Exactly when Mary Marsden became aware of her husband’s adultery is unknown, although there is evidence the couple were living apart by the first months of 1877. Perhaps Mary caught her husband out in a lie, or was tipped off by a ‘well-meaning’ friend. The Dyson sisters, their naivety destroyed by Dr Gully’s disgrace, could have spotted Sabina Welch in south London and put two and two together. In similar manner, gossip about the Bravo case in Malvern may have reminded someone that the comely Sabina had left town soon after Dr Marsden.
One suspects Mary was protected emotionally by moral outrage and by the intense Highland pride that led to her sustained breach with the Rashdall family in 1855. It was a different matter for her daughters, particularly her vulnerable stepdaughters. How were they to cope with their father’s hypocrisy and betrayal following so soon upon the scandal surrounding Dr Gully? Above all, Dr Marsden’s behaviour was a desecration of the memory of their sisters Marian and Lucy, whose childhood deaths were linked to the perception that they had been morally impure.
It is doubtful whether the doctor had any desire to reconcile with his wife or to maintain a relationship with his daughters. His vision of raising children who would reflect the benefits of his medical theories had ended with the scandalous Paris trials, followed by his son’s dismissal from the Royal Navy. In his mind their behaviour provided a convenient justification for his relationship with Sabina Welch. He may also have assuaged his guilt by blaming Mary for the Doudet affair, attributing his daughters’ immoral habits to anxiety over his remarriage.
Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Marsden CB, Justice of the Peace and pillar of society, would have viewed his brother’s messy private life with dismay. Frederick’s estate at Earls Colne was listed among the principal seats of Essex and by 1876 his name appeared in Kelly’s Directory of the Upper Ten Thousand, a list of the ruling elite judged to control the country’s political and financial systems. For James to have dishonoured the Marsden name was bad enough, but his conduct also cast a shadow over an important family celebration. Frederick Marsden Jr, on leave from his position as a magistrate in Calcutta, was married at the British Embassy in Rome on 11 March 1877. It would be interesting to know whether his Uncle James was invited to the ceremony.
Mary Marsden and her daughter were fortunate in that Mary was financially independent, protected by her 1852 marriage settlement. Despite the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, many women had little choice but to continue living with men who humiliated them with barely concealed affairs, were drunkards, or prone to physical violence. Having decided to leave her husband, Mary chose not to return to the Campbell clan in Scotland but to join her sisters Isabella and Augusta on the south coast at Bournemouth. Divorce was not an option. A man’s adultery (unlike a woman’s) did not constitute grounds for legally dissolving a marriage. Separation was tolerated, although it represented social suicide. Mary’s removal from Grosvenor Street virtually destroyed her daughter Isabella’s marriage prospects.
Emily and Rosa were faced with the practical issue of how to support themselves and the invalid Alice if they were to completely break with their father. Possessing neither the capital nor, following the failure of Netley House, the confidence to open another school, their only viable option was to emulate Mademoiselle Doudet and become governesses. But the profession was then hugely oversupplied. In 1874 a home for unemployed governesses in London with accommodation for 99 women received 676 applications for admission. With their proficiency in French, crossing the Channel was a possibility, but there were already some 2,000 English girls either working or seeking work as teachers and milliners in Paris:
Many of them are in a very forlorn and desolate condition…It is melancholy to learn (the statement is made by a chief official of the Paris Police) that most of the bodies found in the Seine and exposed, though rarely recognized, at the morgue, are those of homeless and friendless English girls.1
Given the Marsden sisters’ state of mind and their heartbreaking associations with Paris, they would have been more susceptible to self-harm than their peers.
In the end, the young women threw in their lot with their stepmother and half-sister. And no matter how much they despised their father, there was no alternative but to swallow their pride and accept an allowance from him. The amount they received was far from generous. Like the Standbury sisters in Anthony Trollope’s novel He Knew He Was Right, they must have felt their fate would be ‘…to eat and drink, as little as might be, and then to die’.2
If there was a positive in the move from London it was that Alice’s health could be expected to improve. Bournemouth was a well-established health resort due to its sea air and temperate climate. In the early part of the century two local landowners had planted hundreds of pine trees, including an avenue leading to the seafront known to this day as ‘Invalids’ Walk’. The astringent aroma of the pines was thought to benefit patients with chest complaints such as asthma and consumption. More importantly, sea-bathing was promoted as a means of relieving arthritic and rheumatic pain. How satisfying it would be if the invalid Alice was restored to health by bathing in the ocean when all her father’s water-cure therapies had failed.
Used to undergoing medical treatment in the privacy of her own home, Alice would have appreciated the modesty afforded by the Victorian bathing machine, a small, four-wheeled carriage that was rolled into the sea. Its occupant could discreetly change into a bathing costume before slipping into the waves unobserved from the shore.
Unfortunately, within a few months the newly formed household in Bournemouth split up. By the early spring of 1877 Alice and Rosa had moved into lodgings at Eastbourne, nearly a hundred miles along the coast in East Sussex. Living independently meant serious financial sacrifice. For the first time in their lives the pair would have no lady’s maid and Rosa became her sister’s sole carer. After the spaciousness of Abbotsfield and 29 Grosvenor Street, they were now confined to several small rooms as paying guests. Emily, who remained with her stepmother, would later say that her sisters had moved ‘for their health’, which seems illogical given all that Bournemouth had to offer. It is more likely that tensions arose between the women as they tried to rebuild their lives. Alice had lost her position as ‘baby’ of the family in 1853, during the most traumatic year of her life. It would be understandable if, after another year of emotional turmoil, old resentments towards her stepmother and half-sister bubbled to the surface.
By April the pair had moved again, this time further east to Hastings, where they found lodgings close to the seaside in Plynlimmon Terrace at the home of Mrs Selina Campeney. The young women were obsessive about their health, with their most frequent visitors being the doctor and the chemist’s delivery boy. At the end of September there was yet another move, to the virtually conjoined town of St Leonards-on-Sea, where the air was said to be more bracing. By now there was a disturbingly restless and neurotic aspect to their lives. In Bournemouth, Mary Marsden was able to link into her sisters’ existing circle of friends and acquaintances, but Rosa and Alice faced social isolation, especially as the year wore on and the weather became colder. There would have been many days when it was impossible for them to venture out, throwing them back on their own resources.
Describing the twin resorts of Hastings and St Leonards in 1863, a visitor remarked on the rapid expansion of the area: ‘And what attracts all these people here? you ask. Why, my friend, some come to dance and some to die. The place has its festive side and its funereal side.’ On the subject of invalids, the author wrote that the famous British reserve could lead to loneliness:
Great as is the benefit which, without a doubt, is frequently derived from the air here, that benefit is often neutralized to a great extent by the fact that the visitor frequently exchanges a spacious house for a few apartments and, instead of many friends, finds himself, save from accidental circumstances, destitute of society.3
On 15 December 1877, as Christmas approached, a London journalist wrote a seasonal piece for the New York Times. It was a time, he said, when cares and troubles should be banished and when brave and hopeful hearts should prepare to welcome Father Christmas:
‘Hurrah for Christmas’ seems to be the general sentiment of the hour. Children know it is peculiarly their season. They are dreaming of holidays, presents, puddings, mince-pies. The toy-shops of London are crowded from morning till night. Great wagon-loads of holly and mistletoe come in from country lanes and Western apple orchards. The fruit shops have enormous stores of oranges, lemons, figs, and grapes. Raisins cram the grocers’ windows. Festival candles of every colour (a relic of Catholic days) decorate the Italian warehousemen’s cases. Tailors and dress-makers are busy.4
In St-Leonards-on-Sea, the first Christmas market was being held in the old town and the shops and churches were decorated with laurel, holly and ivy. Nevertheless, perhaps due to unseasonably mild and muggy weather, the jollity of the Hastings and St Leonards Observer editorial appears a little forced:
It is Christmas, unmistakably Christmas. Frost and snow have found more congenial climes; the sun shines brightly overhead: there is slush and mud, almost warm beneath one’s feet; but it is Christmastide for all that. Even if the Almanacs did not tell us, we might see it in the gaily-decked trappings of the shops… Come in what garb it will – in showers of freezing rain, in cold biting frost and falling snow, or in misty muddy mugginess – it is always welcome…5
With its emphasis on home and family, Christmas has always been a difficult time for the poor, the lonely and the depressed. Miss Mary Roberts, aged seventy-one, had, like the Marsden sisters, recently arrived in St Leonards where she was living with a paid companion. On the night of Thursday 20 December she retired to bed and her companion went back downstairs to the kitchen. Soon afterwards there was a thud in the courtyard, described as sounding like the fall of a rolled-up carpet. Upon investigation, the body of Miss Roberts was found in a crumpled heap. Although it was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, an eerie glow from a full moon revealed a sight those who witnessed it would never forget.
At the inquest held the next day at the British Hotel it was revealed that Miss Roberts had jumped from her bedroom window, a height of between 30 and 40 feet. She had multiple fractures, but it was a terrible head wound that killed her. The coroner, Mr Davenport-Jones, concluded that although the woman had taken her own life she had done so while in an unsound state of mind. This was a common finding in such cases, protecting both victim and family members from the stigma of suicide.
The full moon has long been associated with derangement of the mind and abnormal behaviour. In St Leonards, the old myth would gain more credibility when residents discovered that, as Mary Roberts plunged to her death, another drama was being played out just a few streets away at No.1 St Margaret’s Terrace.
Notes
1 Evangelical Christendom, vol. 15, 1874, p. 263.
2 Trollope, Anthony, He Knew He Was Right (Penguin, 1994), p. 254.
3 London Society of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation, 1863, p. 136.
4 New York Times, 30 December 1877.
5 Hastings & St Leonards Observer, 22 December 1877.