Inconvenient People (2 page)

However, as the century went on, campaigners for the improved property rights of married women, and for greater freedom for all types of woman, seized the lunacy-liberty issue and rolled it into the larger battle. As increasing numbers of women admitted to feeling stifled within the prison of domestic life, the deprivation of civil liberties suffered by a lunatic seemed to mirror the deprivation of legal and economic liberties endured by a married woman: the plight of the alleged lunatic and that of the Victorian wife could appear similar. But what follow are not tales of passivity and victimhood: these accounts demonstrate personal resistance and public protest. And rather than preserving the notion of a unified, confident psychiatric profession, garnering increasing power as the decades passed, we see the Victorian mad-doctors in defensive disarray.

But before the curtain rises, some background. Eighteenth-century concerns about the entirely unregulated madhouse industry (in which no certificates were required before committal to an asylum) had culminated in a devastating article, ‘A Case Humbly Offered to the Consideration of Parliament’, published in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
in January 1763. A Select Committee was immediately convened to consider the threat to individual liberty that the anonymous author had highlighted. But it took a further eleven years for parliament to pass the Act for the Regulation of Private Madhouses, 1774. This, the first legislation to regulate private lunacy care, laid down that madhouse keepers could only accept a paying patient upon the signed certificate of a medical man. No certificate was required if a patient was to be confined in his/her own home; and every madhouse
accommodating more than one lunatic henceforth required a licence. Five ‘Commissioners in Lunacy’, elected by the College of Physicians, were given the power to grant the licences within a seven-mile radius of London and to inspect premises. Beyond that limit, licensing and inspection were to be undertaken by local magistrates.

However, the 1774 Act had serious weaknesses. Paupers sent by their parish to private madhouses (an increasingly common phenomenon) were excluded from the statutory admissions procedures. Furthermore, there was no ban on a doctor certifying a paying patient into an asylum with which he had professional connections. Licences were never revoked, and very few meaningful penalties were ever imposed upon proprietors who were found to have broken the law. Moreover, anyone who called himself an apothecary could sign a lunacy certificate. The following perfectly valid certificate, written by an apothecary in 1809 to commit a man to a private asylum, was presented to a horrified lunacy Select Committee of 1814–15:

The 1814–15 Select Committee was one of four that sat between 1807 and 1827 to hear evidence of poor conditions in asylums and the potential for malicious incarceration. Certain ‘arrangements’ between medical men and proprietors regarding patient procurement were uncovered; and scandalous mistreatment at York Asylum, Royal Bethlehem Hospital and Warburton’s private madhouse empire in East London were revealed. But all attempts to introduce tougher legislation were either thrown out by the House of Lords, or modified beyond recognition. The peers were afraid that state intervention in the care and treatment of lunatics could open up private, domestic lives and distressing personal decisions about insane family members to the scrutiny of bureaucratic strangers. Many peers were also on the governing boards of the nation’s larger charitable lunatic institutions, such as Bethlehem and St Luke’s Hospital in East London, and tended to see the issue from the point of view of the governors, doctors and
proprietors, all of whom opposed any interference from laymen or from any arm of the state.

It is possible (though extraordinarily hard to prove) that the popular revulsion against wrongful incarceration – periodically alluded to in the Select Committees’ evidence, and in newspaper reports about lunacy scandals – was exacerbated by the suspension of habeas corpus of 1794 (until 1801) and of 1817 (for several months). The suspensions permitted the authorities to detain anyone indefinitely without a specific charge being brought, during a time of huge social unrest, with the perceived threat of revolution. Habeas corpus, Magna Carta, English liberty – these were the Anglo-Saxon birthrights that radicals repeatedly brandished in the face of governmental authoritarianism, and anti-mad-doctor campaigners, too, did not hesitate to litter their writings with these talismans.

Hack writers kept the issue of wrongful detention in lunatic asylums alive throughout the Regency and into the 1820s, most notably John Mitford, who in 1823 published his
Description of the Crimes and Horrors of Warburton’s Madhouse
. When, in 1827, allegations of appalling cruelty and illegal detention at Warburton’s were once again brought to the attention of a Select Committee, the legislature at last decided to move. The 1828 Act to Regulate the Care and Treatment of Insane Persons in England (known colloquially as the Madhouse Act) created what the legislators believed was a fail-safe way to protect the sane from incarceration, and the insane from abusive treatment. From now on, two certificates of lunacy were required for private patients, each signed by a different doctor following a separate interview (the interviews to be undertaken within fourteen days of each other); no physician could sign a certificate if he owned, co-owned or was a regular medical attendant at the receiving madhouse. A lunacy order, with an accompanying statement, was to be filled in by the person (usually a relative) who had first alerted the doctors to an alleged lunatic. For pauper patients, only one doctor’s certificate was required, with the second being signed by a magistrate, clergyman, schoolteacher, Poor Law officer or other civic figure. A magistrate had no profit motive, and this, it was widely believed, gave the poor greater protection.

The better-staffed Metropolitan Commission in Lunacy replaced the College of Physicians’ inspectorate, but local magistrates retained their licensing and inspection powers in the provinces. Notification
of admission and discharge of patients in all asylums/licensed houses was to be sent to the Metropolitan Commissioners within seven days. Any patient seeking to sue for false imprisonment had to commence his/her legal action within six months of liberation.

Less than a year after receiving Royal Assent, this radical 1828 Act faced its first test.

THEY BURNED THE
effigy on the Thursday night, after a huge public supper at the Castle Inn. This was the fourth successive day of celebration in the Welsh border town of Newtown, Montgomeryshire, and the crowd roared its pleasure as a passable replica of Catherine Bywater went up in flames. The letter telling a local resident of the news from London, that Bywater had failed in her attempt to have her son, Edward Davies, declared a lunatic, was received on the Sunday night; on Monday morning all the bells of the town rang out the general joy. Sheep were roasted in the marketplace and distributed to the poor – the result of a generous response to a subscription set up by Edward’s friends and well-wishers in the town. This was a celebration of ‘triumph over oppression and cruelty’, as local newspapers put it.

Mrs Bywater hadn’t been unpopular in Newtown until then. If anything, she was mildly approved of for her rise in the world from servant/cook to being a local small-landowner with a significant stake in a successful business. Her first husband, Mr Davies, had been a warehouse porter and became a publican when they married. He died in 1802, leaving her with two small children, another Catherine and one-year-old Edward. She remarried sixteen years later – to Mr Bywater – but they had only three years together before he, too, died. In 1820 she received a large legacy from a Montgomeryshire relative. Meanwhile, following a move to London, her son Edward had been apprenticed to a grocer and tea dealer in Walbrook, in the City. He had proved so excellent a protégé that, when he came of age, he and his mother used the inheritance to buy an established tea firm, Hodgson of Philpot Lane – the little byway that runs between Eastcheap and Fenchurch Street – which they renamed Hodgson & Davies in 1823.

Mrs Bywater installed herself in the shop area of the building, which, like most City of London merchant premises, also contained living quarters for the family and the domestic servants, as well as warehousing and a counting house. Edward made the major decisions of Hodgson & Davies, most notably in its bulk tea buying, blending and resale. He had developed an exquisite sense of smell and taste, and made brilliant business choices, every one of which he discussed fully with his mother. By the late 1820s, he was known in the City as one of the best dealers in the highly lucrative tea trade, and was employing fifteen staff in the Philpot Lane premises, all of whom respected and felt affection for their unusual boss. He was tall, thin and long-limbed, and prone, since childhood (as his schoolfriends would confirm), to extravagant gesticulation. His face was highly expressive, with an earnest, penetrating gaze, and revealed his tendency to sardonic humour and ironic observations. ‘I cannot help being witty, even if I were standing at the mouth of a cannon,’ he proclaimed. His voice was expressive too, swooping excitedly when he was discussing a subject of interest to him. While not exactly having a stutter, he would often open his mouth and stare for a short time before the speech came out. All agreed that he was habitually highly strung, quick to take offence, funny, honourable, decent, shy (or at least, wrapped up in himself), whimsical, and that he had a dislike of any conversation he considered improper. He was also a notably submissive son. The Philpot Lane staff observed that this, however, was not enough for Mrs Bywater. She was regularly to be seen with her ear jammed up against doors, trying to listen in on Edward’s conversations; senior clerk William Low more than once tripped over her in the gloom as she knelt to gaze through a keyhole.

Low had been a schoolfriend of Edward’s and had been recruited to a responsible position in Hodgson & Davies. From his desk in the counting house, he could see most of what went on in the shop, and watched how his friend tolerated behaviour that, Low thought, few grown-up sons would accept. Whenever he wanted spending money, Edward had to ask his mother, who would unlock the till and present him with a pitifully small sum, then follow him upstairs to demand to know what he intended to do with it. If he ventured behind the counter during shop hours, she would shoo him out, in front of
customers and staff, sometimes smacking him as though he were a small child. Mrs Bywater also interfered in the running of Philpot Lane. She constantly criticised how the clerks and warehousemen behaved, and she began to sack domestic servants without consulting her son.

Edward had developed a love of the theatre, but each time he wanted to head to the West End of town to see a play, his mother would allow him to go only if his sister (now married to a Mr Pugh) or another relative or close associate went with him. Strolling back from Astley’s Amphitheatre in the Westminster Bridge Road one evening, William Low (whom Mrs Bywater had designated Edward’s companion for this night out) listened as Edward told him how unhappy he was. While he had always dreaded doing anything that might make his mother angry, Edward said he had been reduced to stealing from his own funds in order to have some pocket money. Trying to reason with her was like trying to get a river to change its course, he told Low, but he intended to free himself in one way or another.

Catherine Pugh gave birth to a son in 1828, to whom Edward gave £300, settling £1,000 on his sister. Mrs Bywater seemed to dote on the baby, and Edward hoped this diversion of attention might herald greater personal freedom for himself. In the meantime, he seemed unable to stop making money, and colossal profits of £3,000–£4,000 a year were rolling in.
^fn1
Edward had left school at fourteen to begin his apprenticeship. Now, as his wealth and renown were established, he felt it was time to acquire the learning and leisure pursuits that a gentleman in the late Regency ought to be in possession of. He was the son of a servant and a publican, but only the very spiteful would point out his humble birth; however, he himself felt that it rendered him vulnerable. He saw that his mother’s ‘coarseness’ had been noted by some of his customers, and he worried that this could be detrimental to Hodgson & Davies. So he set about refurbishing himself for his swiftly rising station in life: he applied himself to conquering English literature, and committed to memory vast tracts of poetry; he took up fencing; he bought a horse, a hunting dog and a Newfoundland (angering his mother with this outlay). He pored over the daily newspapers to make himself master of current affairs, and he spotted in one of the journals that the Duc de Chartres was taking boxing lessons from the celebrated Tom Belcher (brother of the even more famous boxer, Jem), and so Edward enrolled too. Belcher bred fancy fowls and rabbits as a sideline, and reading of the popularity among gentlemen of leisure of keeping
bantams as a hobby, Edward bought some fowls at 10s a bird; Belcher also agreed to sell him the next batch of rabbits that was born.