Inconvenient People (31 page)

For reasons that are not clear, the Commissioners went against their family-first policy in the Shuttleworth case. Sarah Rhodes would make over fifty applications to the Commissioners to be allowed to remove her sister from York House to care for her at her home; all were refused. And only with extreme reluctance would Millingen permit visits by Mrs Shuttleworth’s sisters. It is likely that the harsh
view which prevailed was that the sisters had shown no interest in Martha while she was in Quail’s care, and so should not be entrusted with her custody now. It is just possible that a more sinister motive could have made the Commissioners unwilling to allow Martha to rejoin people who had known of her rackety earlier life. Quail may possibly have been keeping hold of Mrs Shuttleworth as a potential crude attempt at blackmail against James Kay-Shuttleworth (soon to become ‘Sir James’), who was one of Mrs Shuttleworth’s trustees and also secretary to the Privy Council on education. It is clear from the Commissioners’ archives that Kay-Shuttleworth intended to distance himself when the case came to light in 1846. He had been born simply James Kay, and took ‘Shuttleworth’ from his wealthy heiress wife, Lady Janet Shuttleworth, when they married in 1842. The faithless, deceased Mr Shuttleworth who had abandoned Martha had been a relation of Lady Janet’s, and perhaps John Quail believed Mrs Shuttleworth’s very existence could be used as leverage to get hold, at last, of the army pension he believed he deserved. It may be that the Commissioners feared damaging Sir James in this way. (Funnily enough, Sir James and Lady Kay-Shuttleworth made repeated attempts to add Charlotte Brontë to their social circle, after enjoying
Jane Eyre
, written in the very year that Sir James was panicking about being linked to an unsound, cast-off ‘wife’ of the Shuttleworth clan.)

In January 1848, Mrs Shuttleworth died at York House. An exhaustive coroner’s inquest was held and Millingen’s tale of her fatally ulcerated back and his failure to inform the family of the death without delay were deemed highly suspicious by coroner Thomas Wakley – a supporter of the Alleged Lunatics’ Friends, many of whom came to the hearing. Once again, the legality of her lunacy certificates was discussed, with Wakley disagreeing with Lord Denman’s view that they were valid: the nature of her hallucinations, no matter how obscene, ought to have been set down in writing. Millingen and his nurses were criticised for their conduct and for the level of care given to Mrs Shuttleworth; Millingen was additionally censured for not allowing her pen and paper to communicate with the outside world and for insisting on being present whenever the Commissioners came to see her. Although the verdict was that Mrs Shuttleworth died of ‘debility and paralysis’ and no negligence was established, Wakley used the hearing to question the implementation of the lunacy law. It had been correct to seize the
patient from Dr Quail, he stated, but the running of York House left a great deal to be desired, and the Commissioners’ procedures had a most unsatisfactory ad hoc feel to them.

Dr Quail too turned up at the inquest, claiming that he was owed £2,554 from the deceased, and providing the following note as evidence: ‘London, August 11, 1842. I engaged Dr Quail in January 1842 as my medical attendant, at £300 per annum. On the 18th of June I thought fit to increase his salary to £500 per year, so satisfied was I of his kind and unceasing attention; I therefore promise that it shall be paid when it is in my power to do so. I am M. E. Eliza Shuttleworth.’ Not surprisingly, Coroner Wakley instantly dismissed this claim.

John Quail relocated to the north-west of England, becoming a thorn in the side of the authorities there until his death in 1859 at the age of fifty-three. He was never punished for his neglect of Mrs Shuttleworth.

The Shuttleworth case had been one of the earliest test cases faced by the new Commissioners with regard to the ‘single patient’ – those lunatics who remained outside the asylum system, cared for either in their own homes or as the only lunatic in the house of another person who had designated him- or herself as carer. In trying to intervene to help Mrs Shuttleworth, the Commissioners had exposed the problematic nature of state intrusion upon private property and one-to-one lunacy care arrangements. (A similar uncertainty and reluctance to interfere in private life would also delay the imposition of legal safeguards against child cruelty and neglect by parents until the 1880s.) To inquire, visit, enter and inspect domestic premises where a single lunatic was kept risked the accusation of trespass and infringement of privacy; but to keep aloof might consign to murderous abuse unknown numbers of the mentally afflicted – or the perfectly sane who were nevertheless immured in their own home by a malicious family member. The single patient received none of the protection given to asylum patients (however scanty and ineffectual that might be). If no more than one paying patient were received, the house did not even need to be registered. One estimate in 1828 stated that around 5,000 individuals may have been in single care at that time; but the difficulty throughout the century was acquiring any accurate, useful figures for those confined in their own homes or in the home of another.

LUNATICS.—The immediate attention of all persons receiving to board or lodge in any house, (other than an hospital, a county asylum, or a licensed house,) or taking care or charge of a single person as a lunatic, idiot, or person of unsound mind, is directed to the 90th and 91st sections of the Act 8 and 9 Victoria, c.100; and notice is hereby given, that they will be required forthwith to make the necessary returns, and to observe the other regulations prescribed by the Act.

By order of the Commissioners in Lunacy,

R. W. S. Lutwidge, Secretary.

August 15, 1845

Upon their formation in 1845 the Commissioners in Lunacy had placed the above advertisement in the national newspapers requesting carers of single patients who were received for profit to send notification – with copies of certificates and lunacy order – of any lunatic on their premises to Lord Shaftesbury, so that he could place this information upon his Private Register of single patients. Only Shaftesbury, the Home Secretary, the Lord Chancellor and two Lunacy Commissioners – one medical and one legal – were permitted to peruse this list. The latter two, plus Shaftesbury, comprised the ‘Private Committee’, who would visit those single patients on an annual basis. The Commissioners were already pledged to secrecy and discretion in their work; the Private Register brought an even more occult aspect – and a vast new workload.

It soon became clear that the new arrangement did not work: there were simply not enough staff at the Commission, and single patients were scattered all over the country, making statutory annual visits difficult. Besides, there was huge under-reporting of home-based lunatics. ‘The three Commissioners could not do the duty, and it was extremely awkward to have secrets within secrets,’ explained Shaftesbury later. The furtive nature of the register had been devised to allay fears among the governing classes of public exposure of their private tragedies. It had, in fact, been a sop to the House of Lords, which had repeatedly rejected lunacy amendment bills that contained a clause requiring the inspection of single patients.

More than half of Chancery lunatics found insane by inquisition were cared for in single houses, and the Lord Chancellor’s own team of visitors inspected premises and interviewed those patients once a year. But non-Chancery single patients could be visited only if they were known of, and fourteen years after the opening of his Private Register, Shaftesbury had to admit, ‘We have spent years and years in endeavouring to learn [of them]. I am certain there are hundreds of persons called single patients of whom we have no knowledge whatever.’ By this time, just 124 notifications had been received, and this was widely believed to be but a small fraction of the true total.

Care given within the family attracted no official scrutiny. If a spouse wished to confine a spouse, a sibling a sibling, a parent a child, or vice versa, no lunacy certificates, notification or inspection were required, as these patients were not kept for profit. Families were deemed to be the appropriate people with whom the insane should reside. Husband and wife were legally bound to care for each other – in sickness and in health – and parents and children were also regarded as having a ‘natural’ mutual obligation. Sibling relationships attenuated this sense of natural responsibility; in-laws stretched the notion yet further. The law permitted the family to take the steps it considered necessary to keep a lunatic safe, and to keep others safe from the lunatic. However, confinement and physical restraint had to be ‘reasonable’, and anyone locking away a harmless unsound person could be prosecuted for illegal imprisonment and ill-treatment – even if the prisoner was a blood relation. Needless to say, the authorities would have to know of the lunatic’s existence before any such action could be taken.

Accidental discoveries of a hidden lunatic, such as that of Mrs Shuttleworth, would, from time to time, induce in the national psyche an anxiety that there were likely to be hundreds more who would never be found – in all classes and all locales. Someone in the Devon village of Lewtrenchard approached a local Poor Law officer, William Perry, with fears that a lunatic was being kept in poor conditions in a disused part of an old mansion, called Orchard, which at the time was operating as a farmhouse. Perry went to Orchard on 27 March 1851, knocked on the door and asked to see the farmer-owner, John Yeo. A servant explained that Yeo was not at home, and although
Perry had no legal right to enter and search the premises, the servant let him in and led him down a narrow passageway that terminated in a strange wooden room. The servant unbolted the door and raised his candle. As Perry’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw a naked man sitting on a small raised platform serving as a bed, which was covered in urine-soaked straw and a piece of canvas for a blanket. His beard and hair were long and filthy, his finger- and toenails untrimmed, and around his left ankle was a large metal ring, attached to a chain that was riveted to a beam in the ceiling. The wooden cell was seven feet by five, and the only light came from a small hole in the wall, barred with iron frets.

Perry went to fetch two magistrates and a doctor, and as they carefully examined the man, John Yeo returned home and told them the story. The confined man was Charles Luxmore, Yeo’s brother-in-law. ‘He was always weak in the head and strange in his conduct,’ Yeo told the magistrates. ‘His mother says he was of weak intellect from childhood.’ He had been a blacksmith and while he was still a young man his behaviour had become of concern and he experienced episodes of mania. In 1838, ‘thinking that he would otherwise get into some mischief’, Luxmore’s father had constructed this cell of wood at the family farmhouse at nearby Germansweek, and had fashioned the leg-iron and chain to restrain him. The years passed, Yeo married Luxmore’s sister, the parents became bedridden, and Yeo inherited the problem of Charles. None of the other Luxmore children had wanted anything to do with him. Mr and Mrs Luxmore asked Yeo to care for Charles in the same way in which they had, and when Yeo and his wife moved to Orchard, the wooden cell had been taken down at Germansweek and reconstructed as an annexe to the old mansion – stuck out on the end of a wing. In the cases that made it into the public record, the extremities of a building – its attic, cellar, most far-off chamber – were often the sites of deposit for the family secret.

The magistrates asked Yeo why he had not yielded up Charles to asylum care: if he had been unwilling to pay for a private asylum, there was the huge new public facility at Exminster. Yeo explained that the Luxmores received £30 a year as an annuity from the lunatic’s uncle, and Yeo believed that if Charles had gone into Devon County Asylum, they would have had to pay for at least some of his care (with the parish paying the rest). ‘Sometimes he is violent, and
sometimes he is quiet for a long time,’ said Yeo, explaining the chain. The reason Charles was naked was that he tore any clothing put upon him; and at the previous Christmas they had given up shaving him and cutting his hair because he had grabbed the razor and slashed at Yeo and the servant.