Authors: Kate Summerscale
John Curtis’s witnesses included …
According to
The Times
, 21 May 1858.
The Custody of Infants Act …
See Ann Sumner Holmes’s ‘The Double Standard in the English Divorce Laws, 1857– 1923’, in
Law and Social Inquiry
, Vol. 20 (1995).
Kindersley dismissed Fanny’s petition …
In spite of this ruling, all three Curtis children were by 1861 living with their mother in Lyme Regis in Dorset, according to the census returns; while their father was alone in a house behind the National Portrait Gallery in London. Twenty years later Mrs Curtis had moved to a house under the cliff in Dover, which she shared with her two daughters, art students aged twenty-seven and thirty-two. Fanny Curtis died in Dover in 1896, aged seventy-one.
In May 1858 … immortality of the soul.
Letter EWL to GC, 17 May 1858.
‘damage my reputation … or immoral?
Letters GC to EWL, 17 and 22 May 1858.
‘were quite alive … appear in the paper.
Letter EWL to GC, 30 Jun 1858.
183 The Examiner
… respectability and worth.
’ See
Examiner,
26 Jun 1858.
‘Mrs Robinson was crazy …
Letter from Charles Mackay to GC, 21 Jun 1858. Mackay was the author of
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
(1841), which explored the collective fantasies that could lead to anything from economic bubbles to witchhunts. ‘Men, it has been well said, think in herds,’ he wrote; ‘it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.’
All those, whom I have asked …’
Letter CD to William D. Fox, 24 Jun 1854. Darwin was undergoing personal and professional crises of his own: he had just learnt of the existence of an essay that threatened to pre-empt his own theory of natural selection; and his youngest son was extremely ill. On 1 Jul his friends presented his theory in public for the first time at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London. Darwin was unable to attend as his son, Charles Waring Darwin, had died the previous day.
‘I am profoundly sorry …’
Letter CD to William D. Fox, 27 Jun 1858.
Edward asked Combe …
Letter EWL to GC, 30 Jun 1858.
His name had been ‘dragged …
Letter EWL to Thomas Jameson Torrie, 25 Jun 1858, quoted in Benn’s
Predicaments of Love
, p. 242.
184 The Daily News
demanded …
See
Daily News
, 25 Jun 1858.
‘no man is safe … completely ruined.’
See
Observer
, 20 Jun 1858.
‘Dr Lane is an innocent …
See
The Morning Post
, 8 Jul 1858.
‘any of our associates with “curls …’
See
British Medical Journal
, 10 Jul 1858.
Both Rousseau’s epistolary novel …
Rousseau’s modern Heloise, like Isabella in the diary, seduced her lover in a ‘bosquet’, an arbour or grove. Pope’s Eloisa, like the dreaming Isabella, seemed to cleave to a succubus: ‘I hear thee, view
thee, gaze o’er all thy charms,/ And round thy phantom glue my clasping arms’.
‘The diary stands self-convicted …
See
Saturday Review
, 26 Jun 1858.
‘Never, oh never shall I forget …
Discussed in Marcus’s
The Other Victorians
, pp. 197–216.
glowing with stimulating fires.’
See
Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
(Wordsworth Editions, 2000), p. 31. See Peter Gay’s characterisation of Holywell Street pornography in
Education of the Senses: the Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud
, Vol. I (1984).
For weeks now the newspapers had been spewing …
See
Saturday Review
, 26 Jun 1858: ‘A man has neither morally nor, as we think, legally any better right to corrupt the public morals by increasing than by originating the circulation of such publications.’ In
Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century
(1871), William Forsyth – Edward Lane’s counsel – compared the ‘polluting details’ in the newspaper reports of the Divorce Court proceedings to the licentious passages in eighteenth-century novels; he upbraided editors for allowing ‘this strain of vulgarity, now driven out of fiction, to find a home in their pages’.
John George Phillimore … drop of English blood.’
See Phillimore’s
The Divorce Court: Its Evils and the Remedy
(1859), p. 71, in which he observed that Isabella had felt a ‘morbid excitement in gloating over the accumulated proofs of her own licentiousness’.
In the summer session …
Palmerston had long had a reputation as a ladies’ man. He recorded his sexual exploits in a pocket diary. See David Steele’s entry,
ODNB
.
‘The great law which regulates …
The author of both was probably the Victorian essayist and lawyer James Fitzjames Stephen, who often railed against the sentimental excesses of Dickens’s fiction. With the rumours now circulating about Dickens’s private life, Stephen’s attacks on his literary dishonesties had a sharper edge.
‘Block up one channel …
‘Old Father Thames has got a rival,’ observed ‘Old Bachelor’ in an anonymous pamphlet published in 1859 or 1860: ‘the accumulated filth that
floats on his venerable bosom is not so noxious as the poison that is daily distributed under the sanction [of] our Christian legislature. And to what do we owe this scandal? To ourselves – to our accommodating morals – to the manner in which we educate our women – to the fearful license we grant them.’ Quoted in Leckie’s
Culture and Adultery
(1999), p. 71.
‘The deathpot boils … the River Thames.’
See
Illustrated London News
, 26 Jun 1858.
George and Cecy Combe …
Letter GC to EWL, 2 Jun 1858.
During their stay …
Jane Welsh Carlyle to Thomas Carlyle, 27 Jun 1858, Carlyle letters online, carlyleletters.dukejournals.org.
Upon the adjournment … had placed upon them.
GC’s journal, 12 Jul 1858.
Bertie was ‘much improved … our civilisation.’
Letter GC to Sir James Clark, 12 Aug 1858.
If the amendment to the Divorce Act …
Letter J. B. Stewart to GC, 3 Jul 1858.
‘This is my dear Cecy’s … than the whole family.’
GC’s journal, 25 Jul–14 Aug 1858 and Charles Gibbon’s
The Life of George Combe, the Author of ‘The Constitution of Man
’ (1878).
On 15 August the undertakers …
See Stack’s
Queen Victoria’s Skull
, p. 2.
Bovill resembled a benign …
See print of Bovill in NPG, and
The Reminiscence of Sir Henry Hawkins, Baron Brampton,
Vol. II (1904), ed. Richard Harris.
In a quick monotone …
E. H. Coleridge’s
The Life and Correspondence of John Duke Coleridge: Lord Chief Justice of England
(1904).
could have made him a witness.
The issue of whether Lane could have appeared at the church court was the source of some confusion. In
The Times
, Cockburn was reported as saying he ‘could have been examined’ of his own accord, but this was a misprint: Cockburn had actually said that Lane
could
not
volunteer to testify. Lane’s solicitors pointed this out in a letter to the paper on 29 Nov.
‘nonsense in a notebook’
. See
Daily Telegraph
, 17 June 1858.
‘No one reading her journal …’
See
Daily Telegraph
, 24 Nov 1858.
Detailed reports also appeared in the newspapers …
See Nicholas Hervey’s ‘Advocacy or Folly: the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society, 1845–63’ in
Medical History
, Vol. 30 (1986). In Aug 1858, in a letter quoted in the British and American papers, Charles Dickens tried to restore his damaged reputation by describing his estranged wife Catherine as suffering from a ‘mental disorder’.
A string of troubling cases …
Accounts of cases from Swabey and Tristram’s
Reports
and from articles in
The Times
and
Daily News
.
The
Saturday Review
disapproved … Saturday Review
, 4 Dec 1858. Condonation and connivance remained bars to divorce for another century. In order to get a divorce, an ‘innocent’ husband or wife had to prove the guilt of his or her spouse; the evidence often consisted of staged assignations in hotel rooms. An Act of 1969 opened the way to consensual divorce.
A week later Queen Victoria wrote …
See
Letters of Queen Victoria: a Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence between the Years 1837 and 1861
(1907), quoted in the
Report of Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes
(1912).
In a judgment that the newspapers …
John Thom pointed out to
The Times
, 5 Mar 1859, that it had misquoted Cockburn: ‘his Lordship is made to say that Mrs Robinson wrote “to” me in the most impassioned language, saying that “passion clung to her heartstrings” &c. This is a mistake. Mrs Robinson never addressed me in such a manner. She may have written “of” me in such terms in her diary, which is a very different thing.’
The judges had found no evidence …
Forbes Winslow, in the
Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology,
Vol. 12 (1859), expressed his annoyance that Cockburn had dismissed the medical testimony out of hand, and had made
the unfounded assertion that sex maniacs always confessed their obsessions to others.
Such entries could hardly be construed …
After the publication of the anonymous erotic memoir
My Secret Life
in the 1880s, many questioned whether it was a work of fact or fantasy. Those who argued for its authenticity pointed to the frequently mundane detail in the book, and to the scenes in which the author chronicled his sexual failures and disappointments. See Marcus’s
The Other Victorians
.
Bovill asked the court … allowances granted to the witnesses.
IHR’s petition to House of Lords Select Committee on Appeals, 6 Jun 1861, HLA. For expenses see:
A Handy Book on the New Law of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes
(1860).
‘it is enough to state … discussion last summer.’
See the
Examiner
, 5 Mar 1859.
Medical Times and Gazette
… In the edition of 12 Mar 1859.
‘nothing could be clearer … altogether insane’.
Collected in John Paget’s
Paradoxes and Puzzles
(1874). Even in 1910, the barrister H. E. Fenn wrote in his memoir that the Divorce Court always looked upon a wife’s confession of adultery ‘with very grave suspicion, and does not, in any case, act upon it without full corroboration, and quite right too, otherwise who would be safe from the utterings of a hysterical woman? … There is no doubt that some women do “romance”, especially if they are of a nervous disposition, imagining things which they would not really object to happen.’
its Sittings with closed Doors.’
By 1860 women were usually excluded from the courtroom in any case, unless they were appearing as witnesses: ‘Divorce a Vinculo’,
Once a Week
.
CHAPTER 13: IN DREAMS THAT CANNOT BE LAID
‘I am glad to say … pretty regularly.’
Letter CD to William Fox, 12 Feb 1859.
Hydropathy; or, the Natural System of Medical Treatment: an Explanatory Essay.
The work was dismissed in the establishment medical journal
The Lancet
as containing ‘nothing particularly new or clever’, being merely an example of a hydropathist ‘puffing his own wares’; but greeted in the
Living Age
as ‘luminous and able … by far the clearest and most rational exposition [of the water cure] that has yet been given’. Both Combe and Darwin recommended the work to friends: it was ‘rational & scientific’, said Combe; Darwin declared it ‘very good & worth reading’. Lane sent a copy to Dickens, who, less enthusiastically, replied with a letter of thanks for ‘your little book’.
‘the Love of my youth … being in the body.’
Letter from Catherine Crowe to Helen Brown, 25 Jan 1861, Crowe Collection, F191822.
to migrate to Australia himself.
Letter from Mary Butler to CD, Dec 1862.
sailed for Queensland in 1863.
Letter from J. P. Thom to CD, 14 Jan 1863.