Christiana Edmunds was scarcely the first or last Victorian woman to fall in love with her doctor. Nor was she the only one to ignite scandal and public trial as a result. In 1858 Isabella Robinson, an unhappy wife with something of a Madame Bovary about her, found herself and her illicit passions dragged all too publicly through the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes – as Kate Summerscale narrates so well. Her husband had discovered a diary filled with intemperate prose relating her sensual desires and describing some charged, seemingly adulterous, scenes with a certain Dr Edward Lane. Isabella’s husband used the evidence of her diary to sue for divorce, but in court and in the press the relationship of journal entries to truth claims proved open to a great deal of argument.
Lane was a decade younger than Mrs Robinson: lawyers and doctors advanced her age to fifty in order to be able to term her ‘menopausal’, a period received wisdom allied to erratic, lascivious behaviour, and sometimes madness. Lane was married to Mary Drysdale, the sister of the sexual reformer. Mrs Robinson and he had first met in Edinburgh’s progressive intellectual circles. Over the years, Lane saw her with some regularity at the popular spa he opened in Moor Park, an ideal location not only for a healthy regime of water, walks and the nineteenth-century version of detox, but also for amorous friendship, certainly for amorous imaginings.
At the first divorce trial of Robinson vs Robinson and Lane, Dr Lane staunchly refuted any sexual doings and was cleared of adultery. In the second trial, thanks to the fine-tuned literary intelligence and worldly wisdom of the great Sir Alexander Cockburn, so was Mrs Robinson. In his summing up, Cockburn emphasized the unreliability of diaries, and the wavering line between fantasy and realism that such writing could fall prey to. He described Mrs Robinson, on the evidence of her writing, as ‘a woman of more than ordinary intelligence and of no inconsiderable attainments’ whose imagination was too vivid and whose passions were too strong.
By then, Isabella Robinson’s reputation had already been thoroughly muddied by press and by prosecution, as well as defence. The last pleaded madness. Medical witnesses testified that Mrs Robinson’s rampant sexuality, itself abnormal though not unusual during menopause, was fostering delusions. She was suffering from ‘a disease peculiar to woman’, from ‘hysteria’ or ‘erotomania’ or ‘nymphomania’, produced by an addiction to ‘self-pollution’, abetted by the imaginings in her journal, which were ‘the hallucinations or the rhapsodical expressions of an over-excited mind’, as Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper had it.
The wealthy heiress Florence Bravo, suspected of poisoning her second husband Charles in 1876, also engaged in an illicit love affair with a doctor under whose sway, some thought, she had committed murder. Dr James Manby Gully was the doctor in question, and he was midcentury England’s premier hydropath. Sophisticated, well travelled, a recognized authority with several books to his name, Gully was the inventor of the famous Malvern water cure, a holistic therapy of exercise, diet, detoxification and healing mineral waters. His hydro, opened in 1842, was frequented by a host of notables from Darwin to Disraeli. Florence Nightingale, who as a young woman suffered from an ‘immobilizing’ despair, from trances and rampant daydreams, came to Malvern for Gully’s water cure. Versed in the ways of the continental spas, Gully had a way with nervous or hysterical women: he recognized that the pressures of chastity and the lack of meaningful occupation could contribute to illness.
In Gully’s view the many nervous symptoms his patients brought to him had their source in both mental and physical causes. Improper diet, forced sexual relations, insomnia, masturbation, the use of opiates, drink, together with prolonged study, disappointed passions and boredom all produced nervous symptoms which the water cure could help alleviate. Gully’s views about the difficulties unhappy marriage could cause were echoed in the 1870s in the correspondence columns of women’s magazines.
It was in April 1870 that Florence Bravo’s mother sent her nineteen- year-old daughter and her then husband, twenty-one-year-old Alexander Ricardo, to Dr Gully’s Malvern spa, so that they could reorder their unhappy and dissolute lives. Ricardo was violent when drunk. Fie was often drunk. Brutal sexual relations may have blighted the young Florence’s romantic views on marriage. In any event, Gully recommended the couple separate. A year later, Ricardo was dead after a spree in Cologne. A prostitute was at his side.
Gully’s ministrations saw the now very rich Florence through shock, mourning and all the attendant travails. Soon the married Gully, who was estranged from his seventeen-years-older second wife, gave up much of his work at Malvern, in part to devote himself to his young widowed patient. Her parents disowned her as a result.
Gully travelled to the continent with her. If they didn’t formally share rooms, they were certainly intimate. He was sixty-three to her twenty-one. Perhaps his older man’s sexuality proved less violent than the rampant Ricardo’s. In any case, sex there certainly was, since veiled comments abound about a female malady that probably veiled an abortion. This, together with Gully’s very success as a doctor, is perhaps what led to Florence breaking off relations with him. Cured, newly capable of independence, the wealthy young widow wanted the marriage her parents approved and the married Gully couldn’t provide. One came with the reportedly tempestuous lawyer, Charles Bravo. When Bravo died of poisoning in April 1876, only four months after the wedding, it seemed for a while that the inquest would find Florence guilty. Her immoral past with Gully, the suggestion that they had been complicit in abortion, were already for the Victorians signs of criminal propensities. Then too, Dr Gully had moved into the mansion next door to hers, and Charles Bravo loathed this predecessor in his wife’s affections.
Florence’s relations with Dr Gully formed the scandalous centrepiece of the second inquest, and it looked likely that the doctor – whom The Times called a man ‘in violation of the heavy duties of his profession and with no excuse from the passions of youth or even of middle life’ – would be implicated in murder. But in fact the inquest ended with an indeterminate verdict: there was insufficient evidence to lay Charles Bravo’s death at any door, even his own. Shamed in court and in the press, Dr Gully and Florence never made it up. She died two years after the inquest, not yet quite thirty-three, and ‘suffering from the effects of an undue amount of stimulants’. He was not around to tend to her, and he duly followed her five years later, in 1883 – a year after his wife: it was her unexpectedly long life that had prevented him from marrying the young Florence, whom he evidently loved.
Like Christiana, these women simply didn’t seem to fit the sought-after Victorian mould. Yet the very avidity with which the press reported on their trials suggests that, as monstrous or excessive as they might be seen to be, they reflected a malaise that was hardly unique. Certainly by the late 1850s, newspapers regularly used such terms as ‘hysteria’, and even the newer diagnoses of erotomania and nymphomania, to describe a host of female maladies that the women before the divorce or criminal courts purportedly suffered from. The last two diagnoses had come into the current lexicon when J.-E. D. Esquirol published his Mental Maladies in 1838, a treatise on insanity that was translated into English in 1845.
Nymphomaniacs were considered to be victims of a physical disorder that could express itself in the most ‘shameful and humiliating acts’. Erotomaniacs, on the other hand, suffered from a chronic mental illness characterized by a ‘mad tenderness’, an excessive love, sometimes for an imaginary other. In erotomania, love is in the mind and the imagination and solipsistic sex alone is in play. Esquirol describes his erotomaniacs as obsessively, deludedly in love with an admired man of higher or idealized status. They devote their love to the secret cult of this object with an ecstasy that blinds them to any of his reality. They are ‘restless, thoughtful, gently depressed in mind, agitated, irritable and passionate. Their moods shift rapidly from gay laughter to weeping melancholy.’ They behave, in other words, like classic romantic lovers. Christiana Edmunds would be called both a nymphomaniac and
an erotomaniac. In the twentieth century, de Clèrambault and then Jacques Lacan would explore erotomania’s forms, underlining components of arrogance, a belief on the part of the sufferer in her own high and special status, a hypersensitivity to slight, and a tendency towards paranoid thoughts – characteristics Christiana exhibited.
A surprisingly long definition of erotomania, citing Esquirol in French, appears in the commentary on Mrs Robinson’s case in the Morning Post of 8 July 1858. Perhaps to use English about such delicate matters would have been considered a step too far. Interestingly, the commentary begins with a line approving the work of the psychologists (a word that was only beginning to take on its medical meaning at that time). The writer tells us these psychologists ‘have accurately described the mental disease of Mrs Robinson’. The proof of Dr Lane’s innocence, he argues, is also the proof of Mrs Robinson’s insanity. ‘The sliding scale of cases which lead from the domain of sanity to those of insanity is so gently graduated as to render it difficult to say where the dividing line between the two ought to be drawn.’ But Mrs Robinson’s diary would, according to the best experts, mark her out as an erotomaniac, ‘possessed of highly imaginative powers morbidly excited, of an immense copiousness in passionate eloquence, and of an ungovernable cacoetez [cacoethes] scribendi’. The Latin term comes from Juvenal and is best translated here as an ‘itch’ or irresistible desire to write.
Christiana Edmunds in her torrent of letters to Charles Beard – the traitorous showing of which to his wife occasioned Christiana’s poisoning spree – gave evidence of the itch and of the same imaginative loquacity as Mrs Robinson. So, too, did Edith Thompson in the outpourings of her romantic passion for Frederick Bywaters, her lover: it was on the grounds of these ‘immoral’ letters and her own histrionic performance in court, in December 1922, that judge and jury deemed poor Edith to have made ‘common purpose’ with her lover in murdering her husband. Female stalkers today, the psychiatrists tell us, have a propensity to stalk by email or text.
The Morning Post commentator, who sounds as if he might well himself be a ‘suffering’ doctor, having quoted approvingly from Esquirol, finishes with a flourish that would place Isabella Robinson and Christiana Edmunds, as well as a host of unnamed others, in the erotomanic category. ‘Many physicians,’ he tells us, ‘have suffered from baseless imputations, the result of the insane imaginings of monomaniacs of Mrs Robinson’s class. Groups of cases often occur together
Loving doctors, it seems, is something of a female habit at a time when they are seen to be part of a privileged cohort armed with expert knowledge of women’s bodies and minds.
Meanwhile, the trials that ensued publicized the existence of women’s sexual nature, its dangers and satisfactions, outside reproduction and marriage.
8. At the Old Bailey
At the end of her hearing at Brighton Crown Court, Christiana Edmunds was remanded to Lewes County Prison to await trial on the charge of murder. Of what went through her mind during her four months of waiting, only one matter is clear: Christiana wanted to see her beloved Dr Beard. This didn’t happen. On 28 December 1871, under the Central Criminal Court Act of 1856, also known as Palmer’s Act, she was taken up to London to be tried at the Old Bailey: it was thought the furore around her case would jeopardize the possibility of an unbiased trial in Brighton. There is an irony here that Christiana might have been alert to. William Palmer, after whom the Act was named, was a doctor who, in 1856 having poisoned a close friend with strychnine – and probably also his wife, mother-in-law, brother and children – and collected large sums in insurance, was moved to London for trial on the grounds that his native Staffordshire could not provide him with a fair one.
The press duly noted the Brighton Poisoner’s arrival at Newgate and her dismay at the conditions there. Being housed in a double cell on the women’s side of the prison in company with ‘an educated woman in custody on a charge of bigamy’ is simply not good enough for Christiana. Throughout her ordeal, she manifests a prickly sense of her own status and a marked attention to the signs that demonstrate it. She makes it clear that she is a lady and this is not the kind of treatment she is used to: she has to have her own clothes and her own cutlery.
Christiana immediately asked for an interview with the visiting magistrates, and then the governor of the prison. She remonstrated ‘with great volubility’. At the Lewes prison, she claimed, she had occupied the same apartment as the matron, had ‘been permitted to change her dress as often as she liked’ and to wear her bonnet to chapel. Here, the ‘velvet dresses and furs suitable for the present season which she had brought with her from Lewes to Newgate had been denied her’. When the prison chaplain came to see her, she explained that the chaplain at the Sussex County Prison at Lewes had been very kind to her, and it would make more sense for her to continue seeing him. He would not have forced her to submit to a regime that sent her to chapel without a bonnet, not to mention without her sealskin jacket – two items of which Newgate had deprived her. Even a visit from an alderman, sent by the governor, who patiently explained that it was desirable that Christiana exhibit ‘a somewhat more conciliatory manner, and conform to rules which could not possibly be framed to suit every person’, did nothing to mollify her. His arguments made not the ‘smallest impression’: she supposed she would now have to appeal to the sheriff. It was explained to her that he had nothing to do with the daily running of the prison.
So intensive was the reporting of the fuss that Christiana made, that the governor at Lewes felt forced the next day to point out that Christiana Edmunds had been treated in all respects according to the regulations of that jail and had had no special indulgences. She hadn’t lodged with the matron. Her rail transport from prison to prison had been with a second-class ticket in an ordinary railway carriage in the company of the chief warder. However, since Christiana was not a convicted prisoner and with all due regard for prison security, the ‘regulations do not require, neither does justice appear to demand the imposition of vexatious restraints or indignities upon persons who are committed to prison for safe custody only, but not for the infliction of penal correction’.
This was a gentle reminder that for all her time behind bars, Christiana had not yet been convicted. Her insistence on what we would now call her ‘rights’, or at least her dignities, are in that sense remarkable and point to the thought that, at least in her own mind, she was innocent of the charge of murder. Papers like the Pall Mall Gazette mocked, while others reprimanded this uppity prisoner.
The trial of the Brighton Poisoner began on 15 January 1872. As ever, there was much else in the news to concern the public and the press. In the month around the trial there had been a total solar eclipse. Parents who neglected to send their children to elementary school – in accordance with the 1870 Education Act – were being fined. Differences had surfaced amongst the promoters of women’s suffrage. Over in France there was a monetary crisis in the new Third Republic, while in Britain agitation was under way for a reform of the hereditary House, which was seen to be inconsistent with liberalism. In the United States, in the wake of the Civil War and continuing malaise between North and South, Federal and State authority, President Grant decided not to introduce martial law in Louisiana; while on 17 January a second African-American Congressman was sworn in.
But reporters and public poured into the Old Bailey. First of all, that January, they came to watch the unfurling of another rare middle- class trial, that of the so-called Stockwell murderer. The ageing and now feeble Reverend John Watson, having lost his post as master of Stockwell Grammar School in south London, had murdered his wife on 8 October the previous year in an act of brutal and uncharacteristic violence. Watson shared a defence counsel with Christiana Edmunds. In the cleric’s case, Serjeant Parry argued that the Reverend was of ‘unsound mind’ and had had no knowledge of the ‘difference between right and wrong’ at the time he had carried out his act of ‘maniacal passion’. English law, Parry contended, had nev
er attempted fully to define ‘what insanity was’, but it was as much of a disease as ‘typhus, paralysis, or epilepsy’. Under ordinary circumstances, Watson was ‘a kind and humane man’, ‘a man of learning and high character’, who ‘led an ordinary and blameless life’. But at the time of the murder, his mind had been ‘perverted and overthrown’ by his hopeless circumstances and he had committed a furious act utterly ‘inconsistent with the whole of his former life’.
The Reverend Watson and Christiana Edmunds, these two unusually bourgeois murderers, would over the next weeks often be considered together by the press. It will perhaps come as no surprise that the elderly Reverend was treated far more sympathetically, despite the brutality of his murder of a loyal wife, than the Borgia of Brighton.
Well dressed women made up a large number of those crowding into the galleries of the Old Bailey’s New Court on 15 January. From their numbers it would seem that Christiana interested women in particular. Her unrequited, excessive and illicit love had allegedly led her to attempt something monstrous. But how many other women may not have secretly wished a legitimate partner dead so that the man of their dreams might be free for them? Her plight, as she attempted to exonerate herself from Dr Beard’s accusation of attempting to poison his wife by distributing ever more poison chocolates, elicited both horror and pity. By acting on her desires, Christiana had entered the zone of the impermissible. In attempting to make wish enter the domain of the real, she was sailing into the terrain of madness. Whatever echoes of their own lives, emotions and fears the gathered women may have found in her drama, it was clear that there was something about Christiana, their ‘accused sister’, that mesmerized.
As for the men who attended Christiana’s trial or read about it in the press, their fascination may well have been edged with terror. Men, after all, were the most frequent victims of female poisoners, particularly if they happened to be married to them. Back in 1852, Charles Dickens’s journal Household Words had run an article on poisoning which underscored its female nature, attesting that murder by poison ‘admits more readily of fiendish sophistication in the mind of the perpetrator than any other form by which murder is committed’.
Trials of Passion Page 7
