Inconvenient People (52 page)

As her LLRA public appearances continued and her fame grew, Mrs Lowe was described in newspaper reports as having ‘a commanding presence and good delivery’; she was tall, well-built and ‘handsome’. When, in 1883, she published
The Bastilles of England; Or, the Lunacy Laws at Work
, it was a detailed and lucid condemnation of the entire system, and a plea for the ‘civil rights’ (an interesting early use of this phrase) of those accused of being insane. An alleged lunatic was in a far worse position than an alleged criminal on remand, she declared, who at least knew the nature of the accusation against him and who would face a public trial by jury. The lunacy laws were the only system in English public life that allowed an accuser preliminary and secret access to the very panel that was supposed to weigh up opposing arguments.

The alleged lunatic’s only support were the Commissioners – yet they were ‘an autocratic power in a free country’, who had no check upon them but an oath of office and the workings of their own conscience. ‘Who or what, then, are they?’ Mrs Lowe asked. ‘A triplet of briefless barristers, and another of patientless doctors, put round a big table . . . men who, hopeless of winning the great prizes of their respective professions, have renounced all chance of them, and accepted itinerating obscurity.’ When a Lunacy Commissioner retired from his £1,500 a year (plus expenses) post, he became an honorary Commissioner, with a pension and full powers to make decisions, and in this way, she said, the Commission was silting up with the sick, the old and the purely ‘ornamental’.

Of the seven visits paid to her by the Commissioners, Mrs Lowe alleged ‘impatience, impertinence, ill-temper, and a firm, evident determination not to give me fair play’. While the law allowed the Commissioners to delve only into the past two years of a patient’s life, Wilkes and Lutwidge had made her go back over her entire life, and focused on her suicide attempt of 1854. She also alleged that the Commissioners turned a blind eye to the abuse of the laws regarding patients’ letters and did not scrutinise the copy certificates that they were sent following a patient’s admission and so routinely failed to identify questionable certification.

The Commissioners’ surviving minute books housed in The National
Archives reveal that dubious certificates and badly kept medical casebooks did lead to the summonsing of certain doctors and proprietors to the Commission to explain themselves. Nevertheless, only verbal reprimands and threats of licence-removal tended to follow these often heated discussions. The modern researcher is left with the impression that Victorian overwork and diligence was combining fatally with complacency and naivety. The job was done thoroughly by the Commissioners; but the job itself appears to have been rubber-stamping, glossing over and hoping that everything would just right itself.

Only the Commissioners could initiate a prosecution for a breach of the lunacy laws – no private individual could do so, having instead to mount cases against individuals for assault, trespass and false imprisonment. But Mrs Lowe detailed the ‘masterly inactivity’ of the Commissioners in clear cases of cruelty, restraint, improper detention, defective certificates and casebooks, and poor physical conditions at asylums. Licences were occasionally revoked, she admitted, but this tended to happen only to proprietors without professional prestige or social connection to the Commissioners or the local JPs. Instead of a required ‘distrustful watchfulness’, the Commissioners habitually gave tacit approval to all manner of abuses – partly through identifying more with the doctors and proprietors than with the patient, and partly because they feared that if any substance were to be found in allegations of misconduct, the entire farcical nature of lunacy detection and treatment would be exposed to the public. The entire function of the Commission, therefore, Mrs Lowe alleged, was a retrospective whitewashing of every asylum committal in England and Wales.

As the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society had done thirty years earlier, the LLRA proposed a whole new national system of lunacy administration. Like the earlier campaign group, it demanded the abolition of private asylums. ‘The physician who starts a madhouse,’ Mrs Lowe argued, ‘ipso facto exchanges his status as a scientific gentleman for that of a licensed victualler to the insane.’ The certificate of lunacy was as readily obtainable as any other marketable commodity, she believed. Referring to her own experience, she now described her behaviour in Exeter shortly before her abduction as a bout of temporary ‘confusion’, which the medical men should have spotted; instead, it was pathologised. ‘Unsoundness is not an evanescent phase
but a protractedly morbid condition of the intellect,’ she wrote. In fact, the phrase ‘unsoundness of mind’ should be replaced by ‘incapacity for self-government’, as the latter referred to an individual’s actions, while the former suggested something intrinsic.

A locally elected inspectorate should replace the over-centralised Commissioners, who did not answer for their mistakes through the ballot box. The initial allegation that someone was a lunatic was to be made upon oath to the local magistrate, followed by a preliminary investigation that was to be strictly private. Every town in England and Wales should have a dedicated office attached to its civic buildings in which prima facie lunacy cases could next be swiftly determined by jury. The absurdly adversarial inquisition process should come to an end. ‘Doctorcraft’, as Mrs Lowe called it, would, ‘like priestcraft, enslave us all’, and must be replaced by the cool common sense of the ordinary man. Scientific obfuscation had replaced religious obfuscation, and ‘the cloven foot of medical arrogance and greed peeps out’, whenever straightforward solutions were suggested.

Only two types of lunacy should be recognised: ‘incapacity for self-government’; and that same incapacity combined with actions that were dangerous to the self or to others. And only in cases of this latter ‘dangerous mania’ should the sufferer face deprivation of liberty, by placement on a ‘probationary ward’ that was not physically connected to an asylum. In such cases, a magistrate was to take sworn depositions from a medical man and from two eyewitnesses to the patient’s dangerous behaviour; only when it was beyond doubt to the magistrate that this was a case of dangerous mania would the patient pass out of the control of any private person and into the hands of the state.

All the nation’s asylums would be state run, and all correspondence would be correctly and honestly dealt with; a more generous and transparent system of visiting by friends and relatives should prevail; male handling of female patients must be banned; religious worship was to be provided in accordance with the patient’s wishes; and all breaches of lunacy law were to be punished by a prison sentence – ranging from two days to two years – rather than by fines. Any member of the public should be entitled to prosecute breaches of the lunacy law, and a fast and inexpensive appeals system to a higher court should supersede the existing route via the Commissioners and Lord Chancellor.

Like many who had interested themselves in patient care, Mrs Lowe
and her fellow campaigners had been impressed by the model settlement at Gheel in Belgium, where those with emotional and intellectual problems were cared for in a large community of foster carers who hosted them within their own houses in the town. She very much hoped that this kind of system could be devised in England. But there was one rather more iron-fisted LLRA proposal, foreshadowing some of the next century’s less alluring state interventions in health matters. Writing in 1883 – an era of ‘advanced humanitarianism’, as she called it – Mrs Lowe argued that the supreme law must be the health of the nation. Both mental and physical disease should be eradicated for the common good, and it was ‘profoundly immoral’ that families attempted to hide a relative’s insanity. The days of keeping madmen and madwomen at home, out of the glare of publicity and the shame of the asylum, had to come to an end, Mrs Lowe wrote, if the modern democratic state was radically to improve the health of its citizens. Therefore all ‘hereditary diseases’, including psychological malfunctions, must be made known to the authorities. She did not develop this proposal further, but it is an interesting example of how a traditional mid-Victorian mind was opening itself up to radical new ideas – some of them anticipating state socialism. She had hitherto been fastidious about appropriate class relations and inter-class decorum; but in the opening lines of
The Bastilles of England
, she addresses a notional working man – who she imagines may be wondering why her book will concern itself solely with private, and not public, asylums – describing herself as ‘I, thy less industrious sister’. Her tone is distinctly apologetic as she explains to this labourer that she is part of the social class that consumes and disperses what another class manufactures.

As will be seen in the next chapter, many of the more mature adherents of spiritualism in the 1860s and 1870s experienced a profound change in their social and political outlooks. Mrs Lowe herself was ‘now more than ever convinced a new and glorious day of progress is dawning for the human race’. She believed that modern spiritualism brought ‘new thoughts’ and ‘some atmospheric change or modification of man’s temperament’. Yet Mrs Lowe remained a Church of England Christian, believing that spiritualism invigorated – rather than replaced or dislodged – Anglican doctrine and practice. Victorian spiritualists have been portrayed by later commentators as under siege on two fronts: from atheistical materialists and from orthodox Christians. Twentieth-century observers have also liked to focus on
female mediumship being attacked by male empiricists. However, a far greater jumble of allegiances is discernible among both the spiritualists and the non-believers, while various individuals simply changed their minds about the subject. Crucially, as we shall see, figures of great authority could not be relied upon to back the sceptics: judges, politicians, doctors and even certain alienists were either themselves part of the spiritualist movement or would defend spiritualists’ rights to believe and practise without being accused of lunacy.

But was Mrs Lowe in fact practising spiritualism? Many who examined her felt that her passive writing had nothing to do with contacting the Other World. Dr Maudsley, although a despiser of ‘cranks’, wrote to fellow alienist Dr Charles Lockhart Robertson for his opinion. Robertson was the superintendent of the Sussex county lunatic asylum at Haywards Heath and also a Chancery Visitor in Lunacy. He was himself a spiritualist and in 1882 would become one of the first members of the Society for Psychical Research, the body that intended to probe the workings of the least understood phenomena of the human mind. (Against the odds, he and Henry Maudsley got on very well.) After interviewing Mrs Lowe on 7 October 1871, Robertson declared her to be of unsound mind, finding that the written messages conveyed her own bizarre and irrational thoughts. Dr Maudsley then asked leading spiritualist Benjamin Coleman for his views, and Coleman stated his belief that Mrs Lowe was not communing with a higher power. Dr Blandford of Otto House thought that Mrs Lowe’s voices were simply a mode by which she could – without conscious knowledge – express obscene thoughts about her husband. In this, Blandford was in line with leading Edinburgh physician Dr Thomas Laycock, who himself had experimented with automatic writing and believed that it was in fact ‘expressive of hidden mental states’.

As early as 1852 physiologist William B. Carpenter had identified what he called ‘ideomotor activity and unconscious cerebration’ as being behind spiritualism, mesmerism and a range of seemingly supernatural phenomena. Ideomotor activity was ‘an involuntary response made by the muscles to ideas with which the mind may be possessed when the directing power of the will is in abeyance . . . Much of our mental work is done without consciousness,’ Carpenter had written; this is an echo of Charlotte Brontë’s thoughts about literary creation and was decades in advance of William James’s, Carl
Jung’s and Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious. (In fact, Dr Thomas Laycock would claim that he himself had developed this concept of the reflex action of the cerebrum even earlier – back in 1838.) In Carpenter’s view, the conscious and unconscious parts of the brain did not always work in harmony, though he knew that science still lacked the technical means to discover anatomically why this might be the case. So a great deal of information was stored in the brain, he believed, without our knowing of its presence. Upon the sudden appearance of such information in the conscious part of the cerebrum, many were tempted to ascribe the phenomenon to supernatural forces.

For those doctors who accepted Carpenter’s premise, Mrs Lowe had, without her conscious knowledge, found a mode of expressing the fears and suspicions which she felt unable to articulate in any other way than by her hand moving over paper without her volition. Today, we may see these fears as at least in part related to sexuality; but British mid- and late-Victorian theorists of the subconscious rarely made a link with the carnal – in print, at least. Indeed, James Crichton-Browne spoke for many at the end of the century when he stated that he found ‘passages in Freud’s writing capable of causing profound nausea’. But how anticipatory of the dreams of certain of Freud’s patients is this passage of Mrs Lowe’s dialogue with the Saviour, dating from 1869:

By the time Mrs Lowe gave evidence to the 1877 Select Committee on Lunacy Law, she had long ceased mentioning her allegations of infidelity against her husband. When the panel put her in a tight spot about this, she reluctantly confessed that her passive writing had given her information about ‘a third party’ (i.e. Reverend Lowe) who had
committed adultery. She was clearly by now very embarrassed about this aspect of her behaviour. Exonerating herself, she wrote on another occasion that she bitterly regretted ‘the slanders’ on her husband and stated that she had written an apology to him, which the reverend had accepted.