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George Combe agreed that Lane was ‘a rational well-instructed physician, & not an ignorant quack like many in that line’; his wife was ‘a clever little woman’, if ‘very nervous’; Lady Drysdale was ‘the soul and body of Moor Park’, ‘a big-hearted, active, clever woman, possessed of a good income’ who ‘manages the household’ and ‘charms the company by her overflowing good nature & frankness’. At Moor Park as at Royal Circus, Edward was happy to let Lady Drysdale rule the roost. Combe remarked that Dr Lane leant on his wife and motherin-law: he had ‘all his life depended on women’.

Combe identified two flaws in the characters of Mary, Edward and Lady Drysdale. ‘Benevolence and Love of Approbation are rampant,’ he noted, ‘and blind them to the defects of persons who are introduced to them by friends, & recommended to their kindness.’

There were few divisions at Moor Park between the patients and their hosts. Since the water cure was a preventative, health-promoting therapy, its benefits could be enjoyed by the well and the unwell alike. Edward strove to act as a kindly friend to his guests, to allow a spirit of tolerance, openness and possibility to flourish around him. Good company, he wrote, ‘lightens and brightens’ a patient’s path to health: it ‘keeps him in spirits’, and ‘prevents him from brooding over his own ailments’. Edward enjoyed his work and took pride in his successes. ‘There are few pleasures in life (if any),’ he told Combe, ‘like that of being able to afford some real benefit to the health or wellbeing of one’s fellow creatures.’ If the mind was a part of the body, as the phrenologists and others claimed, a physician could foster happiness and sanity as well as physical health. Edward’s powers of persuasion were crucial to the cure.

The patients at the spa formed a ‘very intelligent, lively, agreeable, Society’, said Combe. The Edinburgh set came, and so did their friends from London. Among the visitors were the logician Alexander Bain, a pioneer of psychological theory, who remarked on the ‘kindness and attention’ of his hosts; the railway engineer George Hemans, a son of the poet Felicia Hemans; Robert Bell, a friend of Thackeray and Trollope and a well-loved director of the Royal Literary Fund; and the novelists Sydney Lady Morgan, Georgiana Craik and Dinah Mulock, the last of whom wrote her bestseller
John Halifax, Gentleman
(1856) in a room overlooking the sundial in the Moor Park garden.

Mary Lane’s brothers, George and Charles Drysdale, were often in residence. Charles gave his address as Moor Park when he became a member of the Institute of Civil Engineers in November 1854 (with a personal recommendation from Henry Robinson’s former partner, John Scott Russell). George, though, went to Edinburgh that autumn, to complete his final year of medical training and perhaps to put some distance between himself and his family during the imminent publication of his sex manual.

All the guests were encouraged to walk in the park. ‘I strolled a little beyond the glade for an hour & half & enjoyed myself,’ reported Charles Darwin in a letter to his wife, ‘– the fresh yet dark green of the grand Scotch firs, the brown of the catkins of the old Birches with their white stems & a fringe of distant green from the larches, made an excessively pretty view. – At last I fell fast asleep on the grass & awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, & squirrels running up the trees & some Woodpeckers laughing, & it was as pleasant a rural scene as ever I saw, & I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed.’

Darwin may have felt his preoccupations washed clean away at Moor Park, yet on his walks he found fresh evidence for his theories about the struggle for existence. On the heath near Farnham he discovered among the heather a tiny forest of twenty-six-year-old Scotch firs, tens of thousands of stunted trees no more than three inches high, which had been steadily nibbled down by passing cattle: ‘what a play of forces, determining the kinds & proportions of each plant in a square yard of turf! It is to my mind truly wonderful. And yet we are pleased to wonder when some animal or plant becomes extinct.’ He was to cite the little firs in the third chapter of
The Origin of Species
as an example of the precariousness and violence of the natural world, how ‘the fight goes on’. When examined closely, the pastoral idyll yielded scenes teeming with creative and destructive forces, unresting appetite and strife.

When a patient had spent a few days at Moor Park, Edward prescribed stronger treatments. Darwin took a daily shallow bath, a sitz bath (in a tub shaped like a chair) and a douche (a jet of water angled at the afflicted part of the body). For dyspeptics, such as Darwin, the douche was aimed at the abdomen; for women who suffered from hysteria or other diseases of the reproductive organs, it was directed at the pelvis. Some guests submitted themselves to the hot air bath, the dripping sheet and the wet sheet. To take Edward’s hot air bath, the patient sat on a piece of cork on a wooden chair fitted with a hooped frame; blankets were laid over the frame and pulled up tight to the chin, while a spirit lamp was lit beneath the seat. After twenty to twenty-five minutes, the bath brought on a heavy sweat said to be beneficial to the liver and abdomen. In the wet-sheet therapy, the patient was wrapped tightly in damp cloth, laid on a bed and covered with a heap of heavy blankets: ‘the natural heat of the body acting on the damp linen, vapour is forthwith generated,’ explained Edward, ‘and the patient is very rapidly in a delightfully comfortable and soothing warm vapour-bath’. John Stuart Blackie – the professor whom Isabella had heard lecture in Edinburgh – described the sensation as ‘exactly that of being baked very gently and soothingly in a pie’. Another enthusiast wrote that on emerging from a vapour bath he felt ‘as warm as a toast, as fresh as a four-year-old, and as ravenous as an ostrich’.

The illnesses most responsive to hydropathy were hypochondriasis and hysteria, conditions thought to stem from a disjunction between the body and the mind. The novelist Dinah Mulock attributed the prevalence of hypochondriasis – another term for the dyspepsia that afflicted Darwin and Edward Lane – to ‘our present state of high civilisation, where the mind and the body seem cultivated into perpetual warfare one with the other’. The victims were often sensitive, intellectual men; the symptoms could include misanthropy or self-loathing; and the cure, said Miss Mulock, was ‘rest, natural living, and an easy mind’.

Hysteria was the female equivalent of this malady. In an influential work of 1853, Robert Brudenell Carter argued that hysteria was a biological disorder caused by emotional trauma: ‘the derangements are much more common in the female than in the male – women not only being prone to the emotions, but also more frequently under the necessity of endeavouring to conceal them’. Miss Mulock identified the illness as part of a general female malaise: ‘I am afraid it cannot be doubted that there is a large average of unhappiness existent among women: not merely unhappiness of circumstances, but unhappiness of soul.’ The cure was a return to nature, she said, aided by the application of water, ‘the colder the better’: ‘some predominant idea … otherwise runs in and out of the chambers of the brain like a haunting devil, at last growing into the monomania’.

To distract his patients from their anxieties, Edward encouraged them to read. The family subscribed to journals, made a library available to guests and recited poetry in the evenings. The doctor and his friends gave occasional literary lectures at the Mechanics’ Institute in Farnham. Edward Lane spoke on Tennyson, who before becoming Poet Laureate had taken the water cure at Malvern, while Robert Bell discussed the life of William Shakespeare.

When Darwin visited the spa he always brought a stock of books. ‘My object here is to think about nothing, bathe much, walk much, eat much & read much novels.’ He enjoyed discussing popular fiction with Mary Lane, an avid reader of volumes from Mudie’s Lending Library. On one occasion, they debated the authorship of two anonymous novels that both had read, and Mary entered into the discussion with tart, playful self-assurance: ‘Mrs Lane agrees with me that the
Betrothed
is by a man,’ wrote Darwin. ‘She coolly added that
Beneath the Surface
was so poor that it must have been written by a man!’ (The author of
Letters of a Betrothed
was in fact a woman, the novelist and poet Marguerite Agnes Power; but Mary was right about
Below the Surface: a Story of English Country Life
– its author was Sir Arthur Hallam Elton, Bt.) Darwin also engaged in lively debates about evolution with Georgiana Craik, a lady novelist of twenty-three. ‘I like Miss Craik very much,’ he reported, ‘though we have some battles & differ on every subject.’

Edward recalled Darwin’s stays at Moor Park with great warmth: ‘never was anyone more genial, more considerate, more friendly, more altogether charming … he adapted with rare tact and taste to the capacity of his hearer … he was as good a listener as a speaker. He never preached nor prosed, but his talk, whether grave or gay (and it was each by turns) was full of life and salt – racy, bright and animated.’ These were the same qualities – the delicacy and the spirit – that drew Isabella to Edward.

A water-cure spa was one of the few places in Victorian Britain in which unchaperoned wives and daughters lodged alongside bachelors and married men. Occasionally, this led to trouble: a lady patient at Moor Park reported to a friend of Combe that a gentleman had behaved towards her during her stay in a manner that ‘disgusted’ her. In 1855, Miss Mulock published a short story, ‘The Water-Cure’, in which she depicted the sexual undercurrents at the spa as a force for good. The narrator of the story, Alexander, is suffering from writer’s block and ill health: ‘My body hampers my mind, my mind destroys my body.’ He describes himself as ‘a self-engrossed, sickly, miserable, hypochondriacal fool’. His cousin, Austin, is similarly afflicted, though where Alexander has overtaxed his brain, Austin has ruined his constitution by smoking and drinking too much. The two young men, Alexander says, are ‘mind-murderers and body-murderers’.

The water-cure establishment that the cousins visit is closely modelled on Moor Park: a white building facing a steep wooded hillside, a couple of hours from London by train. ‘It was a large, old-fashioned house,’ says Alexander, ‘baronical-like, with long corridors to pace, and lofty rooms to breathe freely in.’ There are about twenty patients, ‘of both sexes and all ages, in which the only homogeneity was a general air of pleasantness and pleasure’. Large as the building is, it has ‘all the unrestrainedness and cosiness of
home
’.