Hospital Snapshots 3

The previous two posts in this series have looked at the idea of physiognomy and the use doctors made of images for diagnostic purposes but to the lay viewer they can provide a fascinating insight into another world, and the life of an individual.

This month we return to the case of John Payne, whose photograph featured in the September 2012 instalment of In the Frame.   The sitter is identified only by the initials JP and the words ‘ruffianism’ and ‘homicide’, indicating that he was a patient in the criminal wing of Bethlem, maintained by the Home Office until Broadmoor opened in the early 1860s.  By reference to the Bethlem archives he can be identified as John Payne, admitted to Bethlem in September 1857, following his trial for murder.

It would appear that within the hospital John Payne attracted as much attention as in his portrait he seems to be inviting.  Charles Hood, Bethlem’s Superintendent Physician, mentions him specifically in his published letter to the Lunacy Commissioners in 1860, commenting, ‘His vicious tendencies are unimpressible by either advice or kindness.’¹

Payne is described as an expert and habitual thief, part of a gang operating in London in the summer of 1857.  After being confined to the Westminster Workhouse following a bout of delirium tremens, he was accused of the murder of a fellow inmate.²  The original trial records make mention of some general symptoms of madness and Payne was acquitted by reason of insanity and sent to Bethlem but it is Hood’s opinion that he was sane at the time of his admission and remained perfectly so.  He does not feel that Bethlem is an appropriate place for him and that ‘he produces constant anxiety to those who have the charge of him’.  Indeed, he made four attempts at escape from Bethlem before being transferred to Broadmoor in July 1864.

Although John Payne appeared troubled, moody and withdrawn on his arrival, the Broadmoor records suggest a more positive outcome.  By the end of the 1860s he was working in the carpenter’s and shoemaker’s shops in Broadmoor and gave up alcohol (patients drank weak beer) in 1871.  He and his sister regularly petitioned the Home Office for his release and he was discharged conditionally into her care on 19 April 1873.

¹ Charles Hood, Criminal Lunatics: A letter to the Chairman of the Commissioners in Lunacy (London, 1860), p. 14.

² John Payne, ‘Murder’, 17 August 1857, available in The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 online resource.

Just Visiting: Fukuzawa Yukichi

Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901) is well-known within Japan as an author, political theorist, and moderniser, the founder of Keio University and, in a manner of speaking, one of the architects of the modern nation. He was an advocate of political and cultural engagement with the West, and some account of his travels to Europe and the United States is available in English translation in The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi, translated by Eiichi Kiyooka (Tokyo, 1981). His diaries, however, remain untranslated, and in them there is an account of a visit made to Bethlem Hospital in 1862 – a fact that may be verified from Bethlem’s visitors’ book, into which Fukuzawa wrote. Fukuzawa was by no means the only personage from abroad to visit the Hospital – nineteenth century psychiatrists maintained a lively cultural and intellectual exchange across national borders – but his Western hosts no doubt saw him as one of their more exotic guests. His own account of the visit, written on 20 May 1862, breathes a liberal, enquiring spirit, and provides another window onto mid-Victorian Hospital life.

“This lunatic asylum is a hospital that accommodates and treats lunatic people. It provides a single room for each patient. Patients are encouraged to come out of their rooms during the daytime. I saw patients who took walks through the hospital, went out into the garden to pick flowers, sang and danced on the rooftop, played ball, drew pictures, and enjoyed music. Patients can amuse themselves according to their inclination. The inside of the hospital is kept especially clean. Bird cages and pot plants are put in place so that patients can soothe their minds.”

Fukuzawa then turned his attention to Bethlem’s State Criminal Lunatic Asylum, within which those who (like Edward Oxford) had been tried for but acquitted of serious crimes ‘by reason of insanity’ were held until Her Majesty’s further Pleasure be known.

“The hospital not only treats patients who go mad but also detains for life people who have committed arson or attempted murder due to their madness. I saw three inmates today. One tried to kill the Queen, one killed his father, and another woman killed her three children.”

The would-be regicide was doubtless Edward Oxford himself, and the parricide Richard Dadd. A little over two years after Fukuzawa’s visit, both men – indeed all the male inhabitants of the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum – were relocated to the newly-built Broadmoor Hospital. Three years after that, Oxford proved an exception to the life detention rule, as related by Fukuzawa, by obtaining a Royal pardon. But that, as they say, is another story – one, incidentally, that is told by Paul Murphy in a book just published by Pegasus entitled Shooting Victoria.

Fukuzawa Yukichi in Paris, 1862

In the Spotlight: Edward Oxford

At the outset of this series of posts, we explained that In the Spotlight would feature “people of previous generations who spent time as Bethlem or Maudsley Hospital patients …whose lives became defined … by their achievements rather than by that experience”. In July and August we departed from this principle slightly by introducing patients with noted relatives, and this month we feature someone who was obliged to go to the greatest lengths to distance himself from his time in the Hospital and the circumstances that led to his admission.

On Constitution Hill in 1840, Edward Oxford (1822-1900) laid in wait for Queen Victoria’s carriage to pass, and fired two pistols (whether or not they were loaded was a point of later dispute) in its direction. No-one was hurt, but Oxford was apprehended and put on trial for his attempt on the life of the Sovereign. The jury was presented with copious evidence in support of the defence plea of insanity, and despite the confusing and sometimes contradictory nature of that evidence, returned a verdict of ‘guilty but insane’. Consequently Oxford avoided both prison and the noose, and was instead sent to the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum (which was maintained at Bethlem until the opening of Broadmoor Hospital in 1863-64), where he was detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. From the outset, he showed no sign of mental derangement, and employed his time at Bethlem by learning a succession of trades and foreign languages. Put simply (in the words of the scholar F.B. Smith), “Bedlam was his university”.¹

In 1867, after Oxford’s transfer to Broadmoor, Her Majesty made her pleasure known courtesy of the Secretary of State: he was pardoned and released on condition of his permanent emigration from the British Isles. Relocating to colonial Australia, Oxford quite literally made an entirely new name for himself as John Freeman, journalist (we may presume for the Melbourne Age or Argus) and author of Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life (London, 1888).

A short biography of Edward Oxford is available online, courtesy of Berkshire Record Office. The Australian author Jenny Sinclair has a fuller treatment in preparation, and a popular history of all the would-be assassins of Queen Victoria is being written by Paul Murphy, a University of Colorado professor. We’ll make blog announcements when these are published.

1 F.B. Smith, ‘Lights and Shadows in the Life of John Freeman’,Victorian Studies, vol. 30 no. 4 (Summer 1987), p. 468.