Inconvenient People (43 page)

When Mary Jane Turner was delivered to him, Metcalfe noted ‘a want of collectedness about her’. The patient had told him she was glad to be at Acomb House as a place of safety from those who wanted to poison her. ‘I find Mrs Turner to be specious, mendacious, ignorant and beastly,’ Metcalfe wrote in his casebook. He repeatedly addressed and referred to Mary Jane as ‘whore’; more elaborately, ‘a sanctified pious whore’. He often forced her to strip in front of him and when she refused, he told her, ‘You have stripped before many men before now . . . You whore, I am up to all the tricks of a whore.’ As punishment she was then locked in a small, dark, cold room for up to fifteen hours at a time with nowhere to ‘perform the offices of nature’.

Mary Jane was not allowed pen and paper, in contravention of the lunacy laws. However, on the day after the Metcalfes’ wedding, she escaped from Acomb House, and walked the twenty-four miles to Leeds. She wrote to Charles Pemberton:

Pemberton immediately tried to see Charles Turner, but was referred instead to Charles’s own solicitor, Mr Norris. When Norris tried to fob him off, saying, ‘Oh she is mad’, Pemberton claimed that he replied to Norris, ‘She is no more mad than I am.’ But Norris did not appear to want to become involved in the matter. Charles Turner himself would always be mysterious about when he had become aware of Mary Jane’s complaints about her treatment.

Mary Jane was recaptured after a week and was put in the dark ‘attic’ room at Acomb. But three weeks later she knotted together her bedsheets and lowered herself from the window. She walked into central York and took lodgings at Mrs Sargison’s in Little Blake Street, having first borrowed £5 (source of loan unknown; an Anne Catherick–Walter Hartright scenario?) and bought herself a bonnet.

Her whereabouts were discovered within a few days, and on the night of 2 April Metcalfe broke down the door to her room. The asylum keeper had brought along his wife and his groom to assist him in the recapture, which became a violent struggle, the most nationally notorious aspect of which turned out to be the extent of Mary Jane’s undress: what would most perplex and horrify newspaper reporters and readers was whether Mary Jane had simply had the sleeve of her cotton chemise torn off by Metcalfe or whether she had been dragged naked from the bedstead that she clung on to, and carried between the two men into the Acomb House carriage. As with the Nottidge and Cumming seizures, the refusal to allow a lady fully to dress herself (including headwear and proper outdoor shoes) had a huge significance. The concern was more than simple prurience (though that aspect shouldn’t be ignored): for many in those years, what seemed to be under attack in such episodes of rough handling was not just a lady’s liberty, but her right to avoid indecent and improper circumstances. In a culture unwilling to confront rape and sexual assault directly – unless both victim and perpetrator were of very low social status – perhaps such enforced immodesty in dress was emblematic of a far more serious violation of a woman’s privacy and physical integrity. In the Turner case, Mary Jane’s nudity and being called ‘a sanctified pious whore’ were given the same weight as
beatings, starvation, cold showers and all kinds of viciousness in the long and grim record of asylum atrocities. Mary Jane would later claim that Metcalfe’s conduct towards her had been far worse than had been indicated; it could be that nudity was standing in for something that she was too ashamed to allege openly.

Charles Pemberton attempted to visit Mary Jane for the first time when she was returned to Acomb House from York, in mid-April. However, Metcalfe told Pemberton on the doorstep, in a ‘most unkind manner’, that he would not allow the solicitor to see her: the only visitors who were permitted interviews were the individuals who had consigned the patient to the asylum, or the local inspecting magistrates. In order to check the legality of this assertion Pemberton travelled to London to see the Commissioners in Lunacy. In fact, he was able to lay the case before Lord Shaftesbury himself, who assured the solicitor that if he put the matter into writing, Shaftesbury would insist that Metcalfe granted him four separate interviews with Mary Jane, to last four or five hours each. Pemberton additionally filed a writ against Charles Turner on Mary Jane’s behalf because Charles had applied to have the Acomb House fees paid out of his wife’s annual allowance, instead of being billed directly to him. The Master of the Rolls suspended these proceedings, pending a full lunacy inquisition.

The Commissioners in Lunacy visited Mary Jane at Acomb House on 28 May, five months after her committal; but during their talk, Mary Jane did not speak of her maltreatment. When asked later about this curious omission she explained that as soon as she knew there was to be an inquisition, she decided to withhold her evidence of abuse until the full hearing. But she did make an allegation of poisoning: as late as May 1858, Mary Jane had become distressed and violent at the belief that the beer she drank at Acomb House had been tampered with.

When the York Castle inquisition began, Mary Jane had a long sotto voce conversation with Commissioner Barlow at the far end of the room, which reporters and onlookers strained – and failed – to hear. When she was ready to address the court proper, she was described as ‘a lady rather above the middle stature, of good carriage and pleasant features. She behaved with the greatest propriety throughout the inquiry . . . Her story was connected and unvarying.’ Mary Jane insisted that all the doctors who claimed she was insane had been wrong. She
admitted making the poisoning allegations in the latter part of 1857, but explained that she had at that time been ill and ‘in difficult circumstances’. Barlow failed to draw from her an admission that her claims of poisoning had continued for months after her incarceration.

York surgeon Dr Simpson had undertaken ten interviews with Mary Jane at Acomb House, starting on 12 July 1858. He told Barlow and the jurymen that while her conversation was now more rational and consistent than it had been, he nevertheless believed that she was still of unsound mind and should therefore stay in asylum care. Dr Simpson believed that her delusion about poisoning was as strong as it had ever been and he suspected that she was now working hard to avoid using the word ‘poison’ – a common phenomenon among the unsound who were desperate to prove their sanity. Dr Simpson’s point of view, then, left no way out for the incarcerated: those who mentioned their delusions were deemed to be ‘mad’, and those who failed to mention them were deemed to be ‘mad’ and cunning.

Two more doctors testified to her unsoundness of mind. Dr Caleb Williams, an eminent local physician associated with the Quaker-founded York Retreat since 1824, had interviewed Mary Jane nine times in the past few days and found her to be delusional and unsound. With asylum care, he estimated, she could fully recover her wits in six to eighteen months’ time. Dr Swaine, the medical visitor at Acomb House, and one of the magistrate-appointed visiting physicians to the West Riding’s lunatic asylums, also believed that she was as unsound as she had been upon admission.

On Mary Jane’s side, Dr George Wilkin said that he had spoken to her the night before at the Royal Station Hotel in York, in a room set aside for these rather desperate-looking last-ditch interviews. He testified that she seemed to be perfectly able to manage her affairs. Dr Wilkin believed that delusions could not be suppressed: they came pouring out as soon as you touched ‘the chord’, as he put it, and he had not managed to get Mary Jane to mention poisoning, despite his repeatedly touching that chord during the interview.

John Owen had for thirty-four years been the keeper of Tue Brook Asylum near Liverpool. He too had spoken with Mary Jane at the Station Hotel and had found nothing unsound about her – she had been entirely coherent and rational. Owen believed that cruel treatment increased ‘erroneous impressions’, and that quiet and kindness were
essential to removing delusional thoughts. Under cross-examination he stated that a lunatic would indeed be able to suppress mention of delusions for one or two interviews; but despite this, he was sure that Mary Jane was sane.

A letter was then read out by Mary Jane’s counsel, written by the patient when she was at Acomb House, in which she (correctly) stated that Metcalfe had £57 of hers in his keeping that she felt should be in her possession so that she could earn interest on it. This was offered to the inquisition as proof that she was capable of managing her affairs.

John William Metcalfe’s admission to the inquisition of his use of foul language and behaviour astonished the onlookers. He made no attempt to lie his way out of trouble, perhaps because his own casebook notes on Mary Jane (‘specious, mendacious, ignorant, beastly’) were documentary proof of his appalling attitude towards the patient. Metcalfe confessed that he had called her a whore, had not left the room when she undressed and had once seized her by the neck and thrown her to the ground, though he denied having ever beaten her. He said that excessive force had not been used to remove her from her lodgings in Little Blake Street after her second escape; that when she had cried out, it had been an expression of rage, not pain; and that his wife had been present throughout, so he was clearly not about to attempt anything improper. Metcalfe made little attempt to justify himself, except to say that he had regarded Mary Jane as troublesome and that he had other patients to think of when she was refusing to do as she was told. No complaints had ever been made against him, he said, and the Commissioners in Lunacy archives do not reveal any previous history of mismanagement or cruelty concerning Metcalfe. In fact, Commissioner Bryan Waller Procter – in a letter that belies his reputation for humanity and gentlemanliness – wrote to John Forster, ‘It is perhaps best, on the whole, that we should prosecute. But I am sorry for the man, who has had to deal with a woman of a decided character, in many ways.’

When Charles Turner stood up to testify, Edwin James, counsel for Mary Jane (and Lady Lytton’s old enemy), asked him, ‘You would be sorry to have her called a “sanctified pious whore”?’ Charles replied, ‘I should be sorry to hear her called anything at all.’ By her husband’s request, Mary Jane had been temporarily liberated from Metcalfe’s
institution for the duration of the hearing and had been permitted to stay under Pemberton’s protection. ‘Convey my gratitude to Mr Turner,’ Mary Jane rather formally said to his solicitor.

Charles revealed to the jurymen the distressing details of how the marriage had failed and of the violent assaults he had been subjected to, because of Mary Jane’s jealousy. He strongly denied Edwin James’s insinuation that he would be £800 better off if his wife were to be declared a lunatic, because he would be made a member of the committee in charge of her estate and the asylum fees would become chargeable to her own savings, not to his separation payments. After Pemberton and Shaftesbury’s intervention, Mary Jane had been able to write to her husband from Acomb House. She sent Charles twelve letters, of which he destroyed ten, for reasons he would not reveal to Edwin James. But in one of them she accused Charles of having had her locked up for financial reasons. The rest of the letters, Charles told the inquisition, had been kind, coherent and affectionate, though he felt that certain paragraphs had been dictated to her by Pemberton, in order to make Mary Jane appear sane. (Both patient and solicitor said that this was not true.)

During his two-hour summing-up on the second day of the hearing, Edwin James heavily implied that, although a basically good man, Charles had raked up unpleasant private marital matters in order to try to prove Mary Jane’s insanity. Was a woman to be deemed insane because she was jealous and angry? He had kept her as his mistress for years before marrying her, was then absent for long spells, and had on one occasion told their servants not to obey any instructions from their mistress. No wonder she had been roused to physical anger. Women’s passions were warmer than those of men, insisted James, appealing to the chivalry of the all-male jury. Should she be ‘immured’ just for those two acts of violence? he inquired of them (appearing to hope that the broken skull could be passed off as ordinary anger).

It was more difficult to pass off her beliefs that she had been poisoned as compatible with a sound mind: this was a woman who had travelled from town to town with a box of bodily substances, claiming that a variety of relatives and acquaintances were trying to kill her. But surely, claimed James (pushing his luck), this was the sort of suspicion that had crossed ‘all of our minds when we have felt unwell’. And he was certain that she no longer laboured under this
mistaken impression. His appeal cleverly played upon the heightened wariness of the mid-Victorian mind following the infamous case of the Rugeley Poisoner, the respectable William Palmer, executed in 1856 for poisoning various equally respectable family members and friends; two years later, the poison panic was still unsettling some people.

James set up an Aunt Sally for the lunacy certification. He claimed that Reverend Redhead had been a very unwise choice of person for Charles to have turned to for help. He painted Redhead as a slippery customer: not only had his affidavits provided two conflicting accounts of the druggist’s shop incident, but James claimed that the reverend had subsequently travelled to Scarborough, ‘broken into’ Mary Jane’s cottage and seized and sold off her belongings, handing the proceeds over to Charles. Moreover, James heavily implied that Redhead and his wife had become so fond of the Turners’ daughter, Ellen, that the reverend wished Ellen’s mother entirely out of the way. Charles may well have been seriously ill at the time of Mary Jane’s certification, but Edwin James nevertheless summoned up the spectre of a husband who saw the asylum as granting him relief from a troublesome wife and employed Redhead to make all the arrangements.