Inconvenient People (42 page)

On the same day that this letter was composed, Stephen Austin, editor of the
Hertford Mercury
, who had shifted his allegiance from Lord to Lady Lytton, took up this aspect of the subject. The newspaper’s editorial stated: ‘In this country, a man is not master of his wife, in the sense that he may do to her what he pleases, or dispose of her in whatever manner his fancy or his passion suggest. A woman has rights which may not be invaded, even by her husband.’ This wasn’t correct,
in fact, as the editor ought to have known (and as the Harriet Price habeas corpus case, mentioned in
Chapter Four
, would prove): husbands did have the basic right to the possession of the body of their wives. But physical assault was, as the newspaper pointed out, a public wrong, and if a third party were willing to act as prosecutor – where a wife felt unable or unwilling – the attack was treated in the courts as a public matter, not a privileged incident behind closed doors.

The family, the
Mercury
argued, did not have the right to flout the law and put an individual’s liberty at danger. It was simply not good enough for a cloak of secrecy to be drawn across lunacy issues by invoking the sacred nature of domestic privacy:

The Victorian paterfamilias no longer had a clear run at it. Women could, and did, avail themselves of the new Divorce Court (albeit on a very uneven playing field); and whereas before the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, just one per cent of divorces had been granted to a wife, after 1857 that figure soared to 25 per cent. Agitation for full property and civil law rights for married women was under way, despite persistent blocking of such moves by the House of Lords. Lady Lytton could have joined in and used her powerful pen to assist the various campaigns for women’s rights, had she not poured her energies into her solitary vengeance upon His Lordship and his cronies.

LADY LYTTON’S WAS
just one of four scandals that led to the ‘lunacy panic of 1858’. The summer and autumn of that year were to bring to light yet more frightening stories of Britons – from high-born to humble – being ‘disappeared’ into a lunatic asylum. By the end of the year, the demands for a Select Committee into the operation of the English lunacy laws could no longer be withstood, as inquisition jury after jury refused to equate bizarre, perverse, even violent, behaviour with insanity. The make-up of the ‘special juries’ had not changed: it was still the same set of men, predominantly Middlesex magistrates, who were gathered together to decide where eccentricity shaded off into lunacy. But in 1858, a shift in sentiment appeared to take place among jurymen.

Six days after Lady Lytton’s coerced voyage to the Continent, a lunacy inquisition opened in York. On Friday 23 July, twenty jurymen and Commissioner Francis Barlow met in the magistrates’ room at York Castle to hear a story that they, and most newspapermen, would consider to be the melancholy tale of a love gone wrong. These eminent local men, charged with a task of high seriousness, were strongly affected by the testimony they heard, reflecting a culture in which, as historian G. M. Young noted, ‘ministers sometimes wept at the table; when the sight of an infant school could reduce a civil servant to a passion of tears . . . an age more easily touched, more easily shocked . . .’

Charles Turner, Harrow-educated and from a wealthy family, worked as the official assignee of the Liverpool Court of Bankruptcy – a highly respectable legal position, passed on to him by his father, also called Charles. He fell in love with Mary Jane Hepworth, seventeen years his junior, who came from a humble background and was
unable to read or write. Turner was afraid that his father would disapprove and so the relationship was clandestine. Mary Jane became pregnant with their daughter, Ellen, in 1839 but Charles did not marry her until 1844, and he kept this secret from his family. They moved across the Mersey, to Bebington in Cheshire, where they lived happily for a while. However, Charles’s job required him to be away from home a great deal, and as he was a good-looking man, in his early forties, Mary Jane strongly suspected that women were very attracted to him. For his part, Charles claimed that he was always ‘passionately’ attached to his wife, and watched as she flourished – learning to read and write and becoming ‘a woman of some accomplishments’, in his words.

Their marriage became hellish within two years, with Mary Jane accusing Charles of infidelities with just about every female he met at the hotels and boarding houses he used when travelling on behalf of the court. Then, on 2 December 1846, one of their rows became violent. Mary Jane screamed and spat at Charles and attacked him with a stick. When he took the stick away from her and struck her with it, his wife threw herself out of the first-floor window, breaking a leg. After this incident, he told his father and his family’s social circle about the marriage. As he had feared, they were not pleased; his wife’s violence and irrationality were only to be expected, was their snobbish reaction to his allying himself to someone low-born.

The rows continued. A policeman confirmed that during a very noisy argument – and presumably neighbours had alerted the constable – Charles had instructed the servants to take no orders from their mistress, only from him. At the height of another quarrel, servants heard him shout at Mary Jane that she was ‘a strumpet’, and on another occasion he shouted that ‘he had found her in the dirt, and he would leave her back there’.

The couple were cruising on a steamboat on Lake Windermere one summer day, when Mary Jane accused Charles of having been looked at by another woman; she attacked him in front of the other passengers. Then, on 1 June 1850, on an outing to the Menai Bridge, a woman passed the Turners, and Mary Jane insisted that Charles had appreciatively returned the woman’s gaze. At home, the row continued, and Mary Jane picked up the poker in the parlour; the
blow that she crashed down on Charles’s handsome head fractured his skull.

She was arrested and put in Birkenhead Gaol, but Charles, bed-bound for weeks, forgave her and declined to prosecute, and so she was released. Mary Jane drank heavily during his recuperation and attacked him in bed; she had to be pulled off by the servants, with whom she accused Charles of being intimate.

And so it went on for three more years, until a separation was agreed. Mary Jane was to receive £200 a year, to be paid to her quarterly by a trustee, solicitor Thomas Pemberton. Charles went back to live in Liverpool; Mary Jane moved to York, then to Bath for four and a half uneventful years, and finally to Scarborough, where she lived servantless in a small and inexpensive cottage. By living frugally and investing wisely during these years, Mary Jane built up savings of £700. Charles kept in touch with his wife and when he noticed during one visit that she was looking very ill, he took her on a tour of Scotland and the English Lakes to improve her health. She seemed to have calmed down considerably, he thought, despite one outburst, when she shouted that when they were apart, his behaviour was driving her ‘mad’ – an accusation he did not understand. And when she made a claim that someone was trying to poison her, with fish as the vehicle for the dose, he chose to ignore it. He would later say that he had remained heartbroken at the failure of the marriage, and once wrote to her: ‘My dearest Mary . . . If you love me one-tenth part as much as I love you, you will come to me in comparative poverty, rather than live apart.’ It is difficult to understand his reference to ‘comparative poverty’ as his salary will have been substantial. He enclosed a portrait of himself with the letter. But no resumption of married life took place.

At four o’clock in the morning of 19 December 1857, Leeds surgeon William Hey was woken by hammering at his door. When he dressed and went downstairs to open it, he found a policeman and Mary Jane Turner, who was carrying two wooden boxes. She told Hey she had terrible pains in her bowels and believed she had been poisoned while taking tea the night before with her sister, her sister’s husband, and friends of theirs. Mary Jane had travelled to Leeds from Scarborough the previous day. Her sister later confirmed that she had not been best pleased when Mary Jane had turned up unannounced at her
Headingley home, though she and her husband had given her supper and a bed for the night. Mary Jane had left the house in the early hours and found the policeman, who had taken her to the surgeon.

Hey examined her briefly and prescribed something for her stomach pains. Mary Jane urged him to analyse the contents of the two boxes she was carrying. Inside them, Hey found four jars. Within these were faeces, urine, vomit and a lump of butter.

None of the four substances contained any poison, Hey established, but Mary Jane was not happy with this finding and angrily said that she would send them to a specialist in London, but changed her mind twice about this. She eventually left the surgeon’s house with her boxes, appearing to need no further treatment.

Later that day her brother-in-law in Headingley, Mr England, telegraphed to Charles Turner about Mary Jane’s extraordinary behaviour. Mary Jane also wrote to her husband asking him to visit her in Leeds as two ‘cold-blooded murderers’ had tried to poison her, first at Scarborough and then at the Englands’ home. Would he help bring the guilty to justice? She reassured Charles that she still loved him despite ‘the insult, cruelty and injustice’ she had received at his hands.

Charles later claimed that he was at this time very ill, and as his recovery could not wholly confidently be predicted, he placed matters in the hands of a clergyman friend in Rock Ferry, Reverend Thomas Fisher Redhead; the reverend had also become the guardian of the Turners’ daughter Ellen during the troubled marriage and later separation. Redhead travelled to York to look for Mary Jane at the temporary address she had left with surgeon Hey. He was told that she had taken herself off to a pharmacist’s shop in Coney Street, where he found her trying to buy an emetic. Her clothes were disordered and the pharmacist told Redhead that she had just cut off her stays with a knife. She claimed that she had been poisoned the night before at York’s Royal Station Hotel, and then she rambled that her husband, the Englands and Redhead had poisoned her too.

Redhead led her away from the shop and placed her under the care of surgeon William Procter (no relation to Bryan Waller Procter), who agreed to make sure she did not harm herself or others. Mary Jane had found lodgings in York for herself and her precious boxes
with one Mrs Potter in De Grey Street. She told her landlady that she would henceforth eat only dry bread, in order to thwart attempts to poison her. During his visits over the next two days William Procter twice found Mary Jane trying to make herself sick in order to obtain samples to prove that Mrs Potter was poisoning her. Then on the night of 23 December a policeman found her crying in Minster Yard, and she told him that she had had to flee her landlady in the middle of the night for fear of poisoning. She became louder and more agitated and the constable took her to the police station and contacted Procter, whose name and address Mary Jane had given him. Arriving with a second medical man, Dr North, Procter wrote a certificate for her admission into Acomb House Asylum, York, where she was received on Christmas Eve.

Neither Redhead nor her husband were told of this. And although the confinement was brought to the attention of solicitor Charles Pemberton before the year was out, he ignored the information,
continuing to pay promptly into her account her quarterly separation money. He would later claim that he very much regretted his initial lack of curiosity and compassion.

Acomb House was run by surgeon-proprietor John William Metcalfe, aged thirty-nine, assisted by nurse Harriet Atkinson, aged twenty-six, whom Metcalfe would marry on 23 February 1858. Metcalfe was the son of a Yorkshire curate and had previously been medical superintendent of York’s county asylum; Harriet was the fourth daughter of a Yorkshire gentleman. Acomb House – or Acomb House Retreat, as Metcalfe sometimes styled it – charged a hefty weekly fee of three guineas, plus extra charges for wine, beer and laundry.