Inconvenient People (53 page)

So how should posterity view Reverend Lowe? Had he used the lunacy laws to silence essentially truthful allegations fatal to his career and standing in society? Circumstantial evidence is all we have (since his daughter Harriet never wrote or spoke about these matters and nor did her siblings) and this does not back up Mrs Lowe’s wildest claim. It was Reverend Lowe himself who came to Dr Maudsley to hand him his wife’s written messages accusing him of sexually assaulting his young daughter – a candour that suggests his innocence rather than the opposite. Yet Reverend Lowe’s incarceration of his wife and subsequent reluctance to have her released – despite Dr Fox’s and Commissioners Wilkes’s and Lutwidge’s belief that she had recovered – reveal him to be extremely cold-hearted towards his confused and unhappy wife. And his attempt to make her pay for her asylum care from her own money adds to the impression of callousness. But despite seeming to enjoy initial support from her children during her time in the asylums and upon her release, by 1884 Mrs Lowe faced open hostility from her eldest child, Thomas, and her daughter Mary. Mary was appointed the reverend’s ‘guardian’ when he became semi-paralysed following a stroke in 1881, living with him not far from the seafront in Bournemouth. She and Thomas refused Mrs Lowe access to Reverend Lowe, claiming that her presence would be ‘dangerous to his life’.

Mrs Lowe’s revenge on her immobilised husband was terrible: she launched an action for the ‘restitution of conjugal rights’. In law, Mrs Lowe was entitled to reclaim her absent husband and to drag him back to the hearth and the marital bed – to protect her and to provide for her, as legally he was obliged. In the late eighteenth century, an estimated eight out of ten conjugal restitution cases in the London consistory courts had been initiated by wives; but in the new century, such instances had become rarer and rarer, and subsequently, for the most part it was the English wife who was compelled to return to beatings, rape, neglect and bullying in the marital home. In the mid-1880s, though, sauce for the goose
once again became sauce for the gander, and this tactic was seen as cripplingly embarrassing for a husband. Which was exactly why Mrs Lowe did it. She did not want his company, protection or money; after all, she was the one with the cash and a high-profile vocation, as secretary of the LLRA, while he was confined to a chair in a house in Bournemouth – his occupation gone and his misdeeds paraded before the public.

Their daughter Mary swore an affidavit that the reverend had offered his wife her marital home upon her release from certification, but that Mrs Lowe had always preferred to live on her own, and that she was, in fact, as Mary put it, the ‘deserter’ of the marriage. However, the court ordered that seventy-two-year-old Reverend Lowe be medically inspected by two doctors, to test the truthfulness of his claim to be semi-paralysed. The examination took place on Valentine’s Day, 1885.

The court found in Mrs Lowe’s favour and ordered Reverend Lowe to take her back into his home within fourteen days, on pain of a hefty fine, and to pay all the legal costs of the case. For only the third time in the century, an English husband was told by a judge that he had to live under the same roof as a wife he despised.

But Mrs Lowe had only been playing with him, and she never took up her conjugal rights. The reverend was dead within four months of the judgment.

Perhaps it was this kind of bloody-mindedness that alienated from Mrs Lowe many important associates within spiritualist circles and the lunacy reform movement. A split occurred in the LLRA in 1876, when a number of men broke away to form the Lunacy Law Amendment Society. It was said that Messrs Plumbridge, Atkins, Hurry, Morsely, Billington and Crutwell had not liked Mrs Lowe’s devotion to spiritualism and found her approach to business matters erratic; it is possible, too, that her insistence that false incarceration was a feminist issue had angered male LLRA supporters – some of them the very men she had fought hard to free from certification and had helped to win justice against their conspirators.

She also fell out with James Burns, influential spiritualist and founder of the movement’s journal,
The Medium and Daybreak
,
which had been a useful vehicle for her cause. Desmond Fitzgerald, editor of the rival journal
Spiritual Notes
, libelled her in an open letter, describing her as a ‘scolding lady’ who had at one time been placed in an asylum when she became possessed by ‘evil spirits, who led you into acts of folly and wickedness. I think it very likely that you are still in some degree under the influence of the same class of spirits.’ Desmond wrote that he and fellow members of the British National Association of Spiritualists believed her actions had only helped to serve those who were endeavouring to crush the movement. Mrs Lowe took Fitzgerald to court for a criminal libel but after receiving a long apology in court, she called off the action.

Mrs Lowe failed first in court, then on appeal and finally in the House of Lords to make Dr Fox accountable for detaining her on deficient lunacy certificates. His defence was accepted that the certificates and lunacy order protected him from charges of assault and imprisonment, though the Lords took the opportunity to request the Commissioners in Lunacy to scrutinise more carefully in future the copy certificates sent to them by asylum proprietors; there ought to be no ambiguities in such crucial documentation, the Lords insisted.

Mrs Lowe, like John Perceval, crowned her career by prompting a Select Committee on Lunacy Law in 1877, which, as in 1859, took evidence on every aspect of the subject, not just wrongful incarceration. The Home Secretary felt the inquiry was needed ‘because there were certain apprehensions abroad which it would be well to disprove’, plainly certain that the committee’s findings would uphold the status quo. She herself proved a very cogent witness, but James Billington, secretary to the rival Lunacy Law Amendment Society, was far from impressive, allowing the questioners to drive a coach and horses through his claims of widespread malicious incarceration and exposing his lack of a grasp of even the fundamentals of how lunacy administration worked.

In the intervening eighteen years, Lord Shaftesbury appears to have fossilised. There had been no incarceration that had not been at the very least ‘plausible’, he said; and there were no longer any cases of wrongful detention of a recovered patient. He was resistant to all suggestions of change, believing that since 1859 the Commissioners in Lunacy had brought about continual, significant improvement in the entire asylum system, and the private sector in particular. By
non-renewal of private licences, a requirement to re-license every thirteen months, and an increasing refusal to allow new asylums to open that were not run by a qualified doctor, the private system had never functioned better, Shaftesbury claimed. And until such time as state-registered hospitals could provide accommodation suitable for middle- and upper-class lunatics, the wealthy should continue to have the option of private licensed houses.

His biggest worry was the rise in the ‘scientific’ specialists in lunacy, who

Yet, for the time being, no one was being shut up without good reason, argued His Lordship, exasperating Mrs Lowe, who felt that he had become out of touch in lunacy matters, and thus ‘purely ornamental’ within the Commissioners in Lunacy.

The
British Medical Journal
saw the Select Committee as a damp squib, believing that those who complained of wrongful incarceration had utterly failed to convince:

The massive
Report
of the Select Committee, running to over 700 pages, had indeed found no case to answer on the part of the asylum proprietors and the Commissioners. It mooted several changes to the
laws – none of them new and some of them quite in tune with the Lunacy Law Reform Association’s agenda for change. Perhaps a magistrate, rather than the Commissioners in Lunacy, should examine all new certificates, and countersign or reject them; maybe an independent medical man could be appointed at each private asylum, together with increased visitation by the Commissioners, whose numbers in that case needed to increase. In the longer term, more public hospitals should be accessible to the wealthy; far more radically, the
Report
wondered whether the state should buy up all private asylums. Yet none of these proposals was acted upon, and no amending legislation followed. Mrs Lowe discovered – just as John Perceval had found – that obtaining a governmental hearing had merely ratified the status quo.

Mrs Lowe died in North London in 1901, at the age of eighty-one. By that time, she had been eclipsed by the formidable woman she had inspired, whose story at long last prompted legislative change.

SHE WAS UP
a ladder in the library, brushing down the music books on the upper shelves with a feather duster, wearing a dressing gown and an old, dirty apron. Her maid, Villiers, came into the room and announced that a Mr Shell and a Mr Stewart were downstairs and wished to see her. ‘Send them up!’ she said, believing them to be her friends, the music publishers Duff & Stewart, and that Villiers had mistaken Duff’s name. It was an odd time to pay a call, ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, but never mind. She felt no need to change her attire; these visitors were well known to her, and in any case, she cared less and less for appearances. As she would later say, ‘Being beautiful only helps men who are no good to fall in love with you.’ She was still up the ladder when two men entered – not her Duff & Stewart at all, but strangers, announcing, ‘Mrs Weldon, you do not know us, but we know you. We are spiritualists and we have read your letters to
The Spiritualist
newspaper on the education of children and we wish to place some infants with you in your school of music.’

Feather duster in hand, she descended, and asked them to please sit down; she would be happy to talk about this subject, to which she had dedicated the past eleven years of her life. Shell was lean and elderly; Stewart, younger, was, in her words, ‘all blinks, winks and grins, and looked like a washed Christy [blackface] minstrel’. They asked her whether the children she educated were brought up to be spiritualists. She said no, spiritualism was an adult concern, and went on to explain her system of musical education for children, and the difficulties that some parents and relations had created, taking away a fully trained child and setting it to work in music halls or other disreputable venues; for that reason, she preferred to take in only orphans. Mrs Weldon was so confident in her system of training, she
was sure that any child, no matter how young, who was taught by her could, after just three years, earn £1,000 a year from singing. If only she were to be put in charge of the Albert Hall, she continued, she could make it into a going concern (which it was failing to be in its earliest years). The conversation then moved on to other topics. The men asked whether an animal could be said to have a soul, and Mrs Weldon replied that she felt that her deceased pug dog, Dan Tucker, had ‘an immortal spirit’; she could almost believe that he had had the soul of a man. She felt she was protected by her guiding spirits and they would warn her if she were ever to be threatened with any great danger. And she recounted a particular experience during which she had felt she had been enveloped in a shower of stars. Mrs Weldon was in full flow on her favourite subjects, and as a naturally loquacious and animated woman, she had much to say in reply to all the questions put to her by the two visitors. After half an hour Shell and Stewart left, and Villiers, along with the male servant, Bell, watched from behind as they went down the front steps, laughing.