Inconvenient People (47 page)

In summing up, Leach’s counsel argued that while Reverend Leach had suffered from ‘acute mania’, there was ‘no chronic disease of the brain’. He had previously recovered swiftly from his breakdowns, and further detention in an asylum would be the worst possible option for him. The jury agreed, and by a majority of nineteen to four found Leach to be of sound mind, a verdict that was welcomed by loud applause from the spectators.

Leach intended to sue his mother for false imprisonment, but called the action off at the last moment – perhaps at the urging of his new wife. For the reverend had married Ann Messenger as soon as the inquisition was over, and the couple went on to live to great old age, with four daughters and two sons. There is no indication of any serious relapse in Reverend Leach’s mental health. The troublesome inheritance was delayed by the longevity of Julia Leach, who lived to be nearly ninety, dying just ten years before her son.

The inquisition severely damaged the reputation of Dr Forbes Benignus Winslow. He had worked extraordinarily hard – with no financial or family advantages – to build his career; as a child, he had been so poor that he hawked cigarettes and newspapers in the streets of Manhattan (his widowed mother had taken her children with her to America in the 1810s). On his return to London he studied at University College, then qualified as MD in Aberdeen, and his career had flourished because of his work on the acceptance of the plea of insanity as mitigation in murder cases. In 1847 he had been able to purchase his Hammersmith asylums – Sussex House and nearby Brandenburgh House, for women – and the following year founded the influential
Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology
. He had been seen as the saviour of Mrs Cumming, Chancery patient Ann Tottenham and many other wealthy alleged lunatics. In terms of reputation, he had had a great deal to lose with the Leach case. Dr Winslow wrote to the
Morning Chronicle
, claiming that he had never tried to keep Reverend Leach’s incarceration at Sussex House a secret; that friends and acquaintances had been given free access to him at the asylum. Leach’s solicitor replied in the
letters pages, claiming that he himself had been turned away when he had wanted to consult his client, and many of the supportive locals had been kept away too.

Winslow’s career hit a further low with the Windham Commission. During this inquisition into the mental soundness of immensely wealthy William Windham, in 1862, Winslow had found himself in a minority of two alienists arguing that Windham was morally insane. From early childhood, Windham, heir to Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk and its estates, had been wild – a succession of tutors and guardians, the masters of Eton, and a variety of concerned family friends had found him impossible to reason with. He was a compulsive masturbator (even in the presence of others), gorged food and then vomited before dinner guests, and insisted on donning servants’ clothing and taking on their tasks around Felbrigg Hall. He had railway guard and Post Office uniforms made for him, and, wearing the latter, caused havoc by hijacking the mail cart and driving it around the Norfolk lanes. He nearly caused a fatal train crash at Cambridge railway station when, passing himself off as a guard, he blew the whistle and one train set off into the path of another. In London, he would dress as a Metropolitan Police officer and arrest women in the Haymarket, accusing them of soliciting. He fell into the clutches of notorious courtesan and gold-digger Agnes Willoughby, and despite her common-law marriage with her pimp plus her knowledge that Windham was by now infected with syphilis, the pair married. It was at this point that Windham’s only living relative, his uncle, instituted a lunacy inquisition.

At the hearing, Dr Winslow, along with Dr Thomas Mayo (Mr Perceval’s bête noire at Ticehurst Asylum), asserted that Windham could not possibly run the Felbrigg estate. Yet a contingent of high-profile alienists (which included Sutherland, Tuke, Conolly and Hood) argued the opposite; the jury, astonishingly, agreed, declaring Windham of sound mind. An Englishman had the right to marry a courtesan, calamitously impersonate petty officials, vomit at table, indulge in as much solitary vice as he pleased, and spend however much cash he liked. The Windham jury rejected any attempt to medicalise his outlandish behaviour. He died just two years later, aged twenty-five, after wrecking the entire Felbrigg estate by his spending – not least the colossal £20,000 cost of the lunacy inquisition. The complexity of the evidence and the length of the inquiry meant that legal fees were extremely high, despite the legislation that had been passed to lower such costs.

Winslow was heavily criticised in some quarters of the press. Dickens’s
All the Year Round
savaged him, in a piece entitled ‘M.D. and M.A.D.’. Men have risen to be national heroes, the article stated, precisely because of that ‘unhealthy restlessness that Dr Winslow’s fingers would itch to put under lock and key . . . The jury of laymen of the world came to a decision contrary to Dr Winslow’s. What confidence does this give us in a mad-doctor’s accuracy of opinion concerning the sanity of any one of us?’ It may also have come to Dickens’s ears, via his very good friend, Lunacy Commissioner John Forster, that Winslow was becoming erratic as an asylum proprietor. A young official at the War Office had come to the Commissioners in January 1862 in great distress because his sister, a patient at Brandenburgh House, had been given immediate notice to leave by Winslow, who said he had been expecting a ‘better’ patient. The Commissioners told the young man to go to Winslow to tell him that this was against the lunacy law; but Winslow responded that if the young man would not remove her, he would be charged a new rate of seven guineas a week – double the cost of the
most exclusive of English asylums. The Commissioners now intervened to organise a transfer of the woman to the less expensive Camberwell House in south-east London.

In the mid-1860s (not long after publication of
Hard Cash
) Forbes Benignus Winslow took to his bed for a year with a never-explained illness, or possibly a mental collapse of his own – one of the colossal Evangelical breakdowns of the century, as experienced by Gladstone, Nightingale and Ruskin. When he re-emerged, he found himself relentlessly inspected and criticised by Dr Charles Lockhart Robertson, one of the Lord Chancellor’s Visitors of Chancery patients, who found that Winslow was regularly detaining wealthy patients who were either recovered or would do better back at home with their families, with a keeper. Even at the time of Winslow’s death in 1874 Lockhart Robertson was still springing Chancery patients from his care.

The year after the ‘lunacy panic’, as the nation had come to think of it, John Stuart Mill published
On Liberty
. Mill was highly critical of a lay jury deciding on matters psychological:

Mill appeared not to have noticed that the juries at the Turner, Ruck and Leach inquisitions had listened to all the tales of ‘personal peculiarities’ and decided that they were not indicative of lunacy. Indeed, his snobbish contempt for jurymen was even more strongly expressed elsewhere, when he wrote of ‘the lying gossip of low servants [which is] poured into the credulous ears of twelve petty shopkeepers, ignorant of all ways of life except those of their own class, and regarding every trait of individuality in character or taste as eccentricity, and all eccentricity as either insanity or wickedness.’

The events of 1858 had rejuvenated the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society. In January 1859, the campaign group hosted a well-attended public meeting at Exeter Hall in the Strand, to discuss the furore of the Lytton, Turner, Ruck and Leach cases. After speeches, a resolution was passed to petition once again for a government inquiry into the operation of the lunacy laws. And this time, the request was granted.

John Perceval’s brother-in-law and cousin, Spencer Horatio Walpole, Home Secretary, was in the chair of the 1859 Select Committee on Lunatics, taking evidence over several months about all aspects of lunacy administration and patient care – the question of wrongful incarceration being just one of many matters under investigation. The Select Committee understandably focused most of its attention on the public asylum system, which was by now responsible for by far the greatest number of lunatics in England and Wales. That year there were believed to be 31,510 pauper insane, whereas private patients numbered 5,269. Of greatest concern, in England and Wales, the ratio of insane to sane appeared to be inexorably on the rise.
^fn1
How many of these people really required institutionalisation? it was wondered. Were the English really getting madder, or were the county asylums filling up with ‘naturals’ and the confused elderly, who were a danger neither to themselves nor to others? The cure rates were far lower than had been anticipated when the great asylum-building regime had commenced in 1845, so what was the purpose of these vast institutions? Warehouses for a population who could not fend for themselves in the outside world? Or had they become a means of siphoning off those whose infirmities were holding back the economic energies of their families, and therefore, collectively, of the nation?

An increase in numbers was, however, also in evidence among the very wealthy. Legislation was making lunacy inquisitions cheaper and faster and by 1859 almost twice as many inquisitions were being held as in the 1840s. The aim of various Acts had been to offer greater protection to the property of a larger number of alleged lunatics; but some wondered whether – notwithstanding the failures in the Turner, Ruck and Leach cases – the Acts had encouraged a greater number of unscrupulous people to attempt to declare unsound an eccentric wealthy relative.

Ann Tottenham, the Chancery lunatic who had been helped by Admiral Saumarez and the now-beleagured Forbes Winslow, was the only victim of mis-certification permitted to testify before the Select Committee, although Mr Perceval, Admiral Saumarez, Gilbert Bolden and campaigning magistrate Purnell B. Purnell were allowed to speak at length to the inquiry. Mr Perceval was something of an anachronism, sitting there before the committee with his Regency ringlets, urging that clergymen should be involved at every level of lunacy administration, badly bodging his survey of Continental lunacy systems, and provoking his questioner to ask him not to wander off into ‘abstract and rather metaphysical questions’ (he had been telling them that Galileo would have fallen foul of the English lunacy laws). He told his brother-in-law and the other committee members: ‘I do not know and have never pretended, and I believe none of our committee has ever pretended, that cases of unjust confinement were general, as compared with the number of persons confined as insane. But I believe that cases of unjust confinement and still more of unjust detention are very frequent and numerous.’ He claimed that in addition to Ann Tottenham, the Society could have brought to the Select Committee’s attention twenty-six recent or current cases of false imprisonment, and ‘I believe they are only a proportion.’