Authors: Kate Summerscale
Macqueen, John Fraser,
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(London, 1858)
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The Diary Novel
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Mad Women in Romantic Writing
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The Making of Victorian Sexuality
(Oxford, 1994)
Mulock, Dinah, ‘The Water Cure’,
Dublin University Magazine
(April 1855)
—————
A Woman’s Thoughts about Women
(London, 1858)
—————
A Life for a Life
(London, 1859)
Munro, J. Forbes,
Maritime Enterprise and Empire
(Woodbridge, 2003)
Nead, Lynda,
Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain
(Oxford, 1988)
Norton, Caroline,
A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill
(London, 1855)
Overton, Bill,
The Novel of Female Adultery, 1830–1900
(Basingstoke and London, 1996)
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford, 2004)
Phillimore, John George,
The Divorce Court: its Evils and the Remedy
(London, 1859)
Poovey, Mary,
Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England
(Chicago, 1988)
Ray, Phyllis M.,
Ashford Carbonel: a Peculiar Parish; A Brief History
(Ludlow, 1998)
Richards, Graham,
Mental Machinery: The Origins and Consequences of Psychological Ideas,
Part 1
: 1600–1850
(London, 1992)
Robertson, Thomas William,
My Wife’s Diary
(London, circa 1854), an adaptation of a French play by Adolphe d’Ennery, first performed in England under the title
The Wife’s Journal
Rose, Phyllis,
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages
(New York, 1983)
Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk,
Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience
(Ithaca, 2003)
Russett, Cynthia Eagle,
Sexual Science: the Victorian Construction of Womanhood
(Harvard, 1989)
Sato, Tomoko, ‘E. W. Lane’s Hydropathic Establishment at Moor Park’,
Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies
, Vol. 10, No 1 (April 1978)
—————‘George and Charles Drysdale in Edinburgh’,
Journal of Tsuda College Tokyo
, Vol. 12 (1980)
—————‘Charles Robert Drysdale in 1848–69’,
Journal of Tsuda College
, Vol. 13 (March 1981)
—————‘George Drysdale’s Supposed Death and
The Elements of Social Science
’ (in Japanese),
Hitotsubashi Ronsu,
Vol. 78, No 2 (August 1977)
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Journal of Social History
(1988)
—————‘Erotic Stories and Public Decency’,
The Historical Journal,
Vol. 41 (2 June 1998)
Secord, James A.,
Victorian Sensation: the Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(Chicago, 2000)
Shanley, Mary Lyndon, ‘One Must Ride Behind: Married Women’s Rights and the Divorce Act of 1857’,
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, Vol. 25 (spring 1982)
Shortland, Michael, ‘Courting the Cerebellum: Early Organological and Phrenological Views of Sexuality’,
British Journal for the History of Science
, Vol. 20 (1987)
Shuttleworth, Sally,
Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology
(Cambridge, 1996)
Smethurst, Thomas,
Hydrotherapia; or, The Water Cure
(London, 1843)
Smith, Roger,
Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials
(Edinburgh, 1981)
Smith, W. Tyler,
Manual of Obstetrics
(London, 1858)
Spencer, Herbert,
Social Statics; or, The Conditions Essential to Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed
(London, 1851)
Stack, David,
Queen Victoria’s Skull: George Combe and the Mid-Victorian Mind
(London, 2007)
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Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion
(London, 1854), reprinted as
The Elements of Social Science
(the thirty-fifth edition, published in 1905, includes a memoir of George by Charles Drysdale)
Stone, Lawrence,
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(Oxford, 1990)
—————
Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England, 1660–1857
(Oxford, 1993)
Swabey DCL, M. C. Merttins, and Tristram DCL, Thomas Hutchinson, eds,
Reports of Cases Decided in the Court of Probate and in the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes: Vol. I
(London, 1860)
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A Home Historical: Moor Park, Surrey
(privately published, 1885)
Tanner, Tony,
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(Baltimore and London, 1979)
Taylor, Jenny Bourne, ‘Obscure Recesses: Locating the Victorian Unconscious’,
Writing and Victorianism
, ed. J. B. Bullen (London, 1997)
—————and Sally Shuttleworth, eds,
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(London, 1988)
Tennyson, Alfred,
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(London, 1859)
Thomas, Keith, ‘The Double Standard’,
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, Vol. 20, No 2 (April 1959)
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(London, 1860)
Tilt, E. J.,
On Diseases of Menstruation and Ovarian Inflammation
(London, 1850)
—————
The Change of Life in Health and Disease
(London, 1857)
Turner, E. S.,
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(London, 1967)
Vicinus, Martha, ed.,
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(Bloomington, 1972)
Wood, Ellen,
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(London, 1861)
Wood, Jane,
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(Oxford, 2001)
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(Aldershot and Burlington, 2004)
Young, Marianne,
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(London, 1857)
Charles Darwin’s correspondence at
www.darwinproject.ac.uk
Abbreviations used in the Notes and Bibliography CD – Charles Darwin
EWL – Edward Wickstead Lane
GC – George Combe
HOR – Henry Oliver Robinson
IHR – Isabella Hamilton Robinson
Lady D – Lady Drysdale
MD – Mary Drysdale
RC – Robert Chambers HLA – House of Lords Archives, London
NA – The National Archives, London
NLS – National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
NPG – National Portrait Gallery, London
ODNB
–
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(2004)
WG – Williams/Gray Papers, Tairawhiti Museum and Art Gallery,
Gisborne, New Zealand
BOOK I: THIS SECRET FRIEND
CHAPTER 1: HERE I MAY GAZE AND DREAM
they moved to Edinburgh that autumn
. The Robinsons arrived in the city with letters of introduction from the wife of Henry’s former colleague John Scott Russell. See letter GC to Sir James Clark, 19 Dec 1857. This and all subsequent letters to and from George Combe are held in the Combe Collection, an archive at the NLS.
A servant let Isabella in to the building … and shining shoes
. Account of Lady Drysdale’s party based on brief references in
IHR’s journal, quoted in court on 14 Jun 1858, along with information from Cecil Cunnington’s
English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century
(1952), Penelope Byrde’s
Nineteenth-Century Fashion
(1992); pictures of the exteriors of the houses at Royal Circus in the early-nineteenth century and plans and personal observation of the interiors; weather reports in the
Scotsman
of 4 Dec 1850; and description of the New Town, including its lighting, in John Stark’s
Picture of Edinburgh
(1823). Robert Chambers also refers to the party in his diary, RC papers, NLS.
an ‘uncongenial partner … selfish, proud’
. IHR’s journal, 14 Mar 1852. This and all subsequent diary entries are taken from the extracts printed in M. C. Merttins Swabey DCL and Thomas Hutchinson Tristram DCL,
Reports of Cases Decided in the Court of Probate and in the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes: Vol. I
(1860).
‘a man who had only a commercial life’
. Letter IHR to GC, 26 Feb 1858.
‘my errors of youth … as a friend, as a mistress’
. IHR’s journal, Nov 1850.
‘
Thou know’st that thou has made me …’.
Burns’s ‘A Prayer in the Prospect of Death’, circa 1781–82. Isabella slightly misquoted the original, adding a hint of compulsion to the line ‘Thou knowst that thou has formed me’ by replacing ‘formed’ with ‘made’.
She was born in Bloomsbury, London
… According to the St Pancras parish records, she was christened on 8 May 1813.
‘a large pretty Garden … Dogs & Cats & Kittens’.
Letter from Bridget Christian Walker to her grandson Thomas Walker, 3 Jan 1859. Private collection (Ruth Butler, née Walker).
The house was set in 230 acres … rented out the rest.
Information on the Walkers’ estate at Ashford Carbonel from Phyllis M. Ray’s
Ashford Carbonel
:
a Peculiar Parish; A Brief History
(1998).
Isabella and her seven siblings …
These were: John Curwen, born 1811; Harriet Elizabeth, born 1815; Caroline, born 1817; Julia, born 1818; Charles Henry, born 1822; Charles Frederick, born 1823; Christian Henry James, born 1831.
Another brother, James Burrough, was born in 1825 but died in the same year. See parish records of St Mary’s Church, Ashford Carbonel. A sister, also Isabella, had died as a baby in 1810 – her death was reported in
Jackson’s Oxford Journal
, 27 Oct 1810.
‘an independent & constant thinker’
. Letter IHR to GC, 24 Oct 1852.
The ceremony … up the hill from her house.
Parish records of St Mary’s Church, Ashford Carbonel.
a widowed Royal Navy lieutenant of forty-three
. He was born in 1794 and joined the Navy in 1815, according to the
Navy List
(1835).
‘headstrong passion’.
IHR’s journal, 29 Jan 1855.
He brought … £6,000 to the marriage
. According to the will made by his father, Richard Dansey.
This capital … about £900 a year
. Isabella’s funds yielded more than £400 a year, and the income from Edward Dansey’s larger settlement would have exceeded this.
Alfred Hamilton Dansey, in February 1841
. Alfred was born on 21 Mar 1841, according to his birth certificate, and christened in St Lawrence’s Church, Ludlow, two days later.
Ludlow ‘had balls … love affairs there’.
See Henry James’s
Castles and Abbeys
(1877).
The Danseys’ house … down to the River Teme
. David Lloyd’s
Broad Street
:
Its Houses and Residents through Eight Centuries
(2001).
Isabella … installed at the heart of Shropshire society.
In the census of May 1841, three servants were listed as resident in their house.
‘Poor Mr Dansey … this most painful of all trials’.
Letter from Bridget Walker to her brother Henry Curwen, 18 Dec 1841, Curwen archive, Cumbria Record Office and Library, Whitehaven, Cumbria.
Dansey died of ‘a diseased brain’.
According to his death certificate, he died on 11 May 1842.
a young lieutenant with the Royal Bombay Fusiliers.
Celestin Edward Dansey was born to Edward Dansey’s first wife, a Frenchwoman, in France in 1824. He married in 1851 and died in 1859.