Christiana Edmunds was not quite the thirty-five-year-old initially described at the Brighton hearings. She was in fact forty-three, but the appearance of relative youth was important to the Dorothea she was posing as. Her true age would become significant at her trial.
She was born on 29 August 1829 in the growing Kentish coastal town of Margate to William Edmunds and his wife, Ann(e) Christiana Burn. Her mother was the daughter of a major; her father, the son of a carpenter, Thomas Edmunds, who had risen in society in the early 1800s to become the proprietor of the White Hart Hotel on Margate’s up-and-coming Marine Parade. Thomas Edmunds was also the surveyor who after the gales of 1808 oversaw the rebuilding of Margate Pier, foreseeing that it might become a promenade for fashionable visitors. William Edmunds, born about 1801, followed in his father’s footsteps. For a brief period after his father’s death in 1824, William looked after the family hotel with his elder sister Mary, who in 1815 had been subject to a libel suit for having rather brilliantly lampooned a man ominously called Boys – though there is no clear indication that this Boys bore any relation to the one Christiana later targeted with her poisoning. (This aunt of Christiana’s, perhaps not altogether unlike her niece, ‘had a habit of writing offensive and annoying letters, not only to her friends but to persons to whom she was totally unacquainted’.)
William Edmunds became a surveyor and a principal architect in Margate’s nineteenth-century efflorescence. In 1825, when the town’s parishes had outgrown their churches, he won the Church Building Commissioners’ competition to build Margate a new ‘Gothic Church at the time of Henry the Third – to contain two thousand sittings’. From the remaining evidence, Edmunds was not only a fine draftsman but an imaginative architect. The church may have ended up costing more than the Commissioners had bargained for, but it was grand in conception and ‘visible at a considerable distance from shore’. At the time of its consecration in 1829, which coincided with Christiana’s birth, William Edmunds was at the height of his powers. His public buildings included the new Margate lighthouse, the offices of the important Pier and Harbour Company, known as the Droit House, and a lavish shopping precinct in the High Street called The Boulevard, locally known as ‘Levey’s Bazaar’. The Kentish Chronicle of 18 August that year noted that Edmunds’s Boulevard commanded ‘universal admiration ... It now takes the lead as.a promenade.’
His flurry of activity spread, together with his reputation. Over the next few years, he completed Trinity Church in Dover, a new work- house at Herne, extensions to the Kent and Canterbury Hospital – an establishment his youngest son would sadly have some connection with after his father’s death – and a grand ornamental pavilion where the city of Dover gave a resplendent dinner for the ageing Duke of Wellington.
In 1828, William Edmunds married Ann Christiana Burn, and the couple came to live in Margate’s elegant Hawley Square with its handsome, tall Georgian brick edifices. Christiana was their first child, followed by a boy, called William after his father. Mary Burn followed in 1832 and a year later Louisa Agnes. Finally, in 1841, came Arthur Burn.
As Christiana grew, so her father’s fortunes declined. Official surveyor to two of Margate’s major civic enterprises – the Margate Pier and Harbour Company and the Margate Commissioners for Paving and Lighting – Edmunds was targeted during 1836–7, a moment of public discontent with the Companies, for mismanagement of funds. The deputy chairman of the Pier and Harbour Company committed suicide in 1836, augmenting the sense that general embezzlement was taking place. Though Edmunds himself was just about cleared in the furore of accusation, his salary was reduced first by one and then by the other company. The family grew poorer, and after 1839 he built no new edifices and disappeared from public view.
In 1842, when Christiana was entering her teens, the family house was sold. Soon after, William Edmunds’s state of mind must have become a trial for his family and affected them in deep, if differing, ways. ‘He was very strange in his manner ... He raved about having millions of money, and attempted to knock down his medical man with a ruler.’ So stated an aged Ann Christiana Edmunds at her daughter’s trial, as she revealed the story of William Edmunds’s shadowy afterlife in the most cursory, if sensational, terms. Her deposition formed the only defence that could be offered for Christiana – a defence of hereditary insanity. But madness in the family has many more ways of affecting its members than the Victorian understanding of heredity gives room for. William’s wild behaviour, the content of his ravings, his wife and children’s ways of coping with it, the shame of his confinement to an institution, the poverty this in turn brought on the family – all of this affected its members as much as any loose notion of heredity.
‘In 1843 my husband became insane and was sent to a private lunatic asylum at Southall, where he was confined till August 1844 ... He had to be confined in a strait jacket before going to the asylum. He had two attendants before he was sent there.’ So stated Mrs Edmunds. Sydney Cornish Harrington of Datchworth, her son’s brother-in-law, amplified this in the ‘memorial’ or affidavit he produced to plead Christiana’s pardon after her trial: William Edmunds in his manic state had talked of his ‘immense wealth and the vast number of cities that he had built’ to his two listening attendants, before trying to overpower them. Only his wife, when called, could finally settle and command him.
Violent, William was described as a ‘dangerous lunatic’ by the proprietor of the Southall Park Asylum to which he was sent. This was a small private establishment, family-run and, like many of its kind, once a handsome residence now converted to new use. It had been opened in 1838 by the reputed Sir William Charles Ellis (1780–1839), whose humane methods of caring for the mad had been inspired by the Quaker William Tuke’s famous York Retreat.
Like many of the early-nineteenth-century mind doctors, Ellis believed that work and the discipline it provided were crucial to providing possible cures for those who suffered madness. He had brought these principles to his work as superintendent of the large Wakefield Asylum, from where he had been recruited to the giant Hanwell Asylum in Middlesex. Here he put in place what were then considered progressive ‘moral’, by which were meant psychological treatment techniques. After political disagreements with the Middlesex magistrates, Ellis and his wife – ever a partner in his asylum management – left Hanwell and established the private Southall Park asylum in the vicinity. Advertised as a retreat suitable ‘for any Lady or Gentleman whose mental state may require a separation from their immediate friends and connexions’, the asylum offered gardens and grounds for outdoor exercise and relaxation as well as horses, billiards, music, cheerful views and the sense of a home away from home.
By the time William Edmunds arrived at Southall Park, Ellis had been dead for some four years and the premises were licensed to a Dr J. B. Steward, who testified at Christiana’s trial. He described her father as being fond of good living, but not a hard drinker. The spur to his malady was, perhaps appropriately for an architect, ‘the loss of the sale of a house’. Acute mania characterized him on admission. He was ‘violent and restless’, and ‘talked nonsense’, insisting he was worth millions. William Edmunds, it was clear, had his idee fixe: he felt he had been cheated out of an elevated public position, one he couldn’t live without. Eventually he became ‘paralyzed’. The ‘paralysis’ Dr Steward mentions in his deposition is the catch-all classification of the later 1800s: ‘general paralysis of the insane’. Only in 1913 were its symptoms definitively linked to the ravages of tertiary syphilis. If William Edmunds did indeed have syphilis, this may also account for the ‘epilepsy’ and ‘idiocy’, or learning difficulties, that the youngest Edmunds, Arthur Burn, was said to suffer from, though there is no indication that Mrs Edmunds was affected.
Southall contained only some nine ‘lunatics’. A stay there did not come cheap: two guineas a week for the better rooms. In today’s terms, depending on the measure used, this translates as around £200 (using the retail price index) or £1470 (w
hen compared to average earnings) per week. A lengthy confinement in such asylum style was not something a mother with four children still to raise and little income could afford. Unsurprisingly, William had to be brought home from Southall in August 1844 ‘from considerations of expense’.
Christiana was then fifteen. As the eldest daughter, it is likely that she had to help care for her father. Together with her siblings, she would have heard his manic outbursts and the overblown fantasies of grandeur, loss and resentment they contained, all with their emotional and in part material core of truth. William had indeed fallen from greater heights than he now occupied. We could speculate that contained in his insistence on millions acquired and cities built, there is a family narrative of a decline unjustly propelled by others – his accusers at the Margate companies. This could well at some level have infected Christiana’s adolescent sense of herself. There are traces of her father’s malady in her own hypersensitivity about her status and her prickly arrogance: her complaints about her jailers, her insistence on being treated like a lady; the straining for equality that her letter to Dr Beard emits – with its Burns quotes and its fashionable smatterings of Italian. Class, after all, is central to Victorian life and its demarcations. Hanging on to gentility as well as reputation is crucial.
The financial plight of the Edmundses is clear from the fact that a mere six months or so after William’s return from the private asylum, he is sent off in March 1845 to the far shabbier Peckham House, an institution with a less than sterling reputation. Often overcrowded, Peckham House by 1846 contained 402 inmates, the largest proportion of them pauper lunatics, sometimes as many as four to a small room, and with very few keepers. The food was insufficient and met with criticism from the Commissioners on Lunacy, who had begun investigative work in 1844 just before the 1845 Lunacy Act, which enshrined them as a centralized overseeing government body. Indeed the Commissioners had entertained thoughts of closing Peckham down, but given the lack of public asylum places, ‘if licences were withdrawn from houses containing large numbers of paupers, there would be no alternative, but to send the patients to workhouses, or to board with other paupers, where they would not have the care which they now receive under regular visitation and supervision’. Apparently, by 1847 the situation at Peckham House had improved, but by 15 March that year, as Dr Henry Armstrong of Peckham House explained at Christiana’s trial, Williams was dead, after suffering three years of ‘general paralysis’.
There is no written record of how William’s years of madness and ultimate death in confinement affected the family. But it is clear that his madness rumbled through their lives – whether we understand this in psychological ways or along the biological hereditarian lines the Victorian doctors then preferred. In that hothouse that a family is, his excessive and eccentric behaviour seems to have affected several of the Edmunds children and become something of a family trait.
Christiana’s teenage years were coloured by her father’s illness, the family’s decline and financial difficulties. She was nearing her twentieth birthday when her father died. Her youngest brother was eight and would soon begin to have the epileptic fits that would have him permanently committed to Earlswood Asylum, a vast institution at Reigate, principally for those with learning disabilities, whose patron was the Queen. According to his mother, Arthur had been an ‘idiot’ from an early age, a condition which the family, but not the doctors, attributed to ‘a blow to the head’. A little while after or perhaps even before the father’s death, the family rented a house in Canterbury at 3 Watling Street – perhaps so as to avoid too many questions from Margate acquaintances. Help for Arthur was sought from two doctors here, both of whom were attached to the Kent and Canterbury Hospital. Dr Hallowes and Dr Andrews signed the 1860 medical certificate that committed the young man to Earlswood, where he lived until his death in 1866. Christiana and her mother may then have moved back to Margate before moving again to those fatal lodgings in Brighton.
After the death of her father, Christiana herself went through some kind of episode. Around 1853, she was sent to London for treatment. Like a case of hysteria from the annals of Jean-Martin Charcot or the young Freud, she was then paralysed down one side and her feet were so affected that she was unable to walk. In her deposition, her mother emphasizes that Christiana ‘suffered for many years from Hysteria and when a child used to walk in her sleep’. It seems the challenges of becoming a Victorian woman would stop her walking in her twenties when wide awake.
Whether Christiana’s ‘hysteria’ was in part the effect of an early unrequited love or a way of escaping an unwanted marriage, whether it was due to a lack of opportunities for intelligent women, genteel but poor, or occasioned by a lack of suitable suitors, it is a fact that at one point she chose what would later become known as a ‘flight into illness’, and remained unattached. She became one of those one in four Victorian women classified as ‘spinster’. Meanwhile her younger sisters, though not unaffected by the family’s decline, did marry. The dynamics of sibling relations, the way their mother may have characterized their successes and failures, the frustrations of the family situation, all inevitably played their role in shaping the rather girlish woman Christiana would become.
All the Edmunds girls were educated – Christiana at a private school, her later records show – and reached a ‘superior’ level of attainment. Louisa Agnes, four years younger than Christiana, worked for some time as a governess in London. It may have been here that she met the widower and naval surgeon Julian Watson Bradshaw: it was certainly in London that she married him in December 1862, when she was twenty-nine. It’s tempting to speculate that the marriage didn’t go well for her, since in a moment of ‘violent hysteria’ she tried to throw herself out of a window and was only saved by her mother and a servant holding her down. Or it may be that Louisa’s ‘violent hysteria’ happened at a time closer to Christiana’s, before she left home for London. Either way, by 1867, at the age of only thirty-three, four years into her marriage, Louisa was dead, buried in Margate. There was no inquest, so a second suicide attempt can’t be inferred.
Christiana’s and Louisa’s labile and excessive states seem to have found an echo in their brother William. There are few traces of him in the historical record, but according to the memorial sent to the Home Secretary after Christiana’s trial by Sydney Cornish Harrington of Datchworth, William as a young man had dramatically threatened suicide when he was refused permission to marry Sydney’s sister. So great were the family fears on both sides, that William’s wish was granted. His own family seems to have provided a fertile training ground for his later profession. At the time of Christiana’s trial he was head of the asylum on Robben Island, which also served as a leper colony and a political prison, much later to house Nelson Mandela for eighteen years.
The only Edmunds child whose behaviour seems to have been unaffected by the early family drama was Mary Burn, the middle sister. At the age of twenty-four, on 18 September 1856 in Henley on Thames, she married the Reverend Edward Foreman of Amberley in Sussex. Sister Mary seems to have lived an ordinary middle-class Victorian life, giving birth to five children, the youngest of whom went up to Cambridge. But Mary’s elder sister’s acts plunged her into a different world. She attended Christiana’s trial, helped where she could and also cared for her tireless mother, who died only in April 1893, five years before Mary herself. There is no record of what Mary thought of Christiana’s passionate delusion.
5. Sex and the Victorian Hysteric
As a young woman classified as a hysteric in the 1850s, Christiana would have been understood as suffering from an illness that engaged both her nerves and almost certainly her uterine system. This latter incorporated what we would now name ‘sexual’, a word whose meaning shifted rapidly from that time on. J. Crichton-Browne, the influential medical director of the West Riding Asylum, lecturing to students at the Leeds Medical School, points out:
... mental phenomena in health and disease ... are
influenced in no slight degree by the sexual functions, and they exercise a reciprocal control ... The period of the rut in animals is accompanied by mental activity, which borders upon morbid excitement, while the gravid state of the uterus in females of our own species may lead not merely to change of temper, morbid appetites, and capricious eccentricity, but to chorea [tics, or involuntary movement], somnambulism, amaurosis [darkening or loss of vision], convulsions, or mental derangement. On the other hand, a condition of mental agitation may derange the menstrual discharge, and ideas may modifiy the nutrition of the sexual apparatus.
Crichton-Browne goes on to give an example of a hysterical pregnancy in which the power of the delusion induced changes in the Vascularity of the uterus and the ovaries’. In this lecture he wants to distinguish between what he calls ordinary hysteria – which involves ‘incontinence of the emotions’, ‘moral obliquity’, ‘towering egotism’ and ‘positive delusions’ – and the even more serious ‘hysterical mania’. While ‘the mental affection is the more prominent feature’ in common hysteria, in hysterical mania both the uterus and the brain are definitely in play. Crichton-Browne is a believer in the physiological base of mental illness, and although he states that there is no necessary continuum between his first and second kind of hysteria, it only takes a small increase in ‘intensity and persistency’ for recognized ‘mental derangement’ of the second sort to come into effect.
It’s clear that, for Crichton-Browne, the very condition of being female and possessing a uterus is a dangerous business, prone to tumble one into insanity at the merest provocation. The very biological factors that differentiate women from men – menstruation, pregnancy, lactation and menopause – are seen as trigger points for madness. The whole reproductive system enchains women to uterine, and thus nervous, disease. Meanwhile female desire, itself, as the leading Victorian gynaecologist William Acton underlined, giving scientific back-up to the period’s ideological presumptions, is an aberration. In his Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857), which deals mainly with male sexuality and the danger to vital energy that masturbation constitutes, he notes that ‘happily for society’, the majority of women ‘are not very much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind’. After the opening of the new divorce courts in 1858 and its examples of sexually desiring women, he revised his views slightly:
Trials of Passion Page 5