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Sir Alexander Cockburn continued to preside over celebrated cases in the law courts. On occasion he was criticised for vanity and for flaws in his logic; but he was admired for his worldly common sense as a judge. In 1864, Queen Victoria refused to give him a peerage on the grounds that he had a ‘notoriously bad moral character’. He was appointed Lord Chief Justice in 1875, and died five years later, leaving most of his fortune to his illegitimate son.

It turned out that George Combe had been right to predict the sexual delinquency of the Prince of Wales. Queen Victoria believed that her husband’s death in 1861 was due in part to the shock of learning that the nineteen-year-old Bertie had lost his virginity to an actress in Ireland. Over the remaining forty years of his mother’s reign, the future Edward VII gained a reputation as a tireless philanderer.

Like Isabella, Combe had not had the chance to sift and sort his private papers before they fell into the hands of others. After his death in 1858, Cecy preserved his correspondence, and his trustees donated it to the National Library of Scotland in 1950. They may not have noticed – as Isabella did not notice on a first reading – that in his letters of February 1858 he had coached Mrs Robinson into pleading insanity.

Eneas Sweetland Dallas’s marriage fell apart in 1867 when his wife, Isabella Glyn Dallas, accused him of adultery after reading a letter that he had written to another woman. He denied the charge and demanded that Mrs Dallas sign a document saying that her accusations were based on insane delusions. When she refused, he left her. Seven years later she petitioned for a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s desertion and adultery and was briefly interned in Holloway prison because she refused to give up documents pertaining to the case. Unlike Isabella Robinson, Isabella Dallas managed to hold on to her private papers, but she surrendered her liberty in their place. The divorce was none the less granted.

Wilkie Collins had already used secret diaries as vehicles for his stories, and in
The Woman in White
(1860) he included a scene of a diary’s discovery: when Marian Halcombe succumbs to a delirious fever, Count Fosco opens her journal and reads of her hatred of him. In
Armadale
(1866), Collins took up the question of why a woman would preserve a record of her dark deeds. ‘Why do I keep a diary at all?’ asks his villainous heroine Lydia Gwilt. ‘Why did the clever thief the other day (in the English newspaper) keep the very thing to convict him in the shape of a record of everything he stole? Why are we not perfectly reasonable in all that we do? Why am I not always on my guard and never inconsistent with myself, like a wicked character in a novel? Why? Why? Why? I don’t care why! … There’s a reason that nobody can answer – myself included.’

The brooding, dreaming, dissatisfied wife became a mainstay of the ‘sensation novels’ of the 1860s. ‘It is curious,’ observed Eneas Sweetland Dallas in 1866, ‘that one of the earliest results of an increased feminine influence in our literature should be a display of what in women is most unfeminine.’ Dinah Mulock defended books about ‘lost women’: it was better to read such stories, she contended, than ‘be swaddled up for ever in the folds of silken falsehood’.

Many of the unhappy heroines of these novels merely dreamt of escape, but Mrs Henry Wood’s bestseller
East Lynne
, serialised between 1860 and 1861, gave an unsettlingly sympathetic portrait of a wife who acted upon her adulterous wishes. Lady Isabel Carlyle, having married a country solicitor, becomes increasingly infatuated with a ‘fascinating’ young man, for whom she can no more suppress her desire ‘than she could suppress her own sense of being’. When separated from the object of her obsession, ‘a miserable feeling of apathy stole over her: a feeling as if all whom she loved in the world had died, leaving her living and alone. It was a painful depression, this vacuum in her heart which was making itself felt in its keen intensity.’ Lady Isabel is tormented by her dreams: ‘Oh, those dreams! They were painful to awake from; painful from the contrast they presented to reality; and equally painful to her conscience, in its striving after what was right.’ She betrays her husband in Boulogne-sur-mer. When he learns of her infidelity, he divorces her. She is haunted for the rest of her life by her longing for her children.

The scandal had left Isabella estranged from her mother as well as her friends. Shortly after the discovery of the diary in 1856, Bridget Walker made a will in which she left her small personal estate (of less than £2,000) to her sons Frederick and Christian and her younger daughter Julia, the wife of Albert Robinson. The will made no mention of Isabella. Early in 1859, Bridget wrote a letter to Christian’s infant son in which she emphasised the importance of shoring up intellectual endeavour with faith: ‘little Children & their kind Teachers must take all the pains they can
to teach
&
to learn
; but they must not forget to pray to their Father in Heaven, to bless their labours’. When Bridget died in May that year, the Ashford Court estate passed to Frederick. It afterwards fell to him, as Isabella’s trustee and legal representative, to fight Henry on her behalf. Frederick filed a Bill in the Court of Chancery for the return of the railway stock that Henry had bought with Isabella’s money. Henry responded by insisting that Isabella had agreed that he purchase the stock and hold it in trust for their sons.

In her small rented cottage in Reigate, Isabella took two lodgers: Joseph Humphrey, a local carpenter in his thirties; and Emily Lucretia Wright, a four-year-old girl whose parents and brothers lived next door. Through this arrangement, Isabella gained a little extra income, as well as the company of a younger man and a child. In reply to the queries of the census-taker in 1861, she gave her marital status as ‘widow’ and knocked five years off her age. She continued to support Alfred, though he was often away from home – in the early 1860s he was apprenticed to marine engineers, first in Liverpool and then in Bolton, Lancashire. Her income rose by £30 in 1860, when she agreed to let Henry keep the railway stock that he had bought with her money on condition that he pay her the dividends; but by 1861 she had managed to pay only £100 of the £636 that she owed for the divorce trial.

Henry sold Balmore House in 1861, and rented two properties in London: a house in Talbot Square, Marylebone, where Otway and Stanley stayed with him in the holidays; and an office in Park Street, near Hyde Park, in which he employed a nephew, Tom Waters.

Otway left Tonbridge School in 1861, aged sixteen, and promptly fled his father’s house to move in to his mother’s cottage in Reigate. Henry was furious: ‘contrary and in defiance’ of his wishes, he said, Isabella had ‘secretly exercised an influence’ on Otway, and ‘induced’ the boy to run away. Alfred, said Henry, had connived in Otway’s escape. When Otway turned seventeen in March 1862, he was entitled by law to choose where he lived. He remained with his mother.

In 1863, seven years after he began hiring agents to gather evidence against his wife, Henry at last obtained the proof of adultery that he required. A lawyer’s clerk called Louis Philip Vincent and a man called William Lines witnessed her sharing a room with a man at the Victoria Hotel in London on 19 and 20 June 1863; and another room, with the same man, at the Grosvenor Hotel on 27 June. The splendid Victoria Hotel, built in 1839, flanked the great Doric arch in front of Euston Square railway station; the Grosvenor, which dated from 1861, was a more modern and equally opulent establishment near Victoria station, equipped with a hydraulic elevator, or ‘rising room’. Isabella denied adultery, but Justice James Wilde, who, after Cresswell’s death, had become Judge Ordinary of the Divorce Court, decreed in June 1864 that the case was sufficiently proved. With no press coverage at all, the Robinsons’ marriage was dissolved on 3 November 1864.

At fifty-eight, Henry Robinson was at last free to take another wife. In Dublin in May 1865 he married Maria Arabella Long, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a former registrar of the Irish Court of Chancery. He was one of forty-eight divorced men to remarry that year. Having set up and sold on a company to run steam packets in Singapore and Batavia in the early 1860s, he continued to negotiate the sale of sugar mills from his office in London. His nieces, the daughters of a sister who lived in Brighton, recalled that their brother Tom had a ‘horror’ of working at Uncle Henry’s office, ‘and no wonder’. Henry reneged on a promise to help fund Tom’s passage to the Far East, where Albert Robinson was establishing an iron works (in Shanghai) and a dockyard (in Yokohama, Japan). He showed little loyalty even to his ailing and forgetful father. Unlike the kindly Albert, one of the nieces noted, ‘HOR will not trouble to do anything for the poor old man’. Henry’s sister Helena and her daughters referred to him privately as ‘the Turk’.