Authors: Kate Summerscale
‘like a river of blood’.
See Grace Greenwood’s
Haps and Mishaps of a Tour of Europe
(1853).
Isabella and the children … three times a week.
Letters IHR to GC, 24 Oct and 11 Dec 1852.
Although her eldest … some amount of obstinacy’.
Letters IHR to GC, 16 Aug and 24 Oct 1852.
Henry planned to establish … theology.
Letter HOR to GC, 25 Dec 1853.
‘cold as a garret … every corner of her heart’.
Quotes from
Madame Bovary
are taken from the first English translation, published in 1886. The translator – Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor – retained the original French word
ennui
, for which there was no direct equivalent in English. Colloquially, though, a sufferer from ennui could be described as plagued by visits from ‘the blue devils’, or ‘the blues’. The narrator of Anna Brownell Jameson’s popular novel
The Diary of an Ennuyée
(1826) gives her journal the alternative title ‘the Diary of a Blue Devil’. This usage is the origin of the expressions ‘to have the blues’ and ‘to feel blue’. See ‘The Blues’, in
Eliza Cook’s Journal
of 1 Nov 1851 and Eric Partridge’s
A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English,
ed Paul Beale (eighth edition, 1984).
Her father, Charles …
Charles Walker, who was born in 1775, had been called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1801, according to James Whishaw’s
A Synopsis of the Members of the English Bar
(1835). Bridget was born at Workington Hall in 1788.
Charles had inherited some land …
Charles’s father, Thomas,
had died in London in 1802, leaving most of his land in west Yorkshire and Shropshire to his eldest son, Thomas, along with two houses in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (probate granted 16 Feb 1802). But in 1828 the younger Thomas died a bachelor, and left his property to Charles, substantially increasing his holdings (probate granted 28 Feb 1828).
The Curwens were an ancient …
For Curwen and Christian family history, see John F. Curwen’s
A History of the Ancient House of Curwen
(1928); Edward Hughes’s
North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century
(1952); A. W. Moore’s
Manx Worthies
(1901). Information about Bridget’s birth and Charles and Bridget’s first meeting from letter of 1911 by their youngest son, Christian Henry James Walker (private collection, Ruth Walker). In the
Cumberland News
of 4 Aug 2000, Denis Periam argues that Wilkie Collins used Ewanrigg as the model for Limmeridge Hall, the home of the heroines of
The Woman in White
(1860). Collins and Dickens toured Cumberland in 1857.
Bridget’s mother, Isabella …
Romney’s portrait of Isabella Curwen, NPG.
To show his fellow feeling …
John Christian Curwen introduced the Suffolk Horse and the Lothian plough to his district, established a herd of Shorthorn cattle and imported Merino sheep to cross with a native breed. See J. V. Beckett’s entry in
ODNB
.
Even her mother … was closed to her.
In 1841, when Isabella and most of her siblings had moved out, Ashford Court still housed three male and six female staff, according to the census returns.
‘many leisure hours … most women’.
Letter IHR to GC, 24 Oct 1852.
‘is a pleasant place … to make many agreeable ones.’
Ibid.
‘You do not know … if I dared to hint at them.’
Letter IHR to GC, 28 Feb 1854.
‘all is dark … once I quit this world’.
Ibid. In Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, composed in about 1851 though not published until 1867, the doubting poet finds himself ‘alone as on a darkling plain’.
Isabella’s loss of faith … the rest of her life’.
Letter EWL to GC, 17 May 1858.
She said she knew … for avoiding blame’.
Letter IHR to GC, 16 Aug and 24 Oct 1852.
Combe firmly discouraged … need not lead to atheism.
The Edinburgh philosopher Sir William Hamilton warned in the 1820s: ‘Phrenology is implicit atheism … Phrenology – Physical Necessity – Materialism – Atheism – are … the precipitous steps of a logical transition.’ ‘Correspondence between Sir William Hamilton and Mr Combe’ in
The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany,
Vol. 5 (1829).
‘does away with the usually received … from animal existence?’
Letter IHR to GC, 11 Dec 1852.
At the very least … & a degree of charity.’
Letter IHR to GC, 10 Feb 1853.
‘There are those living … as they may think fit.’
Letter IHR to GC, 24 Oct 1852.
‘I arrive at the conclusion … to leave Edinburgh.’
Letter GC to Robert Tait, 16 Apr 1853.
‘I can safely promise … inclination for abstract meditations.’
Letters IHR to GC, 10 Feb and 27 May 1853. Having read the draft treatise, Isabella wrote a letter of congratulation to Combe, but she admitted that she was disappointed to find that he had stopped short of atheism. ‘I,’ she explained to him, ‘am obliged to … live without the cheering belief that a great and Beneficent Ruler exists whose mind is in relation with ours. I could not reply with the perfect candor that is natural to me, unless I made this remark in speaking of your book, – & yet, I fear, it is my own fault that I do not see with you on this point.’ Letter IHR to GC, 28 Feb 1854. Another of his trusted early readers, by contrast, was so horrified by the manuscript’s apparent attack on immortality that he begged Combe to suppress it; Combe none the less incorporated the essay in his
The Relation between Science and Religion
(1857).
‘some lines of mine about …’
. Letter IHR to GC, 26 Feb 1858.
‘A Woman and Her Master’ …
See
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal
, Vol. 19 (1853).
a work of ‘deep & thoughtful philosophy’.
Letter IHR to GC, 11 Dec 1852, referring to Herbert Spencer’s
Social Statics; or,
The Conditions Essential to Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed
(1851).
‘the degradation … atmosphere of command’.
See first edition of
Social Statics
, published in 1851. That year Marian Evans met and fell in love with Herbert Spencer. He rejected her, and by the summer of 1852, Evans felt herself doomed to spinsterhood: ‘You know how sad one feels when a great procession has swept by one,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘and the last notes of its music have died away, leaving one alone with the fields and the sky.’ Spencer subsequently repudiated his proto-feminist ideas, and erased them almost completely from the edition of
Social Statics
published in 1856. See Nancy Paxton’s
George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender
(1991).
He had recently been granted a patent …
Patent sealed on 8 Apr 1853, and described in
Newton’s London Journal of Arts & Sciences
in 1854.
was dark where his brothers were fair …
GC’s journal, 30 Aug 1856. Combe examined the heads of the Lane boys, noting that Arthur had large organs of Benevolence, Adhesiveness, Conscientiousness and Wonder; William, who his parents thought ‘soft and dull’, had large Philoprogenitiveness and Adhesiveness; while Sydney had ‘large, enormous Wonder’ and a small faculty of Conscientiousness: ‘He will have a difficulty in keeping to truth’, Combe concluded.
from which Edward sent several letters to Isabella.
EWL’s testimony to Divorce Court, 23 Nov 1858.
its ‘shady lanes’ and ‘murmuring river’. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal
, 3 Apr 1851 (EWL identified as author in authors’ ledger, RC papers, NLS).
On their return … Robinsons for a day and a night.
EWL’s testimony to Divorce Court, 23 Nov 1858.
‘cheating November of its gloom … likes very much.’
Letter HOR to GC, 25 Dec 1853.
her first husband’s brother.
George Dansey and his wife had lived a couple of houses down the hill from Edward and Isabella in Ludlow in 1841, according to the census returns.
who lived with his family in Tasmania.
John Walker was accountant to a bank in Derwent, where he was trying to establish himself as a teacher.
It was, Mrs Ellis wrote … own houses’.
Sarah Ellis’s husband was the educational reformer William Ellis, a friend of Combe. The Combes and the Ellises toured south Wales together in the summer of 1852, despite the fact that disquieting rumours about Ellis had reached Combe in Edinburgh: he was said to be ‘viciously licentious in his conduct in respect to women’, Combe wrote to a friend in 1850; ‘he had even communicated disease to his wife’. Letter GC to M. B. Sampson, Jul 1850.
CHAPTER 4: MY IMAGINATION HEATED AS THOUGH WITH REALITIES
In 1854 a new man …
John Thom had been previously employed as a teacher in Germany and Edinburgh. Letter IHR to GC, 28 Feb 1854.
His letters … Isabella exchanged.
In a conversation reported in a letter from GC to Sir James Clark, 4 Jan 1858.
They ‘proceed from … impressions of the other.’
Catherine Crowe,
The Night Side of Nature
(1848), p. 42. ‘One faculty, or more than one, bursts asunder the bonds which enthralled it,’ wrote Robert Macnish in
The Philosophy of Sleep
(1830), ‘while its fellows continue chained in sleep … and thereby indulges in the maddest and most extravagant thoughts.’
‘Dreaming all night … and Mr Lane.’
The entries refer to Edward as ‘Mr Lane’ rather than ‘Dr Lane’, which should suggest that they were written before he qualified in the summer of 1853; but Isabella seems not to have started to call him ‘Dr’ until seeing him
in situ
at his water-cure spa in the summer of 1854.
‘the accumulation … going mad’.
From ‘Cassandra’, written in 1852 but not published during its author’s lifetime; quoted in Mark Bostridge’s
Florence Nightingale
(2008), p. 372.
‘passional nature … evil of dreaming’.
In a note made on 24 Dec 1850, quoted in Bostridge’s
Florence Nightingale
, p. 127.
The story of Mrs Crowe’s … to the world.
Catherine Crowe Collection, Kent University, F191882;
The Letters of Charles Dickens
and RC papers, NLS. The episode is investigated in ‘Naked as nature intended? Catherine Crowe in Edinburgh, Feb 1854’, a blog posted by Mike Dash on
www.aforteaninthearchives.wordpress.com
on 29 Sep 2010. The Catherine Crowe Collection also contains a letter about the episode from Marian Evans to GC, which expresses sympathy for Mrs Crowe and her great friends, the Combes.
At the end of May, Henry abandoned …
Isabella said that the school failed to win support because of local opposition to social and religious liberalism; and also because Henry was too busy in London. Letter IHR to GC, 25 Sep 1854.
When Thom left the Robinsons’ …
By the mid-nineteenth century, the neighbourhood’s cachet had declined a little, chiefly because of the ugly new military camp at Aldershot, and it had become affordable to entrepreneurs such as Smethurst and Lane. Smethurst set up his establishment at Moor Park in 1851, when he took out advertisements in
The Lancet
and
The Critic
. He was later to be tried for bigamy and murder.
Thom accepted Isabella’s suggestion …
Letter from Mary Butler to CD, Dec 1862. For this and subsequent letters to and from Charles Darwin, see Darwin’s correspondence database online at
www.darwinproject.ac.uk
.
The consultation fee …
Information from ‘Moor Park Hydropathic Establishment [a Prospectus]’ (1856) Combe Collection, NLS; and letter CD to William Fox, 10 Apr 1859.
and Atty continued to be prone …
The six-year-old boy was ‘in a precarious state’, in the autumn of 1854, Isabella told GC in a letter of 25 Sep 1854.
The theory was that immersion …
See, for example, E. S. Turner’s
Taking the Cure
(1967); J. Bradley’s
Taking the Watercure
(1997); and Alastair Durie’s essay in
Repositioning Victorian Sciences
(2006).
Edward Lane said that many …
Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s
Confessions of a Water Patient
(1846) noted that hydropathy spas were frequented by those who lived ‘hard and high, wine-drinkers, spirit-bibbers’.
his ‘everlasting species-Book’ …
Letter CD to Charles Lyell, 13 Apr 1857.
‘I have seen many cases … distressingly great.’
Letter of 1882 from EWL to Dr B. W. Richardson, read out at a lecture in St George’s Hall, Langham Place, 22 Oct 1882. Information on Darwin at Moor Park from Ralph Colp’s
Darwin’s Illness
(2008) and from Darwin’s correspondence.