Inconvenient People (67 page)

Page 250
‘From a happy wife who pities a persecuted one’: manuscript original held at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, DE/K C29/23. •
Pages 250–1
‘In this country . . . domestic wrongs’:
Hertford Mercury
, 24 July 1858. •
Page 251
Figures on pre and post-1857 initiation of divorce:
Family Ties: English Families, 1540–1920
by Mary Abbott, 1993.

Page 252
‘Ministers sometimes wept . . . more easily shocked’: G. M. Young,
Victorian England: Portrait of an Age
, 1936, p. 14. •
Page 253
‘A woman of some accomplishments’:
York Herald
, 24 July 1858. • ‘A strumpet . . . he would leave her back there’: ibid. •
Page 254
‘My dearest Mary . . . live apart’: ibid., 31 July 1858. •
Page 257
‘A want of collectedness about her.’:
York Times
, 24 July 1858. • ‘I find Mrs Turner . . . ignorant and beastly’:
Standard
, 26 July 1858. • ‘You have stripped before many men . . . the tricks of a whore’:
York Times
, 24 July 1858. •
Pages 257–8
‘Dear Sir . . . I shall break my heart’:
York Herald
, 31 July 1858. •
Page 258
‘Oh she is mad . . . no more mad than I am’: ibid. •
Page 259
‘A lady rather above the middle stature . . . connected and unvarying’:
Standard
, 26 July 1858. •
Page 261
‘It is perhaps
best . . . a woman of a decided character, in many ways’: letter dated 29 August 1857, in the Forster Collection of the National Art Library, Forster MS 48 f. 65. • ‘You would be sorry . . . anything at all’:
York Times
, 24 July 1858. •
Page 262
‘Convey my gratitude to Mr Turner’:
Liverpool Mercury
, 27 July 1858. •
Pages 262–3
‘all of our minds when we have felt unwell . . . Fathers, husbands and brothers . . . recovered her intellect . . . considerable caution’:
Standard
, 26 July 1858 •
Page 264
‘Could Metcalfe break into English homes and steal away our English wives’: ibid., 9 August. •
Page 265
‘Show that everything is
couleur de rose
 . . . gratifying averages’:
Morning Chronicle
, 27 July 1858. • ‘An ambulatory sham’:
Hampshire Advertiser & Salisbury Guardian
, 31 July 1858. • ‘Madwomen to lie nude upon straw!’:
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper
, 1 August 1858. • ‘No act could be more indifferent to . . . social importance’:
York Herald
, 31 July 1858. •
Page 266
Census of 1881: Metcalfe and his wife were living in Amitie Cottage, Grouville, Jersey, with their grown-up daughter, Eleonore, and three servants. • ‘The mob of newspaper writers . . . calumnious falsehood’: ‘The Newspaper Attack on Private Lunatic Asylums’,
Journal of Mental Science
, vol. 5, October 1858, pp. 146–52. •
Page 267
‘There is poor Ruck, gone mad’: ‘The Commission of Lunacy on Mr Ruck’,
Journal of Mental Science
, vol. 5, October 1858, p. 123. All direct quotations from the Ruck case are taken from this article, unless otherwise stated below. •
Page 268
‘A little fairy-story house . . . peaceful about it’: Bernard Darwin,
The World That Fred Made, An Autobiography
, 1955, pp. 90 and 94. He recalled his grandfather, Laurence’s, ‘demoniac passion for beautifying and altering and improving . . .’ •
Page 270
Dr George Stillwell: the Stillwell family were proving themselves to be short-lived: Arthur Stillwell had died in 1853 at the age of thirty-nine. His nephew, George, would also die young, in 1867, aged just thirty-four. •
Page 271
‘Showed only her patience and fortitude’:
The Times
, 25 August 1858. •
Page 274
‘The question now becomes ventilated . . . receives an emolument’:
Daily News
, 27 August 1858. • ‘We do not entertain the shadow . . . speedy discharge’:
Journal of Mental Science
, October 1858, pp. 150–151. •
Page 275
‘Unexampled trials . . . kindly Celts’:
Daily News
, 17 September 1859. •
Page 276
Letters between the Rucks and the Darwins:
www.darwinproject.ac.uk
• ‘The noblest creature I have ever known . . . sudden plunges’: Darwin,
The World That Fred Made
, p. 84. •
Page 277
John Conolly’s reputation: the only lengthy in-depth critical study of John Conolly’s career and personal life is Elizabeth Mary Burrows’s PhD thesis ‘Enigmatic Icon: A Biographical Reappraisal of a Victorian Alienist’, Oxford Brookes University, 1999. Diligent archival research by Burrows has thrown an important new light on the non-restraint movement in Victorian England, and suggests the means by which Conolly’s reputation came to be so bloated. • ‘A highly objectionable nature’:
The Fourteenth Report of
the Commissioners in Lunacy
, 1860, p. 51. • ‘I am perfectly satisfied . . . and dangerous’: Conolly’s evidence to the 1859
Select Committee on Lunatics
, Session 1, p. 180. • ‘God bless and reward him!’: ‘Things Within Dr Conolly’s Remembrance’,
Household Words
, 28 November 1857. ‘Juggled’: I have borrowed Georgina Weldon’s irresistible phrase for how she was got into Newgate Prison: see p. 359. •
Hard Cash
: it is generally believed that ‘Dr Wycherly’ was based on Conolly, but the character is more likely to be a composite, as Reade is known to have been fixated on the Leach case, and ‘Wycherly’ features some of Dr Winslow’s idiosyncrasies. ‘Wycherly’ combines syllables from both men’s surnames. Dickens published a disclaimer in
All the Year Round
, 26 December 1863, in order to distance Conolly from ‘Wycherly’. •
Page 278
‘Placed him for a great many years without any society . . . but his servants’: ‘The Commission of Lunacy on Reverend Mr Leach’,
Journal of Mental Science
, vol. 4, 1857–58, p. 620. All direct quotations from the Leach case are taken from this article, unless otherwise stated below. •
Page 280
‘We are guided by the ordinary operations . . . superseded by the Holy Spirit’: ‘Case of the Rev. W. J. J. Leach’,
Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology
, vol. 17, 1 October 1858, p. 675. •
Page 282
Winslow’s letter to the
Morning Chronicle
, 19 August 1858. •
Page 283
The sorry tale of William Windham is found in
An Inquiry into the State of Mind of W. F. Windham Esquire of Felbrigg Hall, Norfolk
, 1862, available online. •
Page 284
‘Unhealthy restlessness . . . any one of us?’: ‘M.D. and M.A.D.’,
All the Year Round
, 22 February 1862. • Young official from the War Office: letter from Bryan Waller Procter to Forster, dated 20 January 1862, National Art Library, Forster MS 48. •
Page 285
Dr Lockhart Robertson’s bad opinion of the Winslow asylums:
Report from the 1877
Select Committee on Lunacy Law
, pp. 200–2. • ‘There is something both contemptible . . . such freedom’: John Stuart Mill,
On Liberty
, p. 83. •
Page 286
‘The lying gossip . . . insanity or wickedness’:
The Principles of Political Economy, With Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy
, vol. 2, Book 5, chapter 11, ‘Limits of the Province of Government’, p. 458 of the Great World Classics edition, published in 1900. • Statistics on pauper and private patients, and the lunacy/idiocy rate:
Evidence from the 1859 Select Committee on Lunatics
, Session 2, pp. 31, 94 and 186. (Hereafter,
Select Committee, 1859
.) These statistics obviously cannot include the unknown single patients who had not been brought to the Commissioners’ attention, as mentioned in Chapter Six. • The county asylums filling up: on the county asylum system see Andrew Scull’s
Museums of Madness
, and Peter Bartlett’s
The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England
, 1993; Janet Saunders has queried the notion that the ‘feeble-minded’ and other categories of the mentally ‘handicapped’ were incarcerated wholesale in the mid-1840s to 1880s, in ‘Quarantining the
Weak-Minded: Psychiatric Definitions of Degeneracy and the Late-Victorian Asylum’, in
The Anatomy of Madness
, vol. 3, 1988. •
Page 287
‘Abstract and rather metaphysical questions’:
Select Committee, 1859
, Session 2, p. 16. ‘I do not know . . . frequent and numerous’: ibid., p. 15. ‘I believe they are only a proportion’: ibid., p. 46. •
Pages 287–8
‘Where a proprietor is unprincipled . . . I could not resist it’: ibid., p. 56; ‘This vicious principle of profit . . . vitiates the whole thing’: Session 1, pp. 54 and 57; ‘. . . prevails in some circumstances . . . the other’s house’: ibid., p. 97; ‘The supposition that they are so peculiarly mercenary as to not be trusted at all’: ibid., p. 179; ‘very seldom’: ibid., p. 176; ‘accidentally’: ibid., p. 168. •
Page 289
Average cure rates in county asylums and for Chancery patients: ibid., Session 2, pp. 94 and 31. • ‘Absurd principle of secrecy’: ibid., p. 17. • ‘Many persons whose families . . . mad member connected with it’: ibid., Session 1, p. 62. •
Page 290
‘Meagre’: John Perceval’s complaints about the 1859 Select Committee are found in his letter to the Home Office of 17 February 1861, The National Archives, HO 45/7102. • ‘However insignificant we were . . . from ignorance’: letter to
John Bull
, 25 January 1862.

Page 291
‘Speeding away in the daily round . . . bucolic repose’:
The Bastilles of England; Or, the Lunacy Laws at Work
, 1883, p. 105. • ‘I require a bracing climate . . . anybody else.’
Report from the
1877
Select Committee on Lunacy Law
, p. 236. (Hereafter, Select Committee,
1877
.
) •
Page 292
‘I do believe you are mad . . . 
Warren’s Tales
?’: ibid., p. 241. •
Page 293
Mary Marshall: the medium’s critics pointed out the extreme and unusual muscularity of both Mrs Marshall and her niece, who assisted her, and the fact that both women wore vast crinolines and thus carried about their persons an expanse of storage space, by means of which, the sceptics believed, the women achieved their furniture-moving phenomena. • ‘A stepping stone to God’:
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes
? no. 3:
How an Old Woman Obtained Passive Writing and The Outcome Thereof
, 1873, p. 5. This series of pamphlets, critical of the lack of safeguards in lunacy law, asks Who Will Guard the Guards? • ‘In accordance with primitive Christianity’:
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes
? no. 1:
Report of a Case Heard in Queen’s Bench, November 22, 1872
, 1873, p. 3. •
Pages 293–4
‘Unseen, impalpable agent . . . brain ear’:
Quis Custodiet
, no. 3, p. 5. •
Page 294
The trip to Norwood, to the bank, infidelity with ‘Harriet’ and wish for divorce: Select Committee, 1877, p. 323. •
Page 296
Thomas Shapter and the will of wealthy Phoebe Ewings:
Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post
, 18 August 1859; and Mrs Lowe’s
account of it,
Bastilles of England
, p. 106. • ‘I thought he seemed rather queer’: Select Committee, 1877, p. 241. ‘Now, mind, I shall come in . . . idea of my insanity’: ibid. •
Page 297
‘I thought I should get in quietly and get out quietly’: ibid., p. 244. •
Page 298
‘She labours . . . distributes them’: ibid., p. 343. •
Pages 298–9
Mrs Lowe’s account of conditions at Brislington House: Supplement to the spiritualist magazine
The Medium and Daybreak
, 25 July 1873. •
Page 299
‘As we walked up . . . then all was still’: Kilvert’s
Diary
, quoted in ‘Psychiatry in the 1870s: Kilvert’s Mad Folk’, by Edward Hare and Alexander Walk,
Psychiatric Bulletin
, no. 3, 1979, p. 153. •
Page 300
The Foxes’ account of their patients’ illnesses is found in the
Report Respecting the Past and Present State of Brislington House
, 1865. The appendix to this brochure (disguised as a report) shows that the average age of a patient at admission was thirty-seven years and four months, the illness having endured for an average of one year and four months before admission. Between 1845 and 1864, the following categories of illness were noted by the Foxes: cases of mania, 181; melancholia, 146; dementia, 48; idiocy, 4; delusional insanity, 14. Total 393. The causes were stated as: anxiety (the most common cause in the table, just ahead of ‘cause unknown’), and then a variety of physical illnesses and emotional states – hysteria, suppressed lactation, concussion, gastric fever, puerperal fever, flu, smallpox, epilepsy, senility, sunstroke, masturbation, overwork, jealousy, hereditary mental weakness and congenital imbecility, political excitement, religious excitement, disappointed affections, fright, scrofula and battle wounds. •
Page 301
‘Oh, you believe the Bible . . . are mad’:
Quis Custodiet
, no. 1, p. 11. • ‘Variable in mood . . . conduct to the world’: Select Committee, 1877, p. 343. • ‘I am in a great difficulty’: ibid., p. 237. •
Page 302
‘I am told . . . God moves her fingers’: ibid., p. 242. • ‘I told them things in professional confidence . . . trustworthy.’: ibid., p. 245. •
Pages 302–3
Account of
Nowell
v.
Williams
,
Pall Mall Gazette
, 14 November 1879. Dr Nowell had been confined to Northumberland House Asylum in Stoke Newington, North London, in 1877 by his brother, who alleged that the doctor had become insanely jealous that Mrs Nowell was unfaithful to him, and had used violence against her and their daughter repeatedly. Nowell won his case for false imprisonment, in large part because one of the certifying doctors had received £700 in ‘consultant’ fees from the asylum’s proprietor. •
Page 303
‘The lady should be discharged . . . think advisable’: reported (much later) in
The Times
, 6 August 1885. • ‘Unyielding delusion’: Select Committee, 1877, p. 321. •
Page 305
‘Consistency signifies prejudice and stagnation’: quoted in ‘Henry Maudsley, Philosopher and Entrepreneur’ by Trevor Turner in
The Anatomy of Madness
, vol. 3, 1988, p. 159. • ‘To understand a man . . . what he has suffered’: quoted in
Henry Maudsley: Victorian Psychiatrist, A Bibliographical Study
by Michael Collie, 1988, p. 55. To Collie’s
biography (the first lengthy study of Henry Maudsley) I am indebted for my information about Maudsley, supplemented by Trevor Turner’s essay, which appeared in the same year as Collie’s book. • ‘Ashanti warrior’: ibid., p. 51. • ‘How can you keep me here? . . . everybody is insane’: Select Committee, 1877, p. 242. ‘The line between sanity and insanity . . . impossible to draw it’: ibid., p. 79. •
Page 306
‘Mr Kempe thinks me a beast . . . all men shall honour thee’: ibid., p. 323; •
Page 307
‘. . . as friends and on intimate terms . . . peculiar’: ibid., p. 324. •
Page 308
‘Oh, do you think . . . yourself?’:
Quis Custodiet
, no. 1, p. 13. • ‘Windowless and pestilential’: ibid.,
p. 15. • ‘Uncultivated . . . slumbering powers’: Mrs Lowe’s lengthier criticisms of Lawn House are in
The Bastilles of England
, p. 84. • The site of Lawn House is to the west of today’s Conolly Road and Lawn Gardens. •
Page 309
Details of the lawsuit: The National Archives, C 16/729/L70,
Lowe
v.
Lowe
, Bill of Complaint in Chancery, April 1871. • ‘. . . undesirable . . . to keep quiet’: Select Committee, 1877, p. 238. •
Page 310
Professional commitments: among his other positions, Maudsley had consultancy roles at the West London Hospital and St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, held the Chair of the Medical Faculty at University College London and was editor of, and contributor to, the
Journal of Mental Science
for many years. Collie,
Henry Maudsley
, pp. 36–7. •
Page 311
‘I would much rather . . . in my life before’: Select Committee, 1877, p. 239. • Report of the inaugural LLRA meeting:
The Medium and Daybreak
, 25 July 1873. •
Page 313
‘Commanding presence . . . handsome’:
Morning Post
, 26 May 1874. • Mrs Lowe’s and the LLRA’s detailed criticisms of the lunacy laws and recommendations for their improvement were published as the appendix to
The Bastilles of England
, while other suggestions appeared in the supplement to
The Medium and Daybreak
, 25 July 1873. Unless otherwise stated, all quotes on the LLRA recommendations for change come from these two sources. •
Pages 314–5
‘Unsoundness . . . protractedly morbid condition of the intellect’:
Quis Custodiet
, no. 3, p. 4. •
Page 315
‘Doctorcraft . . . enslave us all’:
The Spiritualist
, 13 November 1874. • ‘The cloven foot of medical arrogance and greed peeps out’:
The Bastilles of England
, p. 153. •
Page 316
‘New thoughts . . . man’s temperament’:
Quis Custodiet
, no. 3, p. 4. • Alex Owen’s
The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Nineteenth-Century England
, 1989, and Janet Oppenheim’s
The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914
, 1985, present the full social context within which British spiritualism thrived. •
Page 317
‘Expressive of hidden mental states’: Dr Laycock’s experiments with passive writing are revealed in
What the Doctor Thought
by James Crichton-Browne, 1930, p. 31. • Carpenter’s ideomotor activity and unconscious cerebration: Oppenheim,
The Other World
, pp. 242–3. •
Page 318
‘Passages in Freud’s writing capable of causing profound nausea’:
Crichton-Browne,
What the Doctor Thought
, p. 240. • ‘Let me die . . . built it up again’: Select Committee, 1877, p. 324. Owen,
The Darkened Room
, points out the probable sexual source of this episode. •
Page 319
‘Slanders’:
Quis Custodiet
, no. 1, p. 16. • ‘Dangerous to his life’: Mrs Lowe’s petition for restitution of conjugal rights, 6 October 1884, The National Archives, J 77/326. • Late-eighteenth-century conjugal restitution cases in the London consistory courts initiated by wives: ‘At the Limits of Liberty: Married Women and Confinement in Eighteenth-Century England’ by Elizabeth Foyster,
Continuity and Change
, no. 17, 2002, p. 51. •
Page 320
‘Deserter’ of the marriage: Mary Lowe’s affidavit, The National Archives, J 77/326. •
Page 321
The LLRA–LLAS schism was revealed by Mr James Billington at the 1877 Select Committee (p. 308). He said that the breakaway group hadn’t been ‘satisfied with the manner in which business was conducted; they thought they could work in a better direction’, and felt that Mrs Lowe’s spiritualism would cause extra prejudice against them. (Later, Mrs Weldon’s spiritualism didn’t seem to bother them.) •
Page 322
‘Scolding lady . . . same class of spirits’: details of the Desmond Fitzgerald trial,
Morning Post
, 1 December 1880. • ‘Because there were certain apprehensions . . . well to disprove’: quoted in
The Bastilles of England
, p. 95. •
Page 323
State-registered hospitals and the wealthy: experiments in housing large numbers of private patients in special quarters at Stafford, Nottingham and Gloucester county asylums had failed, as subscriptions had been hard to come by, and the wealthy still disliked the stigma of being housed in an essentially pauper institution. • ‘Surrender everything to science . . . they will shut up people by the score’: Select Committee, 1877, p. 545. • ‘Altogether, the mountain . . . his well-known
Hard Cash’: British Medical Journal
, 13 April 1878.