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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 persevered: ‘“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.

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.

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.

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 mercenary 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’.