Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [16]
Despite his continuing delusions, Dadd was evidently no bother to the medical authorities. He remained insane, but in other respects simply became another old man, occasionally wandering about the grounds to watch the other patients playing cricket. His disappearance underneath the Asylum radar is evidenced by the fact that no entries were made on his case for a whole seven years, from 1878 until 1885, at which point he was removed to the infirmary in Broadmoor’s Block 3 with what proved to be his final illness. It was back to where Dadd had spent his first years in Broadmoor. There is evidence to suggest that he was later moved to Block 2, the ‘privilege’ block, where the better behaved patients were allowed more freedom, as he appears to have been observed in a room there by a journalist touring the Asylum in the early 1880s.
Wherever he spent most of his days, he stayed in the infirmary from June 1885 until his death on the evening of 8th January 1886, aged 68, from tuberculosis. The end had been quite quick, with Dadd still getting up and about until a week before he died. He was buried at Broadmoor. In common with a significant proportion of Asylum patients, he had outlived most of his immediate family, and there were no immediate relatives left to mourn his passing. There are a few papers in his Broadmoor file which relate to the dispersal of his estate, though the file adds that various letters from solicitors had been taken from it by the Broadmoor steward, sadly never to be returned.
Dadd’s reputation was recognised during his lifetime, though due to his situation he was not particularly celebrated and only rarely exhibited. His passing was not noted at the time of his death, and it was only in 1974 that the first major exhibition of his work was curated, at The Tate. A substantial collection of his work is held at the Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum in south east London, which includes a number of paintings that remained at Broadmoor after Dadd’s death. One of his most significant works from Bethlem, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, is now on permanent display at Tate Britain in London. A lost work, The Artists’ Halt in the Desert, was discovered in 1987 during filming for the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow and is now in The British Museum. Interest in Dadd’s work only appears to deepen with time, and there seems little chance that this particular Victorian artist will ever be forgotten.
William Chester Minor:
Man of Words and Letters
Probably Dadd’s rival for the crown of best-known Victorian Broadmoorite is Dr Minor, American medic, murderer and contributor to the first Oxford English Dictionary. Minor was the subject of Simon Winchester’s best-selling book The Surgeon of Crowthorne, which is an entertaining and thorough account of his life, and should be easily found by anyone wishing to explore Minor’s story in greater detail.
Winchester records Minor’s birth as having been in June 1834 in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. He was the son of missionaries, and one of two children. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was three, and his father subsequently remarried and had a second family. Minor remained in the east with this extended brood until his father sent him to live with his uncle in New Haven, Connecticut, when Minor reached the age of fourteen.
Once in the US, he attended Yale University, where he studied medicine. He graduated in 1863, and joined the Union Army as a surgeon in the middle of the American Civil War. Winchester says that Minor was sent into action at the awful and bloody Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, and that this experience haunted him. At Minor’s trial,