“Don’t Frighten the Horses”: the Russell Divorce Case

Abstract

The British aristocracy never embraced the Victorian ideals of domesticity and sexual morality with the same enthusiasm as the middle classes, whose “respectability” is a dominant theme in the social history of nineteenth- century England. The upper classes’ permissive attitude toward propriety was cleverly expressed by the Edwardian actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s famous comment: “It doesn’t matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”1 According to this code, marital fidelity was not as important as the appearance of a stable marriage and happy home; scandal was more shameful than adultery. It was a rule painfully learned by the second Earl Russell and his wife. Throughout the decade of the 1890s, as their marriage publicly disintegrated, both Lord and Lady Russell encountered great hostility for their contravention of the social code. In a society that tolerated self-indulgence in private while insisting on propriety in public, the Russells became outcasts.