Inconvenient People (46 page)

In September 1859, Mrs Ruck felt she could no longer remain where her married life had so mortified her. On the day that she and her belongings were to set out from her parental home for a new life in London, the locals descended upon her to make a speech of appreciation and a presentation. To show their support during the ‘unexampled trials of latter times’, they had clubbed together to buy her a £50 clock, while the younger ‘labouring-class’ inhabitants (‘these kindly Celts’, as a newspaper called them) had paid for a morocco-leather-bound Welsh bible, so that she would not forget her native tongue. Mary Ann was unable to finish her thank-you speech for weeping in gratitude.

However, much against the odds, the couple appear eventually to have resumed an at least superficially cordial marriage. When Charles Darwin and his family came for a two-day visit to Pantlludw, ten years later, the Rucks seemed to be nothing other than a conventional couple. In 1874, Darwin’s son Frank married the Rucks’ daughter, Amy
Richenda; Amy died shortly after giving birth, two years later, but the two families remained close. Both Mary Ann and Laurence corresponded with Charles Darwin on such rustic curiosities as castrated lambs’ horns, and whether sheep walk upwards or sideways when grazing on steep slopes. The 1891 Census records Laurence living in Aberdovey as a lodger with one Mary Morris, a fifty-six-year-old widow, and her daughter, Sarah. It is possible that Mr Ruck kept up a second ménage, and it is even possible the widow Morris was the Mary Jones of the 1850s. Rackety marital compromises of this kind were not so very unusual, the trick being to disguise the often polymorphous nature of Victorian bourgeois private lives – sexual selection having to go on furtively.

Mary Ann seemed to settle into a happy old age, living on until 1905. Her grandson, Bernard Darwin, recalled her in his autobiography as ‘the noblest creature I have ever known’ – proud, kind, unselfpitying. The Rucks were very unlike the ‘predictable’ Darwins, being ‘exciting and adventurous, with a greater capacity for sudden plunges’. Darwin
recalled Mary Ann and Laurence’s life at Pantlludw as ‘idyllic’ – a rosy memory of childhood no doubt, but it seems that the relationship in old age may have been more than just a shabby compromise.

The Commissioners in Lunacy investigated the Conolly–Stillwell matter and found that their arrangement had been of ‘a highly objectionable nature’; they stipulated that in future, Conolly should only be paid by Stillwell for individual medical visits to the asylum. Those Moorcroft patients whose certificates had been signed by Conolly had to be re-certified by another physician. Conolly, for his part, refused to alter his opinion of Mr Ruck, stating, a year later, ‘I am perfectly satisfied that the patient was insane . . . his delusions were very serious, gross and dangerous.’

‘God bless and reward him!’ Dickens’s
Household Words
had chirruped of Dr Conolly in November 1857 – the very month he had juggled Mr Ruck into Moorcroft. But despite Boz’s warmth, Conolly’s reputation was soiled. Six years later, Charles Reade would model his villainous alienist in
Hard Cash
, Dr Wycherley, largely upon Conolly. This horrified Dickens, who had begun serialising the work without having realised the attack that was to be mounted upon his hero in later chapters.

Around the same time, another celebrated alienist, Dr Forbes Benignus Winslow, was experiencing a similar loss of face, and the disapprobation of a jury. Winslow, like Conolly, was a big cheese; but the calamities of 1858 meant that he, too, was starting to smell past his best as another inquisition got under way.

Reverend William Leach had never striven to hide the three mental breakdowns he had suffered. In 1841, when he was aged thirty-seven, and again in 1852, he recovered fully after a short spell of erratic behaviour and mental confusion. Then in May 1853, he broke all the windows in the home that he shared with his mother in Southwick Street, Bayswater, West London, in order, he claimed, to allow the neighbours to be better able to hear his flute-playing; he was found attempting to get a tune out of an enema syringe. His family consulted Dr Winslow, who, hearing of his previous recoveries, advised that an attendant should come to live at the family home to keep a watch on William. Again, the reverend recovered.

Leach had been married but when his wife died, he had returned to live with his mother, Julia. The daughter of a baronet, Julia Leach was in her seventies, and her will bequeathed William £30,000. Her
only other child, Mrs Laura Sidden, was to receive £17,000. Mrs Leach watched with annoyance as her son’s study of Scripture took him further and further from conventional Anglican beliefs. William told his mother that the Day of Judgement was at hand and that all social distinctions had therefore been abolished. Servants and poor people were henceforth to be more kindly treated, and he insisted it was God’s wish that the staff at the Bayswater house eat at the dining table with the family. Mrs Leach strongly objected, and when the rows between them became more frequent and embittered, Reverend Leach moved out of the house, leasing a cottage in Hammersmith.

Here, his servants took all their meals with him, he would kiss each of the maids on the cheek in the morning and invited them to sit upon his knee. He would play whist with the staff until 3 a. m. and between deals would read to them from the Bible. When a succession of armed burglaries was causing alarm among householders in West London, and after an attempt had been made to break into his Hammersmith home, Reverend Leach had purchased pistols and undertaken target practice.

In June 1856, Leach agreed to a request by his brother-in-law, Dr Henry Sidden, to undertake a financial transaction by which each of the two men would receive £1,194. All concerned clearly considered him of sound enough mind to complete this legal procedure. Sidden retained almost all of the money in order to invest it for the reverend.

Then, six months later, the reverend told his family that he was planning to marry. He had been working very hard, he said, owing to the illness of the rector of the church he was attached to, and when he looked back at his career, he recognised that after the death of his wife, the hard work he had undertaken for the church had ‘placed him for a great many years without any society, having no one about him but his servants’; their company proved the perfect relaxation after long hours of study. Leach abhorred the sort of man who would live with a woman unmarried, or visit ‘houses where men are in the habit of gratifying their passions’. And so he had decided to marry one of his maids: Ann Messenger, aged twenty-three, was a ‘very well-conducted young woman’, he said, and he believed he ‘should be very happy with her’. He had already received the consent of her parents.

The Leaches immediately contacted Dr Winslow, who sent along the medical superintendent of his asylum, Sussex House. Posing as a
deputation seeking advice about local parish schools, Superintendent Bartlett and two Sussex House keepers arrived unannounced at the reverend’s home and as the bogus conversation got under way, the keepers pinioned him and then drove him off in the asylum carriage to the nearby institution.

During his detention at Sussex House, Reverend Leach would stand for hours with his arms stretched before him; he told Dr Winslow that he was praying for the return of the Church’s ‘miraculous gifts’ – to bring the dead back to life, to heal the sick and to restore sight to the blind. When the doctor requested that the reverend trim his long beard, Leach informed him that the Bible stated that men who shaved were making themselves look like women. The Saviour demanded that he have a long beard.

None of Reverend Leach’s friends, acquaintances and neighbours knew what had become of him. As he was popular in the locality, two tailors, a bootmaker and a builder set out to find him. When, after five months of searching, they established Leach’s whereabouts, the tradesmen alerted the newspapers to his disappearance into an asylum, and in the spring of 1858 the publicity prompted the Lord Chancellor to order a lunacy inquisition. This resulted in a hung jury, and so Commissioner Barlow had to order a rerun.

At this second inquisition, Reverend Leach made a coherent defence of his religious vision, and the ‘dictation’ to him of the Holy Spirit, by which he tried to live his life. Dr Harrington Tuke – as in the Ruck case, testifying in favour of the sanity of the alleged lunatic – asserted that Leach’s interpretations of the Bible were well within what could be considered ‘normal’. Interviewing him at the asylum, Tuke had told Leach that not one clergyman in a hundred would think it acceptable to marry a servant. The reverend agreed, but – in one of several impressive displays of reasoning – told Tuke that although this was probably so, nevertheless, Ann Messenger was highly likely to make him a very good wife, and that these notional ninety-nine disapproving clergymen could not be aware of such a mitigating fact.

Dr Alexander Sutherland was present to put the opposing view. Reverend Leach’s type of direct-connection religion was indicative of an unsound mind, Sutherland said, because it had no social dimension – he believed he was being addressed exclusively, not as part of a body of worshippers. What’s more, Leach was delusional because he did not appear to have any awareness that his beliefs were in contravention of traditional Anglicanism: ‘We are guided by the ordinary operations of the Holy Spirit; Mr Leach thinks that he is guided by the extraordinary operation. Our judgment is assisted; Mr Leach considers that his judgment is superseded by the Holy Spirit.’ Like Winslow, Sutherland believed that Leach was exploited by his servants, who were using his credulity and generosity for their own ends – and that Ann Messenger had inveigled him into marriage simply for the £30,000 inheritance.

Dr Winslow had himself rejected traditional Anglicanism and in the early 1850s had become an Evangelical. It was his Evangelicalism that was behind his determination to save lunatics from the gallows – an ethical position that had caused him to be criticised by certain sections of English society, who accused him of thwarting the process of natural justice. But Reverend Leach’s own private interpretation of Scripture – in particular, his world-turned-upside-down egalitarianism – was socially and morally unacceptable to Dr Winslow, who, as a Tory, believed in the rightness of a social hierarchy. One might be kind to the poor; one did not marry them. Winslow recognised that there was no intellectual confusion on Reverend Leach’s part; but ‘from all the circumstances connected with the case’, and bearing in mind his history of breakdowns, Winslow concluded that the reverend was not fit to
manage his own affairs. He had allowed his servants to manipulate him, and this was weak-mindedness born of a delusional misreading of Scripture.

Leach’s counsel asked the reverend’s brother-in-law, Dr Henry Sidden, whether it was true that Sidden’s wife would inherit the full £47,000 inheritance if Leach were declared insane (and therefore unable to marry, or to make a will). Yes, it was, Sidden admitted. Did Sidden think it odd that Leach was of sound enough mind in the June of 1856 to execute the deed granting Sidden £1,194, but just six months later was too mad to know who he wanted to marry? No, said Sidden, this wasn’t odd. Wasn’t it also true that one of the two lunacy certificates had been signed by a Dr Gray, formerly of Guy’s Hospital, subsequently assistant to Dr Sidden and now, at the time of the inquisition, the witness’s business partner? Sidden confirmed that this was so. This raised serious doubts about the validity of Gray’s certificate, and presented the jury with the scenario of a greedy family member conspiring to divert a harmless, ageing and lonely man’s inheritance into his own hands. And it was Reverend Leach’s very harmlessness that was emphasised by witness after witness, while the words ‘cruel’ and ‘cruelty’ were repeatedly used to describe his detention at Sussex House.