Inconvenient People (72 page)

Mr P—
, in his youth, had taken a common-law wife in colonial Africa and had a child with her; they later separated. Much later, in England, he
married a wealthy widow, but an Act of parliament retrospectively made legal all the questionable colonial common-law marriages that had been contracted. Upon this, the new Mrs P— had the now elderly man certified into Grove House Asylum, Bow, East London. Mr P— was described as rational, genial and kindly; he suffered slight paralysis and was confined to a bed in a shared ward. Mrs S— was his first wife’s daughter and she wished to remove her father and care for him at home. When she confronted Mrs P—, the latter admitted that she had acted for financial reasons: she also said she would not have him released until she had sent to Africa to find out the truth about his earlier marriage, and whether it would affect her standing in his will. Before she received her answer, Mr P— had a seizure and died at Grove House.

Reverend J. W. Thomas
sustained a head injury in 1860, which caused him mental difficulties, and he was confined for fourteen years. He recovered in 1863, but was unable to obtain his freedom because, the doctors claimed, he was very pernickety about his food, tied his shirt in an odd way, and preferred to sleep with his pillow at the foot of the bed. The LLRA believed that the true reason to delay the reverend’s release was the family’s belief that he would take revenge on them for his incarceration.

Catherine Linnett
, one-time servant to the Lord Chancellor’s Masters in Lunacy, at 45 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, fell ill in 1877 and was prescribed morphia by Dr John Charles Bucknill – who had been appointed one of the Lord Chancellor’s visitors. She became incoherent and delirious, and her husband called in two obscure local doctors, who initially refused to certify her insane. However, Mr Linnett wore them down, and she was taken to Bethlehem Hospital. Seven months later, she was allowed home, having shown no signs of insanity.

Henry John Field
of Cheltenham, a silk mercer and draper, was incarcerated by his wife and spent eleven years in Gloucester County Asylum, escaped and was later found to be sane. An 1871 inquiry into his case by the local magistrates found several sane people detained in the asylum.

Mr Elliott
escaped from Barming Heath Asylum in Kent, and many of his friends and some previous employers went to the magistrates to testify to his soundness of mind, one man even saying that he was keeping a job vacant until Elliott could take up the position. While the Commissioners
were pondering his case, Elliott’s certificates became invalid since he had managed to stay at liberty for long enough.

Isaac Hall
, an open-air preacher in Southport, and ‘well-known character’ (according to the local newspaper), spent sixteen months in Lancaster Asylum.

Mrs Traiman
, matron of Heath House at Brislington Asylum, had formerly been an inmate at Brislington during Mrs Lowe’s incarceration. Mrs Traiman’s husband had had her put away, but when he died, her relatives petitioned the Commissioners to have her case reviewed. Pending her hearing, she was allowed to become a carer of female Brislington patients.

Mrs Cureton
was kept as a single patient, though sane, for three and a half years by her uncle and cousin.

Barnard Grant
was consigned to Colney Hatch Asylum, Middlesex, after his wife plied him with drink and called in a doctor and magistrate, telling them that his paralytic behaviour was in fact recurring insanity.

Alexander Kay
, an artisan, escaped from an asylum in 1882, went back to his family and his trade in Clapham, South London, and seven months later was arrested as an escapee and held by the police for twenty hours while two doctors examined him. However, he was freed by a magistrate who declared him sane.

Beatrice Keating
was a single patient whose plight worried the mayor and the townsfolk of Margate in Essex. She was being pursued by Dr Henry Gristock Trend of Highbury New Park, North London, who wanted to take her into his small asylum.

No name
: a fast-living West End doctor put away his amiable, accomplished but ‘feeble-minded’ daughter who had got wind of some seedy escapade of his. With the help of two unnamed compliant colleagues, he placed her in an unlicensed house with unsuitable people, where her mental condition swiftly deteriorated. Her own mother came to the LLRA when her appeal to the Commissioners had proved fruitless.

No name
: the wife of a Tunbridge Wells general was on her way with him to a wedding when they stopped off at a hotel in Brighton, where two doctors came over to talk to her. This was, in fact, a lunacy consultation, arranged by the general, and they certified her. She was placed in various single houses until her family found out and threatened her husband with exposure, whereupon she was liberated. The general later agreed to a judicial separation, gave her full custody of the children and a maintenance allowance. He said he had just wanted to ‘shelve’ her for a while.

No name
: an Exminster spiritualist confined for his mediumship.

Julia Wood:
The Times
, 2 March 1875.

Alice Petschler, Peter Chance, William Thomas Preston, Reverend W. F. Thomas and Barnard Grant:
Report from the 1877 Select Committee on Lunacy Law.

J. L. Plumbridge:
Slavery in England
,
circa
1876.

Samuel Fluyder, Miss M—, James George Lamb, Reverend Robert Bruce Kennard, Mr P—, Catherine Linnett, Henry John Field, Mr Elliott, Mrs Traiman, Mrs Cureton, Alexander Kay, Beatrice Keating, the daughter of the West End doctor and the wife of the Tunbridge Wells general: Louisa Lowe,
The Bastilles of England
, 1883.

Elizabeth Donney:
The Times
, 27 January 1876.

Isaac Hall:
Medium and Daybreak
, 25 July 1873.

The Exminster spiritualist:
The Spiritualist
, 13 November 1874

All items were published in London, unless otherwise stated. Many are available online, and it is worth typing the title into a search engine to check for recent digital uploads.

All the Year Round

Bridgwater Times

British Medical Journal

Daily News

Daily Telegraph

Dickensian

Dublin University Magazine

Edinburgh Review

Englishman

Era

Examiner

Freeman’s Journal

Gentleman’s Magazine

Globe

Hampshire Advertiser & Salisbury Guardian

Hertford Mercury

Household Words

Illustrated Police News

John Bull

Journal of Mental Science
(formerly the
Asylum Journal of Mental Science
)

Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology

Ladies’ Home Treasury

Lancet

Liverpool Mercury

Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper

London Gazette

London Medical Gazette

Manchester Times

Medical Times

Medium and Daybreak

Morning Chronicle

Morning Post

New Statesman and Nation

Pall Mall Gazette

Political Examiner

Punch

Quarterly Review

Social Salvation

Somerset County Gazette and West of England Advertiser

Spiritualist

Standard

Sun

The Times

Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post

Weekly Dispatch

York Herald

York Times

MH 50/1 Minute Book of the Commissioners in Lunacy, August 1845–December 1846

MH 50/2 Minute Book of the Commissioners in Lunacy, December 1846–March 1848

MH 50/3 Minute Book of the Commissioners in Lunacy, March 1848–June 1849

MH 50/9 Minute Book of the Commissioners in Lunacy, February 1858–December 1858

MH 50/41 Minute Book of the Commissioners in Lunacy’s Private Committee, 1845–46

MH 51/778 Lunacy Commission and Board of Control, correspondence and papers on the illegal detention of an alleged lunatic

C 16/729/L70,
Lowe
v.
Lowe
, bill of complaint in Chancery, April 1871

J 77/326, Mrs Lowe’s petition for restitution of conjugal rights, 6 October 1884

HO 40/40 Home Office disturbances correspondence, 1838

HO 44/12 Home Office domestic correspondence, 1773–1861

HO 44/13 Home Office domestic correspondence, 1773–1861

HO 44/36 Home Office domestic correspondence, 1773–1861

HO 44/52 Home Office domestic correspondence, 1773–1861

HO 45/74 Reports of provincial asylums to Metropolitan Lunacy Commission

HO 45/3813 Home Office registered papers on lunacy and lunatics

HO 45/5542 Home Office registered papers on lunacy matters, 25 January–17 September 1854

HO 45/7102 Home Office registered papers on
c.
1841–71 lunacy bills

MSL/1952/1618 Visitors’ book for Tavistock House, 1871–1913

Forster Collection MSS 48, correspondence between Bryan Waller Procter and John Forster

Diary of Dr Robert Gardiner Hill, 1 January–29 April 1859

Box 42/94 Dr Gardiner Hill’s journal

Box 42/96 MS by Rosina Bulwer-Lytton

Box 42/75 MS report of Lord Lytton on the hustings

Letter from Henry Trenchard to Lord Lytton, 19 November 1853, Letter Catalogue

Box 42/79 Letter from Lord Shaftesbury to Lord Lytton, 29 July 1858

The Bulwer-Lytton archive, shelfmarks DE/K C23/72, DE/K C28/22, DE/K C29/5, DE/K C29/23, DE/K O25/199

Davis, Ian C.,
Moorcroft: The History of a House and its Inhabitants
,
c
.1993

Casebook for Dr Peithman, 1840–54

Hansard Parliamentary Debates: 3rd series, 82, cols 410–13, 11 July 1845; 3rd series, 142, col 410, 20 May 1856; 5th series, 41, cols 710 and 714, 19 July 1912

PP 1814–15, IV.80,
Report from the Select Committee on the Provisions for Better Regulation of Madhouses in England

PP 1844, XXVI.299,
Supplemental Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy to the Lord Chancellor, Relative to General Conditions of the Insane in Wales

PP 1859, Session 1, III.75,
Report from the Select Committee on Lunatics

PP 1859, Session 2, VII.501,
Report from the Select Committee on Lunatics

PP 1860, XXII.349,
Report from the Select Committee on Lunatics

PP 1860, LVIII.959,
Accounts and Papers: Return of Charges of Ill-usage and Cruelty towards Patients in Northampton Hospital, 1857, Evidence by Commissioners in Lunacy on Inquiry

PP 1860, XXXIV.231 (338),
The Fourteenth Report of the Commissioners in Lunacy to the Lord Chancellor

PP 1877, XXX.I,
Report from the Select Committee on Lunacy Law

PP 1908, XXXV.83 [Cd. 4215],
Report of the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded

Abbott, Mary,
Family Ties: English Families 1540–1920
, 1993

À Beckett, A. W.,
The à Becketts of ‘Punch’: Memories of Fathers and Sons
, 1903

Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society, reports, 1846 and 1851

Andrews, Jonathan, ‘
They’re in the Trade of Lunacy’: The Scottish Lunacy Commissioners and Lunacy Reform in Nineteenth-Century Scotland
, 1998

Armour, Richard Willard,
Barry Cornwall: A Biography of Bryan Waller Procter
, 1935

Atkinson, Dorothy, Rolph, Sheena and Walmsley, Jan, ‘Community Care and Mental Deficiency, 1913 to 1945’, in
Outside the Walls of the Asylum: Community Care and Mental Deficiency, 1913 to 1945
, ed. Peter Bartlett and David Wright, 1999

Barlow, Kate,
The Abode of Love: A Memoir
, Edinburgh, 2006

Bartlett, Peter,
The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England
, 1993

Bater, Pamela, ‘The Tukes’ Asylum in Chiswick’,
Brentford and Chiswick Local History Journal
, no. 14, 2005

Bennett, Bridget, Nicholson, Helen and Porter, Roy (eds),
Women, Madness and Spiritualism
, 2 vols, 2003

Blain, Virginia, ‘Rosina Bulwer-Lytton and the Rage of the Unheard’,
Huntington Library Quarterly
, Summer 1990

Brontë, Charlotte,
Jane Eyre
, 1847; and introduction to Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
, 1847

Bucknill, John Charles,
The Care of the Insane and their Legal Control
, 1880; and ‘The Newspaper Attack on Private Lunatic Asylums’,
Journal of Mental Science
, vol. 5, 1859

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward,
Pelham
, 1828;
Richelieu
, 1839; and
Paul Clifford
, 1830

Bulwer-Lytton, Rosina,
A Blighted Life: A True Story
, 1880, reprinted Bristol, 1994, ed. and introduction by Marie Mulvey-Roberts;
The Budget of the Bubble Family
, 1840;
Very Successful!
, 1856; and
Shells From the Sands of Time
, 1876, reprinted Bristol, 1995, ed. and introduction by Marie Mulvey-Roberts;
The Collected Letters of Rosina Bulwer Lytton
, 3 vols, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts with Steve Carpenter, 2008