Inconvenient People (48 page)

Lord Shaftesbury himself testified for three whole days. While denying that sane people were ever mis-certificated, he admitted that there was good reason to worry that the private asylums were detaining people who had recovered their sanity. Shaftesbury said:

Clearly referring to the cosiness uncovered in the Ruck–Conolly–Stillwell case, Shaftesbury criticised a system in which ‘a medical man signs a certificate for the purpose of getting an affluent patient into some friend’s house, and the friend repays that by signing a certificate for another affluent patient to go into the other’s house’.

John Conolly appeared as the alienists’ representative, telling the Select Committee that his profession was extremely upset at ‘the supposition that they are so peculiarly mercenary as to not be trusted at all’. Conolly stated that no one was ever committed to an asylum without just cause – even if the condition turned out to be easy to cure (such as delirium tremens). As to keeping recovered patients in asylums longer than was necessary, he claimed that this happened ‘very seldom’. Passing lightly over his own law-breaking in the Ruck case, he stated he had only once ‘accidentally’ signed a faulty certificate.

A number of measures to stamp out wrongful incarceration were under consideration in 1859, including the admission of an independent doctor three weeks after certification to check on the progress of each patient; but Conolly argued that such intervention would so dishearten the profession that the best men would leave for other medical specialisms, condemning the nation to the care of men of inferior skills and morals. And until such a time as publicly or charitably funded institutions could care for middle-class and upper-class patients, it was crucial to maintain the existing private licensed houses. In fact, Conolly and Shaftesbury had attempted to raise subscriptions for a state-administered middle-class asylum, charging fees according to the patient’s
means, but had failed to attract sufficient funds from the public, and the idea had had to be shelved. John Perceval suggested that the government buy up one of the London private asylums and try running it as an experimental middle-class state asylum, but no notice was taken of this proposal.

Conolly denied that there was any significant difference in the rates of public and private patients that were ‘discharged cured’. However, John Charles Bucknill had surveyed all the nation’s county asylums and reported that the average cure rate was 39 per cent. Admiral Saumarez compared this figure with the estimated cure rate of 10–14 per cent for private patients, and the appalling rate of recovery among Chancery patients, with a total of just eleven out of 900 being released from certification in the ten years to 1859. Many observers attributed this to the unnecessary detention of high-fee payers; defenders of the private asylums, on the other hand, claimed that the less shameful nature of insanity among the lower classes meant that the poor entered the system more quickly when their symptoms became apparent, received curative treatment more promptly or at the very least enjoyed respite from the aggravating factors in their home lives. Admiral Saumarez agreed that the ‘absurd principle of secrecy’ was putting many middle- and landed-class lunatics at risk, and Shaftesbury, too, was surprisingly in tune with the Alleged Lunatics’ Friends, stating that ‘many persons whose families were afflicted with lunacy think that they are keeping the fact in entire privacy, but it is an error. If there is an insane relative of any family, it is invariably known; the world may not know where he is, but no family ever succeeded in suppressing a knowledge of the fact that there was a mad member connected with it.’

In July 1860, the Select Committee published its report. While it found that there was little reason to believe that there was any significant wrongful incarceration of the wholly sane, it nevertheless recommended extending the jury system to all lunacy cases, not restricting it to those where significant property was involved. It suggested that every lunacy certificate be signed by a magistrate – the very protection already afforded to paupers – and that its validity be reduced to just three months, at which point a re-certification should take place. Versions of these latter two safeguards were already in place in Scotland.

All these measures were rejected, thwarted by Shaftesbury’s ongoing chronic anxiety that anything that complicated the asylum admission procedure would build in delay in treating, and curing, mental breakdowns. He remained convinced that the best cure rates related directly to the speed with which an individual’s insanity had been identified and s/he had been placed under medical supervision. The slower rate of recovery among the wealthy was, he felt sure, largely the result of families and friends attempting to hide the problem, to deny – even to themselves – that a loved one was losing their wits.

Shaftesbury also believed that his Commissioners in Lunacy were making steady progress in eradicating the worst private asylums and the most corrupt medical men by stricter licensing and more thorough inspections.

The Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society was hit hard by the non-outcome of the Select Committee they had fought so long to establish. John Perceval described the report of the Committee as ‘meagre’, though he failed to appreciate the Society’s rather poor performance at the inquiry. By 1862, the Friends were beginning to wind down operations. Mr Perceval wrote in that year that

Little is known about the final years of the Society or indeed of Mr Perceval. It seems that in his late sixties he suffered a recurrence of his psychological problems. He died in 1876, aged seventy-three, just as he would not have wished to have ended his days: in one of London’s large private madhouses, Munster House, in Fulham. It is highly unlikely that he ever met the woman who took up and pressed ahead with his life’s work.

^fn1
See Appendix 2
here
for official statistics on lunacy.

SOMETHING AWFUL HAPPENED
to Louisa Crookenden on her wedding night. We don’t know the precise nature of her allegations against her husband: they were regarded as so shocking that they were later recorded only as a flurry of euphemism, noted down by the astonished parties who heard them. Whatever occurred on the night of 1 September 1842 – sodomy, impotence, venereal infection, or just ordinary intercourse that a sheltered twenty-one-year-old had not been forewarned of – traumatised her. Neither Louisa nor her husband, Reverend George Lowe, eight years her senior, sought a judicial separation, and between 1843 and 1863, eight children were born (of whom four lived to adulthood). But Mrs Lowe decided to live for long spells apart from her husband, sometimes with her sister, Emily, sometimes with her mother, taking one or more of the children with her.

She could well afford to make her own semi-separate life for herself. Upon her father’s death, shortly before her marriage, she had inherited £10,000 and her pre-marriage settlement permitted her to keep most of her inheritance and gave her an annual income of £1,000 for her sole use. But even the wealthiest wife could not escape the marriage disabilities, which made her a non-person in the eyes of the civil law, and so her money had to be disbursed to her by a trustee.

Her marital home was the vicarage of the Devon village of Upottery, four miles from Honiton, but she found her surroundings boring and stifling. Here, life was ‘speeding away in the daily round of the common task,’ she wrote, ‘in rural affluence and bucolic repose . . . I require a bracing climate, and Devonshire is very relaxing, and I was altogether unable to ride and walk.’ So while Reverend Lowe remained at Upottery, Mrs Lowe would be away for weeks at a time, visiting Exeter, London and Oxford and travelling abroad, to Paris and the spas of
Germany. Many of these trips, she later explained, had been taken because she was ‘depressed in health, and weak’; she would also allude to suffering ‘nervous’ trouble.

There is no record of her feelings about the loss of four of her infants; childhood mortality was so high in those years (a quarter of all deaths were of children under one year old) that the grief and distress did not necessarily receive special mention. But it cannot have failed to have deepened the sense of desolation that had come upon Louisa at the time of her marriage. She later said of these years, ‘I had a good deal of trial. I had a trying life; but there was nothing which affected me, on the whole, more than it would anybody else.’ But that wasn’t quite right: she attempted suicide, with opium, in 1854. She was thirty-three, and pregnant with her fourth child. However, she took such a large dose that she vomited instead, and would make no further attempt to end her life.

One afternoon, she noticed her husband staring at her. ‘I do believe you are mad,’ he said, out of the blue. She went to see a doctor and told him of this remark, saying, ‘It is very queer, I do not half like it’, and the doctor just shrugged and asked, ‘Have you read “The Baronet’s Bride” in
Warren’s Tales
?’ Master in Lunacy Samuel Warren had written a successful series of short stories, and ‘The Baronet’s Bride’ featured an insane husband, whose actions scare his wife. Mrs Lowe did not know what to make of this reference.

She had spotted that George was writing a number of letters these days, the contents and recipients of which he would not reveal to her when she asked. When she silently approached him one day and looked over his shoulder, some of the words in the letter alarmed her. Later that day, when they were taking the air, she on a pony and he on foot alongside, Louisa asked her husband what the letter had meant but he would not tell her. So she tapped the pony with her whip and off it cantered across country, to the home of the vicar of the nearby village of Colebrook, who had known her since childhood. She explained to the clergyman that she suspected some plot was being set in motion and she authorised him to act on her behalf in the event of her disappearance. She then took herself to Exeter for a few days before returning to George and their uneasy marital stalemate.

In 1867, when she was forty-six, she found the remedy for her loneliness and anxiety. A spiritualist friend persuaded her to come along to a table-tilting and -rapping session at an apartment above a ham and beef shop in Red Lion Street, Holborn – the home of one of Britain’s best-known mediums, Mary Marshall. Mrs Lowe had found it a grotesque notion that the departed should choose to communicate with the living by assaults upon items of furniture. Mrs Lowe was much more taken with Mrs Marshall’s
planchette
board and its ‘indicator’, which spelt out spirit messages; and when two communications from her own dead brother came through, she felt that she had found ‘a stepping stone to God’. Mrs Lowe never ceased being a Church of England Christian; and when later defending herself against accusations that she dabbled in the occult, she stated that her spiritualist beliefs were ‘in accordance with primitive Christianity’. It was always the Christian Almighty who was communicating with her directly, with no need for suspect characters such as Reverend Lowe interloping between the Lord and his worshipper.

After the revelation in Holborn, Mrs Lowe began to sit alone with a pen in her hand, and within a few weeks, unintelligible pen strokes on paper gave way to characters and then words, and before long ‘an unseen, impalpable agent’ was guiding her hand to record ‘the
names of all I loved best in Spirit-land’. These ‘loving and holy guides’ became her dearest companions and she was lonely no more. She spent days at a time in solitude with her pen and paper, ‘dialoguing with the Unseen’, using her ‘brain ear’. Often it was quite mundane, suburban matters that came through. ‘I leave my home at Thy bidding alone to travel to Norwood by the midday train, and find there is none,’ she wrote to ‘the Saviour’, ‘and Lord, my heart tells me here I sinned. At Thy bidding I drew on a banker I do not draw on usually, and withdrew my balance from another, without Thy giving me any reason till afterwards, when Thou saidst he would fail to-day.’ However, as good friends will, the Saviour took it upon himself to tell her some unpleasant matters that he thought she really ought to be aware of: ‘My child, it behoves thee to seek a divorce from thy husband.’ The Saviour revealed that Reverend Lowe was a serial adulterer, and provided several names and addresses. As a result, Mrs Lowe went to Exeter, to the house of a stranger (a carpenter, as it turned out), banged on the door to gain admittance and accused the woman within of adultery with the vicar. The carpenter was at home, too, and saw Mrs Lowe off his premises very swiftly, using some choice language.