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

by Kate Summerscale

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  NOTES

  Abbreviations used in the Notes and Bibliography

  CD – Charles Darwin

  EWL – Edward Wickstead Lane

  GC – George Combe

  HOR – Henry Oliver Robinson

  IHR – Isabella Hamilton Robinson

  Lady D – Lady Drysdale

  MD – Mary Drysdale

  RC – Robert Chambers

  HLA – House of Lords Archives, London

  NA – The National Archives, London

  NLS – National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh

  NPG – National Portrait Gallery, London

  ODNB – The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)

  WG – Williams/Gray Papers, Tairawhiti Museum and Art Gallery,

  Gisborne, New Zealand

  BOOK I: THIS SECRET FRIEND

  CHAPTER 1: HERE I MAY GAZE AND DREAM

  they moved to Edinburgh that autumn. The Robinsons arrived in the city with letters of introduction from the wife of Henry’s former colleague John Scott Russell. See letter GC to Sir James Clark, 19 Dec 1857. This and all subsequent letters to and from George Combe are held in the Combe Collection, an archive at the NLS.

  A servant let Isabella in to the building … and shining shoes. Account of Lady Drysdale’s party based on brief references in IHR’s journal, quoted in court on 14 Jun 1858, along with information from Cecil Cunnington’s English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (1952), Penelope Byrde’s Nineteenth-Century Fashion (1992); pictures of the exteriors of the houses at Royal Circus in the early-nineteenth century and plans and personal observation of the interiors; weather reports in the Scotsman of 4 Dec 1850; and description of the New Town, including its lighting, in John Stark’s Picture of Edinburgh (1823). Robert Chambers also refers to the party in his diary, RC papers, NLS.

  an ‘uncongenial partner … selfish, proud’. IHR’s journal, 14 Mar 1852. This and all subsequent diary entries are taken from the extracts printed in M. C. Merttins Swabey DCL and Thomas Hutchinson Tristram DCL, Reports of Cases Decided in the Court of Probate and in the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes: Vol. I (1860).

  ‘a man who had only a commercial life’. Letter IHR to GC, 26 Feb 1858.

  ‘my errors of youth … as a friend, as a mistress’. IHR’s journal, Nov 1850.

  ‘Thou know’st that thou has made me …’. Burns’s ‘A Prayer in the Prospect of Death’, circa 1781–82. Isabella slightly misquoted the original, adding a hint of compulsion to the line ‘Thou knowst that thou has formed me’ by replacing ‘formed’ with ‘made’.

  She was born in Bloomsbury, London … According to the St Pancras parish records, she was christened on 8 May 1813.

  ‘a large pretty Garden … Dogs & Cats & Kittens’. Letter from Bridget Christian Walker to her grandson Thomas Walker, 3 Jan 1859. Private collection (Ruth Butler, née Walker).

  The house was set in 230 acres … rented out the rest. Information on the Walkers’ estate at Ashford Carbonel from Phyllis M. Ray’s Ashford Carbonel: a Peculiar Parish; A Brief History (1998).

  Isabella and her seven siblings … These were: John Curwen, born 1811; Harriet Elizabeth, born 1815; Caroline, born 1817; Julia, born 1818; Charles Henry, born 1822; Charles Frederick, born 1823; Christian Henry James, born 1831. Another brother, James Burrough, was born in 1825 but died in the same year. See parish records of St Mary’s Church, Ashford Carbonel. A sister, also Isabella, had died as a baby in 1810 – her death was reported in Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 27 Oct 1810.

  ‘an independent & constant thinker’. Letter IHR to GC, 24 Oct 1852.

  The ceremony … up the hill from her house. Parish records of St Mary’s Church, Ashford Carbonel.

  a widowed Royal Navy lieutenant of forty-three. He was born in 1794 and joined the Navy in 1815, according to the Navy List (1835).

  ‘headstrong passion’. IHR’s journal, 29 Jan 1855.

  He brought … £6,000 to the marriage. According to the will made by his father, Richard Dansey.

  This capital … about £900 a year. Isabella’s funds yielded more than £400 a year, and the income from Edward Dansey’s larger settlement would have exceeded this.
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br />   Alfred Hamilton Dansey, in February 1841. Alfred was born on 21 Mar 1841, according to his birth certificate, and christened in St Lawrence’s Church, Ludlow, two days later.

  Ludlow ‘had balls … love affairs there’. See Henry James’s Castles and Abbeys (1877).

  The Danseys’ house … down to the River Teme. David Lloyd’s Broad Street: Its Houses and Residents through Eight Centuries (2001).

  Isabella … installed at the heart of Shropshire society. In the census of May 1841, three servants were listed as resident in their house.

  ‘Poor Mr Dansey … this most painful of all trials’. Letter from Bridget Walker to her brother Henry Curwen, 18 Dec 1841, Curwen archive, Cumbria Record Office and Library, Whitehaven, Cumbria.

  Dansey died of ‘a diseased brain’. According to his death certificate, he died on 11 May 1842.

  a young lieutenant with the Royal Bombay Fusiliers. Celestin Edward Dansey was born to Edward Dansey’s first wife, a Frenchwoman, in France in 1824. He married in 1851 and died in 1859.

  Isabella inherited nothing. Edward Dansey’s will, made at the Queen’s Hotel, Cheltenham, on 27 Jan 1840, and proved in London in Jun 1842.

  produced 8,000 gallons of spirits a year. See Accounts and Papers relating to Customs and Excise, Imports and Exports, Shipping and Trade, 1831–32, House of Commons Papers, Vol. 34.

  fast-growing profession … about 900 engineers in Britain. See R. A. Buchanan’s ‘Gentlemen Engineers: the Making of a Profession’, in Victorian Studies, Vol. 26 (1983). According to the Daily News of 3 Aug 1854, Henry and Albert went into business with their father in 1838. When Henry was elected an associate of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1841, he was sharing a terrace house near Waterloo station with his father, James, and his mother, Jane (census returns of 1841). In the Post Office Directory of 1843 Henry was listed as a civil engineer for the colonies with an office at 10 Old Jewry, Cheapside. For details of his parents’ early life, see Arthur William Patrick Buchanan’s book about the family of Henry’s mother, who was born Jane Buchanan: The Buchanan Book: the Life of Alexander Buchanan, QC, of Montreal, Followed by an Account of the Family of Buchanan (1911).

  ‘I suffered my scruples … wedlock like one fated.’ Letter IHR to GC, 26 Feb 1858.

  After a wedding … They were married by the Dean of Hereford at St Peter’s Church in St Owen’s, Hereford. Isabella and Henry’s fathers were witnesses to the marriage. Isabella gave as her address Henry’s sister’s house in the parish of St Owen’s. Henry gave his parish as St Pancras in London.

  was born … just under a year later. Charles Otway Robinson was born at 78 Camden Road Villas on 20 Feb 1845, according to his birth certificate.

  Henry and his brother Albert … boats and mills on site. By 1845, Henry was established at Millwall – in September he took on an apprentice, a Hereford boy called Henry James. See Lord Askwith’s Lord James of Hereford (1930). According to the census of 1851, Albert Robinson employed 700 men at Millwall. See also Survey of London, Vol. 33/34. Scott Russell helped to organise the Great Exhibition of international industry in Hyde Park in 1851, at which the company displayed sugar mills and models of their steamships.

  In one project … under his supervision. The Ganges project is described in Albert Robinson’s Account of Some Recent Improvements in the System of Navigating the Ganges by Iron Steam Vessels (1848).

  In 1848 the Robinson brothers … a decade earlier). See A. J. Arnold’s Iron Shipbuilding on the Thames (2000).

  On the day of the Taman’s launch … the river. See Illustrated London News, 18 Nov 1848.

  Henry’s marriage … his wife’s property. Henry’s property at the time of his marriage, by contrast, consisted of a quantity of furniture, plate and china. Discussion of the settlement system in Mary Lyndon Shanley’s ‘One Must Ride Behind: Married Women’s Rights and the Divorce Act of 1857’, in Victorian Studies, Vol. 25 (1982); Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1988); and Lawrence Stone’s Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (1990). The system was designed less to protect women than to ensure that a man’s grandsons would be provided for even if their father proved profligate.

  ‘a person of very imperious temper’ … to keep accounts. Bill of Complaint filed in the Court of Chancery by Frederick Walker, acting on IHR’s behalf, on 26 Feb 1858, and HOR’s answer of 17 Apr 1858, NA, C15/550/R24.

  higher echelons of the upper middle classes. According to an analysis of the population of the United Kingdom in 1867 in R. D. Baxter’s National Income (1868), 1.2 per cent of the population earned £300 or more. Of these, a ninth (about 50,000 people) earned £1,000 or more; the remaining eight-ninths (150,000 people) earned between £300 and £1,000, the sum required to run a home with servants. The remainder of the country – about 10 million people, or 98 per cent of the population, earned less than £300.

  When her father died … additional £1,000. Charles Walker died on 23 Dec 1847, aged seventy-six, according to his memorial at St Mary’s Church, Ashford Carbonel. In his will (proved in London on 28 Jan 1848) he confirmed settling funds of £5,000 on Isabella, £4,500 on her younger sister Julia, and £5,400 on his youngest surviving child, Christian. The older boys had been separately provided for.

  London & North Western Railway stock. This company, formed in 1846 from a merger of three existing railway companies, ran trains from Euston station to the Midlands, the North-West and Scotland.

  Isabella claimed that Henry … settled property. Letter IHR to GC, 21 Feb 1858.

  ‘irresolute’: ‘chafing; yet still passive’. Letter IHR to GC, 26 Feb 1858.

  ‘With every knowledge … one thing after another.’ Letter IHR to GC, 21 Feb 1858.

  At the time of his birth she was … According to his birth certificate, he was born at 19 Cannon Place on 6 Feb 1849. ‘Stanley’, the name by which he was known, was the maiden name of the wife of Isabella’s uncle Henry Curwen.

  identified her ailments as signs of ‘uterine disease’. Testimony of Joseph Kidd in Robinson v Robinson & Lane, 16 Jun 1858.

  Henry was away on business … The dissolution of his partnership with Scott Russell was reported in The Law Times, 17 Apr 1849.

  Isabella began to keep a diary … According to HOR’s counsel in Robinson v Robinson & Lane, 14 Jun 1858.

  ‘I know not where … ray of comfort I possess.’ IHR’s journal, 27 Mar 1852.

  a bond ‘of no common strength’. Letter IHR to GC, 21 Feb 1858.

  renowned for its liberal and moderately priced schools. According to Adam and Charles Black’s Black’s Guide Through Edinburgh (1851), the educational establishments ‘attract many strangers who desire to secure for their families a liberal education at a moderate expense’.

  Here, their boys could be … Letter GC to Sir James Clark, 19 Dec 1857.

  at a cost of about £150 a year. To rent a house in Moray Place cost between £140 and £160 a year in 1844, according to Black’s Guide (1851). K. Theodore Hoppen’s The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (1998) estimates that the middle classes spent an average of 10 per cent of their income on rent.

  The Robinsons kept four servants … In the Scottish census returns of 1851, in which the family is listed as ‘Robertson’, the servants at 11 Moray Place were Andrew McIntosh, Agnes Thomson, Eliza Power and Mary Graham. This number of servants more or less accorded with the family’s income. According to Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), a household with £1,000 a year would usually employ five: a cook, two housemaids, a nursemaid, and a manservant.

  a ‘strawberry feast’. Robert Chambers’s diary, RC papers, NLS.

  successful lady novelists such as Susan Stirling. A professor’s daughter, she was the author of the bestselling Fanny Hervey, or, The Mother’s Choice (1849). IHR refers to ‘our mutual friend Mrs Stirling’ in a letter to GC on 16 Aug 1852.

  according to Charles Piazzi Smyth, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland. In a letter t
o a friend in 1851, quoted in Miriam Benn’s Predicaments of Love (1992).

  ‘so warm-hearted and unselfish a woman.’ Letters from Elizabeth Rigby to John Murray, 29 Dec 1842 and to Hester Murray, 10 Feb 1843, in The Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake (2009), ed. Julie Sheldon.

  Lady Drysdale was a keen philanthropist … marriage. Among the Italian exiles in Lady Drysdale’s circle was G. B. Nicolini, an ardent Republican who was preparing a coruscating history of the Jesuits. IHR refers to him in a diary entry of 31 Aug 1852. Lady Drysdale’s enthusiasm for Polish refugees is noted in Lady Priestley’s The Story of a Lifetime (1908).

  A photograph of Henry … nose in a long face. Photograph in collection of Robinson family.

  Isabella said … illegitimate daughters. Letter IHR to GC, 21 Feb 1858.

  Within months … the Drysdales almost every day. EWL’s testimony to Divorce Court, 26 Nov 1858. 13 ‘to parse & interpret any line of poetry … or other people’s!’ Letter IHR to GC, 26 Feb 1858.

  Edward, in turn, often invited Isabella … play on the rocks and sand. Letters GC to Jane Tennant and Sir James Clark, 28 Dec 1857 and 4 Jan 1858.

  ‘the port of Leith, the Frith …’. The Firth of Forth, where the River Forth flows into the North Sea, was more usually known as the Frith of Forth until the 1860s.

  ‘Oh, thought I … more weary of life.’ Her description was echoed in a passage in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859, which suggested ‘that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!’

  If she and Henry were to part … she was of good character. See Kelly Hager’s Dickens and the Rise of Divorce (2010).

  to smoke a cigar … a distinctly rebellious, unfeminine act. As Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine put it in an article earlier that year, ‘a man, when he sees his wife after dinner cross her legs, put her feet on the fender and smoke a cigar, will have, to say the least, sensations of doubt’. See article on ‘bloomerism’, the phenomenon of women wearing bloomers instead of skirts, cited in Karen Chase and Michael Levenson’s The Spectacle of Intimacy: a Public Life for the Victorian Family (2000).