Tuesday 1 April 2014

Mediumistic or mad?—the precarious position of women who dared to be spiritualists

Why the Victorians saw ghosts: ten



Mrs Georgina Weldon (neé Thomas, 1837-1914) was one of those extraordinary, larger-than-life characters, London-born to landed gentry but with a fair soprano voice and a sense of theatre fairly pumping through her veins. Though she married for love in 1860, she soon found her talents stifled by her husband, William, who forbade her the professional life she craved and demanded she only appear in amateur theatrics and at charity benefits. In the fourth year of their marriage, which had fast turned loveless, William took a mistress to whom he stayed faithful for the rest of his life.



By the end of the 1860s Georgina's amateur croonings had fallen somewhat out of favour and her marriage was in trouble. She conceived a plan to open a musical training school for poor orphaned children, which she did in 1870, based in her own home, Tavistock House in Bloomsbury. Tavistock House was the perfect venue for such a venture: Charles Dickens, one of its previous occupants, had added a small theatre with its own stage. Georgina had some progressive ideas regarding the education of her orphans. In addition to allowing them to run barefoot for a quarter of an hour each day, they were to be taught singing, dancing and recitation from the earliest age, raised on a vegetarian diet, encouraged to join her in her amateur séances, and taken to see opera. In return they were to pay for their keep by performing at key society events—twee musical programmes that would include a recitation of the history of the orphanage—where the whole troop would arrive in a horse and wagon with the words "Mrs Weldon's Sociable Evenings" plastered along the side. Think of Rosalind Russell's stage-mother character in the 1965 film Gypsy and you'll get the idea.

You may have noticed the words "her amateur séances". Although Mrs Weldon was an ardent supporter of spiritualism, who was lauded in the spiritualist press for rushing to the defence of the ghost-grabbed slate-writing medium Henry Slade (see the previous post), she herself was incapable of remaining sufficiently passive to allow any mediumistic powers to come to the fore. In 1875 she and her husband separated, and William moved out of Tavistock House. He gave her the lease plus an annual allowance of £1000 as a settlement. It's impossible to know exactly what happened next, but here are the facts. At the beginning of 1878 Mrs Weldon returned in haste from a trip to France, leaving her orphans behind in the care of some nuns at a convent. She then brought criminal charges against one of her servants, someone she was convinced had stolen several items from her house. While she was being cross-examined during the servant's trial, the lawyer for the defence suggested that she was suffering from delusions. Within days she had begun to receive visits from pairs of mysterious strangers, people claiming to be fellow spiritualists interested in her charity work and enquiring about her attempts to contact the spirit world. Recognizing that something was afoot, she refused entry to a third delegation, (who, unbeknownst to her, consisted of Dr. L. Forbes Winslow—the ink-squirting alienist from the previous chapter—plus another man from his staff and a female nurse), and quickly started penning desperate appeals for help to all of her friends.

One of these letters was addressed to Mr W. H. Harrison, the former reporter at The Daily Telegraph to whom Florence Cook had written, who was now the editor of The Spiritualist, the leading spiritualist paper at the time. In it she detailed her suspicions that her sanity was being brought into question. Harrison responded the very next day by sending a woman named Louisa Lowe to see her, with whom he had corresponded regarding the dangers of spiritualist wives being committed to lunatic asylums by disgruntled husbands. Mrs. Lowe had barely introduced herself when Winslow and his cronies arrived for a second time and burst into the house. Mrs. Lowe quickly took charge. She instructed Georgina to barricade herself in her room and then sent for the police. The first two constables on the scene were reluctant to act, but the third demanded to be shown the lunacy order, issued at the request of Mrs. Weldon's husband and signed by two separate doctors—the mysterious strangers who had come to interview Georgina. Aided by Mrs. Lowe and the third policeman, Mrs. Weldon was bundled into cab and made good her escape. She managed to stay in seclusion for the full seven days that the lunacy order remained in force.

When she was finally at liberty to do so, she went straight to Bow Street Magistrates' Court and tried to press charges of assault. She was told that, as she hadn't actually been confined, no criminal charges could be brought against Winslow, and that, as a married woman, she couldn't bring a civil case against her husband. But Georgina Weldon was not someone to be easily thwarted. She started a campaign of harassment. She gave interviews to journalists, from the daily papers as well as from the spiritualist press, hoping to bait Winslow and her husband into suing her for libel. She spoke publicly and often about law reforms regarding lunacy. She arranged for someone to stand outside Winslow's house strapped into a pair of sandwich-boards proclaiming that the doctor was a bodysnatcher. And of course she found a way to work readings from her new pamphlet "How I Escaped the Mad Doctors" into her musical evenings, which had regained much of their popularity.

But questions remain. Was Georgina Weldon mad? It seems unlikely. The Bow Street Magistrate she'd appealed to didn't think so, nor did a number of the medical men who bothered to comment on the case in the press. And what was her husband's role in all this? Was he in fact an agent provocateur? Did William Weldon stage the thefts from Tavistock House in order to manoeuvre his wife into court? Had he instigated a whispering campaign against her? And what of the good Dr Winslow?



Dr Lyttleton Stewart Forbes Winslow (1844-1913) was appointed to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1871. In 1874, on death of his father (who had helped establish the insanity plea in English law), he took over the running of his family's two private lunatic asylums. He also continued his father's work by appearing as an expert witness at every major murder trial where the defendant pleaded insanity. By 1877 he had joined the ranks of psychologists (Dr Henry Maudsley, Bedlam's director George Savage, and the University of London's Registrar William Carpenter) who had published articles warning how spiritualism was a major cause of insanity—and in Winslow's case, the major cause—amongst what they termed "weak-minded", "hysterical" women.

It's for this very reason that William Weldon approached him in 1878 with a view to getting his wife committed. As it was necessary for two doctors to examine Mrs Weldon before a lunacy order could be issued, the pair came up with the idea of having them pose as fellow spiritualists. As a result of the interviews, Winslow's first recommendation was that Georgina simply needed a companion, but when Weldon rejected this suggestion out of hand, he agreed to take her on as a patient—for an annual sum of £400, considerably less than the £1,000 (plus rent) that Weldon forked out for his wife's yearly settlement.

In the 1880s English law—as regards women—began to change. The Married Women's Property Act of 1882 gave Mrs Weldon an entirely new theatre in which to perform: the law courts. She started bringing civil suits against all those involved in the attempt to commit her, prosecuting each and every one of the cases herself, and between the years 1883 and 1888 she managed to win them all. She became the darling of the press, earned the nickname "Portia of the Law Courts", and found a staunch friend and admirer in W. T. Stead, editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, who is the subject of my next post.

As for Winslow, it appears he suffered quite a reversal of opinion despite the suit she brought against him. It was he who organised the huge crowd of supporters to come and cheer Georgina upon her release from a six-month prison term in Holloway in 1885. Her misdemeanour? Libel. It was in fact her second stretch at Her Majesty's pleasure for such an offence. Three years later Winslow became embroiled in the Jack the Ripper case, proposing that the Ripper hailed from the upper classes. So passionately did he expound his theory that for a short time he became a police suspect himself.



Not all women spiritualists fared as well as Georgina Weldon. In his 1877 pamphlet Winslow estimated that some 10,000 of them had been committed to asylums in America. Though I pray this is a gross exaggeration on Winslow’s part, I fear that it contains at least a kernel of truth.



Mary Todd Lincoln is a case in point. She never really recovered from the death of two of her sons and the assassination of her husband. She spent the remainder of her life dressed in widow’s weeds, seeking out mediums who could provide her with ways to communicate with them. She took to using aliases as a means of guarding against those who might try to hoodwink her. It didn’t help. Her black garb and distinctive features were easily recognizable, thanks in part to Mathew Brady’s many famous portraits of her.

The final blow came in 1871 with the death of her youngest son, Tad, from respiratory failure. Her grief was entirely unbearable and as her mental health declined, her remaining son Robert, now a Chicago lawyer, had her committed to an Illinois asylum in 1875 against her will.

Her story might have ended there were if not for the fact that she succeeded in smuggling out letters to her lawyer, whose wife was a close friend and fellow spiritualist. They brought her case to trial and the judge declared Mary fit enough to be released into the custody of her sister, Elizabeth Edwards of Springfield, whom she subsequently went to live with. The following year she was declared legally competent to manage her own affairs, and set sail for Europe, where she remained until her deteriorating health forced her to return. She died at her sister’s house on the 15th of July 1882 at the age of sixty-three.

Next month: W. T. Stead—the man who foresaw his own death?
Find out more at michaelgallagherwrites.com


Images:
Carte-de-visite of Georgina Weldon (1837-1914) Elliot & Fry Studios, circa 1884
Lyttleton Stewart Forbes Winslow (1844-1913) Photograph by Alexander Bassano (1829-1913), date unknown
Dr. Forbes Winslow conjures up the secret actions of Jack the Ripper (top panel) From The Illustrated Police News, circa 1889


Michael Gallagher is the author of The Bridge of Dead Things and The Scarab Heart.

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