When Edward Lane first read the diary, this entry in particular drew his anger and scorn: ‘The address to the Reader!’ he wrote to Combe. ‘Who is the Reader? Was this precious journal, then, intended for publication, or if not quite so bad as that, was it meant for an heirloom for her family? On either supposition, I say there is clear madness here – and if there were not another passage in the whole farrago to warrant that view, to my mind this one alone wd be sufficient.’
Yet Isabella’s address to an imagined reader might, on the contrary, point to the clearest explanation of all for why she kept her diary. Part of her, at least, wanted to be heard. She harboured a hope that somebody considering her words after her death would hesitate before damning her; that her story might one day be met with compassion, even love. In the absence of a spiritual afterlife, we were the only future she had.
‘Good night,’ she ended, with a desolate blessing: ‘May you be more happy!’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to the staff of the British Library, the London Library, the National Archives and the Wellcome Library in London; to the staff of the local record offices in Hereford, Reading, Shrewsbury and Whitehaven; to Pauline Dunne at the National Archives in Dublin and to Alison Metcalfe at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. For permission to quote from their archives, thanks to the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, to the Cumbria Archive & Local Studies Centre (Whitehaven) and to the Tairawhiti Museum in Gisborne, New Zealand. Many thanks to Meg Vivers for sharing her excellent research into the Robinson family; to Mark Robinson for his information about his great-great-grandfather; and to Phyllis Ray and Ruth Walker for passing on their knowledge of the Walkers. For arranging for me to look round some of the houses in which Isabella Robinson and her friends lived, I am grateful to Clynt Wellington in Surrey; to Ann and Freddy Johnston in Ludlow; and to Florence Shanks and Lucinda Miller in Edinburgh.
Thanks to all the friends and family who have helped me with this book, among them Lorna Bradbury, Alex Clark, Toby Clements, Will Cohu, Tamsin Currey, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Claudia FitzHerbert, Miranda Fricker, Stephen Grosz, Victoria Lane, Ruth Metzstein, Sinclair McKay, Daniel Nogués, Marina Nogués, Tasio Nogués, Stephen O’Connell, Kathy O’Shaughnessy, Robert Randall, John Ridding, Wycliffe Stutchbury, Ben Summerscale, Juliet Summerscale, the late Peter Summerscale, Lydia Syson, Frances Wilson, Keith Wilson, the mothers who meet at the Coffee Cup in Hampstead and the writers who meet at the Novel History Salon in Bloomsbury. Thank you especially to my son, Sam.
A big thank you to my agent, David Miller, as ever; to his colleagues at Rogers, Coleridge & White, including Stephen Edwards, Alex Goodwin and Laurence Laluyaux; and to Julia Kreitman of The Agency in London and Melanie Jackson in New York. My thanks to Richard Rose for his excellent suggestions and advice. Thank you to everyone at Bloomsbury in London for making the publication process such a pleasure, among them Geraldine Beare, Richard Charkin, Jude Drake, Sarah-Jane Forder, Alexa von Hirschberg, Nick Humphrey, Kate Johnson, David Mann, Paul Nash, Anya Rosenberg, Alice Shortland, Anna Simpson and – particularly – my editor, Alexandra Pringle, whose guidance has been invaluable. Many thanks also to the other publishers who have supported this project: George Gibson and the rest of Bloomsbury in New York, Ann-Catherine Geuder in Berlin, Dominique Bourgois in Paris, Ludmila Kuznetsova in Moscow, Andrea Canobbio in Turin, Sofia Ribeiro in Lisbon and Henk ter Borg in Amsterdam.
FAMILY TREES
THE ROBINSONS
THE LANES
LIST OF LAWYERS IN THE
ROBINSON DIVORCE TRIAL
THE JUDGES
Sir Alexander Cockburn, Bt, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas
Sir Cresswell Cresswell, Judge Ordinary of the Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes
Sir William Wightman
THE BARRISTERS
For Henry Robinson
Montagu Chambers QC
Jesse Addams QC, DCL
John Karslake
For Isabella Robinson
Robert Phillimore QC, DCL
John Duke Coleridge
For Edward Lane
William Forsyth QC
William Bovill QC
James Deane QC, DCL
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UNPUBLISHED SOURCES:
Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes file J77/44/R4, containing papers on the Robinson divorce, NA
Court of Chancery file C15/550/R24, Robinson v Robinson, NA
George Combe’s journals for 1856, 1857 and 1858 (MS 7431), NLS
Journal of Robert Chambers (Deps 341/30 and 341/33) and authors’ ledger (Dep 341/289), NLS
Journals and letters of Henry Robinson’s sister Helena Waters and her family, WG Papers
Letters from Mary Drysdale to Jane Williams, in the Clyde Company Papers at the State Library of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Letters of Charles and Bridget Walker and Henry Curwen in Curwen family archives (refs DCu/3/31, DCu/3/81 and 3/7), Cumbria Record Office and Library, Whitehaven, Cumbria
Letters of William Copland and Mary Drysdale to John Murray, John Murray archive, NLS
Letters to and copybook of George Combe between 1850 and 1858: letters by GC from 1850 to April 1854 are in MS 7392; from April 1854 to June 1858 in MS 7393. Letters to GC cited in this book are in MS 7350, MS 7365 and MSS 7369–7374, Combe Collection, NLS
Letters to and from Catherine Crowe in the Catherine Crowe Collection, Templeman Library, Kent University, Canterbury, Kent
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Records of the House of Lords, HO/PO/JO/9/9/382–448 (17 June 1859 to 13 June 1861); papers relating to the appeal against the Divorce Court verdict, HLA
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