The Case of the Chocolate Cream Killer

by Jones, Kaye;

  It fell to Ann to take charge of these resources and to oversee the day-to-day running of the Edmunds household. Like other middle-class wives of the Victorian period, Ann was regarded as the ‘architect of home’14 and was in charge of all matters relating to the domestic sphere, from managing the accounts and ordering household supplies, to doing housework and caring for the children. Meeting these domestic demands was no mean feat and, like so many of her fellow wives, Ann employed a number of servants to help with her duties. In fact, by the mid-nineteenth century, three-quarters of all middle-class households employed at least one servant,15 and the census return from 1841 shows that the Edmunds had three in their employ: Hannah Minter, Susan Nash and Margaret Jones. Though the Edmunds paid approximately £18 per year16 for their services, a relatively high sum, the assistance that these ladies provided around the home was invaluable. This is especially true for Ann who could now delegate many of the domestic tasks, like cooking, cleaning and laundry, to the servants, rather than do them all herself. It would be wrong, however, to assume that this situation enabled Ann to live as a lady of leisure. With no nurse-maid in the house, Ann spent much of her time attending to the needs of her children and was tasked specifically with their moral, spiritual and physical development. She provided the first lessons in reading, writing, arithmetic and religion, and kept journals to mark milestones and track the progress of each child.17 This close supervision continued until the age of 9 or 10, when the formal education of middle-class children commonly began.

  When the census was taken in 1841, the only children at home were Mary, Louisa and Arthur. The two eldest children, Christiana and William, now aged 12 and 11, had moved on to the next stage in their education and had been enrolled at private boarding schools. William was already in his second year as a boarder at the King’s School in Canterbury, having started a few days before his tenth birthday in 1839. Life at King’s was very different to the life he had known at home. The focus was to mould William into a gentleman and prepare him for entrance into a university, and later, into a respectable profession. To do this, public schools relied heavily on strict discipline, on traditional subjects like Latin and Greek, and on team games designed to instil a sense of manliness and toughness. Fortunately, William thrived in his new surroundings and was elected a King’s Scholar within his first year. This new status enabled William to receive his classical tuition free of charge for up to four years, though he still had to pay four guineas per term for his lessons in writing, arithmetic and mathematics. There were also costs for boarding and additional subjects, including French, German, drawing and fencing. Despite the high costs of his education, his records show that he stayed at King’s until the midsummer term of 1842.18

  While William learned the basics of being a gentlemen at Canterbury, his elder sister, Christiana, was sent to board at Mount Albion House, an ‘establishment for ladies’ in Ramsgate. The focus and scope of Christiana’s education was markedly different to that of her brother’s: it was not about sending her into the world to master a profession but rather about protecting her from its potentially corrupting influences. This is immediately evident in the decision to send Christiana to Ramsgate, as schools by the sea were considered healthier and more morally wholesome than those in the cities. Fortunately, Mount Albion House was nestled in a quiet, respectable street near the harbour and not too close to the hustle and bustle of the main town. This was not a purpose built school like King’s but a residential property that belonged to its headmistresses, Miss Angelina Charriere and Miss Marianna Fisher. This was a common set-up for girls’ boarding schools in the early Victorian period because it offered a more intimate and homely environment, ideal for training the next generations of wives and mothers.

  Mount Albion House was not the only private school for girls in Ramsgate or even in this quiet street called Chapel Place. There was Miss Read’s, Miss Evans’, and Miss Saffery’s, all on the same row. There was even a dancing master, just next door. All of these schools had resident pupils at the time of the census in 1841 but its twenty-two pupils suggests that Mount Albion House was the more popular choice. The school was well-equipped to meet the needs of so many young girls and perhaps this contributed to its popularity. Aside from the two headmistresses, there were two full-time teachers, Miss Caroline Turrion and Miss Veronica Venetozza, alongside three servants to carry out the domestic chores. Beyond these few facts, very little is known about the history or the day-to-day running of Mount Albion House. There is no official paper trail to follow as the school did not require a licence to operate and any material that might have survived was destroyed by a fire at Ramsgate Library in 2004. As a result, it is impossible to know for certain when Christiana entered Mount Albion House but she was in residence by the time of her thirteenth birthday. It was common in this period for girls to board for a year or two, as a sort of rite of passage into womanhood, but there were frequent cases when girls stayed in school for longer periods. These cases included girls who had been orphaned, for example, were deemed unmanageable by their parents, or, for whatever reason, were unable to live at home with their family. The wide variation in ages at the time of the census suggests that Christiana may have boarded with girls in such a situation but the high cost of girls’ education in this period created a significant financial responsibility for their families. The cost of a private education at an establishment like Mount Albion House averaged £130 per annum,19 equivalent to over £7,000 today, and some of the more fashionable schools charged even more. The Irish writer and reformer, Francis Power Cobbe, spent two years at one such school in Brighton in the 1830s. The cost of educating the young Frances at the home of Miss Runciman and Miss Roberts amounted to a staggering £1,000, close to £60,000 in modern currency. This consisted of a nominal fee of between £120 and £130 per annum while the rest came from extras that included a private bedroom and harp lessons. In her autobiography, Frances paints a bleak picture of her time in Brighton. If she expected to receive a well-rounded education, then she was quickly disappointed. Miss Runciman and Miss Roberts were not in the business of equipping young ladies with the skills for a career outside the home, as Frances recalled:

  That a pupil in that school should ever become an artist, or an authoress, would have been looked upon … as a deplorable dereliction. Not that which was good in itself or useful to the community, or even that which would be delightful to ourselves, but that which would make us admired in society, was the raison d’etre of each requirement.20

  This sentiment was echoed by the science writer, Mary Somerville, who attended a private boarding school in the Scottish coastal town of Musselburgh. Miss Primrose’s school was so expensive that Mary spent only one year there but, like Frances, she found the quality and depth of teaching to be seriously lacking. Within a few days of her arrival, she was encased in a steel busk designed to improve her posture and, in this ‘constrained state’, she was taught to learn and recite pages of the dictionary as well as the basics of English and French grammar. Unsurprisingly, Mary found this to be ‘extremely tedious and inefficient’.21 Similarly, Frances spent much of her school day learning the pages of textbooks by heart. In her first class at Miss Runciman’s and Miss Robert’s, she committed to memory no less than thirteen pages of a history book. Even worse, she would have to recite scores of English and French verbs on her weekly promenade around the neighbouring terraces.22

  As dull and pointless as these lessons may have seemed, they were part of a set of accomplishments that formed the basis of the boarding school curriculum. These accomplishments transformed a girl into a lady, in the same way that the Classics came to define the Victorian gentleman. Learning French, English grammar and good posture, however, were not the only accomplishments that these young girls had to master. For Frances, several hours of each day were devoted to singing and learning an instrument, both of which were charged as an extra and were expected to be mastered even if the girls had ‘no music in their souls�
� or ‘voices in their throats’.23 Frances was also attended daily by a dancing master, Madame Michaud, who schooled her in every dance practiced in England and every national dance in Europe. If this wasn’t tiring enough, after dancing came a callisthenic lesson in which she performed a series of exercises with poles and dumbbells to improve and enhance her figure.24

  There was little time for leisure amid these countless hours of lessons. Outside of the accomplishments, Frances spent hours in prayer, at Bible study and Church25 to develop a strong sense of morality and piety. Religion played a central role in school and we can assume that much of Christiana’s life at Mount Albion House involved similar lessons and regular attendance at Church. When free time did occur, it was closely supervised by teachers who sought to root out any potentially negative influences and encourage the girls’ purity and modesty. Many private schools forbade pupils to read newspapers, for example, or to show any interest in masculine subjects, such as politics and economics. Some establishments even prevented girls from writing letters to anyone other than their parents.26 When rules were broken, headmistresses reacted quickly and harshly. At Brighton, after being ‘solemnly scolded’, Frances recalled a number of girls being ‘obliged to sit for hours … like naughty babies, with their faces to the walls’.27

  It is hardly surprising that Frances and Mary looked back on their time at private school negatively and felt that it had been of little academic worth. Frances so hated her time in Brighton that she could remember those ‘solitary hours of first emancipation’ vividly, even in her later years.28 We can only wonder if Christiana felt the same way and if the strict routine and the hours of dancing, singing and French left her feeling physically and emotionally drained. It is likely that Christiana left Mount Albion House in 1842, as custom dictated, and returned to the family home in Margate. Unlike her brother, these brief years at boarding school marked the beginning and the end of Christiana’s formal education. There would be no university studies or entrance into a profession. Her future was in marriage, the only truly acceptable profession for a middle-class lady29 and Christiana, through her study of accomplishments, had already mastered all the skills she would need to secure a husband later in life. In the meantime, Christiana was reunited with her family but found the household to be quite different to the one she had left behind. She had a new sibling, Arthur, and her younger sisters, Louisa and Mary, were about to enrol at boarding school, perhaps also at Mount Albion House. The biggest change of all, however, was in her father. He had started to behave very strangely, he wasn’t working anymore and rarely left the house. Christiana noticed the stress that this behaviour placed on her mother but neither appreciated the full extent of his illness, nor could they have predicted the tragedy that lay just around the corner.

  Chapter Two

  “Where Insanity Has Prevailed”

  By the summer of 1843, William Edmunds’ strange behaviour had become too much for his family to bear. He raved about owning ‘millions of money’ and was prone to spontaneous, violent outbursts. After consulting with the family doctor, whom William attempted to knock down with a ruler,1 Ann accepted that it was time to remove her husband from the family home and place him in the care of a psychiatrist. This was a major decision but one that she hoped would cure him of his obvious insanity.

  Residential care for a person deemed to be insane depended primarily on his financial background. The majority of England’s lunatics were paupers, defined as people unable to pay for their own care and who were instead confined at the expense of the parish. Paupers were confined in a number of places, from the lunatic ward of the local workhouse, to publicly-funded hospitals and even gaols. As the number of pauper lunatics increased over the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the pressure on these resources intensified and the government responded with the County Asylum Act of 1808. This Act encouraged counties across England and Wales to create purpose-built asylums for the care of pauper lunatics. This was not a compulsory recommendation, however, and many counties were slow to respond: by the mid-century, there were only fourteen county asylums in operation. William’s home county, Kent, had opened an asylum in 1833 at Barming Heath, near Maidstone, but it was plagued by overcrowding, despite twice extending the building.

  In contrast to pauper lunatics were private patients, the men and women who were able to meet the cost of their own residential care. These patients, like William Edmunds, were welcomed by the county asylums but there was a consensus among the medical profession that people of the middle and upper classes should not be placed alongside their social inferiors. According to William Browne, the physician and superintendent of the Montrose Asylum:

  To strip a man suddenly, and for no reason that he can comprehend of, of all the luxuries and elegances to which he has been accustomed, and expose him to the bald simplicity and meagreness observed in establishments for the insane, would overthrow a tottering mind, and totally crush one that has already been weakened.2

  Fortunately, an alternative to the county asylum came into existence at the end of the eighteenth century. This was the private madhouse, a profit-making business which provided residential treatment for a weekly fee. The growth in this ‘trade in lunacy’ was significant: the number of private madhouses in England and Wales more than trebled between 1800 and 1845. The quality of care provided by many of these institutions, however, was notoriously poor and they were often the focus of abuse scandals and tales of horror. Writing in 1837, William Browne wrote that lunatics were ‘left to linger out a lifetime of misery, without any rational attempt at treatment, without employment, without a glimpse of happiness, or a hope of liberation’.3 Though Browne’s words were based on observations made at the end of the eighteenth century, the conditions in many of the country’s private madhouses were slow to change, despite a growing public awareness of the need for reform. For example, the Commissioners in Lunacy, tasked with the inspection and improvement of asylums, reported that dirty, cramped conditions and the use of restraint remained a feature of asylum care as late as the 1840s.4

  Of course, not all private madhouses operated in such a manner and William Edmunds was in no danger of living in such conditions. There were a number of private madhouses that catered almost exclusively to middle and upper-class patients, combining psychiatric care with all the comforts and amenities of a genteel house, such as a music room, aviary and horse and carriage. They were often advertised as a ‘lodge’ or ‘retreat’ and generally admitted a small number of patients. One such institution was Southall Park, a small, private madhouse on the outskirts of London which issued the following handbill in 1839:

  For any Lady or Gentleman whose mental state may require a separation from their immediate friends and connexions … The House is within a cheerful view of the road, but sufficiently distant from it to be free from any interruption or annoyances from the passengers … But the principal advantages to be afforded are the domestic association and family union, which are invariably kept up with the inmates.5

  Perhaps after seeing this handbill, Ann decided that Southall Park would become William’s home for the foreseeable future. This former mansion had been converted to an asylum by Sir William C. Ellis and his wife, Mildred, in 1838. The couple had worked together at the West Riding Asylum in Wakefield and later at Hanwell, the county asylum for Middlesex. This husband and wife team pioneered the humane treatment of lunatics and developed the ‘Great Principle of Therapeutic Employment’, where patients participated in work as part of their recovery. This idea was so influential that William was rewarded with a knighthood. The couple were also devout Quakers who provided daily religious instruction to their patients and encouraged Church attendance on Sundays. But less than one year after opening Southall Park, William died suddenly from dropsy but Mildred was determined to maintain the good work that she and her husband had started. She continued to work as the asylum’s matron under Southall Park’s new owner, Dr John Burdett Steward, a Cambridge
-educated physician, and fellow owner George Wythe Daniel, a surgeon from Bristol and relative newcomer to the profession, having qualified in 1840, a few months after William Ellis’s death.

  The process of committing William to Southall Park was relatively straightforward. Under the 1828 Act to Regulate the Care and Treatment of Insane Persons in England, or Madhouse Act, a person could only be detained on the production of two medical certificates of lunacy that had each been signed by a different doctor. This law also required a family member to fill out a lunacy order. Once this paperwork was completed, the next step was to escort William Edmunds to Southall Park. This took place in August 1843 and William did not go without a fight. According to Ann, he had to be placed in a straitjacket and carried out of the family home by two attendants.6 To see her father confined in such a manner must have been a traumatic experience for Christiana. Now 15-years-old, she was aware of the severity of his illness and, in all probability, of the social and financial consequences of his confinement. Like her mother, her only option was to hope that the treatment was successful and that the family could be quickly reunited.

  It was Dr Steward who assessed William on his arrival at Southall Park. Based on his observations, he found William to be a ‘dangerous lunatic’ and later testified that the ‘exciting cause of the malady was the loss of the sale of a house’.7 This was the house in Fort Crescent that William and Ann had unsuccessfully tried to sell in the spring of 1842. Whether Dr Steward heard this directly from William is unknown but it demonstrates the impact of this event on William’s state of mind and gives a clear indication of when he began to display the symptoms of mental illness. Categorised as a dangerous lunatic, it was necessary to have two attendants to care for William on a daily basis and he may have also been separated from the other patients. There are no surviving records relating to the weekly cost of his boarding and care at Southall Park but data from similar institutions shows wide variations, from fifteen shillings to two guineas per week, approximately £50 to £120 per week in modern currency. The price depended primarily on the type of accommodation required: at Droitwich Asylum, for example, a bed on a ward with access to a court for ‘air and exercise’ cost one guinea per week but doubled if the patient lodged in a private apartment.8 If William was boarded separately from the other patients, presumably in an attempt to curtail his violent outbursts then we can assume that his care cost at least one guinea per week. This was a considerable expense to a family who had just lost its breadwinner. With no adult male to take his place, Ann and the children were now reliant on savings and investments while they waited on William’s recovery and return to the family home.