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One of the things that puzzled Victorians was that the greater the number of public asylums, the greater the number of lunatics. It was almost a commonplace that when a new asylum was built, on however grand a scale, it was within a year or two insufficient for the needs of the community it served. It only gradually dawned on the general public that empires were being built by the medical officers in charge of asylums and that maybe many of those locked up had no real need to be there. Today this would seem to us to be obvious. But in the nineteenth century there was very little analysis of the categories of mental illness and no neurological basis by which it could be described. Disturbed patients were seldom treated by general practitioners in any methodical way, and individual psychiatry was practically unknown. Meanwhile, in any large community in Britain, up on the windswept hill somewhere out of town could be found that cross between a prison and a workhouse, the general asylum. It was true that the great and inglorious days of asylumdom were coming to an end and that the workings of the lunacy laws had yet again been widely investigated by a recent parliamentary select committee.

The picture was a bleak one. Paupers, alcoholics, pedophiles, patricides like Richard Dadd, baby stealers, blasphemers, shoplifters, religious maniacs were all lumped together under one category. They were mentally deranged, but much more to the point, they had disturbed the moral order. Henry Maudsley, the most famous alienist of the day, whose sardonic and pugnacious critique of the system had already thrown the mad doctors into confusion, was at least sure about that: “The so called moral laws are laws of nature which [men] cannot break, any more than they can break physical laws, without avenging consequences . . . As surely as the raindrop is formed and falls in obedience to physical law, so surely do causality and law reign in the production of morality and immorality on earth.”

According to Maudsley’s brutally materialist analysis of mental illness, Georgina was mad because her father was mad. In cases where inherited traits could not be established, there was a simple rule of thumb that all alienists applied: if the patient was likely to be a danger to himself or others, an asylum was indicated. Just as “in the body morbid elements cannot minister to healthy action, but, if not got rid of, give rise to disorder, or even death; so in the social fabric morbid varieties are themselves on the way of death, and if not sequestrated in the social system, or extruded from it, inevitably engender disorder incompatible with its stability.”

The very term “alienist” for what would nowadays be called a psychiatrist reinforced this idea that mental illness was foreign to the common experience and had to be dealt with by methods other than those of general medicine. Maudsley was a savage critic of the system but believed as fervently as the most reactionary asylum keeper (but possibly with less Christian compassion) that lunatics were by definition inferior beings—“a new or abnormal kind which being incapable of rising in the scale of being, tends naturally to sink lower and lower.” This from the lecturer on insanity at St. Mary’s Hospital and Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at University College, London.

 

The mad doctors called for Mrs. Georgina Weldon on Sunday, April 14, the day after Menier was remanded for a second time. The house was in a turmoil of spring cleaning, Georgina atop a library ladder wielding a feather duster, her servants at more basic tasks, when two gentlemen called Shell and Stewart sent in their names. She scolded Villiers, who had surely meant Messrs. Duff and Stewart, small-time music publishers of her acquaintance. (They had quite characteristically gone bankrupt, and she supposed it was this they had come to discuss.) Before she could completely descend her ladder and get out of her apron she was astonished to see ushered in two complete strangers.

“Mrs. Weldon, you do not know us but we know you very well, we have often seen you. We are spiritualists. We have read your letters on The Education of Children in the Spiritualist newspaper and we are very desirous of placing some children with you.”

She came down; tea was offered and accepted. While they talked, she took note of their appearance. Though they spoke like gentlemen, they were miserably unappealing specimens. One was an old man—“the very ideal of the lean and slippered Pantaloon.” His companion was about thirty, “all blinks, winks, and grins, and looked like a washed Christy Minstrel.” The discussion, which had begun with spiritualism, ranged over topics close to her heart, and she was soon prompted to disclose some of her own mystical experiences. As professed spiritualists, they asked a great many elementary questions, mostly to do with mediumistic powers. For example, how far did she believe in the physical manifestation of the departed spirit? Her answers were uncontroversial. She had never attended a séance in order to see the table fly to the ceiling or a ghostly face appear from behind the curtain. What she sought from spiritualism was a better opinion of herself. As to whether she thought her dear dog Dan Tucker had a soul, which was one of the questions these two then asked, the answer was self-evident. Such a loyal and faithful friend deserved an afterlife, as much as and more than many people. Was he in heaven, then? She supposed so. As to the rest, yes, she had received visions and heard voices—who hadn’t? Why, only a month or so ago she had been talking to Victor Hugo about these very things! Her visitors must surely concur that from the Other Side came insights and wisdom wholly beyond the grasp of mortal beings, as well as providing glimpses of a higher moral order. She really could not spare the time to discuss these things, though she commended to her visitors the interest in psychic phemonena shown by many distinguished men of their generation, including some doctors. But, they persisted, wasn’t much of spiritualism a fraud practiced on the credulous? She replied succinctly that she knew all about fraud.

Georgina’s experience of spiritualism was much less dramatic than these two gentlemen wished to suggest. She liked the medium Towns best of all because he set her what seemed to be such entertaining riddles. A good example was his insistence that she would one day be threatened by a man with one eyebrow. This seemed such a bizarre possibility that she puzzled over it without success, until at last she realized Towns was trying to indicate Charlie Rawlings, the eldest of the bell-ringing brothers. (A friend of hers, Mrs. Adamson, quite disgusted by the bushy blackness of brows that met in the middle, had once insisted to Georgina that the pubescent Charlie shave a gap over the bridge of his nose, else she would never come to the house again.) At another sitting, Towns indicated danger from the friend of a man in uniform who died with a ball in his head. Nobody in her family or acquaintanceship could be made to fit the bill, until at last Menier, walking into the room on some other errand, mentioned offhandedly that a friend of his in the Garde Nationale had been shot in the head by a Prussian bullet. Spiritualism was always a roundabout way of telling her what she already knew.

Mr. Bell watched the visitors leave. They walked through the ruined and overhung gardens in high spirits, laughing and joking.

“Aren’t they hugging up to each other as if they had a fine prize?” he mused thoughtfully to Villiers, who was with him.

The two men were in fact Dr. Winn and his son-in-law Forbes Winslow. Bell’s independent testimony that they were laughing as they left is especially interesting. Dr. Forbes Winslow had made a parlor trick out of a parlor trick by attending society séances in London and at the critical moment leaping up and exposing the medium. On one occasion he flung a pot of red ink into the face of a spectral visitor that was decorating the face of the medium when the lights went up. He was the son of a much better known—and very much more sympathetic—doctor specializing in the insane who had died four years earlier. Lyttleton Stewart Winslow inherited his father’s Hammersmith asylum in 1874 and changed his name by deed poll to ensure a continuity of brand image—in Georgina parlance, he had already been materially helped from the Other Side. He was ambitious, hardworking, and completely unscrupulous.

The conversation Georgina had with him was never disclosed to her as a medical consultation, or anything like it. Indeed, no case history of Georgina’s symptoms was ever taken by a doctor of any kind. Armed with the knowledge that her father had died insane, Forbes Winslow had only to prove in her a hereditary disposition to madness. This would manifest itself by the exhibition of suitably irrational behavior. It happened that an interest in spiritualism seemed to the unlikable Winslow just that. In the Mordaunt case, a telling piece of evidence had been that Lady Mordaunt sat down upon a gravel walk in the grounds of the Crystal Palace and pushed a fallen sprig of fir into the top of her boot. No person of quality in his or her right mind would do such a thing. Talking to angels—or being duped by mediums—was hardly less aberrant.

That afternoon, just after lunch, Villiers announced Major General Sir Henry de Bathe. In the circumstances, this was a piece of brazen effrontery on de Bathe’s part, though of course he was there at Harry’s bidding. He was appropriately uneasy and only stayed ten minutes. He had come to welcome Georgina back to England and commiserate with her on the theft of her belongings by the blaggard Frenchman Menier. The unsuspecting Georgina pressed him to stay longer. This was a family friend and she had much to tell him. In fact, he could have no idea the troubles she had experienced. De Bathe waved all this away and made the pitch he had been sent to make. Concerning this theft business, did she not see that it would only increase her woes to drag some worthless wretch through the courts? She was at a loss to understand him. Why, de Bathe said, wasn’t it clear as day that a lady of quality could and should let the prosecution drop? It was beneath her to trifle with this man. Georgina was astonished. She had been robbed. Did a lady who had been robbed decline to prosecute—was this the advice of a veteran of Talavera? De Bathe fled shortly after.

At half past eight in the evening, Bell admitted two men again claiming to be Shell and Stewart, alias Winn and Winslow. They were in fact yet two more doctors, the “short and tubby” Semple and “the dark, taciturn, evil looking” Rudderforth. They explained that they were associates of Shell and Stewart, with the same high purpose of placing children with the orphanage. Georgina gave them an hour of her time in the drawing room and once again allowed the conversation to turn more upon spiritualism than philanthropy. This meeting was more cordial than the first, and she rather fancied Semple had taken a shine to her. As a reward, she told him about the rabbit that had materialized at a séance with all the corporality and bodily functions of an actual rabbit before disappearing back across the earthly divide. Semple asked where this farewell had taken place, and Georgina freely told him: in the garden. One day the rabbit was there and the next, gone. The two men were greatly interested.

After they left, a cold wind of doubt began to blow. She had found it exhilarating to speak about the orphanage, even in the last minute to midnight of its existence, but two inquiries after it in a single day were either heaven-sent or sinister. A huge reaction set in.

“Oh Tibby,” she cried to her maid, “I feel dreadful. Something awful has come over me. What can these men be? They are Menier’s men. All is prepared. They want to get me away from here.”

Twenty minutes later she heard the large piece of masonry that held together the ruined gates of Tavistock Square being moved, and a landau was driven through. The timing would seem to indicate that all four doctors had met out in the dark in order to have a pavement consultation, for the landau was from Forbes Winslow’s asylum and the three occupants of it were a keeper named Wallis-Jones and two female nurses. There was to be no more shilly-shallying or deception. Nice Mr. Semple agreed with his colleagues and did not need reminding that the referrals he had made to Forbes Winslow in the past had always been profitable. If he had the fleeting sensation they were behaving like burglars, it was something he must put from his mind. They were doctors and Mrs. Weldon was unwell. Now they had come to fetch her.

Inside the house all lights had been hastily extinguished, and after an agonizing pause there came a hammering on the door. With Georgina and Tibby clinging to each other in terror, the phlegmatic Bell went to parley with the unknown parties gathered in the courtyard. Standing in pitch-dark, the door on the chain, Bell refused to allow Winslow’s servants into the house. It is evident from this he had been kept in ignorance of his employer’s intentions toward his wife, and this in turn suggests that only the threat posed by the upcoming trial had forced Harry into such urgent comings and goings.

Though Wallis-Jones did not identify himself, Bell could read the situation as well as anyone. More than a few times, in his capacity as a bailiff, it had been he who had stood out in the cold trying to gain access to a property. Now, with some gallantry, he held his ground. Mrs. Weldon was abed and could not be roused. He refused a bribe to open the door. It was a sorry piece of work, this, and the honest and bighearted Mr. Bell had begun to take a dislike to the voices blustering on the other side of the woodwork. Their way was not Bell’s way, oh no. But there was something said that certainly made him think, if the significance of it did not immediately strike Georgina.

“You are here for Mr. Weldon,” Wallis-Jones explained with heavy emphasis, not once but twice. Bell was being told which side his bread was buttered on. It may be that he put two and two together at this point, and if he did, the stubborn defense he made of the front door does him even greater credit.

After a while, Georgina heard the landau pull away, and Villiers, who was returning to the house from her night off, saw it pass her, driven by a coachman with a cockade in his hat. Unseen, but surely somewhere close by in the shadows, was her former master in a huddle with the four doctors. It was nearly midnight.