by Jones, Kaye;
While the Edmunds adapted to these changes in their environment, there were great changes in the structure of the household. Shortly after the family’s arrival in Canterbury, the eldest son, William, left the city and headed to university in London to study medicine. He showed great talent in the subject and was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1852. He worked briefly as a surgeon in the army before emigrating to South Africa to start a new life in 1854. He took with him his new wife, Georgiana Harrington, a 36-year-old widow from Chelsea, whom he married weeks before leaving the country. William’s career had been financed by his late father who had set up a trust fund for each of his children. For his sons, he bequeathed an unspecified amount to meet the cost of their education, entrance into a profession and general ‘advancement in the world’.2 But for his daughters, William envisaged a very different life and had not provided financial support for Christiana, Louisa or Mary to enter into a profession. He subscribed to the view that marriage was the only truly acceptable path for a young lady and bequeathed to each daughter one-half of her trust fund on the day of her wedding.3 At the time of the census in 1851, Christiana and Mary were both unmarried and living at home with their mother but Louisa had fled to London in search of a new life. Sometime before 1851 she accepted a position as a governess in the home of Nina Welsh, a merchant’s wife and a native of New York, who now lived in a prestigious development in Camberwell called Champion Hill.
As a lady, Louisa was neither expected nor encouraged to work outside of the home. Victorian society idealised her as a “creature of leisure” who was completely supported by her father or husband4 and who had no need to risk her respectability by earning a wage. Of course, this idealised image was often very different from reality and there were many ladies, like Louisa, who had no male relative on whom they could financially rely. For this reason, the Victorians came to accept the role of governess far more readily than any other profession. After all, this type of work took place inside the home and was the only profession in which being a lady was the requisite.5
By 1850 there were around 20,000 governesses in employment in Britain and they were tasked with educating the daughters of the some of the country’s wealthiest families. The quality of teaching and variety of subjects covered varied from governess to governess, depending entirely on her skills and personal interests. Generally, a governess was expected to teach the basics, like English and arithmetic, alongside genteel accomplishments, like music and languages. She was also expected to act as a chaperone outside of the home and to provide supervision on a daily basis. At Champion Hill, Louisa had three pupils to teach: Nina’s daughter, also called Nina, and her two resident nieces, Petwin and Eliza. The girls were all born in the Honduras and they ranged from 10 to 13 years old. Aside from her siblings, Louisa had no practical experience with children and it is very likely that she encountered some initial difficulties in establishing her authority. The governess’s ambiguous position in the household also set the scene for conflict with her employer, and is neatly summarised by one Victorian commentator: ‘the real discomfort of a governess’s position in a private family arises from the fact that it is undefined. She is not a relation, not a guest, not a mistress, not a servant – but something made up of all. No one knows exactly how to treat her’.6
Amid this uncertainty over her status, Victorian households varied greatly in their treatment of the governess. While some employers respected and cared about their governess, there were many reported cases of disobedience, snobbery and even physical cruelty.7 Without written records, we are left to wonder how Nina Welsh and her children treated the young Louisa and for how long she stayed with the family. But, even in the most amiable environment, working as a governess offered neither prosperity nor permanence. On average, a governess could expect to earn between £20 and £45 per year8, depending on her level of education. This included the cost of bed and board but did not cover any incidental expenses, like laundry and medical care9 and it was thus highly important that a governess saved what money she could. Her position came with no guarantees: she could be dismissed at any time and faced stiff competition in finding a new situation. During times of unemployment, she had only her savings on which to rely and no pension to look forward to in her retirement.10 From 1843, the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution provided assistance to those who were between jobs or who were too old or sick to work, but there was still some way to go to improve the working conditions of the Victorian governess. For Louisa, her new life presented as many challenges as the one she had left behind in Margate but she was determined to make the best of her situation and never returned to live with her family.
Back in Canterbury, Christiana had no intention of following her sister into such a profession. Since the death of her father, she had become increasingly emotional and sensitive and clung to her mother than more than ever. Ann would later report that Christiana would burst into her room at night, claiming that she had a ‘fit of hysteria and could not breathe’.11 By 1853, Ann had become so concerned with her daughter’s behaviour that she sent her to London to see a doctor. He diagnosed Christiana with hysteria, one of the most commonly-experienced ailments of the Victoria era.
Hysteria was categorised as a nervous illness that affected both body and mind and created a wide-range of symptoms, including shortness of breath, muscular spasms, fainting, anxiety, irritability and insomnia. Physicians increasingly came to view hysteria as a female-only ailment because historically, the uterus had been identified as the underlying cause. Even the word hysteria was rooted in this idea, deriving from a Greek word that means ‘that which proceeds from the uterus’. According to the Greek philosopher Plato, the uterus was an animal that roamed inside a woman’s body, causing illness as it moved around. Pain in the abdomen, for example, was caused by a uterine attack on the liver, while feelings of lethargy came from the uterus squeezing the blood vessels that travelled toward the brain.12
The notion of a ‘wandering womb’ that attacked the female body persisted for centuries among physicians. It was only in the midnineteenth century, around the time of Christiana’s diagnosis, that uterine explanations of hysteria begin to fade in prominence.13 Some physicians went so far as to reject the very term hysteria, on the grounds that this uterine connection was unsound. One such person was Frederick Carpenter Skey, a physician specialising in hysteria, who preferred the term ‘local nervous irritation’.14 In place of the wandering womb came new ideas about the causes of hysteria and physicians became particularly interested in the menstrual cycle, for example, and began to study its impact on the hysterical woman.15 In his Treatise on Hysteria, the physician, George Tate, wrote:
Since I have been attentive to cases of hysteria, I have never seen one, either of a simple or of a complex character, in which there did not co-exist distinct traces of a faulty menstruation. There is always some deficiency or depravity of this secretion … I take it to be a justifiable conclusion, that this is a fundamental cause, and that our remedial means ought to be directed to that cause.16
As physicians studied more closely the role of menstruation in creating hysteria, they began to see how dramatically its absence could affect a woman’s state of mind. According to James Cowles Prichard, ‘females … experience a suppression of the catamenia (menstruation), followed in some instances immediately by fits of epilepsy or hysteria, the attacks of which are so sudden as to illustrate the connexion of cause and effect’.17 What especially interested physicians, however, was how the return of menstruation could bring about symptomatic relief: ‘We have already alluded to the case of a young female,’ continued Prichard, ‘who suddenly exclaimed that she was cured of her disorder; her catamenia had flowed spontaneously, and her restoration to sanity was the immediate consequence’.18
In this understanding, then, a woman’s menstrual flow was characterised as an explosive, hysterical energy. This energy was primarily sexual in its nature and controlling it became the key to preven
ting and curing incidences of hysteria in the female population. A central problem, however, was that women had very few opportunities in which to legitimately vent this sexual energy, and, while Victorian society accepted this fact, it was not prepared to change.19
By adhering to the strict codes of acceptable feminine behaviour, Christiana Edmunds had unwittingly caused her own hysteria. Her chastity, modesty and devotion to domesticity, traits that were first developed at Mount Albion House, had created an energy that threatened her physical and mental health. In his famous lecture on hysteria in 1866, Julian Althaus acknowledged that this was a common problem for women of Christiana’s status: ‘[hysteria] is frequent in the higher classes of society, in ladies, who lead an artificial life, who do nothing, whose every wish or whim is often gratified as soon as formed’. His solution to these cases of hysteria was ‘real honest work’ or ‘the pursuance of an object in life’, not in a profession, but rather ‘the education of children or some charitable undertaking’.20
The idea that Christiana might channel her nervous energy into philanthropy was not a realistic one. On her return from London, her symptoms of hysteria had intensified and she became paralysed on one side of her body and in her feet.21 Paralysis was a common symptom of hysteria that tended to occur after an attack of ‘painful emotions’. Episodes of paralysis varied enormously in their intensity and duration among patients but physicians noticed that the left side of the body and the legs were most frequently reported.22 During Christiana’s attack of paralysis, she was attended by a surgeon called Mr Prettyman who had a number of remedies with which to treat his new patient. First of all, Prettyman had to understand and remove the root cause, or the ‘painful emotion’, which had caused her bout of hysteria. For Christiana, this was likely the grief she felt after the loss of her father or perhaps the family’s upheaval to Canterbury in 1847. Once the root cause was identified, it was Mr Prettyman’s job to ‘rouse the will’ of his patient by promoting her optimism and encouraging the support of those around her. He might even suggest a change of scenery or air to improve her overall mood. Next, he might focus on Christian’s constitution. If she appeared pale and anaemic, he would recommend a diet rich in milk, poultry, wine and chocolate, alongside a cold sponge bath in the morning and two to three doses of iron each day. Conversely, if her complexion was ruddy, he advised bland food, saline remedies, regular warm baths and occasional blood-letting.23
With her diet and constitution in order, Mr Prettyman could now turn to Christiana’s bodily functions, a source of much interest among physicians. He enquired about the frequency of her bowel movements and how often she passed urine. If these were not in ‘proper order’, he might then prescribe a course of laxatives or emetics.24 Menstruation was considered the most important bodily function of a female patient and Christiana could expect to be questioned at length on the frequency and character of her periods. Given her diagnosis of hysteria, it is likely that her menstruation was irregular, if at all present, during her illness in 1853, and that her doctor sought to bring about its return and thus dispel her hysterical energy.
Writing in 1840, the Scottish physician, Alexander Tweedie, outlined a number of methods that could be used to induce menstruation in the hysterical woman. The first was to place leeches on the labia or thighs as the patient approached her usual time of menstruation, while also submerging her feet in a bath of mustard. If this method proved unsuccessful, Dr Tweedie recommended a single dose of a mixture made from aloe, digitalis (a foxglove) and calomel, (mercury chloride), followed by a laxative. This was to be followed by a pill containing aloe, myrrh and galbanum, a type of resin, twice daily, until menstruation returned. If both of these methods failed, Dr Tweedie turned to a guaranteed solution: the transmission of an electrical charge through the patient’s pelvis to kick-start an ‘evacuation’.25
Dr Tweedie was not the only physician to recommend the use of electricity to treat hysteria and its troublesome symptoms. In fact, electrotherapy, or galvanism as it was known, was so popular by the 1840s that there were a plethora of galvanic machines on the market. These machines contained a small battery that discharged a continuous current of electricity. A piston controlled the current’s intensity and two conductors enabled the user to direct the electricity to any part of the body. Galvanic belts, worn around the patient’s trunk, and even rings and ear plates became fashionable accessories in the battle against hysteria. One of galvanism’s staunchest supporters was Thomas Laycock, a physician who rose to become one of era’s leading voices on female nervous diseases. Like Tweedie, Laycock favoured the use of galvanism above any method of treatment but believed that hysteria was caused by the increasing immorality and sexualisation of ladies and had little do with the menstruation: ‘Young females of the same age, and influenced by the same novel feelings towards the opposite sex, cannot associate together in public schools without serious risk of exciting the passions, and of being led to indulge in practices injurious to both body and mind’. As a result, ‘the young female returns from school to her home, a hysterical, wayward, capricious girl; imbecile in mind, habits and pursuits; prone to hysteric paroxysms upon any unusual mental excitement’.26
Laycock was not alone in the view that intense sexual feelings created the symptoms of hysteria and, in expressing this opinion, he echoed ideas that were centuries old. This belief had given rise to genital massage, one of the most notorious treatments of the nineteenth century. The practice of massaging a woman to orgasm to relieve her sexual energy and thus cure her hysteria dated back to the time of Galen but was practiced on an unprecedented scale by the Victorians. In fact, the demand for this treatment was so high that it prompted the invention of the vibrator, not as a tool for sexual pleasure but as a labour-saving device for physicians.27
As genital massage and galvanism were so routinely used by physicians in the mid-nineteenth century, it is not unreasonable to suggest that these methods were employed as part of Christiana’s treatment. Whatever the case, her treatment proved unsuccessful and she continued to experience bouts of hysteria throughout the course of her adult life. She was not the only woman in the Edmunds family to suffer either. Her sister, Louisa, was plagued by hysteria and depression as an adult, though there are no records to indicate the extent or severity of her symptoms.28 That Louisa continued to work in London as a governess throughout the 1850s, however, suggests that she was able to conceal or control her symptoms during this period, well enough to maintain her employment.
A year or so after Christiana’s visit to London, her youngest brother, Arthur, began to display some worrying symptoms. His mood became increasingly sombre, often angry, and he started to have seizures. Shortly before the onset of these symptoms, Arthur had received a blow to the head but it was not severe enough to bring about such changes, according to his mother.29 Nevertheless, she related this incident to the family physician who diagnosed Arthur with epilepsy. This common neurological disorder is characterised by a tendency to have seizures and was first recognised by the Ancient Babylonians who believed that it was caused by an evil spirit. This supernatural explanation persisted well into the eighteenth century but by the Victorian period, the focus had changed and physicians claimed that epilepsy was the result of excessive masturbation. According to the Swiss-born physician, Samuel Auguste Tissot: ‘too great a quantity of semen being lost in the natural course produces very direful effects: but they are still more dreadful, when the same quantity has been dissipated in an unnatural manner’. This view went unchallenged throughout the century, prompting the French physician, Jean Alfred Fournier, to declare that ‘one of the nervous affections which onanism occasions most frequently is epilepsy … There are very few physicians who have not observed cases where it has been produced, maintained or aggravated by the practice of this pernicious habit’.30
The notion that excessive masturbation caused epilepsy has long been defunct but there is another possible explanation for the sudden onset of seizures
in the young Arthur Edmunds and it relates to the death of his father from general paralysis in 1847. As mentioned previously, the German physicians, Esmarch and Jessen, demonstrated a causal relationship between syphilis and general paralysis in 1857, but their findings were not accepted by the medical establishment. Instead, physicians continued to argue that general paralysis was the result of environmental factors, like intemperance and promiscuity.31 But, in 1913, the Japanese bacteriologist, Hideyo Noguchi, found syphilis in the brains of general paralysis patients,32 thereby providing irrefutable proof of their causal relationship.
Whether William Edmunds knew he had syphilis is open to speculation because this highly contagious bacterial disease has very mild symptoms that are easy to overlook. William may not have noticed the small and painless chancre which develops in the weeks after infection or the non-itchy skin rash, weight loss and flu-like symptoms which characterise the second stage of this disease. Even if William became concerned by these symptoms, and received the proper diagnosis, there was no cure for syphilis in the nineteenth century. Doctors did, however, have a number of treatment options at their disposal, including cauterisation of the chancre or pills and potions made from mercury. The latter quickly became a popular method of choice but it was completely ineffective and came with a range of nasty side-effects, like tooth loss and gastro-intestinal problems. For bachelors, some doctors offered no treatment at all and instead advised their patients to simply wait a few years before marriage, in the belief that syphilis would eventually go away. 33 Of course, this view of syphilis is inherently flawed. When left untreated, the disease enters a latent phase in which the patients experiences no symptoms but remains contagious for the first year. Latency can last for many years before the patient reaches the third and most dangerous phase: tertiary syphilis and disorders like general paralysis of the insane. The introduction of antibiotics in the early twentieth century has rapidly reduced the number of people who reach this final phase but, for the Victorians, tertiary syphilis was a very real and very frightening possibility.
