Thomas Hardy (27 page)

After fifteen years spent at the Warneford Asylum, Richard died there on 5 November 1904, aged 69; the cause of death being given as ‘Chronic Bright’s disease’ (or ‘glomerulonephritis’ – inflammation of the kidneys).
¹⁵
The symptoms of chronic glomerulonephritis, in its latter stages, are fatigue, headache, generalised itching, drowsiness, confusion, delirium and seizures. There is no way, therefore, that this disease could have accounted for Richard’s symptoms of mental illness, as described above.

In death, as in life, the existence of ‘lunatics’ was not acknowledged, and Richard was no exception. As with his fellow patients, his body was buried in the cemetery of Holy Trinity church, Headington Quarry: the parish in which the Warneford Asylum was situated. Some tombstones of former Warneford patients survive from this period, but not Richard’s. It is possible that a wooden cross, which has since decayed, originally marked the place of his burial.
¹⁶

It is sobering to reflect that, but for her marriage to Hardy, Emma might well, like her brother Richard, have spent her latter years in a mental asylum such as Warneford.

From the above, it is clear that mental health problems were present not only in first-degree relatives of Emma, but in more distant relatives of hers. Yet not all members of the Gifford family suffered from mental illness. In fact, many led perfectly normal lives and distinguished themselves in their careers. For example, Emma’s grandfather, Richard Ireland Gifford, was a schoolmaster; her brother, Walter Edwin Gifford, became an employee of London’s Post Office Savings Bank; her uncle, Edwin Hamilton Gifford, became Archdeacon of London; another uncle, Charles Frederick Gifford, became a doctor of medicine; a cousin, William George Gifford, was a British army royal engineer, and another cousin, Charles Edwin Gifford, was paymaster-in-chief of the Royal Navy.

Emma’s father, John Attersoll Gifford’s, offensive and inaccurate description of Hardy as ‘a low-born churl who has presumed to marry into my family’, indicates that he too suffered from delusions (chiefly of grandeur, in respect of the Gifford family name). Was he ever admitted to an asylum? It can be revealed for the first time that the answer is yes.

On 18 July 1859, when Gifford was aged 51 and living at 9 Bedford Terrace, Plymouth, he was admitted as a ‘second class’ private patient (at a fee of 16
s
per week) to the Cornwall Lunatic Asylum at Bodmin, as ‘a person of unsound mind’. The reason for his admission was stated as ‘Intemperance’, for a period of three months, but it was also recorded that his first ‘attack’ of this type had occurred when he was aged 27, and that he had previously been seen and treated by Dr Duck of Bristol (1834), and by Dr Richard Langworthy, surgeon and proprietor of the Lunatic Asylum, Plympton House, Plympton, Devon (1844, 1846, 1847, 1853, 1857, 1858).

Dr Thomas Anthony Stewart, of the Dispensary, 19 Princess Square, Plymouth, who signed the medical certificate, noted of Gifford:

Occasional great excitement and restlessness – uncontrollable desire for intoxicating drinks – which when indulged in leads him to commit acts of violence to others and [to display] great eccentricity of manner.

Yesterday he rang violently at my door and the servant found him very noisy and in a state of great excitement, without hat, coat or vest – surrounded by a mob … Knowing the patient well, I am sure he would not be guilty of such conduct if of sound mind. He also threatened to kill two of his sons.

The other doctor who examined Gifford, Dr Charles Hingston of Plymouth, stated of his patient: ‘I was informed by his Mother and Wife that he was extremely violent without any sufficient motive and that they were afraid of personal injury unless he were placed under restraint.’
¹⁷
(Although chains, fetters and the straitjacket were still used at this time to restrain violent patients, isolation in a ‘padded cell’ – one lined with coconut-matting – was increasingly becoming the treatment of choice.)
¹⁸

The duration of Gifford’s stay in the Cornwall Lunatic Asylum – which had its own farm, gardens and workshops, and which provided a wide range of periodicals for the benefit of its patients – is not known, but on 23 May of the following year, 1860, he was readmitted; the cause this time being given as ‘excitement at his mother’s death combined with drink’.

On this occasion, Dr Stewart reported as follows:

Manner irritable and violent, conversation incoherent and natural disposition and habits totally perverted. Of these I can speak with the utmost confidence as Mr. G has been well known to me [for] many years and has frequently suffered from similar attacks of maniacal excitement requiring restraint.

And Dr John Nicholls Stevens, surgeon to the Parochial Infirmary, Princess Place, Plymouth, stated:

Manner irritable, demeanour restless, frequently gives utterance to perverted ideas, has broken the windows of his home, injured the furniture, is very excitable and requires restraint.
¹⁹

The medical records relating to these two admissions might lead to the conclusion that Gifford’s violent and irrational behaviour was occasioned by excessive drinking. However, medical notes relating to a third admission to the Cornwall Lunatic Asylum, On 24 October 1871, reveal that his problems were of a more fundamental nature. (Four years earlier, in 1867, the ‘Carew Building’ for private patients, named after the Right Honourable Reginald Pole Carew and his son William Henry Pole Carew – leading lights in the establishment and management of the asylum – had been opened on the same site. From 1873 the asylum held a total of 760 patients, of whom 50 were private.)

Now aged 64, and residing with his wife at Kirland House, Bodmin,
²⁰
it was noted that the ‘pre-disposing’ cause of Gifford’s present ‘attack’ was ‘intemperance’, and that he had suffered ‘five of six’ similar such ‘attacks’ in the past.

This time, Gifford was examined first by Dr Bartholomew G. Derry of Bodmin, who noted as follows: ‘Says he hears voices as of a man and woman disputing together – says he hears a voice speaking to him telling [him] he is the Lord Jesus Christ.’ And Dr Thomas Q. Couch of Bodmin, who noted in Gifford: ‘Great incoherency of speech; and great restlessness of manners. Says he cannot be mad, as he is only so in particular states of the wind! Has many delusions.’
²¹

Finally, and most significant, is Gifford’s answer to the following question, asked of him by the two doctors who examined him: ‘Have any … relatives of the Patient been the subject of Insanity, or other, and cerebral disease?’To which Gifford replied: ‘Father.’

The conclusion is that Gifford suffered from auditory hallucinations and delusions, and that this, rather than drink, was the root of his problems. It may also be concluded that his father before him, Richard Ireland Gifford, experienced similar mental health problems. And it seems likely that it was on the advice – or possibly on the orders – of his doctor, that Gifford made the decision to relocate to Bodmin from Plymouth in 1860, because here he could be attended by the doctors and nurses of the town’s Cornwall Lunatic Asylum, who were skilled in the care of the insane.

Insanity, as has been demonstrated, played havoc with the lives of at least four generations of the Gifford family. How much insight each sufferer had into his or her individual illness is not known. However, the thoughts of the 80-year-old John Attersoll Gifford in January 1888, as he signed the document committing his son, Richard Ireland Gifford, to the Cornwall Lunatic Asylum – where he himself had so often been incarcerated as a patient – may be imagined.

The conclusion is, therefore, that some members of the Gifford family were genetically predisposed to mental illness, and that Emma was no exception. And as for those Giffords mentioned above who experienced mental illness, there is no question that their disordered lives impinged greatly and deleteriously upon those closest to them – Thomas Hardy being a case in point. No wonder Hardy’s acrimonious meeting with Emma’s father, John Attersoll Gifford, in the summer of 1872 had come as such a shock to the young man.

One day, in the not too distant future, the genetic basis for what are regarded as mental disorders, such as paranoia and delusions, and the mechanism by which they are transmitted from one generation to another, will be elucidated in more detail. And this, in turn, May lead to a cure for these conditions.

In March 1910 Hardy visited the grave of his friend, the poet Swinburne, on the Isle of Wight, and composed a poem entitled
A Singer Asleep
in his memory. In May, when he and Emma were in London as usual – staying in a rented flat – there came the announcement that King Edward VII had died.

Now aged 69, Hardy was as active as ever. Advising Lady Grove about her writing, he confessed modestly ‘that I am no authority’. He had, he said, ‘written heaps of ungrammatical sentences’, and had learnt his grammar by ‘general reasoning, rather than by rules’. To Sidney Trist, editor of the publication
Animals’ Guardian
, he explained how difficult it was to extend ‘the principle of equal justice to all the animal kingdom’, when nature herself was ‘absolutely indifferent to justice’.
¹

His name having appeared in the Birthday Honours List in June 1910, Hardy went to Marlborough House the following month to be invested with the Order of Merit by the new king, George V. When Emma returned to Max Gate without him, Hardy wrote to her saying how depressing it was to come home late in the evening to a ‘dark, silent flat’ which was ‘full of the ghosts of all those who have visited us there’.
²
On the subject of suffrage, he held that a woman had as much right to vote as a man, but wondered ‘if she may not do mischief with her vote’. What the nature of this mischief might be, he did not specify.
³

In August Hardy was complaining to the superintendent of the Dorchester police about some boys whom the servants had caught stealing apples from the garden at Max Gate. He wished the superintendent to enquire into the matter, and ‘at least caution the boys’ – whose names were known to him. However, he did not wish them ‘to be punished further than that’ (which presumably would have meant the birch).
⁴

That November, Hardy was honoured by being given the Freedom of Dorchester (his native county town). In December he described as ‘such a loss’ the death of ‘Kitsey’ the ‘study cat’, who was accustomed to sleeping ‘on any clean sheets of paper’ and ‘to be much with me’.
⁵
By this time, Florence Dugdale had become a permanent feature of the Hardy household.

The year 1911 saw Hardy energetically continuing with his programme of visits to all the English cathedrals. In April he was at Lichfield, Worcester and Hereford. In June, together with his brother, Henry, he was at Carlisle. This latter visit to the Lake District gave him the opportunity to see the grave of the poet Wordsworth at Grasmere church, and to take in Chester Cathedral on the return journey. In July, this time in company with his sister, Katharine, he visited Devon, where yet another cathedral was ticked off the list; that of Exeter. In November the Dorchester Debating and Dramatic Society staged performances of plays derived from his
Wessex
novels.

The sinking of the steamship
Titanic
, Off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in April 1912, occasioned Hardy to write a poem,
The Convergence of the Twain
, in aid of a fund for the victims. This season, instead of renting a flat in London, he and Emma stayed in a hotel.

On Hardy’s 72nd birthday he was visited at Max Gate by the poets Henry Newbolt and W.B. Yeats, who had been asked by the Royal Society of Literature to present him with that society’s Gold Medal in celebration of the occasion. Newbolt, in setting the scene, cannot disguise his discomfiture:

The dinner lives on in my memory as beyond all others unusual and anxious. Mr. and Mrs. Hardy faced one another the longer way of the table: Yeats and I sat rather too well spaced at the two sides: we could hold no private communication with each other … Hardy, an exquisitely remote figure, with the air of a nervous stranger, asked me a hundred questions about my impressions of the architecture of Rome and Venice, from which cities I had just returned. Through this conversation I could hear and see Mrs. Hardy giving Yeats much curious information about two very fine cats, who sat to right and left of her plate on the table itself. In this situation Yeats looked like an Eastern Magician overpowered by a Northern Witch – and I too felt myself spellbound by the famous pair of Blue Eyes, which surpassed all that I have ever seen.