Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [5]
The yin to this yang were the ‘time’ patients. These criminals were all guilty, but not initially insane. After their conviction, they had been given a custodial sentence by the courts, and became prisoners. Sentence length varied: most convicts at Broadmoor were serving somewhere between five and ten years, though their number included murderers who were serving a life sentence, commuted from their appointment with the gallows. The usual passage into Broadmoor for the convict patient was that during their sentence they had become insane, and therefore in need of treatment in an asylum. Those with lesser sentences tended to be farmed out to the county asylum network, with Broadmoor reserved only for the more truculent types. The second way in, somewhat rarer, was that they faced the death penalty, and the Home Secretary had ordered a special inquiry into their sanity. A number of murderers were respited to Broadmoor’s care in this way. Usually they retained the guilty verdict, such as Mary Ann Parr; exceptionally they might become an innocent ‘pleasure’ patient instead, such as Christiana Edmunds. This escape route from the clutch of death (or even incarceration) might beg the question of whether any fake lunatics were to be found within the walls. Evidence exists that suggests the possibility arose, though also that an attempt to feign mental illness was often without success. Broadmoor’s staff were wise to the possibility of malingerers, and there was a revolving door that returned as many convicts to the prison system as it received; quite apart from which, a sane convict soon discovered that sharing space with the lunatics was not necessarily preferable to the greater rationalities of jail. The more intriguing question to consider is whether any sane murderers cheated the noose. This is an investigation that also reveals a time when mental illness was understood rather differently to how it is today.
For the lunatics were, by definition, insane. Though they were no longer diagnosed as being affected by the moon, they were affected by things that did not so affect the other, non-lunatic people. There was an element of mystery about their disease, something intangible about how it made effect upon their bodies. The word ‘lunatic’ has itself become a somewhat guilty word of late, an incorrect way of describing a sufferer from mental illness. This seems a shame: the word is ripe for reclaiming by those afflicted by the moon. It is a word of great power, and potentially empowerment. It aptly conveys the loss of control and influence over one’s actions to forces both outside our control, and not fully understood.
The Victorian definitions of insanity were different to our own, though they recognised the same phenomena. I have already written about the idea of ‘moral’ and ‘physical’ causes, something which only began to die out as the nineteenth century drew to a close. As far as the doctors were concerned, these causes then manifested themselves in defined diseases, each of which might be inferred by observing the patient’s habits, as well as through interview.
These diseases are still recognisable today: mania, melancholia, dementia. Monomania was an obsession with a single subject; amentia, absence of mind, would be described as learning disabilities, now recognised as something completely separate from mental illness. To these cognitive deficiencies, the Victorians added the concept of moral insanity. This was a disease free of delusions, but where the mind was unable to think and behave properly as it should. Although it did not fit the modern term of psychopath, itself a rather overworked word, it is perhaps the nearest to it that the Victorians acknowledged. Of course, for all these diseases, it was not sufficient to merely be a sufferer for a plea of insanity