Inconvenient People (58 page)

Winslow liked to tell the tale of how his sangfroid had once saved his life at Brandenburgh House. He had entered the room of a powerfully built woman of suspected homicidal tendencies and had closed the door behind him. During their conversation she pulled out a knife and, remarking how sharp it was, told him, ‘I really must kill you, Doctor. I am very sorry, but it can’t be helped.’ ‘Just one moment,’
Winslow said, as she strode towards him. ‘Don’t you think it would be a shame to spill blood on this new carpet? Just let me go and call for a basin.’ ‘Perhaps it would, but be as quick as you can,’ said his would-be assassin as he slipped from the room.

Winslow placed great emphasis on recreation in his asylums, and for this, he was viewed as rather advanced. A keen cricketer, tennis player and angler, he laid on frequent outings for these activities, taking a hearty part in them himself. There were also regular trips to concerts and plays in the West End, and a small stage at Sussex House allowed performances to be put on by the patients. The
Pall Mall Gazette
reporter noted with alarm the many artworks produced by the male inmates at Sussex House: ‘The billiard room, which in other respects is a marvel of comfort and cosiness, has indeed an eerie aspect, with its walls adorned by the efforts of generations of artistic madmen who have once been inmates of Dr Winslow’s asylum, who have covered them with pictures in oil, watercolours, black and white, landscapes in defiance of every principle of art, and distorted figures with hideous features.’ (Sadly, these fantastical pieces appear to have been lost for good when Sussex House was pulled down in 1888; Brandenburgh House vanished four years later.)

Winslow’s father had believed that an asylum’s cure rate would be significantly higher if it had the feel of a large family home. The Winslows lived on site, with Winslow Jnr growing up at Sussex House; however, Winslow Snr’s detractors claimed that before long, the head of the family was in fact living in his chambers in Albemarle Street, Mayfair, and later, the whole family did indeed depart for 23 Cavendish Square. In any case, some commentators were sceptical that recreating a family home had any therapeutic benefits at all for inmates. The family home was often, after all, the site of (if not the actual cause of) emotional collapse.

When her lunacy order expired, on Monday 22 April 1878, Mrs Weldon emerged from hiding and straight away had herself examined – separately – by two doctors. Both certified her sane. She then visited her mother and her brother, who appeared to be truly repentant, claiming that they had been inveigled into her husband’s plot to have her declared of unsound mind. Dalrymple stated that he hadn’t realised that Harry had wanted to put her in an asylum; he had assumed that
some kind of home care, or a single-patient arrangement, would have been worked out. Mrs Weldon chose to believe him.

Mrs Treherne, meanwhile, explained that she had only sought a temporary term of respite care for her daughter, so that she would calm down a little. She was now willing to help in whatever way she could to restore Georgina’s reputation. Next, Mrs Weldon visited Sir Henry de Bathe and his wife. At first they tried to deny any role in the events but, while trying to laugh it off, the general finally admitted that he had signed the order. ‘You will repent this, both of you,’ announced Mrs Weldon as she stalked out of their house.

One of her many geniuses was for publicity, and Mrs Weldon would spend the next ten years ensuring the most public of humiliations for her husband, the doctors and the so-called friends who had questioned her sanity. Their mistake had been to underestimate her, and they would pay for their complacency with damaged careers and shattered reputations. ‘May God give me the means, give me the allies, to ruin them,’ Mrs Weldon wrote in her diary. In fact, she needed no other people, not even the Almighty. Her retribution succeeded because of her intelligence, energy, theatrics, egotism, lack of self-doubt and huge charisma. Thousands rallied to her talks, concerts and platform appearances. She hitched a flight with one Captain Simmons and a ‘cloud photographer’, Mr Small, on their ascent from Hastings in a balloon called ‘The Colonel’, so that she could scatter leaflets about her case across the entire south coast. And when she was in court, the street outside would be filled with those who had failed to find a place in the public gallery, cheering her on her way in and out of the building. Her trials were the best shows in town; even Lord Tennyson had to battle his way to a seat. The court became her stage, now that her singing and teaching careers had collapsed. Here, she won the bemused approval of judges, barristers, newspaper editors and the medical press. She became the nation’s ‘second-favourite martyr’ of the day – after the Tichborne Claimant (the obese Wapping butcher Arthur Orton, who was mounting his campaign to be recognised as the long-lost heir, Sir Roger Tichborne).

Like the Claimant, Mrs Weldon had huge appeal for those who feared the mysterious power of doctors and lawyers and believed that a supine parliament had failed to check the rise of the sinister professional classes. The wronged wife was still a highly attractive rallying
point for a populace sickened by incidents in which wealth and power appeared to have silenced and crushed those they found inconvenient. There were few rebellious causes to which Mrs Weldon would not lend her name and support. She joined the Magna Charta Association, with its narrow remit of supporting the claims of Arthur Orton to the Tichborne title, and its broader one of exposing the secret cabals that it was supposed ran the country. Mad-doctors fitted in perfectly with the Magna Chartists’ gallery of criminal professionals who threatened English liberty:
The Englishman
newspaper reported that ardent Tichbornite Father Meyrick had been pronounced mad by ‘Jesuit conspirators’ and put in confinement in a Fulham asylum, whence he escaped over the wall, was recaptured, and sent to the Augustinian retreat of St George’s, Burgess Hill in Sussex.

Mrs Weldon favoured a version of the French
conseil de famille
system, where substantial weight at a hearing was given to those in daily contact with the alleged lunatic. A writ against an alleged lunatic should be filed like any other writ at the High Court of Justice, she believed; and a lunacy order and certificates should be made upon oath, and compensation should be available for a wrongful detention, just as it was in the case of a miscarriage of criminal justice. A public register of lunatics and alleged lunatics should be kept, which would be consultable by any member of the public. To those who objected that ‘we will all have our throats cut by raving lunatics’ if asylum confinement became less common, Mrs Weldon responded: ‘How many persons’ throats are cut, women kicked to death, by raving, drunken, brutal husbands daily in this lovely country? Who cares? Of who are the community so afraid?’

She called for a complete overhaul of the Commissioners in Lunacy (an ‘overpaid set of sinecurists’) and the removal of Lord Shaftesbury as chairman. She asserted that former employees of the Ashley dynasty (Shaftesbury’s family name) were benefiting from payments made to them to be keepers of Chancery single patients. Mrs Weldon deduced, from various conversations with escapees who turned up at Tavistock House, that Shaftesbury had pensioned off his poorer relations, former servants, governesses and so on by giving them Chancery lunatics to board, or by making them members of wealthy lunatics’ committees. Mrs Weldon believed that she had made a breakthrough in discovering how this occult cabal functioned, and she used the word ‘vampyres’
to describe figures connected with Chancery. Given the opportunity, she would ‘have stirred up so much mud that Chancery, high and mighty as it is, would have been properly besmirched, and have received thrusts far more deadly than Dickens ever levelled at the whole infernal structure’.

It is difficult to know what to make of Mrs Weldon’s sinister conclusions about the plight of Chancery lunatics. While it chimes with Admiral Saumarez’s criticisms of fifty years earlier, her allegations that Lord Shaftesbury took personal advantage of the single-patient system seem excessive. Mrs Weldon did not appear to appreciate that in an era when personal recommendation was the glue of public life, it might be a wise idea to lodge vulnerable people with those who were known to be trustworthy and kind: Shaftesbury would have been able to recommend his former servants with confidence. But for Mrs Weldon, Shaftesbury did ‘not wish for any reform in laws which answer his and his colleagues’ purpose so well. He does not want the light thrown on so much hideous wrong and cruelty. Not he! Charity is a very good cry, and it enables some pauper lords to live sumptuously, and to pay countless myrmidons.’

Charles Reade urged Mrs Weldon on, writing in her Tavistock House visitors’ book: ‘Justice is the daughter of Publicity.’ Mrs Weldon got hold of a copy of Lady Lytton’s
A Blighted Life
, reading it just one year after its author had died, and deduced from it that alienist perfidy must be hereditary, since Winslow Snr had been such an ‘old intriguant’ in the Lytton saga. Cometh the hour, cometh the woman, Mrs Weldon declared: ‘I no longer hesitate, therefore, in making my own personality very prominent. It is necessary that I should do so, and I beg my readers will pardon the absence of false modesty they may observe in these pages. I cannot help being as the Creator made me, and I have no wish or desire to have been created differently.’ An eyewitness gave his impression of one of her earliest lunacy-reform speeches, which lasted two and a half hours: ‘She has a pleasing manner, smiles profusely, and speaks in a colloquial manner and with much fluency, delivering her remarks with telling emphasis . . . The audience of 200 laughed loudly at her jokes and cheered and hissed at all the appropriate places . . . “Don’t laugh too loud,” she told them, “or they will say you are ‘excitable’.”’

A passage that captures the more hilarious aspect of her
indignation, and the hopping from subject to subject (the ‘disconnectedness’ the alienists had noted in her speech), is to be found in her 1882 pamphlet
Death Blow to Spiritualism – Is It
? With this publication, she intended to alert the public to the prosecution (and persecution) of Dr Henry Slade, a spiritualist of Upper Bedford Place, Bloomsbury, who took celestial dictation upon a slate:

She will have had no idea why this is so funny but also potentially so dangerous to her – an internal monologue, self-involved and always off on a tangent, which could be twisted to demonstrate an unsoundness of mind. Trapped in her own misery, anger and self-righteousness, Mrs Weldon in her writings sometimes appears to have begun conversing with herself, rather than addressing the reader.

But that does not seem to have deterred her many followers. In the post she received declarations of erotic enchantment from men (‘You are a perfect siren, yes, enchantress, Queen of Song. You have been with me in my dreams ’mid the loved faces of my children’), as well as warnings from asylum escapees about her safety (‘Dear Madam, A lady warns you that if your house is not detached, people may listen to all you say. An instrument may be placed in any part of your house, they can receive all sounds to report all your words to your enemies . . .’). And the occasional abusive message that she should
stop making a public spectacle of herself (‘Go to a nunnery!’).

Her friendship with Louisa Lowe foundered quickly, and it is likely that Mrs Weldon’s fearsome egotism was to blame. She considered Mrs Lowe too timid in her approach to getting the law changed, and seems to have disliked sharing a platform with another woman. For her part, Mrs Lowe may have resented being usurped within the movement that she had founded; as we saw in the previous chapter, Mrs Lowe had already experienced a schism within her organisation. The break between the two women occurred as they struggled for the soul – and the publicity value – of one Mrs Walker. Tavistock House was now a place of safety for those who had escaped their asylums, as Mrs Walker had, after having been wrongfully incarcerated by her army major husband. But Mrs Walker began to miss her children and expressed the wish to return to her marital home in India. Mrs Weldon would not hear of this: it was a total betrayal of the cause and Mrs Walker was told that she should turn and fight every bit as hard as she herself had done. Mrs Weldon claimed that Mrs Lowe then inveigled Mrs Walker away from Tavistock House to Keppel Street, and encouraged her to patch things up with Major Walker.

Mrs Weldon – feeling betrayed and devastated, as usual – refused to return to Mrs Walker the boxes of her belongings that remained at Tavistock House, and so Mrs Lowe instituted proceedings against her at Bow Street magistrates’ court. Mrs Weldon carried the day, though not without being thoroughly patronised by the magistrate, Sir James Ingham: ‘No one who sees you, Mrs Weldon, will accuse you of acting corruptly. If anyone charges you with these base designs, send him a photograph of yourself, and he will be appeased.’ The magistrate’s comments were met with laughter from the court, the newspapers reported and Mrs Weldon happily reprinted; but ‘the lady smiled, looked more fascinating than ever, and retired’. While she deplored a world that valued a woman mainly for her beauty and charm, Mrs Weldon loved to reprise and dwell on the acclaim her physical presence evoked.