Authors: Kate Summerscale
Edward said that … he had to ‘struggle …
‘To the minds of a large number of persons,’ wrote Lane, ‘a water-cure establishment is a country retreat for patients, where a kind of merry inquisition goes on from morning to night, a jocular torture in sport. The patients are pictured as everlastingly gibbering in cold and wet sheets, in a state, it must be presumed, of the highest discomfort, to say the least, and only tolerable to poor deluded mortals who have well-nigh parted with their senses.’ Lane’s
Hydropathy
(1857).
She caught a train from Reading … his own pace’.
Description of the house and the grounds at Moor Park in this and the following chapter from Marianne Young’s
Aldershot, and All About It
(1857); ‘Moor Park, As It Was and Is’, an anonymous piece in the
New Monthly Magazine
, May 1855;
Black’s Guide to Surrey
(1861); Charles T. Tallent-Bateman’s
A Home Historical: Moor Park, Surrey
(1885);
Sketches of the Camp at Aldershot
(anon, 1858); Thomas Babington Macaulay’s
The History of England from the Accession of James II
(1848); Richard John King’s
A Handbook for Travellers in Surrey, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wigh
t (1865); Egerton Brydges’
The Autobiography, Times, Opinions, and Contemporaries of Sir Egerton Brydges
(1834); Dinah Mulock’s ‘The Water-Cure’ (1855) and
A Life for a Life
(1860); and personal observation.
To the right of the terrace …
Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park
includes a reference to ‘a Moor Park’, a strain of apricot cultivated by Sir William Temple.
‘She who is faithfully … romance.’
Cited in Nancy Armstrong’s
Desire and Domestic Fiction: a Political History of the Novel
(1987), p. 274.
The plot on which Henry was building …
Particulars and plan in Balmore House estate sale catalogues (1861 and 1865), Local Studies Dept, Reading Central Library.
The next month, Thom took a post …
Letter IHR to GC, 25 Sep 1854. Thom ‘finds the office an interesting and satisfactory one,’ Isabella told Combe. Information on Duleep Singh (1838–93) from Amandeep Singh Madra’s entry in
ODNB.
he ‘clings to my heartstrings … his image.’
Quoted in Cockburn’s judgment on the case, 2 Mar 1859.
In the summer of 1854 Henry checked …
HOR’s answer to IHR’s Bill of Complaint in the Court of Chancery, 17 Apr 1858, NA, C15/550/R24.
They argued – …
HOR’s response of 1 Feb 1862, Divorce Court file, NA, J77/44/R4; IHR’s reply of 4 Mar 1862; and letter IHR to GC, 26 Feb 1858.
Though he had refused the £15 …
HOR’s answer to IHR’s Bill of Complaint in the Court of Chancery, 17 Apr 1858, NA, C15/550/R24.
Albert now lived in Westminster …
Census returns of 1851,
The Daily News
of 2 Dec 1852 (on the flotation of shares in the Eastern Steam Navigation Company) and
The Morning Chronicle
of 27 Jun 1853 (on the schooner
Dolphin
’s trip to Greenland).
Albert refused to pay Henry …
See
The Daily News
, 3 Aug 1854.
CHAPTER 5: AND I KNEW THAT I WAS WATCHED
Isabella twice visited …
Divorce Court file, NA, J77/44/R4.
Elizabeth Drysdale … of the great establishment’.
In Henrietta Litchfield’s
Emma Darwin, Wife of Charles Darwin: Vol. II
(1904).
‘Dr Lane & wife …
Letter CD to J. D. Hooker, 25 Jun 1857.
He did not subscribe … can explain’.
Letter CD to W. D. Fox, 30 Apr 1857.
George Combe agreed … good nature & frankness’.
Letter GC to M. B. Sampson, 11 Jan 1858.
Combe remarked … depended on women’.
Letter GC to Sir James Clark, 19 Dec 1857.
‘Benevolence and Love … their kindness.’
Letter GC to M. B. Sampson, 11 Jan 1858.
Good company … his own ailments’.
Lane’s
Hydropathy
(1857).
‘There are few pleasures … fellow creatures.’
Letter EWL to GC, 23 Aug 1857.
‘very … agreeable, Society’.
GC’s journal, 28 Aug 1856.
‘kindness and attention’ of his hosts …
Alexander Bain,
Autobiography
(1904); it was he who recommended the establishment to Darwin.
All the residents ate together … at seven) …
EWL’s evidence, 23 Nov 1858.
‘I have been playing … splendid strokes!’
Letter CD to W. E. Darwin, 3 May 1858.
‘The physician has his patients …’
Lane’s
Hydropathy
(1857).
‘I strolled a little … had been formed.’
Letter CD to Emma Darwin, 28 Apr 1858.
‘what a play of forces … becomes extinct.’
Letter CD to J. D. Hooker, 3 Jun 1857.
‘I had such a piece … Master’s nests.’
Letter CD to J. D. Hooker, 6 May 1858. The slave-makers were
Formica sanguinea
and their slaves
Formica nigra
.
‘thare whare a grate many eggs …’
Letter from J. Burmingham to CD, 10 Sep 1858.
Darwin took … part of the body).
Letter CD to W. D. Fox, 30 Apr 1857.
For dyspeptics … directed at the pelvis
. See Rachel P. Maines’s
The Technology of Orgasm
(1999).
To take Edward’s hot air bath …
GC’s journal, 29 Aug 1856.
Another enthusiast … as an ostrich’.
See Captain J. K. Lukis’s
The Common Sense of the Water Cure
(1862). The sitz-bath – which resembled a sixteen-foot-wide washing tub – was recommended by Lane’s predecessor, Smethurst, as a treatment for diseases of the womb, as well as constipation: the patient should sit in the tub and rub his or her stomach for ten or fifteen minutes a day, he suggested. William Temple’s
Of Health and Long Life
(1701, edited by Jonathan Swift) also recommended hot bathing: it ‘opens the pores, provokes Sweat, and thereby allays Heat; supples the joints and sinews’. Friction, wrote Temple, ‘is the best way of all forced
Perspiration … I have heard of Persons, who were said to cure several Diseases by stroaking’.
When taking the water … the actual hour’.
See Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s
Confessions of a Water-Patient
(1845).
The illnesses … hypochondriasis and hysteria.
According to Lane’s predecessor at Moor Park, Thomas Smethurst, in his
Hydrotherapia
(1843).
conditions thought … body and the mind.
See Jane Wood’s
Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction
(2001).
The novelist Dinah Mulock … and an easy mind’.
See her novel
A Life for a Life
(1860). For hypochondria, including an account of Darwin’s illness, see Brian Dillon’s
Tormented Hope
:
Nine Hypochondriac Lives
(2009).
In an influential work … to conceal them’.
See Robert Brudenell Carter’s
On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria
(1853).
‘I am afraid it cannot … the monomania’.
Dinah Mulock in
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal
, Vol. 7 (1857), reprinted in
A Woman’s Thoughts About Women
(1858).
‘My object here … read much novels.’
Letter CD to Charles Lyell, 26 Apr 1858.
‘Mrs Lane agrees … written by a man!’
Letter CD to Emma Darwin, 25 Apr 1858.
‘Beneath’ the Surface
is Darwin’s error –
Below the Surface
is the correct title.
the novelist and poet Marguerite Agnes Power …
See Adrian Room’s
Dictionary of Pseudonyms: 13,000 Assumed Names and their Origins
(fifth edition, 2010).
‘I like Miss Craik … – on every subject?
Letter CD to Emma Darwin, 28 Apr 1858, and footnote.
‘never was anyone more genial … and animated.’
Letter of 1882, EWL to Dr B. W. Richardson, read out at a lecture in St George’s Hall, Langham Place, 22 Oct 1882.
A water-cure spa …
A census return that records the guests at Lane’s hydropathic spa (from 1861, by which time it had relocated to Richmond) lists eight unmarried men and four unmarried women aged between twenty and forty-one, as well as three adolescent girls (two of them unaccompanied) and a married couple with two daughters. About twelve servants, including bath attendants, catered to them and the Lane family.
Occasionally … ‘disgusted’ her.
Cited in letter from GC to EWL, 23 Feb 1858.
In 1855, Miss Mulock published …
Dinah Mulock’s ‘The Water-Cure’ appeared in the
Dublin University Magazine
, Apr 1855, and was collected in
Nothing New
:
Tales
(1857).
A lawyer from Lincoln’s … I call it divine.’
See ‘Moor Park, As It Was and Is’,
New Monthly Magazine
, May 1855.
In this cave … Temple’s housekeeper.
Victorian commentators were disapproving of Swift’s libertinism and his ruthless treatment of Esther and the other women he wooed: see, for instance, William Howitt’s
Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets
(1857), which accused him of a tendency to ‘pluck and torture’ the hearts of women.
‘The meadows interlaced … taller woods.’
Swift’s ‘A Description of Mother Ludwell’s Cave’ (1692–93), reproduced in
Collected Poems by Jonathan Swift
(1958), ed. Joseph Horrell.
Goethe’s most famous novel …
The urgent intimacy with which Isabella spoke to her diary – the exclamations and apostrophes – was similar in style to that of the introspective, despairing, love-struck Werther: ‘My only consolation is: She may have turned to look back at me! Perhaps! Good night! Oh, what a child am I!’,
The Sorrows of Young Werther
(1787).
‘we spoke of his early age, thirty-one …
Isabella did not mention that it was Edward’s birthday, although the reference to his age may have been prompted by that fact. If he was thirty-one, he was born in 1823; but he was later to argue that his date of birth was 10 Oct 1822, which would have made him twenty-one in Feb 1844, old enough to be assigned part of his father’s estate. This became crucial in 1864, when the estate was divided upon Elisha Lane’s death, and the children of his second wife (whom he had married in Montreal in 1848) tried to claim it all as their own – see
The Lower Canada Jurist
, Vol. VIII (1864).
The late-eighteenth-century guide … coach cushions altogether. Harris’s List
was published in 1788; quoted in Stone’s
Road to Divorce
(1990), p. 110.
CHAPTER 6: THE FUTURE HORRIBLE
At Boulogne harbour …
For Boulogne, see Charles Dickens, ‘Our French Watering-place’,
Household Words
, 4 Nov 1854; A. C. G. Jobert’s
The French-Pronouncing HandBook for Tourists and Travellers
(1853); and John Murray’s
HandBook for Travellers in France
(1854).
‘We have established ourselves … town.’
Letter IHR to GC, 17 Nov 1854.
Now they joined …
The school was unusual in refraining from the use of corporal punishment, according to Henry Melville Merridew’s
Visitor’s Guide to Boulogne
(1864).
More than 7,000 British …
Murray’s
Handbook for Travellers in France
(1854).
‘It is a bright, airy, pleasant … bonnes in snow-white caps.’
Dickens’s ‘Our French Watering-place’.
That November …
See
The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Slingsby Duncombe
:
late MP for Finsbury,
Vol.
2
(1868).
When Henry visited Boulogne …
Letter IHR to GC, 28 Feb 1855.
‘unhappy turn of mind … delusions’.
Quoted in Cockburn’s judgment, 2 Mar 1859.
she had ‘nothing bright … information, or reproof.’
Letter IHR to GC, 17 Nov 1854.
Combe wrote back … act out our love in good deeds.’
Letter GC to IHR, 7 Dec 1854.
‘Nature alone cures … act upon him.’
Florence Nightingale,
Notes on Nursing
(1860).
On 10 October … in early November.
In spite of her new vocation, Nightingale continued to be plagued by ill health and nervous conditions, for which she sought help at the hydropathic clinic at Malvern in 1857 and 1858. She was mildly scornful about hydropathy – ‘a highly popular amusement … amongst athletic invalids who have felt the tedium vitae and those indefinite diseases which a large income and unbounded leisure are so well calculated to produce’ – but she admitted that her spell at Malvern did her good. See Bostridge’s
Florence Nightingale
, p. 125.