Inconvenient People (49 page)

The moving fingers brought her a far more distressing communication regarding Reverend Lowe’s sexual activities:

Harriet was George and Louisa’s seven-year-old daughter.

The child was delicate and was described as suffering from ‘water on the brain’; she lived at the vicarage in Upottery, as did Mary, the Lowes’ twenty-one-year-old eldest surviving daughter. However, there was also in the household thirty-year-old servant Harriet Richards, and Mrs Lowe would later accuse her too of adultery with the
reverend: as little Harriet was incapable of becoming pregnant, it is possible that the moving fingers had somehow conflated the two Harriets.

As Rosina Bulwer-Lytton’s story suggests, talk of father–daughter incest was not unknown among the middling and upper social classes. But such allegations were outrageous, and if no corroborating evidence could be produced, the accuser could expect a backlash. And that is what Mrs Lowe and her troublesome fingers were about to experience.

In September 1870 Louisa was off by herself alone again in Exeter, staying in rooms she had rented at the house of one Miss Radford, at 23 East Southernhay. Reverend and Mary Lowe came to Miss Radford’s to ask Mrs Lowe to come back to Upottery vicarage, but she refused. The discussion soon became heated, and Mrs Lowe locked herself in her suite of rooms. Her husband and daughter appeared to leave but the next morning, Mrs Lowe claimed that she could see the vicar outside her window. That evening, she demanded that Miss Radford give her more light so that she could search her bedroom, as she was convinced that George had secreted himself under the bed and would crawl out to attack her once she had retired for the night. Her landlady found this an extraordinary request, as the bedroom was small and the bed so low that no one would have been able to hide under it.

Two nights later, when Mrs Lowe complained that the key to her suite of rooms was missing, Miss Radford’s servant lied and told her that there never had been a key. But when Mrs Lowe began to make a loud fuss, the servant reached under the mat and pretended to be surprised to find the key there. Later on, when Mrs Lowe rang for hot water, she discovered that the servant bell had been muffled. She now became very scared and would only open her door to receive refreshments; she felt that, somehow, her husband had infiltrated this haven she had created for herself. As a long-time sufferer from anxiety, she recognised the general aches, pains and indigestion that her mental state brought on and decided to consult Exeter’s most prestigious physician, an old family acquaintance. She also hoped that he could recommend new lodgings.

Dr Thomas Shapter had been the hero of the city’s 1832 and 1849 cholera outbreaks, writing an outstanding work on the epidemiology of the disease. Twice mayor of Exeter and once its sheriff, he was senior physician to the Devon and Exeter Hospital and to the Lying-In (Maternity) Hospital; and while no lunacy specialist, he was also physician to St Thomas’s Hospital for Lunatics, near Exeter. His very high standing had, however, been damaged by a lunacy case of 1859: during an inquisition, it transpired that he had failed to dissuade an aged, wealthy, ‘unsound’ yet un-certificated woman from leaving her entire estate to him in the will that she made while in his private care. (Even his keenest supporters at the inquisition into the patient’s soundness had had to admit that, at best, Shapter had acted ‘imprudently’ regarding her will.) When she consulted him, Mrs Lowe hadn’t known this – or indeed that Shapter’s own wife been confined as a lunatic in single-patient care since 1845.

Dr Shapter had treated the Lowe family off and on for a quarter of a century, and so it was natural that Louisa should seek his medical advice. However, ‘I thought he seemed rather queer,’ was Mrs Lowe’s verdict on the consultation of Saturday evening, 24 September. She had begun by complaining about life at her lodgings and detailed her numerous minor ailments; but before long she spilled out all the reverend’s iniquities and her fear of having to return to him. The consultation lasted two hours, and at seven o’clock in the evening, Dr Shapter insisted on walking her back to Miss Radford’s. A little later he returned, and a little later still he was joined by Dr Kempe, another medical acquaintance who had occasionally treated her own family. She swallowed the story that Dr Kempe was visiting another lodger of Miss Radford’s and then ‘spoke pretty freely’, as she later admitted, to both doctors. She did know, at the time, that she appeared to be agitated and ‘excitable’ and therefore avoided bringing up the subject of her ‘passive writing’, knowing how sceptics could react to such talk. She told the doctors that she realised her allegations about her husband sounded strange but claimed she had letters at her London address that could prove that they were true. When Dr Shapter made to leave, he said to her, ‘Now, mind, I shall come in and see you tomorrow morning.’ She would have preferred him not to do so, as she was gradually becoming aware of the
possible significance of this odd scenario – of what two interviews with doctors could lead on to. ‘I lived in a kind of chronic apprehension of this kind of thing,’ she said later. ‘It was a persistent delusion, a recurrent delusion . . . on the part of my husband, this idea of my insanity.’

She therefore left before dawn the next morning and went to stay with her sister-in-law, Anne Lowe, at Torquay. Returning a day later, she found that Miss Radford had emptied her rooms of her belongings and re-let the suite. Stunned and not knowing what to do next, she and Anne went to the Clarence Hotel to take tea, and on the way, Mrs Lowe sent a telegram – in Italian, to fox her pursuers – to Charles Roupell, a friend in London: ‘I am in great danger. Come immediately.’ After tea, as the two made to leave, a large woman blocked their way in the hotel lobby and requested that Mrs Lowe come with her. Outside, a carriage awaited. After a minor scuffle, Mrs Lowe knew that she had lost, and acquiesced in going into an asylum. ‘I thought I should get in quietly and get out quietly,’ she later said. She believed that the lunacy authorities would quickly see the mistake that had been made, and it could all be discreetly sorted out.

Mrs Lowe was taken to Brislington House, arriving at around ten o’clock on the night of Monday 26 September. Brislington was at that
point housing over ninety patients and so was far from being the small private concern she had been expecting. Assisted by his brothers, Charles Henry Fox had taken over the running of the place in 1866, on the semi-retirement of his father, Francis Ker Fox (who, forty years earlier, had been so heartless to Mr Perceval). Upon admission, Mrs Lowe spoke at great length to Fox of her distressing intimate life. The asylum keeper wrote in his casebook:

This was also when Mrs Lowe made her allegations about her wedding night, which Fox declined to detail in print.

Brislington failed to measure up to Mrs Lowe’s exacting social and behavioural standards. The Lowes’ joint estate was being charged at a rate of £300 per annum for her care, but the food, she noted, was no better than the fare served up at a London boarding house with a decent room for a mere £1 15
s
a week. Among the inmates, she recorded, language could be foul and quarrels frequent. One of the more violent patients repeatedly threatened her life, and the matron would burst into her room on occasion to insist that Mrs Lowe go and sit in the parlour with the maniacs, as she was being too solitary. Patients were locked into their rooms at 9 p.m., with a night keeper, who, in Mrs Lowe’s case, turned out to be a loud and persistent snorer. And what little night-time sleep Mrs Lowe achieved in her top-storey room was shattered at dawn with ‘blasphemous obscenities and maniacal cries’. Her room was also close to the dinner gong and a loud
staff-bell, so her ‘auditory nerves’ were permanently on edge. The Reverend Francis Kilvert, who came to see his mad Aunt Emma at Brislington, at about the same time as Mrs Lowe’s incarceration, described the eerie sounds of the asylum in his diary: ‘As we walked up and down the lawn . . . I heard a strange uproar proceeding from the house. It sounded at first like a woman’s voice in voluble expostulation and argument, then loud impassioned entreaty rising swiftly into wild, passionate, despairing cries, which rent the air for some time, and then all was still.’

If Mrs Lowe’s allegations were true, then it seems that the ethos of grandfather Fox, Brislington’s founder – strict segregation of the social classes and of the violent from the non-violent – had broken down. Indeed, Charles Henry Fox (going against the views of the Commissioners in Lunacy on this matter) believed that accurate categorisation on medical grounds was unworkable, because – he had observed – mania often lapsed into melancholia, while manic excitability could slump into stolid, unrousable immobility.

The Fox brothers were among those alienists (there was no consensus) who believed that masturbation caused insanity; or that the insane worsened their condition with its practice; or at least that there was some kind of cause and effect between masturbation and insanity; or something like that. So moving fingers of a different kind were fiercely policed at Brislington. Mrs Lowe was deemed to be one of the patients to be ‘free from solitary propensity’, as the Foxes put it, and so was told that her night-keeper would be withdrawn; but she realised that a keeper would be her only chance of exit from her room should a fire break out at night-time, and so she insisted on keeping the snorer with her after dark, for safety.

Mrs Lowe later claimed to have witnessed patients being exhibited in a strait-waistcoat to newly recruited servants as ‘a raree show’. And she alleged that to pare the salary bill for attendants, the Foxes made unnecessary use of solitary confinement. She was shocked that female patients who were becoming fractious were rough-handled by male attendants. She was also astonished that the Foxes allowed lady patients to be addressed by servants as ‘My dear’, which, she believed, would do nothing to restore their self-respect or overcome their sense of lost position in life; although each would have denied it, Mrs Lowe and the Foxes were united by a shared sense of social hierarchy and
decorum and highly alert to transgression of the appropriate gender and class behaviours.

Dr Fox acknowledged the economic basis of a great deal of mental ill health in England. In his view, his lady patients at Brislington tended not to have been exposed to one of the main causes of female psychological problems: the dreadful anxiety experienced by England’s overworked needlewomen and other types of female ‘artisan’. Poverty and its stresses, he stated, were responsible for the large number of female patients in the county asylums. By contrast, his wealthy patients tended to have been made mad by ‘moral’ (that is, emotional) stresses, including such factors as disappointment in love, jealousy and fright. And ‘self-pollution’, of course.

In fact, Brislington held more men than women in these years, and this imbalance was not unusual in private asylums. It was in the county asylums that women outnumbered men, by a ratio of around 55:45. This is not a huge differential and is explicable by the combination of such factors as the surplus of females over males in the general population and the greater longevity of women – male asylum patients tended to die significantly earlier than female, with elderly female dementia sufferers or other female ‘incurables’ living on within the public system, their numbers aggregating, and thereby helping to give rise to the myth that the threshold for insanity in Victorian women was set lower than for men. (See Appendix 2
here
for some official statistics.)

Upon her arrival, Mrs Lowe was refused permission to see a solicitor; and so she set about writing letters explaining her predicament, completing between fifty and eighty in four months. As the law stood, Dr Fox was obliged either to send these to the addressee, or, if he thought their contents were likely to be abusive or alarming, to set them aside for the Commissioners in Lunacy to read and decide their fate, which was either to forward them on to the intended recipients or to destroy them. In fact, Fox sent all the letters to Reverend Lowe, leaving it to him to make the choice. Mrs Lowe later claimed that only one of her letters ever reached its correct destination. Fox would never be prosecuted for this clear breach of the lunacy law; the fine of £20 would, in any case, have held little terror for the owner of Brislington House. Mrs Lowe later discovered that the Commissioners had never prosecuted anyone for ‘misdealing’ with a patient’s correspondence.