Inconvenient People (50 page)

After she had been at Brislington for three weeks, Mrs Lowe was paid her first visit by Commissioners James Wilkes and Robert Skeffington Lutwidge. Although this, too, contravened the rules, Wilkes and Lutwidge acceded to Dr Fox’s request that he have a private conversation with them before they spoke to his patient. In addition, Dr Fox asked Mrs Lowe to declare to the Commissioners that she had been properly detained. During her interview, she later reported, Wilkes and Lutwidge kept popping in and out of the room, so she had in effect only a few minutes alone with them. She alleged that Commissioner Wilkes said to her, ‘Oh, you believe the Bible and all that sort of thing’, and had commented, ‘All spiritualists are mad.’ It is a mark of her naivety that she was astonished that Wilkes and Lutwidge left her behind when they departed Brislington: she had assumed the Lunacy Commission would have spotted immediately that her detention had been a mistake.

Two weeks later, on 1 November 1870, Dr Fox wrote in his casebook that Mrs Lowe was ‘variable in mood’, one day talking of nothing but Reverend Lowe’s supposed adulteries and the next admitting that she had probably exaggerated the matter and ought to put it all behind her ‘and not expose his conduct to the world’. Surprisingly, after that Dr Fox made no more casebook entries about Mrs Lowe for the next three months. During this time, as her conduct seemed unremarkable, she was moved to Heath House, one of several separate lodges in the grounds of Brislington. This may have been an acknowledgement that the main building, with its shrieks and cries, was likely to hold up her progress towards placidity. Dr Fox was, in fact, beginning to consider her to be fully recovered but was having difficulty in persuading the Commissioners that she was fit to be discharged. As a provincial asylum, Brislington was also subject to inspection by local magistrates. One of these, Dr William Budd (who, sadly, later himself became insane), had known Mrs Lowe and her children in earlier years and felt sure that she was of sound mind. ‘I am in a great difficulty,’ he told her, referring to the Commissioners’ wish that she should stay in the asylum for the time being. Budd’s dilemma highlights the ongoing battle for supremacy in the provinces between the Whitehall Commissioners and the local magistracy.

In the New Year, Emily Chamier, Mrs Lowe’s widowed sister, arrived in London from her home in the South of France, alarmed at what
the Lowe children had told her of their mother’s sudden vanishing from Exeter. Emily did not think that Louisa was a lunatic; but nor did she believe any of the accusations made against George, and Emily and her brother-in-law would maintain a cordial relationship throughout. In fact, most of the Lowes and her own family, the Crookendens, were baffled by Louisa’s behaviour, feeling that she was sane but that her allegations against her husband had no foundation. Emily went to see the Commissioners in Lunacy to plead for Mrs Lowe’s release. In law, the patient him- or herself could only know the contents of the certificates upon their discharge, and even then, only if the Commissioners gave their assent. But Emily also contacted a London solicitor, John White, and White was eventually, at the discretion of the Commissioners, allowed to see the lunacy order and certificates upon which Mrs Lowe had been committed.

The certificates had been signed by Doctors Shapter and Kempe, the lunacy order by Reverend Lowe. Dr Kempe’s certificate noted, ‘Various delusions about her husband, &c, &c, &c.’ – the three &cs giving the document an alarmingly insouciant air. Although Mrs Lowe had been careful not to bring up the subject of spiritualism in her talk with Dr Shapter, he had nevertheless written: ‘I am told that she says she is in direct communication with the Saviour; that she writes much and often and says she can only write as God moves her fingers.’ Mrs Lowe later contended that this was inadmissible hearsay; she had never used such an expression to anyone, and certainly not to Shapter. The certificates also included the erroneous statement that there had been madness among the Crookendens. Mrs Lowe had thought that she was protected by the Hippocratic oath when telling Kempe and Shapter of her concerns about her husband: ‘I told them things in professional confidence, thinking them to be thoroughly trustworthy.’ Instead, it had led to her incarceration.

She also queried the legitimacy of the interviews: each doctor examining an alleged lunatic was by law required to hold these interviews entirely separately – alone with the patient. Mrs Lowe had been subjected to a double act that complied with the letter of the lunacy law, but not with its spirit, in that Kempe and Shapter had each briefly left the room during the conversation at Miss Radford’s and so could claim that each interview had been separate. Lord Coleridge, summing up in the (all-male) wrongful incarceration court case of
Nowell
v.
Williams
, would jokingly name this sleight of hand by physicians ‘a Dutch barometer
conversation’: the ingenious mechanism on these fashionable household gadgets featured a little man coming out of his slot as another went back into his own slot when climatic conditions changed. This was similar, in Lord Coleridge’s view, to the technique of the two lunacy doctors who had acted in collusion in
Nowell
v.
Williams
.

As for the lunacy order, George Lowe had answered the question of whether this was ‘the first attack’ of insanity with the statement: ‘For the last twenty years [she] has been subject to what is termed hysteria.’ And under the heading ‘When and where under previous care and treatment’ he had written, ‘During this period of twenty years has been constantly under treatment’. Mrs Lowe would later argue that the latter was not an answer to the question, and that the term ‘hysteria’ had no true medical meaning.

By now Dr Fox was becoming keen to get her off his hands. He told the Commissioners he did not want her at Brislington beyond Lady Day (25 March). And finally the Commissioners began to budge. Wilkes and Lutwidge now informed their colleagues at the Lunacy Commission that further detention of Mrs Lowe was not desirable and on 19 January 1871 the Commissioners wrote to George Lowe, requesting that, ‘The lady should be discharged.’ Reverend Lowe informed Dr Fox: ‘After the Commissioners’ letter I suppose I must consent to Mrs Lowe’s discharge and beg you will carry out the suggestion as soon as you may think advisable.’ He enclosed a cheque for £10 to cover his wife’s fare to London, where he assumed she would reside.

But just as Mrs Lowe was on the point of being released, Emily Chamier suddenly changed her mind about her sister’s sanity. She informed the Commissioners that recent letters she had received from Mrs Lowe disclosed that shocking new revelations were once again coming from her fingers. Emily therefore concluded that Louisa was suffering an ‘unyielding delusion’ and that the seclusion of Brislington House had not eradicated what Emily had at first considered just a brief spell of confusion and excitement. Instead of release, Reverend Lowe and the Commissioners now decided, with Emily’s support, that Mrs Lowe should be transferred to the care of Dr Henry Maudsley at the exclusive Lawn House in Hanwell, on the western edge of London, close to the Middlesex County Asylum. Maudsley had inherited this going concern upon marrying Anne, the daughter of John Conolly.

Henry Maudsley has a heroic reputation today, largely thanks to his £40,000 grant for the building of what became the Maudsley Hospital, in Denmark Hill, South London. He had been an outstanding young medical student, who, with little family finance or connections, had become one of the most respected British alienists by the mid-1860s. But he was busy getting himself stuck in a Darwinian dead end – or rather, in the bleaker rut of the T. H. Huxley strain of evolution theory. He was to become unshiftable in his belief that ‘mental disease’ (as he called it) was a purely physiological problem of poor ‘organisation’ and defective structure; he thought that environment and personal history had no bearing on an individual’s psychological functioning. The nervous system of someone from poor hereditary stock would inevitably function worse than that of someone whose lineage had experienced no degeneration. Nature’s purpose was fixed: all you could ever do was function in the way your heredity permitted you to function. He described this sad state of affairs as ‘the tyranny of organisation’.

Maudsley was blunt, sardonic and unclubbable, and his increasingly hard line on the materiality of mental disease, and the pessimism of his inheritance theory, distanced him from many fellow workers in the field. Goings-on at Lawn House were an additional factor that would finally compel him to leave active public life and move further into his authorship and immensely lucrative, secretive, West End private consultancy for the very wealthy. However, Dr Maudsley was consistently inconsistent, and so it is hard to come up with definitive ‘Maudsleyism’. Very late in life he wrote that, ‘Consistency signifies prejudice and stagnation’, and he changed his mind about many things over the course of his career, including masturbation (moving from viewing it as a significant cause of mental disease in adolescence and young adulthood to deciding that it was probably of little importance). In an unpublished note of 1912, he appeared to accept that even his evolutionism had flaws: ‘To understand a man you must know not what he is, but what he has suffered.’

But Maudsley did remain pessimistic about women. Pioneering female doctor Elizabeth Garrett Anderson attacked Maudsley in print for his stance on gender, using late-Victorian racial theory to mock him as ‘an Ashanti warrior’, lobbing any antiquated projectile he could lay hands on as a weapon against the advance of civilisation and female equality. Because he believed energies to be finite, and that each creature was highly adapted to specific roles, Maudsley had concluded that women could not menstruate and engage in intellectual pursuits (at least, not without serious health consequences). Furthermore, as he detested all spiritualists as ‘cranks’, it is little surprise that Maudsley believed Louisa Lowe to be of unsound mind and that there was little hope of recovery. Here at last was the coldly mechanistic, atheistical scientist of Mrs Lowe’s nightmares – the man who insisted that her messages from Beyond were indicative of ineradicable insanity. One day, when she asked Dr Maudsley, ‘How can you keep me here? You know I am not insane!’, he replied, Cheshire Cat-style, ‘I never said you were not insane. Everybody is insane.’ Later on, chewing it all over in the aftermath of the Lowe case, he would write, ‘The line between sanity and insanity is like a line of demarcation between light and darkness – it is impossible to draw it.’

Reading her passive writings, Maudsley noted that ‘many of them were of a very puerile character, some of them read very blasphemously, and others rather tend to the obscene.’ As an example of the puerile and grandiose, Maudsley pointed to an exchange with the ‘Almighty’ that read: ‘Mr [i.e. Dr] Kempe thinks me a beast and a fool.’ To which the Almighty had replied: ‘My poor child, both he and all men shall honour thee.’ In another exchange, according to Maudsley, Mrs Lowe had claimed to be the female Christ. Yet what alarmed Maudsley most was that Mrs Lowe acted upon instructions contained in these messages. She had attacked her husband’s character on the writing’s say-so and had made an equally unfounded accusation against a stranger (the carpenter’s wife), which rendered Mrs Lowe a ‘social nuisance’, as Maudsley put it. Maudsley and Emily Chamier were extremely concerned about the welfare of her young daughter, Harriet, feeling certain that Mrs Lowe’s passive writing and general oddness had had a terribly disturbing effect on the physically debilitated child. For her part, Mrs Lowe pointed out that right up until the time of her seizure from Exeter, her husband had never tried to keep any of the children away from her. Would he have allowed her such a
huge presence in their lives if he had truly believed her to be of unsound mind? she asked.