Inconvenient People (65 page)

Except where stated otherwise below, all direct quotations are taken from ‘The Important Lunacy Case of Catherine Cumming’, printed as an appendix to vol. 5 of the
Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology
, April
1852, and available online; or from
The
Times
reports of her second lunacy commission, printed between 8 and 26 January 1852 inclusive. •
Page 133
‘I have hitherto done my duty to him and I will still continue to do so’: the
Standard
, 22 September 1846. •
Page 138
Dr Millingen’s failings: entries dated 26 February and 2 April 1846 in the Minute Book of the Commissioners in Lunacy, The National Archives, MH 50/1. John Gideon Millingen is not to be confused with the Dr (Julius) Millingen, in whose arms Lord Byron had expired in 1824. • Millingen’s relationships with Thackeray and Dickens: E. Gaskell, ‘More About Spontaneous Combustion’,
The Dickensian
, January 1973. • The Society for the Protection of the Insane: Nicholas Hervey, ‘A Slavish Bowing Down’, p. 115. • ‘Full of delusions . . . certainly of unsound mind’: entries dated 21 and 24 May 1846 in the Minute Book of the Commissioners in Lunacy, The National Archives, MH 50/1. • York House had been built for the Bishop of York, but its fine Tudor rooms were destroyed in the eighteenth century (including a richly ornamented domed roof and painted wood panelling) and the house later became firstly the site of Battersea’s renowned enamelling trade and then a distillery. (
Historic Battersea
by Sherwood Ramsey, 1913.) It next became an asylum, then the Price’s Candles factory, demolished and rebuilt in the 1870s. The site was excavated in 2002. •
Page 146
‘A morbid perversion of the natural feelings . . . the business of life’: Prichard quoted in ‘The Meaning of Moral Insanity’ by Eric T. Carlson and Norman Dain,
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
, vol. 36, 1962, p. 131. •
Page 147
‘Gay and smiling and evidently in high spirits’:
The Era
, 27 September 1846. •
Pages 147–8
‘If Mrs Cumming . . . disgrace our statute book’: the
Sun
editorial quoted in the
Liverpool Mercury
, 2 October 1846. •
Page 148
‘A compromise with a lunatic!’
The Lancet
, 14 February 1852. •
Page 149
Sutherland’s 185 private patients:
The Care of the Insane and Their Legal Control
by John Charles Bucknill, 1880, p. 112. •
The Woman in White
: Paul Lewis, in his 2010 pamphlet, ‘Walter’s Walk’, traces the route precisely. •
Page 154
William Vesalius Pettigrew: Pettigrew would be admonished by the Commissioners in later years for signing patients into Munster House Asylum in Fulham, which was also owned by Elliott – the suspicion being that Pettigrew was proving a little too reliable in drumming up business for the Elliott madhouse empire in South and West London. Pettigrew wrote a letter to the Commissioners, complaining that they had even dared to question him, and sure enough, the Commissioners did not pursue the matter further. Minute Book of the Commissioners in Lunacy, The National Archives, MH 50/9, p. 40. •
Page 157
The Eyre Arms inquest: Dr Millingen had not been called to give evidence, because the Commissioners in Lunacy mistakenly believed that he had died. John Gideon Millingen would live on until 1862 but no one appeared to notice the mistake, not even the newspapers or the medical press. •
Page 158
‘Insanity does not admit of being defined . . . 
derangement of the mind’: Forbes Benignus Winslow,
The Plea of Insanity in Criminal Cases
, 1843, p. 74; available online. •
Pages 159–60
The jurymen’s visit to Gothic Villa: Mrs Cumming’s terse self-justification and mocking of a world that she felt had misused her calls Miss Havisham irresistibly to mind, particularly Chapter XI, when the ghastly Pocket relatives visit. •
Page 172
A Practical Treatise on the Law Concerning Lunatics, Idiots and Persons of Unsound Mind
by Leonard Shelford, 1833; 2nd edn 1847: Leonard Shelford, 1795–1864, was a Nemo-style law-writing recluse who, in his Temple chambers, compiled treatises condensing and clarifying complex legal issues, including summaries of recent cases and precedents. •
Pages 173–4
‘With the exception of the cats . . . connected with the inquiry’:
The Lancet
, 17 January 1852. •
Page 174
‘From my judicial recollection of the facts . . . the proceedings in lunacy were proper’:
The Times
, 11 February 1854. • ‘. . . as rational and composed . . . to proceed’: reported in
The Lancet,
14 February 1852. The Lord Chancellorship had just changed hands, Lord St Leonard’s taking over from Lord Truro. His verdict on her sanity is quoted at the very end of ‘The Important Lunacy Case of Catherine Cumming’,
Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology
. •
Page 175
‘The merciful hand . . . certain easy formalities’:
The Lancet
, 9 July 1853. •
Page 176
‘There was a decorous expression of applause in the body of the court’:
Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post
, 8 April 1852. •
Pages 176–7
English Reports, a digitised database of law cases, 1220 to 1867, provided details of the Inces’ and Hoopers’ later legal entanglements. Their later lives were pieced together from Census and birth and death indexes.

Page 179
‘A dangerous lunatic’: The National Archives, MH 50/1, Minute Book of the Commissioners in Lunacy, entry dated 22 October 1845. •
Page 180
‘This is my protector . . . do me harm’:
The Times
, 30 January 1847. • ‘A person of weak and unsound mind . . . very comfortable’: MH 50/1, entries dated 19 November and 4 September 1846 respectively. •
Page 181
‘Obscene and blasphemous . . . security and comfort’:
The Times
, 18 November, 1846. •
Page 184
‘I engaged Dr Quail . . . in my power to do so’:
Morning Post
, 24 February 1848. • Estimated 5,000 single patients in 1828: physician Sir Andrew Halliday, quoted in McCandless, ‘Insanity and Society’, p. 26. •
Page 185
‘The three Commissioners . . . secrets within secrets’:
Report from the 1859 Select Committee on Lunatics
, Session 1, p. 30. •
Page 186
‘We have spent years and years . . . no knowledge whatever’: ibid. The only documentation relating to the Private Register to survive is the Minute Book of the Commissioners in Lunacy’s Private Committee, in The National Archives, MH 50/41. Frustratingly, it runs for only fourteen months,
c.
1845–46. The Private Committee comprised Shaftesbury and
Commissioners Turner and Mylne. •
Page 187
‘He was always weak in the head . . . into some mischief’: the Charles Luxmore case is told in The National Archives, HO 45/3813. •
Page 188
‘Remarkably amiable, quiet and inoffensive . . . a more unfortunate mode of showing it, he had never heard of’:
Examiner
, 2 August 1851. • ‘to render the parties implicated liable to punishment . . . might exercise their discretion’: The National Archives, HO 45/3813. •
Page 190
‘A general prejudice . . . screen patients’: entry dated 14 January 1846 in the Minute Book of the Commissioners in Lunacy, The National Archives, MH 50/1. •
Page 192
‘His mental condition was that of chronic mania . . . a prisoner by nature’: The Lancey case is told in the
Asylum
Journal of Mental Science
, vol. 2, 1855, pp. 114–20. Bucknill was the founding editor of the
Journal
. •
Page 193
The local vicar:
Supplemental Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy to the Lord Chancellor, Relative to the General Condition of the Insane in Wales
, 1844, reveals that local vicars brought to light several family-confined people. The report was clearly commissioned to provide proof of the need to build county asylums in North Wales, to encourage the poorer population to come forward with their insane. At that time, North Wales had no asylum at all, either public or private. •
Page 194
‘Epileptic fits are treated . . . people as vermin’: quoted in Charlotte MacKenzie,
Psychiatry for the Rich: A History of Ticehurst Private Asylum, 1792–1917
, 1992, pp. 98–9. • ‘We have endeavoured year by year . . . very sorry for it’:
Report from the Select Committee on Lunatics
, Session 1, p. 34. •
Pages 195–6
‘Private List’: letter in the Forster Collection of the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Forster MS 48 f. 43. •
Page 196
‘Makes me quite sick . . . shook his head about other places’: letter dated 25–30 September 1842, in G. N. Ray,
The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray
, 1945, 4 vols, vol. 2, p. 81. • John Sutherland suggests, in
Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers
, 1995, that Isabella’s care was low cost, and D. J. Taylor, in
Thackeray
, 1999, pp. 231–2, points out that in paying £2 a week to her carer, Mrs Bakewell, the novelist was not being parsimonious. • ‘Straighten out their wayward children’: Nicholas Hervey’s ‘A Slavish Bowing Down’ cites Morison’s diaries for such incidents, p. 116. • Dr James Crichton-Browne on cruelty to Chancery single patients:
Report from the 1877 Select Committee on Lunacy Law
, p. 66. • ‘Gaskell is single-patient hunting’: National Art Library, Forster MS 48, letter dated 13 October 1863. •
Page 197
‘Oh you devils, let me go . . . kill me’: the Winn case is detailed in The National Archives, MH 51/778, from which all details are taken. •
Page 198
‘Masturbation was the cause of all this’: Blandford’s letter, dated 6 March 1882, ibid. •
Page 199
‘The victim to be interesting . . . be a villain’: ‘Mr Wilkie Collins at Home’,
John Bull
, 29 December 1877. • ‘Newspaper novelists’: H. L. Mansel,
Quarterly Review
, April 1863; ‘the novelist with a purpose’: A. W. à Beckett,
The à Becketts of ‘Punch’: Memories of Fathers and
Sons
, 1903, p. 146. The novel’s serialisation was under the title
Very Hard Cash
. For further reading on Sensation Fiction,
The Maniac in the Cellar: The Sensation Novels of the 1860s
by Winifred Hughes, 1980; Barbara Fass Leavy, ‘Wilkie Collins’s Cinderella: The History of Psychology and
The Woman in White
’, in
Dickens Studies Annual
, vol. 10, 1982; D. A. Miller, ‘
Cage Aux Folles
: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins’s
Woman in White
,’ in Jeremy Hawthorn (ed.),
The Nineteenth-Century British Novel
, 1986; Helen Small,
Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel and Female Insanity, 1800–1865
, Oxford, 1996; Lynne Marie DeCicco,
Women and Lawyers in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Uneasy Alliances and Narrative Misrepresentation
, Lampeter, 1996; Matthew Sweet’s introduction to the 1999 Penguin edition of
The Woman in White
; Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox’s introduction to the 2006 Broadview Press edition of
The Woman in White
; Elaine Showalter, ‘Family Secrets and Domestic Subversion: Rebellion in the Novels of the 1860s’, in Anthony S. Wohl (ed.),
The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses
, 1978; Tamara Silvia Wagner, ‘Sensationalizing Women’s Writing’ in Annette R. Federico (ed.),
Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years
, University of Missouri Press, 2009. •
Pages 199–200
The lack of success and swift denouement of
Very Hard Cash
: Sutherland,
Victorian Fiction
, pp. 157–8. •
Page 200
‘Perchance half-forgotten’: à Beckett,
The à Becketts of ‘Punch
’, p. 146. However, George Orwell – strangely, in my view – believed that, ultimately, Reade would prove more significant than George Eliot. ‘Of all the nineteenth-century novelists who have remained readable, he is perhaps the only one who is completely in tune with his own age.’ ‘Charles Reade’, essay in the
New Statesman and Nation
, 17 August 1940, available online. •
Pages 200–1
‘Fatal Fortune’: this Collins story fictionalises the case of thirty-seven-year-old James Tovey-Tennent, old Etonian and Oxford graduate, who was placed in High Beach Asylum in Essex by his father in 1853. On the beach at Deal in Kent he had met a German woman, and swiftly decided he wished to marry her. His father was very angry and had him committed. After his father’s death, James was allowed (though still under certification) to live with his sister at Goring in Oxfordshire. Here, he would row on the Thames with a statue of the Virgin in his boat; but this eccentricity apart, all the locals, including a senior police constable, testified that he was entirely sane. In 1866 he inherited a huge, £60,000 fortune from his uncle, which led to an inquisition to determine his fitness to manage his estate. He was found insane. However, on single-care probation from his latest asylum, Tovey-Tennent met a Miss Hancock at the Scarborough seaside, and married her in secret. The marriage was legally void, as lunatics were not able to contract a marriage, and Tovey-Tennent was sent back to the asylum. He escaped, and with his wife fled to America. (
The Times
, 27 April, 8 and 9 May 1867.) ‘Fatal Fortune’ is available online. •
Page 201
‘It snatched and growled . . . strange wild
animal . . . three generations’: Jane comes face to face with Bertha in Chapter 26; in Chapter 27, Mr Rochester tells Jane the story of his courtship and marriage. •
Page 202
‘This I know . . . as little deserve blame’: Charlotte Brontë’s introduction (available online) to Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
. • ‘My perverse brains set to work without consulting me’:
Ladies’ Home Treasury
, 1 November 1888. • ‘I agree with them . . . compassionate it as such’: letter dated 4 January 1848 to W. S. Williams, reprinted Wise, Thomas J. and Symington, J. A. (eds), in
The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence
, Oxford, 1932, 4 vols, vol. 2, pp. 173–4. •
Page 204
In 1979 . . . published their famous theory: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
The Madwoman in the Attic
, 1979. •
Page 205
‘no law to prevent a Mr Rochester . . . in
Jane Eyre
’:
British Medical Journal
, 15 February 1879. •
Page 206
‘A woman of station . . . the foundation of his tale’:
The Times
, 14 January 1865, which carried coverage of the Hammond case. The Penge Mystery is told at length in the
Manchester Times
, 19 May 1877. A rather moving, fictionalised version,
Harriet
, was published in 1934 by Elizabeth Jenkins and has recently been reissued.