Authors: Kate Summerscale
B007M836FY EBOK (26 page)
Several papers praised the artistry of the diary, with varying degrees of irony. ‘The whole work is not without marks of
considerable literary power,’ commented
The Morning Post
. The
Saturday Review
likened Isabella to the erotic Greek poetess Sappho. The
Daily News
compared the journal’s strain of ‘passionate sentimentalism’ to Rousseau’s
Julie, or La Nouvelle Hélöise
; and its ‘more sensuous pruriencies’ to Alexander Pope’s
Eloisa and Abelard.
Both Rousseau’s epistolary novel of 1761 and Pope’s poem of 1717 were based on the story of Abelard and Heloise, twelfth-century scholars and lovers who exchanged a series of ardent, erudite letters. Less romantically, Isabella saw herself compared to a witch (by
The Morning Post
) and to Messalina, the violent and promiscuous wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius (in a book by Dr Phillimore’s brother John). Much of the reporting about the diary struck a feverish note that not only matched but extended Isabella’s own. Some of the men who commented on the case may have insisted on the freakishness of the journal because they feared that readers, especially female readers, might sympathise with its story.
‘The diary stands self-convicted of insanity,’ said the
Saturday Review
on 26 June. ‘But its consequences are terrible.’ This weekly journal compared Isabella to Lady Dinorden, a widowed peeress who was that week convicted of libel – she had bombarded her nephew with anonymous letters that accused him of being bankrupt, illegitimate and insane. ‘The moral of the matter, we are much afraid, is against literary ladies. Lady Dinorden’s epistolary style, and Mrs Robinson’s command of descriptive and idyllic writing, have ruined them. They are victims – and others too are victims – to literary skill and felicity in the art of composition.’ Female writers, who had become increasingly prevalent by the mid-nineteenth century, were all implicated in the excesses of Isabella’s journal.
A further editorial in the same issue of the
Saturday Review
decried Isabella’s ‘luscious sentimentality’, arguing that her diary was indebted to ‘the exquisitely pathetic deathbeds of
beautiful little girls’ in contemporary novels; to the piteous letters from prostitutes that appeared in the pages of the press; and to the dirty pamphlets and pictures sold in Holywell Street, off the Strand, the centre of the British pornography trade. The author of this piece traced a direct line from maudlin emotion to sexual decadence. Isabella, taking her cue from the ‘fondling love-scenes’ of popular fiction, ‘in linked sweetness long drawn out’, had dwelt lovingly on her downfall, lingered over her ruin, sentimentalised her sinning. In doing so, she had exposed the connection between romance and pornography.
Though far less explicit than most of the texts hawked in Holywell Street, Isabella’s diary conformed to a popular pornographic formula: its narrator was a woman who happily abandoned herself to sex. Its rapturous recollections read like an expurgated version of the exclamations in
The Lustful Turk
(1828): ‘Never, oh never shall I forget the delicious transports that followed the stiff insertion; and then, ah me!’ Isabella’s half-conscious reveries in bed in the morning recalled those of Fanny Hill in John Cleland’s
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
, a publication of 1749 that had gone through twenty editions by the middle of the nineteenth century: ‘I felt about the bed, as if I sought for something that I grasped in my waking dream, and not finding it, could have cried for vexation, every part of me glowing with stimulating fires.’
Isabella had transgressed by writing down her lascivious thoughts, but the newspapers, as her publishers, were collaborating in her crime. During the Robinson case, said the
Saturday Review
, ‘as filthy compositions as ever proceeded from any human pen’ had been reprinted at full length in the press. For weeks now the newspapers had been spewing out a ‘stream of filth’, ‘matter which rendered them altogether unfit for the reading of any decent woman, and most dangerous stimulants to the prurience of the young’. It seemed that
mid-Victorian society had a compulsion to publish and to read sexual scenes quite as strong as Isabella’s compulsion to write them.
John George Phillimore, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, and the brother of Isabella’s counsel, argued that Isabella had ‘unsexed’ herself in the diary – she had surrendered her femininity with her modesty. He warned that the divorce reports, having ‘brought home corruption to our hearths and altars’, might end by ‘dissolving the foundations of national morality’. The integrity of England, wrote Professor Phillimore, rested on the integrity of marriage: ‘In no country was the relation of husband and wife of greater dignity and more hallowed than our own. To maintain this part of our national character, which is a compensation for so many deficiencies – to keep this pearl of great price unbartered, is the concern of every man in whose veins there beats a drop of English blood.’
In the summer session of Parliament in 1857, Lord Palmerston’s government had pushed through the Matrimonial Causes Act, which established the Divorce Court, and the Obscene Publications Act, which made the sale of obscene material a statutory offence. Both Acts identified sexual behaviour as a cause of social disorder. A year on, though, they seemed to have come into conflict: police officers were seizing and destroying dirty stories under the Obscenity Act, while barristers and reporters were disseminating them under the Divorce Act. ‘The great law which regulates supply and demand seems to prevail in matters of public decency as well as in other things of commerce,’ noted the
Saturday Review
in 1859. ‘Block up one channel, and the stream will force another outlet; and so it is that the current dammed up in Holywell Street flings itself out in the Divorce Court.’
Parts of the House of Commons were evacuated during the heatwave, and Members of Parliament hung lime-soaked sheets from the windows to keep out the bad air. The river
‘reeks and steams’, reported the
Saturday Review
, in ‘the more than Indian heat’ of the city. ‘The deathpot boils,’ observed the
Illustrated London News
. ‘We can colonise the remotest ends of the Earth … we can spread our name, and our fame, and our fructifying wealth to every part of the world; but we cannot clean the River Thames.’
George and Cecy Combe were in London at the start of the Robinson trial, in lodgings near the Edgware Road. During their stay they attended the Royal Academy summer exhibition, where Augustus Egg’s triptych was on show. Upon the adjournment of the legal proceedings in July, they visited a friend called Mr Bastard, who ran a secular school in Dorset, and then joined the Lanes and the Drysdales at Moor Park. Among their fellow guests was Marmion Savage, who as editor of the
Examiner
was supporting Edward Lane’s cause. Combe found his hosts ‘all low in spirits’, he told his journal, ‘altho’ relieved, from the load of anxiety and toil’ that the case had placed upon them. On 12 July he wrote to Sir James Clark, including in his letter an account of his recent re-examination of the head of the Prince of Wales. Bertie was ‘much improved’, he said, ‘but cerebellic difficulty remains’. ‘The difficulty in question,’ he noted – that is, sexual desire – ‘is one of the great unsolved problems of our civilisation.’
Combe had succeeded in keeping his name and many others out of the court: there had been no mention made during the trial of such figures in their circle as Charles Darwin, the Drysdale brothers, Robert Chambers, Sir James Clark, Alexander Bain, Dinah Mulock or Catherine Crowe. The fall-out from the diary had been contained. It remained to be seen whether Edward and his family, too, could be spared its worst consequences. If the amendment to the Divorce Act were passed, they were told, the doctor might be summoned to testify in November.
‘This is my dear Cecy’s birthday,’ Combe wrote in his diary on 25 July 1858. ‘She is happy, and her affection towards me is overflowing. The evening was sunny after a blustering day, and Cecy and I walked into the glade. I found shelter from the wind under high ferns, and sat on the ground, she on her camp stool, and she sung to me several favourite songs, with the sweet tones and expression which no other voice has to me. God bless her and long preserve her.’
The next day George Combe felt unwell, and in the fortnight that followed he developed a violent cough, nausea, ‘heat and fuss in the head’. Edward tended to him: he ‘is very kind,’ Combe told his diary, ‘but says nature must best be left to work her own cure’. Sir James Clark came to see his old friend at Moor Park on 4 August, a visit that indicated his acceptance of Edward’s innocence. On 11 August, Combe was unable to write, and dictated his diary entry to Cecy. By 13 August he could dictate no longer, so Cecy continued the journal in her own words. ‘At 2 a.m. I went to him, fed him, tried to wash his face and hands, and heard the word “darling”; but he grows indistinct, and the voice is low.’ At 10 a.m. on 14 August, Combe’s breathing slowed and ceased. Cecy recorded the moment in her husband’s journal: ‘Dr Lane said, “it is over”. A profound stillness was in the room.’ The cause of death was given as pleuro-pneumonia. ‘No son could be kinder than Dr Lane has been,’ wrote Cecy, ‘no friends more so than the whole family.’
On 15 August the undertakers – Messrs Sloman and Workman – removed Combe’s head from his body so that the skull could be subjected to phrenological analysis. Cecy took her husband’s remains back to Edinburgh, where Combe’s body was buried on 20 August.
Westminster Hall, November 1858–March 1859
In the month that George Combe died, Parliament passed a series of amendments to the Divorce Act, among them a clause that authorised the court to dismiss a co-respondent in order to call him as a witness. The judges in
Robinson v Robinson & Lane
duly dismissed and then summoned Edward Lane, for whose benefit the law had been altered. On Friday 26 November the doctor came to Westminster to defend his name. Though the court had already technically cleared him of adultery, his reputation would be in tatters unless Isabella was cleared too.
The morning was clear, dry and unusually warm, the temperature in London having risen over the previous three days from thirteen to fifty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. In Westminster Hall, Cockburn, Cresswell and Wightman had reassembled on the bench.
The doctor took his place at the witness box. William Bovill QC, Isabella’s counsel, stood to examine him. Bovill resembled a benign, bespectacled professor, earnest in manner, with a reedy body and a big shiny head that bulged at the temples. Though he had not spoken in the court in June, he was the barrister who, with Phillimore, had formulated Edward and Isabella’s defence.
‘I am a physician,’ said Edward Lane in reply to Bovill’s queries, ‘and a graduate of the Edinburgh University. I married the daughter of Sir William Drysdale in 1847. My wife is about thirty-one or thirty-two years of age. I have four children.’
Bovill asked the doctor about his friendship with Isabella.
‘I became acquainted first with Mrs Robinson in the autumn of 1850 when I was residing at Edinburgh,’ said Edward. ‘The two families became on intimate terms. She was a lady of considerable literary attainments, and corresponded with literary men. Our acquaintance was renewed at Moor Park, when they were living at Reading. In 1853, when my wife and I went to the Continent, we left our children with the Robinsons for four or five weeks. They also stayed with them on other occasions. Mrs Robinson showed them a great deal of kindness.’
Edward confirmed the dates on which Isabella had visited Moor Park, which included one visit made after Henry’s discovery of her journal. She stayed for a day and a night in 1856, he said. ‘As well as I can recollect that was about the end of September, or early in October.’
Bovill asked whether Mrs Robinson came to the spa as a friend or a patient.
The doctor replied that though Isabella was ‘always an invalid’, she usually visited Moor Park as a friend of the family. She first consulted him professionally, he said, in June 1855. ‘She told me that she had been suffering from a complaint of the womb for several years. She also told me that she was suffering from continual headaches and a great depression of spirits, and as well from irregularities. She seemed between forty and fifty, a period at which a change in females generally takes place.’
Bovill asked further about the nature of her illness.
‘The disease from which she was suffering was one that affects the nerves,’ said Edward. ‘She was a mixture of calmness and excitement.
‘She was exceedingly staid in her demeanour, but was sometimes flighty in her conversation,’ he added. ‘I did not prescribe for her, but merely gave her advice, and told her she ought to follow a course of tonic treatment.’ This method of treatment, designed to stimulate the system, typically involved taking drinks such as chalybeate (iron-rich spring water) or bitters (alcohol infused with bark or quinine), in combination with a regime of exercise, good diet and cold baths.