Here’s another piece I wrote during my Arvon creative writing week for history writers. I’ve taken some old research and done something new with it. The aim of this piece was to be present in the text as a character, talking about myself and reflecting on my own experiences. The other aims were to fill the piece with changes of ‘texture’, as our tutor called it. It seems an odd word, but it makes sense: a piece of writing needs changes of pace, tone, point of view, etc., otherwise the reader feels it’s all too samey and they get bored. A third aim was to try to include dialogue or reported speech, though I only made a token gesture at that.
Death in the Archives
“The commissioners in lunacy! It sounds like something out of Orwell!” said my friend.
I was attempting to explain the history of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, as I so often did. As soon as I mentioned my current job, working as the archivist for Broadmoor, people rushed in with their misconceptions about the place. “Did they chain them up? Did they torture the patients?” and most irritatingly of all, “They used to lock up all the un-married mothers in asylums, didn’t they?”
But before I started my contract as the Broadmoor archivist, I had the same ideas. Since then, I had spent my days immersed in the world of the asylum, pulling open crate after crate of old records; squinting over indecipherable names and hastily scrawled dates; and carefully entering information onto a database. There were thick, blue volumes of annual reports with their endless tables of statistics, and admission books and patient files. Half the patient files had been kept in an attic and were damp and mouldy. The other half had been stored in an attic and were covered with bird shit, and so fragile that their thin, blue paper sometimes crumbled to dust in my hands.
The admission books gave the name, age, sex, mental disorder and crime of the patients. Many of the patients were murderers, so this made dismal reading. An endless catalogue of human tragedy, reduced to the length of a haiku. Almost every page featured a woman who had murdered her own children. And the descriptions of these incidents, though short, were ghastly. August to December 1885, for example, revealed the following stories. Sarah Ann Hanson killed her five month-old baby by cutting its throat with a razor; Margaret Hibbert drowned her two children in the bath; Isabella Hewson hanged her two year-old illegitimate child; Mary Bickrell smothered her children, aged ten and three in their bed; Martha Homard killed her four month-old baby by hitting it in the neck with a bill hook; Ann Perry drowned her three year-old child in a pond. Every year Broadmoor recorded a similar litany of horrible child deaths: boiled in a wash pot; burnt on the fire; thrown out of windows, off bridges or onto railway lines; stabbed in the head with scissors; poisoned; beaten to death with a shovel.
I tried to view all this violence as though it were no more than a Tom and Gerry cartoon, in which archaic household objects were turned into makeshift weapons, and dead children popped right back to life again. But the children remained dead. Their mothers were dead, too, by now. It occurred to me that as an archivist, I dealt with hundreds of dead people every day. My job suddenly seemed horrifically morbid. I spent most of my time in a windowless basement room, folding patient case files into acid-free folders, and they were so dirty I had to wear sweaty plastic gloves or risk getting a skin infection. Most of the time I felt bored and lonely, and all those dead people didn’t help. I’d had more fun washing dishes in the university canteen.
And yet all these dead people were important. It was sad they’d been forgotten about. It was sad that their story had been swept up into a collective tale of comically prudish Victoriana, tinged with gothic horror. The truth was much worse than the fiction, but at least the truth has a kind of dignity to it.
The truth is, Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum opened its doors to its first patients in May 1863. They were all women. The men’s wing wasn’t even finished. They were herded off the train at Crowthorne and hastily driven up the hill to their new home. Fortunately they arrived, in the dry prose of the annual reports, ‘without mishap’. The patients were a peculiar class of criminals, deemed ‘Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity’.
Inside their new home there was plenty of work to do. The female patients cleaned, laundered and sewed an astonishing array of items. In their first year they hand-made 938 shirts, 197 dresses and 259 pairs of stockings. The Rules for the Guidance of Officers at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum admonished staff that “Kindness and forbearance are first principles in the care and management of persons of unsound mind; few such persons are beyond their influence.” There was no therapy or drug treatment. The Superintendent simply visited them on his rounds and scribbled notes in his case book.
There was the case of Ann Goring, for example. This forty-two year-old charwoman contracted puerperal fever, a leading cause of death for Victorian women, following the birth of her fourth child. Ann’s family hired a nurse to look after her, but when the nurse left the room for a few minutes, Ann thrust her newborn baby into a pail of water and drowned it. Ann was too ill to stand trial and was obviously not in her right mind, so she was transferred to Broadmoor, where she had alternating periods of restless excitement and mute depression. She remained in the asylum with no improvement to her health for five years, when she died of ‘inflammation of the brain membranes’.
Stories like Ann’s electrified the Victorian media. The Lancet exclaimed that the infant mortality rate ‘Out Herod’s Herod’, while the Journal of Social Science Review reported ‘the police think no more of finding the dead body of a child in the street than of picking up a dead cat or dog.’ But when it came to particular cases, all-male juries were sympathetic towards women who killed their children. They almost always sent women like Ann to Broadmoor, instead of the gallows. Social Science Review wrote that the penalty for infanticide ‘falls on the wretched mother, who may have been more sinned against than sinning, while the equally or more guilty father cannot even be brought under the power of the law.’ In this patriarchal society it was up to the men to care for the weaker sex, and prevent such things from happening.
There are hundreds of biographies about famous people like Churchill and Henry VIII. But no one will ever write a biography of Ann Goring. Little is recorded about her except the few thin facts here. In fact, if she had never killed her child, her life would probably have just been subsumed into the great mass of nineteenth century statistical data. Her story would never have been an individual history at all. The archives are full of dead people. The archives can’t change the past. They can’t bring the dead back to life. But they can tell the truth.
