Inconvenient People (14 page)

His early fame came with his agitation for the protection of child industrial labourers – particularly the infant mine-workers – which then broadened into moves to provide education for pauper children (on a charitable basis) and to improve the housing of the working classes. The poor were not to be empowered to improve their own lot, or to increase their own rights: Shaftesbury deplored trades unionism and the concept of universal suffrage. Instead, it was for gentlemen to reach down and offer the hand of kindness and charity. Unfortunately for the Perceval–Paternoster circle of agitators, Shaftesbury next directed his benevolence towards the nation’s lunatics, and in 1834 became chairman of the Metropolitan Commissioners. The immense respect he had won appeared to allow Shaftesbury the final word on all matters concerning madness. As his diary entries reveal, the important public role of chairman had been filled by a gentleman-amateur who felt evangelically obliged to take on these tasks as part of his portfolio of worldly burdens:

Here was a man straight from the social, political and religious world of John Perceval, and they had been near-contemporaries at Harrow; but their mature views diverged widely. While Shaftesbury took pride in his unchanging opinions, Mr Perceval’s breakdown had brought him the freedom to examine an issue from many viewpoints and had hugely enlarged his range of sympathies. And Mr Perceval would come to change his mind on important aspects of the lunacy question: on the role of the local magistracy he would move from despairing disapproval of the provincial JPs to a keen advocacy of localism; and he would shift from an appreciation that private asylums could offer
a discreet alternative to the county asylum system, to viewing all private madhouse proprietorship as inherently corrupt. His detractors saw these changes of heart as evidence of ongoing intellectual infirmity; rather, they show an analytical mind that constantly turned over each subtle point, attempting, across three decades, to reach what Mr Perceval felt were the correct conclusions.

Mr Perceval wrote of Shaftesbury that he could ‘scarcely believe that he is the man that was educated with us at Harrow – that gentlemanly and public-spirited school’. Both men wondered in the 1830s what should be done to offset the worst social and cultural effects of industrialism–mercantilism. As High Tories, they would have preferred that the pastoral landlord–tenant nexus had never ended, but it had – so was it for the state or for certain spiritually enlightened individuals to counter the ill effects of the new age? Mr Perceval eventually (and reluctantly) came to the conclusion that only state intervention would have had the power, when he was asylum-bound, to free him and to do so publicly, as a warning to others. However, he could not let go of the notion that small, less visible, private pressures should be brought to bear in policing the nation’s asylums. A point of conflict with Captain Saumarez was Mr Perceval’s insistence that men of God should be appointed at every level of lunacy care – as inspectors, magistrates and asylum staff. He appeared, in his campaigning, to be seeking a Benthamite big-state, but with individual churchmen operating at the blunt end. Bringing God into everything irritated some of his fellow campaigners but it is something that Shaftesbury did too, which made the two men odd opponents, when they agreed on so many first principles.

The campaigners got nowhere with their demands for a lunacy Select Committee. However, there was immense behind-the-scenes activity in the early 1840s. An Act of 1842 expanded the staff of the Metropolitan Commissioners by two barristers and two doctors and allowed them a trial period of three years to extend their remit beyond the metropolis to include inspection of all types of institution where lunatics might be kept throughout the nation (including charitable hospitals, the lunatic wards of workhouses, prisons housing the criminally insane, and military and naval hospitals). One of the fruits of this expansion beyond London was the report of the Commission in 1844 to the Lord Chancellor, which recounted many of the poor conditions and patient abuses that Mr
Perceval and others had been publicising for years. It may well be the case that the torrent of eyewitness accounts and criticism coming from Mr Perceval and his associates had percolated into official minds – so that while being officially shunned, the campaigners were instead succeeding slowly by the ‘transmission of ideas’, as one historian has noted.

With regard to wrongful incarceration, worries were expressed in the 1844 report regarding a small number of individuals confined in public asylums and charitable hospitals; but no private licensed house was cited in connection with doubtful certification or prolonged detention. The individuals concerned were, according to the Metropolitan Commissioners, ‘persons who are termed morally insane, about the propriety of whose detention there are frequently great doubts’. However, they stated that: ‘We have rarely found any patient confined in a lunatic asylum who, as far as we could judge, had been sent there whilst in a decidedly sane state.’ Rather, they believed, there had been a strong social or moral, rather than medical, case for incarceration: habitual drunkards who either assaulted their wives and families or threatened to do so; ‘imbeciles’ and ‘idiots’ who exposed themselves or otherwise behaved indecently in public; a wife who had repeatedly threatened to poison her husband; a ‘quarrelsome idiot’ who had threatened to stab someone. Instead of malicious certification, the Commissioners concluded, the larger problem was the difficulty in deciding when recovery had occurred and at what point liberation should take place – John Perceval’s very own problem of 1832, in fact.

This validation of the status quo within the private asylum system was no help at all to Mr Perceval and his fellow campaigners. Nor were a series of infamous murders in 1843. On Saturday 22 April, thirty-seven-year-old William Ferry escaped from Mr Kent’s Asylum at Sheriff Hill in Gateshead, near Newcastle, and returned to his family home on the quayside at Monkwearmouth. Here, his wife, Hannah, and his father-in-law deliberately baffled the keepers’ attempts at recapture, claiming they did not know Ferry’s whereabouts. On the Monday morning, Mrs Ferry went to the local Poor Law officer, admitted that she was sheltering her husband and implored that he be allowed to stay at home with her and their children, since the insanity for which he had been incarcerated for two years had been cured. The official noted how rational Mr Ferry appeared, and how much in need of a male wage the family was, and so agreed to this, writing to Mr Kent
that he would not return his patient. That night, Ferry battered to death his wife and adolescent daughter. At his trial at Durham Assizes three months later, the jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity, and Ferry spent the rest of his life confined as a criminal lunatic.

Also in 1843, delusional Glasgow woodturner turned actor Daniel M’Naughten fired a pistol into the back of Prime Minister Robert Peel’s private secretary, Edward Drummond, believing Drummond to be Peel himself. Drummond died from the infection in the wound. Twenty-seven-year-old M’Naughten had been haunting Whitehall for days in search of his quarry, believing that he was under surveillance by the Tory party at all hours of the day: ‘They follow and persecute me wherever I go, and have destroyed my peace of mind . . . In fact, they wish to murder me,’ he claimed. M’Naughten went on to make English legal history: the ‘M’Naughten Rules’ laid down for over a century the parameters of what could and could not constitute insanity in a legal defence at a murder trial. M’Naughten spent the rest of his life as a criminal lunatic, dying in Broadmoor Hospital in 1865.

Then there was the case of artist Richard Dadd, who had become insane and dispatched his father with a knife and razor in Cobham Park, Kent, in August 1843, and then attempted to kill a passenger as he fled by boat to France. He was committed to Royal Bethlehem Hospital the following year, before being transferred to Broadmoor.

These cases of 1843 provided extremely stony ground in which Mr Perceval tried to plant his proposals to minimise custodial care for the unsound of mind. The madman who did not appear to be mad had reappeared in the English public mind, in his most bloody mode. Ferry, M’Naughten and Dadd were full-blown delusionals who had walked the streets with no obvious markers of insanity about them. Who now cared if a few eccentrics were taken out of circulation if this was the price of protecting public safety? Reports of lunatics and ‘idiots’ being killed in asylums or single-patient care did shock the nation but failed to match the terror that mad-folk evoked in the public – and legislative – imagination. No matter how much genuine sympathy Mr Perceval and his friends were able to drum up, fear of lunatics triumphed every time.

But then in the spring of 1845, the campaigners got wind of Shaftesbury’s plans for an overhaul of English lunacy legislation, and
realised that it was time to consolidate their separate and slightly diffuse efforts. They decided to become the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society – an unwieldy name that mockers would reformulate as ‘The Lunatics’ Society’. The apostrophe would wander around from time to time in their own publications, and sometimes an ‘s’ would be added to ‘Friend’, all of which reinforced the impression of a quaint and rather unworldly set of naïfs, all at sea in a world of parliamentarians, Lord Chancellors, doctors, lawyers and asylum keepers. The Society announced their arrival by taking out newspaper advertisements such as the one opposite.

Luke James Hansard complained about ‘the railway speed and confusing commotion of this legislative proceeding’; writing that these ‘lunatic bills’ were ‘steaming hot-headedly on their course’, while what was required was the calm consideration that a Select Committee would bring. However, members of parliament and other influential men did begin to lend an ear to the evidence that the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society had collected. Around eight Liberal MPs and an equal number of Tories gave their backing to the Society, both sets of parliamentarians being opposed for their different reasons to the monolithic, centralised Poor-Law-style lunacy administration that was being hatched. Though the Society would never number more than sixty full members, and received little funding from any source other than its membership’s own pockets, it attracted some heavyweight backing. Most prominent among its supporters were Thomas Wakley, Radical Liberal MP, founder (in 1823) of
The Lancet
and coroner for Middlesex; and Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, also a Radical Liberal MP, champion of Chartism, religious liberty and prisoners’ rights. New cases were continually making contact and calling at the Society’s offices, which were originally in Coleman Street, near the Bank of England, and subsequently at Gilbert Bolden’s place of residence, 44 Craven Street, Charing Cross.

ALLEGED LUNATICS’ FRIEND SOCIETY, founded July, 1845.—At a
MEETING
of several Gentlemen feeling deeply interested in behalf of their fellow-creatures, subjected to confinement as lunatic patients,

It was unanimously resolved :—

That a Society be now formed, to be entitled “The Lunatics’ Friend Society,” and it has subsequently been agreed to name the same “The Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society.”

That this Society is formed for the protection of the British subject from unjust confinement, on the grounds of mental derangement, and for the redress of persons so confined; also for the protection of all persons confined as lunatic patients from cruel and improper treatment.

That this Society will receive applications from persons complaining of being unjustly treated, or from their friends, aid them in obtaining legal advice, and otherwise assist and afford them all proper protection.