Authors: Kate Summerscale
B007M836FY EBOK (42 page)
for ‘certain family considerations’.
Probate of Elizabeth Drysdale (dated 14 May 1887), Edward Wickstead Lane (30 Oct 1889) and Margaret Mary Lane, née Drysdale (15 Aug 1891). Lady Drysdale died in Harley St, Edward in Boulogne, and Mary in Connaught Square, near Hyde Park.
Charles became the spokesman …
He was a witness for the defence when Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh were prosecuted for obscene libel after publishing a book on birth control in 1877. In spite of his efforts, the pair were convicted of circulating material ‘liable to deprave and corrupt’, a test of obscenity devised by Sir Alexander Cockburn in 1868 and still in use today.
Charles had two sons with Alice Vickery …
Their sons were Charles Vickery Drysdale and George Vickery Drysdale.
George shared a house … died three years later.
Wills of George Drysdale (proved 10 Dec 1904) and George Drysdale (proved 21 Dec 1907). Both died in the same house in West Dulwich, Surrey. Susannah Hamilton Spring in census returns of 1891 and 1901.
By the time that he died in July 1863 …
See Joshua S. Getzler’s entry in
ODNB
.
‘one of the greatest social revolutions …’ The Times
, 28 May 1867.
Queen Victoria believed … an actress in Ireland
. See Christopher Hibbert’s
Queen Victoria: a Personal History
(2000), p. 299.
might be physiological after all.
In 1854, the French alienist Jean-Pierre Falret had described a form of mania that he named ‘
la folie circulaire
’; it was the first identification of the illness now known as manic depression or bipolar disorder. When manic, the sufferers could experience a heightened sexual drive, wrote Falret, accompanied by the delusion that the objects of their lust reciprocated their feelings; they sometimes sought out sex with reckless abandon. When depressed, they were subject to profoundly melancholic, even suicidal feelings. Falret pointed out that victims of this circular madness often appeared normal: they did not experience thought disorder, and their extreme moods were often interrupted by lucid intervals. These symptoms corresponded to the sensations of being ‘crazed’ and then ‘crushed’ that Isabella recorded in her diary. Though the doctors who testified in the Robinson trial probably knew of Falret’s findings (they were reported in the British medical press in 1854), his theory did not support the case for Isabella’s madness: a victim of
la folie circulaire
might misinterpret sexual intentions, but she was not likely to hallucinate sexual acts.
Dinah Mulock …
A Life for a Life.
A Life for a Life
and George Eliot’s
Adam Bede
were the most borrowed library books of 1859, according to Sally Mitchell’s
Dinah Mulock Craik
(1983). Dinah Mulock married Georgiana Craik’s cousin, George Lillie Craik, in 1865, when she was forty and he twenty-five.
‘sensation novels’ of the 1860s.
The narrator of
The Serpent on the Hearth: a Mystery of the New Divorce Court
(1860), for instance, cannot help ‘dwelling on the past … though there is an agony in that past, there is still for me an exquisite delight, and a pleasure, which I can, in writing this mystery only, again and again recall’.
‘It is curious … most unfeminine.’
See E. S. Dallas’s
The Gay Science
(1866).
books about ‘lost women’ … silken falsehood’.
Dinah Mulock’s ‘To Novelists – and a Novelist’, a review of George Eliot’s
The Mill on the Floss
in
Macmillan’s Magazine
, 1861.
‘an adulteress in her heart’.
HOR’s response of 1 Feb 1862 in NA, J77/44/R4.
he appealed to the House of Lords …
Minutes of the Appeal Committee of the House of Lords, 25 Jun 1860, and HOR’s petition to withdraw appeal, 3 Jun 1861, HLA.
When ordered to pay … North America.
HOR’s rejoinder of 14 Apr 1862, in NA, J77/44/R4.
‘little Children & their kind …
’ Letter from Bridget Curwen Walker to her grandson Thomas Walker, 3 Jan 1859, private collection (Ruth Walker).
When Bridget died …
Bridget Christian Walker’s will, proved 28 May 1859.
estate passed to Frederick.
When Frederick died in 1880, aged fifty-seven, the estate was valued at £41,000. It passed to John Walker, Isabella’s eldest brother, and his son, who subsequently barred the entail and sold it. Frederick left a widow, Henrietta, their two children, Isabella and Frederick, having predeceased him.
Henry responded by insisting …
HOR’s reply of 17 Apr 1858 in the Court of Chancery and his response of 1 Feb 1862 in NA, J77/44/R4.
She continued to support Alfred …
Papers in NA, J77/44/R4 and census return of 1861.
on condition that he pay her the dividends …
HOR’s response of 1 Feb 1862 and IHR’s reply of 4 Mar 1862 in NA, J77/44/R4.
but by 1861 she had managed to pay …
IHR’s petition to the House of Lords Select Committee on Appeals, 6 Jun 1861, HLA.
Henry sold Balmore House …
HOR’s rejoinder of 14 Apr 1862, in NA, J77/44/R4. Henry described the Talbot Square property – a four-storey terraced building – as a ‘small house’, which he was about to give up because of his business losses. In the spring of 1861, according to the census returns, he was resident there with Otway, Stanley, three servants, and two of his nieces. The house in Park Street cost £84 a year, according to the rejoinder.
Otway left Tonbridge School …
See
Register of Tonbridge School
(1893).
‘contrary and in defiance’ …
HOR’s rejoinder of 14 Apr 1862, in NA, J77/44/R4.
In 1863, seven years … Hotel on 27 June
. HOR’s petition to the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, 2 Nov 1863, sworn in Paris before the British Consul and resworn in London a week later before being filed on 10 Nov, Court minutes,
Robinson v Robinson & Le Petit
. Both documents in NA, J77/44/R4.
The splendid Victoria Hotel …
See John Henry Sherburne’s
The Tourist’s Guide; or Pencillings in England and on the Continent
(1847).
‘rising room’.
T. C. Barker and M. Robbins,
A History of London Transport
(1963).
dissolved on 3 November 1864.
Court minutes,
Robinson v Robinson & Le Petit
, NA, J77/44/R4.
Her paramour in the hotel rooms …
HOR’s petition to the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, 2 Nov 1863, in NA, J77/44/R4.
son of an Irish nobleman …
Lord Rossmore’s
Things I Can Tell
(1912).
a survey of local primary schools.
See
Memoires de la Société academique de l’arrondissement de Boulogne-sur-Mer
(1880).
In Dublin in May 1865 he married …
Marriage reported in the
Belfast Newsletter
, 4 May 1865. The ceremony took place at St Stephen’s Church.
men to remarry that year.
See
Annual Reports of the Register-General of the Births, Deaths and Marriages in England
(HMSO, 1878–1902).
Having set up and sold on …
Details of steam-packet venture in J. Forbes Munro’s
Maritime Enterprise and Empire
(2003).
Henry reneged on a promise …
In a letter from Tom’s sister, Amy Waters, to their sister Lucy on 19 Jun 1864, which describes Henry as behaving ‘most shamefully’, WG 9/6. This and all subsequent correspondence between members of the Waters family from Williams/Gray Papers at the Tairawhiti Museum and Art Gallery, Gisborne, New Zealand.
Unlike the kindly Albert …
When the census of 1871 was taken, Albert was staying in Westbourne Park with his eighty-nine-year-old widowed father. In 1881, Albert’s wife Julia, with her children Alice and Hubert, was taking the waters at Great Malvern.
‘HOR will not trouble …’
Letter from Helena Waters (née Robinson) to her daughter Lucy, 19 Jun 1864, WG 9/6.
privately as ‘the Turk’.
In letters from Helena to her daughter Lucy Waters, 31 Dec 1868, and from Carry Cowan to her sister Lucy Waters early in 1864. Carry added that Henry had just come back from a trip to the East, ‘very oleaginous minded … & very grey & mysterious old donkey’, WG 9/6. Albert, by contrast, was referred to lovingly by his nieces as ‘dear Albert’. He and his sister Helena were members of the Plymouth Brethren, an evangelical Christian sect founded in Dublin in the 1820s, and Albert was the chief negotiator when the Robinson firm agreed to build a flour mill, at cost price, for the paupers of Hereford (see Jean O’Donnell,
John Venn and the Friends of the Hereford Poor
, 2007).
Stanley ‘seems very anxious …’.
Letter from Helena Waters to Lucy Waters, 23 Nov 1863, WG 9/6.
‘Stanley has gone … unmanageable.’
Letter from Helena Waters to Lucy Waters, 25 Dec 1863, WG 9/6.
Henry transferred Stanley …
See
Register of Tonbridge School
(1893) and the
Edinburgh Academy Register
, which records Stanley’s attendance from 1864 to 1866.
In the late 1860s, Henry …
The
Scottish Commercial List
shows HOR in Glasgow in 1869.
In 1869 he patented …
Patent listed in
Chronological Index of Patents
(1869).
‘a splendid … interested for her’.
Waters family journal, 13 Apr 1870, WG 10/7.
‘Mrs Robinson … in the evening.’
Waters family journal, 4 Apr 1870, WG 10/7.
On a return visit …
Waters family journal, 7 Apr 1870, WG 10/7.
In 1874, Alfred, at thirty-three …
According to the marriage certificate, both bride and groom were living in Rupert Street, Westminster when they were married on 21 Sep 1874.
cotton business in the 1860s …
Otway is listed as having dissolved a partnership in a firm of Liverpool cotton dealers in the
London Gazette
, 24 Aug 1867.
joined the Merchant Navy
. Otway received his master’s certificate in London on 19 Feb 1873, according to
Lloyd’s Captains’ Registers 1851–1947
, NA, ref BT 122/86.
Alfred as first engineer.
See, for instance, census of 1871, where Otway is listed as the master of a ship docked at Cardiff, and Hamilton as his first engineer. Otway was the captain of the
Frascati
when it docked at Bute in 1875, according to
The Western Mail
of 15 Jun that year.
‘He has become quite … his memory.’
Letter from Lucy Gray (née Waters) to her husband Charles, 12 Mar 1876, WG 9/3.
‘He could not stand his idiotic …’
Letter from Lucy Gray to her sister Adelaide, circa May 1877, WG 10/2.
‘poor little “Marie”’ …
Letter from Helena Waters to Lucy Waters, 31 Dec 1868, WG 9/6.
bore her husband three sons.
Oliver, born in 1867, became a naval surgeon; Arthur, born in 1871, became a shipwright; and Ernest, born in 1877, became a naval engineer. See census returns of 1871, 1881 and 1891.
to a house called Fairlight in Bromley, Kent.
Isabella bought a house and land on the corner of Newman Road and Tweedy Road in Bromley from Dorothea Tweedy of Belvedere in the early 1870s, according to schedules of deeds in the Bromley public library; she sold off parts of the land in the early 1880s.
Flaubert’s
Emma Bovary. The quotations from
Madame Bovary
in this book are taken from the first English translation, by Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, which appeared in 1886, a year before Isabella Robinson’s death. In 1898, Eleanor killed herself with prussic acid after discovering that her lover, the atheist Edward Aveling, had married a young actress.
At her house in Bromley …
According to her death certificate, Isabella died of general pyaemia, an often fatal form of septicemia, three days after a suppurating abscess was found on her thumb.
That December …
Henry died at 84 Upper Leeson Street, Dublin, on 12 Dec 1887. See ‘Calendars of Probate and Administration’, Dublin.
‘fed up with England’ … Time
magazine, 14 Apr 1930. Otway’s will was unsuccessfully challenged by his brother Alfred – see NA, TS27/794. CODA : DO YO U ALSO PAUSE TO PITY ?
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