by Jones, Kaye;
Despite Harrington’s offer to pay for his sister-in-law’s care in Broadmoor, the Home Secretary was adamant that financial responsibility lay with the town of Brighton. As the mayor argued, this decision meant that town’s rate-payers would be ‘saddled as long as Miss Edmunds lives’ and it was, in his opinion, ‘the grossest piece of injustice ever perpetrated’.24 Burrows was as stubborn as Home Secretary Bruce: he blocked every move made by the town clerk and coroner, David Black, to collect the money for Christiana’s board and repeated his complaints of injustice at every opportunity. Even the threat of legal action by the Treasury would not convince him to comply. The matter did eventually go to court but Burrows had one last card to play: he claimed that the financial burden lay with the city of Canterbury, Christiana’s parish of residence, and not with Brighton, the parish of ‘irremovability’. The judge was suitably convinced and, in 1875, Canterbury was billed over £56 in expenses and ordered to pay the 14s per week until the time of Christiana’s death.25
On 27 June 1872, Christiana received her formal respite from the government and the warrant authorising her immediate removal to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. She was to be confined until the ‘signification of Her Majesty’s pleasure’ and to be accompanied by a document certifying her state of mind.26 This was completed by Richard Turner, the prison’s surgeon, whose observations make for interesting reading. Turner was not at all convinced by Sir Gull and Dr Orange’s diagnosis of insanity, nor of the need to confine Christiana in an asylum. On her certificate, he made his thoughts as clear as possible: ‘after 10 months daily supervision, I fail to satisfy myself that Christiana Edmunds is insane or irresponsible for her actions’. He added that ‘she has never shown symptoms of being suicidal or dangerous to others’ and ‘has manifested no delusion in my presence’. He did, however, admit that ‘she is of delicate constitution and disposed to be hysterical’ but he provided no examples of her conduct while incarcerated at Lewes. He also noted that she was ‘much weakened by her long detention in prison’27 but it is unclear if Turner was referring to Christiana’s mental or physical health, or perhaps a combination of both. Whatever her weaknesses, Christiana arrived at Broadmoor Asylum on 5 July determined to look her best. She was wearing ‘a large amount of false hair’, false teeth and had painted her cheeks with rouge; the Venus of Broadmoor had finally arrived.
Chapter Twelve
“The Venus of Broadmoor”
The Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum was set amongst acres of pine trees in the tranquil and picturesque Windsor Forest in the county of Berkshire. In 1865, a visitor to the site remarked on its ‘lofty and handsome’ buildings, claiming that a ‘warmer and more comfortable-looking structure had never been erected in a more wild, though beautiful, situation’. Behind its high walls, the visitor found a female croquet party on the lawn and a group of men in the garden playing bagatelle. Inside, he found the patients were treated ‘with an almost excess of care’ and enjoyed all the freedoms and pleasures of ordinary people: ‘they can see their friends, write to whom they please’ and ‘can take what exercise they like in the spacious airing grounds’. But there was one crucial difference between the patients at Broadmoor and ordinary lunatics: ‘they can, in short, do anything but pass the boundaries which shut them in forever from the world beyond. Within these they live and die’.1
When Broadmoor opened in May 1863, the long-standing question of where to house England’s criminal lunatics was finally answered. In previous decades, the provision for criminal lunatics was haphazard and inadequate. The Bethlem Hospital in London had opened two wings for the detention of the criminally insane in 1816 but, beyond this, such patients were housed in ordinary asylums or prisons. That the criminally insane were perceived as dangerous and in need of a permanent place of confinement helped to bring the problem to the attention of the government. According to the Select Committee of House of Commons of 1860:
To mix such persons, that is criminal lunatics, with other patients is a serious evil; it is detrimental to the other patients as well as to themselves; but to liberate them on recovery, as a matter of course, is a still greater evil, and could not be sanctioned, for the danger to society would be extreme and imminent.2
In the same year, the government passed the Criminal Lunatic Asylum Act which authorised the creation of Broadmoor and gave the Home Secretary control over its management and the admission of patients. It took less than three years for Broadmoor to be constructed and, on 23 May 1863, it welcomed its first patients, a group of women transferred from the Bethlem Hospital. Nine months later, the women were joined by the first intake of male patients and, by the end of 1864, the population of Broadmoor had risen to 200 men and 100 women.3
Tasked with the supervision and cure of these criminal lunatics was Dr John Meyer, Broadmoor’s first superintendent. Meyer was well-suited to this new and challenging post, having gained a considerable amount of experience with the mentally ill. Between 1844 and 1854, he worked as the supervisor to the Convict Lunatic Asylum in Tasmania and as chief resident physician of the Surrey County Asylum from 1858 to 1862. Meyer had military experience too; he managed the Civil Hospital in Smyrna during the Crimean War, which perhaps accounts for his tough attitude towards Broadmoor’s more dangerous criminals. For this group, he advocated the use of cages for periods of solitary confinement, a move which contravened the principles of moral treatment, the asylum’s guiding philosophy. When Meyer died in May 1870, his deputy, and the man who had declared Christiana insane, William Orange, became Broadmoor’s new superintendent. He removed Meyer’s cages and steered the asylum in a more humanitarian direction, during which time Broadmoor and its residents enjoyed a period of relative peace and prosperity.
Orange was in his second year as superintendent when Christiana arrived at Broadmoor and she was, in many ways, a unique patient. She was not the only woman detained after committing murder: in fact, forty per cent of the women at Broadmoor were murderesses,4 but Christiana’s choice of victim made her stand out among the others. This was because Victorian women were far more likely to murder members of their own household than a stranger or other persons outside of the domestic sphere.5 The overwhelming majority of Broadmoor’s murderesses had killed or attempted to kill their own children: between 1863 and 1902, 286 women were confined as a result of committing this crime. Unlike Christiana, however, most of these women were married and belonged to the working or lower middle classes where socio-economic problems, like financial difficulties and a lack of domestic help, contributed to a mother’s mental breakdown.6 One such woman was Margaret Jones, a 31-year-old housewife from Warrington, who arrived at Broadmoor in September 1872, two months after Christiana. Margaret had murdered her two daughters earlier that year by drowning them in a large tub and was found insane during her committal hearing. Margaret’s life was characterised by isolation and deprivation: she was frequently alone as her husband worked long hours, money was tight and she had no family nearby. To exacerbate these problems, she had lost two sons in infancy from natural causes. However inexcusable her crime, Margaret’s life had been a difficult one and she was typical of many of the women who found themselves confined in Broadmoor.7
Christiana, then, faced none of the social and economic problems that plagued the lives of many of her fellow patients. She was a very different sort of patient but Dr Orange was proven right in his assertions of her moral insanity shortly after her arrival. In an entry from her file, dated 17 August 1872, he admitted that his findings from her interview in Newgate had been ‘fully confirmed by her conduct and conversation since admission.’ While she was ‘quiet and orderly’ in her behaviour and did not pose any physical threat to herself of others, she expressed no remorse for her crimes nor offered any explanation regarding the motive. When her mother came to visit a few days later, she told Dr Orange that Christiana had never expressed sorrow, not even for the ‘trouble’ she had caused her family. But the purpose of Ann’s visit t
o Broadmoor was not just to see Christiana. She had bad news: Christiana’s brother, William, had passed away in South Africa, at the age of 43. When William had left England in 1854 to start a new life, he had gone to Grahamstown, a city in the Eastern Cape province. Over the next eight years, he worked as a medical officer at the Albany Hospital and as a surgeon to the Grahamstown Volunteers and the Katberg Convict Station. In June 1862 he left Grahamstown for his most challenging role, having been appointed the new superintendent of the asylum on Robben Island, an institution in desperate need of reform. William was an avid supporter of moral treatment who followed the methods of John Conolly to the letter: he hired more staff, increased their wages, abolished unnecessary instances of mechanical restraint, improved the patients’ diet and provided opportunities for leisure.8 In short, he transformed the asylum and the lives of its patients and he was, perhaps, inspired and motivated by the experiences of his father in Peckham House thirty years earlier.
Ann Edmunds told Dr Orange that her son had experienced some mental health issues before his death in 1872 but this cannot be verified by any sources. On the same day she also told Dr Orange that Christiana was not truthful as a child and, maybe, this was her attempt to demonstrate the extent of insanity in her family. For Christiana, the news of his death prompted barely any reaction, as Dr Orange observed: ‘she appeared quite unable to experience any feeling of sorrow, although she tried to look grieved’.9 The sad reality of William’s death is that it left Christiana with only one surviving sibling, Mary, who wrote to her frequently over the coming years.
Like other asylums, Broadmoor actively encouraged its patients to maintain contact with family and friends. Letters to and from patients flowed freely, though they were subject to inspection by asylum staff. The correspondence between Christiana and Mary reads like the typical sisterly conversation of teenagers, focusing almost exclusively on make-up and clothing. This is hardly surprising as Christiana’s vanity and desire to be attractive had been noted on several occasions by Dr Orange. On 2 November 1872, asylum staff inspected one of Christiana’s letter to Mary and found that inside the envelope, she had ‘ingeniously fastened’ a single scrap of paper, covered in extremely small writing. In this communication, Christiana asked her sister to bring some clandestine ‘articles of wearing apparel’ and half a crown to give to one of the attendants, presumably as a bribe. When presented with the scrap of paper, Christiana ‘exhibited neither surprise nor shame’ and this behaviour continued unabated. Her letters to Mary in the following year focus on methods of applying paint to the face and hatching schemes to procure articles of clothing that made her look different from the other patients. Clearly, Christiana had no love for Broadmoor’s uniform. Over the course of 1874, more and more parcels from Mary arrived, each one inventively hidden with another beauty item or pieces of false hair. Christiana’s smuggling became an increasing source of frustration for Broadmoor’s matron, Mrs Jackson. In June 1874, Mary sent a leather cushion to her sister but Mrs Jackson refused to hand it over. In a letter to Dr Orange, she stated that the cushion was ‘not really sent in to amuse or please’ but was, in fact, ‘a deceptive manner of conveying false hair. She has already great quantities which have been obtained by deception’.10 Ironically, Broadmoor would have allowed Christiana to have the false hair, had she gone through the proper channels. By smuggling it in, it reflected a much more serious problem: that Christiana was driven by a need to be deceitful.
Her love of deception turned into a ‘mania’ over the remainder of 1874 and 1875. Christiana turned her attentions from Dr Beard to Reverend Henry Cole, the chaplain of Lewes Prison. In July it was discovered that Christiana had sent letters to Cole through her sister, Mary. Given her efforts to conceal the correspondence from the staff at Broadmoor, it is likely that the letters were of an amorous nature and they demonstrate her need to be the centre of other people’s attention. In her file, Dr Orange wrote that he would have ‘no objection’ to Christiana writing to the chaplain but, once again, it was ‘in conformity with her state of mind to prefer mystery and concealment’. Letters to an attendant were found in her room in the following April but there are no surviving details of their contents. During the same search, the matron found that ‘numerous articles’ had been secreted and Christiana was forced to change rooms. Two months later, another search of her room found additional hidden items amongst the furniture. As she sought to conceal these things, it was noted that her mind became more ‘impaired’ and her conduct increasingly ‘irrational’. Dr Orange was at a loss to understand her behaviour: ‘she deceives for the pure love of deception and with no sufficient motive’.
As Christiana became more irrational, her behaviour became increasingly difficult to manage. While in ward three of her block, ‘her delight and amusement seemed to be in practicing the art of ingeniously tormenting several of the more irritable patients’. The purpose of her torment was ‘to complain of their language to her’ and to evoke sympathy for her situation. Likewise, when her mother came to visit, she omitted her make-up, shed false tears and complained of the ‘injustice and cruelty’ with which she was treated. Of course, her treatment at Broadmoor was far from cruel but Christiana was a woman who needed to be the centre of attention and, when she was not, she would go to extreme lengths to get it. Once again, she had demonstrated that she was ‘unable to resist the desire to conceal’ and be deceitful, even when there was no call for it.
This behaviour resulted in Christiana being moved to another ward in July 1876. The move had a positive effect, she became ‘tolerably tranquil and orderly in her behaviour’11 and finally settled into the routine of life in Broadmoor. By this time, Christiana was one of 125 female patients, split over two self-contained blocks and completely separate from the male section of the asylum. Her day began at 6.00 am (or 7.00 am during the winter), she rose for prayers led by the chaplain and ate a breakfast of bread and butter, served with tea. For most patients at Boradmoor, the day was then spent at work, one of the foundations of moral treatment, and Christiana may have worked as a seamstress, in the laundry or, perhaps, tending to the garden. The asylum was virtually self-sufficient: every item of clothing was made in-house and much of the patient’s food came from its farm or garden.
Between work and meals, Dr Orange encouraged his patients to pursue their personal interests, another defining principle of moral treatment. For Christiana, this included embroidery, sewing and painting. She also copied pictures, a hobby which had brought her closer to Dr Beard some ten years earlier. Brighton might have felt like a million miles away but, generally, her life was still as comfortable and fulfilling as it had once been. She had the freedom to spend time outside, either playing games like croquet or simply walking in the airing court attached to her block. Good behaviour was also rewarded with a ride in the carriage or an accompanied stroll around the local area. Over the years, Broadmoor also developed its own evening entertainment, a varied programme with music, dances and amateur dramatics.12 Life at Broadmoor was highly-regulated but, overall, it provided its patients with a good standard of living, regardless of how much Christiana complained.
Despite an overall improvement in her behaviour in 1877 and 1878, she continued to display excessive levels of vanity and frivolity. She painted her face each morning, worked hard to achieve a ‘youthful appearance’ and dressed herself as best she could for inspections. Her conversation and manner demonstrated to Dr Orange that she harboured ‘sexual and amatory ideas’13 and she was, perhaps, guilty of flirting with male members of staff whenever the opportunity arose. If her thoughts returned to Dr Beard, then there is no mention of it in her file, but she was never able to appreciate the severity of her crimes in Brighton and how it related to her confinement in Broadmoor. Nevertheless, in October 1880, Christiana penned a letter to the Home Office in which she eloquently petitioned for her release:
Sir, I venture to petition for my release from the Broadmoor Asylum. I have been eight years in conf
inement and am very anxious to regain my liberty. I earnestly trust that my conduct has been such as to gain me the favourable regard of the Superintendent and those over me. I shall feel very grateful if you will kindly consider my petition and grant my release.
I remain Sir, Your Humble Petitioner,
Christiana Edmunds.
This appeal was accompanied by a letter from Broadmoor which stated that Christiana was ‘tranquil and orderly in her conduct’ but that her mind remained ‘unsound’. 14 Many years had passed since Christiana was a free woman however, and the British political landscape had changed significantly. Henry Austin Bruce was no longer the Home Secretary, after the Liberals were defeated by the Conservatives in 1874. Bruce had since been raised to the peerage and was now known as Lord Aberdare, and busied himself with his presidency of the Royal Historical Society. In 1880 the Home Secretary was Richard Assheton Cross, a man not well acquainted with the details of Christiana’s case but who rejected her appeal on 4 November. This is hardly surprising given her status as a patient detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure and who had shown no remorse for her crimes nor improvement in her mental state, despite extensive moral treatment. Christiana did not appeal again but, in 1884, Dr Orange noted that all of the paperwork authorising her confinement had been lost but he did not push the government to reproduce it nor did it effectuate her release.