Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [0]
Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum
Mark Stevens
Copyright Mark Stevens 2011
This edition was published electronically in summer 2011. Most of the stories can also be read on the Berkshire Record Office website, www.berkshirerecordoffice.org.uk/albums/broadmoor. Comments and corrections are welcome: visit the Berkshire Record Office website and click on ‘Contact Us’.
Mark Stevens
c/o The Berkshire Record Office
9 Coley Avenue
Reading
RG1 6AF
Mark Stevens has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Front and rear covers show a photograph of the male staff at Broadmoor, taken to commemorate the retirement of Dr William Orange, 1886. Orange is in the top hat in the centre of the front cover, flanked by his medical staff. Berkshire Record Office reference D/H14/B6/1.
Contents
Preface
Broadmoor Hospital: By Way of Introduction
Edward Oxford: Shooting at Royalty
Richard Dadd: Artist of Repute
William Chester Minor: Man of Words and Letters
Christiana Edmunds: The Venus of Broadmoor
Broadmoor Babies
Escape from Broadmoor
Only Passing Through
Sources
About the Author
Preface
This short collection of stories grew from work to advertise the many personal tales contained in the archive of Broadmoor Hospital. When, in November 2008, the Berkshire Record Office made the archive available for research, it was the first time that the general public could access the historic collections of what was England’s first Criminal Lunatic Asylum. As the person responsible for promoting use of the archive, it fell to me to piece together some stories of the more well-known patients, with the idea that this would raise awareness of the fact that the archive existed, and give researchers an idea of what they could discover about the people who spent time in the Hospital.
This was and is not always a straightforward task. As you might expect, a lot of restrictions for access remain on the archive. Particularly, patients’ medical records are closed for a considerable time. This meant that any publicity had to focus on the Victorian period, and so I began to put together brief biographies of those nineteenth century patients who are already part of public consciousness. Their stories are here: Edward Oxford, Richard Dadd, William Chester Minor and Christiana Edmunds.
However, those are only four patients out of over two thousand admitted before 1901. They are also four patients about whom others have written, and about whom others are more qualified than me to write. So for me, the more interesting thing became how to tell some stories that were not well-known. There is no shortage of such material. You could choose virtually any patient and manage to bring something new to our understanding both of Victorian England, and also about the care and management of the mentally ill.
I chose a couple of things to write about as part of the Berkshire Record Office publicity. Firstly, I felt that the women of Broadmoor needed to be heard, and that Christiana Edmunds was too unusual a case to be representative of that group. On the other hand, a representative female case would have to be a child murderer, and this would potentially lack the redemptive element of the male stories of Oxford, Dadd and Minor, who were all remembered for achieving something despite their illnesses. Being a man, and therefore impressed with all things maternal, I thought that a great achievement of some female patients had been to give birth while they were in Broadmoor, so I decided that I could balance my infanticide narrative by writing about the babies who came into the world through the Asylum, as well as those who had left it. Secondly, I considered that I should not shy away from the non-medical aim of the Asylum, that of being a place of public protection. Rather than dwell on tales of violence and rage, I thought that a more entertaining way to highlight this would be through the concept of