Authors: Kate Summerscale
B007M836FY EBOK (4 page)
After such disappointment, the renewal of Edward Lane’s attentions only thrilled Isabella the more. She rose at eleven on 13 April, a fine, warm Tuesday morning, and sat in the garden reading a book by one of the Schlegel brothers, the founders of German Romanticism and advocates of love and freedom. Alfred was at school, but Otway was unwell and had been kept at home with Stanley. At four o’clock, Isabella went shopping and at five she picked up Atty Lane from Royal Circus and took him to her house. ‘Children played in garden,’ she wrote. ‘St— very quarrelsome; his temper is excitable and passionate.’ She returned Atty to Lady Drysdale at eight in the evening, and then went with Edward, Mary and ‘Miss R’, another friend, to a lecture on Homer. This was one of a series of talks given that April at the Philosophical Institution in Queen Street by John Stuart Blackie, Edinburgh University’s new Professor of Greek. Professor Blackie, by his own account, could be an ‘elastic and buoyant’ public speaker, inducing in his audience ‘a state not merely of delighted attention but of manifest exhilaration and glee’. In the lecture hall, Isabella sat on one side of Edward and Mary on the other. The professor’s talk was ‘amusing and original’, wrote Isabella. She and Edward chatted before and after the lecture. ‘We talked of nicknames and of grave characters, and I was merry, much excited by his presence. We laughed much.’
They continued to talk on the ten-minute walk back to their houses. ‘Mrs L— and Miss R— walked on in front out of hearing. We spoke of weather, quoted poetry on the subject, discussed Homer, Shakespeare, talent, etc.’ Isabella reached home in a state of high and agitated pleasure. ‘These
dark walks are very exciting,’ she wrote, ‘and on retiring to my lonely bed, I was too much roused to sleep, and tossed about for hours.’
At the party at Royal Circus on 15 November 1850 Isabella had also met the publisher and writer Robert Chambers, a bear-like man with swathes of wavy hair. They were neighbours: the back windows of the Robinsons’ house overlooked the back windows of Robert and Anne Chambers’s house in Doune Terrace. Robert was one of the city’s leading literary men; he and his brother William ran the popular progressive magazine
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal
, which sold more than 80,000 copies a week. Within two months of meeting the Robinsons, Chambers had twice dined with them at Moray Place, and the Robinsons had twice attended parties at Doune Terrace. The next May, while Henry was away, Isabella went to a dinner party at the Chambers’ house at which the other guests included the bestselling author Catherine Crowe, another near neighbour, and the young actress Isabella Glyn. At about this time Isabella Robinson began to submit poems to
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal
.
The only published verse that can be identified as hers, ‘Lines Addressed to a Miniature, By a Lady’, appeared under the initials ‘IHR’ in the number of 2 August 1851. The poem describes a woman’s secret longing for a man who belongs to another. Unable to gaze openly upon the man himself, she dwells instead on a miniature portrait of him. Unable to disclose her feelings to him, she confesses herself to his image. She tells the picture: ‘In vain I met, I knew, approved, and loved/ Him whose most truthful likeness thou dost bear.’ For all the poem’s high romance, there is no mistaking the narrator’s physical yearning for this man: ‘How sweetly on those closed and manly lips/Firmness and love together hold
their sway!/ Thy form I see, with strength and courage braced./ Thy glance with all its native energy!’ Her beloved, like the miniature painting, is innocent of her desire for him – ‘calm and unmoved, unconscious of my eye’ – and she burns with jealousy of the woman he has chosen over her. ‘My heart is rent,’ writes the love-struck lady, ‘my inmost spirit seared.’
Isabella’s journal was the equivalent of this miniature, a memento of the man she loved, a place where she spoke privately in order to keep her public silence. The lady in the poem vows to conceal her feelings – ‘prayer and silence shall alone be mine’ – though by putting words to her thoughts she has already half-broken her pledge. The diary, like the poem, exposed as well as buried Isabella’s secrets. But she insisted on her privacy: ‘
Here
I may gaze and dream, and fear no blame,’ her poem says. ‘
This
I may love and prize unseen – alone.’
Edinburgh, 1840–52
Edward Wickstead Lane, the object of Isabella’s love, was born in 1823 into a Presbyterian family on the French-speaking island of Terrebonne, Quebec. Soon after his birth the family moved to the neighbouring city of Montreal, where his father, Elisha, found work as a clerk to a Scottish-born wholesaler. When Edward was nine, his mother died, leaving him and his four-year-old brother Arthur in their father’s care. Elisha Lane and his boss built up a business importing liquor, meat and grain to Montreal and by the late 1830s Elisha was rich enough to send his sons to Edinburgh to be educated. Within a decade his company had assets valued at £70,000.
The Lane boys lodged with a family in the New Town and attended the renowned Edinburgh Academy, where Edward became a close friend of Elizabeth Drysdale’s son George. While Edward was a sociable boy, George Drysdale was intense and self-conscious. Both were outstanding pupils. In 1840 Edward was named ‘Dux of the Academy’ – the highest honour in the school – and the title passed the next year to George. Edward won prizes for his achievements in French and English, both as a writer and as a speaker, George for
Latin, English, French, mathematics and arithmetic. Afterwards George read Classics at Glasgow, where he won six prizes in his first year. Edward read Law at Edinburgh University, where he continued to be praised for his eloquence and was elected in 1842 to the celebrated Speculative Society debating club. As a student, Edward took rooms at 30 Royal Circus, a few doors along from the house that the Drysdales had occupied since it was built in the early 1820s. He became intimate with several members of the family: George’s parents, Sir William and Lady Drysdale, his younger brother, Charles, and – especially – his elder sister, Mary.
Mary was a small, sensitive young woman, clever, affectionate and trusting. She appears frequently in Isabella Robinson’s diary as an innocent figure, seemingly oblivious to her friend’s passionate interest in her husband. But Mary and Edward were bound together by shared sufferings that Isabella, in her anxious self-attention, may have failed to catch. These concerned George, Mary’s beloved brother and Edward’s best friend, and they began in 1843, when he was nineteen.
George was at university in Glasgow when his father, Sir William, died of cholera in June 1843; two weeks later, George’s older half-brother William Drysdale died of the same disease in India. George suffered a breakdown, abandoned his studies and returned to his mother’s house in Royal Circus.
The family and their friends rallied round. To help George recover his strength and spirits, his brother Charles and his friend Edward, who had just taken his law degree, accompanied him in 1844 on a walking tour of Europe. But while they were staying in Vienna, George disappeared. Charles and Edward’s desperate search for him ended only with the discovery of George’s clothes lying on the banks of the River Danube. His body was not recovered and his companions returned to Scotland with the news of his death. ‘The deceased’s mother and friends were in the deepest distress,’ reported Lord Cockburn, an eminent Edinburgh judge who lived in Royal
Circus; George, he said, was ‘the ablest and the most amiable boy I almost ever knew.’ The newspapers announced that George had died while bathing in the Danube, and his tragic end became the subject of prize poems that year by students at the Edinburgh Academy.
Just under two years later, in March 1846, George reappeared. He begged his family’s forgiveness. He had faked his death, he confessed, in lieu of taking his life. Lord Cockburn, in a letter to a friend, reported that George had been ‘in a state of grievous despair of fulfilling the kindly expectations he had excited, and thought it would be less grievous to his friends to lament his death than his failure; and that therefore he had combined this with avoiding suicide, by
pretending
to be drowned’. Wolfgang von Goethe’s late-eighteenth-century novel
The Sorrows of Young Werther
had supposedly inspired a spate of suicides by young men anxious to emulate its hero, and Cockburn speculated that George had been afflicted by ‘a sudden Germanising of the noddle’. But he was baffled that such a beloved boy could have behaved so irrationally, and cruelly: ‘the heartlessness of his conduct is the incomprehensible part of it’. The Drysdales’ ‘horror of his resurrection’, claimed Cockburn, was ‘perhaps greater than their grief for his death’.
George had tried to achieve a strange kind of annihilation in which, instead of ending his life, he shed his identity and his past. Amid their joy at his return, his mother and his siblings must have experienced some of the confusion and hurt that Cockburn attributed to them. But Mary, in a letter to a friend in Tasmania, expressed only compassion for her lost little brother: ‘our dearest, our idolised boy did not perish in the Danube, but is
alive
and
well
& at present with us, having reached us only last Thursday … Poor poor fellow, dear Doddy, he has suffered much since we parted both in
mind
and
body
, but now through the mercy of the Almighty Father he has been conducted safe back to his happy family.’
Although not yet quite well, she said, he was getting much better, and his mind was ‘purified, humbled, yet strengthened by the trials he has undergone’.
John James Drysdale, Sir William’s son by a previous marriage, came from Liverpool to see George. John, at forty, was one of the leading homeopaths in Britain, the editor of both the homeopathic manual
Materia Medica
and the
British Journal of Homeopathy
. The theory of his chosen branch of medicine – which was contentious even among the liberal medics of Edinburgh – was that solutions of medicinal substances, diluted so as to be almost undetectable, would effect cures. After examining his half-brother, John Drysdale diagnosed a nervous collapse brought on by overwork and instructed the family to keep George clear of books.
Mary reported to her friend that over the previous two years, George had ‘suffered under a temporary pressure on the brain, occasioned by overstudy, which rendered
impossible
to him any reflection on the step he was taking, & impelled alone by a feeling of suffering, he travelled to Hungary, where he has ever since been living, acting as teacher of English to the only son of a nobleman there, & treated by the family with the greatest kindness, nay even affection and confidence’. Eventually, the pressure on George’s brain subsided ‘& then he could not rest till he shd see us all once more’.
The family was dazed with delight at seeing George again. ‘We cannot gaze at him nor listen to him sufficiently, poor fellow,’ wrote Mary; ‘the past seems to him & to us like a fearful dream, from wh. we have just awakened to know what happiness & thankfulness are.’ She found him gentler, kinder, more warm-hearted than ever. ‘Our dear Mama looks with happiness many years younger since our darling one has returned, & dear Charlie’s sad face has cleared up, & we all feel so very happy that we would not exchange places with any human being.’ Their homeopath brother John reassured them that George’s health would improve and that one day he
might even be able to take up a profession. In the meantime, they were to ‘guard him well from any temptation to study’.
The Drysdale family and Edward Lane must have known something of the truth. George’s condition stemmed not so much from intellectual stress as from what he called his ‘secret shame’: a sexual neurosis. In an anonymous work he later published, he described himself as having been a young man ‘of active, studious, and erotic disposition, but of almost feminine bashfulness’. ‘In Scotland,’ he explained, ‘where there is a stricter sexual code than in perhaps any other country, and where the lusts of the flesh, as they are called, are stigmatised and controlled as much as possible, sexual shyness and timidity constitute a great
national
disease, and cause more unhappiness among young people, than can well be conceived.’ At fifteen he accidentally discovered masturbation, and found that the practice offered an ‘easy mode of satisfying his passions, which had long been the source of unrest and torment to his vivid imagination’. For about a year, George masturbated two or three times a day. As he moved on to university in Glasgow, at the age of seventeen, he began to discharge semen involuntarily at night: he became terrified that his compulsion had started to control him, to sap his strength and to push him towards madness. It was at this point that his father and his half-brother died and he returned home in distress.
On his trip to Europe with Edward and Charles in 1844, George found that he was still a slave to his vice. This so disturbed him that he decided to stage his own death. Afterwards, while living secretly in Hungary, he underwent a series of operations to cauterise his penis – that is, to deaden or destroy its nerve endings by inserting into the urethra a thin metal rod coated in a caustic substance. He submitted himself to this procedure seven or eight times.