Authors: Kate Summerscale
B007M836FY EBOK (23 page)
The chief symptom of nymphomania – implied but probably not named in the courtroom that Tuesday – was masturbation. The French doctor M. D. T. Bienville, who popularised the term nymphomania in a treatise published in English in 1775, identified ‘secret pollutions’ as the key to the disease. ‘Nymphomania,’ as Tilt spelt out, ‘is the almost irresistible desire to relieve the irritation of the pudenda by friction.’ This would explain why Isabella had written the erotic scenes in her journal – they were pieces of personalised pornography – and why she had been reckless enough to do so: her ‘self-abuse’ or ‘self-pollution’ had weakened her grip on sanity. In some cases, Tilt noted, a woman could stimulate herself with words alone. He quoted a French doctor who observed that ‘fictional tableaux can excite the generative organs more effectively than the presence of men’ and had ‘many times seen the genitals inflame in this way without any
external action or being touched’. The solitary acts of reading and writing, in which most middle-class women indulged, might mask and incite more carnal pleasures.
This was especially true of diaries. Everything that distinguished masturbation as a sexual practice also distinguished diary-writing as a literary practice. If masturbation was a sexual communion with the self, diary-writing was an emotional communion of the same kind. Both required a person to imaginatively divide, to become the subject and the object of a story. Both were private, self-sufficient activities. The medical witnesses in the Divorce Court suggested that Isabella had become mired in a circle of desire and excitement, recorded and created by her diary: her lascivious thoughts, translated to paper, took on an apparent reality that gratified her erotic impulses. Her journal did not only echo her secret life, but abetted it. It was both symptom and cause of her sickness. In their efforts to save Edward while condemning Isabella, the lawyers had come up with a sex act in which she had been able to indulge without the participation of any man.
Isabella’s defence was far more degrading than a confession of adultery would have been. The story of how she came to claim that she was a sexual maniac emerges in a series of letters that she exchanged with George Combe in February 1858.
On 14 February, just before Henry filed his petition for a full divorce, Isabella sent a letter to Lady Drysdale, her first communication with any of Edward’s family. ‘My dear Lady Drysdale,’ she wrote from her cottage in Reigate, ‘I deeply regret that so much importance has been attached to the loose and unguarded expressions in my journal, which I considered as sacred as my own thoughts, & I deplore it the more, since they have been used as the means of accusing another so unjustly. I can only solemnly declare that he is perfectly innocent of the slightest participation in any thought, word
or act, therein expressed!’ The references to Edward, she said, were the ‘lax and purely imaginative recitals of a Lady’s thoughts, unwisely committed to a journal, and never intended to see the light’.
Lady Drysdale forwarded the letter to Combe, who had by now decided to do all he could to support Edward. He was not convinced that Isabella’s denial would help their cause. The tone was ‘too light & flippant’, he told Lady Drysdale. Anyone reading it would think: ‘Oh, she sees that she has injured Lane by betraying their secret, & now she thinks to save him by denying everything.’ To protect the doctor, Combe said, they needed ‘to destroy the credibility of the Journal as a record of actual occurrences’.
A week later, on 21 February, Isabella wrote to Combe himself. She said that she knew that Henry had been in touch with him (someone seemed to be keeping her informed of how the story was breaking in Edinburgh). She begged him: ‘assist me, if you can, to clear a mutual friend from blame, who, with his family, is implicated by my unguarded & thoughtless conduct; & whose generous concern & sympathy for my wretched social position has drawn them into this sorrow’. Isabella said that she had regarded the journal ‘as my inalienable property, & as my sole confidant’, and was horrified that it might be used to hurt those who had shown her kindness. She assured Combe that she had ‘the ardent wish to make all the reparation in my power to a family who have been annoyed & injured by certain careless, unguarded, private writings of mine – writings which a too lively imagination caused me to compose, & which the almost entire absence of caution & secretiveness occasioned me to retain’.
Combe seized the chance to help the doctor. In his reply of 23 February, he began by reminding Isabella of what was at stake: ‘
if
your Journal contains the descriptions now mentioned, & be
true
, Dr Lane is ruined as a professional
man; for no woman of reputation could venture under his roof, with such a stain attaching to him. His poor wife is robbed of his affections, & Lady Drysdale, in her old age, sees the dearest objects of her affections disgraced & ruined.’
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 “21
st
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.