Inconvenient People (51 page)

Maudsley quickly found Mrs Lowe to be a very ‘disagreeable’ patient. Lawn House had no locked doors within, and there were no gates or railings, as the five other ladies – although under certification – were resigned to the fact of having a better life with the Maudsleys than elsewhere, and so did not attempt to escape. (This perhaps suggests how terrible the home lives of these very wealthy women – aged between thirty-one and fifty-two – may have been.) They ‘were there as friends and on intimate terms’, declared Dr Maudsley, blurring, as many private proprietors did, the true nature of the transaction. But Mrs Lowe did try to flee, and this required Dr Maudsley to introduce locks and bolts into the house, which, he claimed, upset his other patients, no doubt reminding them that the country cottage aura of Lawn House was indeed illusory. Mrs Lowe made a run for it one day when out strolling with Mrs Anne Maudsley, but was swiftly re-taken. During another escape attempt, someone in the village of Hanwell spotted her, ‘thinking she looked very insane and peculiar’, and raised the alarm. After this, Mrs Lowe was not allowed out of the house, except on attended visits to Emily’s rented home at Ealing; but Emily found Louisa’s repeated accusations against Reverend Lowe highly distressing, and these visits stopped. The reverend, as signatory of the lunacy order, was the only person who could permit visitors to see Mrs Lowe, and he himself, Emily, daughter Mary, one son, and a Crookenden nephew all came to Lawn House, as did Charles Roupell, who was a very good friend of both Lowes and was perplexed and upset by their marital unhappiness. The reverend would not allow Mrs Lowe to see solicitor John White.

Dr Maudsley told Mrs Lowe quite openly that he would not be
allowing her written communication with the outside world, after he opened one of her letters that was filled with her usual accusations against her husband. Her letters to the Commissioners in Lunacy were delivered but were not responded to, and in the summer of 1871 Dr Maudsley asked her, ‘Oh, do you think they would let out such a firebrand as yourself?’ Lutwidge and Wilkes, who visited her four times at Lawn House, remained fixated on her passive writing. They asked her whether, if the power that moved her fingers so instructed her, she would seek a judicial separation from Reverend Lowe and would mount a criminal case for false imprisonment if she were to be liberated. To the first, she replied that she might, but not because the Saviour told her to; and to the second, she said she would give no promise not to go to law. She was angry that all the Commissioners sought to discuss with her were metaphysical or religious matters; she wanted to bring the discussion round to how monstrous it was that six entire months of rational behaviour in the asylums were not being taken into account, with a view to her liberation.

At close to £420 a year, the fees at Lawn House were extremely high, and Mrs Lowe delighted in detailing the squalor at the Maudsley establishment. She nicknamed it Pond Hall, and said that the entire place stank of sewage because the small lake at the front of the house received all the contents of the privies, and that these were in themselves disgusting beyond description – ‘windowless and pestilential’. So bad was the smell from the pond, she claimed, it rendered the bedrooms at the front of the house unusable.

The food was very bad and there was not enough of it, and she claimed that the temperature in the dining room was a mere 42 degrees Fahrenheit because the Maudsleys were parsimonious with fuel. There were no attendants – just three maids and a companion kept by one of the ladies. All the staff were badly paid and had to sleep on the floors of the patients’ rooms. Even worse, Mrs Lowe felt, these women were ‘uncultivated’ and could provide the ladies with ‘no diversion from painful introspection’ nor ‘reawaken slumbering powers’. Lawn House, Mrs Lowe said, was a whited sepulchre: bright, fair and surrounded by flowers – and foul within.

Dr Maudsley, for his part, was thoroughly fed up with Louisa Lowe, and asked Reverend Lowe to take her away. The reverend, meanwhile,
was setting in train a lawsuit which would ensure that any future asylum costs would have to be paid directly from Louisa’s own money, and not from their joint finances; her trustee, in charge of disbursing her separate moneys to her, was refusing to settle the asylum bills, clearly unhappy about her incarceration, and demanding that the reverend pay up instead. The costs to April 1871, when George commenced his suit, were substantial: at Brislington House they had amounted to £140 5
s
10
d
; and for Lawn House they had reached £61 19
s
9
d
. If Mrs Lowe was to spend many more years in an asylum, the married couple’s joint estate would be facing vast outlay. This lawsuit seems an extraordinarily cold act, and it is clear from the Chancery documents that the Lowe children had taken their mother’s ‘side’, on this matter at least. Happily, the reverend’s action backfired. He had repeatedly refused to petition for a lunacy inquisition, as his wife wished, but his lawsuit prompted the attention of the Lord Chancellor, who now decided to investigate how Mrs Lowe’s considerable fortune was to be managed in future. As a result, Mrs Lowe was at last permitted access to a lawyer, and with solicitor John White she started compiling a list of witnesses who could vouch for her sanity.

She was entitled to choose whether the inquisition should take place in camera, before a Master in Lunacy, or in public, in front of a jury. She chose the latter because she wanted the world to know what had been done to her. And – contra John Stuart Mill – she wished to place her fate before the ‘common sense’ of the layman rather than the ‘science’ of the lunacy specialist, as she put it. She may also have been aware that juries were far more likely to return a ‘sane’ verdict than a Master in Lunacy; as we have seen, from the late 1850s, juries were rejecting cases where ‘intellectual confusion’ was not clearly evident and were not easily swayed by tales of ‘moral insanity’. Commissioner Lutwidge was surprised at her choice, as a jury trial meant greater publicity, which – he believed – women would normally seek to avoid at all costs. He told her that a public hearing would be ‘undesirable . . . We always advise ladies in these circumstances to keep quiet.’

This unexpected twist horrified Reverend Lowe. It also meant that the limelight of an inquisition would be shone upon Lawn House. As Maudsley’s biographer has written, his asylum looked curiously old-fashioned for a man who so loudly embraced
physiology and evolutionary biology. Maudsley believed that the large county asylums herded together too many diverse and poorly classified patients – a set-up that was highly unlikely to bring about any improvement in their condition. But Lawn House merely appeared to be performing the same action in miniature – as a holding pen for six unclassified ladies, offering only respite, not cure. Because he charged steep fees, he could easily be accused of exploiting the mentally troubled; and some might also question how it was that, with his many other famous professional commitments, Dr Maudsley could possibly be supplying top-quality personal care to these patients. Mrs Lowe was certain to make criticisms of Lawn House at her inquisition.

The reverend and the doctor decided to act and, with the Commissioners in Lunacy’s approval, Mrs Lowe was shifted, to Otto House Asylum in Hammersmith. Here, visiting physician Dr George Fielding Blandford examined her and declared that she was fully recovered. Blandford agreed with the Lord Chancellor’s suggestion that she should be allowed to live outside Otto House on probation, ahead of the inquisition. He asked her to sign a document, drafted by her husband’s solicitor, which signalled her agreement to remain under certificate for three more months. She did so reluctantly, worried that it might look as though she was condoning her original incarceration.

Her solicitor John White found pleasant lodgings for her at 9 Bedford Place, Russell Square, where she moved in late December 1871. As part of the probation and inquisition process she was visited regularly by Dr Rhys Williams of Bethlehem, who found her to be sane and certificated her as such in April 1872. With that, no inquisition was needed: Mrs Lowe was a free woman after one year and three months of asylum detention and supervised probation.

Although Mrs Lowe was only fifty-one years old at the time of her release, one of her subsequent tracts about her experiences was subtitled
How an Old Woman Obtained Passive Writing, and The Outcome Thereof
. She selected as her persona the dignified middle-class matron – an unthreatening, unquestionably feminine creature. To have revealed her rage in its true colours would have turned her into
a caricaturable figure à la Rosina Bulwer-Lytton – easy to mock, easy to ignore, easy to accuse of exaggeration and to condemn with the insult ‘unfeminine’. ‘I would much rather have had it [the incarceration] investigated quietly than before the public. I never had lived in public in my life before,’ she wrote. For eighteen months she pursued justice without publicity, writing privately to the prime minister, the leader of the opposition, the current Lord Chancellor and the men who had filled that post in previous years. Many did not reply, and those who did refused to support her request for a government investigation into her case and those of other doubtful certifications. No woman relishes the spotlight, she announced (rather sweepingly), but because she had failed to achieve anything ‘quietly’, in July 1873 she founded the Lunacy Law Reform Association (LLRA), with offices in Berners Street, off Oxford Street.

Mrs Lowe made a long inaugural address from the stage of the Cavendish Rooms in Mortimer Street, nearby, on 17 July. Her audience was described as a very well dressed, ‘select’ crowd, with women far outnumbering men. As was the case at many a nineteenth-century public meeting loud agreement from the floor punctuated Mrs Lowe’s speech; she frequently had to stop for bursts of applause and exclamations of sympathy. ‘Shame!’ individuals roared when she brought up the subject of male attendants handling a female patient. Her resolution, condemning the existing lunacy laws, was carried unanimously, funds were pledged, and the names and addresses of those wishing to join the campaign were collected. Emily Chamier had clearly been forgiven and reconciled with her sister and was bustling around at the meeting as an LLRA committee member and collector of subscriptions. Long after the meeting had officially broken up, groups of people remained in the Cavendish Rooms, discussing cases that they knew of, including those of individuals who were being confined within their own homes.

In her speech Mrs Lowe had addressed her inability to mount a civil case against her wrongdoers because she was a married woman. And she maintained that it was more common for women to be ‘put away’ without cause than men. Furthermore, not only did wives face legal disabilities in fighting their cases, women were more afraid of scandal and so were less likely to mount an action if they were released.

But in fact, the cases subsequently brought to the attention of Mrs Lowe and the LLRA did not suggest a gender bias in the problem of doubtful certification: the ratio in these is fourteen males to ten females. (See
Appendix 4
.) But with the lurid real-life sagas of Lady Lytton, Mary Jane Turner and now Mrs Lowe, plus the best-selling fictional dilemmas of Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick in
The Woman in White
, lunacy law became, from the late 1850s, a focus of women’s rights campaigners. For them, the asylum – its deprivations and entrapment, its insistence on a narrow range of acceptable behaviour, its thwarting of autonomy – writ large the lack of freedom that women, and wives in particular, experienced in everyday life. ‘We always advise ladies to keep quiet,’ Lewis Carroll’s uncle had told Mrs Lowe when she sought a jury hearing. But the insistence that a woman be ‘ladylike’ was increasingly seen by many women
as a potential threat to the liberty of more than half of the English nation.