The asylum at Wells is a grand red-brick building, perched on a plateau in the Mendips, with breathtaking views of the city and its cathedral and a broad panorama beyond. The perfect symmetry of its towers and chimneys and pointed apexes is a testament to the balance the institution strove to establish, even as early as the mid-decades of the nineteenth century, in the troubled minds of the “frenzied objects” it called its patients.
If the Bristol Asylum aimed for well-ordered stability, Wells triumphed in it. Attendants were provided with no method of restraint from the 1860s and the use of seclusion was highly regulated. Firm emphasis was placed upon good nutrition, recreational and occupational activity, fresh air and regular sleep. Attendants were warned that patients deserved to be treated not just kindly, but “indulgently”; that they were “never to strike or speak harshly to them”, and that they would be disciplined for failing to show respect. In return, the attendants’ need for recreation and relaxation was acknowledged and respected.
Amelia was led directly through to the physician’s reception, where she was given a thorough medical examination by Dr William.
On admission – a stout and robust looking woman, hair grey, conjunctival suffused, pupils equal and normal, very few teeth, tongue coated, pulse weak, 63, heart sounds weak and distant, lung sounds normal.
Urine – acid … slightly albuminous.
Mentally – very depressed and melancholy, converses coherently, taking a very gloomy view of her condition, and says she has been brought low by trouble. Had little sleep, talks of suicide saying that in the morning the birds told her “to go and do it”, and she felt she was better off out of the world. Takes her food.
In common with all patients at Wells, she also had her photograph taken. Today, the images in the asylum case files offer grisly evidence. Often undernourished, all with an air of desperation, and in many cases in a state of complete personal neglect, the women are, by the rigorous standards of the day, half-dressed, their hair a tangled, hopeless mess, as if reflecting their mental turmoil. In some cases, the medical staff indulged themselves with a second photograph, revealing an astounding transformation: hair perfectly pinned, fully corseted, neatly dressed and a hat perched primly on the head. The patient clearly transformed into the self-possessed individual Victorian society required her to be.
Amelia Dyer’s case file has the yellowed outline where her photograph had once been pasted; presumably it was removed and taken home as a macabre keepsake, or else sold to the press during her later notoriety. The dark-eyed image she displays in which she glares at the photographer is the most sinister ever taken of her (see plate 3) and has been widely circulated, but its provenance cannot be ascertained. It seems likely that this was the photograph taken upon her entry into Wells Asylum that December.
The easy regime at Wells soon worked its magic. After just two days of hot baths, plentiful food and some gentle sewing tasks, her case file recorded a marked improvement:
Dec. 28th expresses herself as feeling better.
Converses freely and seems brighter.
With a sizeable working farm on site, the asylum was all but self-sufficient, providing optimum nutrition at meal times. Fresh vegetables, home-farmed milk, and protein in the form of daily rations of cheese and meat, were seen as an integral part of every patient’s cure. Meal times were made all the more pleasant by an in-house band of attendant musicians, who would frequently play light-hearted tunes through dinner.
Dec. 30th is going on very well.
The attendants’ charge, to “promote cheerfulness and happiness”, was evidently well adhered to. Amelia passed contented days strolling in the manicured gardens of the airing courts, sewing, reading “light-hearted literature” beside roaring fires, eating and sleeping at regular intervals, and, of course, accepting her daily dose of opium. Her progress was pleasing to her carers.
Jan 5th – expresses herself as feeling much better and as having got rid of all her morbid ideas. Sleeps very well and takes her food.
Jan 10th – continues to improve
Jan 16th – bright and cheerful and takes an interest in her surroundings
It seems Wells Asylum was quite the holiday.
On 20 January 1894, Amelia Dyer left the asylum, the Committee fully satisfied that she had made a complete recovery. She weighed 17 stone 1lb: 3lb heavier than she had weighed upon admission.
Mother had no intention of remaining long in the Wells Road after coming out of the asylum. She left William Dyer and moved with all five children to several different addresses across Bristol: to Montpellier, just north of St Paul’s; to Stokes Croft, to where she had fled following her release from prison in 1880; and to Horfield, close to the Bristol Asylum. For several months, she could settle nowhere for long. Anticipating discovery and arrest at every turn as she must have been, she nevertheless continued to adopt infants: it was, as Polly admitted, her mother’s only source of income. Without the premiums from permanent adoptions, she would have had no means of making the advance rent payments needed to secure lodgings for herself and her children.
It is hard to understand why Polly, now twenty-two and engaged, continued to live with her mother. She had long been the victim of her raging brutality and cowered from her unpredictable mood swings. She is not recorded as having expressed a moment’s affection for her mother; indeed, she was to prove quick to damn her given the opportunity. But for another few months at least, Mother exerted sufficient influence to keep her daughter at her side.
Polly Dyer, Famous Crimes, 1905
By early spring, Arthur approached Mother once more, this time to request that she provide the family details required for the marriage banns to be put up.
Polly’s brother, Willie, was eighteen years old and a working man. He had been raised in mayhem just like his sister and for him, too, it was clearly time to leave Mother behind. That same spring he announced that he had enlisted in the Royal Navy; he would become a marine. Mother was left reeling. Her marriage had ended, though it had never been an especially happy one; her daughter was about to be married, and now she was to be parted from her son. Five months spent essentially on the run from the pursuing governess and her husband and the Bristol police had already taken their toll on her nerves; separation from Polly and Willie now pushed her beyond the brink of what she could withstand.
This time her incapacity continued far longer than the usual few days. She later described to a physician that she was rendered “unconscious for three weeks”, finally awakening with the delusional sensation that her body was swarming with vermin: “I fancied that the rats were crawling all over me.” Her memory loss and unsettling psychotic delusions almost certainly describe the consequences of a sustained period of heavy alcohol and laudanum consumption.
But events were about to become far worse: just four months after Dyer’s release from Wells Asylum, at the end of April, the governess and her husband appeared at the door to Mother’s lodgings in Horfield, a police officer at their side once more.