English Horror Story: Asylum

Patients in a Victorian Asylum (from the BBC).

Part of Dracula is set in an insane asylum because they were definitely scary! Bram Stoker used to visit them with the actress, Ellen Terry. She was studying for roles, or something, but visiting the asylum to look at the lunatics once a week was a disturbingly popular Victorian pastime, as evidenced by the portraits Henry Hering took of patients in the late 1850s.

Eliza Camplin

Eliza Camplin's portrait is decidedly posed. She didn't like the dress she was wearing, and insisted on sitting with a book (which she is holding upside-down).

The photos of Harriet Jordan are also interesting.

Harriet Jordan, diagnosed with mania.

Harriet Jordan, a few months later.

I wonder if Jordan was pulling herself together because she wanted to get out of there.

Hering took his photos at Bethlem Hospital, and Stoker gives us the impression of a great big asylum, but most people 'diagnosed' with Victorian mental conditions were simply locked away in the private homes of non-medical men, who set up to profit from these arrangements. Families paid for secrecy and discretion.

Hospitals used padded rooms to keep patients from injuring themselves.

Photo by Henry Hering.

Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the Victorian mental asylum was how easily women could end up there. London's most successful female journalist and newspaper editor wound up in one after her husband died because her family didn't like her and wanted her money.

Women were thought to be at particular risk of mental illness caused by supposed disorders of the reproductive system. Cases of melancholia associated with the menopause were treated with leeches to the pubis. The male doctors of the day saw ‘hysteria’ – from the Latin for womb – everywhere; almost any form of behaviour, such as excited chattering with other women, could be diagnosed as hysteria. - Wendy Wallace

Photo by Henry Hering.

I must admit that I felt a bit hypocritical selecting these photos to share, after mocking Stoker for his asylum tourism. In a way, we are all becoming asylum tourists by scrolling through this blog, but the images haunt me because of the deep sense of empathy and sadness I feel for each of the patients portrayed.

I'd venture to say that these people were lucky to end up in Bethlem - not in some fake doctor's private home.

More photos by Henry Hering

Though not all of Hering's photos are women, women were the primary subjects of psychiatric care that focused on sexual disorders.

Treatments included: calomel (which was really just mercury); antimony (a chemical we now use in fire retardants) to keep patients in a constant state of nausea (if they were nauseous, they were less likely to be violent); cold baths; cold showers; cold applications to the uterus (I don't even want to think how that was arranged); I personally prefer cycling for the insane. Electric shock therapy, and the lobotomy were both also invented during this time as a form of treatment for mental patients.

Cycling for the Insane' was an article published in a late-Victorian medical journal about the benefits of cycling for mental health patients. It reflects a movement to treat medical problems with moral solutions, a trend also reflected in the number of institutions established and constructed during the nineteenth century.

Doctors working in these mental institutions exaggerated the success of their methods. More patients poured in. By the 1890s, most died there.

Many mental hospitals closed in the 1970s and 1980s. This was due to pressure from the antipsychiatry movement, feminist criticism, ex-patient activism and political suspicion of large, unaccountable institutions. - The Science Museum

Throughout October 2014, I will be sharing the horror stories of 1890s London. Check back often!

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The Most Haunted House in London... or not?

The haunted upper floor of the headquarters for Maggs Bros Rare bookseller have been out-of-bounds since the 1950s, and one room in the attic is said to be so haunted that it has driven at least two men to their death through 'fits.'

The four-storey house at 50 Berkeley Square was built around the end of the eighteenth century. It housed Prime Minister George Canning. Then the Viscount Bearsted, bought the house, and rented it out. It was resold, and eventually purchased in 1937 by Maggs Bros, a firm of antiquarian book dealers.

From Charles Harper's
Haunted Houses (1907).

Alternately called the most haunted house in London, and not haunted at all, the original source of the specter is said to be the spirit of a tormented young woman, who threw herself out of the top-storey window, to escape the abuse of her uncle.

According to Charles Harper the haunting of the house in Berkeley Square was known throughout London, and even attracted tourists of the supernatural. Harper wrote in 1913 that:

There is quite a literature accumulated around No. 50, and even in the staid pages of  Notes and Queries the questions of "Haunted or not haunted? and if so, by what or whom?" have been debated. It seems that a Something or Other, very terrible indeed, haunts, or did haunt, a particular room. This unnamed Raw Head and Bloody Bones, or whatever it is, has been sufficiently awful to have caused the death, in convulsions, of at least two foolhardy persons who have dared to sleep in that chamber.

Harper goes on to describe a case that was reported in 1887.

The story is told of one who was not to be deterred by the fate of an earlier victim. He was skeptical and practical as well. Before retiring to bed he gave some parting instructions to those who occupied the rest of the house. "If I ring once," said he, "take no notice, for I might perhaps be only nervous, without due cause, but if I ring twice, come to me."

He should have chosen to signal with a second ring if all was not well.

They bade him good-night. When the clock struck twelve they heard a faint ring, followed by a tremendous peal, and on opening the door, they found the unfortunate man in a fit. He died, without ever being able to reveal what It was.

Harper talks about how past owners had to pay people to live in the house so that it wouldn't sit empty.

You can read Haprer's Haunted Houses: Tales of the Supernatural: With Some Account of Hereditary Curses and Family Legends (1907) for free online.

Throughout October 2014, I will be sharing the horror stories of 1890s London. Check back often!
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The Lambeth Poisoner

Not every Canadian, who moved to London, was as wonderful as Robbie Ross. One was the Lambeth Poisoner. Dr. Thomas Neill Cream was born in Glasgow, raised in rural Quebec, and attended to McGill University.

At age 26, he married Flora Brooks in a shotgun wedding; her family forced him to the church at gunpoint (and Canadians are usually very nice people). She was pregnant, and the abortion he performed almost killed her. They went to London, so he could attend medical school, and she died of consumption a year later, or did she?

A year after Flora's death, Cream left London England for London Ontario (my hometown). It was 1878. He set up a medical practice, and had an affair with Kate Gardner.

London, Ontario, 1878.

She turned up dead in the alley behind his office, pregnant and poisoned by chloroform.

Cream claimed a prominent local business man got Gardner pregnant, but suspicions mounted. When he was accused of both murder and blackmail, he fled to the States.

Abortions were Cream's specialty. Before long, he set up a new practice outside Chicago's red-light district. Abortions were illegal in Chicago. In August 1880, Mary Anne Faulkner died on his operating table, but Cream managed to escape charges. That December, Miss Stack also died after being treated by Cream.

A drawing titled
“The Genius of Advertising”
from an 1880 issue of the
National Police Gazette
shows men outside a
brothel gazing at pictures
of some of the attractions
awaiting them inside
(photo via The New York Times)

This time, Cream blamed the pharmacist, and tried to blackmail him.

Cream lost another patient in July 1881, when Daniel Stott died of strychnine poisoning, after seeing Cream for his epilepsy. Stott's death was initially attributed to natural causes, but after the pharmacist refused to be blackmailed, Cream wrote to the coroner.

The police arrested Cream and Mrs. Julia A. (Abbey) Stott, Stott's wife, who was having an affair with Cream and got the poison from him to get her husband out of their way. When push turned to shove, she provided the evidence against Cream to avoid going to jail. Cream was found guilty and sentenced to life in Joliet Prison.

One night, people secretly erected a tombstone at Stott's grave that read 'Daniel Stott Died June 12, 1881 Aged 61 Years, poisoned by his wife and Dr. Cream.'

In July 1891, Governor Joseph W. Fifer commuted Cream's sentence after Cream's brother pleaded for leniency (probably with bribes), and Cream was released from prison.

Cream and his brother had inherited money from their father's death, and Cream used this to go back to England. He set up residence at 103 Lambeth Palace Road. It sounds nice, but Lambeth was full of poverty at the time, not unlike Chicago's red-light district.

On 13 October 1891, 19 year-old Ellen "Nellie" Donworth accepted a drink from Cream. She fell ill the next day and died three days later from strychnine poisoning. In spite of Stott's death, Cream had developed a pattern of poisoning women, and trying to profit from their deaths. During Donworth's inquest, he wrote the coroner hoping for a £300,000 reward if he could name the killer. He was trying to blackmail W. F. D. Smith, owner of the W H Smith bookstalls.

On 20 October, Cream met 27-year-old Matilda Clover. She died the next morning. Initially, the coroner thought the cause was alcoholism.

Cream took a holiday, and went to Canada, but he'd be back.

Dr. Thomas Neill Cream

On 11 April 1892, Cream met 21 year-old Alice Marsh, and 18 year-old Emma Shrivell. He talked his way into their rooms, and gave them each bottles of Guinness. He left before the strychnine  took effect. Both women died.

The hunt for the Lambeth Poisoner had been on since Donworth's death. Cream didn't know that they didn't suspect murder, when he anonymously wrote to them - offering to reveal the killer. The police were convinced that the author of the letter was the serial killer, already referred to in the papers as 'the Lambeth Poisoner.'

Soon, Cream ran into a police officer from New York City, on holiday in London. The officer had heard of the Lambeth poisoner and was interested in the case, so Cream gave him a murder tour, pointing out where each of the victims lived. When the American police officer mentioned this tour to a British police officer, they were right to be suspicious, and Scotland Yard put Cream under surveillance, which revealed Cream's affinity for prostitutes.

It didn't take long for them to find out about Cream's criminal past, and on 13 July 1892, Cream was arrested for the murder of Matilda Clover.

Newspapers from the period refer to him as Dr. Neill because he insisted that was his name, presumably to try to distance himself from his criminal past.

He was sentenced to death in October that year.

On 15 November, Cream was hanged at Newgate Prison by James Billington. Billington claimed that Cream's last words on the scaffold were "I am Jack The..."

Cream was an active serial killer longer than Jack the Ripper was, but his desire to be associated with the famous murderer further reveals the narcissistic nature of Cream's sadistic psychopathy.

Throughout October 2014, I will be sharing the horror stories of 1890s London. Check back often!

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The Murder of Mrs and Baby Hogg

Arthur Conan Doyle once speculated that Jack the Ripper may have been a woman, who could have posed as a midwife and get away with wearing bloody clothes out of doors. It was then suggested that Jill the Ripper could have been Mary Pearcey, the killer of Phoebe Hogg, and her infant daughter, Phoebe Hogg.

Pearcey was convicted of killing her lover's wife and child on 24 October 1890, and executed for the crime two days before Christmas the same year.

Pearcey was born Mary Eleanor Wheeler in 1866. She assumed the name Pearcey after living with a man of that name, who left her because of infidelity. Later, she moved in with the furniture mover, Frank Hogg, who also had a habit of being unfaithful.

Mrs. Phoebe Hogg

When his other lover, Phoebe Styles, became pregnant, he married her. Pearcey insisted upon it. Their little polyamorous family lived in Kentish Town, London, where little Phoebe Hogg was born.

Some eighteen months later, a neighbour heard screaming, and violent fighting in the house. Several hours later, Mrs. Hogg's body was found on a rubbish pile in Hampstead. Her skull was crushed, and her head nearly severed from her body. About a mile away, baby Phoebe's black perambulator was found, its cushions soaked with blood.

Baby Phoebe's perambulator.

Baby Phoebe was found dead in Finchley, suffocated.

That night, witnesses had seen Pearcey pushing the perambulator around London.

Upon searching her house, the police found blood spattered on the walls, ceiling, a skirt, an apron, everywhere... blood stains on a poker and a carving knife.

When the police asked her about it, Pearcey said she "had a problem with mice and was trying to kill them." Sir Melville Macnaghten wrote that Ms. Pearcey would later chant, "Killing mice, killing mice, killing mice," in answer to their questions.

Wax figure of Mary Pearcey. The writing on the wall:
"In a fit of jealousy Mrs. Pearcy killed Mrs. Hogg and
and her baby in the back kitchen. She put the bodies
into a pram and wheeled them to Haverstock Hill.

With her chant, and blood filled perambulator, Pearcey became one of the scariest things in London in 1890. A media sensation, Madame Tussauds wax museum made a wax figure of Pearcey and placed it in their Chamber of Horrors. They they decorated this exhibit with the actual perambulator of Baby Phoebe, and the contents of Pearcey's kitchen (forensic science was still a Sherlockian wet dream in the 1890s). This exhibit drew an opening night crowd of 30,000 people.

Throughout October 2014, I will be sharing the horror stories of 1890s London. Check back often!

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Bram Stoker's Rules for Cursing

I must tell you beforehand that Mr. Morris doesn’t always speak slang—that is to say, he never does so to strangers or before them, for he is really well educated and has exquisite manners—but he found out that it amused me to hear him talk American slang, and whenever I was present, and there was no one to be shocked, he said such funny things. I am afraid, my dear, he has to invent it all, for it fits exactly into whatever else he has to say. But this is a way slang has. I do not know myself if I shall ever speak slang; I do not know if Arthur likes it, as I have never heard him use any as yet. - Bram Stoker, Dracula

In that passage from Bram Stoker's Dracula, Lucy is writing to Mina. In it, she provides a wonderful peak into late-Victorian usage of colloquial language, from an upper-class woman's perspective. Her description reminds me of when I first had to describe to my daughter the appropriateness of swearing:

"Certain words have the power to hurt people, some of those words also seem to amuse other people, and some of them are appropriate to use some of the time, but you have to be careful when using them. Pay attention to who you are speaking with, and never say anything like that in front of grandma, a teacher, or someone younger than you."

That's why Mr. Morris never speaks slang to strangers. He knows Lucy finds it funny, so he does it to make her laugh. As of yet, Lucy is not sure she will ever find an appropriate situation to use slang.

As a guide to late-Victorian use of slang, this passage is informed by gender and class.

In Dracula, Stoker makes the old seaman speak in a phonetically-spelled Whitby accent, littered with colloquialisms.

“An’ when you said you’d report me for usin’ of obscene language that was ’ittin’ me over the ’ead; but the ’arf-quid made that all right. I weren’t a-goin’ to fight, so I waited for the food, and did with my ’owl as the wolves, and lions, and tigers does. But, Lor’ love yer ’art, now that the old ’ooman has stuck a chunk of her tea-cake in me, an’ rinsed me out with her bloomin’ old teapot, and I’ve lit hup, you may scratch my ears for all you’re worth, and won’t git even a growl out of me. Drive along with your questions. I know what yer a-comin’ at, that ’ere escaped wolf.” - Bram Stoker, Dracula

I've never enjoyed reading phonetically spelled dialects, but this passage adds to what Lucy has to say about colloquial language by offering a working-class male perspective. Even as a working-class man, he recognizes that some words are obscene, though he appears to have developed such a habit of using obscene words that he doesn't always remember to think about his audience when speaking.

Though this is just one late-Victorian writer's perspective on the use of Victorian language, it's something to consider when deciding whether a character you've set in the era would use the word 'fuck.'

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Riches to Rags: the Wilde Stories

Oscar Wilde, Constance Wilde, and one of their sons.

If you've ever been broke, you are probably familiar with the way that it makes you feel, like there's something wrong with you, and the world despises you. Academically, we know this isn't true. Not having money isn't a character fault in and of itself. As the saying goes: "You can't control what happens to, but you can control how you deal with what happens to you."

The Wilde Family make an interesting case study in this phenomena when we look at the lives and misfortunes of Speranza and her two sons, Willie and Oscar Wilde. Each lost a fortune, and each dealt with it differently, with different consequences.

Speranza

Speranza was Dublin's most popular socialite. Her husband was knighted. She lived in the best house. She had the most interesting guests, and the best parties. She loved culture, history, art, and Ireland. Her fortune dried up when she and her husband got caught up in a scandal, the details of which are still controversial. Her husband soon died, leaving her with little money.

In response, she packed up her house, and moved to smaller quarters in London, where she could continue to pursue her art. She did what she could to continue to support her family. She got a little support from her sons for a while, but their lives weren't going well either. She kept trying, until she was too old to try anymore. She continued to host her famous salons, and the most interesting people continued to attend.

Her son, Willie, was an alcoholic though, and alcoholics tend to drag their loved ones down with them, which Willie did. Speranza died in a room full of empty gin bottles, and Willie blamed his brother.

Willie Wilde

Willie also made a noble effort to prevent himself from descending into rags. A few years after he went bankrupt, he married the richest woman in America. That didn't go so well because of his drinking, and he wound up living with his mother, and claiming to take care of her. As you know, from Speranza's story, he didn't do a very good job of that.

After his mother died, he had to find a new place to live. He sold off most of his brother's belongings. He sold his wife's wedding ring. Eventually he died from alcoholism, and few of the wonderfully successful people he once called friends ever mentioned him in their memoirs. The newspaper he was a lead reporter for, at one time, barely mentioned his passing.

Oscar, on the other hand, continually tried to make everyone happy. In a way, that's how he got his money. He became a celebrity before he did anything, just because people liked him so much. His wife had money, which was helpful, and he was good at earning his own money, which he promptly spent on his friends and lovers.

Oscar Wilde's downfall was very public. He went from being a darling to being a demon, and he definitely felt terrible about the impact that this had on all the people he cared about. Oscar realized that we never suffer in isolation, but our suffering impacts everybody around us. His imprisonment, and the backlash against him, hurt his family, his friends, and his business associates. For this, he expressed his remorse.

When Oscar was released from prison, he was broke, worse off than his brother or mother had ever been, but the love that he gave to other people came back to him. His good friends did what they could to help support him, and, though he never really recovered from the losses he sustained at that time in his life, he is remembered with fondness because of the love he spread.

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Images of London in 1898

William Ewart Gladstone died in May 1898. As one of the icons of the Victorian Era, his passing brought the period nearer to its end. He had only been out of office for three years. Yet, the city moved on, post was delivered, the Earl's Court Exhibition featured big. Londoners were interested in all things Egypt.

Midland Railway goods offices at Poplar Dock, London, 1898.

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party from 'Alice in Wonderland'
with Rosa Hersee as Alice and Arthur Elliot as the Hatter
at the Opera Comique Theatre in London, 1898

The Mad Hatter in action (I think Johnny Depp got it right), 1898.

Gladstone's coffin entering Westminster Abbey, London 1898. 

Broad Street Station, 1898.

The Great Wheel, Earl's Court, 1898.

Robert Bosch's first shop outside of Germany. (Circa 1898)

The Great Northern Railway Station in 1898 (later renamed King's Cross).

Changing of the Guard at Tower London, 1898.

First foreign branch of the Swiss Bank opened in London in 1898.

Construction work on the Central Line of the London Underground, 1898.

Aubrey Beardsley 1898.

Acoustic location experiment in London, 1898.

A surgery at University College Hospital Medical School, London, 1898.

A horse hauling a railway wagon at the Midland Wharf at Victoria dock,
London, 1898. Coal was unloaded here onto barges waiting below.

An early recording studio set up in rooms of the Cockburn Hotel, 1898

Poster for the Earl's Court Exhibition, 1898.

The Midway at the Earl's Court Exhibition, 1898.

A zebra-drawn carriage, London, 1898.

London postmen, 1898.

Ella Skyes, photographed in London,
as "a Persian Lady," 1898.

Want more? Go further back to Images of London in 1889, 1890, 1891, 1892,1893,1894, 1895, 1896, and 1897.

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