No longer able to count on meeting at least once a week or even once a fortnight, the young couple now fell back on the mail to keep their relationship ticking over, if not exactly moving forward. Isabella addressed her letters to Sam at the Dolphin because, she said, she did not want people in the office, especially Sam’s brother Edward, opening them and knowing their business.
This arrangement allowed for plenty of delay, confusion, and resentment since Sam had neither the time nor, quite probably, the inclination, to bob and weave through half a mile of heavy traffic every hour or so to see whether any communication had arrived for him at home. As a result he habitually got Bella’s letters late and wrote fewer in reply than she thought he should. Thus on 8 May she writes pointedly: ‘I should have written to you before … but waited the arrival of the middle day post, expecting to see a note from you; but fate ordained that I should go without one of your much prized epistles, much to my annoyance.’ Equally suspicious is the way that Sam seems to be unreachable on those weekends when he is busy out of town getting their new house ready: ‘They do not seem to be particularly quick in postal arrangements at Pinner, for I did not receive your note till this morning. How do you account for it?’ A few weeks later, however, she is in a more forgiving mood about Sam’s failure to make the elbow-scraping dash from Bouverie Street to Milk Street: ‘Poor dear, I suppose you felt so poorly and not equal to climbing the great hill of Ludgate.’ All the same, the Victorian post was a marvel – communications sent from Ormond House in the morning arrived only a few hours later at the Dolphin.
What emerges from the letters that Sam and Isabella wrote to each other during these intense, miserable five months was just how different were the lives of a single man and single woman at mid century. Sam’s existence is busy, crammed with people, surprises, obligations, calamities, and sudden dashes here, there, and everywhere. It is a life lived in public spaces, on the streets, in parks. ‘I have been exceedingly busy all the week, – was at Covent Garden on Monday, Dalston on Tuesday, and Holloway on Wednesday, and to-night I go again to … Manor House.’ He works late on Saturday and now usually most of Sunday too. His letters to his fiancée have to be written in snatched moments during a bursting day.
Isabella is busy too, but with domestic duties and social obligations that leave her plenty of mental energy to dream and fret. There are the hated ‘formal feeds’ with middle-aged neighbours such as Mr White and Mr Sherwood, a notecase to make for Uncle Edward (Henry’s brother), fittings with the dressmaker and, of course, the tribe of ‘children on the hill’ to be supervised and soothed and periodically transported into Epsom or down to Brighton. Significantly, Isabella’s piano playing – always remembered sentimentally by her sisters as the bedrock of her life – was often shunted aside when pressing domestic duties intervened. During Christmas week of 1855 with the younger children struck down with heavy colds, Isabella is unable to find a moment to practise and so cancels her lesson with Benedict since ‘it would be useless to come up’. Indeed, references to trips to Benedict peter out over the course of the engagement, just at the point when mentions of new clothes, furniture and window blinds increase. Just what Julius Benedict – fast on his way to becoming Sir Julius for his services to music – thought about Miss Mayson’s growing disinclination to concentrate on her art in favour of her coming nuptials goes unrecorded. Intriguingly, five years later Isabella gave Benedict’s new opera The Lily of Killarney an uncharacteristically cool response in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, which hints that she and the maestro may have parted company on less than genial terms.
Isabella’s life, then, may have been frenetic but it was small, mundane. In her letters to Sam she apologizes constantly for not having any news – ‘it is rather a scarce article in Epsom’, ‘you must put up with this news bare epistle’ – and worries that when Sam’s sisters Lizzie and Viccie come to stay in the country in late January there is nothing for them to do except take long, muddy walks and fiddle with embroidery. Isabella tries hard to empathize with Sam’s situation – the thousand letters a day spilling into his office, the crazy schedule of deadlines, and worries about spiralling costs – but it is quite apparent that she has no concept of the pressure he is under. When he fails to spend a Sunday with her she sulks, when he arrives late or leaves early she cannot resist a sly dig in her next letter. So in mid April she signs herself ‘Your loving and affectionate deserted one’, while on 3 May she grumbles, ‘It is needless to say how disappointed I am that you are not coming down this evening, rather hard lines …’. She wants his health to improve but only because it means that he will be able to spend more time with her. Without enough to think about, Isabella turns her searching intelligence onto her relationship with Sam. Letter after letter finds her mulling over their last encounter, looking for meaning in a throwaway phrase, worrying that he is angry with her when he is probably simply tired: ‘I imagine you are cross with me and don’t care so much about me.’ There are rows and reconciliations, accusations and apologies, most of them the result of the fact that this is, increasingly, a relationship that exists mainly on paper.
And yet, there is nothing out of control about Isabella’s letters. They are neatly written, crossed in order to save the postage (‘do you have any particular objection to crossed letters?’ she asks, oddly, having spent the past ten months sending them to him), about half of them are dated in full. Initially her letters are cautious and impersonal, confined to practicalities, descriptions of dull days with the children in the Grandstand, detailed arrangements for the next longed-for rendezvous. Isabella knows, though, that she sounds closed and stiff and struggles to find a voice more appropriate for what is supposed to be a letter to her lover. And yet the moment she lets down her guard, the insecurities come rushing out – worries that Sam does not love her enough, that she appears aloof, that she is untidy, even that she is fat – and she finds herself writing letters that surprise and embarrass her by their neediness. It is then that she backtracks sharply, begging Sam to take no notice of her ‘nonsense’, or ‘scribble’, maintaining, ‘I do not really know what I have said,’ and urging him to ‘burn this as soon as perused’ in case – her nightmare – other people find out that she is ‘soft’. (Sam, thankfully, did not follow this instruction and her letters were found in his coat pocket when he died.)
Sam’s 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
