Inconvenient People (41 page)

Forster protested that he was willing to swear an oath that he had never made any comments about Lady Lytton’s ‘malady’ prior to her being placed in confinement. Hill retorted that ‘if that was the fact, he was a most wicked liar’.

Now Dr William Charles Hood began to make a sinister intervention, as he attempted to get hold of the paperwork that Hill believed would prove Forster’s key role in the plot. Over dinner on 18 March, Hill claimed that Hood soothed him by saying that Sir Edward ‘would protect me against any attack by the Commissioners’ and would ‘give me something that would make me independent of the Commissioners for the future’. When this attempt at a pay-off failed, Dr Hood ‘gave me to understand that if I did not accede to this proposition then I was a ruined man. I told him I might as well be ruined at once as by degrees . . . I told him that I had been completely sold by Sir Edward BL.’ Hood informed his powerful crony, Lord Lytton: ‘I have not at present altogether succeeded with Mr Hill. He is more stubborn than I anticipated . . . I shall adopt other measures and am determined not to be defeated.’

Hill copied out the incriminating document in his diary, in case Hood should somehow be able to get his hands on the original. This letter – from Forster to Lord Lytton, dated 9 June 1858 – began with Forster stating that Shaftesbury had just told him of the hustings horror and that Lady Lytton had addressed the crowd in a ‘most violent and excited way . . . her words . . . were those of utter insanity . . . Lord Shaftesbury knows I am writing this to you, and desires me to tell you that there can be only one impression as to the wretched exhibition made by this unhappy person – a full justification of yourself in any measure you may now think it right to take.’ Forster wrote that Shaftesbury’s very words about the hustings incident had been: ‘It is very fortunate . . . it puts him [Lord Lytton] quite right. I am sure it will be satisfactory to you [Forster] to know this.’ A letter of 29 July 1858 from Shaftesbury to Lord Lytton reveals, ‘I am quite convinced that your course was just and necessary in placing Lady L under care and treatment.’

Another letter, from Forster to Lord Lytton – and unknown to Hill – exists: when Lytton had asked Forster’s advice, long before the hustings, about what could be done with his wife, Forster had replied, in October 1857: ‘Pray, pray be careful in what you do as to the matter you mention . . . I have long been convinced that she is insane, but it is a case belonging exactly to the class which it is most difficult to get medical men to certify.’ However, elsewhere, Forster had described Lady Lytton as ‘more bad than mad’.

Forster also suggested to Lytton that certain technical matters should be kept in mind if the plot was to go ahead: Forster tells his friend that ‘in cases where there is method and infuriatingly mixed, reason and madness, you [must] act wisely in making the attempt . . . Success ought to be next to a certainty before you do so. That makes this difficult, to my thinking, and sending medical men expressly from London, who must do this thing by a kind of coup de main, if at all – hit or miss [writing becomes illegible]. I should have thought that the wisest course would have been to instruct reputable medical men in the neighbourhood who, being on the spot, might watch the opportunity.’ Forster instructed his friend on no account to be the person who signed the lunacy order, as Lord Lytton must not appear in the matter ‘until success is absolutely obtained’.

Forster actually thought that single-patient care, with one of the celebrated and discreet alienists (Sutherland, Winslow and Monro were all
cited), would be a safer way of avoiding exposure. These lines are damning proof of Lady Lytton’s suspicion that the very authority charged with ensuring that no sane person could be placed in an asylum or single-patient lodgings had approved her seizure, months before any doctor had even interviewed her. These men really were As Bad As They Seemed.

Lord Lytton’s response to this proof? He simply replied that the document that Hill possessed was a forgery. However, George Ross, the Fenchurch Street apothecary, now entered the fray, stating that Hill’s evidence accorded with his memory of how the incarceration had been pre-arranged.

Solicitor William Loaden threatened Hill with litigation if the doctor did not hand over the paperwork; Hill replied to Loaden that it was he who was the injured party, and would do whatever he thought best for his own defence. An independent legal opinion was sought, and after having listened to the tales of the various parties, the lawyer backed Hill, confirming that he had nothing to fear from any court action.

Yet the Lytton business would hardly ever be mentioned in connection with Dr Hill, even by his enemies. Posterity has attributed his
flight into insignificance to another cause altogether: an increasing peevishness at having been largely written out of the story of ‘non-restraint’. His repeated attempts (entirely justified) to publicise his large role in the humanitarian treatment of lunatics was coming to be seen as tiresome and graceless. Dr John Conolly had adapted Hill’s methods for use at the huge Middlesex County Asylum at Hanwell, and the glory and fame had gone to Conolly, not Hill.

As soon as he could abandon his Downing Street office, Lytton fled to a Continental spa to recuperate. Those who detested him did so more strongly; but some of his closest friendships suffered damage too. When the conspiracy collapsed, Lord Lytton suggested that the idea to confine his wife had been John Forster’s, and a letter from Forster to His Lordship indignantly (and erroneously) insisted, ‘I was not your “adviser”.’ In a letter dated 14 March 1859, a panicked Forster told Lytton that if the true sequence of events were to be discovered, ‘It would be a momentous scandal, and would require a public inquiry into the lunacy laws and practice . . . I know the line I took all through. I cannot be mistaken as to the general character of the views I held and suppressed . . .’ The friendship did not mend fully until the mid-1860s. It is not much credit to Forster that it mended at all.

Even Dickens appeared to cool towards Lord Lytton. The editors of the Pilgrim edition of Dickens’s correspondence noted that a letter from Dickens dated 11 June 1858 (eleven days before the abduction of Lady Lytton) opened with ‘Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton’. In a footnote they make the point that, ‘It seems impossible that Dickens should address an old friend so formally.’ The message was to decline a dinner invitation with Lytton on 26 June. Perhaps Dickens knew of the outrageous plans and was indicating his disapproval.

There has been speculation about whether Dickens himself ever contemplated the madhouse for his wife Catherine, from whom he was controversially about to separate. Descendants of Dr Thomas Harrington Tuke, superintendent of Manor House Asylum in Chiswick between 1849 and 1888, are believed to have seen correspondence in which the novelist asked Tuke to investigate the possibility of having his wife committed to Manor House. Allegedly, Tuke, in reply, refused, on the grounds that there was no evidence that Catherine was of unsound mind. The original letters were handed to a researcher in
the 1970s and have been missing ever since; as no copies were ever made, this story cannot be verified. Dickens, for his part, made a huge bonfire of much of his correspondence on 3 September 1860, possibly immolating evidence of such a plan. In a surviving letter to his confidante Angela Burdett-Coutts, dated 8 May 1858, Dickens wrote of his wife that ‘her mind has, at times, been certainly confused’. He claimed that Catherine took no interest in the children – an accusation not uncommon against women who were the subject of lunacy investigations, as we have seen; the Dickens children themselves denied that this was the case. But a full-blown lunacy panic – of which Lady Lytton’s story was just one part – was taking place in 1858, as the Dickens marriage disintegrated; and so it is difficult to accept that the nation’s most popular fireside companion would have been so unwise as to risk mass opprobrium by attempting to have certified a quiet, dull, withdrawn, nervy woman who was, moreover, popular with many of Dickens’s friends, not least John Forster. Lord Lytton’s experience had shown how fraught with danger such an attempt could prove. Dickens’s concerns in the correspondence that has survived were that Catherine should live where, and with which family members and companions, she wanted. (In the event, the separation allowed her £600 a year.) Until the Tuke letters turn up again, Dickens must surely be permitted the Scottish verdict regarding any madhouse plot of his own.

Things didn’t go well in France, of course. Lady Lytton suspected Robert and Rebecca Ryves, her companion, of reporting stories about her back to Lord Lytton, and of trying to get hold of the perjuring letters. His father suspected that Robert was now taking his mother’s side and Robert almost broke under the strain of being vilified by both his delinquent parents. His mother later wrote that when Robert wished to discuss family matters with her, he would turn pale and look around him furtively, ‘as if the very birds in the air would carry his words back to Park Lane or Downing Street’. Lord Lytton reprimanded the pair for spending too much money, and Lady Lytton quickly discovered that her £1,000 a year had been reduced to £500. She also learned of Robert’s letter to the press and its attempt to exonerate Lord Lytton, and realised that she had been ‘smuggled abroad in such electric telegraph haste’ as the best means of shutting her up. After five months,
their life together had become unbearable and Robert abandoned his mother. They would never see each other again.

Lady Lytton came back to England a few months later. She, too, was in breach of the agreement and continued to send abusive letters to her husband; but Lord Lytton knew now that the best course was not to respond. When Wilkie Collins published
The Woman in White
in novel form in the August of 1860, she wrote to him: ‘The great failure of your book is the villain; Count Fosco is a very poor one, and when next you want a character of that sort, I trust you will not disdain to come to me. The man is alive and constantly under my gaze. In fact, he is my own husband.’ Collins, who was on friendly terms with Lord Lytton, forwarded the letter to Knebworth. His Lordship’s thoughts on this are not known; but we do know that he believed
The Woman in White
to be ‘great trash’.

Lord Lytton was indeed weirder than Fosco. His interest in the occult was now consuming more of his time and energy, and he had regular conversations with Little Boots and Shakespeare, attempted to raise from the dead Apollonius of Tyana on a Regent Street rooftop, and completed detailed horoscopes of Mr Gladstone (predicting he would always be a solitary creature) and of his old friend Disraeli. Haughtier than ever, he once refused to continue a seance with a medium because she dropped her ‘h’s.

Despite (perhaps because of) his by now extreme deafness, Lord Lytton entered the House of Lords, where he voted on the Second Reform Bill, presumably not having heard a word of the debate.

In 1867 Lady Lytton sent a manuscript copy of her autobiography,
A Blighted Life
, to a lawyer and, it is believed, to Charles Reade. The author of
Hard Cash
had corresponded with Lady Lytton and suggested to her that it was John Forster who ‘had whispered into her husband’s ear what facilities the lunacy law affords for disposing of an inconvenient wife’. She later suspected that the manuscript was copied by the lawyer, who then published it in a small print run. It was so filled with libel that she had to publish a pamphlet denying that she was the book’s author; it did not re-emerge from its suppression until 1880, two years before her death at the age of seventy-nine in Sydenham, South London.

To her delight, Lord Lytton had predeceased her in 1873. Robert subsequently raised her allowance to £700 a year. But she was not to
be mollified, leaving instruction ‘that he should never desecrate the grave of the mother he had so cruelly betrayed and inhumanly neglected, by any tombstone verbiage, or any impious posthumous sentimentalities in poems or magazines’. Poisonous to the very end – and then beyond.

The Lytton scandal is one of the earliest of the nineteenth-century lunacy panics that identified women’s rights as deserving of particular mention. Where before, simple gender-blind justice, or, alternatively, the chivalrous/patronising need to take extra care of the ladies, had been called upon by those defending liberty, this time, a ‘feminist’ perspective is evident. Take the following letter, which was sent to the editor of the
Taunton Courier
on 24 July 1858 and was entitled ‘From a happy wife who pities a persecuted one’. It is quite possible that it was written by Lady Lytton or by one of her supporters (the handwriting is not hers, but the syntax has elements of her style). It hardly matters, though, who the author was, because it is the rallying cry that is of note: