Inconvenient People (15 page)

That the Society will endeavour to procure a reform in the laws and treatment affecting the arrest, detention, and release of persons treated as of unsound mind.

VICE-PRESIDENTS.

Trustees—Sir John Wm. Lubbock, Bart. ; Luke James Hansard, Esq. ;

John T. Perceval, Esq.

Treasurer—Luke James Hansard, Esq.

Honorary Solicitor—Henry F. Richardson, Esq.

Bankers—Messrs. Hoare, Fleet-street.

Subscriptions and donations of any amount will be thankfully received at the office, 36, Coleman-street ; by the Directors ; Luke James Hansard, Esq., the Treasurer, 7 Southampton-street, Bloomsbury ; John Thomas Perceval, Esq., the Honorary Secretary, Campden Cottage, Notting-hill-square ; or by Mr. John Taylor, the Secretary, at the office of the Society ; and by the following bankers—Messrs. Hoare, Fleet-street ; the London Joint Stock Bank ; the London and County Bank ; the London and Westminster Bank ; Messrs. Praed & Co., Fleet-street.

Cases of great interest are now under the consideration of the Board, and every information can be obtained at the offices, where attendance is given daily, and the Committee will be happy to give attention to any case which may fairly come within its rules and regulations.

JOHN T. PERCEVAL, Hon. Sec.

JOHN TAYLOR, Secretary.

36, Coleman-street, London, March, 1846

The fabric of the new legislation was woven by two men who would go on to become oblique influences on some classics of Victorian literature. Lawyer Bryan Waller Procter, credited with devising many of the clauses, was also ‘Barry Cornwall’, a minor poet of the Romantic school. Procter would have
Vanity Fair
‘affectionately dedicated’ to him by Thackeray in 1847–8. Procter was also suspected of being ‘Currer Bell’, author of
Jane Eyre
, until Charlotte Brontë broke cover in 1848; no doubt his expertise on lunacy matters contributed to the notion that he was the creator of poor Bertha Mason. Later, in 1860, Procter would be the dedicatee of Wilkie Collins’s
The Woman in White
(perhaps Procter fed the author tales of asylum escapes). Lawyer Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge, meanwhile, whose input into the new laws was significant, was Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson’s favourite uncle, ‘Uncle Skeffington’. Certainly, many of the exchanges between patients, doctors and inquisitors
have a
Wonderland
/
Through the Looking-Glass
feel to them. Carroll was known to have had in his immense personal library many books and pamphlets on lunacy matters, and it is tempting to wonder whether Uncle Skeffington discussed official business with his nephew. Carroll’s notoriously obscure 1876 poem
The Hunting of the Snark
has recently been decoded as a parable of the Lunacy Commissioners, with ‘The Bellman’ representing Shaftesbury. The
Snark
was published three years after Uncle Skeffington was murdered during his inspection of Fisherton House Asylum in Salisbury, by a patient who hammered a rusty nail into his skull as he was leaning over to read a ledger.

In the August of 1845, two major Procter- and Lutwidge-constructed pieces of lunacy legislation were shunted through and given Royal Assent. The first obliged every county in England and Wales to provide asylum accommodation on the rates for its pauper insane. (By 1847, thirty-six of England and Wales’s fifty-two counties had built their own asylums, and the programme would be pretty much complete by the end of the 1850s.) The second, the Act for the Regulation of the Care and Treatment of Lunatics, amended the 1828 Madhouse Act, but in Mr Perceval’s view perpetuated all the ‘odious defects’ of the existing legislation. Despite an excellent performance in the Commons by Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, only a few of the Society’s recommendations were incorporated into the 1845 legislation. From now on, the two certificates required to commit a paying, private patient to custodial care had to state in full the reasons the doctor had for believing there was unsoundness of mind – a simple assertion was no longer enough. The proprietor of any new asylum would now have to live on the premises. And the time limit within which an individual was permitted to mount a legal action for false imprisonment following release from an asylum was extended from six months to twelve.

Duncombe failed to achieve the legal right of the patient to be told who had instigated the committal, to know the evidence given as proof of insanity, to be present at meetings relating to his/her case, or even to be represented at such a hearing. This, stated the Society, remained ‘a blot upon our legislature’. Their demand for a coroner’s hearing into every lunatic patient’s death was excluded, too, although it was conceded that the registrar now had to be notified of such a death within forty-eight hours. The new Act also offered no greater protection to patients’ property; and no notice at all was taken of the foresighted suggestions by the Society for halfway houses to be set up, in which voluntary patients could place themselves for observation before any formal certificates of lunacy were signed.

To the Society’s horror, the Metropolitan Commissioners were not done away with and replaced by a jury and appeals system: instead, they were augmented. The new Board of Commissioners in Lunacy employed six full-time Commissioners (three lawyers and three
doctors), assisted by up to five lay members, with power to inspect all 949 national institutions in which certified lunatics could be found. They were in charge of licensing asylums within the metropolitan area, with the provincial JPs retaining their power of local licensing. Lord Shaftesbury stayed on as chairman of the Commission (and would remain so until his death).

With the creation of the Commissioners in Lunacy, a centralised inspectorate came into being one hundred years before the National Health Service, and far in advance of any comparable body to oversee other vulnerable groups in society. Lunacy was furnished with a very un-Victorian publicly funded administrative machinery, prompted in equal measure by humanitarian concern for the insane and the urge to control those who suffered the distressing condition.

The new Commissioners intended to continue their predecessors’ preference for persuasion – in cases of doubtful incarceration – to make the signatory of the lunacy order agree to remove the patient. As
The Lancet
pointed out, this turned liberation into a ‘favour’ to be granted, rather than a civil right. The Commissioners planned to act only in cases where the confiner could not be persuaded despite either overwhelming evidence of the sanity of the patient or unambiguous proof that malice had been behind the certification. One new ruse within the 1845 legislation that facilitated this non-confrontational approach was the provision for the Commissioners to remove an asylum patient temporarily ‘for reasons of health’. This could prove a valuable way of avoiding making scandalous accusations of malice against the signatory of the lunacy order or charges of improper admission and detention on the part of the proprietor.

Remaining outside the scope of the new Lunacy Commission were all Chancery patients, who continued to be overseen by the Lord Chancellor and his Masters in Lunacy; also, controversially, Royal Bethlehem Hospital, which was permitted largely to continue its self-regulation since it was a charitable foundation.

The Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society composed and presented to parliament, via Mr Duncombe, a whole new Bill in 1847, but it failed to get past the first reading. Further unsuccessful attempts
were made in 1848, 1851 and 1853. But in the meantime, the Society continued a range of practical activities, with the intention of becoming ‘the alter ego to the Lunacy Commission’. In fact, the battle to expose physical abuse and foul conditions in private care, county asylums and single-patient confinement would turn out to occupy most of the Society’s energy and time. But there were also vigorous attempts to publicise cases of wrongful incarceration,
^fn1
including some hands-on attempts at ‘rescue’, as Captain Saumarez called it – some of it very hands-on indeed. He had been for a time the mayor of Bath, and became Admiral Saumarez in 1853, despite (rather than because of) some swashbuckling on the part of an alleged lunatic. On 4 January 1856, Admiral Saumarez entered the garden of Effra Hall Asylum in Brixton, South London, and stole away Anne Tottenham, a young Chancery patient who had spent eight months at the asylum because her mother had wanted to control her finances. Miss Tottenham had not been able to get any sense out of Lunacy Commissioners Procter, Hume and Gaskell (the writer Elizabeth Gaskell’s brother-in-law), but had, via her loyal brother, Algernon, been able to smuggle out an account of her ordeal to the Alleged Lunatics’ Friends. The admiral lodged her for a year with alienist Dr Forbes Benignus Winslow and one year later they were able to get the Chancery ‘of unsound mind’ verdict overturned, with the legal assistance of Gilbert Bolden. The expense of the battle cost Miss Tottenham half of her fortune, which added to the admiral’s fury about the expense of Chancery cases.

For his part, Mr Perceval was told by the owner of Manor House Asylum in Chiswick, West London, ‘I would rather see the Devil in my asylum than you.’ Thanks to the Society’s intervention to free a sane man, the proprietor had lost the £300 a year paid for the patient’s keep.

In the West Country, the Society teamed up with formidable local magistrate Purnell B. Purnell, who instigated a thorough probe of
Gloucestershire’s private and county asylums, with devastating conclusions that grabbed national headlines in 1849. One asylum was shut down and two proprietors had their licence renewals refused. Many lunacy certificates were found to be invalid, some downright untruthful, and some patients had clearly become sane but had been unable to obtain their discharge. (Incidentally, Mr Perceval’s violent attendant, Samuel Hobbs, was discovered among the staff at exclusive Ridgeway House, near Bristol.) The intention of Purnell and the Friends was not just to root out bad practice and malevolent incarceration, but to demonstrate to the Commissioners in Lunacy and to magistrates in other parts of the country just what could be achieved if only there were sufficient zeal. Purnell became a huge local hero, and a subscription raised in Gloucestershire to thank him for his help in liberating the wrongfully incarcerated and improving the conditions in asylums raised thousands of pounds; this was spent on the gift of an ebony and rosewood table with silver inlay. It was displayed at the Great Exhibition and to this day remains the V&A Museum’s grandest example of nineteenth-century presentation silver.