Trials of Passion (7 page)

Southall contained only some nine ‘lunatics'. A stay there did not come cheap: two guineas a week for the better rooms. In today's terms, depending on the measure used, this translates as around £200 (using the retail price index) or £1470 (when compared to average earnings) per week. A lengthy confinement in such asylum style was not something a mother with four children still to raise and little income could afford. Unsurprisingly, William had to be brought home from Southall in August 1844 ‘from considerations of expense'.

Christiana was then fifteen. As the eldest daughter, it is likely that she had to help care for her father. Together with her siblings, she would have heard his manic outbursts and the overblown fantasies of grandeur, loss and resentment they contained, all with their emotional and in part material core of truth. William had indeed fallen from greater heights than he now occupied. We could speculate that contained in his insistence on millions acquired and cities built, there is a family narrative of a decline unjustly propelled by others – his accusers at the Margate companies. This could well at some level have infected Christiana's adolescent sense of herself. There are traces
of her father's malady in her own hypersensitivity about her status and her prickly arrogance: her complaints about her jailers, her insistence on being treated like a lady; the straining for equality that her letter to Dr Beard emits – with its Burns quotes and its fashionable smatterings of Italian. Class, after all, is central to Victorian life and its demarcations. Hanging on to gentility as well as reputation is crucial.

The financial plight of the Edmundses is clear from the fact that a mere six months or so after William's return from the private asylum, he is sent off in March 1845 to the far shabbier Peckham House, an institution with a less than sterling reputation. Often overcrowded, Peckham House by 1846 contained 402 inmates, the largest proportion of them pauper lunatics, sometimes as many as four to a small room, and with very few keepers. The food was insufficient and met with criticism from the Commissioners on Lunacy, who had begun investigative work in 1844 just before the 1845 Lunacy Act, which enshrined them as a centralized overseeing government body. Indeed the Commissioners had entertained thoughts of closing Peckham down, but given the lack of public asylum places, ‘if licences were withdrawn from houses containing large numbers of paupers, there would be no alternative, but to send the patients to workhouses, or to board with other paupers, where they would not have the care which they now receive under regular visitation and supervision'. Apparently, by 1847 the situation at Peckham House had improved, but by 15 March that year, as Dr Henry Armstrong of Peckham House explained at Christiana's trial, Williams was dead, after suffering three years of ‘general paralysis'.

There is no written record of how William's years of madness and ultimate death in confinement affected the family. But it is clear that his madness rumbled through their lives – whether we understand this in psychological ways or along the biological hereditarian lines the Victorian doctors then preferred. In that hothouse that a family is, his excessive and eccentric behaviour seems to have affected several of the Edmunds children and become something of a family trait.

Christiana's teenage years were coloured by her father's illness, the
family's decline and financial difficulties. She was nearing her twentieth birthday when her father died. Her youngest brother was eight and would soon begin to have the epileptic fits that would have him permanently committed to Earlswood Asylum, a vast institution at Reigate, principally for those with learning disabilities, whose patron was the Queen. According to his mother, Arthur had been an ‘idiot' from an early age, a condition which the family, but not the doctors, attributed to ‘a blow to the head'. A little while after or perhaps even before the father's death, the family rented a house in Canterbury at 3 Watling Street – perhaps so as to avoid too many questions from Margate acquaintances. Help for Arthur was sought from two doctors here, both of whom were attached to the Kent and Canterbury Hospital. Dr Hallowes and Dr Andrews signed the 1860 medical certificate that committed the young man to Earlswood, where he lived until his death in 1866. Christiana and her mother may then have moved back to Margate before moving again to those fatal lodgings in Brighton.

After the death of her father, Christiana herself went through some kind of episode. Around 1853, she was sent to London for treatment. Like a case of hysteria from the annals of Jean-Martin Charcot or the young Freud, she was then paralysed down one side and her feet were so affected that she was unable to walk. In her deposition, her mother emphasizes that Christiana ‘suffered for many years from Hysteria and when a child used to walk in her sleep'. It seems the challenges of becoming a Victorian woman would stop her walking in her twenties when wide awake.

Whether Christiana's ‘hysteria' was in part the effect of an early unrequited love or a way of escaping an unwanted marriage, whether it was due to a lack of opportunities for intelligent women, genteel but poor, or occasioned by a lack of suitable suitors, it is a fact that at one point she chose what would later become known as a ‘flight into illness', and remained unattached. She became one of those one in four Victorian women classified as ‘spinster'. Meanwhile her younger sisters, though not unaffected by the family's decline, did marry. The
dynamics of sibling relations, the way their mother may have characterized their successes and failures, the frustrations of the family situation, all inevitably played their role in shaping the rather girlish woman Christiana would become.

All the Edmunds girls were educated – Christiana at a private school, her later records show – and reached a ‘superior' level of attainment. Louisa Agnes, four years younger than Christiana, worked for some time as a governess in London. It may have been here that she met the widower and naval surgeon Julian Watson Bradshaw: it was certainly in London that she married him in December 1862, when she was twenty-nine. It's tempting to speculate that the marriage didn't go well for her, since in a moment of ‘violent hysteria' she tried to throw herself out of a window and was only saved by her mother and a servant holding her down. Or it may be that Louisa's ‘violent hysteria' happened at a time closer to Christiana's, before she left home for London. Either way, by 1867, at the age of only thirty-three, four years into her marriage, Louisa was dead, buried in Margate. There was no inquest, so a second suicide attempt can't be inferred.

Christiana's and Louisa's labile and excessive states seem to have found an echo in their brother William. There are few traces of him in the historical record, but according to the memorial sent to the Home Secretary after Christiana's trial by Sydney Cornish Harrington of Datchworth, William as a young man had dramatically threatened suicide when he was refused permission to marry Sydney's sister. So great were the family fears on both sides, that William's wish was granted. His own family seems to have provided a fertile training ground for his later profession. At the time of Christiana's trial he was head of the asylum on Robben Island, which also served as a leper colony and a political prison, much later to house Nelson Mandela for eighteen years.

The only Edmunds child whose behaviour seems to have been unaffected by the early family drama was Mary Burn, the middle sister. At the age of twenty-four, on 18 September 1856 in Henley on
Thames, she married the Reverend Edward Foreman of Amberley in Sussex. Sister Mary seems to have lived an ordinary middle-class Victorian life, giving birth to five children, the youngest of whom went up to Cambridge. But Mary's elder sister's acts plunged her into a different world. She attended Christiana's trial, helped where she could and also cared for her tireless mother, who died only in April 1893, five years before Mary herself. There is no record of what Mary thought of Christiana's passionate delusion.

5.
Sex and the Victorian Hysteric

As a young woman classified as a hysteric in the 1850s, Christiana would have been understood as suffering from an illness that engaged both her nerves and almost certainly her uterine system. This latter incorporated what we would now name ‘sexual', a word whose meaning shifted rapidly from that time on. J. Crichton-Browne, the influential medical director of the West Riding Asylum, lecturing to students at the Leeds Medical School, points out:

... mental phenomena in health and disease ... are influenced in no slight degree by the sexual functions, and they exercise a reciprocal control ... The period of the rut in animals is accompanied by mental activity, which borders upon morbid excitement, while the gravid state of the uterus in females of our own species may lead not merely to change of temper, morbid appetites, and capricious eccentricity, but to chorea [tics, or involuntary movement], somnambulism, amaurosis [darkening or loss of vision], convulsions, or mental derangement. On the other hand, a condition of mental agitation may derange the menstrual discharge, and ideas may modifiy the nutrition of the sexual apparatus.

Crichton-Browne goes on to give an example of a hysterical pregnancy in which the power of the delusion induced changes in the Vascularity of the uterus and the ovaries'. In this lecture he wants to distinguish between what he calls ordinary hysteria – which involves ‘incontinence of the emotions', ‘moral obliquity', ‘towering egotism' and ‘positive delusions' – and the even more serious ‘hysterical mania'. While ‘the mental affection is the more prominent feature' in common hysteria, in hysterical mania both the uterus and the brain
are definitely in play. Crichton-Browne is a believer in the physiological base of mental illness, and although he states that there is no necessary continuum between his first and second kind of hysteria, it only takes a small increase in ‘intensity and persistency' for recognized ‘mental derangement' of the second sort to come into effect.

It's clear that, for Crichton-Browne, the very condition of being female and possessing a uterus is a dangerous business, prone to tumble one into insanity at the merest provocation. The very biological factors that differentiate women from men – menstruation, pregnancy, lactation and menopause – are seen as trigger points for madness. The whole reproductive system enchains women to uterine, and thus nervous, disease. Meanwhile female desire, itself, as the leading Victorian gynaecologist William Acton underlined, giving scientific back-up to the period's ideological presumptions, is an aberration. In his
Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs
(1857), which deals mainly with male sexuality and the danger to vital energy that masturbation constitutes, he notes that ‘happily for society', the majority of women ‘are not very much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind'. After the opening of the new divorce courts in 1858 and its examples of sexually desiring women, he revised his views slightly:

What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally. It is too true, I admit, as the divorce courts show, that there are some few women who have sexual desires so strong that they surpass those of men, and shock public feeling by their consequences. I admit, of course, the existence of sexual excitement terminating even in nymphomania, a form of insanity that those accustomed to visit lunatic asylums must be fully conversant with; but, with these sad exceptions there can be no doubt that sexual feeling in the female is in the majority of cases in abeyance, and that it requires positive and considerable excitement to be roused at all...

In his footnote on nymphomania, Acton discusses the excision of the clitoris, which has been recommended as a cure, only to say that he
doesn't consider it effective, since there is also ‘special sensibility' in several portions of the vaginal canal.

Not all the mid-nineteenth-century mind doctors in Britain bought into the uterine or ovarian theory of hysteria and presumed it had a physiological base. Argument was rife, and continued at least until the end of the century. Nor did all of them agree with the guiding Victorian notion that the existence of female desire was itself an indication of a classifiable condition, such as nymphomania, calling for confinement in an asylum. But many shared a sense of the precarious nature of being woman. Women are both endangered and dangerous.

Julius Althaus (1833–1900), a cultivated German-born and -trained neurologist, prolific writer and eventual founder of the Maida Vale Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London, for instance, is keen to leave the uterus to one side and focus on hysteria's emotional character alone. Althaus had briefly worked with the young Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris, and at times sounds more radical than that French Napoleon of the Neuroses himself – certainly in his conception of hysteria. All symptoms of hysteria, Althaus writes in 1866, ‘have their prototype in those vital actions by which grief, terror, disappointment and other painful emotions and affections are manifested under ordinary circumstances, and which become signs of hysteria as soon as they attain a certain degree of intensity'. Women whose ‘sensibility is blunt', Althaus argues, ‘never become hysterical; while those who are readily accessible to impressions coming from without, who feel acutely and are liable to strong emotions, are certain to become hysterical and made to suffer mental agony or prolonged pain'.

The Protean range of symptoms they may then manifest can include any or several of the following: convulsive attacks, fainting fits, pain, cough, difficulty in swallowing, vomiting, asthma, hiccups, palpitations of the heart, general and partial loss of power, paralysis, anaesthesia and hyperaesthesia. These are extreme symptoms, and yet this is an ordinary enough condition, one that ‘impressionable' women who are not particularly ‘strong-minded' are prone to suffer
from in an age that requires a ‘long and laborious training' in ‘self-control'.