B007M836FY EBOK (9 page)
Authors: Kate Summerscale
Thom arrived at Ripon Lodge at half past nine in the morning of 24 March 1854, a dry, cold, gusty day. He gave a lesson to Otway, now nine, while Isabella supervised the studies of Alfred, thirteen, and Stanley, who had just turned five. Until her sons went to school, she was in charge of their education. After Otway’s class, she chatted to Thom. ‘I was really sorry for the young man,’ she wrote in her diary; ‘he was lifeless, dispirited, and lonely. Mr Robinson had brought him to Reading and now seemed [to be] deserting him. I resolved to show him that I was conscious of his situation.’ She too felt abandoned by Henry to a barren provincial life.
Over the next three months, Isabella’s compassionate
attachment to her sons’ tutor became febrile and needy. She was by turns caught in a ‘storm of passion and excitement’ and cast into a ‘languid and sorrowful’ decline, always hoping that the next encounter with him might answer her desires.
She anticipated her appointments with Thom as anxiously as if he had been her lover. ‘My thoughts went often and with somewhat of terror to my planned meeting with Mr Thom,’ she wrote in an undated entry, ‘and yet an unutterable yearning drove me onward. Tried all I could to reason myself calm, but in vain.’ To her dismay, he did not turn up to this meeting. ‘Had he possessed or returned a tithe of my real interest in him, he had not so lightly set at nought my invitation. I was crushed, humbled, as I had often been on other occasions, and really cursed the excitable nervousness and clinging emptiness of my heart.
‘If I could only live alone,’ she wrote, ‘if I could only banish all longing for companionship and participation of mental pleasures, I might get on tolerably. As it is, my life is one tissue of excitement, of suffering, of inconsistency. What shall I do?’
Isabella’s attraction to Thom had not dispelled her feelings for Edward Lane, to whom she sent a flurry of notes and letters. ‘Mr Lane still silent,’ ran an undated entry, ‘did not even reply to my query, would he like to hear from me? Felt indignant and surprised. I supposed that his personal presence (which is all that is courteous and gracious), is all that his friends can have from him. Absent, they are forgotten.’ It seemed not to have occurred to her that Edward’s silence might have been deliberate, an attempt to separate himself from an infatuated friend. Once he and Isabella were apart, his prudence reasserted itself. His letters, when they came, were necessarily cautious: he later said that Mary read every word that he and Isabella exchanged.
Isabella did, bleakly, allow that Edward might not reciprocate her feelings. ‘Looked at Mr Lane’s last two letters,’ ran one entry. ‘That written at Christmas gave me much
pleasure, it is so fresh and clever. But whenever I look at them I feel how widely different is the tame friendship he feels and professes for me and the absorbing regard I feel for him. Would it were otherwise.’ This realism did little to stop her daydreams: ‘In loneliness and in enjoyment,’ she wrote, ‘his voice, his look, come freshly back, and I long for his society. I fear time, which takes from my power of attraction, takes away nothing from passionate and uncontrollable feelings.’
In sleep, Isabella was besieged by sensual fantasies, reveries far richer and more beguiling than her dull, empty days. ‘Had confused dreams of Mr Lane in night,’ she wrote on 24 March 1854, ‘and woke with my imagination heated as though with realities. I thought of the subjects that had occupied my sleeping moments all day. I was alternately depressed and excited, and the day was desultory.’
Phrenologists believed that dreams issued from regions of the brain that broke free while reason slept. They ‘proceed from some parts of the brain being less at rest than the others,’ wrote Catherine Crowe in
The Night Side of Nature
; ‘so that, assuming phrenology to be fact, one organ is not in a state to correct the impressions of the other.’ Sometimes this correction did not take place even when the dreamer woke. In
Sleep and Dreams
(1851), John Addington Symons explained how, in such cases, a person upon waking ‘looks out on a new world projected from his own inner being. By a melancholy power, a fatal gift, of appropriating and assimilating the real objects perceived by his senses, he takes possession of them, nay, disembodies them, and fuses them into his imaginary creation.’
In one dream, Isabella found herself taking flight at night with Edward Lane and her older sons, Alfred and Otway. Mary Lane pursued and overtook them, halting Edward’s escape; Isabella, chased by Henry and a figure identified only as ‘C’, carried on running. ‘I never had any dream which took such entire possession of my soul,’ she wrote. ‘I hurried to
finish my morning’s avocations, that I might write it down in the form of a story; and all day I could not forget it or hardly realise how much of it was true and how much false. Good God! What puppets of the imagination are we?’ She was disturbed and excited by the way that her dreams leaked into her days. The night visions were fragments from an alternate world, intimations of freedom. ‘Dreaming all night of absent friends, romantic situations, and Mr Lane,’ ran another entry. ‘Oh! Why are dreams more blest than waking life?’
Florence Nightingale, in an essay written in the early 1850s, described ‘the accumulation of nervous energy’ that built up in women such as herself and ‘makes them feel … when they go to bed, as if they are going mad’. She ascribed the intensity of her dreams to her ‘passional nature’ – marriage, she thought, might ‘at least secure me from the evil of dreaming’. Isabella’s dreams, too, were driven by erotic yearnings; and they seemed, in turn, to fire her literary ambitions, waking her in the morning with the urge to set it all down on paper. Her craving for physical contact spilled over into a wish to write. ‘Strange, romantic dream at dawn till I rose,’ Isabella wrote. ‘I have often the plot and groundwork of a novel in my mind during sleep, with names, scenes, and all perfect, yet quite unconnected with aught that has occurred to myself, and I long for the pen of a ready writer to note all down at the time.’
That year, one of the novelists whom Isabella had met in Scotland seemed to cross completely into a world of fantasy. In late February, the sixty-four-year-old Catherine Crowe, who had long since separated from her husband, was found wandering naked through the streets near her home in Darnaway Street, off Moray Place. Charles Dickens reported on Mrs Crowe’s strange turn in a letter of 7 March 1854: she ‘had gone stark mad – and stark naked … She was
found t’other day in the street, clothed only in her chastity, a pocket-handkerchief and a visiting-card. She had been informed, it appeared, by the spirits, that if she went in that trim she would be invisible. She is now in a madhouse, and, I fear, hopelessly insane.’
Catherine Crowe was treated briefly at a private asylum in Highgate, just north of London, by the famous alienist – or ‘mad doctor’ – John Conolly. ‘When she came here, her delusions had passed away like a dream,’ Dr Conolly told her friend George Combe. ‘Is there not some Epidemic influence raging, affecting the brains of multitudes with vain belief, as in the Middle Ages with a propensity to perpetual dancing?’ Mrs Crowe moved on from Highgate to the hydropathic spa at Malvern, to take the water cure. In a letter published in the
Daily News
of 29 April, she denied that she was mad, but acknowledged that she had been ill in February with a ‘chronic gastric inflammation’, and during a period of unconsciousness had fancied that spirits were guiding her.
The story of Mrs Crowe’s naked ramble was confirmed by Robert Chambers, who in a letter of 4 March 1854 explained how the novelist’s friends, finding her unclothed near her house, had rescued her from her ‘terrible condition of mad exposure’. She had thought herself invisible, but had ended up stripped of all dignity and reason, her delusions laid bare to the world.
At the end of May, Henry abandoned his plans to start a school and gave John Thom notice to leave his post as tutor. Isabella was distraught. On Saturday 3 June – a fair day, with gleams of sunlight and a fresh, northerly wind – she sent Alfred to fetch Thom from his lodgings in the London Road, on the eastern edge of Reading. She had not seen the young man in a week, and was engulfed by worry when he did not come at once: ‘depressed, anxious, miserable, restless, tears in
eyes’. She dressed and ordered dinner, still hoping that he would turn up. At last he came: ‘At 12 I heard his voice with boys, but was too much agitated to see him, and ran to room as pale as a ghost, but, recovering a little, descended and saw him in my room.’ He seemed as wan and anxious as she. ‘He was looking thin, pale, worn, agitated, hopeless. I never saw any one so sadly changed in a week; his great eyes seemed like pale violets, shaded with heavy, drooping lids; his cheeks were hollow, and there was a look of intense dejection about his whole person. He said he had been ill, and in despair at so abrupt a dismissal.’ Where he was emptied out, Isabella became over-full with answering emotion, brimming with tears, suffused with heat. ‘I could hardly command myself to talk, and had a wretched headache; my cheeks flushed, tears came every second to my eyes, and my voice was choked.’
When she regained her composure, they talked ‘long and earnestly’. Isabella criticised Henry for his ‘pride and tenacity’ in sacking John Thom so suddenly. Thom confessed that he did not know what he could do next. ‘He detailed his sufferings, his wretched sufferings; drudgery in Scotland; exclusion from everything, owing to not being an University man.’ She sympathised with his plight – like her, he was under-educated, shut out from power, condemned to tedious tasks – and she tried to cheer him with ideas for the future: ‘we named plans, most if not all hopeless’.
His distress distracted her from her own: ‘We strolled for half an hour in the garden and I became better, and then dined most cheerfully; but the wretched pallor never left his face.’ They sat in her room afterwards, discussing sculpture, painting and Italy. Isabella offered Thom some coffee and whisky, which he accepted, and he became ‘animated’ enough to walk alongside her and her sons when they took a ride on their horses in the afternoon. Alfred went to Thom’s lodgings – for ‘Dickens, etc.’, she wrote; he may have been collecting some books – and then the young man accompanied Isabella and the
boys on horseback to Whiteknights Park. They sat by the lake with their books, but ‘talked too much to read’. Isabella offered Thom a present of £15, which he turned down, and she made a note of his mother’s address, promising that she would write. ‘It was nearly our last interview,’ wrote Isabella, ‘and our feelings were acute though not altogether sad. He was glad, he said, he ever came to Reading; so was I.’ They stayed at the park until it was about to close for the day, when they were asked to leave.
Isabella and the boys returned to Ripon Lodge. Henry reached home in time for tea, and was ‘civil’, Isabella said. They ate together. She wrote for the rest of the evening and went to bed at midnight.
When Thom left the Robinsons’ employ that month, Isabella urged him to visit Edward Lane’s new water-cure establishment at Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey, which lay twenty miles south of Reading. The Lanes and Lady Drysdale had moved down from Edinburgh in March to take over the spa from the well-known hydropathist Dr Thomas Smethurst. Thom accepted Isabella’s suggestion, hoping that a spell at Moor Park might lessen his dependence on tobacco, alcohol and opium. Edward, as a favour to Isabella, may have agreed to treat the impoverished tutor at a reduced rate.