Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum

by Mark Stevens

  Christiana was taunting the Police, and she was taunting Dr Beard; in fact, she was taunting everyone. Did she want to be caught? If so, she had sown the seeds of her own capture. It was after he received that latest letter that Dr Beard decided to go to the Police and voice his suspicion that Christiana Edmunds might have something to do with it all. He handed over the large cache of letters which she had continued to write to him, even after her banishment from his presence. That he had kept these letters, secretly, meant that they were potentially incriminating to him as well; but he concluded that the seriousness of the situation required him to face his own, social judgement. The Brighton Police decided to test his theory. They wrote to Edmunds about the Barker case, and received a reply in the same hand as the doctor’s correspondence. They decided that the matter warranted further investigations.

  Christiana was arrested a week after that last batch of poisoned parcels arrived. Immediately, the Police began to ask around about Miss Edmunds and what she did, and suddenly, many small and unconnected incidents began to make sense. It did not take long to discover that she had left Brighton on Tuesday 8th August to spend two days in Margate, attending to family business. Further enquiries indicated that she had then caught the train to London, before returning to Brighton from Victoria on the Thursday in question. She was on the same train that carried the poisoned post, and had been placed at the scene of the crime However, what exactly was the crime? The Police worked forwards from Dr Beard’s letters. They concluded that the motive must be sex: Christiana was demonstrably in love with Dr Beard, and had decided that her only hope at union lay in the removal of Mrs Beard from this mortal coil. Edmunds was charged with attempted murder.

  This set the scene for her committal hearing, which began at the Brighton Police Court one week after her arrest, on 24th August 1871. Christiana appeared decked in black: a long silk dress, a lace shawl, and a veiled bonnet. Over the course of three hearings over the next fortnight, many witnesses provided pieces in the jigsaw. Dr Beard testified to the events of September 1870, when his wife had fallen sick after eating chocolates. A boy called Adam May testified that he would run errands for Edmunds, taking forged prescriptions to druggists to obtain poisons. He would also purchase sweets and chocolates for her from Maynard’s. A chemist called Isaac Garrett testified that he had known Edmunds as ‘Mrs Wood’ for four years, and that in March 1871 and two subsequent occasions he had supplied her with strychnine. She had said she wanted to poison some local cats which had become a nuisance. Garrett said that a local milliner called Mrs Stone had vouched for Edmunds’s good character. There were others who were called to the stand, too, placing Edmunds at the scene of other poisoning events, hitherto unknown.

  It quickly became apparent that enough evidence existed to charge Edmunds with additional offences. Arsenic had been found in the last batch of parcels, and Edmunds was also known to have purchased arsenic as well as strychnine. Secondly, those who had received the recent poisoned gifts all appeared to know the Beards or have some knowledge of the poisoning case. Most significantly, the name of Maynard’s kept returning. It was Christiana who had drawn attention to herself and to Maynard’s at the time of the inquest into Sidney Barker’s death, when she had provided evidence of her own poisoning. Now, a handwriting expert concluded that the addresses appended to the parcels, the signatures of ‘Mrs Wood’ in Mr Garrett’s books, and even the notes handwritten to Sidney Barker’s father, were all by the same author as that August letter to Dr Beard. The handwriting was a direct match. That author had also been a regular customer at the sweet shop, placing herself at the centre of all that had gone on in Brighton that summer. The direction of the prosecution changed, probably to Dr Beard’s great relief. The case was no longer about his wife, and his relationship with Christiana. On 7th September, Edmunds was charged with the murder of Sidney Barker, and it was this new charge on which she would stand indicted.

  The story now suggested by the prosecution was that after Christiana’s failed attempt to poison Emily Beard in September 1870, her subsequent poisoning spree had been occasioned by a wish to blame Maynard’s for the whole affair. The suggestion was that by casting guilt elsewhere, Christiana believed she could reassure Charles that he had no grounds to banish her. The truth was that no one was really sure what she had hoped to achieve. An alternative argument doing the rounds was that Christiana had taken to experimenting in preparation for a renewed attempt to kill the obstacle to her own, personal happiness. Throughout the spring and summer of 1871, these experiments had been meted out allegedly on animals and innocent passers-by, with different dosages of poison being trialled and the results noted. Whatever, it was all sensational stuff, and while some of these ideas were purely supposition, the notion of Edmunds’s unrequited love driving her to murder was one all too eagerly consumed by the press.

  The case was scheduled to be heard at the Lewes Assizes, close to Brighton, until it was felt impossible to find a jury who would not be prejudiced by what they had read in the newspapers. Instead, Edmunds was taken by train to Newgate Prison in London, and her case was heard at the Old Bailey on the 15th and 16th January 1872. She was placed on trial for the murder of Sidney Barker.

  The circumstances of the case had set tongues wagging all over the metropolis, and it was not surprising to find the court room full of journalists and other onlookers. Christiana did not disappoint them, appearing once more before the court resplendent in black, this time of velvet with a fur trim. She was bareheaded, and though her age was stated to be thirty-five, for the first time her audience could see that she might be older than those stated years. Her black hair was parted centrally and plaited, so that it was drawn back and down the back of her head. The Times reporter was rather uncomplimentary, suggesting that she had a ‘long and cruel’ chin, her lower jaw ‘massive, and animal in its development’. Despite that, he was prepared to concede that ‘the profile is irregular, but not unpleasing’, and that there was ‘considerable character in its upper features’. Her lips occasionally pressed together in a look of ‘comeliness’ that turned to ‘absolute grimness’. The portrait was painted: a woman who thought herself more than she was, an amatory, predatory woman. It is this caricature that has stayed with her.

  She took copious notes of proceedings, her dark eyes flashing up and down as she dipped her pen into the inkwell. The evidence from the earlier hearings was repeated, of poisons purchased and of love gone bad. There were more witnesses by now, various people had come forward to say that Edmunds sent boys to buy sweets for her from Maynard’s shop. Shortly after, she would return the sweets, indicating that the wrong ones had been purchased in the first place. These sweets would then be returned to their jar for resale, and alternatives purchased in their stead. There were also witnesses who had seen her leave bags of Maynard’s sweets lying around in other shops and public places. Gradually, the events of the last eighteen months came to light.

  Her barrister set up the defence of insanity. Several well-known authorities testified on her behalf. Dr William Wood argued that she satisfied the principal MacNaughten Rule – she could not distinguish right from wrong. He had worked previously at Bethlem, and now ran private asylums in London. He was also a regular expert witness in insanity cases. Drs Charles Lockhart Robertson and Henry Maudsley, the famous psychologist, argued that Edmunds belonged to the ‘morally defective’ group of lunatics – a Victorian precursor to the later term of psychopath. Robertson was a friend of Maudsley’s, and the Superintendent of the Sussex County Asylum. He was particularly interested in women’s mental health, and had pioneered the use of Turkish baths to calm female patients. Between the three of them they offered a heavy tilt towards a verdict of not guilty, but insane.

  Then Edmunds’s mother took the stand to deliver a long tale of family madness, which had eventually trapped her surviving daughter. Edmunds, for the only time in court, reacted to proceedings. Contemplating her mother laying bear the family soul, she cried
out: ‘This is more than I can bear’. In the end, it was futile testimony anyway. As her counsel moved on, Christiana’s defence unravelled. There was evidence of hereditary insanity, to be sure, but there was nothing else to offer to back up the opinions of the medical men. There was nothing obviously insane about Edmunds’s own life. Any sympathy the court had drifted away from her. When the jury was asked to deliver their verdict, they found Christiana Edmunds guilty of murder, and did not recommend mercy.

  The defendant remained in the dock to hear her fate. Neatly dressed, she was still wearing her black velvet cloak with its fur trim. She had added a pair of black gloves to her courtroom attire, and her hair was now arranged ‘coquettishly’. Before sentence was passed, she asked to be tried on the original charge too, of attempting to murder Emily Beard, so that she might be able to describe the nature of her relationship with Dr Beard. If she was to go down, she surmised, then he would go down beside her. It was, of course, too late for that.

  Edmunds faced the gallows alone. Her immediate response was fittingly dramatic: she claimed that she was pregnant. It was a legal tradition that a pregnant woman could not be hanged until after she had given birth. A great murmur erupted around the court: so the business of sentencing was not done yet. Immediately, the court officials began to cry out for women of a certain age to make themselves known to them. A jury of matrons was duly empanelled from amongst the spectators in the room, and retired to examine Edmunds in an ante room. A doctor was summoned. The court adjourned until an hour later, when both Edmunds and this latest jury returned to the room. Asked for their verdict, they declared that Edmunds was not pregnant. The law would take its course.

  She was returned to Lewes Prison to suffer the extreme penalty of the English legal system. But the medical evidence presented at her trial had not gone unnoticed, and there was popular sentiment locally towards sparing Edmunds’s life. On 23rd January 1872, Dr William Orange, by now Broadmoor’s Medical Superintendent, visited her together with Sir William Gull from Guy’s Hospital at the Home Office’s request. Their report summarised her case as follows: ‘This woman appears to have had a tranquil, easy and indifferent childhood and womanhood up to a period of about three years ago…The acts were the fruit of a weak and disordered intellect with confused and perverted feelings of a most marked insane character…The crime of murder she seems incapable of realising as having been committed by her though she fully admits the purchasing and distributing the poisons as set forth in the several counts against her. On the contrary she even justifies her conduct’. They declared her to be insane, and after some consideration the Home Secretary, Henry Bruce, respited her sentence to one of Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

  This was quite an unusual decision, overturning as it did the verdict of a jury. It was not uncommon to have the death sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and there were other Broadmoor murderers who had been transferred with such a tariff. Their guilt, however, remained. Christiana had been absolved from hers by two professionals, contrary to the result in the courtroom. The Times bemoaned this unsatisfactory situation in a leader piece on 25th January, even if it did agree that the outcome had been the right one. It wondered aloud on the wisdom of politicians permitting a jury to give ‘a solemn verdict which they know will be afterwards reversed’. The decision was unpopular back in Brighton too: the Home Secretary had effectively saddled the ratepayers with Christiana’s upkeep from now on, creating another large bill to pay. Certainly her case had been a big ticket item, making full use of venues, discourse and precedent. Perhaps the attention was thrilling, though the fact that a verdict could be legally correct yet medically unsound was a conclusion of little importance to Christiana. She had achieved a more basic ambition. Gull and Orange had given her back her life, and she was therefore transferred to Broadmoor as a pleasure patient on 5th July 1872.

  On her arrival at the Asylum, she was forty-three years-old. She was wearing make up on her rouged cheeks, a wig (‘a large amount of false hair’) and had false teeth. ‘She is very vain’, wrote Dr Orange at the time. The surgeon at Lewes Prison who signed her transfer documents had obviously done so reluctantly. He was most unimpressed with the diagnosis of insanity, writing that after ten months of supervision he could not be satisfied either that Edmunds was insane, or that she was not responsible for her actions. He did, however, say that she was of a delicate constitution, and prone to being hysterical.

  Dr Orange was nevertheless convinced that he had made the correct diagnosis. Edmunds’s behaviour in his charge did not conform to social norms. When her surviving brother died shortly after her admission, she showed no grief, and appeared to be completely unmoved by the loss. She was also deceitful. As soon as she was transferred, she immediately began to try and smuggle in clothes or beauty aids. Her younger sister, Mary, was complicit in this. One letter asked for clothing; another talked about ways to find and apply make-up while in the Asylum. Orange attempted to reason with Mary, insisting that Christiana was able to partake of any comfort that she required. It was to no avail. Mary began to send Christiana gifts too, and it was the gifts that caused great irritation to the matron of Broadmoor’s female wing. Inside every parcel was some sort of contraband, hidden within another item. Each one needed time and attention to search. It appeared to be attention-seeking on the part of both of the Edmunds women, and it was more than the matron could bear. The final straw was the receipt of a cushion stuffed with false hair during 1874. The matron complained to Orange that Edmunds was amassing and hoarding hair in her room, and that no further gifts should be allowed. The Superintendent was initially reluctant to interfere with behaviour which he saw as self-indulgent, but largely harmless. The matron, however, put her foot down.

  Also in 1874, Broadmoor intercepted clandestine correspondence sent to the chaplain at Lewes Prison, with whom Christiana had struck up a bond during her time in custody. Dr Orange noted that he had no objection at all to Edmunds corresponding with the chaplain, but her decision to do so secretly was ‘in conformity with her state of mind to prefer mystery and concealment’. Presumably the chaplain was intended to become a Dr Beard substitute. Still, Christiana’s webs of intrigue continued. In 1875 her room was twice searched and various concealed articles were recovered on each occasion. Dr Orange wrote that ‘she deceives for the pure love of deception’.

  Edmunds was a patient who required micro-management. She was a bundle of contradictions. Generally quiet and biddable, she joined the ranks of the more trusted patients in the original female Block. She had access to the Terrace and the gardens, and probably delighted in causing mischief through playing croquet and other games with her fellow patients. For she was certainly disruptive, as a note of 1876 indicates: ‘her delight and amusement seem[s] to be in practising the art of ingeniously tormenting several of the more irritable patients so that she could always complain of their language to her whilst it was difficult to bring any overt act home to herself’. The same note suggests that her room is still being regularly searched, and that when her mother visited, she would omit her make up and try to look as desperate as possible.

  The subject of Christiana’s make-up appears often in her notes. She was evidently perceived by the male doctors as Broadmoor’s painted lady, and as a creature motivated by romantic desire. They were the sole males in regular contact with her, and she appears to have been determined to maximise their attention to her. A note made in 1877 by David Nicolson, as Edmunds approached the age of fifty, related her daily life as one of embroidery and etching; but also maintained that she ‘affects a youthful appearance’ and that ‘her manner and expression evidently lies towards sexual and amatory ideas’. It seems certain that at the annual Christmas dance for female patients, no doctor or male attendant could escape a dance with Christiana.

  Her life at Broadmoor continued in this vein for another thirty years. She presented no danger to any staff or patients, and unlike some patients she showed no obvious signs of insanity. Many ti
mes her notes described her as being obsessed with her personal appearance. She won the battle to wear her own clothes eventually. We know this because she sent out a parcel of them to a Wokingham lady for repair in 1887, and the parcel was sent back to the Broadmoor steward, who made a fuss because he was not expecting it. Otherwise, she became less disruptive. She sewed, she painted, she made herself up and demanded acknowledgement from the male staff when she met them; she was quiet, she was well-behaved, and she showed no remorse for her crimes. And in doing all these things, she grew into an old woman.

  Perhaps if she had been one of the Broadmoor women who had acted while suffering from post-natal depression, she might have been discharged. But there was no clamour for that, nor any regular petitions to the Home Office, letters in the newspapers or campaigning friends to ask questions on her behalf. Dr Orange even noted in 1884 that he did not actually have any paperwork authorising her detention, because the Treasury Solicitor had lost it all. It never seems to have crossed anyone’s mind that she might be discharged to rejoin society. As the years went by, her remaining family died, and she was left alone at Broadmoor.

  Gradually her own health weakened. In 1900, she was bedridden for a while with flu. By 1901 her sight was fading badly, and she could barely see out of her right eye. She rallied in time to attend the Asylum’s annual ball in 1902, but her mobility decreased, and by 1906 she could hardly walk to go anywhere. As she entered the last year of her life, a final Christmas ball approached. Laid up in the infirmary, and closely observed by the medical staff, a snippet of conversation between her and another patient was entered into her case notes: