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He and the Drysdale brothers, all of them now students or practitioners of medicine, were well placed to help put together a medical defence. The physicians who appeared in Westminster Hall on 15 June were closely connected to their circle. Locock, as an
accoucheur
to Queen Victoria, was a colleague of Combe’s great friend Sir James Clark; Bennet, as a progressive gynaecologist, was known to George Drysdale and to the Drysdales’ friend James Young Simpson (all three were ‘speculumisers’); Forbes Winslow was an early phrenologist and admirer of Combe; and Kidd was a former patient of the homeopath John Drysdale.

Robert Chambers remained sceptical that the diary was a product of insanity. It read like ‘a history of events as well as a journal of thoughts,’ he told Combe, ‘and I must ever deem it one of the strangest things ever presented to my notice, that a woman shd have deliberately committed to paper through a space of months and years the particulars of a criminal intrigue which had no basis but her fancy, and which involved the possible infamy of another innocent person’. After Combe had showed him Isabella’s letters, Chambers claimed to accept her denial of adultery, but his tone remained incredulous. ‘Had you only seen the Journal,’ he wrote to Combe, ‘how amusing it would have been to you to hear it described as a work of imagination – daydreams … I do not believe that Lane was guilty; but that the lady was an adulteress in her heart, and willing or wishful to be one in reality, it were lunacy to doubt after what I have seen.’

The case had exposed a lacuna in the law. When a wife sued for divorce, she did not need to name her husband’s lover – this was partly because her petition never rested solely on adultery; partly because the man’s lover, being a woman, could not be called on to pay the court costs; and partly, as a guide to divorce explained, ‘to protect the character of perhaps an innocent third party from being blasted behind her back’. When a man tried to divorce his wife, though, he was compelled to name the paramour. For many Victorian men, an allegation of adultery would not be disastrous, but for Edward Lane, whose livelihood rested on his being trusted with the care of ladies, it would. He was as vulnerable to disgrace as a woman, and he stood to be ruined by a woman’s words.

Before the judges adjourned to consider the problem, Isabella’s counsel asked to call John Thom as their final witness. Cockburn agreed to hear his testimony.

Thom introduced himself as a gentleman ‘connected with literature’ who knew Mr and Mrs Robinson, ‘the latter intimately’. ‘I became acquainted with them at Reading in 1854,’ he testified, ‘and afterwards met Mrs Robinson at Moor Park.’

Phillimore asked him to describe Mrs Robinson.

‘She is a very excitable person,’ said Thom. ‘There is a certain amount of formality in her general behaviour, but she now and then utters romantic and flighty observations.’ The description fitted the defence case, suggesting that Isabella had a public self and a diary self, wild inner fancies beneath her shell of decorum.

Thom was asked to read aloud from the diary an entry of 3 June 1854, in which Isabella recorded her impressions of him. ‘His great eyes seemed like pale violets,’ read out Thom, ‘shaded with heavy, drooping lids; his cheeks were hollow, and there was a look of intense dejection about his whole person.’ There was laughter in the courtroom at Thom’s rendition of this lushly romantic description of himself. He read on, turning to Isabella’s report of her own demeanour during the meeting between them: ‘My cheeks flushed, tears came every second to my eyes, and my voice was choked. We talked long and earnestly.’

Phillimore asked Thom what he made of this account.

‘It is highly coloured and exaggerated,’ replied Thom, ‘and I was not in a state of dejection or depression.’

Phillimore called Thom’s attention to an entry of 4 July 1854, about his meeting with Isabella at Moor Park. This, too, said the young man, was a ‘highly coloured’ rendition of the facts.

Finally, Phillimore asked Thom about the entry of 15 July 1854, which included the reference to ‘that tree, which I never see without thinking of my escapade with Mr Thom’.

‘The word “escapade”,’ said John Thom, ‘is inexplicable to me. I remember one day that I was reading under a tree in the garden with Mrs Robinson, when Mr Robinson approached, and Mrs Robinson then ran round a corner, in order apparently to keep out of her husband’s way.’ He categorically denied that any kind of impropriety had ever passed between Mrs Robinson and himself.

On cross-examination, Thom admitted that he was a friend of Dr Lane: after he had acted as tutor to the Robinson children, he said, Mr Robinson had introduced him to the doctor, with whom he had since remained upon ‘terms of intimacy’.

With this, the trial was adjourned.

Over the next three weeks the Robinson case threw the Divorce Court into deeper confusion. When Cockburn, Cresswell and Wightman returned to it on Monday 21 June, Cockburn said that five of the six judges authorised to sit in the court had concluded that they were unable to dismiss Edward Lane from the suit. The one dissenter was the elderly William Wightman, who argued that there was nothing in the wording of the Act to prevent them from doing so. Cockburn, expressing his regret that Wightman was not in accord with the majority, said that the case would proceed as planned. He invited the barristers to sum up.

Since the judges had agreed that there was no case against Edward, Forsyth was not required to speak. Phillimore, on behalf of Isabella, repeated his argument that the diary was a fabrication; he suggested that his client ‘supposed she was writing a sort of novel, in which she evidently thought the scenes she described would have formed an appropriate climax’. Chambers, for Henry, summarised his case by pointing out that though the diary was ‘undoubtedly written – as women will sometimes write – in a high-flown strain, it appears to be a perfectly accurate account of things that took place. My learned friend has attempted to disparage it by quoting passages relating to Mr Thom, and then placing Mr Thom in the box to deny the correctness of those passages. But Mr Thom does not deny them. He only says they were exaggerated accounts of what really took place.’ Chambers added that Mrs Robinson’s age in 1854 was not fifty but forty-one.

Cockburn said that the judges would deliver their verdict in just under a fortnight.

The judges continued to consider other petitions. On Monday 14 June, the first day of the Robinson trial, the court had heard that a Mrs Ward wanted to divorce her drunken, violent husband on account of his adultery, cruelty and desertion. She was ‘a quiet, hardworking woman’, testified their landlady, who after years of ‘ill-usage’ had seemed ‘quite agreeable’ to her husband’s leaving her. The police confirmed that Mr Ward had beaten his wife. But Cresswell pointed out that if Mrs Ward had been glad to see the back of her husband, the court might have to deny the divorce. ‘The act of desertion,’ he noted, ‘must be done against the will of the wife.’ Divorce could not be consensual, nor could it be justified by unhappiness alone. When formulating the new law, the legislature had been keen to avoid the example of the French who, in 1792, had sanctioned divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, with the result that over the next decade one in every eight French marriages was dissolved, nearly three-quarters of them on petitions by wives. Yet Cresswell found a way to give Mrs Ward her freedom. On Wednesday 16 June, after John Thom’s appearance in the Robinson case, Cresswell ruled that she was ‘clearly entitled to a dissolution on the ground of adultery and cruelty, even if there were any doubt about the desertion’. Thanks to the regulations of the new Act, she would be entitled to keep any property that she subsequently acquired.

On 21 June, after the third adjournment of the Robinson trial, Cresswell delivered his verdict in a case originally heard over four days in May:
Curtis v Curtis
, a wife’s petition for a judicial separation by reason of cruelty. Since it was a plea for separation rather than divorce, Cresswell could judge it alone. As in the Robinson case, the court’s decision turned on the interpretation of a document written by a woman.

Frances and John Curtis, like Henry and Isabella Robinson, had made an unequal marriage, and Cresswell identified the disparity in the couple’s social status as key to their discord. Fanny’s father was a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, the same Inn to which Isabella’s father and grandfather had belonged, while her husband, like Henry, was a civil engineer. Fanny’s parents did not take to John Curtis. On the night before the wedding, John spent four hours quarrelling with his prospective father-in-law about Fanny’s marriage settlement. At parties at Fanny’s parents’ house, John felt he was treated as ‘inferior’. Fanny admitted that her mother and father often referred to her husband’s work as ‘engineering rubbish’, though she claimed it was not said offensively.

John became increasingly unstable, suffering an attack of ‘brain fever’ in 1850 and developing extreme religious views. In her petition for a separation, Fanny alleged that he also became brutal towards her and the children – for instance, she said, he frequently beat his son ‘with great violence and with heavy and deliberate blows on his face, head and ears’.