by Lucy Inglis
THE ‘LUNATIC TRADE’: THE EAST LONDON MAD-FARMS
From the early 1700s, the ‘Lunatic Trade’ flourished in east London. Just north of the turnpike was Hackney Mad House, more correctly known as Brooke House. Private madhouses were a feature of the Hackney and Bethnal Green area. It was quiet, peaceful and close to the City.
Until the 1845 Lunatics Act, there was little public provision for those suffering with mental health issues. Bedlam and St Luke’s in central London had limited capacity. Nor were all patients eligible for admission. Small private madhouses had been in existence all over London for centuries. Usually, they had one or two patients; the household was maintained by a minimal staff and supervised by a doctor, who was unlikely to be resident. These establishments usually escaped the notice of the authorities for the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century. Many were well respected and maintained a high standard of sympathetic care for their patients. Brooke House was a grand Tudor building, converted to use as an asylum, in 1758, by a Hackney resident, William Clarke. It sat upon a fifty-acre estate, which was let out as farmland. Clarke was a friend of the Monro family of Bedlam asylum doctors, and John Monro recommended patients to be sent to Brooke House after 1762. These patients were mainly middle and upper class, and the standard of care they received was good.
The better establishments, including Brooke House, used treatments such as bleeding, purging and cold baths, as well as early forms of occupational therapy. But they were reserved for gentlemen and women who could pay. One of the main problems with these smaller, private madhouses was the confinement of those who were perhaps difficult and troublesome, but not mentally ill. It was easier to incarcerate a wife for madness and appropriate her property than it was to obtain a divorce, after all. Awareness of mental health rose in the latter part of the eighteenth century: the periodic madness of King George III brought the matter into the public consciousness, where before it had been something to be hidden away. In 1774, an Act of Parliament was passed ensuring the regular inspection of London’s private madhouses by commissioners from the Royal College of Physicians.
More problematic were the pauper lunatics, the responsibility for whose care fell upon the parish. Larger asylums were established in east London to care for these patients. The Bethnal Green Asylum, established in the early 1700s, was one of the largest, taking patients from all over London and the south-east.
Conditions in London’s pauper madhouses, and particularly in Bethnal Green and Hoxton, were exposed by John Rogers in his 1815 pamphlet ‘A Statement of the Cruelties, Abuses and Frauds which are practiced in Madhouses’. He told of patients chained on filthy straw, and force-feeding techniques using iron spouts which had resulted in smashed teeth. Some patients became gangrenous after being restrained and subsequently neglected. There was a public outcry, and a Select Committee was hastily set up to inquire into the matter.
Thomas Warburton had been the proprietor of the Bethnal Green Asylum since 1800, and was called before the Committee. He explained the difficulties of caring for violent patients, the need for restraints and assertive handling. The subsequent report of 1816 was damning. Yet it did not stop Warburton continuing in business in Bethnal Green – both at the main asylum, now housing many hundreds of patients, and at smaller establishments, including Whitmore House in Hoxton. Then, in 1827, a Select Committee was again established to investigate conditions at the Bethnal Green Asylum. The investigating officers found conditions beyond their worst fears: ‘disgusting objects of humanity’ lay chained to the walls and floor, covered in their own excrement. The smell was so offensive that one of the officers had to excuse himself to vomit outside.
Thomas Warburton was discredited, yet the asylum was not closed down. Where, after all, could the hundreds of inmates go? Warburton’s son John took over the business, as the 1828 Act for the Regulation of Madhouses came into effect. One of the Act’s key stipulations was that in the large asylums, such as Bethnal Green, there must be resident medical officers. John Warburton appointed Charles Beverly. Beverly was not the obvious choice for the post. A forty-year-old Scottish naval surgeon who had spent most of his career in Arctic exploration, he had married, and wanted to settle down in London. Beverly was, however, competent and unflappable.
Warburton and Beverly set about transforming the asylum. The buildings, known as the Red House and the White House, were old and in poor repair. They were tidied up, and better provision was made to separate men and women. More staff were employed to supervise the inmates; at the time of the 1827 inquiry, there had been as few as one member of staff to every fifty patients.
The lack of pastimes or occupation had been a worry for the Committee, and soon Beverly installed an extensive library of 500 books, to which he added constantly until it numbered over 2,000. Fresh air and exercise began to play a part in the lives of the inmates, who had before been confined. It took fifteen years to transform the Bethnal Green Asylum, and massive investment on Warburton’s part. He had been made a wealthy man through his father’s ‘mad-farming’, and he had married the eldest daughter of John Abernethy, the prominent surgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. The 1827 inquiry had almost destroyed his credibility, along with his father’s, and the improvements to Bethnal Green were also part of a professional transformation. By the mid-Victorian period, Bethnal Green Asylum was held up as a model of mental healthcare.
‘THE ITALIAN BOY’: CARLO FERRARI
The cheapness of life in the emerging East End can be seen in the story of Carlo Ferrari, who became known by the press as ‘The Italian Boy’ after he was murdered for the value of his corpse. Carlo earned his living exhibiting white mice as a little sideshow on the streets of London. He lived mainly on the streets, moving around so as to exploit new audiences. In the winter of 1831, Carlo was murdered to order for dissection, because it was presumed, as a friendless immigrant, his disappearance would go unnoticed.
On 5 November
… two men, named Bishop and May, called at the dissecting-room at King’s College, and asked Hill, the porter, if he ‘wanted anything’. On being interrogated as to what they had to dispose of, May replied, ‘A boy of fourteen.’ For this body they asked 12 guineas, but ultimately agreed to bring it in for 9 guineas … The appearance of the subject excited Hill’s suspicion of foul play, and he at once communicated with Mr. Partridge, the Demonstrator of Anatomy … To delay the men, so that the police might be communicated with, Mr. Partridge produced a £50 note, and said that he could not pay until he had changed it. Soon after, the police officers appeared upon the scene, and the men were given into custody.
The gang were found guilty and sentenced to death. Their evidence revealed
… that they had enticed the boy to their dwelling in Nova Scotia Gardens, a small slum now underneath Columbia Road Flower Market; there they drugged him with opium, and then let his body into a well, where they kept it until he was suffocated.
They had hawked the body around most of the London hospitals before trying King’s College in desperation. Throughout the trial, they swore that the boy they had murdered was an unknown from Lincolnshire, not Carlo Ferrari.
Quite why they insisted on a different identity for Carlo is a mystery. It seemed that he was a known figure on the streets, and perhaps they feared public backlash against their crime. They had removed his teeth to sell ‘to Mr. Mills, a dentist, for twelve shillings’ and they hadn’t treated his body well in transit, all of which was reported in the papers and pamphlets to a huge public outcry. One paper reported a record circulation of 50,000 on the day of the confessions, which was massive by the standards of the time. Carlo’s sad story highlights the vulnerability of London’s street children, and the cheapness of life in the poorer areas of the city.
The dramatic social changes in London’s East End followed a distinct downward trend as the pressure of population increased. To the north, the villages survived longer and maintained their rural qualities well into the nineteen
th century. They are visible in the distance from Hackney Marshes, and we set our course there now. Here we will find meadows, fruit farms, stabling and grazing for many of London’s thousands of coach horses, as well as springs, spas and theatres before the geography rises and we head up to the hills to find a Romantic view of London.
12. Islington, Hampstead and Highgate
To the north, the villages of Highgate and Hampstead escaped the urban creep for far longer, retaining their country status. On the way, we pass through the small settlements of Islington and Kentish Town.
Islington, bordered by the City in the south and Stoke Newington in the east, had long been a thoroughfare for traffic from and to the north of England. In the late seventeenth century, mineral waters had been discovered at what became known as Sadler’s Wells, after the owner, Richard Sadler. He claimed the warm waters were most effective against ‘distempers to which females are liable – ulcers, fits of the mother, virgin’s fever and hypochondriacal distemper’. Sadler’s Wells became infamous by the beginning of the eighteenth century as a notorious pleasure garden, probably not helped by the large passing trade brought to Islington by its many thoroughfares to and from the City.
The Aquatic Theatre, Sadler’s Wells, 1813, by an unknown artist
Roads were the village’s main feature. In 1717, it had one of the earlier Turnpike Trusts, set up to maintain them. By 1735, the main roads all had houses along them, although infilling would not come until the nineteenth century. The Angel, Islington, was an inn near one of the tollhouses on the Great North Road. The courtyard of the Angel is thought to be depicted in Hogarth’s ‘Stagecoach’, and here Thomas Paine wrote passages of his Rights of Man during one of his stays in London in 1790–91. The sheer amount of traffic passing through the village dictated its character, and it was always a busy place populated by those who made their living from travellers, or those who wanted to be just one mile from the City of London and didn’t mind the clamour from the cattle and carriages.
Many of the buildings around Upper Street were medieval in origin, and there had been several fine manor houses in Barnsbury. The majority of the new buildings, though, were solid eighteenth-century stock, for the retired or those connected with commerce. By the 1790s, the village had two hairdressers, warehouses selling pottery, tea and fabric, as well as a wine merchant’s and a toy shop. Yet it had an air of neglect, and the green with its associated pond became drab and dirty.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Islington’s population had risen to over 10,000, and there were thriving, if slightly seedy, music halls and entertainment venues. Sadler’s Wells was now a theatre. In the first decade of the new century, it styled itself an ‘aquatic theatre’, specializing in ‘aquadrama’, where the theatre was flooded for the purpose of re-enacting naval or mythological battles or scenes. The illusion of flooding was created by a tank ninety feet long, some twenty feet wide and three feet deep. The New River, which carried water into London, was used to fill the tank. Charles Dibdin the Younger, of the Dibdin theatre family, staged the Siege of Gibraltar there, in April 1802. Children were cast as the Spanish sailors and threw themselves about in the water, ‘swimming and affecting to struggle with the waves’.
Islington’s true building boom came in the Victorian period. Camden and Kentish Towns were consolidated in the Victorian years, but the process began in 1791, when Lord Camden sold building rights for 1,400 houses on his land. Horace Walpole said it heralded the spread of London to ‘every village ten miles around’. Kentish Town had previously been used to pasture coach horses and animals on their way to Smithfield. It had rich grazing meadows with dugout ponds in the centre, collecting rainwater in the clay soil. There were also enclosures with high grass-studded mud walls. The walls were made from the insides of the horns of the thousands of cows slaughtered every week at Smithfield. The exteriors went to make cheap drinking cups, or horn handles, books and tablets, but the tapered interiors formed the ‘bricks’ for these walls, which were then mortared with mud into which grass seed was pushed. Cheap, sturdy and opaque, they were the safest place to keep expensive livestock and horseflesh close to London.
From the middle of the eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth, Kentish Town had a fashionable assembly room where tea and coffee were served ‘morning and evening’ and public and private dinners could be arranged, ‘on the shortest notice’. They also served a ‘good ordinary on Sundays at two o’clock’, with ‘ordinary’ meaning a good roast lunch.
Islington and Kentish Town were both country villages for the majority of the Georgian period. In the minds of Londoners, as long as they could see Hampstead and Highgate from the city’s northern limits, London was still contained. Both villages had long been the resort of fashionable London: Hampstead in the summer months, to enjoy the clean air and water, and Highgate for the smart professional set, to provide commutable housing. Hampstead was built up first with the ‘charming old red-brick mansions which make Hampstead what it is’.
Defoe gave a heady image of the village, in 1727, when he noted in his tour of Great Britain that
Hampstead indeed is risen from a little country village, to a city, not upon the credit only of the waters, tho’ ’tis apparent, its growing greatness began there; but company increasing gradually, and the people liking both the place and the diversions together; it grew suddenly populous, and the concourse of people was incredible.
He did, however, consider it ‘so near heaven, that I dare not say it can be a proper situation, for any but a race of mountaineers’.
Hampstead had a long association with quality schooling and intellectualism. This may have been a result of the cosmopolitan population: as far back as the sixteenth century, the names of landowners indicate Jewish and European origins. Wildwood, a house first mentioned in Domesday, was one of the most significant within the parish boundary and is remembered today in Wildwood Road and Grove. There, William Pitt the Elder recovered from his nervous breakdown, in 1767, ‘a miserable invalid … he refused to see anyone, even his own attendant, and his food was passed to him through a panel of the door’.
At the top of Hampstead Heath stood the vast house of Kenwood, known commonly during the Georgian period in speech and letters as Caenwood. Dating originally from the early seventeenth century, it was bought by Lord Mansfield, in 1754. He had it remodelled extensively, by Robert Adam, in the 1760s and 1770s. It was here that the Mansfields lived with Dido Elizabeth Belle, their illegitimate mixed-race grand-niece. Dido died in 1804, aged a little over forty. In 1975, Dido’s last relative, Harold Davinier, died a free white South African in a land still struggling under apartheid.
Near the Hampstead reservoir, through which the Hampstead Water Company had been supplying the West End with water since 1692, there was the Upper Flask Tavern. Clarissa fled here from Lovelace in Samuel Richardson’s novel after his ‘wicked attempt’ upon her, and the Whigs’ Kit-Cat Club used to meet here during the summer, sitting under the shade of a splitting mulberry tree which was later preserved with iron bands in memory of the club. There, too, lived George Steevens, who was famous for his edition of twenty-one Shakespeare plays published in 1766, a year after Samuel Johnson’s edition. Steevens walked into London before seven o’clock each morning to discuss Shakespeare with various eminent researchers, before making the rounds of all the bookshops, then walking back to Hampstead for the evening. Johnson was so impressed with Steevens’ work that he suggested they produce a complete works of Shakespeare together, which appeared in 1773, in ten volumes. In order to get the work done, and with Johnson not fulfilling his part of the bargain, Steevens had, for twenty months, left Hampstead with the watch patrol at one in the morning, walked into London to his printer ‘without any consideration of the weather or the season’, taking with him as much work as he had ready. He would then collect the previous day’s pages, go home and edit them, before writing the next batch. He would sleep briefly before setting off for London
again.
On the west side of the Heath, in Well Walk, sprang the well producing Hampstead’s renowned purgative chalybeate waters, drawing hundreds of Londoners on sunny days. The waters contain ‘oxyde of iron, muriates of soda and magnesia, sulphate of lime, and a small portion of silex; and its mean temperature at the wells is from 46° to 47° of Fahrenheit’. In the reign of Charles II, a halfpenny token stamped with the words ‘Dorothy Rippin at the well in Hampsted’ on the back was issued, exchangeable for a pint of water. In 1698, Susanna Noel with her son Baptist, 3rd Earl of Gainsborough, gave the well along with six acres of ground to the poor of Hampstead. From here, the water was carried every day for sale to Holborn Bars, Charing Cross, and throughout the streets, for purchase by those who preferred Hampstead water.
A Pump Room was built on the south side of Well Walk, which was opened in August 1701 with a concert. On the northern side of Well Walk was built the Long Room for dances and assemblies. These parties were a fixture of Hampstead and London life. The addition of the Pump Room transformed Hampstead into a ‘spa town’ in its own right, and by the 1760s, it had 500 dwellings. The artist John Constable lived for a while in Well Walk, at Number 6, though he continued to go into work to his London studio. By the time he was living in Hampstead, many people commuted daily to the city, and by 1834, eight omnibuses were making twenty journeys each day. London merchants had favoured Hampstead as a retreat since the Civil War, but now it became possible to live there and still work in their counting houses. The atmosphere was wealthy, liberated and educated.
Like Hampstead, Highgate had become a wealthy village in the late sixteenth century. Highgate village straddles the border between Hampstead and Hornsey. It became built up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with good houses and a prosperous high street. Like Hampstead, and Hackney, it had originally been a place to enjoy fresh air and peace, whilst staying close to London. Highgate’s church, St Michael’s, is at the same height as the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral: 365 feet. The soil and altitude made the area ideal for the growing of soft fruit, and from Islington to Highgate there were many fruit farms. There were also dairy farms, and the absence of smallpox in the milkmaids led Londoners to credit Highgate with having particularly healthy air, which kept the girls’ skin fresh and clear. It was from this high point that Boswell ‘went in’ to the theatre of London on 19 November 1762, after the long journey from Scotland, recording in his journal: ‘When we came upon Highgate Hill and had a view of London, I was all life and joy.’