Inconvenient People (61 page)

Winslow came up with an early definition of what we today call a psychopathic serial killer. He made a thorough nuisance of himself to the police during the Jack the Ripper investigation, and excitedly insisted on one G. Wentworth Bell Smith (or Bellsmith) as the culprit. But Winslow’s schematisation of the outlook and behavioural traits of what was then called ‘a homicidal maniac’ did represent something of a breakthrough in the study of the criminal mind. His was an early instance of what is now called ‘criminal profiling’, and Winslow summarised what he believed were the likely habits and haunts of the Whitechapel Fiend. (But still, he couldn’t resist falsifying a date in a document, in order to boost his case against Bell Smith.) Bell Smith, a Canadian commercial traveller in trusses, was a lodger at 27 Sun Street, Finsbury, and his behaviour there (noiseless rubber boots, bloodied clothing, habitual copying out of reams of the Old Testament) prompted his landlord to approach Winslow with his suspicions.

Two years later, he was involved in another pioneering project: he founded an outpatient centre where the poor who were suffering the early symptoms of nervous disorder could be treated as voluntary patients in a non-asylum setting. The Forbes Winslow Memorial Hospital (later the British Hospital for Functional Nervous Disorders) opened in February 1890 on the Euston Road, with opening hours that were convenient for working men and women. The hospital was viewed with suspicion and starved of cash by a legislature that had not yet digested the notions of mental outpatients, voluntary patients and preventive medicine in lunacy; and so it relied wholly on donations, and a considerable amount was raised from boxes placed in various pubs in London.

Winslow now believed that nine in ten mental health sufferers could avoid incarceration if diagnosed and treated early enough. He was one of the first English doctors fully to understand that mental health needed to lose the stigma of compulsory incarceration if the mind problems of the largest section of the population were to be successfully treated. While he blamed drink and hereditary mental weakness for much of the insanity of the poor, he also stressed that their living and working conditions caused great anxiety, which could lead to mental disturbance: ‘These poor people worry about their children, their work, their earnings and their health – in fact, about almost all mortal things, and sooner or later their minds, deprived of diversion, give way.’

Winslow’s transition from aggressively patriarchal Victorian bogeyman to twentieth-century humanitarian was further enhanced by his new-found approval of female doctors and by his attempts to drum up charitable payments for labouring folks who were out of work because of a nervous complaint. And his existential full circle was completed in 1910, when – thanks to an encounter with Italian medium Eusapia Palladino – he embraced spiritualism. Drawing-room seances hosted by the second Mrs Winslow helped to raise money for the Nervous Disorders Hospital.

We don’t know what, if anything, Mrs Weldon made of this strange turn of events. For unknown reasons she had fallen out with Winslow again and she receives no mention in his entertaining, Holmesian memoirs,
Recollections of Forty Years
, published in 1910 (in which he complained that in the mid-1880s he had been made a ‘cat’s paw of the imperfections of lunacy law’).

After an acrimonious split from Angèle in 1889, Mrs Weldon went to live at the Gisors convent in Normandy, to recuperate from eleven years of litigation and overwork. With an insatiable urge for righteousness, she wrote millions of words to ensure that posterity understood how wrong her adversaries had been. After Gounod’s death in 1893 she wrote a devotional biography that attempted to analyse his genius. Now that he was dead, she got on with him better than she ever had since the early 1870s: a medium transmitted around 600 lines a month of communication from Gounod to Mrs Weldon, who allowed the composer to make the important decisions in her life at Gisors. For seven years she was deceived by the medium, who was revealed at last to have been duping her; but the communications did help her to come to terms with the pain of her losses – the pregnancies, the academy, the marriage, the deaths of all her various pets, the feeling that Angèle had used her, the friendships that had turned nasty, the Treherne family life that had been so frightening. The demolition of Tavistock House in 1901 (the British Medical Association’s headquarters are on its site today) shook her badly, especially the fear that her dogs’ remains might have been turfed up.

She returned to Britain in 1905 and, not content to be a living piece of recent history, she resumed litigation, including a Chancery suit against her brother Dalrymple’s rather unpleasant widow. ‘So many old faces,’ she wrote in her journal, of her return to the Royal Courts of Justice, ‘so glad to see them. All of us looking so old.’ When a woman in the crowd pointed her out as
the
Mrs Weldon, and said that she looked just like a judge, Mrs Weldon replied, ‘Well, I must be an ugly old frump.’

Feeling the end was approaching, in 1913 she commissioned her deathbed photography in advance of her actual demise, which happened on 11 January 1914, six months after Dr Winslow’s death. Such a noisy man, he lies forgotten in the brambles of the Old Cemetery in Barnes.

The impact of Mrs Weldon’s litigation frenzy was immense. The Portia of the Law Courts had fashioned an exemplary horror story that demonstrated precisely how the lunacy law might be used to send a sane person into confinement. While her lawsuits were under way, the House of Lords debated the slender threads by which individual liberty appeared to hang. Lord Salisbury, leader of the Conservative opposition (and soon to be prime minister), told the peers that it was now clear that something had to change in order to prevent the inconvenient being falsely imprisoned by their relatives or spouses. ‘Motives of that kind were familiar in fiction,’ he said, but he feared that ‘they were not altogether strange in real life’. Literary and non-fiction melodramas – both played their parts in bringing home to the legislature the mechanics of a malicious incarceration.

In 1883, 1885, 1886, 1887 and 1888, lunacy law amendment bills failed to win parliamentary time in a hugely overcrowded agenda. In the meantime, the proprietors of private asylums became tightly organised to counter the threat to their trade. They argued, with some justification, that if wealthy people were to be compelled to use state-run asylums, they would simply lodge their troubled, or troublesome, family member in private care on the Continent – out of reach of inspection and regulation. Or there might occur an expansion of unlicensed, unregulated single-patient care in England – an underground network of private ‘houses’, with huge potential for patient abuse and malicious incarceration. However, the landscape of mental health was beginning to undergo small transitions that, taken together, would slowly change attitudes. As we have seen, Dr Winslow himself felt that the time was right for a voluntary, outpatient approach for the working classes. In the 1880s, the wealthy were also increasingly
using private wards within the county asylums, and new wings or separate blocks for fee-paying mental patients were being constructed within many state institutions. Sanatoria and nursing homes began to emerge, taking in guests who felt the first symptoms of potential nervous collapse. While psychiatric problems continued to carry a social stigma, it seems that from the mid-1880s having a lunatic in the family was less likely to be viewed as a permanent blight on the standing of a public person, nor did it thwart inter-clan marriage alliances among wealthy families.

After seven years of parliamentary wrangles, the 1890 Lunacy Act at last placed the certification of all alleged lunatics under the auspices of a public figure – the magistrate. England appeared to have finally run out of patience with the private proprietor mad-doctors, whose cure rates failed to match those of county asylums and whose cavalier attitude to the nervously afflicted was out of step with the times. Laissez-faire was on the back foot in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and the Weldon case had powerfully demonstrated the pitfalls of permitting a free trade in lunacy. The Act therefore required that anyone wishing to have a private patient confined must petition a justice of the peace, supplying two separate doctors’ certificates. The patient’s regular physician was to be the signatory of one of the certificates (a proposal that John Perceval had made fifty years earlier), and if he was not, an explanation for this should be forthcoming. In sudden acute or violent cases an ‘urgency order’ could be obtained, bypassing the JP and requiring only one lunacy certificate; however, such an order was valid for just seven days, at the end of which the patient was to be discharged, or re-certified with the JP’s approval and the completion of a second lunacy order. Chancery proceedings remained largely unchanged; but from 1890, the nation’s ‘Mrs Rochesters’ – the uncertificated, home-confined family members – were subject to the visitation of the Commissioners in Lunacy, who could recommend to the Lord Chancellor that the confined person be freed entirely or sent to asylum care. The old problem remained, of course, of how the authorities found out about them.

Legislators had never believed John Perceval’s, Louisa Lowe’s or Georgina Weldon’s assertions that wrongful incarceration was a common phenomenon; but they had been more persuaded regarding prolonged detention by private proprietors. And so from 1890, lunacy
certificates were to be valid for one year only and had to be followed up with re-certification examinations. Moreover, no new licences were to be granted to private asylums.

The Lunacy Law Reform Association and the breakaway LLAS both welcomed the new Act, but wished that it had gone further, abolishing all private care and axing the ‘hopelessly effete’ Commissioners in Lunacy.

The first major test case for the new law came in 1895. Edith Lanchester was the epitome of the New Woman of the Nineties: educated to degree level, she was a white-collar worker, a Socialist, a feminist, and determined to spend the rest of her life with her lover, James Sullivan, a railway clerk, in their Clapham Junction lodgings, without marrying. Her father, a wealthy architect, was having none of this, and on the evening of Friday 25 October 1895, he and two of Edith’s brothers dragged her to a carriage, tied her with rope, and deposited her at The Priory, Roehampton. It was all very old-fashioned.

An ‘urgency order’ had been written out by Dr George Fielding Blandford – the same doctor who had disagreed with Dr Maudsley and had declared Louisa Lowe sane. Blandford’s rationale for authorising Lanchester’s detention sounded decidedly quaint in 1895, and indeed there was some sniggering when his diagnosis became public: ‘She says she is going to live with a man below her in station because marriage is immoral. This she argued in a wholly irrational manner.’ Blandford stated that certification would have been unquestioned if Miss Lanchester had threatened suicide; as it was, she was threatening ‘social suicide’, which had justified his saving her from ‘utter ruin . . . She had a monomania on the subject of marriage, and I believed that her brain had been turned by Socialist meetings and writings, and that she was quite unfit to take care of herself.’

Coincidentally – and fortunately – just two days later the Commissioners in Lunacy turned up at The Priory for a statutory visit; and as her father had not yet had time to obtain a magistrate’s order and a second lunacy certificate, they immediately freed Edith. She was brought back to Clapham in triumph by her comrades from the Social Democratic Federation, who helped to keep the tale of ‘The Socialist Romance’ in the newspapers for weeks. Fresh from his destruction of Oscar Wilde, the Marquess of Queensberry – atheist,
divorcé – wrote James Sullivan a supportive letter, offering to pay any legal costs: ‘I should like to shake you and your wife [
sic
] by the hand . . . You have a chance now of making a public protest, as everyone’s attention is attracted. What is their idiotic [marriage] ceremony?’ (Lanchester and Sullivan never married and lived together until James’s death in 1945; their daughter, Elsa, went on to be the Hollywood star of
Bride of Frankenstein
– a different kind of horror story.)

The Lanchester case had shown that the new lunacy system seemed to be working, as the victim had been speedily freed. However, some things clearly hadn’t changed. The Commissioners refused to take any action against Blandford or the Lanchester family. Her counsel also warned Edith not to go ahead with a private prosecution, as it would be an expensive failure to try to prove in court that malice – rather than a genuine mistake – lay behind the attempt to have her certified.

History is the study of change over time. But the stories in this book have demonstrated the stubborn unchangeability of many aspects of the lunacy issue. (Many, perhaps most, of the chapters also contain uncanny echoes for those who have experience of present-day mental health systems, whether as ‘client’, carer or health worker.) What, in essence, is so very different about the strategies and motivations of Edward Davies’s mother in 1829, and Edith Lanchester’s father in 1895? In terms of protest, the street ‘mobbing’ we saw in the Davies case died out shortly afterwards, but many thousands rallied to cheer Mrs Weldon. The spectators’ galleries at lunacy inquisitions and post-liberation lawsuits were as crowded with well-wishers of the alleged lunatic in the 1890s as ever they had been in the 1820s. And in terms of patient advocacy, John Perceval’s revolutionary late-Georgian ideas could have been written this very week.