two tales in the guise of journals by women. Wilkie Collins’s ‘Leaves from Leah’s Diary’, the framing device of his collection After Dark; and his proto-detective tale The Diary of Anne Rodway.
‘Use your diary … Advertisement from the 1820s, quoted in David Amigoni’s Life Writing and Victorian Culture (2006), p. 27. The essayist Isaac D’Israeli spelt out the purpose of a diary in his Curiosities of Literature (1793): ‘We converse with the absent by letters, and with ourselves by diaries … [they] render to a man an account of himself to himself.’
bound in cloth or in red Russian calf hide … See advertisement for Letts diaries in David Morier Evans’s The Commercial Crisis 1847–48 (1849).
The word ‘diarist’ … See John Craig’s A New Universal Etymological, Technological, and Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language (1859).
in three volumes after her death in 1840. See Carter’s ‘The Cultural Work of Diaries in Mid-Century Victorian Britain’.
‘Your journal all about feelings …’ See Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, Vol. II (1913), ed. James Anthony Froude.
In Mr Nightingale’s … fantasies. See Charles Dickens and Mark Lemon’s Mr Nightingale’s Diary: a Farce in One Act (1877).
The play parodied … self-diagnostic ‘diaries of health’. These had become popular since the publication in 1820 of Henry Matthews’s The Diary of an Invalid; Being the Journal of a Tour in Pursuit of Health; in Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, and France, in the Years 1817, 1818, and 1819. Darwin kept a diary of his symptoms between 1849 and 1855.
‘Burn that book, and be happy!’ Dickens and Lemon, Mr Nightingale’s Diary. In My Wife’s Diary: a Farce in One Act, a play by Thomas William Robertson that opened at the Royal Olympic Theatre in London in 1854, a husband gloats as he unlocks his wife’s desk with a duplicate key: ‘diaries are a devilish good invention’. See Carter’s ‘The Cultural Work of Diaries in Mid-Century Victorian Britain’.
CHAPTER 10: AN INSANE TENDERNESS
At lunchtime … ‘Divorce a Vinculo’, Once a Week.
malfunction in the uterus itself. The term ‘uterine disease’ was too much for most newspapers: The Times (16 Jun 1858) translated it for its readers as ‘a disease peculiar to women’.
He was an Irish Quaker … See Walter Kidd, Joseph Kidd 1824–1918: Limerick, London, Blackheath: A Memoir (privately printed, 1920, revised 1983). Kidd went on to become physician to William Gladstone and, from 1877, to Benjamin Disraeli, whose health rallied after he advised him to drink claret instead of port. Disraeli died holding Kidd’s hand.
Their task was to confirm … Doctors who gave evidence about insanity in the criminal courts, observed the alienist John Charles Bucknill, ‘may usually be divided into two classes: those who know something about the prisoner and nothing about insanity, and those who know something about insanity and nothing of the prisoner’. The physicians before the Divorce Court that day fitted these categories: Kidd knew Isabella, but little about sexual mania; the others were well versed in women’s diseases, but had not examined Isabella.
The first of the specialists … See portrait of James Henry Bennet by Ferdinand Jean de la Ferté Joubert, after a mezzotint by Édouard Louis Dubufe, 1852, NPG.
the modern school of gynaecology. The term gynaecology was first included in a dictionary in 1849.
He was an authority … Obituary of James Henry Bennet, British Medical Journal, 12 Sep 1891.
The speculum was controversial … In On the Pathology of Hysteria (1853) Robert Brudenell Carter wrote that he had ‘more than once seen young unmarried women, of the middle classes of society, reduced, by the constant use of the speculum, to the mental and moral condition of prostitutes; seeking to give themselves the same indulgence by the practice of solitary vice; and asking every medical practitioner, under whose care they fell, to institute an examination of the sexual organs’. Stephen Smith’s Doctor in Medicine: and Other Papers on Professional Subjects (1872) discussed the danger of women being afflicted by ‘speculum-mania’, a condition that could lead to depravity and insanity.
The second was Sir Charles Locock … See G. T. Bettany’s entry in ODNB and Locock’s obituary in British Medical Journal, 31 Jul 1875. As a young man, Locock had fallen ‘devilishly in love’ with a pretty and well-connected young woman, but she aroused his disgust when she ‘appeared rather too forward and loving … I always look with a cursedly jealous eye upon that very coming disposition in young ladies.’ From a letter to a friend in 1823, quoted in Russell C. Maulitz’s ‘Metropolitan Medicine and the Man-Midwife: the Early Life and Letters of Sir Charles Locock’, Medical History 26 (1982).
He was the author of nearly … His research suggested that young women who indulged in intercourse or masturbation while menstruating could experience convulsive fits, and he experimented in treating sexual mania with potassium bromide (this turned out to be highly effective in the treatment of epilepsy).
Dr Forbes Winslow, shiny-pated … Photograph of Forbes Winslow in 1864 by Ernest Edwards in NPG, and Jonathan Andrews’s entry in ODNB.
Though the press reported sparingly … The condition of furor uterinus, or excessive sexual feeling in women, was identified during the Renaissance. See Carol Groneman’s ‘Nymphomania: the Historical Construction of Female Sexuality’ in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 19 (1994).
about ten per cent of sufferers … According to Charles Bucknill and Daniel H. Tuke’s A Manual of Psychological Medicine (1858), quoted in Shuttleworth’s Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (1996).
After giving birth … local irritation.’ Bennet’s A Practical Treatise on Inflammation of the Uterus, Its Cervix, and Appendages, and on Its Connection with Uterine Disease (third edition, 1853). In a later edition, published in 1864, Bennet revised this sentence to make explicit that nymphomania could lead to ‘self-abuse’. W. Tyler Smith’s Manual of Obstetrics (1858) also made a connection between childbirth and sexual mania: ‘sexual excitement is sometimes apparent during or after labour in a very high degree; indeed cases of this kind may pass into erotomania after parturition’.
Alternatively, the trigger … See E. J. Tilt’s The Change of Life in Health and Disease (1857).
Forbes Winslow, too … In his Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology (1854), Forbes Winslow wrote: ‘Sometimes erotism breaks out at the time of the suppression of the catamenia [menstruation], and is evidently connected with a special state of the sexual organs.’
Tilt argued that ‘sub-acute ovaritis’. Tilt, The Change of Life.
When Euphemia Ruskin petitioned … Information on the Ruskins’ divorce from Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983). Euphemia was seeking an annulment because she had fallen in love with the artist John Millais, who was painting her husband’s portrait.
These were distinct illnesses … Esquirol’s book was published in France in 1838, and translated into English in 1845. His ideas had been introduced to Britain a decade earlier, in James Cowles Prichard’s A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (1835). Monomania could afflict anyone, however seemingly sane, wrote Esquirol, and it could depart as swiftly as it had arrived. The clever and inquisitive were especially susceptible: ‘The more the understanding is developed, and the more active the brain becomes, the more is monomania to be feared.’
erotomania was a disorder … ‘Erotomania is the result of an excited imagination,’ explained James Copland in A Dictionary of Practical Medicine (1858), ‘unrestrained by the powers of the understanding; satyriasis and nymphomania proceed from the local irritation of the sexual organs, reacting upon the brain, and exciting the passions beyond the restraints of reason.’ According to the Scottish alienist Sir Alexander Morison, erotomania was revealed in ‘restlessness, melancholy and silence’; he observed one sufferer ‘continually writing the name of the beloved object on paper, on the walls of the room, or on the ground’. See Morison’s Ou
tlines of Lectures on the Nature, Causes, and Treatment of Insanity (1848).
Nymphomaniacs were less prone … she met a man. Horatio Storer’s ‘Cases of Nymphomania’ in American Journal of Medical Science, Vol. 32 (1856), quoted in Groneman’s ‘Nymphomania: the Historical Construction of Female Sexuality’.
‘The two may exist together … in the head.’ See Daniel H. Tuke’s ‘On the Various Forms of Mental Disorder’ in The Asylum Journal of Mental Science, Vol. 19 (1857).
Older women were especially likely … See Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1988). The phrase ‘redundant women’ is from W. R. Greg’s ‘Why are Women Redundant?’ in the National Review, Apr 1862.
The ‘redundant women’ … See Tilt, The Change of Life.
Though Dr William Acton famously … In Acton’s Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs. In a later edition, published in 1862, Acton seemed to have (slightly) modified his views on the basis of this and other divorce cases. He added: ‘It is too true, I admit, as the divorce courts show, that there are some few women who have sexual desires so strong that they surpass those of men, and shock public feeling by their exhibition. I admit, of course, the existence of sexual excitement terminating in nymphomania, a form of insanity that those accustomed to visit lunatic asylums must be fully conversant with; but, with these sad exceptions, there can be no doubt that sexual feeling in the female is in abeyance, and that it requires positive and considerable excitement to be roused at all; and even if roused (which in many instances it never can be) is very moderate compared with that of the male.’
back of her skull with cold water. See Alexander Morison’s The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (1840). George Combe’s brother had also insisted that sexual disorders were based in the brain: ‘the affection of the generative organs,’ wrote Andrew Combe, ‘is generally the effect, and not the cause, of the cerebral disturbance’. Andrew Combe studied Esquirol’s work in France in the 1840s. ‘Remarks on the Nature and Causes of Insanity’, The Phrenological Journal, Vol. 15 (1842).
hip baths, deep baths and showers. In A Practical Treatise on Inflammation of the Uterus, Bennet noted that uterine inflammation was particularly prevalent immediately after childbirth – the time that Isabella first consulted Kidd. The symptoms, Bennet wrote, included ‘intense headache, great depression and lowness of spirits, and groundless terrors’, often ‘accompanied by delusions or hallucinations, and by the fear of insanity’.
Locock advised the application … In his entry on amenhor-rhea in the Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine (1833).
A London surgeon relieved … The Lancet, 5 Jun 1853. In the early 1850s the physician Isaac Baker Brown performed his first successful clitoridectomy, upon his sister, and he was to become notorious for the practice in the 1860s. See Ornella Mosucci’s ‘Clitoridectomy, Circumcision and the Politics of Sexual Pleasure in Mid-Victorian Britain’ in Sexualities in Victorian Britain (1996), ed. Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams.
‘My dear Lady Drysdale … Letter IHR to Lady D, 14 Feb 1858.
The tone was ‘too light … actual occurrences’. Letter GC to Lady D, 3 Mar 1858.
She begged him: ‘assist me … me to retain’. Letter IHR to GC, 21 Feb 1858.
In his reply … vindicate yourself & Dr Lane’. Letter GC to IHR, 23 Feb 1858.
On the same day … is insanity’. Letter GC to EWL, 23 Feb 1858.
‘It looks like insanity.’ Letter GC to HOR, 6 Jan 1858.
‘The woman was not mad … down as facts.’ Letter GC to Sir James Clark, 4 Jan 1858.
‘I will make my reply … but the writer’s.’ Letter IHR to GC, 26 Feb 1858.
Gustave Freytag’s Debit and Credit … Mrs Malcolm’s translation of the novel was reviewed in The Times, 31 Dec 1857.
‘Could I dream … not how this can be.’ Letter IHR to GC, 26 Feb 1858.
‘I have been reconsidering … another word to add.’ Letter IHR to GC, 28 Feb 1858.
Isabella’s latest letter … on the brink of insanity’. Letter GC to EWL, 2 Mar 1858.
In a letter to Lady Drysdale … ‘an insane account’. Letter GC to Lady D, 3 Mar 1858.
George Combe believed … Combe was drawing here on the teachings of his younger brother Dr Andrew Combe, who in Observations of Mental Derangement (1831) had warned of what might happen to upper- or middle-class women who had no outlet for their energies: ‘their own feelings and personal relations necessarily constitute the grand objects of their contemplations: these are brooded over till the mental energies become impaired, false ideas of existence and providence spring up in the mind, the fancy is haunted by strange impressions, and every trifle which relates to self is exaggerated into an object of immense importance’.
to his friend William Ivory, an advocate … Ivory had been a classmate of George Drysdale at the Edinburgh Academy from 1834 to 1841. See Edinburgh Academy Register 1824– 1914 (1914).
To this end, he wrote … in Edinburgh. Letter GC to EWL, 29 Feb 1858. There is room for confusion between the Bennett who Combe hoped would appear in court and the Bennet who did appear as an expert witness. The legal reports on the case spell the witness’s name as ‘Bennet’, and describe him only as an MD, not a professor, which identifies him as James Henry Bennet, the London doctor who specialised in women’s diseases, rather than John Hughes Bennett, the Edinburgh doctor and lecturer to whom Combe alluded. The two were likely to have known one another – in his book on uterine inflammation, J. H. Bennet makes admiring reference to J. H. Bennett’s work on cancer of the uterus.
‘a fantastical, vain … corrupt imagination’. Letter EWL to GC, 13 Apr 1858.
170 (all three were ‘speculumisers’) … In The Elements of Social Science (1861), George praised ‘Bennett’s [sic]’ work on uterine inflammation and commended his use of the speculum.
patient of the homeopath John Drysdale. Kidd’s obituary in British Medical Journal. John Drysdale treated Kidd in Liverpool in the early 1850s, and advised him that he should take holidays from work.
‘a history of events … innocent person’. Letter RC to Cecilia Combe, 26 Feb 1858.
‘Had you only seen the Journal … Letter RC to GC, 2 Mar 1858. His allusion was to Christ’s warning, in the Gospel of St Matthew, that ‘anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart’.
‘whether peace … a sea of uncertainty.’ Letter EWL to GC, 16 Mar 1858.
‘perfectly impassable & determined’. Letter EWL to GC, 25 Mar 1858.
‘evidently does not wish … a complete fanatic’. Letter EWL to GC, 28 Mar 1858.
CHAPTER 11: A GREAT DITCH OF POISON
The heat of London … Details of weather from The Annual Register 1858 (1859).
It was ‘pestiferous … See The Morning Post, 20 Jun 1858.
‘A great ditch of poison … See Illustrated London News, 19 Jun 1858.
In the Westminster courts … See Annual Register 1858. A barrister in the Court of Exchequer asked the judge if they could dispense with their wigs.
When a wife sued for divorce … behind her back’. See John Fraser Macqueen’s A Practical Treatise on Divorce and Matrimonial Jurisdiction (1858).
When formulating the new law … See Stone’s Road to Divorce (1990), p. 322.
On 21 June … Account of Curtis v Curtis from divorce papers in NA, J77/8/4; from Swabey and Tristram’s Reports; and, for the Court of Chancery proceedings, from the Law Times, 24 Sep 1859.
Fanny’s father … Later, as Attorney General of Gibraltar, Fanny’s father, Frederick Solly Flood, set in motion the conspiracy theories about the Mary Celeste, a merchant ship that was found abandoned 600 miles west of Portugal in 1872. In Gibraltar’s Vice-Admiralty Court, Solly Flood refused to countenance an innocent explanation for the ship’s desertion. Instead, he suggested that the crew had mutinied, murdering the captain and his family; or that the captain had murdered the crew, and then h
anded the ship to a co-conspirator to claim the reward for finding an abandoned vessel; or that the crew of another ship had murdered all those onboard in order to claim the salvage reward. The Court found no evidence for any of these suggestions, concluding instead that the ship had been abandoned because she was sinking, and that her crew had been subsequently lost at sea. None the less, Solly Flood’s theories passed into legend, notably through Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’ (1884). See Bob Solly’s ‘Solly-Flood Family Notes’ in the Nov 1999 edition of Soul Search, the journal of The Sole Society.
John Curtis’s witnesses included … According to The Times, 21 May 1858.
The Custody of Infants Act … See Ann Sumner Holmes’s ‘The Double Standard in the English Divorce Laws, 1857– 1923’, in Law and Social Inquiry, Vol. 20 (1995).
Kindersley dismissed Fanny’s petition … In spite of this ruling, all three Curtis children were by 1861 living with their mother in Lyme Regis in Dorset, according to the census returns; while their father was alone in a house behind the National Portrait Gallery in London. Twenty years later Mrs Curtis had moved to a house under the cliff in Dover, which she shared with her two daughters, art students aged twenty-seven and thirty-two. Fanny Curtis died in Dover in 1896, aged seventy-one.
In May 1858 … immortality of the soul. Letter EWL to GC, 17 May 1858.
‘damage my reputation … or immoral? Letters GC to EWL, 17 and 22 May 1858.
‘were quite alive … appear in the paper. Letter EWL to GC, 30 Jun 1858.
183 The Examiner … respectability and worth.’ See Examiner, 26 Jun 1858.
‘Mrs Robinson was crazy … Letter from Charles Mackay to GC, 21 Jun 1858. Mackay was the author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), which explored the collective fantasies that could lead to anything from economic bubbles to witchhunts. ‘Men, it has been well said, think in herds,’ he wrote; ‘it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.’
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