the year of their engagement Isabella continued to live with her family in Epsom while Sam was in London. Around 1853 he had moved into offices in Bouverie Street, a hop, skip and a jump from 148 Fleet Street where Charles Clarke was still running the printing side of the business. Sam mainly lodged at the Dolphin, although he frequently spent nights away at the homes of various members of his extended clan around north London. During the first six months of the engagement, until the close of 1855, the arrangement seems to have been that Sam would come down to Epsom every Sunday on the train, the standard pattern for dutiful sons and prospective sons-in-law (this was also the day that Henry Mayson Dorling and John Mayson arrived home from their busy lives in London). In addition there would be weekly rendezvous in London when Isabella went up to Manchester Square for her lesson with Benedict and returned back to London Bridge station via the Dolphin. No letters have come down from this first half of the engagement, which suggests that few needed to be written. Isabella and Sam were seeing each other a couple of times a week, and their thoughts, wishes, needs and tiffs could be saved up and played out in person, either in London or Epsom.
But by the end of six months’ worth of Sunday lunches with the chilly Dorlings, Sam had reached breaking point. Working, as always, like a maniac, he knew that he could not bear another half-year’s worth of lost and disagreeable weekends. It may even be that he was beginning to wonder whether he could go through with the marriage at all. For it was becoming painfully clear that Isabella, still only 19, was utterly under the thumb of her parents, parents who were unable to disguise the fact that they didn’t really like him. Henry and Elizabeth quizzed Isabella constantly about the relationship: ‘I trust you will not have been much tortured with many catechizings?’ asks Sam nervously in late April. They also continued to drop hints about Sam’s unsuitability to the extent that, only a couple of months before the wedding, we find Sam consoling Isabella over the ‘many cutting speeches’ that she has recently been forced to endure: ‘I fear that you are made very miserable oftentimes on my poor account.’ In addition, the Dorlings made sarcastic comments about the frequency with which the couple wrote to each other, and made sure to pass on disagreeable gossip about Sam that they knew was bound to hurt. Isabella, in turn, became pliant to the point of imbecility in her parents’ presence. Marriage should, in theory, have resolved this unpleasant state of affairs – when a woman left her father’s home for her husband’s she was supposed to switch allegiance – but what if the Dorlings continued to be a daily dogmatic presence in their eldest daughter’s life? It didn’t bear thinking about. In a state of imminent collapse, coughing compulsively, looking ‘queer’ and sunk in ‘the miserables’, Sam did something quite unheard of for him and went on holiday. Taking refuge with various Beetons in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, he refused to budge until he had formulated a strategy for dealing with the second half of what had by now become a kind of purgatory.
The first two surviving letters that Isabella wrote to Sam come from the closing days of 1855, just before he left for Suffolk, and give a flavour of their relationship during the first half of the engagement. Writing to Sam on Boxing Day Isabella laments the fact that she has been tied up with domestic duties – mopping up after her poorly half-siblings Walter, Frank and Lucy in the Grandstand – rather than flirting with her husband-to-be: ‘I cannot say I spent a happy Christmas day, you can well guess the reason and besides that Frank being so poorly, we were not in spirits to enjoy ourselves.’ Still, there is something to look forward to: Sam has suggested coming down to Epsom that very evening to escort her up to London to see Jenny Lind in concert. For many a young Victorian woman a trip to hear the Swedish Nightingale – in this case for the second time – might seem like a sort of polite bore. Isabella, though, is genuinely musical and therefore genuinely thrilled: ‘I do not know how to thank you enough for your kind invitation, the more delightful because so unexpected.’
The next letter, again from Isabella to Sam, is written a few days later, on New Year’s Eve. Still in role as mother hen to a brood of sickly siblings, Isabella is inclined to fuss over her fiancé: ‘I was very glad to hear your cold was so much better, only mind and take proper care of yourself, as you promised me you would, for I certainly was terribly afraid you were going to be seriously ill when I left you on Friday night.’ Next she makes sure to let Sam know how well she got on with his taciturn Uncle Thomas on her last brief visit to the Dolphin after the Lind concert: ‘seldom has he been so agreeable to me before’. Then comes the pang of realization that, despite the fact that their lives are soon to be united, they are at present running on divergent tracks. Sam is about to set off for his holiday in East Anglia while she is obliged to stay in Epsom and continue on the same round of dreary duties and doubtful pleasures. Particularly grim is the thought of having to attend a looming New Year’s dinner party – ‘that terrible ordeal’ – given by the middle-aged solicitor Mr White: ‘I am very sorry you will not be able to go,’ writes Isabella ruefully, although as it turned out the meal was followed by ‘a good dance … which exactly suited me’. Isabella’s brother John, by contrast, will be celebrating New Year with Sam’s sisters at a black-tie party held by some cousins of the Beetons in Mile End. Penned up in a world of provincial domesticity, the only thing Isabella can think to do is ask Sam: ‘When do you start for Suffolk? I should like to know because then I can fancy what you are doing.’
The next letters in the sequence are, even now, 150 years later, painful to read. Isabella, unaware that Sam might be embarking on anything other than a short break of a few days, makes excited plans for a romantic reunion, which she believes will come any day now. Sam, meanwhile, stays pointedly entrenched in East Anglia, deliberately missing each deadline that she sets for their next meeting, which has the effect of sending her frantic with frustration. On 3 January, only a couple of days after Sam has left for Suffolk, Isabella is already writing to say that she had hoped that he would be home by next Saturday as ‘I intended writing to invite you to join our family circle … as we are going to the Stand to keep Christmas now the small ones are recovered,’ apparently unaware that a room full of other people’s children is hardly the sort of thing to tempt a young man about town. Sam, though, has evidently already written to explain that he has extended his stay in East Anglia, so instead Isabella floats the idea of meeting on the 11th, after her next lesson with Benedict. ‘It will then be a fortnight since I have seen you. Absence &c &c &c. I don’t know whether you have found that out. I for one have.’ But Sam, clearly, does not feel Absence &c &c &c quite as urgently, since he writes back explaining that, sadly, he still won’t be home by the 11th.
Here was the signal for Isabella to swing into action. She wanted Sam back, and she wanted him back now. In her letter of 8 January she is careful to let him know what he has been missing: ‘We spent a very merry evening at the Stand on Saturday. I was very sorry you were not present, for I am sure you would have enjoyed yourself,’ apparently unaware how unlikely this was. Having spent a couple of routine sentences saying how pleased she was to hear that Sam was feeling better, she launches into her plan.
Now for business. Will you be so kind to arrange your affairs, so that you will be home by Monday night or Tuesday morning as we are going to have a few friends to dinner and you are to be one of the dozen if you can manage to be home by then. I hope you will not disappoint me because you know very well these formal feeds I abominate, and if you come of course it will be much pleasanter for me. I am the only one of the girls going to dine with them, so pray do not leave me to sit three or four hours with some old man I do not care a straw about.
After a few more limp courtesies Isabella signs off before adding what Sam would come to know and joke about as the crucial postscript, the one in which the real purpose of her letter was revealed: ‘Let me have a letter soon telling me how you have been amusing yourself, and bear in mind Tuesday, Jany 15th.’
Notwithstanding the peremptory postscript, Sam’s response was to send a note explaining that, alas, he was not coming home until Thursday evening and so would be obliged to miss the Dorlings’ dinner party. This made Isabella redouble her efforts. Determined to get Sam down to Epsom by hook or by crook, she contrived to get the dinner party set back a couple of days. What was the point of having a fiancé, if you never got to show him off?
My dear Sam,
You say you intend returning home on Thursday evening, but as our dinner party is