B007M836FY EBOK (7 page)
Authors: Kate Summerscale
Edward and Isabella continued alone. They stopped to sit silently side by side in the shelter of a steep bank: ‘F, the spaniel, was on my lap, and Mr L next me. It was the very scene I had often longed for and pictured to myself; but now it was realised.’ They remained there for an hour, watching a group of bare-legged children play nearby. Eventually they rose and turned back towards the house, taking a path through a plantation of trees. ‘I walked on with Mr L, but without his
arm,’ wrote Isabella, ‘and a slight bitterness seemed to come over his spirit.’ They paused near the house: ‘I sat to rest in our own meadow,’ she wrote, ‘and he leaned up against the rails opposite me.’
She and Edward were interrupted by the approach of Mary Lane and the children, with whom they returned to the house for early evening tea. Isabella prepared and poured the tea herself, and ‘enjoyed it’, she noted in her diary. Perhaps this was a task that in Edinburgh had been carried out by a servant; the customs of the country were more informal, with the hosts often carving and pouring for their guests. ‘Mr L sat by me at tea,’ wrote Isabella, ‘and we talked for an hour on politics, hereditary descent, funds, paupers, emigration, &c.’ The week’s newspapers had been busy with debate about whether British parishes should finance the emigration of paupers to Australia, where there had been a shortage of labour since the discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851.
‘Afterwards, at nine o’clock, dismissing all boys to bed, as it was Sunday, we sat out in the garden,’ wrote Isabella. ‘Mrs L had cold, and went in at ten.’ While Mary warmed herself at the fire inside, Isabella and Edward, now alone, ‘talked of Lord Byron, of riding, of courage, of balloons, and of coolness’. Their discussion of balloons may have been prompted by the many advertisements in the Sunday papers for hot-air-balloon launches at London hippodromes and pleasure gardens on the Whit bank holiday. Edward ‘smoked and chatted’, wrote Isabella, ‘and I laughed much’.
As night fell, their banter gave way to a more serious conversation. They discussed ‘man’s spirit, his life, the grave, immortality, God, the universe, man’s reason, and his short fleeting nature’. Isabella told Edward that she had lost her faith, and was alone among her friends in not believing in ‘all the illusions of the Christian’s creed’. She claimed to be at peace with her new understanding: ‘I expressed my gradually acquired calmness of mind,’ she wrote. ‘I said that the
grandeur of truth made up to me for relinquished hopes.’ Edward talked to her about a Greek friend who had just died, a fellow medical student. ‘He spoke sadly,’ wrote Isabella, with ‘deep feeling’. Edward confided in her his own religious doubts: ‘he longed to pray, longed to believe’.
Together they watched the rise of the moon and listened to the reedy rasp of the landrail. Edward ‘seemed entranced by the beauty of the scene’, as if the darkening garden were bewitching him, and he told Isabella that he wished to be out all night. The moment inspired her to quote in her journal from Henry Longfellow’s epic poem
Evangeline
, first published in 1847 and a bestseller by the early 1850s. As the lovelorn heroine steps outside, ‘The calm and the magical moonlight/ Seemed to inundate her soul with indefinable longings.’
At last Isabella thought to comfort Mary Lane. ‘Soon after eleven I felt that Mrs L would think us unkind to leave her,’ she wrote, ‘and we went to the fire. She was still low, and I tried to cheer her.’
In the diary, Isabella replayed the events of the day in her mind’s eye, as an observer, the better to enjoy the sensations of being envied and wanted. She had spent so long on the outside of the Lanes’ marriage, gazing jealously in, that to be the cause of Mary’s discomfort was a secret delight to her now. The journal magically remade the scenes that had passed, no longer dissecting her longings but instead allowing them to infuse her recollections. Being subject to no supervision, tested against no external source, checked by no other perspective, the diary could conjure up a wished-for world, in which memories were coloured with desire. This was an entry to be re-read, for pleasure.
In the late summer of 1852, Henry found his family a villa just outside Reading, Berkshire, from which he could travel
the forty miles to London by train in little more than an hour. Reading lay in a fertile valley formed by the River Thames; Berkshire’s plentiful produce – corn, beans, cherries, onions, brick-earth, pigs, wool, broomsticks and butter – was carried from the town to London by canal and railroad. An American author who visited Reading that summer remarked on the wild poppies lining the railway track – through the window of a speeding train the scarlet flowers rushed by ‘like a river of blood’.
Isabella and the children moved in to Ripon Lodge, a detached house on the hill that rose out of Reading to the west, and she began to take delivery of the furniture that had until then been stored in London. Henry went up to the capital three times a week.
The boys were not enrolled at a school, and Isabella wrote to Combe for his advice on their education. Although her eldest, Alfred, was ‘good-humored & sociable’, she told him, the seven-year-old Otway was ‘of a less amiable & more peculiar disposition’. Like his little brother, the three-year-old Stanley, Doatie had ‘a hasty temper, & some amount of obstinacy’. Henry planned to establish a school for middle-class boys in Berkshire, and to send his boys there in due course; his model was the ‘secular school’ that Combe had founded in Edinburgh, which taught science instead of theology. But Isabella was not sure that a day school would suit her middle son. She wondered whether he might need the discipline of the boarding system.
Her anxieties about her younger children echoed her worries about her own passion and dissatisfaction. Though the family had moved to Edinburgh so that Isabella could keep the boys by her side, she had now started to think of the family home as a place that they might need to escape.
To an extent, Isabella blamed Henry for her sons’ unhappiness. ‘The children are so dull and dejected when he is with them,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘nothing goes on but
gloom, sullenness, silence, or fault-finding.’ On 26 August, Henry was irritated when he came home from London to find that his wife was unpacking and the nursemaid, Eliza, was out on an errand: ‘Henry came at 12; much disconcerted to find us out of sorts. E— out; in hurry for dinner. He was cross about potatoes.’ At half past three he went on his own to Pangbourne, a village five miles from Reading, to search for a site on which to build a new house. Isabella took Stanley in a chaise to Whiteknights, the grounds of a former country house three miles in the opposite direction: ‘a fine park, not now used; the house not inhabited; parties taking tea in it and walking about’. The scene inspired in her the wish ‘to possess a quiet spot of earth, and get free from the petty worry and vexation of life’.
She came back in slightly brighter spirits, but Henry spoiled her mood. ‘Henry was cross at night, and we had high words after tea. I was thoroughly vexed with the idea of living with him. Very unhappy; miserable day.’ Her world had dwindled. There were no more outings with Edward or dinners with novelists and philosophers; just domestic duties, the company of her children, and sour Henry.
In France that summer, Gustave Flaubert completed his draft of the first part of
Madame Bovary
, a work he had started a year earlier. Like Isabella Robinson, the heroine of his novel was succumbing to loneliness and languor: her life was ‘cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north’, wrote Flaubert: ‘ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart’.
Isabella’s discontent stemmed in part from the disparity between her life and the lives of her forebears, especially on her mother’s side of the family. Her father, Charles, had met Bridget Curwen at a dinner at her parents’ home in Cumberland in about 1808, when he was practising as a
barrister on the Northern Circuit. Charles had inherited some land in West Yorkshire, but Bridget’s fortune was greater: on their marriage in 1809, £9,500 was settled on her and £5,000 on him.
The Curwens were an ancient and powerful dynasty, with two seats near the Cumbrian coast – Workington Hall and Ewanrigg Hall. Bridget’s mother, Isabella, was portrayed by the painter George Romney in the late-eighteenth century as a rosy-lipped, dark-haired beauty. The sole heir to her father’s coal-mining fortune, she had eloped with her cousin John Christian when she turned seventeen, reputedly breaking the heart of Fletcher Christian, another cousin, who soon afterwards led the mutiny against Captain Bligh on the
Bounty
. When John Christian married Isabella Curwen, he adopted her surname, gave her an island on Lake Windermere (named Belle Isle or Bella’s Isle in her honour), and presented her with a £1,000 diamond ring. John Christian Curwen, as he now was, became a Whig MP for Carlisle and later Cumberland, and earned renown for his social and agricultural reforms. To show his fellow feeling for his countrymen, he once turned up at the House of Commons in the garb of a Cumbrian peasant, a loaf under one arm and a cheese under the other. His wife shared his political convictions, and took a keen interest in the welfare of the people on their land.
Isabella Robinson yearned for such a role. Even her mother had played an active part in her husband’s affairs, helping to run his estates and further his connections. Isabella, though, had no more than a house with three or four servants to supervise, and Henry’s world of manufacture and commerce was closed to her. He vanished on trains to his factories and iron yards and offices in the City, on steamships to the distant colonies with which he traded.
In Reading, Isabella told George Combe, she had ‘many leisure hours’; ‘far more leisure than falls to the lot of most women’. Most ladies of her class made and received social
calls in the afternoon, but she had no friends in the neighbourhood. Berkshire, she wrote, ‘is a pleasant place as far as climate & beauty are concerned, but we have no acquaintance here; nor do I think from the narrow-minded character of the inhabitants, & the way they are mainly led by the clergy that we are very likely to make many agreeable ones.
‘You do not know how often I wish I could see & converse with you,’ she wrote to Combe, ‘or how much I miss the intelligence & earnestness of the little circle I used to meet either in your house, or in those of your friends.
Here
I feel isolated, as one whose views would be condemned almost unheard, if I dared to hint at them.’
She confided to her diary, as she did not to Combe, how much she missed Edward Lane. ‘Up late, being stiff and weary,’ began her entry of 31 August 1852. ‘Boys came to see me and then all went to river; but a thunderstorm drove them in, and the morning was spent in a desultory manner. Wrote to mother.’ Isabella received a letter from Mary Lane that day, a friendly note that passed on the news that Lady Drysdale was ill and that Edward had been to the hydropathic spa at Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, to recover from an injury to his foot. Isabella was disappointed to hear from Mary rather than Edward. ‘Ah, thought I, though he is not busy, and cannot even walk now, I am not in all his thoughts.’ She had sent him several notes and a gift of studs with which to fasten his shirts, but he had not responded. ‘Not one line either of thanks for the studs or of reply to my many notes could he write, though not an hour elapsed but my thoughts did not anxiously and fondly go towards him.’ She tried to feel angry with Edward but could summon up only pity – for him and for herself. ‘Tears came into my eyes as I thought of him lame and alone, and not the deep bitterness of finding myself so entirely neglected could fortify my heart with pride enough to despise him and forget in my turn. Wayward and
deplorable disposition. All that day and several following did the humbling, sorrowful truth of his utter forgetfulness, even of my friendship, follow me, and fill my heart with unspeakable sadness.’
In her lowest moods, Isabella feared that none of her feelings mattered in any case, that her inner life was a matter of supreme indifference. She had come to believe that there was no God and no immortal soul. She was convinced that nothing would succeed death: ‘all is dark to me,’ she wrote, ‘when once I quit this world’. Isabella’s loss of faith, said Edward Lane later, ‘seems to have given her whole nature such a shock as to have cast a lurid cloud of depression and
malaise
over the rest of her life’. While other discontented beings could take comfort in the idea that this life was merely a preparation for the next, a trial to be endured and to be rewarded with future bliss, Isabella was tortured by the thought that she had only this one, unhappy existence. She sank into a deep and pervasive gloom, her spiritual desolation meshing with her boredom, her heartache and her melancholy. Her religious and romantic disillusions became one.
In an attempt to turn her misery to some account, Isabella suggested to Combe that she publish her views about the myth of immortality. The false expectation of a future life, she argued, fostered spiritual pride and stymied scientific progress; those who believed in Heaven failed to attend to and improve the world in which they lived. She said she knew that Combe had carefully avoided expressing such dangerous opinions in his own work, but since she had no public reputation to protect she had ‘
no motive
for avoiding blame’.
