Authors: Kate Summerscale
B007M836FY EBOK (8 page)
Combe firmly discouraged her from writing about religion. He tried to persuade her, as he had tried to persuade others over the years, that phrenology need not lead to atheism. To this end, he sent her a clergyman’s essay about the relationship between the body and the soul. Isabella was not swayed: the author, she told Combe, ‘does away with the usually received
opinion that the
soul
& the
body
are separate … but then he holds out a hope, that by some mysterious processes of prayer & good works, we
may
become
spirits
, & so live for ever, – a deduction only more complicated but not more probable than the doctrine he discards’. She speculated that human beings would upon death experience ‘a revolution into the elements that composed them’ – after all, she asked, ‘why should human life differ so materially from animal existence?’. At the very least, she said, believers should show humility: ‘in the face of so many conflicting religious opinions’, she was astonished that ‘vain man should in all ages have resolutely & furiously contended for his
own
form – his
own
persuasion, to the total exclusion of all chance of even a hearing for his neighbour’s. One would imagine, that the very existence of such
varied
doctrines & opinions would at least teach doubt, & a degree of charity.’
She took Combe’s advice, though, and resisted trying to publish her observations. ‘There are those living whom my doing so might anger tho’ not injure,’ she wrote to him, ‘& perhaps I may merely leave behind me a few remarks to be published or not by my friends, after my death, as they may think fit.’ She complied, reluctantly, with the secrecy and self-containment that were required of her.
George Combe was struck by the quality of Isabella’s reasoning. ‘You are,’ he told her in a letter, ‘clear-headed, forcible, & intellectually comprehensive in the power of penetrating into the relations of cause & effect, far beyond the average even of educated women.’ When he decided in 1853 to write about his own opinions on religion, she was one of the ‘very very few’ to whom he sent a copy of the manuscript (another was Marian Evans). He impressed upon these favoured readers the importance of keeping its contents a secret. ‘I arrive at the conclusion that there is no supernatural religion,’ he explained to one correspondent. ‘Were the contents of this book known … we should find it necessary
to leave Edinburgh.’ Isabella assured him of her discretion. ‘I can safely promise to fulfil the conditions you propose. I shall lock up the book at once among my private papers, & shall mention it to
no one
, unless to Mr Robinson, as you give me permission to do.’ She conceded that Henry’s ‘general opinions are liberal, & he has the utmost respect for your views’ – she and her husband did have in common their enthusiasm for scientific progress and secular education – but she could not resist reminding Combe that Henry had only a cursory interest in ideas. ‘He has,’ she wrote, ‘little leisure or inclination for abstract meditations.’
Isabella immersed herself in reading and writing. In 1852 she sent a piece on religion to the newspaper
The Leader
, though she knew that her opinions would probably be considered too extreme even for its radical pages, and
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal
printed another of her poems, ‘some lines of mine about some fanciful symbols of immortality that rather pleased me’. In June 1853 the same magazine published an essay about marriage, ‘A Woman and Her Master’, signed ‘A Woman’, which Isabella may have written: the predicament of the author, her heightened prose, her intense love for her children and her dissident views all resembled Isabella’s own. The essay was indebted to Herbert Spencer’s
Social Statics
, a new book that Isabella had read that summer and recommended to Combe as a work of ‘deep & thoughtful philosophy’. Marriage, Spencer said, could cause ‘the degradation of what should be a free and equal relationship – into one of ruler and subject … whatsoever of poetry there is in the passion that unites the sexes, withers up and dies in the cold atmosphere of command’.
Similarly, the author of the
Chambers
piece argued that a husband’s inordinate power could ruin his wife, leaving her full of hatred for him and for herself. A woman was not just wronged by a bad marriage, she suggested, but deformed by it. As a feeble satellite to the ‘all-controlling planet’ of her
husband, she became weak, supine, pitifully dependent. As time passed, ‘she may strive hard, strive with tears of blood, to be patient, and wise, and strong; but the crippled energies of a life can never be made whole again’. Like a ‘white Christian slave’, she ‘must walk quietly, and with pulses subdued … Her face must wear an outward calm, though the fires of Etna boil within her breast.’ An unhappy woman, she wrote, often remained in a marriage only because she could not bear to be parted from her offspring. She might feel a ‘surpassing tenderness’ for her children, but she had no independent right to them, ‘none whatever’.
Robert Chambers felt obliged to justify his decision to publish such views. He added a postscript to the essay: ‘Our contributor, while perhaps more than sufficiently earnest in depicting what we must believe an exceptive case, is right in looking for a remedy … it may in time appear that much less risk is incurred than is now generally supposed, by ruling that a wretched woman may go away with her children from an intolerable husband.’
In the summer of 1853, Edward, Mary and Lady Drysdale visited the Robinsons at Ripon Lodge. Henry was still busy with his sugar mills. He had recently been granted a patent on a coupling disc that could yoke together a new engine and an older mill: the end of the engine’s gear shaft was driven into one groove on the iron disc, and the tongue of the mill’s top roller into another. Edward had just qualified as a physician – a gentleman doctor, expert in diagnosis rather than surgery – and he and his family were passing through Berkshire on their way to the Continent, where they planned to spend a month’s holiday. They asked Isabella, who had been so kind to their children in Edinburgh, if they could leave their sons with her while they were abroad. Arthur and William were five and two. Mary Lane had by now had another son, Sydney Edward
Hamilton, born in 1852, who was dark where his brothers were fair; it may have been in honour of Isabella that he was christened ‘Hamilton’, as she and Alfred both bore this middle name.
The Lanes and Lady Drysdale travelled to the spa town of Baden in Germany, from which Edward sent several letters to Isabella. He had already visited a hydropathy spa in Scotland and the Bagni di Lucca hot springs in Italy – in a piece he wrote for
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal
in 1851 he praised the Tuscan resort for its ‘shady lanes’ and ‘murmuring river’. Now that he was ready to practise as a doctor, he was making plans for a water-cure retreat of his own, an airy world of glass, water, lawns and sunlight.
On their return to England, Edward Lane and his family stopped at Ripon Lodge to collect the boys, and stayed with the Robinsons for a day and a night.
‘I long to know if he thought of me and ever missed me,’ Isabella confided in an undated diary entry, ‘though in my serious moments I do not at all believe that he does.’ She admonished herself: ‘How can any one so busy, so beloved, and so admired spare one thought on a plain, awkward-mannered, and distant friend? Good God! I could coin my life’s drops if that were possible for his advantage, and ask only to be loved while dying; and he – why should this disparity in affection exist? – he only thinks of me as a quondam acquaintance. Alas!’ In moods like this, she valued herself as lowly as she set him high – she was unattractive and graceless, she lamented, where he was loved and prized by all. Her wish to coin her ‘life’s drops’ for Edward was a wish to turn her blood to gold for his gain, to offer herself up for him.
The Robinsons themselves took a trip to Europe in the foggy winter of 1853 – ‘cheating November of its gloom’, as Henry described it in a letter to Combe. For six or seven weeks the family toured the northern French towns of Calais, St
Omer, Lille and Boulogne. ‘Our stay was chiefly at the last,’ wrote Henry, ‘which Mrs Robinson likes very much.’
The family was back in Ripon Lodge by the end of the year. On the first day of 1854, Isabella got up early (at a quarter to eight), did the accounts, finished her journal for 1853 and began a fresh volume. She strove to be patient and practical with her moody husband and sons. ‘This day was cold, frosty, with east wind,’ she noted, ‘sunny till noon, and cheering. Not well in night, but better on rising, and felt cheerful. Restored good humour to Henry by my sunshine, and greeted the children affectionately, though they seemed rather gloomy.’
Henry had started to build a house for the family at Caversham, a suburb four miles north of Ripon Lodge, and over breakfast he and Isabella discussed what to name it. The two of them then read with the boys. Afterwards, in private, Isabella counted up her letters of the previous year: ‘189 received, and 26 notes; 214 written, and 54 notes’. As she made a tally of her correspondence, she also drew up a list of the acquaintances and relatives who had died, among them her first husband’s brother, George Dansey, ‘once a friend but recently a stranger and alienated’; two aunts on her mother’s side; and two sons of her eldest brother, John, who lived with his family in Tasmania. This annual stock-taking, which was common in diaries of the time, inspired Isabella at least to try to pray: ‘May the Great Author of the being of all beings here on Earth direct our steps, and lead us to acknowledge and perceive the presence of good and order in the midst of seeming contradiction, pain, and sorrow.’
At half past one Isabella took a walk with Alfred and Stanley. To begin with, her eldest boy was ‘dull and out of sorts’, she said, but all their spirits were lifted by the cold air and the sight of the snowy hills. On their return, Isabella was brought down again by Henry. ‘Dinner good, but Henry sulky and determined to find fault.’ Since she was in charge of the household, his criticisms of the meal were directed at
her. ‘Read to children after dinner, and then had a long discussion with him as to the causes of his discontent. He railed at the servants, wanted a manservant (with whom he would disagree in a month); wanted a study; wished I was a more active housekeeper; complained of cold, and planned how to spend less of his time here and more in London.’ She responded calmly to his attacks on her domestic management, and to his determination to spend as little time as possible with his family. ‘I said all I could think of to bring him to some degree of reason; remarked on the selfishness of complaints, the reasonableness of making the best of things, and pointed out several small things that might be done to make matters better.’
Isabella’s behaviour that day seemed designed as a message to herself, a new year’s resolution in action. She was trying to act in accordance with such conduct books as Sarah Stickney Ellis’s
The Wives of England
(1843), which argued that a woman’s mission was to submit to her husband and devote herself to creating a comfortable and serene home. It was, Mrs Ellis wrote, ‘unquestionably the inalienable right of all men, whether ill or well, rich or poor, wise or foolish, to be treated with deference, and made much of in their own houses’. To bring a man happiness was a wife’s gift and privilege. As Coventry Patmore observed in his narrative poem
The Angel in the House
(1854), ‘Man must be pleased, but him to please/ Is woman’s pleasure.’
Isabella did her best to suffer Henry’s rudeness and bad temper in silence, to wait lovingly for the cloud of his discontent to pass. She stayed with him until he was less vexed, and then went out for another walk with Alfred: ‘The wind had sunk, and it was agreeable.’ They came in for tea at eight o’clock, after which she and Henry spent another hour discussing the name of their new house. At half past nine she wrote her journal, and completed some exercises in Latin – though no longer able to attend lectures and classes as she had
in Edinburgh, she was still trying to correct the deficiencies of her education. By eleven Isabella was in bed: ‘and so closed the first day of the year,’ she told her diary, ‘not unpleasantly, though in some measure spoiled by Henry’s ill-humour’. She had been left ‘wearied and ruffled’, she wrote, by the ‘thorough unamiableness of his disposition’.
4
My imagination heated as
though with realities
Berkshire & Moor Park, 1854
In 1854 a new man entered Isabella’s life and the pages of her journal: John Pringle Thom, a Scot of about twenty-four, employed by Henry to be the first teacher at the day school that he planned to set up in Berkshire. Henry’s school had not yet got off the ground – he was finding little support for his progressive project among the conservative residents of the district and he was in any case preoccupied by his business in London. In the meantime, John Thom took lodgings in Reading and acted as an English tutor to the Robinson boys.