Gloucester was a thirty-mile carriage ride from Eastville in Bristol; it would have been late in the day by the time Amelia arrived.
The County Asylum in Gloucester was spread over two sites. It was not to the newly built, expertly designed site that Dyer was delivered on the evening of 13 November 1891 but to the crescent-shaped façade of the ageing First County Asylum at Wotton. This sprawling tangle of original buildings and extensions, described by its own Commissioners as the “Rabbit Warren”, housed on average eight hundred patients. Its manicured lawns, ivy-clad railings and the neatly planted borders would have at least offered that same semblance of respectability which Amelia had first encountered as an attendant at the Bristol Asylum in Fishponds.
Upon arrival, Amelia was given a thorough medical examination, and the details of Dr Bernard’s medical certificate entered in the patient case file book. The nature and duration of her attack were recorded, along with her personal circumstances and the patient’s perception as to the cause of her indisposition (in this case, “domestic trouble”). Her heartbeat and breathing were monitored and recorded; her pulse and the condition of her abdomen determined; the acidity of her urine was noted. Finally, the asylum doctor, Dr Harold T. Johnson, made an assessment of her mental state: “Dull, lazy manner, quiet and orderly, answers questions. Does not know why she cut her throat, will not talk much. Clean, appetite good.”
Evidently, several things about Amelia had changed since her first encounter with Dr Bernard earlier that day. Firstly, the raging aggression had stopped; so too had the voices. She was now left “dull”, “quiet and orderly”. Secondly, at some point she had taken the opportunity to clean herself up. If Amelia’s “fits of madness” were feigned, staged in order to avoid, if only temporarily, the clutches of the law (such as was to be argued five years later by a weighty school of thought, with catastrophic consequences), then Dyer would at this point have put into practice those lessons she had learned as an attendant at the Bristol Asylum. She would have been keenly aware that some small effort with one’s personal appearance and a degree of quiet cooperation were essential if a female lunatic was to enjoy the best an asylum had to offer.
But there was another explanation. Sustained and significant laudanum abuse can account for the volatility, the aggression and the paranoid delusions Amelia exhibited for the two weeks prior to her hospitalization. And as the laudanum wore off, so too would the excitability, the crazed “volubility” described by Dr Bernard, giving way to the “dull, lazy manner” she displayed at Wotton.
Certainly, three days later Amelia’s case file reads very differently:
November 20th
Is quiet and orderly. Industrious and doing sewing now. Clean and tidy in habits.
App good. Health good.
Was she recovering from a laudanum binge? Or was she playing a shrewd game? Whatever the answer, her surroundings were pleasant enough. Light flooded in through the large windows of the day rooms, which were tiled up to dado level and hung with a selection of framed prints. Easy chairs, draped with crocheted rugs and throws (crafted by the female patients as part of their therapy), pot plants, reading matter and even a resident cat all helped soften the hard edges of incarceration. And outside were broad, tree-lined gardens, known as airing courts, where primly uniformed attendants would take the female patients along gravelled pathways, past the ornately covered pagoda, for their daily “airing”.
Weekly entries in Amelia’s case file suggest the perfect patient. The Commissioners of any late nineteenth-century asylum would have wished for nothing better than to have in their wards lunatics such as Amelia Dyer, with her cooperative, malleable and easily rectifiable “madness”. Whatever “suicidal” tendencies patient number 9806 had exhibited upon her admission to the asylum on the night of 13 November 1891 had quickly been eased by a few weeks of daily opiates, used routinely to treat “suicidal mania”, along with an ordered routine and purposeful activity.
Nov 27
Much improved. Orderly industrious sewing and caring for others all the time.
Dec 4
Same state practically well
Dec 11
Quite well
On 12 January 1892, Amelia Dyer was “discharged, recovered”. She left Gloucester and travelled back to her home at Glenworth House in Bristol by train.