Hospital Snapshots 6

One of the aspects that make the Hering collection fascinating is how much they resemble portraits, either painted or photographic, rather than institutional mug shots.  For the most part, the clothing, pose and objects would not look out of the ordinary in a conventional portrait of the time.

Photography, as a new medium in the late 1850s, may well have been something of a novelty for the type of patient Bethlem admitted.  To have a photograph taken in this early period might have been seen as a mark of distinction. Queen Victoria herself had been photographed and the photographic series ‘Living Celebrities’, published monthly by Maul and Polybank, depicted key individuals such as politicians, churchmen and writers, alongside their biographies.  Bethlem’s patients might not only have enjoyed the experience of a photographic session, but have had their own ideas about how they should be shown according to the photographic conventions as they understood them.

As in painting, clothing is an important indicator of circumstance, individuality and taste.  Although the hospital did not issue clothing, for patients choice may have been somewhat limited.   A number are wearing dresses of the same material and style, perhaps because Bethlem bought in fabric and ‘sewing parties’ were held in which the female patients could make  or alter their own clothing.  Despite these constraints many of the photographs show touches of refinement and personality, perhaps giving a hint to the individual themselves.

The patient we know only as EA is dressed as a respectable, middle class woman.  Her clothes are neat and well made but not showy, the material good but not expensive.  Her hair is firmly tied back, though unusually not covered.  There are touches of decoration such as the ruffles on the sleeves of the dress, lace collar and cuffs.  A fringed shawl is draped around her.  She has taken care over her appearance.

In other photographs, clothing and occupation are more closely allied.  Edward Oxford, the would-be assassin of Queen Victoria, is shown here as if taking a break from his decorating.  He appears to be dressed for the task in hand, wearing a painting overall on which can be seen some traces of paint.  Though the shirt underneath looks fairly standard, the tie appears worn for the occasion.

Clothing was clearly, at least to some extent, within the control of the sitter and helped give personality to each image; next month’s post will consider pose and props.

Oxford Martyr 3

We hope we may be permitted to add a postscript to our reviews of recently-published books concerning Edward Oxford, in order to give context to the claim that Oxford was (for a time, at least) a martyr to British public opinion, which had been outraged by his intended attack (whether in seriousness or in pretence) upon the person of the Queen. Were it not for the success of the insanity plea advanced by his defence counsel, Oxford surely would have been sent to the gallows, despite serious doubts being entertained concerning whether his pistols were loaded. Yet his incarceration at Bethlem and then at Broadmoor could have quite easily been lifelong: once he admitted to a visitor that, though he dreamt of being released, he knew it wasn’t very likely.¹

A paper just published by Dr Tom Davies in the National Library of Wales Journal treats the medical evidence preserved in the records of the Welsh Court of Great Sessions as illustrative of the range of ways in which so-called ‘criminal lunatics’ were handled in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain. Davies gives the example of a 1734 homicide on the Gower Peninsula against whom no prosecution was pursued due to ‘insanity’,² and he speculates that in cases such as these, some “would have been released” and left “to fend for themselves, permanently psychologically scarred as they were”, while for others “arrangements were made for some type of custodial care”, with an eye more to “the protection of the community” than to “the welfare of those being detained”. In eighteenth century Wales, these arrangements ranged from being “kept in close custody for life”, through being sent to Ireland, there to be “detained in some safe and proper place of confinement”, or being transported to the colonies as a convict, to being attended by “proper persons…to administer medicines or such remedies as shall be thought necessary to restore [the] reason”.³ ‘Confinement’ in this context usually meant confinement to prison, but by the early nineteenth century another option was available: transfer to Bethlem’s Criminal Lunatic Department, opened on the Hospital’s new site in Southwark in 1816. Davies instances two Welsh admissions to this Department, though without naming them – Aaron Bywater, who was first charged in 1799 and held at Montgomery Gaol prior to 1816; and John Roberts, who was admitted to Bethlem in 1825 directly following his trial  – both acquitted of murder on the grounds of insanity, and both confined at His (later Her) Majesty’s Pleasure.⁴

‘Arrangements’ such as these were effectively life sentences. Oxford, though he had caused no actual harm and was considered by his doctors to be of sound mind, was extremely lucky to escape this fate. His case, like that of Daniel McNaughten, another resident of Bethlem’s Criminal Lunatic Department, became a cause célèbre and a lightning rod for public debate concerning the insanity defence. One school of thought, to which the Queen herself subscribed, was that the defence was being cynically exploited as an expedient to escape deserved punishment. In 1843 the inimitable Punch magazine placed within its pages a spoof advertisement for a ‘Monomaniac Academy’ at the Hospital:

“Messrs Oxford and Macnaughten beg to announce that they have opened an Academy for the instruction of youth in the art of insanity. This very desirable and necessary acquirement will enable persons who have committed any crime or offended against the law of their country to escape punishment…Young gentlemen who are studying the art of picking pockets will also find this a desirable addition to their education; as, should they be detected, and tried at the Old Bailey, two or three lessons will teach them how to become monomaniacs pro tempore. Terms – One Guinea per lesson.”⁵

In 1867, the Evening Standard considered Oxford’s release to be “merciful” and his banishment to the colonies to be “very proper”, opining that “it is very right that the person of the sovereign should be protected from the vanity of a man who, at however distant a period, could commit the cowardly outrage of which he was the perpetrator”.⁶ One gets the impression from the story of Oxford’s life that there were certain points at which events could have easily taken a different course, one that would have been far less auspicious for him.

In his paper, Davies makes one critically important point which is easily lost sight of in the midst of historical (as well as contemporary) discussions of mental health and criminal responsibility. “In spite of the adverse publicity which crimes committed by the mentally ill attract,” he reminds us, “they form only a small proportion of the whole criminal population”. Again, his examples are from Wales, where “from 1730 to 1830, 855 [people] were taken to court for murder”, but only “twelve were considered to be ‘insane’”, and from 1825 to 1846 there were “not more than six” mentally ill offenders of any kind “being kept in…gaols at any one time”.⁷ Davies’ point is well taken: according to Mind, the UK mental health charity, today’s crime statistics “do not support…sensationalised media coverage about the danger that people with mental health problems present to the community”. Further, “people with mental health problems are more dangerous to themselves than they are to others”, as well as being “more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than the perpetrator”.⁸

¹ Jenny Sinclair, A Walking Shadow: The Remarkable Double Life of Edward Oxford (Melbourne, 2012), p. 68.

² T. Davies, ‘A Kind of Medical Knowledge’ , National Library of Wales Journal, vol. XXXV, no. 4 (2013), p. 18.

³ibid., pp. 21, 25.

⁴ibid., p. 23.

⁵Punch, volume 4, January-June 1843, p. 132.

⁶Evening Standard, 27 November 1867.

⁷ T. Davies, ‘A Kind of Medical Knowledge’, National Library of Wales Journal, vol. XXXV, no. 4 (2013), pp. 17, 22.

⁸ Mind, ‘Dangerousness and mental health: the facts’, available online at www.mind.org.uk.

Oxford Martyr 2

Whereas Paul Murphy’s Shooting Victoria, insofar as it tells the story of Edward Oxford, principally concerns itself with the commission and aftermath of the crime for which he was tried, Jenny Sinclair’s A Walking Shadow: The Remarkable Double Life of Edward Oxford (Melbourne, 2012) concentrates its attention on the latter half of his life, which he spent under an assumed name in the company of people who had no knowledge of his past. Murphy, to be sure, devotes two or three pages to this turn of events, brought about by the “deal” offered to Oxford in 1867 by the Home Secretary, Gathorne Hardy, who was in receipt of reports testifying to Oxford’s long-standing sanity: Oxford “could go free if he moved to one of Her Majesty’s colonies and agreed never to return to England”.¹ Yet Sinclair, the Australian author of the affectionate When We Think About Melbourne, is better placed to do justice to the contours of the new life Oxford (under the pseudonym ‘John Freeman’) forged in that city in the last third of the nineteenth century, following in the furrow of the work of scholars such as Dr Katharine Haydon in so doing. For his was in many ways an archetypal story of making good in the colonies.

“However much Freeman’s secret separated him from his fellow passengers [aboard the ship on which he emigrated], what he had in common with them was far greater”, according to Sinclair. “…In their uncertainty, hopes and dreams of a new start there was only a difference of degree between him and them…Melbourne was fifteen years into the gold rush, and the potential would have seemed endless, if a little daunting.”² In Melbourne, where “a man could be taken at face value”, Oxford remained what he had become – “John Freeman: respectable churchman, family man, author” – until his death at the age of 78 in 1900.³ Sinclair even ventures that in his latter years “he might have begun to believe that the years lost to Bethlem were worth it”.

“Had he lived an ordinary life in England, he might have become the urban version of … ‘the poor agricultural labourer of Britain, doomed to work hard, and live sparingly, and always in an uncomfortable state of uncertainty where he will get work from one day to another’. Freeman’s method of emigration might have been a questionable one, but Australia had been kind to him anyway.”⁴

Oxford had a lifetime in which to repent of the deed which, his Bethlem doctor believed, “probably originated in a feeling of excessive vanity and a desire to become notorious if he could not be celebrated” and did not in any event constitute a serious attempt on the life of Her Majesty.⁵ There is no reason to doubt Murphy’s judgement (in which Sinclair concurs) that he found incarceration at Bethlem “excruciating”.⁶ Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to argue that his fantasy-driven ‘publicity stunt’ may have – indirectly – improved his longer-term prospects. In any event, his life in Melbourne – the subject of painstaking reconstruction by Sinclair – amounted to a resurrection from the ashes of what we have previously described as his living martyrdom.

¹ Paul Murphy, Shooting Victoria (Pegasus Books, 2012), p. 509.

² Jenny Sinclair, A Walking Shadow: The Remarkable Double Life of Edward Oxford (Melbourne, 2012), p. 97.

³ ibid., pp. 108, 157.

⁴ ibid., p. 157.

⁵ ibid., pp. 70, 79-80.

⁶ Paul Murphy, Shooting Victoria (Pegasus Books, 2012), p. 509; cf. Jenny Sinclair, A Walking Shadow: The Remarkable Double Life of Edward Oxford (Melbourne, 2012), pp. 78-79.

Oxford Martyr 1

Over a year ago we promised that we would let blog readers know when two new books on Edward Oxford, one of Victorian Bethlem’s most famous patients, were published. We have – admittedly, in passing – already alerted readers to the publication of one of them, and now we provide a partial review of it, with the intention of devoting a second post to the other. Paul Murphy’s Shooting Victoria “documents”, in the words of the author, “the important if unwitting parts the Queen’s seven assailants played in the great love story between Victoria and Victorians”, Murphy’s thesis being that she “converted each episode of near-tragedy into one of triumphant renewal for her monarchy, each time managing to strengthen the bond between herself and her subjects”.¹ Oxford’s was the first attempt on her life, in 1840, but Murphy’s trawl through the transcripts of the subsequent trial gives rise to considerable doubt concerning its seriousness – doubt encapsulated in a question put by the defence to a medical witness:

“Supposing a person in the middle of the day, and without any suggested motive, was to fire a loaded pistol at Her Majesty passing along the road in a carriage, and that such person afterwards remained on the spot, declaring that he was the person who had fired – nay, even took pains to have it known, and that afterwards he entered freely into discussion, and answered questions put to him on the subject, would you refer such conduct to a sound or unsound state of mind?”²

Oxford’s defence against the capital charge of treason rested on two propositions: that the guns he used were loaded with powder but not shot, and that he was insane at the time of the shooting. The jury’s acceptance of either proposition “would result in Oxford’s acquittal”, as Murphy writes, but “the consequence of acquittal for unloaded guns differed dramatically from the consequence of an acquittal for insanity”.

“If [the jury could not dismiss the possibility that] Oxford had no balls in his pistols, he would walk from the Old Bailey a free man. If, on the other hand, he was acquitted on the ground of insanity, he would be subject to confinement at the Queen’s pleasure – confinement that could last for decades, if not a lifetime”.³

Though the indications that Oxford was of unsound mind were inconclusive, so was the evidence that his pistols were ever loaded. With the benefit of one hundred and seventy years’ worth of hindsight, it seems more likely that he was attempting an extremely ill-advised publicity stunt. The jury initially returned this delphic verdict: “We find the prisoner, Edward Oxford, guilty of discharging the contents of the two pistols, but whether or not they were loaded with ball has not been satisfactorily proved to us, he being of unsound state of mind at the time”.⁴ Arguably, this amounted to a finding of ‘Not guilty’ in law (there being no English equivalent of the Scottish ‘Not proven’), there clearly having been doubt in the minds of members of the jury concerning whether Oxford’s guns had been loaded. Over against the protests of the defence, however, the presiding judge ruled that the jury must return to their deliberations to formulate a clearer verdict. Uncertainty about Oxford’s ammunition was not reflected in their second, equally confused attempt: “Guilty, he being at the time insane”. Since “by law no one could be simultaneously found insane and guilty of a crime”, the judge obtained the agreement of the jury to record the verdict as ‘Not guilty on the ground on insanity’.⁵

As has already been noted, the fact that acquittal took place on this ground was fateful for Oxford – it meant decades, if not a lifetime, of confinement (first at Bethlem, then at Broadmoor) at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. There is in fact much more to Oxford’s subsequent life than this, as Murphy goes on to recount later in his book, and as anyone familiar with the story will know. For the time being, however, we will leave him in the position in which he found himself in the wake of his trial: as a hapless living martyr to the sentiments of the British establishment, which was outraged by the prospect of him being (in the words of the prosecuting attorney) “let loose upon society to endanger the life of Her Majesty or her subjects”,⁶ whether he had committed a treasonable offence, or not.

Naturally, there is also much more to Murphy’s book. Oxford’s case is but the first, paradigmatic case out of seven he recounts which turned out to Victoria’s advantage – not just because she escaped unharmed on each occasion, but because “she [and, in his lifetime, her husband Albert] refused to hide or allow any visible sign of heightened security” in the aftermath of these incidents, thereby demonstrating “that absolute trust existed between them and their subjects, and…that no would-be assassin could ever come between them”.⁷

[to be continued]

¹ Paul Murphy, Shooting Victoria (Pegasus Books, 2012), pp. viii-ix.

² ibid., p. 115.

³ ibid., p. 108.

⁴ ibid., pp. 108,119.

⁵ ibid., p. 122.

⁶ ibid., p. 121.

⁷ ibid., pp. 56,73.

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