she was not attractive, she indulged it in impure imaginations & to enhance the pleasure wrote these down as facts’.

  On 26 February 1858, three days after Combe wrote to her, Isabella sent her answer. ‘I will make my reply as clear & as satisfactory to you as I can,’ she said, ‘but I fear I must do so at some length, as writing is, after all, an irksome & roundabout way of expressing ourselves.’ The letter ran to nearly two thousand words, almost half of which were taken up with an impassioned denunciation of Henry, as a husband and as a man. She named his insensitivity, his unpoetic soul, his meanness, his underhand raids on her money, the immorality of his private life. She ran through the sorry story of their marriage. She blamed herself for her naivety and impulsiveness – ‘In looking back on my life, I see nothing but a series of erroneous steps, as far as worldliness & prudence are concerned’ – and claimed to be reconciled to her lot. ‘I have been sad so long that sorrow finds me patient & resigned; & perhaps, I have even learned useful lessons.’

  Yet Isabella’s contrition kept giving way to fury and pride. The letter was suffused with her rage at the injury done to her by all those who had read her diary. The unauthorised reading of her journal, she wrote, was ‘an injustice, a meanness, a robbery’. ‘That men, mere strangers, no ways authorised, should have considered themselves at liberty to pry into, to peruse, to censure, to select from, my private writings, with curious, unchivalrous, ignoble hands, I cannot understand. I could no more have done so than I could have listened meanly to their prayers, their midnight whisperings in sleep, or their accents of delirium; I should have considered myself insulted by bare proposition to read papers not meant for my eyes but the writer’s.’

  By conjuring up the intrusive, clumsy hands of the men who read her words, the eager eavesdropping at her bedside, Isabella depicted the illicit reading of her diary as an almost sexual assault. The secret spaces of her diary were aligned with the secret spaces of her body. Gustave Freytag’s Debit and Credit, published in English in 1857, played on the same parallel. The heroine of the novel slips her diary – ‘a small thin book bound in red silk’ – beneath her corset before a ball: ‘No stranger was allowed to look into this precious book – no one must see or touch this sanctuary.’ When a rakish gentleman steals the diary from beneath her underclothes, her beau proves his own honour by recovering the volume and handing it back to her unread.

  Isabella’s hatred of Henry burned bright. ‘Could I dream that the man who called himself my husband; who had smiled from his lofty pedestal of worldly prudence at my poetic outbursts, would cruelly enter my sick chamber (actually in search of money) & deprive me of my papers – those poor little treasures of a disappointed nature; & keep them too, in spite of the immutable laws of real justice.’ By English law, a woman’s papers were the property of her husband – as the reformer Caroline Norton complained, ‘the copyrights of my works are his; my very soul and brains are not my own!’. Isabella remarked that her brother Frederick, ‘whom no one can blame for being either poetic or enthusiastic’, agreed with her that Henry had been barbaric to force her writings from her when she was ill, and then to use them against her. ‘It is only on a woman that this indignity would be inflicted,’ she wrote. ‘Man would resist, & make the cowards who had dared to insult his privacy, recoil & tremble.’

  In the loneliness of her marriage, ‘What was my resource?’ she asked. ‘What my consolation? Solitude & my pen. Here I lived in a world of my own, one that scarcely any one ever entered. I felt that in my study, at least, I was a ruler; & that all I wrote was my own.’

  She dismissed the diary as a fanciful literary work, though even as she did so she could not resist casting her writing in a romantic light: ‘I dipped my pen but too often in the fairy ink of poesy; – the true & actual, the shadowy & the visionary were too often blended – I had the fatal gift – more curse than boon – of giving “to airy nothings, a local habitation & a name”.’ Her apparent composure, she said, belied an intense and desperate imaginative world: ‘If I have appeared calm, it was because a seething poetic life was sternly repressed into the precincts of solitude, there to be indulged with perchance twofold alacrity, in that it was a preeminently essential fact of my individuality, & that it had no outer food.’

  As to why she had preserved her journals, ‘I can only reply that I have almost no Caution – that I thought if I died, no evil to any one could result from what would then be waste paper; that if I lived, no one would take them from me; besides, I always promised myself to put them to rights, compare, destroy & sift them.’

  Isabella claimed that she was at a loss to know what more she could do to help the doctor. ‘I must say,’ she wrote, ‘that it rather surprised me that you should eagerly look for my explanations regarding my journal, as tho’ I could even yet do something towards removing the impression they have made, & the evil they have done. I see not how this can be.’

  This letter was no more effective in discrediting the diary than the previous two that she had written. Though she was by turns angry and remorseful, Isabella sounded like a perfectly
rational woman. She had ignored Combe’s veiled instructions to declare herself insane. Over the next few days, though, she discovered that Henry had initiated proceedings for a divorce in the new court. She reread Combe’s letter. On Sunday 28 February, the day after her forty-fifth birthday, Isabella wrote to Combe for the last time.

  ‘I have been reconsidering your letter & my reply to it, & it occurs to me that the latter may have appeared to you somewhat vague & inconclusive. Will you allow me to make a few definite & final remarks upon the subject.’ The incriminating diary entries, she said, were written while ‘I was the victim temporarily of my own fancies & delusions … I constantly put down for facts what were the wildest imaginings of a mind exhausted with the tyranny of long years, & given up to seek in imaginative writings for the only solace of my daily lot.’ In these entries she had given ‘free vent to the suggestions of my imagination’: ‘each & all of them as regards the friend now specially referred to, are purely & entirely imaginative & fictitious’.

  Isabella expressed humility and sorrow: her regrets were ‘of a deeper kind than can well be imagined by any other human being than myself. I have not, & cannot have another word to add.’ Her words had brought nothing but pain to Edward and his family; her best recourse, now, was a denunciation of her own sanity, and then silence.

  At last she had provided George Combe with the answer that he needed. She had submitted to his guidance, as she had when she was tormented by the contradictions of her nature. He passed on the good news to Edward. Isabella’s latest letter, Combe said, was ‘written in a calm, earnest tone, indicating a sense of the injury she has done you, and declaring most solemnly that every one of the entries in her Journal in relation to you are pure fictions’. The diary, he said, was ‘the invention of a brain either insane or on the brink of insanity’. In a letter to Lady Drysdale, he explained that Isabella had failed to give a ‘rational account’ of her diary entries, but had at least provided ‘an insane account’.

  George Combe believed, or endeavoured to believe, that Isabella had been crazed by unsatisfied desire. His own books had helped to establish the idea that one part of the brain could be disordered while all the others remained sound: an individual could even house a ‘double’ or ‘divided’ consciousness, in which one self was unaware of the actions of the other (Forbes Winslow quoted Combe on this subject in his Obscure Diseases of the Brain and Mind). Over the next few weeks, Combe showed Isabella’s letters to his friends in Edinburgh and consulted doctors and lawyers about how to establish that she was insane. To this end, he wrote to his nephew Dr James Cox, a commissioner of the Board of Lunacy in Scotland; to his friend William Ivory, an advocate whose father, Lord Ivory, ruled on divorce cases in Scotland; and to Professor John Hughes Bennett, who had in 1851 published an essay about the physiological causes of the craze for mesmerism in Edinburgh.

  The Drysdale family, given George’s troubled history, may also have found it possible to believe that Isabella had a hidden streak of insanity. Edward readily adopted the argument that she was mad. In his reply to Combe he described her as ‘a fantastical, vain, egotistical being half-crazed through misery, & goaded on by wild hallucinations to put down as facts all the fancies & desires of a much-diseased & most corrupt imagination’.

  He and the Drysdale brothers, all of them now students or practitioners of medicine, were well placed to help put together a medical defence. The physicians who appeared in Westminster Hall on 15 June were closely connected to their circle. Locock, as an accoucheur to Queen Victoria, was a colleague of Combe’s great friend Sir James Clark; Bennet, as a progressive gynaecologist, was known to George Drysdale and to the Drysdales’ friend James Young Simpson (all three were ‘speculumisers’); Forbes Winslow was an early phrenologist and admirer of Combe; and Kidd was a former patient of the homeopath John Drysdale.

  Robert Chambers remained sceptical that the diary was a product of insanity. It read like ‘a history of events as well as a journal of thoughts,’ he told Combe, ‘and I must ever deem it one of the strangest things ever presented to my notice, that a woman shd have deliberately committed to paper through a space of months and years the particulars of a criminal intrigue which had no basis but her fancy, and which involved the possible infamy of another innocent person’. After Combe had showed him Isabella’s letters, Chambers claimed to accept her denial of adultery, but his tone remained incredulous. ‘Had you only seen the Journal,’ he wrote to Combe, ‘how amusing it would have been to you to hear it described as a work of imagination – daydreams … I do not believe that Lane was guilty; but that the lady was an adulteress in her heart, and willing or wishful to be one in reality, it were lunacy to doubt after what I have seen.’

  Edward still hoped to stop Henry’s suit. Even on 16 March he told Combe that he did not know ‘whether peace is to be the order of the day or war to the knife’: ‘All is a sea of uncertainty.’ But on 25 March he realised that the trial was inevitable. Robert Chambers had just been to London to try to talk Henry out of the action, Edward reported to Combe, and had found him ‘perfectly impassable & determined’: he ‘evidently does not wish to be convinced. He has a bad wife and he wants to be rid of her at any price.’ The more that Edward’s friends in Edinburgh tried to play down the evidence of the diary, the more Henry craved a public vindication. In a courtroom four years earlier, he had experienced the pleasure of triumphing over his younger brother. He now sought the same unequivocal victory over his wife, and over the educated gentlemen whom she so valued. Henry’s hatred of Isabella, said Edward, seemed ‘to have become so intent, as to have bereft him of reason on all subjects connected with her, and turned him into a complete fanatic’.

  See Notes on Chapter 10

  11

  A GREAT DITCH OF POISON

  16 June–20 August 1858

  The heat of London peaked on Wednesday 16 June 1858. As the temperature rose to a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, the highest ever recorded in the city, the Thames’s thickening stew of smells filtered further in to the Houses of Parliament and the courts at Westminster Hall. The heavy river lay dark, low and rank in the sun. It was ‘pestiferous, degraded, a mere sewer’, said The Morning Post, and ‘a powerful shock to the nose’. Huge quantities of excrement were emptied into its waters each day, releasing vapours that were believed to contaminate those who inhaled them. ‘A great ditch of poison,’ complained the Illustrated London News, ‘is allowed to crawl, day by day and night by night, through the grandest city in the world.’

  In the Westminster courts, the judges performed their duties under a sense of danger, dealing with the business brought before them as quickly as possible. The Divorce Court opened, as usual, at eleven, but Cockburn began by announcing that he was going to suspend the Robinson trial. The judges, he said, were baffled by Edward Lane’s position in the case. They had decided to adjourn to discuss whether they could take the unprecedented step of dismissing the doctor from the suit so that Isabella’s lawyers could call him as a witness. ‘That question,’ said Cockburn, ‘involves such grave consequences and such serious principles as regards the administration of justice under the Divorce Act, that we are anxious to have the assistance of all the members of the Court before making a precedent. We adjourn the case till Monday, when we hope to be able to state the conclusion at which we may have arrived.’

  The case had exposed a lacuna in the law. When a wife sued for divorce, she did not need to name her husband’s lover – this was partly because her petition never rested solely on adultery; partly because the man’s lover, being a woman, could not be called on to pay the court costs; and partly, as a guide to divorce explained, ‘to protect the character of perhaps an innocent third party from being blasted behind her back’. When a man tried to divorce his wife, though, he was compelled to name the paramour. For many Victorian men, an allegation of adultery would not be disastrous, but for Edward Lane, whose livelihood rested on his being trusted with the care of ladies, it would. He was
as vulnerable to disgrace as a woman, and he stood to be ruined by a woman’s words.

  Before the judges adjourned to consider the problem, Isabella’s counsel asked to call John Thom as their final witness. Cockburn agreed to hear his testimony.

  Thom introduced himself as a gentleman ‘connected with literature’ who knew Mr and Mrs Robinson, ‘the latter intimately’. ‘I became acquainted with them at Reading in 1854,’ he testified, ‘and afterwards met Mrs Robinson at Moor Park.’

  Phillimore asked him to describe Mrs Robinson.

  ‘She is a very excitable person,’ said Thom. ‘There is a certain amount of formality in her general behaviour, but she now and then utters romantic and flighty observations.’ The description fitted the defence case, suggesting that Isabella had a public self and a diary self, wild inner fancies beneath her shell of decorum.

  Thom was asked to read aloud from the diary an entry of 3 June 1854, in which Isabella recorded her impressions of him. ‘His great eyes seemed like pale violets,’ read out Thom, ‘shaded with heavy, drooping lids; his cheeks were hollow, and there was a look of intense dejection about his whole person.’ There was laughter in the courtroom at Thom’s rendition of this lushly romantic description of himself. He read on, turning to Isabella’s report of her own demeanour during the meeting between them: ‘My cheeks flushed, tears came every second to my eyes, and my voice was choked. We talked long and earnestly.’

  Phillimore asked Thom what he made of this account.

  ‘It is highly coloured and exaggerated,’ replied Thom, ‘and I was not in a state of dejection or depression.’