Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [13]
Sources indicate that there is further correspondence from Haydon elsewhere to suggest that Oxford later changed his name to John Freeman, and published a book called Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life in 1888. Certainly the book exists, but there is nothing in the Broadmoor archive which confirms that he was its author. These other sources quote Haydon as reporting that Oxford was a house painter by trade (carrying on the skills he learnt in hospital) and had married at some point before 1888. Oxford’s suggested date of death is 1900.
Queen Victoria suffered several other assassination attempts during her reign, mostly from subjects who, if not legally insane, were certainly considered by the general population to be mad. One of those was another Broadmoor patient, Roderick MacLean, who shot at her at Windsor Railway Station on 2nd March 1882. MacLean was sent to Broadmoor after his trial, but unlike Oxford he did not recover, and remained there until his death in 1921. It was MacLean’s case that resulted in a change in sentence for those found to be criminal lunatics, from the traditional ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’, to the more condemnatory ‘guilty, but insane’. The motivation for the law change is always levelled at the Queen’s response to MacLean’s not guilty verdict: ‘Insane he may have been, but not guilty he most certainly was not, as I saw him fire the pistol myself.’ This is not entirely true: the Queen did not see MacLean shoot, though she did hear the report of his pistol. However, her displeasure at MacLean’s innocence was real, and she pressurised Prime Minister Gladstone to change the law. It is unclear exactly what Victoria hoped to achieve by this, though she alluded to the view that if Edward Oxford had been hanged all those years ago, it might have deterred those potential regicides who came after him. Forty years of being shot at had not mellowed Her Majesty.
Richard Dadd:
Artist of Repute
For many years, Dadd has been perhaps the most celebrated Victorian resident of Broadmoor. An artist of some repute, the quality of his fairy paintings was acknowledged during his lifetime, and he continued to paint remarkable works during his time in asylums. Many of these works survive, and quite apart from any sensational interest in Dadd’s circumstances, it is acknowledged that Dadd possessed a rare talent.
His artistic endeavours had benefitted from conducive surroundings. Dadd’s father, Robert, was an intellectual man, a chemist and the first curator of the Chatham and Rochester Literary and Philosophical Institution’s museum, and Dadd himself attended The King’s School at Rochester. When he was seventeen, the family moved to London, and at nineteen he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools where he completed his training as an artist.
Dadd had been born on 1st August 1817 in Chatham. He was the fourth of seven children borne by his mother Mary, a total of four of whom would eventually die insane. The young Dadd was influenced by both literary and classical themes, and by the early 1840s had begun to create the fairy paintings for which he would become best known. In due course, his work attracted the patronage of Sir Thomas Phillips, a solicitor from South Wales who had been knighted for his part in ending a Chartist riot, and who had money to burn. Phillips decided that he wished to undertake the Grand Tour of classical sites across Europe, and he recruited Dadd to accompany him as his personal artist, and draw what they saw.
They began their journey in July 1842, travelling first through Belgium, Germany and Switzerland before reaching Italy, then moving on to Greece, Turkey and Palestine. Dadd seemed to enjoy the tour, and wrote various letters home detailing his wonderful experiences. He was fascinated both by the scenery he encountered and the people he met, and an internal record of these