Authors: Kate Summerscale
‘reverenced the conjugal vow’ himself.
Letter GC to Sir James Clark, 19 Dec 1857.
‘half out of her mind … such a scandal.’
Letter EWL to GC, 29 Dec 1857.
‘You will believe my solemn words …
Letter Lady D to GC, 1 Jan 1858.
Edward went to Edinburgh …
Letter EWL to GC, 31 Dec 1857.
He claimed that he had not flirted …
Letter GC to Sir James Clark, 4 Jan 1858.
I never wrote a line to Mrs R …
Letter EWL to GC, 11 Jan 1858.
She was ‘a rhapsodical & vaporing fool …
Letters EWL to GC, 5 Feb and 17 May 1858.
‘the consummation of human meanness …
Letter EWL to GC, 17 May 1858.
‘anxious to escape …
Letter EWL to GC, 29 Dec 1857.
Combe … the doctor’s honour.
Letter GC to HOR, 12 Jan 1858.
She ‘professed a great … all interest for us’.
Letters GC to Sir James Clark, 19 Dec 1857 and 4 Jan 1858.
‘an extraordinary … her own infamy’.
Letter Sir James Clark to GC, 22 Jan 1858.
‘by devoting himself … a victim.’
Letter from M. B. Sampson to GC, 9 Jan 1858.
Disingenuously … private and confidential’.
Letter HOR to GC, 4 Jan 1858.
‘Now, your offer … his defence.’
Letter GC to HOR, 18 Jan 1858.
‘you have acted towards me … malignant’ manner.
Letter EWL to GC, 5 Feb 1858.
136 ‘I speak to you … much moment’. Ibid.
‘May I … our only safety.’
Letter from Lady D to GC, 2 Mar 1858.
When the Court of Divorce …
See
Parliamentary Papers: Accounts and Papers 1859
, Vol. 22, paper 106.
The new court conducted … before 1858.
Tidswell and Littler’s
Practice and Evidence
(1860).
In February 1858, Henry served papers …
HOR’s response of 1 Feb 1862 in NA, J77/44/R4.
On 22 April
,
Isabella … Edward did the same.
Isabella’s solicitor was Francis Hart Dyke, Queen’s Proctor, a former practitioner in Doctors’ Commons; Edward’s was John Young of Desborough, Young & Desborough, in the City of London.
Edward organised for the diary …
Letter EWL to GC, 26 May 1858.
In the first five months …
The
Birmingham Daily Post
reporting on recently published Parliamentary Return, 25 Jun 1858. According to
Parliamentary Papers: Accounts and Papers
1859
, Vol. 22,302 petitions for a full dissolution of marriage were presented to the court in its first fifteen months. Of these, 244 were filed in 1858, according to
Vol. XXVI: Return of Proceedings (Session 1)
.
On 12 May, a solicitor …
See
Daily News
, 13 and 14 May 1858, and Swabey and Tristram’s
Reports
.
‘Everybody with whom …’
See
Daily News
, 28 May 1858.
Even Queen Victoria …
See Roger Fulford’s
Dereast Child: Letters Between Queen Victoria and the Princess Royal Previously Unpublished
(1964), p. 99.
CHAPTER 9: BURN THAT BOOK, AND BE HAPPY!
Lord Brougham may have been aware …
Brougham also had first-hand knowledge of mental illness – he was afflicted by spells of hypochondriacal depression and mania; his sister was insane and his wife had suffered from nervous illness ever since the birth of their second daughter in 1822. Henry Brougham had several affairs and in 1826 paid the courtesan Harriette Wilson to keep his name out of her memoirs (see Michael Lobban’s entry in
ODNB
).
He enjoyed the limelight … court.
The
Daily Telegraph
of 17 Jun 1858 noted that this was the first case heard before the new court to be reported in detail in the press.
Caroline Suckling … a distant relative of Lord Nelson.
See William R. O’Byrne’s
A Naval Biographical Dictionary
(1849).
Combe described … her mother advice’.
GC’s journal, 28 Aug 1856.
Phillimore was probably … repentant self-flagellation.
See H. C. G. Matthew’s
Gladstone
(1997), pp. 90–95.
I might, for instance … that he masturbated.
William Acton alluded to this in his
Functions and Disorder of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in the Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations
(1857) when he wrote that Rousseau ‘pries into his mental and moral character with a despicably morbid minuteness’, a ‘hideous frankness’ that perpetuated the condition it described. Quoted in Stephen Marcus’s
The Other
Victorians: a Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England
(1966), p. 24.
The edition of 1848 omitted … regret their loss’.
From a review of the third edition of the diary in
Blackwood’s Magazine
, which observed that ‘the great charm of the book is its utter freedom from disguise’. ‘Diary of Samuel Pepys’,
Blackwood’s
, Vol. 66 (1849).
Pepys had been edited … honesty.
Also edited out of the historical record – by Pepys himself – were the private confessions of Mrs Pepys, as he explained to his diary on 9 Jan 1663. On that day Elizabeth Pepys pulled from a locked trunk a copy of a piece of writing that she had tried to show her husband before. She started to read it aloud. She had written, said Pepys, about ‘the retirednesse of her life and how unpleasant it was’. He was horrified to find that it was written in English (his own diary was encrypted) and therefore ‘in danger of being met with and read by others’. ‘I was vexed at it and desired her and then commanded her to teare it – which she desired to be excused it; I forced it from her and tore it, and withal took her other bundle of papers from her and leapt out of the bed and in my shirt clapped them into the pockets of my breeches that she might not get them from me; and having got on my stockings and breeches and gown, I pulled them out one by one and tore them all before her face, though it went against my heart to do it, she crying and desiring me not to do it.’ Pepys’s panic and rage was caused by the fact that his wife had written a document that others might read, carrying her private thoughts into a public realm.
The preface quoted … ‘due to his memory’.
According to Kathryn Carter’s analysis of the
English Catalogue of Books
in this period, in ‘The Cultural Work of Diaries in Mid-Century Victorian Britain’,
Victorian Review
, Vol. 23 (1997).
The Diary of an Ennuyée …
Jameson was a good friend of Cecy Combe’s cousin Fanny Kemble, and an acquaintance of the Combes.
pastiche inspired a string of imitations …
These included Anne Manning’s
The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell: afterwards Mistress Milton
(1849);
Passages from the Diary of Margaret Arden
(1856) by Holme Lee (Harriet
Parr);
The Diary and Houres of the Ladye Adolie, a Faythfulle Childe
,
1552
(1853), ‘edited’ by Lady Charlotte Pepys; and the anonymous
Ephemeris: or Leaves from ye Journall of Marian Drayton
(1853),
The Diary of Martha Bethune Baliol, from 1753 to 1754
(1853); and the
Diary of Mistress Kate Dalrymple, 1685–1735
(1856).
Dinah Mulock … secret journal of a governess.
Mulock,
Bread upon the Waters
(1852).
two tales in the guise of journals by women.
Wilkie Collins’s ‘Leaves from Leah’s Diary’, the framing device of his collection
After Dark
; and his proto-detective tale
The Diary of Anne Rodway
.
‘Use your diary …
Advertisement from the 1820s, quoted in David Amigoni’s
Life Writing and Victorian Culture
(2006), p. 27. The essayist Isaac D’Israeli spelt out the purpose of a diary in his
Curiosities of Literature
(1793): ‘We converse with the absent by letters, and with ourselves by diaries … [they] render to a man an account of himself to himself.’
bound in cloth or in red Russian calf hide …
See advertisement for Letts diaries in David Morier Evans’s
The Commercial Crisis 1847–48
(1849).
The word ‘diarist’ …
See John Craig’s
A New Universal Etymological, Technological, and Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language
(1859).
in three volumes after her death in 1840.
See Carter’s ‘The Cultural Work of Diaries in Mid-Century Victorian Britain’.
‘Your journal all about feelings …
’ See
Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle
, Vol. II (1913), ed. James Anthony Froude.
In
Mr Nightingale’s
… fantasies.
See Charles Dickens and Mark Lemon’s
Mr Nightingale’s Diary: a Farce in One Act
(1877).
The play parodied … self-diagnostic ‘diaries of health’.
These had become popular since the publication in 1820 of Henry Matthews’s
The Diary of an Invalid; Being the Journal of a Tour in Pursuit of Health; in Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, and France, in the Years 1817, 1818, and 1819.
Darwin kept a diary of his symptoms between 1849 and 1855.
‘Burn that book, and be happy!’
Dickens and Lemon,
Mr Nightingale’s Diary.
In
My Wife’s Diary
:
a Farce in One Act,
a play by Thomas William Robertson that opened at the Royal Olympic Theatre in London in 1854, a husband gloats as he unlocks his wife’s desk with a duplicate key: ‘diaries are a devilish good invention’. See Carter’s ‘The Cultural Work of Diaries in Mid-Century Victorian Britain’.
CHAPTER 10: AN INSANE TENDERNESS
At lunchtime …
‘Divorce a Vinculo’,
Once a Week
.
malfunction in the uterus itself.
The term ‘uterine disease’ was too much for most newspapers:
The Times
(16 Jun 1858) translated it for its readers as ‘a disease peculiar to women’.
He was an Irish Quaker …
See Walter Kidd,
Joseph Kidd 1824–1918: Limerick, London, Blackheath: A Memoir
(privately printed, 1920, revised 1983). Kidd went on to become physician to William Gladstone and, from 1877, to Benjamin Disraeli, whose health rallied after he advised him to drink claret instead of port. Disraeli died holding Kidd’s hand.
Their task was to confirm …
Doctors who gave evidence about insanity in the criminal courts, observed the alienist John Charles Bucknill, ‘may usually be divided into two classes: those who know something about the prisoner and nothing about insanity, and those who know something about insanity and nothing of the prisoner’. The physicians before the Divorce Court that day fitted these categories: Kidd knew Isabella, but little about sexual mania; the others were well versed in women’s diseases, but had not examined Isabella.
The first of the specialists …
See portrait of James Henry Bennet by Ferdinand Jean de la Ferté Joubert, after a mezzotint by Édouard Louis Dubufe, 1852, NPG.
the modern school of gynaecology.
The term gynaecology was first included in a dictionary in 1849.
He was an authority …
Obituary of James Henry Bennet,
British Medical Journal
, 12 Sep 1891.
The speculum was controversial …
In
On the Pathology of Hysteria
(1853) Robert Brudenell Carter wrote that he had ‘more than once seen young unmarried women, of the middle
classes of society, reduced, by the constant use of the speculum, to the mental and moral condition of prostitutes; seeking to give themselves the same indulgence by the practice of solitary vice; and asking every medical practitioner, under whose care they fell, to institute an examination of the sexual organs’. Stephen Smith’s
Doctor in Medicine: and Other Papers on Professional Subjects
(1872) discussed the danger of women being afflicted by ‘speculum-mania’, a condition that could lead to depravity and insanity.
The second was Sir Charles Locock …
See G. T. Bettany’s entry in
ODNB
and Locock’s obituary in
British Medical Journal
, 31 Jul 1875. As a young man, Locock had fallen ‘devilishly in love’ with a pretty and well-connected young woman, but she aroused his disgust when she ‘appeared rather too forward and loving … I always look with a cursedly jealous eye upon that very
coming
disposition in young ladies.’ From a letter to a friend in 1823, quoted in Russell C. Maulitz’s ‘Metropolitan Medicine and the Man-Midwife: the Early Life and Letters of Sir Charles Locock’,
Medical History 26
(1982).