Inconvenient People (32 page)

Charles was cut free from the chain and assisted into a covered cart, being unable to walk unaided. He was taken to Devon County Asylum, the 800-bed institution that had opened in July 1845. Here, Dr John Charles Bucknill, one of the eminent alienists of the day, was medical superintendent; the newly invigorated county asylum system offered far larger scope than the private asylums for the study of lunacy in all its varieties, and many brilliant men would therefore choose to work in the public system. Bucknill described Charles as ‘remarkably amiable, quiet and inoffensive’. He oversaw the slow, careful removal of the thick metal ring around his ankle.

Something had to be done about John Yeo – but what? What law had been broken? How had the Lunatics Act been flouted? The Devon magistrates wrote to the Commissioners in Lunacy that there appeared to be nothing in the 1845 Act ‘to render the parties implicated liable to punishment’; they guessed that Yeo’s harbouring of Luxmore could only be ‘a misdemeanour at common law’. The Commissioners prevaricated, requesting more information on the case and wondering whether the local Poor Law officers could be blamed for not finding out about the recluse of Orchard farmhouse earlier. In an increasingly testy set of letters, the magistrates and Commissioners passed the buck back and forth. Finally, a report was sent to Home Secretary Sir George Grey, which included Bucknill’s upbeat report on Luxmore’s health – he had shown no signs of physical injury, his cough had proved not to be consumptive, he was now happy to wear clothing and be groomed. Grey’s scrawl on the documentation’s envelope reads: ‘It is impossible to doubt that the treatment of this poor man amounts to a misdemeanour of a very aggravated description. As to the propriety of a prosecution, the Commissioners might exercise their discretion.’ Just what they didn’t want to do.

The prosecution of John Yeo, for the common-law misdemeanour of volunteering to look after a lunatic and failing to do so properly, took place at the end of July 1851. Dr Bucknill used the opportunity
to advertise the wonders of the county asylum system, detailing the progress Luxmore had made since his admission: ‘The lunatic has been very quiet and tractable since I have had charge of him . . . He is good tempered and perfectly harmless.’ But this could also suggest that the thirteen years in a darkened cell had not wrought half as much damage as the prosecution would hope to demonstrate. Indeed, Yeo’s servants testified that Luxmore had been well fed and kept warm; his episodes of violence, they said, entirely justified the use of the chain. The local vicar revealed that he had known all about the situation, and had even deigned to look in on Luxmore while visiting the Yeos. ‘There was a terror in the neighbourhood about him,’ the clergyman said, prompting many to wonder why none of the locals had come forward earlier to raise the alarm and have Luxmore removed from their vicinity. It was also put in as evidence that Yeo had had the burden of care placed upon him by his parents-in-law; the blood relatives had distanced themselves, but Yeo had attempted to do what he could to help, while struggling to run his own small farm. Should a man be punished for taking such duties upon himself?

The judge, Justice Coleridge, thought so, noting Yeo’s unwillingness to contribute financially to any better quality care provided by the county asylum. Coleridge declared: ‘Any man who took upon himself voluntarily to interfere with the liberty of his neighbour must do it under all responsibility . . . It never was the law, and God forbid it should be, that an individual might take upon himself the custody of a lunatic . . . and then, even from innocent motives, chain that lunatic up for a series of years, without regard to his situation.’ If, as the defence had claimed, the family had great affection for Charles, ‘a more unfortunate mode of showing it, he had never heard of’.

Yeo was sentenced to six months in prison, but Coleridge spared him the house of correction, sending him instead to the less punitive common gaol. Coleridge was keen that the Luxmore case should act as a warning to people who did not come forward with their insane family member yet were manifestly unable to provide adequate comfort and humane treatment within the home. The message was that a layperson was not competent to diagnose or treat the insane; ignorance and local custom ought now to be giving way to trust in
the well-funded and humane new asylums. But resistance to asylums could be deeply felt in many communities. County asylum superintendents throughout England and Wales were aware of the refusal of local people to hand over escapees. Attendants seeking to recapture Rees Williams, a pauper lunatic who escaped from his warders at Briton Ferry asylum in South Wales in early 1846, were fought off by a crowd who gathered about Williams’s home, where he had fled after being helped over the fifteen-foot-high asylum wall by a fellow patient. Police officers had to go in large numbers to re-take Williams, and the local magistrate wrote that ‘a general prejudice existed against lunatic asylums, and the friends were disposed in most cases to assist escapes and screen patients’.

FOUND, wandering about in the parish of Bowness, in Cumberland, on the 6th October instant, a
FEMALE LUNATIC
, supposed to have escaped from a private asylum. She cannot tell her name, but has been heard to mention Liverpool. She is about 50 years of age, hair gray and cut short like a man’s, gray eyes, strong masculine features, and speaks with a Lancashire accent; hands and face freckled. She was dressed in a blue print gown, neatly made, and apron to match, white cotton stockings marked “E.G.,” and lasting boots, black silk shawl with fringe, fine black and white tartan woollen shawl, and long-haired boa, worked cap trimmed with yellow, and Tuscan bonnet with white ribands. She is supposed to have been in the neighbourhood since the 15th of September last. Further information may be obtained by application to Mr. T. H. Hodgson, Courts, Carlisle.

A remarkably similar case to the Yeo–Luxmore scandal, four years later, showed a tougher reaction by the Commissioners in Lunacy. Following the Yeo conviction, they seemed to have felt more optimistic about going ahead with a prosecution; in addition, an Act of 1853 gave greater powers to magistrates to examine and institutionalise lunatics other than the ‘wandering lunatics’ found in public spaces. (Advertisements such as the above, in
The Times
, in October 1845, were sometimes placed when a ‘wandering lunatic’ was discovered.) An Englishman’s home was his castle; but if he chose to make a dungeon within it, and keep a lunatic, the state could now more confidently enter and explore if there was prima facie evidence of false imprisonment or abuse. In April 1855 local rumour had led a Poor Law official, magistrates and a doctor to the Devon home of Anthony Huxtable, a farmer. Here, in the village of Bratton Fleming, in a small, stinking, darkened, ground-floor room at the end of a passage, lay Edward Lancey, on a low bed, semi-naked. Lancey was Huxtable’s brother-in-law, and Huxtable, a widower with several children to care for, had been bequeathed the care of Edward by his in-laws; he had kept Lancey in that room for seven years. The farmer received £21 a year for his care – each of Huxtable’s late wife’s three sisters paying him £7 – and he admitted that he relied on that cash to be able to feed his family and pay the rent. As in the Luxmore case, none of the blood family had taken on the burden of care, once the lunatic’s parents were no longer able to do so.

Lancey lay on the bed with his knees drawn up to his chest. He hallooed and sang throughout the magistrates’ visit, and was unable to respond to questions put to him. Huxtable said that Lancey would tear any clothing and break items; he was also doubly incontinent, so that it was impossible to keep him clean twenty-four hours a day. Huxtable was very unwilling to let go of his brother-in-law and only with reluctance brought forward some items of clothing – including two petticoats – in which Lancey could decently be transported to the Devon County Asylum.

Here, Dr Bucknill found that he was emaciated and had fractures to both shin bones. Lancey could not straighten his legs and would be unlikely ever to walk. ‘His mental condition was that of chronic mania – the faculties of the mind were deficient but not lost,’ noted Bucknill. At the court case three months later, and once again promoting county asylum care, Bucknill revealed that Lancey’s mental state was now ‘considerably improved . . . He was at first noisy, anxious and timid, having a most anxious and wistful expression of face.’ Contradicting Huxtable’s assertion that Lancey was hopelessly dirty, the doctor stated that he was from the start quite capable of indicating that he needed to use the privy and was able actively to help staff keep him clean. Bucknill also denied that Lancey had violent tendencies. The doctor rejected the argument that Huxtable had struggled to work his farm and pay adequate attention to his charge, whom he had willingly taken on in return for a fee. Bucknill did not hesitate to use the word ‘imprisoned’ of these home-care cases, which he felt were all too common in the rural parts of the West Country and Wales. Ignorance of the help
available and prejudice against the asylum were no excuse for this type of barbarity, he believed.

The judge, Mr Justice Compton, disagreed. He stated that the case had not been made that Huxtable had wilfully mistreated and neglected his charge. No proof had been given that Lancey was in any worse condition when discovered than when Huxtable had first taken charge of him seven years earlier (the broken shin bones seem to have been overlooked by the judge). And there had been no false imprisonment, as ‘the lunatic was a prisoner by nature’. The jury agreed and returned a verdict of not guilty.

The Yeo case of 1851 had strongly suggested that a brother-in-law was not under a ‘natural’ obligation to take upon himself the care of a lunatic in-law: he had entered into the situation voluntarily, and so was bound to perform his duties properly. However, Justice Compton seems to have believed that the opposite was the case: the very fact that Huxtable, a struggling farmer, had the care of Lancey delegated to him meant that he was entitled to more sympathy than a blood relative. The Lancey siblings had not bestirred themselves to help their insane brother, and Huxtable had undertaken their ‘natural’ duties for them.