Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [28]
She died nine months later on 19th September 1907, aged 78. The cause of death was given as senile decay, or old age.
Edmunds had a lasting effect on many of the professionals around her. Her case had been notable, and Dr George Blandford used it to illustrate his book Insanity and its Treatment, quoting Dr Orange’s original report on Edmunds. In 1892, Blandford was preparing a new edition of his book, and wrote to Nicolson, Orange’s successor, asking if he could have an update on how Edmunds had changed during her twenty years at Broadmoor. Dr Nicolson replied that he had seen no change in Edmunds during the fifteen and a half years that he had known her.
Most significantly, hers was apparently the first capital trial witnessed by the great English barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall. Marshall Hall would later make a name for himself by taking on the defence case in a number of high profile English murder trials, earning himself the title of ‘The Great Defender’. Another Brighton resident, he was only thirteen at the time of Edmunds’s trial, but it is generally accepted that he joined other spectators at the Brighton Police Court hearings, and perhaps he was captivated by the undoubted sense of legal theatre which surrounded Edmunds and her woman in black persona.
This sense of performance was something that attached itself to Edmunds, and as a result her case has leant itself to dramatisation. She was the subject of an ITV Saturday Night Theatre film as part of its Wicked Women season in 1970, where Anna Massey starred as Edmunds. The story has also been broadcast as The Great Chocolate Murders on BBC Radio 4 in 2006, and recently become part of Steve Hennessy’s series of Broadmoor plays.
In Brighton, Christiana and the other characters in her story are still well-known and used regularly in written or dramatic works. The facts of the case have become a popular path travelled by those interested in Victorian true crime. The facts have told a story, though still an incomplete one, for Edmunds leaves behind a sense of mystery in terms of her motivation. She is a character who always seems within grasp and then disappears beyond reach. She never denied her actions, nor offered up an explanation of what she was trying to achieve.
She was certainly a slave to adulation, and must have thrived on the publicity that her criminal actions generated. She must also have enjoyed the secrecy attached to affair on which she embarked with her doctor neighbour. Perhaps her motive was no more than to enjoy all these experiences. It is unclear whether she wanted to have Dr Beard or to ruin him, and there is no firm evidence that she ever sought to correspond with him again after August 1871. It is, though, too neat an ending to conclude simply that all was vanity with her: that this unusual woman can be reduced to a female stereotype, a frustrated spinster whose desires eventually destroyed her. Not enough of her survives in the records to be able to see the true Christiana, and she has left us with only shards of the mirror containing her reflection. The search to discover the Venus of Broadmoor goes on.
Broadmoor Babies
Broadmoor was no different to any other institution which housed women of childbearing age. Like a workhouse, a prison or a charitable refuge, it admitted women on a series of set criteria, regardless of their physical condition. The same was true equally of the county and city asylums which had sprung up during the nineteenth century, though with one notable difference. Although the average local asylum would have plenty of patients who had just experienced childbirth, those asylums very rarely received women who were pregnant, and who went on to have their babies within the institution. Generally, asylums were seen as somewhere to be avoided during pregnancy. Broadmoor, by comparison, showed its judicial side in these circumstances. As its patients had been deprived of choice in this matter in favour of direction, it had a small,