Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson

From time to time, society rethinks what its institutions mean. Despite what fundamentalists will tell you, this may include — indeed, almost invariably does include — the institution of marriage. Previous rethinks have involved the admissibility of polygamy (mostly in non-Western societies), the marriageable status of the religious, and the precise borders of incest. Some societies admit the concept of marrying a dead person, as in France and China. The possibility of a man’s marrying the sister of a deceased wife was as energetically opposed, during most of the 19th century in Britain, as the possibility of his marrying another man is now.

As we seem to be entering into another substantial reconsideration of the nature of marriage, it’s a good moment to return to a historic watershed. Kate Summerscale’s absorbing new book is a consideration of the moment of marriage’s dissolution; indeed, the forms of the law shifted during the case, which is the book’s subject, and under that case’s peculiar pressures.

The Robinson divorce was a moment when marital behaviour and responsibility were reconsidered — an emblematic divorce for the 19th century, as (in a very different way) the Argyll divorce was in the 20th. The marriage, which was embarked on in 1844, was one of those familiar through the fiction of the period. The husband, Henry, an engineer, maintained a mistress and two children. Less commonly, the wife, Isabella, had been married before and had a child from the first marriage, which ended with her husband descending into madness and sudden death.

Isabella was relatively wealthy. She had been reluctant to marry Henry, and quickly began to feel that he had been attracted by her money, which came under his sole control. By the time all liking and trust between them had broken down, he was creating a huge estate in Caversham for their marriage to decay in.