Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [4]
Around a quarter of the men and 40% of the women were murderers; many others had attempted to kill. Otherwise, the average patient had probably been caught stealing, or, if he was male, setting fire to something. There were sex offenders too amongst the men, including paedophiles and those who had committed bestial acts. Those were all demonstrably serious offences. The law though, could pass a pleasure sentence for any crime, with the result that a relatively few patients were also treated at Her Majesty’s Pleasure on what appear to be more trivial matters, such as vagrancy, sending threatening letters or even attempting suicide.
Most of the men had been labourers or tradesmen in their previous lives, though around one in ten had served in the forces. The latter figure included soldiers and sailors who had seen actions in the campaigns of Empire across the globe. The professional class was represented too, including by patients such as Dadd, with his intellectual and artistic background. In contrast, most of the women were housewives or labourers, with comparatively few women coming from more privileged backgrounds. The suggestion has been made that, since many women had attacked their own children, the middle class Victorian lady was not likely to be found at Broadmoor. Any murderous tendencies such a lady might have had would have been deflected by her distant relationship with her offspring, and thus thwarted by the presence of the nanny.
The poorer nature of the female class is perhaps reflected in the fact that while around two-thirds of the men were married, fewer than half the women were. These were workers more often than homemakers. There was a disparity in education too: most of the men could read and write, but only a third of the women could.
Attempts were made to categorise the patients, much as diagnoses might be made today. One of the tasks that befell the Victorian doctor in lunacy was to ascribe a ‘cause of insanity’ to each case. Sometimes these were what were termed as moral circumstances, such as: intemperance and vice; religious excitement; being unlucky in love; anxiety; and poverty. Yet even with the Victorians’ fondness for morality, most causes were assigned to physical conditions, even if these were not fully understood, such as fever, head injuries and childbirth. Patients were also categorised by the activity that they undertook as part of their treatment. And, although the popular conception is that the Victorian asylum was a house of raving madmen, in reality around a third of the patients were well enough either to be employed in the Asylum or in its farm.
***
If that serves to give a flavour of who was within the walls, it does not answer the question of how they came to be there. In keeping with the nature of Broadmoor, this question has both a legal and a medical side to the response. These twin tacks are reflected in the separate elements both of the name given to the Asylum, and the epithet given to the patients: ‘criminal’ and ‘lunatic’.
That the patients were all criminals is down to their judicial history. Every patient had been arrested for a crime, and then dealt with by the courts. Most of these had been found ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ (at least until 1883, when the standard form became ‘guilty, but insane’, in a vain hope to deter lunatics from their actions by denying them innocence), just as James Hadfield had been so found in 1800. These were the ‘pleasure’ men and women, destined to remain in Crowthorne until what was now Her Majesty’s Pleasure was known. Although the balance varied, roughly two-thirds of the patient population at any time were ‘pleasure’. These patients had been declared insane usually at their trial or before it. Some patients did not even get as far as making a plea,