Nina In Utopia

by Miranda Miller

  I move upwards to the convalescent wards where my efforts to make the hospital more home-like have already borne fruit. We have coconut matting and bird cages in these long galleries now, and flowers and prints soften the walls. At Colney Hatch we exhibited the patients’ artwork on the walls, and here, too, the ladies’ watercolours and fancywork are displayed. Barred windows have been replaced by glazed ones, despite the tendency of patients to jump out of them. The local glazier remarked last week that I am his best customer. I would rather have all the windows broken than tolerate a single bar or strait-waistcoat in my hospital.

  In the little cubicles that lead off these long galleries most of the women sleep quietly, and those who are noisy are visited by attendants. My candle illuminates each sleeping head as I pass among them. How I wish it could light up the contents of those heads. We have no mentometer, to coin a word, which will indicate the thoughts that pass through the mind. The diagnosis of each patient is infinitely difficult.

  Although I rarely sleep I have a vision: a spacious palace surrounded by beautiful gardens; a light and bright interior filled with laughter and music; men and women labour in the kitchens, gardens, bakehouse and laundry. Their work is pleasure, rewarded with approval. No bars on the windows and, above all, no whips, chains or chastisement.

  Jane tells me that my utopian schemes are more fascinating than practicable. Yet I feel I have made a start towards creating an ideal environment here, based on benevolent and rational policies. It is not so long since Pinel freed the lunatics in the Pitié Saltpetriere from their chains and only a year since I freed my dear children from theirs. I am not their judge but their guardian, and I believe that I can help them pass from darkness into light.

  My system is based on moral treatment, on practical philosophical principles and the benefits of exercise, fresh air and occupation. Without employment they will only sink into lethargy or torment each other. Patients who can walk must not be allowed to stay in bed all the time. It is not enough to provide a large building and have medical advisers occasionally inspect inmates. ‘Presumed curable’ is the promise we make to all new arrivals, and we do cure three out of five within a year. Bleeding, blisters and baths cannot help; the lancet cannot relieve mania and melancholy. They thrive on hope, sympathy and interest in their self-created miseries.

  Our little community must become a family. My own family are safely sleeping on the other side of the wall; they are the engine that drives me on. I am glad that my children will grow up here. It delights me to see little Donald and Chas play on the front lawn with the patients. At first Jane protested and admitted that she was afraid the patients would harm our children. Then I reminded her that she was once called a lunatic and abandoned in a far worse place than this, that we must all wear several masks on our life’s journey, many of them false.

  Then Jane wept and said I was right and turned with renewed zeal to our work. Without her help I could not achieve the half of what I do. The only thing my dear wife does not share is my insomnia. Now she is sleeping soundly after her long day tending our children and her evening work compiling statistics and editing the weekly journal for the governors. In her calm intelligence I see the proof that women do not have to be weak and foolish.

  Yesterday was Jane’s birthday, and she was horrified to find herself suddenly thirty. ‘I am an old woman!’ she said. I kissed her and told her that I shall always find her beautiful. Although I am two years younger I feel like some Old Testament patriarch, the father of several hundred children. Yes, they shall all be my companions. Instead of hiding them away in shame and darkness we will celebrate their lives: their triumphant rise through the building, their birthdays and, above all, the great Christian feast of Christmas. Together we will embrace the joys of family life.

  And yet I know that too often it is families that destroy their members. I think of poor Sally Jones, who was perfectly reasonable here. After three months I considered her cured and sent her home. But three days later she came back to the gate in tears and begged to be readmitted. She told me she felt, after spending some days with her family, that she was about to become ill again. Said it almost with longing, as if illness were a desirable state.

  My father wore out his life as a doctor among the poor here in Lambeth. How often he used to say to me that most of his patients’ problems were not in their bodies. He died of overwork while I was a student in Dublin, but I often feel that I am continuing his work and imagine his shabby figure at my elbow. In the old black coat he could never afford to replace, he takes my arm. His face is crumpled and faded like his youthful ambition; it wears a puzzled look as he says again, ‘It’s all in the brain, my boy.’

  A common opinion still, but I do not believe it. If all our actions, virtuous as well as vicious, resulted from the condition of our brain, then we would have no more control over them than the paddle-wheels of a steamboat over the engine by which they are set in motion. It would be as cruel to punish a man for horse-stealing - if his brain impelled him to - as to punish a man for shaking his limbs in a fit of ague. Burglars and thieves might rejoice in their predestined career, police offices close and the Central Criminal Court adjourn sine die. We must trace all manifestations of the intellect and feelings to the higher power of the mind itself. The mind, independent in its own citadel, reflects. The brain is only an organ.

  Here in the lonely night my own mind argues with my father; with Dr Morison, my predecessor here, who said my ideas about non-restraint were a young man’s wild experiment and could never succeed; and with Lord Palmerston. I wish I could show those gloomy old men how optimism, humanity and common sense have already succeeded. As Dean Swift said, ‘The best doctors are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet and Doctor Merryman.’

  The study of mental disease is now at last recognized to be a distinct and legitimate branch of medical science. I want this hospital to be a place where students have the opportunity to study all the different forms of insanity, to dismiss book-taught theories and learn to appreciate the value of facts. As I pass down these long galleries with my candle the attendants smile and nod. I interviewed them all and trust in them, for all are well educated, gentle and humane. Together we are making a new world, complete with kings, queens, bishops and deities. At the last count we had eight Napoleons, six Queen Victorias, three Marys, Queen of Scots, two Christs and a Buddha. A most distinguished little community.

  But here on the top floor my delight in the utopia I am creating fails me. I stare out of the window at the male and female criminal wings where darkness reigns - and not only at night. Even in daylight I dread my visits to those dismally arched corridors feebly lit by small barred windows. The lost ones stare out at hopelessness through gratings like cages in the zoological gardens. To step inside this purgatory of punishment is to step back fifty years. It is lamentable to see healthy, strong men sauntering listlessly about the wards or airing-courts, lounging away in idleness the remnant of their existence. The only exercise available to them is fives and running in the exercise yard. If our criminal lunatics were employed in any outdoor work they would come into contact with other patients.

  These criminal blocks are run by the Home Office, run without any respect for dignity. Although I have no responsibility for these patients I think of them all the time. They are my failures, and I shall not rest until Dadd and the other - I can only think of them as the more refined and civilized lunatics - are safely installed in our enlightened wards. Educated persons of good family find it a great hardship to associate with convicted felons, whose insanity has only exaggerated the more revolting features of their character.

  To myself alone I confess that I do not dare to go inside the male criminal wing at night. And, yet, what to do? In cases where murder has been committed or attempted the man or woman must be perpetually confined. Britain has more homicidal maniacs than other countries, just one of many ways in which we lead the world. Perhaps our dog fights, bull-baiting and pugilistic contests encoura
ge violence in the lower orders. However, there are said to be more lunatics in America than any other country, possibly as the result of the acquisition of independence. Well, I cannot speculate on international lunacy. I have quite enough work to do here in London.

  The male criminal block is a little hell because the heartless, nameless officials at the Home Office refuse to spend a penny on improvements. Criminal lunatics must be isolated to protect society, but if they never see any other persons than lunatics, how are they ever to recover? They are totally excluded from all rational society, breathing only the contaminating atmosphere of insanity.

  As if those dank and filthy walls were transparent I can see through them to the benighted ones within: Joseph Felden, who, while awaiting transportation as a convict in Millbank Prison, murdered one of the warders. If any of his wishes are opposed he threatens the wardens or fellow patients and has twice nearly murdered other men. Worthless and depraved, he has spent most of his life in gaol. There is no sign of the mental disease, on which ground he gained his acquittal. He was sent back to Milbank for three months, then the governor of that prison sent him back to us, not because he was insane but because he was neither a prisoner nor a convict. Gentleness and kindness are impossible with such men as him around. Stern discipline is needed for the few like him, and this invades the general morale of my hospital.

  The gallows was cheated of another victim when John Patterson, an expert thief, being seized with delirium tremens, was placed in Westminster Workhouse where he committed murder. At the time of his reception here he was sane but brutal, and no amount of kindness or advice can temper his vicious tendencies. Such men refer to our criminal block as the Golden Bank, for the same conditions I abhor are comfortable and easy compared with a life of hard labour or transportation or even the gallows. Many, I know, pretend to be mad, and these counterfeit lunatics are always trying to escape. But they cannot, for the criminal block is secure as a place of detention.

  As if there are not enough genuine lunatics to occupy me for a lifetime. Some crimes never lose their power to shock. For many years the Romans had no law against parricide, for they thought it impossible, the stuff of mythology. I think of Horace: ‘Do you imagine that Orestes grew mad after the parricide and was not distracted and haunted by execrable furies before he warmed the dagger in his mother’s blood?’ Whether the blood be of the mother or the father, the crime is equally terrifying. Yet I must understand this form of lunacy, like all the others.

  I have confessed that I have my favourites. Chief among them is Richard Dadd, parricide and genius. It moves me to tears to see him calmly draw or play the violin, squalor and pandemonium all around him. With a few other inmates of cultivated tastes and tragic histories he plays chess and discusses religion and theology.

  For some years after admission Dadd was considered a violent and dangerous patient, for he would jump up and strike a violent blow without any aggravation and then beg pardon. Even now he often pays no sort of attention to decency in his acts or words. After murdering his father he escaped to France with the intention of killing the Emperor of Austria (who is now here, together with several tsars). Hayden, my steward, shares my fascination with Dadd. Whenever we can, we pluck him from Hades and smuggle him into the comfort of the steward’s room. This is against all the strict Home Office rules, but the keepers in the criminal block are so harassed that they are grateful to see one of their charges disappear, if only for a few hours. There, before Hayden’s fire, with a pipe and a glass of port and a plate of good food, Dadd thaws, and the three of us have remarkable conversations.

  Ralph Kenyon, a carpenter from Yorkshire, also murdered his father. He mutters to himself frequently and swears as at some imaginary being. Someone who tries to kill his sovereign is also a kind of parricide. Edward Oxford tried to assassinate our Queen in 1840, when he was only eighteen. He fired two pistols at her as she drove in Hyde Park with Prince Albert. Physicians described him as ‘sane’, and he was sent here under Royal Warrant for twenty-four years.

  Margaret Nicholson, who tried to assassinate George III with a blunt table knife, was also sent here. The King said, ‘Do not hurt her, for she is mad’, touching, when you consider his own future. She lived to be ninety-eight; indeed, many of our patients live into extreme old age, which I take as proof that this is a healthy place. There has been no cholera here, even now when it is raging in nearby Lambeth and Vauxhall. I believe that God watches over us. Practical Jane says it is our artesian well that protects us.

  Insanity is curable and is indeed less contagious than many fevers. I have no doubt that lunatics are capable of some form of reasoning, for the mind is never totally eclipsed; there is always some lingering ray of light. Dadd often penetrates deeper into my mind in the course of our conversations than I do into his.

  These criminal lunatics cannot but be unhappy, for they know they will never recover their liberty. Yet they remain curious about each new arrival, and some, like poor Dadd, continue to pursue their intellectual interests despite being surrounded by manners and language of the most revolting description. Oxford spends his time learning French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin and Greek.

  As Jane and I argue in our petition dedicated to Lord Palmerston from ‘His Lordship’s very humble servant’ (humph!), we need to organize a Central State Lunatic Asylum for their safe custody or put criminal wards in the existing county asylums. Asylums should be curative hospitals not prisons. Many madmen deserve pity but none punishment. Meanwhile, I long to remove Dadd and the forty or so others from the Home Office block to my own wards where I can care for them with respect and compassion.

  We must solve these problems, for they will not go away. Insanity is greatly on the increase. The frenzy of modern life, the dreadful materialism and cut-throat competition all around us, bring increasing numbers to our gates. How fragile is the human mind!

  I look down at the female criminal block, a less terrifying place but just as heart-rending. The most amiable and gentle of her sex may, in the agonies of childbirth, be attacked by puerperal mania and commit infanticide. I cannot consider this issue without thinking of my dear Jane, who did not. All alone and abandoned in her remote circle of hell, she gave birth to Louisa and refused to give her up. When we married we agreed to pretend that Louisa is Jane’s little sister. It is a nod to the social conventions, and I do not think it does any harm, for the child lives with us and knows she is loved by us both.

  But my Jane is strong and intelligent. Nothing can be more melancholy and pitiable than the position of a weaker woman when she recovers her reason only to discover that she has destroyed her child and so must be treated as a prisoner for the remainder of her life. The law is an ass to treat such a woman as a criminal; she should be taken care of until after the change of life when she may safely be entrusted with her liberty.

  Others have as much blood on their hands as Lady Macbeth or Clytemnestra, and indeed there is more drama within those dreary walls than in all of Drury Lane. Margaret Baker murdered her six children, yet, according to her sister, twenty-four hours before these murders she was in a composed and rational state of mind. Sometimes she forgets that they are dead and calls out their names with such pathos that silence falls even in that society of outcasts. Such criminal lunatics should not associate with harmless unfortunates.

  With Emily Weston, for example, a lady of rank and property, who, without the least conceivable motive, committed a theft in a public bazaar. She stole a yard of Brussels lace, although she had enough money in her purse to pay for ten times as much. Such crimes are pointless and in my opinion unlikely to recur. Yet crimes they are. Miss Weston’s humiliation, her knowledge that in a few seconds of mental aberration she ruined her life, are pitiful. I would like to consider her crime expiated and the stigma attached to her removed.

  I unlock the door of our Chapel and enter for a few minutes of solitary prayer. In these lonely nocturnal communions I feel closer to His presence than dur
ing our Sunday services. I am a father, asking another Father for guidance and for time to accomplish my work. I pray for the poor wretches in the criminal blocks, beyond my control yet always on my conscience. Kneeling here alone, my candle throws my shadow on to the white walls. How enormous I look, and how small I feel.

  Attendance of our Sunday services is not compulsory, although desirable. The attendants decide which patients may join us in our prayers. Sadly, those who are most eager to attend are often the least suitable. Two Sundays ago Roger Fuller, a butcher from Clapham who is convinced he is Jesus Christ, became overexcited. The poor fellow believed we were all money-changers and chased us out of his temple, much to the terror of little Chas and Donald.

  Usually, though, our services are soothing occasions. Our chaplain is careful to make the sermons short and dull and to avoid references to hellfire and apocalypse. I always find it a great comfort to have my family here beside me. Indeed, this is the only place ‘on the other side of the wall’ (as the children call it) that Jane will happily enter. The rest of the building revives distressing memories of her own captivity. She can smile graciously at the inmates from our pew but fears meeting them face to face. They must think her remote and haughty. I wish they could see her humble, tireless labour on their behalf as she strains her eyes late into the night, writing letters and reports and gathering information. Facts, she once said to me, are her fortress. She calls me her dreaming spire and says I would float away were it not for her practicality. Perhaps it is so. I know I feel securely anchored when I lie beside her and clasp her swelling warmth and wonder about our child budding within her.