Inconvenient People (35 page)

Yet two horrific cases – one from the mid-1860s, the other from the mid-1870s – kept fresh the public anxiety about family confinement, and that of wives in particular. On a summer day in 1864, Mrs Rosalind Hammond tore a strip of wallpaper from the bedroom in which she had been imprisoned by her husband and two maidservants for the past two years; she wrote upon it using a pencil that had been accidentally left in the room and tossed the paper through the bottom of her iron-barred window at Laurel Cottage in Peckham Rye, south-east London. It fluttered into the path of a passer-by, who looked up and saw her at the window, and then alerted PC John Spinks. Gaining entry to the bolted and chained house, Spinks found Mrs Hammond emaciated and in a wretched physical condition, though rational and able to tell her story coherently. Later that day, at the magistrates’ court, she explained that her husband Edward, a doctor, and maids Emily Wakeman and Eliza Allen had imprisoned her when she had discovered that Wakeman and Edward were lovers. The maids dressed themselves in Mrs Hammond’s clothes and jewels, pawned her other belongings and rode out in her carriage. Each had beaten her when she had tried to escape; on one occasion they had goaded her drunken
husband to assault her with his fists. Looking out from her window, she was too afraid to make a sound when she saw neighbours coming and going; she watched her child playing in the garden but was scared to communicate with the little girl. She was plied with brandy and morphine and degenerated into a passive state. She gave birth to a child in the room in July 1863, and was attended by a Dr Nine, who does not appear to have asked any questions about the unusual set-up, and she was unable to alert him. The baby lived just a few hours.

At the subsequent trial, in September 1864, Dr Edward Hammond pleaded guilty to illegally imprisoning and ill-treating his wife. Sentence was deferred for a few weeks, and when he came back to court, Hammond told the judge that he was willing, as part of a judicial separation, to return to his wife half of the large fortune that she had brought to the marriage. The judge was outraged and said that he should give the entire sum back to her and sentenced Hammond to twelve months’ hard labour. Hammond was astonished at the severity of the sentence. In a verdict that angered the public, Wakeman and Allen were acquitted for lack of evidence. The
Times
editorial asked who could believe that ‘a woman of station could be shut up in England in her husband’s house without the possibility of release? The supposition was too absurd to be entertained.’ That particular plot line in
The Woman in White
had,
The Times
continued, been ‘ingenious’ but ‘improbable . . . and the novelist was discredited for making it the foundation of his tale’. Yet in Peckham Rye, the newspaper pointed out, the unlikely Sensation plot had actually occurred.

In 1877, the Penge Mystery, also known as the Staunton Starvation Case, linked another London suburb to marital imprisonment. Harriet Richardson was described by her mother as a ‘natural’ – perhaps today we would describe her as someone with ‘learning difficulties’. Harriet, aged thirty-four, was worth £3,000, with a far larger sum to come upon the death of her mother (who had remarried and was now Mrs Butterfield). The family had assumed that no man would ever want to marry Harriet, but when, in 1874, debonair and glib Lewis Staunton began to pay court, Mrs Butterfield panicked. She asked a doctor if he would certify Harriet as of unsound mind, thereby making any marriage she might contract legally invalid. The doctor refused to do so, claiming (incorrectly) that Harriet did not fall within the category
of ‘unsound’ as described in the Lunacy Act; and in any case, there would be nasty gossip – it would be said that Mrs Butterfield was more interested in protecting the family fortune than the welfare of her child. This doctor’s refusal (calamitous, as it turned out) gives the lie to the notion that any doctor would happily sign away liberty for a fee. Indeed, one line of defence made by the alienist profession at the time was that the increasing suspicion under which they operated would cause physicians to shy away from putting their name to any lunacy certificate.

Mrs Butterfield then appealed to the Lord Chancellor, but this too failed. Lewis Staunton acted swiftly and the couple married before Mrs Butterfield could find any other solution. Staunton now removed Harriet to a farmhouse at Cudham in Kent, where he imprisoned her in a back bedroom, while he, his lover Alice Rhodes, his brother Patrick and sister-in-law Elizabeth embezzled Harriet’s money. As Mrs Butterfield tried continually to find out where her daughter was, the Stauntons and Rhodes deliberately starved Harriet and the baby she had given birth to in March 1876. Shortly before their deaths, mother and child were transported to 34 Forbes Road, Penge, the dying infant being dumped at a hospital on the way. Harriet died weighing 5st 4lb, and when a local nurse came to lay out the body, she found the skin deeply filthy – like the bark of a tree, she said – and Harriet’s hair full of lice. She alerted a doctor and magistrate, and the Stauntons were taken into custody.

All four were found guilty of wilful murder and sentenced to hang, but the verdict proved controversial. Many medical men believed that the evidence in fact indicated death from typhus, not starvation; they signed a testimonial stating that the judge had misunderstood the science and had misdirected the jury. There was public outrage when the Home Secretary, acting on the testimonial, commuted the three Stauntons’ sentences to penal servitude for life and Alice Rhodes was given a free pardon.

In the Hammond and Staunton cases, the law punished the wrongdoers (though the public would have wanted far harsher retribution). Both women had been illegally confined, since neither was insane; both had been physically maltreated, which even a husband was not entitled to do. The first woman to shout very loud about what the mid-century paterfamilias could do, with regard to incarceration, is the subject of the next chapter.

^fn1
Let other pens dwell on the Sensation Fiction of the 1850s and ’60s. There is a very healthy strand of literary studies that has produced some excellent work on the genre, and I have little to add that is new,
Hard Cash
and
The Woman in White
excepted.

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON IS
remembered today for two things only: the opening line of one of his works of fiction – ‘It was a dark and stormy night’; and having his wife confined to an asylum in controversial circumstances. Very few Victorians would have guessed at his almost total eclipse in the twentieth century. Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73) was one of the era’s best-selling, highest-earning authors; a novelist, poet, playwright, historian, MP and statesman; necromancer, ostentatious setter of trends both literary and sartorial, owner of Knebworth House; and from the mid-1830s to the late 1860s one of the most powerful and influential men in the country. This was the writer Charles Dickens idolised above all others and whose innovations had profound effects on Gothic fiction, crime fiction and what we today call ‘science fiction’. But his flatulent, mouldy prose style places him alongside G. M. W. Reynolds, Harrison Ainsworth and Charles Reade as a literary lion who ceased to roar beyond his own lifetime. It was rare for Dickens’s acuity on such matters to fail him; but he seems to have been blinded by the dazzle of Bulwer-Lytton.

Here he is in April 1826, aged twenty-two, at a tea party at a fashionable house in the West End: glittering golden ringlets fall to his shoulders, his shirt is a riot of lace and embroidery, with turn-back cuffs that pre-empt a fashion craze by ten years; his boots are as shiny as a looking-glass; he is affecting a Byronic world-weariness. This description was supplied by Rosina Wheeler, who had just entered the room, and of whom his mother, nudging her son, had said, ‘Edward! What a singularly beautiful face!’ Miss Wheeler, for her part, later wrote that Edward’s mother’s turban had looked like a pile of strawberry baskets heaped up at Covent Garden market, and that
taken as a whole, she had the appearance of ‘a galvanised rag bag’.

Rosina Wheeler was becoming noted in London drawing rooms both for her beauty and for her savage, seemingly uncontrollable urge to mock. Even her friends called her ‘The Asp’. One observer wrote of her ‘white shoulders, abundant hair, grace in the figure . . . It was not difficult, however, to perceive . . . something that gave disquieting intimations concerning the spirit that looked out from her brilliant eyes – that he who wooed her would probably be a happier man if content to regard her as we do some beautiful caged wild creature of the woods, at a safe and secure distance.’ She was a brilliant mimic, in speech, action and on paper, and she was surely tittering four months later when she received from Edward the following reply to a letter of her own. She had written to her lover (they had consummated their relationship very quickly, in the summer of 1826) offering to end their engagement because of his mother’s disapproval: if he married too early and without Mama’s consent, it might threaten his highly promising literary career. Edward replied to Rosina’s letter: ‘Hate
you
, Rosina!? At this moment the tears are in my eyes, my heart beats audibly! I stop to kiss the paper consecrated by your hand – can these signs of love ever turn into hatred?’ And so on for Romantic reams. Two months later, following a row with his mother about his infatuation with Miss Wheeler, he wrote to one of his confidantes, in the style for which we now un-celebrate him: ‘It is a dim, heavy, desolate evening, the trees quite breathless, one deep cloud over the sky, the deer grouped under my window, and the old grey tower of the church just beyond.’ The reason for his picturesque misery was that, as Miss Wheeler had advised, he had broken off the engagement from a sense of duty to his mother. One month later, however, word reached him that Miss Wheeler was ill in London and he rushed to her bedside, where he swore that, Mama or no, poverty or no, literary obscurity or no, they must marry. Twenty years later he refashioned this episode, erasing Miss Wheeler’s reluctance and his own foolhardiness: ‘I married my wife against all my interests and prospects, not from passion, but from a sense of honour. She had given herself to me nearly a year before, and from that moment I considered myself bound to her.’ Small wonder that in later years Rosina would refer to her husband habitually as ‘Sir Liar’.

‘If you marry this woman, you will be in less than a year the most miserable man in England,’ Mama told her son, who later went on to be a huge believer in clairvoyance. Mama made one last attempt to prevent the match, having parochial records searched in order to prove that Miss Wheeler was a good deal older than she claimed. How could a young lady have such devastating self-assurance, be so very well (self-)educated, so articulate? But Miss Wheeler really had been born in November 1802, and so the marriage went ahead, on 30 August 1827 at St James’s Church, Piccadilly. Edward’s mother did not attend and instantly withdrew her son’s allowance (though she stopped short of disinheriting him). He still had an income from the small lump sum that had been left to him by his father, who had died when Edward was four years old, and Rosina brought an inherited income of £80 a year to the marriage. But this was not enough to live fashionably without incurring debt.

The couple appear to have been fairly happy in the early months of their marriage; or if they weren’t, each of them uncharacteristically
failed to mention it. He was her ‘Pups’, and she was his ‘Poodle’. A prize-winning student poet, Bulwer-Lytton had published five reasonably well received volumes of Byronic poetry, and one politely, unenthusiastically reviewed novel,
Falkland
, which appeared in the year of his marriage. Now, in their relatively inexpensive rural retreat near Henley-on-Thames, he set to work, to earn money and glory. With energy that his wife would later consider diabolic, he averaged a substantial book every ten months or so. His intense labour, his desolation at having been cast aside by his mother, his anger at having to watch his spending, plus his naturally foul temper and self-absorption, before too long caused antagonism between the couple. Rosina made few complaints in the first four years, despite noticing some extremely unpleasant aspects of married life that she probably had not anticipated. She wrote light-heartedly to a friend that her husband had laid down many rules about what she was and was not allowed to do. His literary work required him to be alone and quiet for much of the day – that much she understood; but when he did find leisure time, he was off up to London, to the theatre or to literary gatherings, and so she saw very little of him.

Their first child, Emily – known as Little Boots in her infancy – was born in June 1828 and her father immediately sent her off to be wet-nursed by a farmer’s wife, several miles away, which caused Rosina great distress; she had been ill following the birth and had been unable to suckle, but would have preferred a wet nurse to have come to live in. Her husband and his supporters, however, would later maintain that she had shown no maternal feelings. When their second child, Robert (‘Teddy’), was born in November 1831, Rosina appeared to have understood that she was only to be a distant presence in her own children’s lives. She was not to descend to the middle-class cult of domesticity and intimacy with one’s offspring. She bought a lapdog, a Blenheim spaniel called Fairy, for companionship; her husband had a Newfoundland called Terror. Both children would later say that they feared both their parents and felt that they must on all accounts avoid annoying or causing offence to the dogs. Emily and Robert had to address their father as ‘Mr Bulwer’. This distance between parents and offspring was quite normal in Society circles in these years and it is difficult to establish whether Rosina truly didn’t care about her children or whether she was simply fitting in with expectations of upper-middle-class motherhood. These
would change as the century wore on, leaving her vulnerable to accusations that she had been cold and indifferent.