Inconvenient People (30 page)

Charles Dickens published
Bleak House
– with its brilliant attack on the deadly nature of Chancery delays and costs – in serial form, from March 1852, two months after Mrs Cumming was expensively declared insane; its final instalment appeared three months after her death. The new legislation may possibly have received some additional impetus from Dickens’s devastating portrait. When the intention to slash lunacy inquisition costs was announced ‘there was a decorous expression of applause in the body of the court’, a newspaper reporter noted. However, the Act would prove to be not much of a memorial to Mrs Cumming’s suffering. Ruinously expensive inquisitions could still take place, and, if anything, the streamlined system had the potential to increase malicious attempts to proclaim a rich relative a lunatic. (Indeed, the number of inquisitions soared after 1853, peaking in the 1880s.) Any number of Mrs Cummings could find their eccentricities or foul temper presented as unsoundness of mind by those who preferred not to wait until the hand of death delivered them a financial legacy.

Because Mrs Cumming died intestate, her daughters inherited the estate. However, the old lady had not wasted her final year: she appears to have booby-trapped her financial dealings, and many creditors began pursuing Thomasine and Catherine, who had been bequeathed a wonderful
Jarndyce
v.
Jarndyce
mess by their mother. In 1856 John Ince became a bankrupt, Catherine was being pursued for unpaid fees by snooping solicitor John Turner, and by 1860 the Cumming estate was barely sufficient to pay the costs of the suit of
Elliott
v.
Ince
, in which the compliant physicians and the proprietor of Effra Hall Asylum were seeking payment for their services in incarcerating Mrs Cumming. The Ince marriage foundered, and the couple separated, with an
agreement that John Ince would pay Catherine £200 a year; when he failed to meet his quarterly payment to her in 1858, he was taken to court and lost the case. (How his mother-in-law would have chuckled.) John Ince died nine years later, aged sixty.

A month after her mother died, Thomasine arranged a post-nuptial agreement with her husband, in an attempt to avoid paying the trumpeter’s many creditors. A court case of November 1856, to judge whether this agreement had been fraudulent, and therefore void, found in the Hoopers’ favour, but by that time the couple were also being vigorously pursued by the hugely expensive counsel they had employed to pursue the lunacy inquisition. They were bankrupt in 1857, but were still living well, if their various Knightsbridge and Belgravia addresses are anything to go by; they adopted the surname ‘Bayley’ for some of the 1870s, possibly in an attempt to avoid creditors. The trumpeter died in the 1880s, but Thomasine made it into the twentieth century, dying aged ninety-three in 1906.

After the Cumming case, it was once again noted by most commentators how unsatisfactory it was that nineteen eminent medical men could give widely differing opinions of what constituted soundness of mind, tailoring their learning according to which ‘side’ in the dispute had hired them. One alienist had claimed that Mrs Cumming was a monomaniac, another that she was an imbecile, and yet another that she was perfectly sane. How could the public trust the judgements of a body of men who were in such theoretical conflict with each other? How safe was anyone when the experts had such divergent views of insanity?

DURING THE SUMMER
of 1846, York House – the asylum to which Mrs Cumming had been abducted that May – was also temporary home to one Martha Shuttleworth, whose dilemma was of a very different nature to Mrs Cumming’s. At the end of July, Reverend John Clark Rowlatt, of St Peter’s, Pimlico, was asked to visit the top-storey room of an otherwise empty and unfurnished house, at 10 Lower Eaton Street, Belgravia. Here he discovered fifty-five-year-old Mrs Shuttleworth, who lay naked on a urine-soaked bed under ragged bedclothes. She was emaciated, one of her legs was swollen, her pulse was weak and when Rowlatt addressed her, she was unable to make any sensible reply. Rowlatt called in Thomas Wilmot – the local surgeon who had recently certified Mrs Cumming – whose examination of Mrs Shuttleworth convinced him that she was insane. The two men established from the landlord, who lived next door, that the woman was in the care of one Dr John Quail, who left her alone for long periods of time. As there appeared to be no family or close friends to do so, the reverend now wrote out a lunacy order and Wilmot and another doctor signed certificates of lunacy. But when the carriage from York House arrived to take Mrs Shuttleworth away, Dr Quail appeared at the door, struggled with the doctors and shut himself and his patient inside the house. When the doctors and the York House keeper returned the next day, the landlord informed them that Quail, almost having to carry the enfeebled woman, had abandoned the house. Dr Wilmot rushed to the offices of the Commissioners in Lunacy and asked them how he was to proceed in a case where a private doctor claimed custody of a lunatic and refused to hand over the patient for asylum care.

Quail was a name that the Commissioners dreaded hearing. He was well known to the police, and had in fact been ‘watched’ off and
on for six years. The Commissioners’ own minute book refers to Quail as ‘a dangerous lunatic’, who since 1840 had been in and out of magistrates’ courts for pestering Whitehall officials about a pension and remuneration he believed he was owed for his medical services to the Greek, Polish and Portuguese armies. Quail, a qualified surgeon, had been employed by the government to assist its allies and had been salaried to do so; but he believed that he was additionally entitled to a pension and had taken to menacing various officials in pursuit of this. He had turned up at the Commissioners’ offices the previous autumn and told them a rambling tale of persecution of himself and one Mrs Shuttleworth by political enemies (the Foreign Office, in particular). He gave his address as 10 Upper Fitzroy Street, Fitzroy Square, and Scotland Yard Commissioner Richard Mayne promised Lord Shaftesbury that he would detail constables to keep a watch on Quail, though this was an expensive use of manpower.

The Commissioners in Lunacy encouraged Dr Wilmot to trace Quail and Mrs Shuttleworth but warned him that he was not entitled to use the certificates and lunacy order to commit a trespass or a breach of the peace. Although they believed the woman’s life could be in danger, their cautious approach may have been a reaction to the controversial seizure of Mrs Cumming just three months earlier. The new lunacy law and its regime were only a year old, and it is clear from the documentation, and the contradictions and prevarications within it, that the Commissioners were feeling their way towards the correct way of implementing the new rules.

But then, the following week, Dr Quail himself turned up at the Lunacy Commission, presenting them again with his petition for a pension but now also complaining about being persecuted by Wilmot. The Commissioners demanded to know where Mrs Shuttleworth was, and when Quail refused to tell them, they handed him a formal summons for her to be surrendered to them. With Scotland Yard situated just the other side of Whitehall, a messenger was dispatched to dash round and ask Mayne to send a plain-clothes officer to follow Quail when he left the Lunacy Commission. PC Edwards tailed the doctor all over central London but late in the evening he lost him in a pub crowd in Norfolk Street, near Tottenham Court Road. Fortunately, Wilmot’s own hired detective, a Mr Bradford, shortly afterwards located Quail at 19 Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square – a known brothel. This was
where he was keeping Mrs Shuttleworth, who would later state that some women there had tried to make her drink alcohol and to sing ‘queer’ songs with them. When Bradford had attempted to speak to Mrs Shuttleworth at number 19, she simply pulled from her pocket a handkerchief with the astrological sign of Leo printed upon it and told him, ‘This is my protector. While I have this, nothing can do me harm.’

The Commissioners in Lunacy and the Lord Chancellor were unsure how to proceed. Was it legal to enter a private house and remove from the custody of a registered medical practitioner a lunatic single patient, who seemed to have suffered neglect and abuse? What exactly were the powers – under the Act or at common law – for an asylum keeper to take custody of a certified lunatic? Robert Skeffington Lutwidge, the Commission’s secretary, decided that the 1845 Act permitted Commissioners to enter premises and attempt an interview with a lunatic; so Commissioners Turner and Bryan Waller Procter went to the house in Grafton Street at five o’clock on 7 August, accompanied by two plain-clothes police officers, Dr Millingen of York House, and two of his nursing staff. But when the brothel keeper told them to go away, the party withdrew, unwilling to force entry.

Three days later, Bradford spotted Mrs Shuttleworth being removed in a cab. He pursued her and Quail across the City and as they crossed London Bridge he alerted two police officers, who seized them. The cab was full of luggage – they had been heading for the Dieppe packet boat.

Mrs Shuttleworth was conveyed to York House, where the Commissioners interviewed her and decided that she was ‘a person of weak and unsound mind’. She told them that Dr Quail had frequently asked her for money and when she refused, sometimes he would kick and beat her. As proof, she showed the Commissioners her latest bruises. Her former solicitor, Mr Newland, confirmed that Quail had often called at his office trying to gain access to Mrs Shuttleworth’s funds to invest in some wild speculations.

Quail repeatedly tried to see Mrs Shuttleworth at York House but was refused each time, the Commissioners telling him he was ‘an improper person’ to have charge of her. However, so ineptly had Mrs Shuttleworth’s certificates and lunacy order been filled in, the Commissioners requested that a visit be paid to York House by the Lord Chancellor himself, because it had emerged that she was in fact a woman of some means. The Commissioners later wrote that Mrs Shuttleworth was found to be of
‘imbecile mind and utterly incapable of taking care of herself or managing her affairs . . . she would wish to remain at York House where she was kindly treated and very comfortable.’ Yet in the same month, her casebook reveals that she was threatening to smash windows at the asylum, alleging ill-treatment and neglect.

The enraged Dr Quail brought a habeas corpus case in November 1846, in order to regain custody of Mrs Shuttleworth. He alleged that she had been mis-certified into asylum care while he was providing – at her request – single-patient care. In his view, Mrs Shuttleworth was being illegally detained in an asylum on false certificates. In court, the two certificates and the lunacy order admitting her into York House were indeed found to have been technically illegal, as they were incomplete and contained many errors. Reverend Rowlatt and the two doctors told the judge, Lord Denman, that they had been so shocked by Mrs Shuttleworth’s ‘obscene and blasphemous’ delusions that they had refused to put the full ‘monstrous’ particulars down on paper; her behaviour and conversation had been dirty and indecent in the extreme, they claimed, but they had not provided specific facts in the paperwork to back up this verbal assertion. Lunacy certificates and orders were public documents, but the need for euphemism could create problems for investigations of lunacy law breaches, when so many ‘delusions’ of troubled Victorians featured obscenity and blasphemy. Unseemly statements which had been screamed out in a padded room, or a darkened attic were often crucial evidence to justify incarceration, but were not easy for an official to write out verbatim, or to discuss in front of the public and the newspaper reporters at a trial or inquisition. As the century wore on, the urge to use an ever thicker linguistic veil risked greater compromise of the certification procedure.

Reverend Rowlatt, inexperienced in lunacy matters, had failed to answer sixteen factual questions on the lunacy statement, including those asking about the patient’s age, gender and religion. Wilmot and the other doctor had simply scored out some of the printed form’s rubric. Despite this, Judge Denman threw out Dr Quail’s case, stating that Mrs Shuttleworth’s detention at York House was legal and that the documentation’s deficiencies had been solely technical. The bench had interviewed Mrs Shuttleworth during the trial and within minutes found her to be ‘imbecile’. Denman had no patience for the tired old mangling of the liberty issue, pronouncing:

Thanks to decades of progress, the modern asylum should be seen as a place of safety and refuge for those unable to care for themselves, he said.

When reports of the court case appeared in the newspapers, Mrs Shuttleworth’s two sisters came forward, and told the Commissioners what Mrs Shuttleworth had been too enfeebled to reveal. In the late 1810s and early 1820s she had been the mistress of a scion of the wealthy Shuttleworth family, who, when he decided to marry another woman, had settled an income of £300 a year upon her. She had been born Martha Elizabeth Rhodes but now took the name Shuttleworth, as she believed herself to have been her lover’s common-law wife. It was when her health and wits began to fail her in her late forties that she engaged the services of John Quail, who soon moved in with her. As she became more and more confused, her income was delayed and reduced to £100 by her trustees, who suspected that Quail was obtaining the money for himself, rather than spending it on her comfort and care. Mrs Shuttleworth became estranged from her sisters; we don’t know the reasons for this, but Quail may have managed to engineer a row with her family, or simply kept Mrs Shuttleworth so well secreted that they lost all trace of her. Both her sisters insisted that she was not insane, and although her former solicitor, Mr Newland, considered her ‘flighty’, he too believed that she had been of sound mind. (It is possible, though, that five years with Dr Quail had driven Mrs Shuttleworth from ‘flighty’ to insane, as ill-treatment – and narcotics, if he had chosen to administer these – could have sent her mad.)