Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: Tracing the Evolution of Women’s Rights in a Victorian Lady’s Journals

How the most private of frontiers became a public front for the gender dialogue.

If one were to purchase a leather-bound diary in mid-nineteenth-century England, the pages might have carried these instructions: “Use your diary with the utmost familiarity and confidence…conceal nothing from its pages nor suffer any other eye than your own to scan them.” The diary in its most secret form, locked with a key or hidden away under the bed, was a distinct product of the nineteenth century. The Romantics and their poetry had turned a nation inwards, and its people were ready to examine their desires in a private narrative of their own lives. Even Queen Victoria herself kept a journal, dotted with drawings from court.

The Victorians had a passion for the lives of others — biographies, memoirs, journals, and travel narratives — but the diary held tantalizing secrets of the heart, and none were so tantalizing as the writings of Isabella Robinson, whose private thoughts were publicly laid out in a London divorce court in 1858. Author Kate Summerscale explains in Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady (public library):

Of all the written life stories that fascinated the Victorians, the diary was the most subjective and raw.

Queen Victoria kept a very rigorous diary for most of her life. Here the young queen describes her wedding day and draws a picture of her headdress.

The diary of forty-one year old Isabella Robinson — a twice-married housewife on trial for adultery with a young doctor and family friend ten years her junior — revealed a woman who felt passionately while living a life of constrained dullness, monotony, and normalcy. In France, Gustave Flaubert put a name to this temperament — Madame Bovary had been published in 1856 but was considered too scandalous to be translated.

Augustus Leopold Egg, 'Past and Present,' 1858. A husband discovers his wife's adultery in a letter. This painting was part of a moralizing triptych exhibited at the Royal Academy just weeks before the Robinson trial.

The French had sanctioned divorce due to incompatibility in 1792, and one out of every eight marriages in the next ten years ended in divorce — the Revolution itself being a particularly violent form of divorce of a people from their king. But in nineteenth-century England, an Act of Parliament was required to end a marriage, and only 325 divorces had been granted since 1670, a rate of approximately two a year. In 1857, the Matrimonial Causes Act made divorce much easier to obtain — for the husband. A man had to prove adultery, a woman both cruelty and adultery. (A woman’s adultery was considered more serious because she could produce a bastard heir.)

A Victorian divorce court, c. 1870. Isabella Robinson was not allowed to appear as a witness for the defense. Her only voice in court was her diary.

In her diary, Isabella would fall deeply in love with different family friends — and once, her children’s tutor — eager to talk, read, and share ideas, yet always stymied by physical desire. She was at times anxious, frustrated, and depressed with her multitude of feeling. She wrote to her doctor:

[Women like me] exist quietly who bring up families…to tread in the purposeless steps of those who went before them — what motive — what hope may be found strong enough to enable them to bear up against trials, separations, old age, and death itself?

Her doctor cautioned that she should think less about herself and more about others:

Intellect alone does not fill the vacuum of human desire.

The world 'diarist' was first used in 1818. Published diaries doubled in the 1820s, and by the 1850s blank diaries were sold in the thousands.

In her trial, the prosecution used this flightiness as a condemnation:

[This diary is] the product of extravagance, of excitement, and of irritability, bordering on, if not actually in, the domain of madness. There never was a document which bore on the face of it marks of so flighty, extravagant, excitable, romantic, irritable foolish and disordered a mind as this diary of Mrs. Robinson.

George Elgar Hicks, 'Woman's Mission: Companion of Manhood' 1863. (Tate Britain)

Isabella won her case, but the winning was bittersweet. Now friendless, she retained her allowance from her husband and access to her children — all because she remained married. The public judgement placed on her private passions was a first rough step towards an understanding of women who wouldn’t conform socially or sexually, making Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace a fascinating chronicle of an ordinary woman’s life exposed in extraordinary circumstances.

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Chasing Venus: When the World Came Together to Measure the Heavens

What Ben Franklin, Sweden, and a lucky break in the clouds have to do with the distance to the Sun.

In 1716, sixty-year old Sir Edmund Halley called on astronomers all over the world to leave their cozy observatories, travel to the edges of the known world, set up their telescopes, and turn their eyes toward the sunrise on the morning of June 6th, 1761, when the first Transit of Venus of the scientific age would march across the face of the sun.

In the eighteenth century, the solar system had a shape but not a size. By timing the entrance and the exit of Venus across the sun from latitudes all over the world, Halley explained, astronomers could roughly calculate the distance between the Earth and the Sun — a “celestial yardstick” for measuring the universe, as Andrea Wulf calls it in her excellent book Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens.

A photograph from the 1882 Transit of Venus

It was the first worldwide scientific collaboration of its kind, a mathematical olympiad six hours in duration, with years of planning and seconds that counted. Today, more than 250 years after this grand experiment that required astronomers all over the world to gather together and look to the sky at the exact same moment, we will experience the last transit of our lifetime (unless modern medicine makes us survive to December 2117, when the next one will take place).

To avoid looking directly at the sun, a reflecting telescope could project the image onto a wall. (Wellcome Library, London)

Astronomers had two chances to catch this rare event, one in 1761 and one eight years later, in 1769. (The first viewing had taken place in 1639, observed by two astronomers in the English countryside.) The first outing was a gamble that the venture could work, the second was a high-stakes race to get it right. Mild-mannered scientists would have to become swashbuckling adventurers.

Crabtree watching the Transit of Venus, A.D. 1639 by Ford Madox Brown. William Crabtree was one of the first to ever view the transit, along with his friend Jeremiah Horrocks.

In 1761, the best viewing locations for the transit were also the most remote. The best times to capture data, explained Halley, were the shortest and longest durations and required locations in the extreme north and south, and unified efforts of the British, French, Russian, and Swedish governments, despite the fact that the British and French were at war — an unlikely alliance as heartening as the Christmas Truce of 1914.

A 1793 cartoon with a man and a woman viewing the transit (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Sun-Earth Day)

Months before the 1761 transit, a fleet of international astronomers was dispatched to South Africa, India, Siberia, Mauritius, eastern Finland, Newfoundland, and the remote island of St. Helena with instructions to set up their massive telescopes in some of the most inhospitable places on Earth. They required an impossible union of plentiful government funding, smooth sailing, open roads, understanding locals, accurate clocks, keen eyes, and clear skies.

A 1790 map showing the viewing path of the 1761 Transit of Venus, by James Ferguson. Central Europe would miss much of it, as would most of North and South America. (Library of Congress)

In the morning of June 6, 1761, the Queen of Sweden hurried to the Stockholm observatory to watch as the boiling edge of Venus touched the edge of the nighttime sun at 3:21AM. A Swedish astronomer stationed in eastern Finland was prepared to time the entry at 4AM, but local farmers had decided that the morning was also a good time to set fire to unwanted brush, and the smoke obscured much of his precious view. India caught the entrance at 7AM, Jakarta at 9AM, but most had trouble securing both the entrance and the exit. Clouds plagued the viewings at Cape Town and St. Helena, but Harvard professor John Winthrop was able to carefully time Venus’ exit while stationed in Newfoundland, the only calculation in North America.

A drawing of the 1761 transit, with an accurate depiction of the planet’s path, by Nicholas Ypey (Library of Congress)

Once the data was collected, a second problem emerged: there was no standard measurement on Earth for a proper calculation. A minute in India would be different than one in Halifax which would be different than one in South Africa. The same for feet, inches, meters, miles. The task at hand was monumental, impossible, and essential for mapping the heavens. When the final figures were tallied for the distance of the Earth to the Sun, the range of answers covered over 20 million miles. It was a poor mathematical showing.

Unlike the event eight years before, a fair amount of the 1769 transit would be visible in London. (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Sun-Earth Day)

Eight years later, in 1769, the scientifically-minded Catherine the Great was in power in Russia, as was George III in England, and both were eager to spend heavily on a new army of astronomers. Over four hundred viewings were scheduled, including locations in Lapland and Baja California. The brightest minds of the Enlightenment rallied around the cause: Benjamin Franklin spearheaded the calculations in the colonies, and Captain James Cook shuttled a fleet of scientists and naturalists to Tahiti, where they viewed the transit with cloudless blue skies.

During the 1769 transit, the observations of Captain James Cook in Tahiti were an essential part of the international data collected. (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society)

It took three years for Captain Cook to return to England with his essential data, and the calculations when completed narrowed the margin of error from 20 million miles to just 4 million. But the Venus expeditions had gathered not just numbers, but plants and animals and observations of customs from around the world. Chasing Venus chronicles a rare planetary event that happened at a rare juncture in human history, when the age of empire, the age of science, and the age of curiosity brought the world together for just a few moments — to achieve the measure of the universe.

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Free Radicals: How Anarchy and Serendipity Fueled Science, from Newton to Tesla to Steve Jobs

How Goethe fueled Tesla, why Newton pricked his own eye, and other lessons in breaking the rules of science.

What goes on at the moment of discovery? Is it a flash or a slow burn? Does it come at the end of a long day of work, or upon waking in the morning? Artists might evade explanation and just call it their “muse“, but what about scientists? Science is supposed to come from a rational source, a set of long equations or a series of dogged experiments. But the truth — to which some of history’s greatest scientists can attest — is far more irrational: Discovery is anarchy, inspiration is unexplainable, and getting that Nobel Prize might just be dumb luck.

Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science (public library) by Michael Brooks is the story of scientific rule-breakers, the men and women who experimented on themselves, had fantastic visions and unexplainable hunches, and took once-in-a-lifetime risks, all in the name of pursuing curiosity.

A corridor at Allied Chemical in 1967, by Eliot Erwitt

After the second world war, Brooks explains, scientists were suffering from an image problem. They had created the bomb, cracked the enigma machine, developed nerve gas, and performed experiments on prisoners of war. “You scientists,” declared a 1960s TV drama, “you kill half the world, and the other half can’t live without you.”

After the mad-scientist archetype had done its damage, it was time to rebrand the working scientist, clocking in from 9 to 5 in a crisp white lab coat. Indeed, for the second half of the twentieth century, scientists were perceived as subservient, rule-abiding, lab-dwellers. But for the majority of scientific history, this was simply not the case.

The charicature of Humpry Davy's laughing gas experiments, by James Gillray

Much of medical history involved scientists experimenting on themselves. Issac Newton once stuck a blunt needle, or bodkin, in his eye just so he could record what happened: “there appeared severall white darke & coloured circles… I continued to rub my eye [with the] bodkin.” In the eighteenth-century Sir Humpry Davy began a series of notorious experiments with nitrous oxide by delivering himself the first dose:

This evening… I have felt a more high degree of pleasure from breathing nitrous oxide than I ever felt from any cause whatever — a thrilling all over me most exquisitely pleasurable, I said to myself I was born to benefit the world by my great talents.

Sometimes, as with Davy, self-experimentation led to a moment of inspiration. Kary Mullins, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize for gene copy-technology, would often use LSD to create “a mind-opening experience… much more important than any courses I ever took.” Steve Jobs also called LSD “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.”

'The glow retreats, done is our day of toil; / It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring…' Nikola Tesla was reciting his Goethe poem when he saw his vision of alternating current.

Some of these inspirational hallucinations were undrugged and out of the blue. Nikola Tesla famously developed the self-starting alternating current motor after walking in a Budapest park and reading a passage of Goethe, when he was struck with a vision of a rotating magnetic field. While working on the Manhattan Project, Enrico Fermi had planned to induce radioactivity by shooting a lead target with neutrons, but at the last minute switched out the lead for paraffin for no apparent reason. “It was just like that,” he wrote, “no advanced warning, no conscious, prior reasoning.” For the first time, the experiment worked.

Albert Einstein reportedly once said that the secret to creativity was knowing how to hide one’s sources. Not because they were necessarily wrong, although fudged numbers were a part of Einstein’s success, but because the sources were often times unexplainable. One Nobel Prize winner described a “feeling of guilt about suppressing the part chance and good fortune played” in the work that earned him the holy grail of scientific acclaim.

Steve Jobs on LSD: 'one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.' The drug was popular among Silicon Valley pioneers.

“Scientific anarchy may not be beautiful,” writes Brooks, “but it gets the job done.” Free Radicals illuminates the role of the irrational in science, the mistakes that make scientists human, and reveals that breakthroughs that change our lives in the most fundamental ways may have the most serendipitous origins.

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.

♥ $7 / month♥ $3 / month♥ $10 / month♥ $25 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Dating Advice from Dickens: A Collection of Victorian Vignettes

A “Manly Young Lady” and a “Poetical Young Gentleman” walk into a bar.

1837 was a good year for Charles Dickens. Sketches by Boz, his collected essays on London life, and the first volumes of The Pickwick Papers were both in circulation, and his publishers were eager to cash in on this rising star with the satiric voice.

The next year, a slim book of short vignettes appeared with the title Sketches of Young Ladies. It had a certain Dickensian flair, each lady named and tagged and organized in an encyclopedia of of feminine characters. Immediately popular, its author was, like Boz, anonymous.

Six months later, another similar book appeared, Sketches of Young Gentlemen, and then another, Sketches of Young Couples, specially timed to Queen Victoria’s 1839 engagement to the future Prince Albert. Also hugely popular, the three sketches were bound up and sold together over the second half of the nineteenth century before disappearing in the twentieth.

But who was the author? There was always “gold to be got out of Dickens,” as one newspaper put it in 1884, but the truth was not revealed until the turn of the century: the first book, Sketches of Ladies, had been written by the young humorist Edward Caswall; the others, Sketches of Young Gentlemen and Sketches of Young Couples, were written, as everyone had expected, by Charles Dickens himself.

All three books were recently resurrected by Oxford University Press as Sketches of Young Gentlemen and Young Couples: With Sketches of Young Ladies by Edward Caswall, revealing a taxonomy of archetypes that is at once amusingly outdated and surprisingly timely.

The “Extremely Natural Young Lady” might be a cousin to today’s manic pixie dream girl:

[She] is always doing some out-of-the-way-thing, that she might appear simple and girlish… She enjoys nothing so much as getting her gown torn and arranging her hair out of doors.

Indeed, Dickens had been inspired by a Dickens stylist — because everything was, and still is, a remix.

'The Mysterious Young Lady never utters a syllable to anyone.' Illustration by Phiz.

The “Petting Young Lady” would no doubt be delighted with today’s cat videos:

Her favorite term for expressing intense admiration is ‘little.’ Thus if she sees a hose which pleases her, she instantly cries out ‘What a dear little horse!’ although the horse be as big as a hay-stack.

The “Manly Young Lady” would surely put you in your place:

In conversation, she is most spectacularly positive, and should you sit next to her at dinner, ten to one but she puts you down half a dozen times at least.

'The Manly Young Lady has been known to travel alone, outside of the coach, all the way from Manchester to London.' Illustration by Phiz.

The “Out-and-Out Young Gentleman” had time only for parties:

[He] is employed in a city counting house or solicitor’s office, in which he does as little as he possibly can; his chief places of resort are, the streets, the taverns, and the theaters.

And the “Poetical Young Gentleman” was as you would expect:

He has a great deal to say about the world, and is given much to opining, especially if he has taken anything strong to drink, that there is nothing in it worth living for.

'The favorite attitude of the Poetical Young Gentleman is staring with very round eyes at the opposite wall.' Illustration by Phiz.

This new collection of Dickens’ Sketches of Young Gentlemen and Young Couples: With Sketches of Young Ladies gives Caswall his due both as a satirist and as an inspiration for one of the nineteenth century’s greatest caricaturists. And though its blend of humor and astute cultural observation captures a bygone era beautifully, its tease-points could easily apply to today’s crop of hipsters, techies, and other social performative roles we all don.

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.

♥ $7 / month♥ $3 / month♥ $10 / month♥ $25 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.