B007M836FY EBOK (38 page)

Combe was ‘deeply mortified’ … cause of religious freedom’.
Letter GC to Charles Bray, 15 Nov 1854.

‘Bible of the Brothel’.
Cited in William H. Johnson’s
Life of Charles Bradlaugh, MP
(1888).

Among the neo-Malthusians …
See Tomoko Sato’s ‘E. W. Lane’s Hydropathic Establishment at Moor Park’ in the
Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies
, Vol. 10, (1978).

She was ‘a treasure … remarkably modest’. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth,
Vol. IV (1967), ed. Ernest de Selincourt, p. 495.

She asked her husband … and their future children.
Account of John Wordsworth’s behaviour in letter from Henry Curwen to his son Edward, dated 30 Jan 1846, Curwen archive, Whitehaven, DCu/3/31. ‘The old Poet I know has altered his will,’ Curwen wrote, ‘& left all to Isabella’s children, out of his JW powers, and I have done the same.’

He wrote to his son-in-law …
In
William Wordsworth: a Biography
(1965) Mary Trevelyan Moorman makes a cryptic reference to this letter: ‘A letter from old Mr Curwen exists,’ she writes, ‘in which John is unmercifully abused,’ p. 598. She had evidently read the letter, but she gave no clue to its whereabouts nor any detail of its contents. Even a century later, it seems, a biographer of Wordsworth felt bound to protect his family’s honour.

Isabella continued to correspond …
Letter IHR to GC, 28 Feb 1855.

‘sweet, mournful little note … they missed each other.
IHR’s journal, 27 Apr 1855.

‘I have found more employment … to prepare.’
Letter IHR to GC, 28 Feb 1855.

Unknown to Henry …
HOR’s answer to IHR’s Bill of Complaint in the Court of Chancery, 17 Apr 1858, NA, C15/550/R24.

Henry’s house was Italianate in design … kitchen.
Details from Balmore House sale catalogues (1861 and 1865), Reading Central Library.

As soon as Isabella … a fortnight’s water therapy.
EWL’s testimony to Divorce Court, 23 Nov 1858.

The establishment at Moor Park …
Letter IHR to GC, 4 Nov 1855.

douche the vagina with a syringe.
The syringe is recommended, for instance, in Charles Knowlton’s bestselling
Fruits of Philosophy; or, The Private Companion of Young Married People
(1832). See also Angus Maclaren’s
Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England
(1978).

‘It is very far from finished …’
Letter IHR to GC, 4 Nov 1855.

Queenwood School …
See ‘A Mid-Nineteenth-Century Experiment in Science Teaching’ by D. Thompson in
Annals of Science
, Vol. 2, (1955).

‘long been on the worst of terms … be called sane’.
Letter IHR to GC, 21 Feb 1858.

marital bond as a ‘superstition’ …
Letter GC to Sir James Clark, 19 Dec 1857.

Mrs Norton set out the injustices … to destroy’.
See
A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill
(1855).

‘one of the chief instruments for the degradation of women …’
See
Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion
(1854).

the longest and gravest diphtheria epidemic …
See Ernest Abraham Hart, ‘On Diphtheria’ (1859), a pamphlet reprinted from
The Lancet.

‘Boulogne sore throat’.
A French physician had dubbed it ‘diphtheria’ in 1855; the term derived from the Greek word
diphthera
, meaning leather, a reference to the thick, dry throat membrane that characterised the condition. See Charles Creighton’s
A History of Epidemics in Britain
(1891).

As she lay in her bed …
HOR’s response of 1 Feb 1862 in NA, J77/44/R4.

BOOK II: OUT FLEW THE WEB

CHAPTER 7: IMPURE PROCEEDINGS

‘The Robinsons married in 1844 …
Details of the trial of
Robinson v Robinson & Lane
are taken from reports in
The Times
,
Morning Chronicle, Liverpool Mercury, Manchester Times, Reynolds Newspaper, The Era, Daily News, Daily Telegraph
,
Observer
,
Caledonian Mercury
and
The Morning
Post
published 15–22 Jun 1858; 5–6 Jul 1858; 27–30 Nov 1858; and 3 Mar 1859; and from Swabey and Tristram’s
Reports.
Most of the quotations from counsel are attempts to translate back into direct speech the continuous prose of the legal and press accounts. For instance, the line given in
Reports
as: ‘He proposed to put in evidence certain diaries written by Mrs Robinson’ is here given as ‘I propose to put in evidence certain diaries written by Mrs Robinson.’

The three judges …
See entries in
ODNB
; (Michael Lobban on Cockburn, Joshua S. Getzler on Cresswell); Edward Foss’s
Biographia Juridica: A Biographical Dictionary of the Judges of England from the Conquest to the Present Time
(1870); Mr Serjeant Robinson’s
Bench and Bar, Reminiscences of One of the Last of an Ancient Race
(1894); Justin McCarthy’s
Reminiscences: Vol. II
(1899); and John Duke Coleridge’s memoirs.

The judges had decided …
This was one of twenty-two cases – for divorce or for judicial separation – to be heard before the full court without a jury in 1858.

The sun funnelled …
Description of the architecture, the judges’ bench and the spectators from an engraving of the new divorce court at Westminster Hall published in the
Illustrated London News
, 22 May 1858, and from the series ‘Divorce a Vinculo’,
Once a Week; Vols I & II
(1860).

The temperature climbed …
See
The Annual Register 1858
(1859) and reports in
The Times
.

Mr Chambers …
For Montagu Chambers, see his obituary in
The Law Times
, 1885, and lithograph after Robert Samuel Ennis Gallon, 1852 or after, printed by M. and N. Hanhart, NPG.

In moments of impatience …
‘Divorce a Vinculo’,
Once a Week
.

The Divorce Court investigated adultery …
Barbara Leckie argues in
Culture and Adultery: the Novel, the Newspaper and the Law, 1857–1914
(1999) that the partial perspectives of the Divorce Court narratives influenced the emergence of the unreliable narrator in English fiction; her book includes a chapter on the Robinson case.

The law required … to this effect.
See Richard Thomas
Tidswell and Ralph Daniel Makinson Littler’s
The Practice and Evidence in Cases of Divorce and other Matrimonial Causes
(1860).

Proximate acts might include …
Ibid.

‘The testimony of discarded … and alarm.’
John J. J. S. Wharton, ‘An Exposition of the Laws Relating to the Women of England, showing their Rights, Remedies and Responsibilities’ (1853), quoted in Stone’s
Road to Divorce
(1990).

Most of the petitioners …
The
Parliamentary Papers: Accounts & Papers 1859,
Vol. 19, paper 131, reports that the earliest of the 356 instances of adultery alleged in the court (by men and by women) in its first eighteen months took place in 1833; most, though, were from the 1850s – 30 in 1853, 27 in 1854 (including Isabella and Edward’s), 32 in 1855, 41 in 1856, 53 in 1857, and 53 in 1858.

The new law stipulated … bourgeois society.
See David M. Turner’s
Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England 1660–1740
(2002); Ann Sumner Holmes’s ‘The Double Standard in the English Divorce Laws, 1857–1923’ in
Law and Social Inquiry
, Vol. 20 (1995); and Lynda Nead’s
Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian England
(1998). The issue of whether men and women should be equal under the divorce law had been debated in the Houses of Lords and Commons. In a vote in the Lords on 25 May 1857, the motion to approve a distinction in the divorce laws between men and women was carried by 71 to 20; in the Commons on 7 Aug it was carried by 126 to 65. George Drysdale objected to the double standard by which ‘For a man to indulge his sexual appetites illegitimately, either before or after the marriage vow, is thought venial; but for a woman to do so, is the most heinous crime.’ Women were granted equal rights in divorce in 1923, soon after they won the vote.

‘a light literature entirely based … Saturday Review
, Jul 1857.

a notorious haunt of prostitutes and suicides.
Thomas Hood’s poem ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ (1844) had forged the association of this spot with sexual transgression and self-destruction. The poem commemorated the suicide of a prostitute washed
up on this bank of the river: ‘Still for all slips of hers,/ One of Eve’s family –
Wipe those poor lips of her
Oozing so clammily.’ The fallen woman was redeemed and purified by her remorse and death, but also preserved as an object of gruesome erotic fascination. John Everett Millais made an etching inspired by the poem in 1858.

CHAPTER 8: I HAVE LOST EVERYTHING

Henry refused to allow her back …
HOR’s answer to IHR’s Bill of Complaint, Court of Chancery, 17 Apr 1858, NA, C15/550/R24.

moved twenty miles south …
Letter IHR to GC, 26 Feb 1858.

‘gloom & solitude’ … shattered by illness.
Letter IHR to GC, 21 Feb 1858.

‘I have lost every thing …
Ibid.

His first plan was to sue …
Ibid. ‘He tried, in the autumn of ’56 a direct legal attack;
that, of course, failed’
.

a lawyer called Gregg …
This may have been the William Gregg who read Law at Edinburgh University with Edward, graduating with an MA in 1844.

Neither Edward nor Isabella …
See letters IHR to GC, 21 and 26 Feb 1858.

The cost could run to …
This cost was estimated at anything between £200 and £5,000, according to Gail L. Savage’s ‘The Operation of the 1857 Divorce Act, 1860–1910: A Research Note’ in
Journal of Social History
(1983). The cost of a separation was far lower: Stephen Lushington, a judge in the Consistory Court, estimated in 1844 that the minimum cost of an uncontested suit was £50, rising to a maximum of £800 for a contested suit. See Stone’s
Road to Divorce
(1990), p. 188.

‘cosey, dosey, old-fashioned …
Charles Dickens,
David Copperfield
(1850).

‘Lady Drysdale is taken ill …
This and subsequent quotations from GC’s journal, 3 Jul–3 Aug 1857.

George suffered from digestive … anxiety.
See Stack’s
Queen Victoria’s Skull
, p. 156.

In these letters Miss Smith …
From F. Tennyson Jesse’s
The
Trial of Madeline Smith
(1927), quoted in Leckie’s
Culture and Adultery
(1999).

Within a few days … unabated interest.
RC’s journal, RC papers, NLS.

Though Henry … acquaintances in Edinburgh.
Divorce Court file, NA, J77/44/R4.

In the meantime … case came to court.
See
Register of Tonbridge School
(1893).

Otway was selected … Rule 13.
See
The Tonbridgian
of October 1861 and D. C. Somervell’s
A History of Tonbridge School
(1947).

Henry’s petition … under the old system.
For workings of the ecclesiastical courts, see Stone’s
Road to Divorce
(1990).

The Times
reported the case in a few lines
… The Times
, 4 Dec 1857.

‘scarcely enough to live as a gentlewoman’.
IHR’s petition to the House of Lords Select Committee on Appeals, 6 Jun 1861, HLA. Her brother Frederick invested her settlement in Three Per Cent Consols (government bonds). Though she asked him to invest instead in stocks that might achieve a higher rate of return, he refused. After an international commercial crisis in 1857, he may have felt it incumbent upon him to be cautious on her behalf. See IHR’s response of 4 Mar 1862 in NA, J77/44/R4.

£300 a year was considered the minimum …
According to R. D. Baxter’s
National Income
(1868).

Henry was staying … society in Reading.
Letter IHR to GC, 21 Feb 1858.

‘impassioned and disgusting’ …
Letter GC to Mrs Tennant, the half-sister of Mary Lane, 28 Dec 1857.