Inconvenient People (70 page)

Regarding gender, there was a paucity of official returns in the earliest decades of the century. Few medical writers attempted to make any sex-related generalisations based upon statistical evidence. Dr George Man Burrows was an exception and his 1828 findings are included overleaf. John Thurnam, in his 1845
Observations and Essays on the Statistics of Insanity
, attempted a sophisticated numerical model, using the 1841 census returns and asylum admission and discharge data, and found a slight preponderance of male lunacy over female.

Sociologist Joan Busfield, in ‘The Female Malady? Men, Women and Madness in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ (
Sociology
, February 1994), found that at the end of the century there was a 55:45 ratio of females to males in institutions, the result of females becoming long-stay patients and male inmates having a higher death rate in asylums. Female admission figures were no higher than male, and discharge rates differed little, Busfield found.

The following table has been compiled from various Lunacy Commission returns to the Lord Chancellor. It excludes lunatics in non-asylum care.

^*
1829 figures are for the London area only. A large proportion of pauper patients were in private asylums but paid for by the parish, as there was comparatively little public accommodation for them. Source:
Report from the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy
, 1830.

Average number of lunatics in private asylums in England and Wales, 1812–24:

Inmates of the Middlesex County Asylum at Hanwell, 1827:

Brief outlines of cases highlighted by the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society

In addition to the individuals mentioned in
Chapter Three
, the following instances of apparently wrongful asylum incarceration came to the attention of members of the Society, before its demise in 1863. It is possible that the Society knew of more cases, but few annual reports were published by John Perceval and his colleagues.

Captain Joseph Digby
was violently seized from his home at 12 Beaumont Street, Marylebone, London, on 5 May 1844, and taken to Moorcroft House Asylum, in Hillingdon, Middlesex. This was on the say-so of Digby’s wife, although she persuaded an aged brother of the captain to sign the lunacy order, so that she would not be responsible if there were to be recriminations. His brother had not seen the captain for fifteen years, and this was very much against the spirit of the 1828 Madhouse Act, which sought the provision of up-to-date information on alleged lunatics. Captain Digby was in the asylum for thirteen weeks, but – assisted by his wife’s sister and her husband – he threatened to mount a lawsuit for conspiracy if he were not released. Fearing such a move, Mrs Digby agreed to his discharge. Neither alienist John Conolly nor the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy had considered Digby to be mad but they were reluctant to release him without his wife’s consent. Captain Digby abandoned his proposed lawsuit because of its expense. When his story became known, he was inundated with letters from people who claimed that the same thing had happened to them, signing themselves with such pseudonyms as ‘A Victim’ and ‘One of the Miserables’. The captain became an active and founder member of the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society.

William White
, a seventy-two-year-old pensioner resident at the Charterhouse in London, quarrelled with the institution’s doctor who then had him certified, on 1 August 1844. Luke James Hansard intervened and a long list of petitioners to White’s sanity was compiled. The Charterhouse had imposed
a three-month ban on any contact between White and the outside world, but Hansard’s agitation compelled the Metropolitan Commissioners to look at the case closely and they agreed that White was sane, and freed him. White became an active member of the Society.

Edward Fletcher
, an epileptic aged twenty-eight, was confined to Kensington House Asylum in London by his Uncles Charles and James. Edward’s father had died in 1848, and his bequests to his son had been interfered with by the uncles. If Edward were to make a will, they would lose out financially, and so they cooked up a madhouse plot to ensure that he was unable to draw up a will. In July 1858, after three months’ confinement, Edward escaped through a small gate in the garden wall and into Kensington Road, wearing two suits, the outer of which he pawned for cash. When cornered by the keeper and a policeman several days later, he made a dash across the rooftops of Covent Garden, ending up in a woman’s lodgings. She listened to his tale and offered him her clothing. Wearing her crinoline, but failing to cover up his thick black moustache, Edward walked downstairs and out into the street, and evaded his pursuers. He was given refuge by novelist Charles Reade, who later made heavy use of the Fletcher case in his 1863 novel,
Hard Cash
. The Society assisted in the prosecution of the uncles for unlawful confinement, during which the judge reiterated Baron Pollock’s 1849 legal opinion that only those ‘dangerous to themselves or to others’ were eligible to be placed in an asylum. Reade was critical of the quality of assistance the Society provided to Edward.

James Hill
, a bankrupt merchant from Huntingdonshire, with ten children and Radical political sympathies, became violent and delusional in May 1850 and his wife had him committed to Kensington House. However, he swiftly recovered but found that all access to him was forbidden and that his letters to the Commissioners in Lunacy were suppressed. He was released in May 1851 and in January 1852, backed by the Society, he sought compensation for wrongful confinement from the proprietor, but lost the lawsuit.

Charles Verity
was transferred from Northampton Gaol to Northampton Hospital’s Refractory Lunatics Ward in September 1856 after attempting to hang himself during a two-year sentence for receiving stolen goods. He wrote to John Perceval in April 1857, outlining the extreme violence of the attendants, which included a killing. Mr Perceval succeeded in getting an inquiry into the abuse, which substantiated Verity’s reports. Verity was now deemed to be sane and was transferred back to gaol to serve the rest of his sentence.

Ellen Finn
was committed to Warburton’s Asylum in Bethnal Green, East London, in 1844 by her husband, Police Sergeant James Finn, after eighteen years of marriage. Following a violent row, Sergeant Finn found two doctors to certify his wife. However, Ellen’s sister paid for two independent doctors to examine her at Warburton’s: they found her sane and she was discharged. The couple eventually agreed to a judicial separation.

‘T. C. H.’
, aged forty-seven, was described as being of ‘weak mind’ and suffering ‘nervous excitement’ but with no signs of insanity. He had inherited £6,200 on the death of his father in 1831, and then £3,800 from an uncle, for both of whom he acted as executor. In 1843, he announced his intention to marry a Mrs B—, a widow, and his two brothers had him seized and incarcerated in Fiddington Asylum (aka Willett’s) near Market Lavington in Wiltshire. If T. C. H. were to marry, certain inheritable moneys would no longer be available to his brothers. He managed to alert a lawyer, and an eminent doctor came to the asylum, examined him and pronounced him sane. This episode cost him £1,200 and seven months’ loss of liberty. He suffered low spirits subsequently, and in 1848 his brothers again managed to get him certified, this time into Ridgeway House, near Bristol, where the proprietor claimed that T. C. H. would be certain to commit suicide if freed. This time around, T. C. H. had just announced his intention to marry a Miss H—. He stayed at Ridgeway House until February 1849 when Gloucestershire magistrate Purnell B. Purnell came to inspect the premises. Upon liberation, T. C. H. married Miss H—, in March 1849, and regained most of his property. Purnell notified the Society of this case, plus 150 other dubious certifications in West Country madhouses.

James Drury
was fifty-nine when his case came to the attention of Purnell B. Purnell and the Society in the late 1840s. He had been living as a ‘nervous patient’ in lodgings not far from Fishponds Asylum near Bristol when he was inveigled into the asylum proper on faulty certificates. He spent twenty years at Fishponds. His income of £200 a year was administered by a trustee, who paid himself a total of £400 over the two decades. The Commissioners in Lunacy would not accept that Drury was sane, or that his funds were being embezzled. Purnell got him released and into lodgings pending a lunacy inquisition and an investigation into the missing funds.

Edward Vicars
, in his mid-forties, a wine and spirit merchant of Liverpool, was a heavy drinker who, during an attack of delirium tremens, was put into Walton Lodge Asylum in February 1847 by his sister, Hannah, and brother, Matthew. Among other delusions Vicars expressed during the
tremens was the notion that he had no stomach and that food went directly into his legs; and that the local magistrates had been using electricity to trigger insanity in the patients at Walton Lodge, feeding it into the asylum through telegraph wires. Vicars escaped in March 1848, to find that his property had been sold off by his brother and a business partner. The Society represented Vicars at his subsequent lunacy inquisition, in August 1849, at which the jury declared him sane.

John Gould
of Bath was placed in the asylum of Charles Cunningham Langworthy at Box in Wiltshire in 1840. He admitted that he had been a heavy drinker and that his relationship with his wife had become very strained, but said that they had agreed amicably to a separation. His wife and son had him certified when he was suffering delirium tremens, and assumed control of his property. When Gould was released, thirteen years later, he intended to mount a legal case to regain his business and some leasehold property, but decided not to proceed when he found out the enormous likely cost of the case.

Arthur Legent Pearce
was discovered in Bethlehem Hospital by John Perceval in 1850. The former doctor had been confined ten years earlier following a violent assault upon his wife. Mr Perceval did not argue that Pearce was sane but was horrified at the conditions Pearce was kept in and at the erosion of his capital in patient fees. To help him, Mr Perceval published a volume of Pearce’s poetry,
Poems by a Prisoner in Bethlehem
(1851).

George Hubback
was in his sixties when he was consigned to Kensington House. His supporters claimed that Hubback, who had once been a boon companion of the Prince Regent, was simply suffering from diabetes and that his wife did not wish to care for him any more. He died in September 1839.

Richard Hennah
of Blackheath, south-east London, was a heavy drinker whose father had him certified into Blacklands House Asylum, Chelsea, West London, in an attempt to dry him out.

Reverend Wing
of Thornhaugh, in Cambridgeshire – described as harmless, nervous and irritable – was put into Kensington House by his son, a Gray’s Inn attorney, and died there.

Robert Orme Smith
, aged about fifty, spent thirty years in Warburton’s Asylum, on the lunacy order of bank director John Bowden. Fifteen years into his captivity he escaped, and made it to Bowden’s home to ask what he had done with his money and property, but was recaptured.

Miss Mackray
, first name unknown, was incarcerated in Elm House Asylum in Chelsea, which the Society believed was entirely inappropriate for her nervous but not ‘unsound’ condition. In 1857, they persuaded the Commissioners in Lunacy to have her removed to a private house in Whittington Villas, Upper Holloway, North London, run by a Mrs Pope. However, Miss Mackray escaped from here and was able to make contact with her own solicitor to fight her certification.

Mr Evans
, first name unknown, eventually won £30 from a relation after he had been able to prove that there had been a conspiracy to place him, sane, in Bethlehem Hospital.

Mr S—
was confined by order of his relations, who then seized his leasehold farmhouse. The Society helped to liberate him, and solicitor Gilbert Bolden obtained an annuity from his relations in compensation for the seized farm.

No name
: a young man was found confined in an asylum upon a lunacy order from his father, which, the Society reported, ‘contained statements of his having been insane when at college, which was without foundation’. The boy drank too much and his father stated that he had ‘an utter want of self-control [which] produced, on each indulgence, attacks of excitement amounting to positive insanity’. He was under certificate from 1846 to 1849 and although the Commissioners in Lunacy recommended his discharge, the proprietor and the father refused.