Inconvenient People (33 page)

The failed Huxtable prosecution of 1855 was a setback for the Commissioners, and to promoters of the county asylums, such as Dr Bucknill. Prosecutions would continue to be brought, where there was prima facie evidence of abuse or neglect; but in less clear cases, gentle and then firm personal persuasion was the Commissioners’ preferred method, to encourage families either to place their relative in an asylum or to agree to being periodically inspected by a medical man or a Poor Law official.

In the Huxtable case, it had been the local vicar who called in the authorities; rumours had come to his ears, he explained. Clergymen were often the breakers of the spell of silence and secrecy within rural communities where a lunatic was concealed. In urban areas, it was the public who frequently alerted the authorities to the possible harbouring of uncertificated people, both family members and single patients detained for money. Screams, shouting and strange comings and goings prompted town-dwellers to come forward to have the mystery investigated. Mr Chalk of 78 Warwick Square, Pimlico, told the Commissioners in Lunacy of the
disturbance caused by the loud cries of a female lunatic confined at the house of surgeon Thomas Blanchard, next door at number 79. In February 1847, the Commissioners instituted a special inquiry and discovered that Blanchard was charging £80 a year to board one Miss Kidston, who had never been certified and who ‘never went out of the house, owing to her noisy propensities, being obscene in language and violent in gesture’. The surgeon was summoned to the Commissioners’ office where he was made to promise to have Miss Kidston certificated and to have her added to the Private Register.

The Commissioners were keen to maintain a mixed economy in lunacy care, recognising that a discreet single-patient set-up could be of particular benefit to the wealthy; they were also reluctant to interfere in the free trade of lunacy – that would be an assault upon the business ethic. Lord Shaftesbury himself chose to avoid the asylum system for his epileptic son, Maurice, instead lodging him in 1849 as a single patient with a family in Lausanne. John Perceval would doubtless have been stunned if he had read this diary revelation by Shaftesbury: ‘Epileptic fits are treated like madness, and madness constitutes a right, as it were, to treat people as vermin.’ Shaftesbury agonised over what would become of Maurice when he and his wife died – a common source of distress for those with mentally troubled dependants. It was, after all, the wishes of elderly in-laws that had created John Yeo’s and Anthony Huxtable’s dilemmas. Maurice never did come home, despite his father acknowledging that ‘separation and solitude have done nothing’ for him.

Throughout the Commissioners’ minutes, boarders of single patients were urged to observe the lunacy laws and to ensure that conditions were optimal. ‘We have endeavoured year by year to do things by persuasion until I have lost all patience,’ Shaftesbury revealed in 1859. ‘We have erred on the side of lenity in respect of licensed houses and those who receive single patients, and I am very sorry for it.’ But he felt that public opinion was still not ripe for state officials routinely to enter domestic spaces unless there were grave allegations of wrongdoing.

It is clear that, privately, it wasn’t just Shaftesbury who lacked full confidence in both the private and the public asylum system that the Lunacy Commission oversaw. In August 1857, Commissioner Bryan Waller Procter wrote to John Forster – Commission Secretary, from 1855 – requesting a recommendation for single-patient care for a friend of his, one Mr Strickland, who was shortly to go abroad and needed to place his unsound son. Procter wrote that, ideally, a public institution should have separate wards made available for paying middle- and upper-class patients, which strongly suggests that Procter secretly believed that the private asylums were not up to scratch; the desire for the state system to set aside private wards for fee-paying patients would become increasingly urgently voiced in the second half of the century. Procter asked Forster to lend him the ‘Private List’, as he wanted to see whether a Miss Bailey of
Tavistock Place, Bloomsbury, was on this register of trustworthy and discreet keepers of wealthy single patients. Back in 1842, William Makepeace Thackeray had asked Procter to recommend a good private asylum for his wife Isabella, who had become mentally ill. The author visited the asylum that Procter believed to be the best, but later wrote that it ‘makes me quite sick to think of even now. He [Procter] shook his head about other places.’ Thackeray decided instead to place Isabella in single-patient care in Camberwell, where she lived until her death in 1894.

Thackeray has been criticised for placing his wife in an obscure South London lodging under no particularly eminent alienist, but Procter may well have pointed out to him that the exclusive end of the market was no guarantee of humane and companionable confinement. Two of the century’s biggest names in mad-doctoring, Alexander Sutherland and Sir Alexander Morison, routinely failed to register their many single patients with the Commissioners, and for many of the confined, little attempt was made to provide them with appropriate company or mental stimulation. Abusive attendants blacklisted at asylums were often employed to guard wealthy single patients; and drugging, bleeding and head-shaving appear to have been carried on against them; many had been confined on the mere say-so of parents, who had asked Morison to ‘straighten out their wayward children’. Dr James Crichton-Browne was one of the three Lord Chancellor’s Visitors in Lunacy who in 1877 inspected the 336 Chancery lunatics in single care (a further 676 were in asylums). Among the cruelties he uncovered were a woman tied to a chair by a rope and another shut in a darkened room for three months. He witnessed wealthy patients being brought into asylums from home care with broken bones, the marks of flogging upon them, covered in bruises and sometimes delivered in ropes or in strait-waistcoats. Crichton-Browne believed that greed and indolence were much more likely to pass undetected in a private home, even within a family, than in an asylum. An expensive single house, overseen by a top doctor, ought to have offered the best lunacy care possible, but it seems that abuses in this sector went on in defiance of the inspectors. ‘[Commissioner] Gaskell is single-patient hunting,’ John Forster wrote to Procter about a fellow Commissioner whose quest to unearth these lodgings was made harder by the blatant refusal of men like Morison to reveal the existence and whereabouts of their single patients when requested by the Commissioners.

LUNACY.—A Married Medical Man, in one of the midland counties, having long experience in the treatment of the insane, wishes to
RECEIVE
into his house a High-class
RESIDENT PATIENT
. The house is large and commodious, and has attached to it gardens and pleasure grounds, comprising nearly four acres, with a large extent of surrounding grass land. A quiet and harmless patient, whom it may be considered inadvisable to place in a public institution, would find here combined the ordinary associations of home with skilled management.—Address “Medicus,” care of W. H. Smith and Son’s bookstall, railway station, Charing-cross, London.

If the alienist elite appeared to remain safe from state censure, those on the fringes of the medical profession might face disproportionate scrutiny. On 10 February 1882, two Marylebone butchers were standing in Devonshire Place when a carriage drew up. They watched as a slender, fair, young man, wearing no boots or hat, and with his hands tied, was manhandled out by four people and up the steps of number 39, calling out, ‘Oh you devils, let me go, I am no more mad than you are!’ He spotted the two bystanders and cried, ‘They are trying to kill me!’ The butchers found a police officer and a watch was placed on the premises. Before long, Mrs Talbot of number 38 reported that she heard the sound of groaning coming from next door on successive mornings, which made her think there was someone living there who was ‘mentally afflicted’. The police officers reported the case to the Commissioners in Lunacy, who asked alienist Dr George Blandford to investigate. When Blandford was reluctantly admitted into the house, he was shown up to a large, airy, clean and well-furnished attic suite, where he found one Mr Winn. The man refused to give his first name, but it emerged that he was one of the aristocratic Winns of Warley Lodge, near Brentwood in Essex. Winn had rented these rooms from Dr George Fenton Cameron so that he could spend time with his elder brother – the chap spotted by the butchers – who was in a ‘nervous state’. Winn thought that being in London might distract his brother and raise his spirits. The patient was under the care of Dr Duncan Herbert Wilson, of Brook Street, Mayfair, a homeopathist, ‘who is unfavourably known in this department’, the Commissioners in Lunacy curtly noted. They were not likely to have thought well of Dr Cameron either, who was one of the first promoters in Britain of massage as a therapeutic treatment for all sorts of problems, physical and psychological.

Winn the younger worked by day in a solicitor’s office, and hired a servant to be with his brother while he was at work. When Dr Cameron turned up, he refused to tell Blandford the Winns’ first names, or any other information. He said he had no intention of certifying the elder brother, as he did not believe him insane under the terms of the Lunacy Act. Blandford thought quite the reverse, after finally being granted the right to interview him alone: the elder Winn was ‘trepidatious’ in the extreme, admitted that he would only go out in the London streets at night because in the daytime everyone looked at him, and was clearly unsound, in Blandford’s view. ‘Masturbation was the cause of all this,’ wrote Blandford to the Commissioners, failing to substantiate this most interesting assertion.

The Commissioners wrote to the Attorney-General to find out what grounds there might be for prosecution of Dr Cameron, and were told that there were none. The younger Winn had merely rented rooms without paying for any care from Dr Cameron – and therefore the elder Winn could not be described as a lunatic being kept for profit. Cameron was acting as nothing more than an ordinary landlord, while the servant who was with the elder Winn in the daytime was not fulfilling the role of a keeper. The Commissioners seem to have been spoiling for a fight with an ‘alternative’ practitioner, but this time, they were thwarted.

So, now – mad wives, in the attic; or sane wives to be driven mad. They are our most potent image of nineteenth-century lunacy, largely thanks to
Jane Eyre
’s Bertha Mason, slightly less so to Laura Fairlie in
The Woman in White
– drugged, housebound then asylum-bound by her money-obsessed husband. The 1938 Patrick Hamilton play
Gas Light
– filmed in 1944 with Ingrid Bergman being driven close to distraction by Charles Boyer, as the dastardly husband, in Pimlico, in 1880 – revived and reinvigorated the image of Victorian womankind’s mental distress in the face of unbridled male power. Feminist academics picked up this ball and have run with it, for the past thirty-five years or so, heroically retrieving from unjust neglect Victorian women’s novels, diaries and poetry and placing them centrally in any serious consideration of the period. And there, perhaps, lies a problem. By privileging literary work over other less accessible, less pleasure-giving sources of information about lived
experience, some distortion has crept in. If we call up the shade of Wilkie Collins, he can explain. In 1877, in answer to an interviewer’s question about the origins of
The Woman in White
, published in 1860, he said: ‘The victim to be interesting must be a woman, to be very interesting she must be a lady, [and] as there is a person to be injured – innocent and beautiful, of course – there must be a villain.’ Hamlet and King Lear notwithstanding, it is a woman in psychological peril that attracts mass audiences and mass readerships.