Trials of Passion (17 page)

On the 23rd, the eminent Sir William Gull (1816–90) of Guy's Hospital and Dr William Orange, Medical Superintendent of the new Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, were dispatched by the Home Secretary to Lewes Prison to make an unbiased medical appraisal of Christiana. The earlier assessments had been done for defence counsel and so had a less objective status.

Gull – the son of a Colchester barge owner and his industrious wife, who had been left early on to bring up her eight children single-handedly – had come up the hard way through university and the medical ranks to become one of Victorian England's great society doctors. He was a man of vast energy, highly respected for what was reputed to be an outstanding clinical talent. In 1843, as a young man,
he had briefly been in charge of the ward for lunatics at Guy's, but he was a generalist and by the 1850s he was attached to Guy's as a ‘full physician'. He left in the 1860s to run a lucrative high-society practice, always retaining his consultancy at Guy's. Eventually, he became the hospital's governor.

The year before he came to examine Christiana, Gull had attended the Prince of Wales during his battle with typhoid. He was knighted in January 1872, just in time for his visit to Lewes Prison. This may account for the exorbitant fee of fifty guineas that he charged, which despite assiduous and repeated billing, travelled from Treasury to Home Office and back, queried by a variety of civil servants, until it was finally paid in June that year. Gull wrote amply for the medical journals and had made contributions to the understanding of melancholia, or ‘hypochondriasis'. He was also one of the first clinicians to name and study anorexia, differentiating it from the tuberculosis so prevalent amongst young women of the time, and accurately describing its symptoms. He was known to be good with women patients, and also, by furnishing special scholarships, encouraged women into the medical profession.

Dr William Orange, junior to Gull in the Edmunds affair and Christiana's second examiner, had been deputy superintendent at England's first asylum dedicated especially to criminals, Broadmoor, since its opening in May 1863. Then it was a facility for women. Male ‘criminal lunatics' arrived only the following year when the complement of special buildings had been added. In 1870 Dr Orange, then thirty-three, became the chief medical superintendent of the hospital and introduced a more humane, rehabilitative system. Though once attacked by an inmate, he was held in great affection by the patients, who briefly included M'Naghten and also the artist Richard Dadd. Dadd left a portrait of Orange and painted murals in his house.

That same day, 23 January, Sir William penned the eight-sided letter to the Home Secretary detailing their visit of over four hours to Christiana Edmunds. Gull points out that they would have gone on longer, made a repeat visit or asked for additional evidence, had
they thought it necessary. But four hours of ‘personal communication' and ‘examination' had proved ‘sufficient for a conclusion'. Christiana Edmunds was in their view most definitely ‘a person of unsound mind'.

The doctors report that Christiana appears to have had ‘a tranquil, easy and indifferent childhood and womanhood up to a period of about three years ago ... since which time there is evidence of mental perversion and defective memory'. Though she suffered no special crisis beforehand, ‘there is proof of an indifferent intellectual state which led up to the present state'. Citing the madness of her father and the hysteria of her sister, the doctors note that her ‘physical organisation presents marks of low cerebral and feeble cerebral organisation which characterises this class of criminals'. Miss Edmunds's narrative to them of her life and feelings since September 1870 they consider to have been given ‘in good faith', and ‘truthful so far as her perverted feelings admitted'. The crime of murder ‘she seems incapable of realizing as having been committed by her, though she fully admits the purchasing and distributing the poisons as put forth in the several counts against her'. Maddest of all, she ‘even justifies her conduct and in an insane way tries still to give a justification of it'.

Gull and Orange don't mention their fellow professional Dr Beard, but it may not be too great a leap to imagine that Christiana did, as part of the justification for her own actions. Such feminine perceptions or even misperceptions of cause, when they are shared, can easily feed into a professional designation of insanity. Passionate love is, after all, ever a form of mental derangement from the norm. The doctors emerge certain that the ‘acts referred to and acted by her were the fruit of a weak and disordered intellect with confused and perverted feelings of a most marked insane character'. Christiana Edmunds ought to be treated accordingly.

The Secretary of State acted instantly on the medical report. The very next day, the 24th, Christiana's death penalty was respited. This does not mean her sentence as a whole was yet permanently commuted: ‘perhaps it will be better to do nothing in that respect, at all
events at present,' the letter to Sussex County Prison, also carrying the doctors' report, stated. This was in no way a pardon, or a reconsideration of what Christiana's sentence might be. It was simply a removal of the death penalty for the present. The letter also noted that Christiana could be moved at once to Broadmoor. A return letter from the governor of the Sussex County Prison on 25 June confirms that Christiana is now ‘respited until further signification of Her Majesty's Pleasure'. Christiana has not been absolved of her crime because of her medically certified insanity: she is guilty but insane, and under the provisions of the 1800 Criminal Lunatics Act subject to ‘safe custody' rather than to judicial murder.

The Home Secretary's action was not universally applauded, particularly since it was the second such decision in a matter of weeks. The
Spectator
and the
Pall Mall Gazette
, quoting it on 27 January, argued: ‘The plain meaning of the respite of Christiana Edmunds is that a weak Secretary has allowed himself to be bullied by the
Daily Telegraph
into an act of cruelty (confinement) towards an unhappy but most wicked convict, to destroy respect for the law by placing the mad-doctors above it, and to liberate an immensely numerous class (those insane by descent) from all fear of legal retribution for crime.' Moreover, Home Secretary Bruce had reversed a verdict on the ‘private unexplained report of two doctors', and thereby overturned a judgement made by judge and jury. This was tantamount to undermining the law.

Much has changed, but the battle between the so-called mad-doctors, who, some felt, were gaining too much influence, and those who wanted punishment for crime unmediated by psychological considerations, still goes on. The year 1872 marked an early moment in an argument in which the public, given the rise and rise of the popular press, had an increasingly vocal say. In the specialist journals Christiana Edmunds's case, like that of the Reverend Ian Watson, would be fought out for months to come. Even those who were on the side of the doctors thought the case, with its swift reversal of a jury's verdict, had brought the law into disrepute. It was ‘injurious to
the welfare of society' for uncertainty to exist about ‘whether a person shall be convicted as a criminal or acquitted as insane'.

The long-time champion of psychological medicine, Forbes Winslow, saw the battle as one between punishment and compassion, the two axes of Victorian morality. In an article on ‘Insanity and Homicide' he cites the approbation of one critic of the first ilk for a judge who, in sentencing a prisoner to death for sheep-stealing, says, ‘I do not sentence you to be hanged for stealing sheep, but ... that sheep may not be stolen.' This, Winslow states, shows a complete failure ‘to grasp the real nature of insanity as a disease for which the sufferer is not responsible, and which renders him irresponsible for what he does. Were one half of the lunatic population of the country hanged the spectacle would have no effect upon the insane person who cannot help doing what he does.' He gives the example of a boy in school who wilfully pulls faces at the headmaster as against one who suffers from tics and chorea. ‘The one is a proper object of punishment; the other is a sad object of compassion, whom it would be a barbarous and cruel thing to punish.' He points out that to execute a madman is no punishment to him and no warning to others, but simply an act of extreme inhumanity and cruelty.

Only if the notoriously imperfect test of insanity is changed can the current impasse be navigated, he argues. It is not a question of whether the accused can distinguish between right and wrong and whether she knows she is acting against the law of the land. This omits ‘the form of insanity in which the power ... to choose the better and reject the worse – the power of self-control – is destroyed'. The homicidal impulse can be irresistible. Esquirol's continental language of madness here comes in to support the English doctors once more. People can and do suffer from an irresistible ‘impulse – sudden, instantaneous, unreflecting, and uncontrollable'. Such concepts will be part of the mind doctors' argument against legal definitions of insanity and criminal responsibility, until these are finally changed halfway through the next century. An anonymous writer in the
BMJ
of February 1872 further and presciently notes, as if he had read writings
on psychosis of a far later era, that the crime itself can be ‘the first symptom of the lurking and latent disease' that has silently eaten away at the mind of the accused to produce, after a ‘sudden strain', the ‘brain disaster'. Madness is a subtle matter.

Indeed, one way to make sense of Christiana's crime is to think of her as someone in the grip of an inner psychotic structure. Masquerading (to herself) as the sophisticated, flirtatious but poised, letter-writing Dorothea, she has been able to control her erotic obsession with the idealized Charles Beard, or we might say keep it secret, split off from her everyday self, until it explodes in the violent poisoning attack on Emily. This is the first outward manifestation of her delusion. In this view, the force with which she thrusts the poisoned chocolate into Emily Beard's mouth is the wordless eruption of the illness she suffers – an obsessive erotic investment in Charles which in her inner scenario he returns.

‘La Sposa', that abstracted, and made foreign, entity of the eternal wife, Emily, is someone the world and Charles need to be rid of. Then, magically, spinster Christiana, or at least Dorothea, will have Charles all to herself. After the murderous act, Christiana can protest her innocence to Charles because she
feels
innocent: to prove that innocence to him, she will carelessly broadcast poisoned chocolates, talk to the police and even stand in the witness box during the inquest on Sidney Barker, pointing the finger at Maynard. She is unmoved by the trial accounts of the death of little Barker, or the sufferings her poison has caused: all of this is split off from the narrative she lives inwardly. It happens in a separate world. Only the story of Charles, Dorothea and ‘La Sposa' matters. So when her ‘Caro Mio' doctor tells her he has blurted the secret of the Dorothea letters to La Sposa a long time back, the betrayal sets off another poisoning spree aimed at La Sposa and all those whom Christiana imagines as somehow ranked against herself.

Notable in the sexual politics of the case and the tensions it mirrors is the fact that Christiana parodies the image of girlish Victorian femininity – one attached to good behaviour and fetching looks. She
attacks through that most feminine and nurturing of modes: poison robed in sweetness. Christiana would like to be a good and sweet woman, whatever the bitterness within. It may even be that in the symbolic universe she inhabits, her declaration of pregnancy after the lawyers conspire not to put her love story on the witness stand is a way of saying that Charles started the whole business. He ‘injected' her first with his male poison. When she takes on an active male role, it is to carry on the process, injecting her chocolates and sweetmeats in the same way and, notably, forcing her poison into Emily's mouth.

But what of the man who, whatever his intents, could be considered a precipitating factor in Christiana's derailment? There is no record of Dr Charles Beard visiting Christiana, either in prison or during her lengthy stay in Broadmoor. But his name does figure in relation to hers once more, whether out of guilt or compassion or a mixture of both cannot be known. It appears on a petition, dated 7 February1872, though put in train before the Home Secretary's speedy respite. The covering letter is from Charles Lamb, Christiana's Brighton attorney. He is lodging this petition with the Home Secretary, he says, because it stands as ‘a way of proving, if necessary, that the Public were not indifferent to the evidence which was tendered at the trial in proof of the Prisoner's state of mind during the commission of the acts laid to her charge'. He underlines that Dr Beard and his wife Emily are both signatories.

The text of the petition repeats the two aspects of Christiana's defence: ‘there is no ground for supposing the Prisoner to have been actuated by direct malice towards the child or any other person to have partaken of the poisonous chocolates'. Secondly, having regard to the insanity in her family, to ‘her own partial paralysis and hysteria' and to ‘the motiveless and irrational character of many of the acts committed by her', even though she may not have been proved legally insane ‘her mind was in so diseased and unnatural a state as greatly to weaken ordinary moral restraints, to diminish her responsibility for her action and to render her a fitting object for the exercise of the Royal Clemencies'.

The petitioners include in first place the mayor, aldermen and town councillors of Brighton. Charles and Emily Beard come next, along with all the other Brightonians to whom Christiana's poisoned packages were addressed. Even Emily Beard's father signs, together with some four hundred ‘intelligent and respectable inhabitants and visitors of Brighton'. It is tempting to think that some of the women signatories recognized the plight of this spinster, and with one part of themselves cheered her rebellion against passive acquiescence to convention. Certainly, the pathos of Christiana's situation – the way love, which ever bears the freight of imagination, can so easily slip into obsessive delusion, and overturn the mind – was something this seaside town of many pleasures could well understand, even if the law itself continued to reject aberrant passion as a mitigating circumstance.