Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  On 15 January 1872 at the Old Bailey, Mr Serjeant Ballantine laid out the case against Christiana Edmunds with a damning logic and an understated aplomb. He had long passed the age, he told the jury, when the conviction of a prisoner brought him a sense of victory. He simply wanted to elicit the truth and administer justice. The prisoner, he said, had formed an acquaintance with Dr Beard which ‘seems to have ripened into an intimacy scarcely consistent with the strict relations that ought to exist between a medical adviser and one of his female patients’. There could be no doubt that the lady herself entertained ‘the strongest feelings towards Dr Beard, and expressed them in very strong language which indicated on her part a considerable amount of affection towards him’. All of which led her to pursue a course of conduct Ballantine described as ‘so extraordinary as to be totally unparalleled in the records of any criminal court of justice’.

  Ballantine’s exposition of the case against Christiana was masterly. In setting out her relations with Beard he mentions the many letters that ‘had been sent between the parties’, and states that he will have no objection to them being read out in court in order to further the ends of justice, if ‘there is a desire expressed that they should be read’. In the event, the letters are not read. Having shown the passionate motive behind Christiana’s extraordinary actions, neither the judge, nor the prosecution, nor the defence seem keen to enter into these murky intimate waters. This, after all, is not a trial for the attempted murder of Emily Beard, but for the wilful murder of Sidney Barker.

  At the end of the proceedings, it is clear that Christiana feels her own story has hardly been touched. An unstated gentlemen’s agreement, perhaps, too, a moral worry about inflaming the imaginations of the ladies present in the courtroom and the wider readership of the press, means that her ‘reality’ is never heard. The ins and outs of Christiana’s love affair, how much of it was in her mind, how much of it induced or even initially reciprocated by Dr Beard, would never be tested in open court. Wisely for himself, Dr Beard and his wife did not press charges, and so only Christiana’s inadvertent murder of little Sidney Barker strictly concerned the court. The passion that had occasioned the crime – those matters that would have kept a French court busy and a French public enthralled – barely surfaced above the barricades of Victorian propriety.

  The witnesses for the prosecution were those who had already been examined in the Brighton hearings: Garrett the chemist, the milliner, the various boys who had served as Christiana’s chocolate and strychnine messengers, Maynard the chocolatier, Sidney’s father Albert Barker, the handwriting experts and Inspector Gibbs, who had grown suspicious of Christiana during the inquest. Christiana’s eloquent anonymous letters to Mr Barker, urging him, as a fellow parent, to pursue Maynard after the inquest had termed little Sidney’s death ‘accidental’ and had failed to find Maynard guilty of purveying poison creams, were read out. Towards the very end of the day, Ballantine called Dr Beard. It was then that Christiana was jarred out of her composure, ‘her bosom heaved convulsively and her face flushed scarlet’. But Parry objected to Ballantine’s line of questioning, which would have taken the court onto the terrain of Christiana’s first attempted poisoning of Emily Beard. Perhaps he was worried that too much attention to these intimate matters would do his client more harm than good. Neither did judge nor prosecutor seem eager to go there. And so Dr Beard’s moment on the witness stand extended only to his saying that he knew the prisoner and had seen Christiana both in her own home and his. The ‘remoteness’ of that night on which Christiana had allegedly attempted to poison Mrs Beard made it unsuitable to be called as evidence, the judge determined.

  The next day Serjeant Parry led Christiana’s defence. His tactic, in the first instance, was to point out just how circumstantial the evidence tying the chocolate cream that four-year-old Sidney Barker had eaten to Christiana was. It was all fine and well, he argued in his opening statement, to have witnesses lined up to say that Christiana might have impregnated with poison the chocolate that had some weeks later found its way into Sidney’s mouth, but there was nothing to put her at the scene of the crime or to indicate direct intent. Before convicting the prisoner, the jury must be satisfied beyond all doubt that the ‘chocolate which caused the little boy’s death came to be given to him, directly or indirectly, through the agency of the prisoner’.

  There was a gap in the evidential trail, and Parry wanted the jury to be aware of his contention that Christiana was not ‘wilfully’, maliciously or directly guilty of Sidney’s murder.

  His second line of defence was that Christiana was not guilty on grounds of insanity. The nature of that insanity was in her case ‘the entire destruction of her moral sense’. He believed that she could not fully distinguish the difference between right and wrong, or recognize the quality of the act she was committing – the two grounds for legal insanity.

  Playing to the jury, Parry ‘thanked God that he had not to decide the question for it would baffle him altogether’. It was they who would have to determine whether Christiana’s falsehoods in obtaining poison, distributing it in broad daylight among children – ‘all for the alleged purpose of disabusing the mind of one man of a strongly formed conviction’ – spoke of imbecility or of a strong and vigorous mind. Parry recognized the inconsistency of the argument he was making. At one and the same time, he was arguing, the prisoner was not guilty of the deed, and was not guilty on the ground of insanity, which virtually admitted it. He felt certain the jury would give their verdict under a full appreciation of the evidence adduced on both sides.

  Parry then set out to prove that Christiana was of ‘impaired intellect’, not altogether easy given the intelligence of her letters. Heredity was his strongest suit. Most Victorian doctors believed that madness was inherited, and Christiana’s family on both the maternal and paternal sides, as well as her siblings, had suffered from insanity and were of ‘unsound mind’. Then, too, she herself had been treated for hysteria and her ‘conduct for some time past had excited attention among her friends’. About twelve or fifteen months ago, Parry stated, a great change had come over her, and even now, ‘she has the idiotic vanity to deny her real age’.

  Christiana’s mother was first up for the defence with her long trail of family woes, which the relevant asylum medics – Steward, Armstrong and George W. Grabbam of the Earlswood Asylum – corroborated. Mrs Edmunds finished by saying she had long dreaded that when Christiana reached the age of forty-two – the age at which her father had gone mad – the paternal lunacy would take her over. ‘She is so very like her father.’ For women the age also indicated the onset of menopause – as mentioned earlier, a time popular lore together with the medics linked to female madness and erotic flights.

  Next on the witness stand was the Revd Thomas Henry Cole, the chaplain of Lewes Prison, about whom Christiana had spoken warmly in her first days at Newgate. She had been under his watch until Christmas Day 1871. Rules in the jail had it that if any insanity was noticed in a prisoner, a report should immediately be made to the governor, the surgeon and the visiting justices. Cole had noticed ‘a peculiar formation and expression’ in Christiana’s eyes. At times, she looked vacant. While many conversations might be perfectly coherent, they struck him as extraordinary, given her situation. Where he expected ‘great excitement and dejection’, he found only ‘calmness and exceeding levity’. When he tried to talk to her about the gravity of her situation, she would burst into ‘an extraordinary laugh’. She had no power to focus and she would pass in an instant from sudden tears to equally sudden laughter. He believed her to be of ‘unsound mind’.

  Two Brighton neighbours, the Overs, who had shared the Edmundses’ accommodation for two years, now gave witness to how much Christiana had changed over that time. Two years before, she had been ladylike, quiet and good in every way. Then in March or April of the previous year, everything about her had altered. Her eyes had grown very large, and rolled: her entire appearance made Mrs Over un
comfortable. Mr Over corroborated his wife’s words, and also drew attention to Christiana’s eyes and the ‘wildness in her look’. Meanwhile her manner had grown much more excited than before. Christiana had even told Alice Over that she ‘felt she was going mad’.

  Borderlands: Between Crime and Insanity

  It was now time for the medico-legal expert witnesses to take the stand.

  Parry had obtained some of the most eminent alienists in the land to furnish opinions on Christiana’s mental state at the time of the murder. Dr William Wood, the most junior of them, had served for some ten years as physician to St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics in London and was currently the resident at the oldest asylum in the land, Bethlem. Dr Charles Lockhart Robertson, educated at Edinburgh and Cambridge, had been the first medical superintendent of the Sussex County Asylum, universally recognized, according to his obituary in the Lancet, as a ‘model institution’. He had very successfully, it seems, introduced calming Turkish baths for the women inmates. He had retired as the asylum’s head in 1870 to become an eminent Visitor of Chancery Lunatics – a regular overseer to those individuals judged insane by public trial whose property was administered by the Treasury during the period of their confinement. He was one of the doctors to expose the campaigning alienist L. Forbes Winslow’s alleged profiteering. He was also president of the Medico-Psychological Association, and with Christiana’s third expert, Dr Henry Maudsley, co-editor of the Journal of Mental Science.

  Robertson, known as a genial and sociable man, was also one of the alienist profession’s early number crunchers. Addressing the delegates to an international congress in London in 1881, he detailed the rise of the lunatic population in England, which by then had reached seventy-one thousand, or one in every 350 of the population. Like his more internationally famous colleague, Dr Maudsley, Lockhart Robertson was hardly likely to find Christiana in full possession of her reason.

  The popular and prolific Maudsley was the most publicly prestigious of Christiana’s examiners. Victorian England’s leading alienist and medico-legal expert, he had by 1872 already published two of his eleven widely read and much translated books: The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind (1867) and Body and Mind (1870). Maudsley adapted Charles Darwin’s and Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary ideas to his views on mental illness. He understood this to be a heritable disease with a physical basis and its own visible physiognomy.

  Something of a misanthrope, Maudsley was most certainly a misogynist: women were for him inferior and possessed of little intellectual power or judgement. Like many Victorians, he was a believer in the wide-ranging and fluid concept of ‘moral insanity’, a mixture of ethical idiocy, asocial conduct and vicious, irresponsible character – a category given a medical imprimatur but born of a fear that the urban badlands with their fug of squalor and ‘inherited’ vice were breeding national degeneracy. Later, when he came to write about hysterics, a classification that could easily stretch, for Maudsley, to most women, he would see them as ‘perfect examples of the subtlest deceit, the most ingenious lying, the most diabolic cunning, in the service of vicious impulses’. In 1874, Maudsley would publish Responsibility in Mental Disease, which became a touchstone text in formulating understanding of insanity in relation to the law and prodding the latter towards change.

  Even if Christiana had had the moral intelligence and reasoning ability of George Eliot, these would have been difficult doctors, in the circumstances, to impress with one’s sanity. That said, the insanity plea was Christiana’s single defence against a verdict that would bring the gallows centre stage. Only if she could pass the legal definition of insanity was there hope for her life.

  The trio of alienists, together with Mr Gibson, the surgeon to Newgate Prison, had seen Christiana some two weeks before the trial for approximately ninety minutes. Dr Wood had been struck by her utter indifference to her position and had failed to make her see its seriousness. He estimated that her mind was ‘so weak that she was really incapable of judging between right and wrong in the same sense that other people would’. There was no doubt, he testified, that insanity was hereditary and that the children of the insane were predisposed to commit insane acts, all the more so when the insanity was on both sides of the family.

  Cross-examined by Serjeant Ballantine, Dr Wood stated that Christiana had indeed been told the doctors had come to ascertain her state of mind. She seemed to take that in. He had asked her if she understood the consequences of a conviction. Miss Edmunds had replied that she would rather be convicted than ‘brought in insane’. He interpreted what, under different circumstances, might be considered a proud woman’s response, as her failure to understand the seriousness of the charge against her. Since the legal bar for sanity was the prisoner’s ability to distinguish between right and wrong, not only in the general sense but more importantly in relation to her own case, he then asked her whether ‘she thought it wrong for a person to destroy the life of another because she believed the husband of that person wished to get rid of her’. Apparently, Christiana took a moment to answer this query about Emily and Charles Beard. Finally she replied that she thought yes, it would be wrong. Yet her manner of saying it didn’t convince Dr Wood that she really believed her own words.

  It was at this juncture that Christiana abruptly rose from her place in the dock and addressed the court for the first time since her plea. She could remember the doctor’s questions, she asserted. But her attempt to demonstrate her sanity – in this case her grasp of memory – was allowed to go no futher. The judge hushed her and ordered her to resume her seat. She could not be heard, he stressed.

  Dr Wood was asked to continue. He stated that he couldn’t recollect Christiana’s response to his comment that sometimes innocent people were convicted. Four of them, after all, were asking questions, so he could only offer a general resume of what had transpired at the examination.

  Serjeant Parry, who despite his client’s wish to be considered sane, needed her mad, then pressed Dr Wood on his overall assessment of Christiana. The doctor pointed out that he was judging Miss Edmunds by her ‘demeanour and appearance’, not by the answers she gave. This is an interesting resort to the physiological register, that textbook for the trained medical gaze. To conclude his expert opinion, Dr Wood repeated that he believed Christiana was not in a state to tell the difference between right and wrong as other people were.

  Dr Lockhart Robertson, a specialist in ‘insanity as a disease’, was next in the box. He had seen the prisoner early in October in Sussex and then again in December when she was at Newgate, in order to ascertain her state of mind before the trial. He confessed that he had great difficulty in coming to a conclusion about her. He considered her case on the borderland between criminality and insanity. Her intellect was clear and free from delusion. But her moral sense was deficient. This was often the case in the offspring of insane parents. He had failed to impress the prisoner with the gravity of her situation. Given the history of the case, he finally determined that she was morally insane – in other words, could not determine right from wrong.

  Cross-examined by Ballantine, Robertson repeated that he believed Miss Edmunds had the intellectual knowledge that it was wrong to administer poison to kill a person. But she had an absence of, or deficiency in, moral sense. Translated into current idiom, Robertson is saying that she may have the cognitive wherewithal to distinguish between right and wrong, but the hold of her rational faculties over her emotions or psychological make-up is so weak as to be deficient. The way in which Robertson situates Christiana on the ‘borderland’ foreshadows psychiatrists’ use of the term ‘borderline’ today, as in borderline personality disorder.

  In Responsibility in Mental Disease Maudsley would devote a whole chapter to the ‘borderland’, that shadowy zone where sanity ‘shades imperceptibly into insanity’, since there is no single ‘hard and fast line’ to divide one from the other:

  ... it is a fact of experience that there are many persons who, witho
ut being insane, exhibit peculiarities of thought, feeling and character which render them unlike ordinary beings and make them objects of remark among their fellows. They may or may not ever become actually insane, but they spring from families in which insanity or other nervous disease exists, and they bear in their temperament the marks of their peculiar heritage: they have in fact a distinct neurotic temperament – a certain neurosis, and some of them a more specially insane temperament – an insane neurosis.

  In his testimony to the court, Dr Maudsley stated he had made the disease of insanity his special study and had written a book on the subject. He largely agreed with Dr Robertson, insofar as he had understood him. Christiana’s uffered from an extreme deficiency of moral feeling as to the crime with which she was charged. Nor did she realize the position she was in. As to her moral sense, he believed her mind to be impaired: she had a ‘want of moral feeling as to events or acts regarding which a perfectly sane person might be expected to exhibit feeling’. This was general amongst the mad who committed crimes. (He had, he added, signed a certificate to the Home Secretary in the case of Reverend Mr Watson, to plead his insanity, too. Watson had demonstrated the sam e lack of feeling as Miss Edmunds).

  Unsurprisingly, the doctors summoned by the defence were united in their opinion of Christiana’s insanity. Neither her actions nor her behaviour in prison as she awaited trial were those of a woman whose perceptions of right and wrong were in accordance with the time’s morality. She was deviant. Nor did she have any recognizable ‘moral feeling’ for the little boy she had inadvertently killed. This moral insanity was understood as a disease, propelled into being by inherited facts, and it predisposed the patient to commit criminal acts.