letters are quite different. They are carelessly written and hardly ever dated beyond ‘Friday afternoon’ or ‘Tuesday morning’ and their punctuation consists mostly of dashes. Like the editorial voice he employs in his magazines, especially in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, Sam’s style tends to be verbose, overblown. Times change, and so do prose styles. It is Isabella’s letters – reminiscent of the crisp, clear voice of the BOHM – that have lasted best. Sam’s prolixity, his fanciful diversions, his self-conscious ‘literariness’ make him sound, to our ears, like a true Victorian. Nothing can ever be said simply. Asking Isabella to meet him next Saturday at Anerley Bridge station turns into: ‘Thus, then, fair maid, do I beseech thee to name the hour at which I shall meet thee at the ancient tryst of Anerley on the Jews’ next Sabbath Day.’ Or, describing to her how he spent last Sunday in the country at Pinner: ‘I commenced the day badly, I fear, for I was violating the Sabbath by violetting in the fields and woods, this morning.’ He can never be feeling low, but must always be ‘horribly blue, wretchedly cobalt, disagreeably desolate’. No wonder that Isabella drops hints about the length of his letters, refers ironically to ‘your large catalogue of words’ and asks him outright to avoid any ‘namby pamby nonsense’.
The five months that followed Sam’s return from Suffolk and Cambridge were inevitably turbulent as Isabella tried to fathom how she was meant to behave in a situation that had changed without her really knowing why. Her first letter after Sam’s return is written in a white-hot fury, at least if the lack of a date and frostily formal ‘Ever yours, ISABELLA MAYSON’ is anything to go by. She wastes no time getting to the point: ‘My dear Sam’ (previously he has been ‘dearest’) ‘Your sisters have kindly invited me to come up with them on Friday to the Concert [this time to see Opertz], but as you said nothing about it on Sunday to me, I thought I would write and ascertain your intentions on the subject.’ She then proceeds to tick him off, obliquely, about the indecent haste with which he scampered away from Epsom the last time she saw him: ‘You went off in such a hurry the other morning, I have scarcely recovered the shock yet. Your reason for doing I suppose was business.’ Then the imperious postscript that Sam would come to dread: ‘I shall expect a note by return of post, so please don’t disappoint.’
This sounds like the Riot Act and Sam sensibly responds immediately with a letter that, unusually for him, is dated, perhaps because he wants to prove to Isabella that he really has attended to her the first chance he has got. He gets straight to the point, making it clear that the reason for his tentativeness over making plans for the opera is entirely due to her parents’ coldness towards him: ‘the suggestions of your most humble and loving servant have been latterly so unfortunately received that I have not had the courage to utter my notions with respect to your going anywhere or doing anything.’ He is careful to explain, too, why he has not written before: ‘I did not get your letter till 10 o’c last night, or I would have posted me to you before this.’
Yet Sam was not so biddable that he was going to be shamed, nagged, or bullied into abandoning the strategy he had devised for making the last few months of the engagement bearable. He is sure enough of himself, and sure enough of Isabella, to risk weeks of escalating tension as he repeatedly tries to dodge his prospective in-laws. On 31 January he turns down yet another invitation from the hospitable Epsom lawyer Mr White and, while pronouncing himself ‘very vexed’ at not being able to attend, seems unworried by the thought of Isabella having a good time with other men: ‘you will enjoy yourself, very much, I hope, and find some good [dance] partners’, which is hardly the sort of thing any girl wants to hear from the man who is supposed to be in love with her. What Sam really wants is to be alone with Isabella and he drops constant hints to that effect. For instance, if, on her next London visit, she could arrange things so that there was time ‘to go for a short walk with me’, he would be ‘very glad’.
Three weeks later and the couple are on better terms, with Isabella more bewildered than resentful about Sam’s reluctance to visit Epsom: ‘Anyone would think our house was some Ogre’s Castle, you want so much pressing to come down. I am sure we are not so very formidable.’ Another month on and Sam has been restored, finally, to ‘My dearest Sam’. Just for once it is Isabella who is obliged to put distance between them. During the coming weekend the Grandstand is needed for the spring race meeting with the result that Ormond House will be crammed with a ‘living cargo’ of small Dorlings. Ever resourceful, though, she has come up with a contingency plan: perhaps he could come down on the first train on Sunday morning instead? Having not heard from him for a week she is feeling ‘desolate’ and begs him to write: ‘Please don’t call me silly, it is a fact, and facts are stubborn things.’
Sam’s reply is loaded with the usual ambivalence: ‘If I can rise early enough tomorrow morning, I will come down by the early train, but don’t quite expect me, as in the case of a snooze and a turn around I shall be a lost man.’ His excuse is as ever: ‘business is so very heavy, and will be for a month.’ And in one sense this is true: deep in the middle of an EDM promotion and busy launching the brand-new Boy’s Own Journal, Sam is currently drowning in a ‘huge and dreary desert of notepaper and Envelopes’. And yet, he hints, if there were a chance of seeing Bella on her own, the correspondence could magically be left to its own devices. In fact, this time it is Sam who has a plan: his stepmother is going to spend a few days at Brighton with a friend. Could Bella not ‘steal away from Surrey to its sister county, Sussex, for a few days, or even one’?
In the end, of course, Sam did not get to Epsom during the spring meeting week. At least this time he sent Isabella a note on Sunday morning to warn her, for which she thanked him profusely – ‘if you had not done so I would have expected you all day’ – and sent as a telling postscript ‘1000000 kisses’. Still, that doesn’t stop her immediately wanting to plan ahead for next weekend, and she demands to know ‘your arrangements for Sunday’. Unable to stand the thought of a trip to Epsom, it was now that Sam seems to have resorted to lying. He told Isabella that Mr Hagarty, a friend of his late father’s, was dining at the Dolphin, and he couldn’t really get out of it. For Isabella this resulted in a dreary day, one of the quietest Epsom Sundays she had ever known, and she writes to tell Sam that she wished Mr Hagarty ‘were at the bottom of the Red Sea to-day instead of at Milk St, for then he would not have deprived me of the pleasure of your company’.
But in fact Mr Hagarty was not dining that Sunday at the Dolphin, and Sam, mindful of the way that news and gossip flew back and forth between the Mayson, Dorling and Beeton girls, knew that he had to cover himself. At nine o’clock that night (a guilty conscience perhaps making him put the hour on his letter) he sat down and wrote a letter of explanation to Isabella:
First of all, by some misunderstanding, Mr Hagarty didn’t dine with us to-day and consequently I had not even the satisfaction of being able to say unto myself – Well, if you would have preferred being with Bella, still you are doing your duty in paying all the respect you can unto a good fellow, and most valued friend of your Father’s – you see I couldn’t even gammon myself with that small specific, so I ate my dinner with the best grace possible, potted everybody, was surly to all, and escaped to my den in Bouverie – have written a multitude of people on different matters, looked at Ledgers, Cash books, Cheque books, etc., and, after all this dreadful wickedness, complete the scene by annoying you.
Sam had given a suspiciously full account of his Sunday, but it was probably enough to convince Bella, who never seems quite to have understood the depths of his aversion to Ormond House. Her parents, though, were not so trusting. Henry and Elizabeth Dorling were increasingly critical of the way in which Sam was leading a life that was insultingly independent of his fiancée, the woman with whom he was supposed to be getting ready to share his life. Four days after the Mr Hagarty Sunday, Henry and Elizabeth made a point of telling Isabella that they had discovered that Sam had recently invited friends to the house in Pinner and had a tea party without bothering to ask her, or, indeed, even mentioning it to her. ‘Naughty boy to thus forget your nearest and I hope dearest friend,’ Isabella starts her next letter with gritted gaiety. And, indeed, she had every reason to be piqued: this was their house, after all, and the fact that Sam had borrowed a proper tea service showed that it was no hugger-mugger affair, unfit for ladies.