"Some mysterious agency": Women, Violent Crime, and the Insanity Acquittal in the Victorian Courtroom.

Ainsley, Jill Newton

In June 1854 Mary Ann Brough, the middle-aged mother of a large family, slashed the throats of six of her children before unsuccessfully attempting to cut her own. Two months later she stood trial in Guildford to answer for her crimes. The issue at the trial was not whether or not Brough had actually committed the murders, for she had immediately confessed, but whether or not she was legally responsible for her actions. Brough's attorney described his client as a "devotedly attached" mother "who, in a moment, by some unaccountable impulse ... became a fiend." He spoke of "some mysterious agency" which no one in the court could "divine" but which was most certainly responsible for the murders, and asked the jurors if they could believe that Brough was the "mistress of her actions" when, in "an instant," she murdered her children and attempted to commit suicide. The jurors could not; they acquitted Brough on the ground of insanity and dispatched her to Bethlem, where she died eight years later.(1)

The Brough case was heavily publicized and controversial, not only because of the number of victims involved, but also because many regarded the verdict with skepticism, particularly since the murders could be interpreted as Brough's brutal act of vengeance against her husband, who had recently left his adulterous wife and initiated proceedings for a legal separation. Although the prominent alienist Forbes Winslow testified that Brough was suffering from a "diseased brain," and pointed to the crime itself as ample proof of her madness -- "The act itself bears insanity stamped on its very face," he later wrote of the case -- (2) his colleague John Charles Bucknill criticized the verdict as a "legal fiction" intended to spare the life of a woman who would otherwise have hanged for her crimes.(3)

Mary Ann Brough was only one of dozens of Victorian women accused of horrifying murders who were judged "not guilty on ground of insanity," or, as the official wording became in 1883, "guilty but insane."(4) Indeed, Victorian women charged with a serious violent crime were more likely than men to be acquitted on ground of insanity, even when women and men were charged with similar crimes.(5) Why was the Victorian legal system far more willing to declare female defendants insane? Was the verdict simply a "legal fiction" designed to save women from the gallows, and employed by chivalrous, paternalistic jurors, as Bucknill believed had happened in the Brough case? Although the theoretical evolution of the insanity acquittal has been well documented, we know relatively little about the acquittal in practice, except for the handful of cases which set legal precedent or illustrated key issues in the ongoing straggle between the legal and medical professions for authority over the concept of criminal insanity.(6) Unfortunately, this approach reinforces the Victorian perception of the defendants involved as passive victims, either of the mysterious workings of their bodies (particularly in the case of women), or of the skilful manoeuvres of physicians and lawyers. This paper examines the insanity plea in practice in violent crime trials in England and Wales between 1832-1901, focussing on 145 women's trials and a comparative sample of ninety-three men's trials, in which the insanity acquittal figured.(7) Analyses of these cases permit fundamental questions to be addressed about the incidence of the plea, the circumstances in which an insanity acquittal would be sought and received, and the purpose of the acquittal.

In her widely read and highly influential book, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980, Elaine Showalter argues that in the nineteenth century insanity became identified as a female condition, and cites both statistical and cultural evidence to support her contention that women were (and are) more readily declared and represented as insane.(8) This argument, notes the sociologist Joan Busfield, has become "a part of feminist orthodoxy."(9) Bus field has criticized Showalter for creating a "one-sided" picture of nineteenth-century madness, principally on the ground that Showalter's use of statistical evidence is simplistic and inaccurate. Busfield points out that"women's greater life expectancy contributed to the accumulation of female patients in the nineteenth-century asylums, just as it is an important factor in women taking up more psychiatric beds than men in Britain at the present time."(10) She also notes that Showalter failed to consider the male-dominated criminal lunatic population and the image of the homicidal male lunatic when she looked for statistical and cultural proof that the Victorians regarded insanity as a female condition.(11) Certainly, at least in terms of hard numbers, more men than women were acquitted on ground of insanity than women, but far more men were placed on trial for violent crimes. In proportional terms, women were twice as likely to receive an insanity acquittal and, although the best-known homicidal lunatics may have been men, alleged murderesses were declared insane more frequently than alleged murderers.(12) This willingness to ascribe violent female criminality to insanity surely both resulted from, and contributed to, a popular perception of women as susceptible to mental illness.

The statistics cited above suggest that although insanity pleas were ostensibly evaluated according to the objective criteria known as the M'Naghten Rules, the insanity acquittal was gendered, and subjective notions of appropriate male and female behaviour dictated how jurors would respond to insanity pleas. When faced with a woman who, like Mary Ann Brough, had committed a shocking crime which defied any other explanation, physicians, lawyers, judges, and juries were very likely to declare, purely on the basis of the crime itself, that the defendant was insane. Although one might conclude that women's greater likelihood of receiving an insanity acquittal stemmed from the legal system's willingness to treat female defendants more leniently than male defendants, and that women acquitted on ground of insanity effectively "got away with murder," to do so would be to ignore the fact that when the legal system acquitted these women on ground of insanity it denied their agency and reinforced the perception of women as mentally and emotionally weak. At the same time, the insanity acquittal benefited more than the defendants who escaped the death penalty by this means: the insanity acquittal enabled the legal system to convict female murderers without executing them; more importantly, it allowed Victorian society to avoid the discomfiting prospect of acknowledging women's agency when confronted with physical proof of their capacity for anger, power, and violence.

II

Although the recognition that not all criminals could be held equally responsible for their actions has a long history, only in 1843 did the Home Office introduce the M'Naghten Rules, which were intended as a single standard by which all defendants who pleaded insanity would be objectively assessed.(13) Named for the particularly controversial case which inspired their creation, the M'Naghten Rules stipulated that a defendant was not legally responsible for his crime if at the time he committed the crime he "was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong." A defendant who acted under "partial delusion" and was not "in other respects" insane could not plead insanity. Finally, the rules stated that "it is for the jury to decide," not "the medical man," whether or not the defendant could be held responsible for his actions.(14)

"They are supposed to be the authoritative exposition of the law as it affects the insane, as juries are constantly told," an article in the Cornhill later complained of the rules. "That they are a very imperfect exposition must be evident to both professional and lay readers."(15) Roger Smith has suggested that the imprecision of the rules "allowed the boundary of criminality and insanity to be continually reassessed." Many Victorian physicians, however, regarded the rules as rigid and limited, particularly on the issue of the delusion. The medical profession complained incessantly about the rules, and in lectures, articles and books alienists argued that they alone possessed the necessary qualifications to judge criminal responsibility. The prominent alienist Henry Maudsley dismissed the rules as "confused" and "a false inference founded on insufficient observation" of insanity, and declared "they are unanimously condemned by all physicians who have a practical knowledge of the insane."(16) Not only did the M'Naghten Rules inspire debate between and within the legal and medical professions, but they fell far short of eliminating public doubt about the legitimacy of the insanity acquittal. "When men read in the newspapers that a murderer has been declared `Not guilty' on the ground of insanity, the intelligence affects them in various ways,'" a self-described "mad-doctor" wrote in the Cornhill. He noted that public opinion ranged from approval of the verdict to the certainty that the accused "has been got off by `those mad-doctors'" or, "lunatic or not, he knew that he was doing wrong" and deserved hanging.(17)

Despite its prominence in public and medico-legal discourses, the insanity acquittal figured in relatively few violent crime trials: only 12 per cent of women and 8 per cent of men placed on trial for murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, or assault sought an acquittal on ground of insanity. Although any individual charged with a crime could plead insanity, the Victorians identified the insanity acquittal with murder, and this identification was rooted in fact: 28 per cent of women charged with murder pleaded insanity; 91 per cent of those women were successful (thus 25 per cent of women's murders were attributed to insanity), and murder charges comprised 77 per cent of women's insanity pleas. Among men, 21 per cent of those charged with murder pleaded insanity, 51 per cent were successful (thus only 15 per cent of men's murders were blamed on insanity), and murder charges comprised 60 per cent of men's insanity pleas. The vast majority of women who sought an insanity acquittal received one: 87 per cent of women's insanity pleas were accepted, compared to only 59 per cent of men's insanity pleas. Thus 10 per cent of women and 5 per cent of men placed on trial for murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, or assault were acquitted on grounds of insanity.(18)

The above figures suggest that juries were holding male and female defendants to different standards of responsibility. Was it a case of juries inflexibly adhering to the M'Naghten Rules when dealing with male defendants, and assessing female defendants more subjectively? Some women's cases unquestionably met the requirements of the M'Naghten Rules: the accused had committed their crimes without realizing what they were doing, or they believed that in committing their crimes they had done the right thing. For example, after Sarah Dobbins cut her daughter's throat she told her common-law spouse that "it was better for the child that it was in heaven," and Annie Jackson murdered her daughter "to save the child's soul." Sarah Chiswell "read prayers over her aunt" before cutting her throat, "thinking that she was doing an act of kindness and that [her aunt] 'would soon be in glory.'" At the time Adelaide Cole murdered her son she "imagine[d] that she was impelled by evil spirits" and Ann Amess told the police, "Charge them that has done it -- the witches, don't charge me," after she cut her daughter's throat and collected the blood in a large bowl; Amess had also disembowelled the family cat. Other women had a psychiatric history which predated their crimes. Lucy Mills, a young domestic servant, threw her infant nephew from a cliff shortly after her release from the asylum at Haywards Heath, and Martha Bacon, a twenty-six year old Lambeth housewife, cut the throats of her son and daughter two months after her release from St. Luke's Asylum. When Sarah Jane Calendar was acquitted of the murder of her great-niece on ground of insanity, she had already spent six years in the asylum at Hanwell.(19)

However, many women acquitted on ground of insanity knew both that they had committed a crime and that it was wrong, as demonstrated by their immediate confessions to family, friends and the police, and this points to the fact that, while the medical and legal professions wrestled one another for authority over the insanity acquittal, many juries essentially ignored the M'Naghten Rules in order to grant insanity acquittals to deserving female defendants who did not meet the rules' criteria. The identification of insanity, declared an essay published in All the Year Round in 1862, required "none but the sort of evidence patent to the natural sense of ordinary men."(20) Smith has observed that alienists undermined their campaign for authority in the courtroom by employing "publicly accessible observations" and "commonly available criteria" in their diagnoses, which encouraged the assumption that any reasonably intelligent and observant individual could recognize insanity.(21) Forbes Winslow had pointed to Mary Ann Brough's crime as ample proof that she was insane at the time she murdered her children, and many juries used just this type of evidence when they concluded that the defendants who stood before them were insane, using what Smith calls the "commonsense criterion" to determine whether or not a particular case warranted an insanity acquittal.

The fact that juries were often flexible when they interpreted and applied the M'Naghten Rules, at least when dealing with female defendants, did not mean that they granted insanity acquittals to female defendants indiscriminately, and the relatively low incidence of the plea combined with women's high success rate suggests that an insanity acquittal was sought only when the defendant or her lawyer felt reasonably confident that the plea would succeed. An examination of the victim-defendant relationships, methods, and circumstances of the crimes in which the insanity plea figured reveals that the vast majority of successful cases shared two primary characteristics: the crimes were unpremeditated and, apparently, motiveless.(22) The typical female defendant who pleaded insanity successfully was a working-class mother who, purportedly maddened by poverty and/or puerperal mania (the Victorian equivalent of post-partum depression), impulsively cut the throat of a child or children she loved: children and step-children comprised 72 per cent of victims (77 per cent if one includes the cases in which the woman murdered a child not her own), and 40 per cent of these had their throats cut.(23) These figures reveal significant differences between insanity cases and women's violent crimes in general. Firstly, although throat cutting figured in 34 per cent of women's insanity cases and as such was the single most common method in insanity cases, only 6 per cent of all women charged with a violent crime were alleged to have cut their victim's throat; on the other hand poison, which accounted for 30 per cent of methods in all women's murder trials and was the single most common method in murders allegedly committed by women, figured in only 8 per cent of women's insanity cases. Secondly, although women's violence most commonly targeted their children and step-children and, as noted, children and step-children were the victims in 72 per cent of women's insanity cases, the second and third most common victims of female violence -- friends, acquaintances and neighbours (22 per cent of all victims) and husbands (17 per cent of all victims) -- barely figured in women's insanity cases, accounting for just 6 per cent and 8 per cent, respectively, of cases.(24)

That the majority of women acquitted on ground of insanity were accused of murdering their own children is not surprising: the idealisation of the relationship between mother and child inevitably encouraged the medical and legal professions and the public to surmise that only women disturbed in their minds could take the lives of their own offspring. When Eleanor Bell was placed on trial after she quite unexpectedly stabbed her ten year old son, the judge interrupted the testimony to observe that Bell must have been insane to murder a child she had always treated with affection, articulating a common belief which figured in the trials of many murderous mothers.(25) Medical theory helped to support this belief. Physicians routinely identified poverty and biology, or a combination of the two, as significant causes of insanity in women. According to doctors, impoverished circumstances depleted women's physical strength and increased their anxiety about their children; this accounted for child murder not by demonizing the woman in question as a "maternal monster," but by locating the mother's behaviour within the realm of extreme maternal devotion. "A mother, worn down by anxiety and ill-health, becomes very low-spirited and desponding," Henry Maudsley explained, "and one day, in a paroxysm of despair, kills her children in order to save them from misery on earth, or because she is so miserable that she knows not what she does."(26)

Financial troubles were identified as a major causative factor of insanity in many women's cases. Elizabeth Harpham, a widowed laundress, gave her two adolescent sons "a black draught" to "sleep them gently away" because, she explained in a note she left for her adult son, she could not bear to see thirteen year old Frederick working until one o'clock in the morning, six days a week, in a glass factory. Both the jury and The Times concluded that Maria Chitty "beat out" her seven year old daughter's brains with a mallet while "labouring under a state of great excitement and misery" after her husband was "suddenly deprived of his reason and consigned to a lunatic asylum, thus depriving her and her family of his support and assistance." Chitty carried on her husband's bakery business for five months before she killed her daughter; she also had to make court-ordered maintenance payments to her husband's illegitimate child, the product of an "unfortunate occurrence" with a former servant. Mary Ann Dyson, the twenty-three year old wife of a labourer and the mother of two, told the police she had cut her children's throats to take them "out of their misery." The single room in which the Dysons lived was "almost destitute of furniture." Sarah Freeman's husband was injured and unable to work, and he had been summoned to the magistrate's court for failing to send one of their children to school. He could be jailed for this offence, and Sarah "did not know what she would do for bread" without him. In November 1878 Sarah cut the throat of her thirteen month old son, Harry, and then attempted to cut her own before going to her neighbour and confessing the crime.(27)

The sympathy and compassion with which juries regarded women who decided to murder their children rather than subject them to impoverished lives did not extend so readily to poor fathers who committed similar crimes, as a comparison of the very similar cases of Joseph Speed and Sarah Dickenson indicates. In 1847 Speed, an unemployed factory hand, cut the throats of his two children, attacked his wife with a hammer, and then turned himself in to the police. Friends and neighbours testified that Speed had, as a result of his poverty, been known to go without food for days at a time, and he often complained of "headach" and nightmares. Three years earlier, Sarah Dickenson cut the throats of her two children after her husband had been unemployed for two years. Most of the money the Dickensons received from their lodgers went to pay the rent, and their tenant Elizabeth Spencer knew they pawned "the greatest part of their furniture and wearing apparel to obtain food for themselves and their children." Although Spencer urged them to apply to the parish for relief, the Dickensons refused, nor would they contemplate the workhouse, in part because Sarah Dickenson in particular was "anxious to avoid exposure" of their desperate circumstances. At Dickenson's trial Spencer described her as depressed, distracted and suffering from headaches. The prosecution at Dickenson's trial made no attempt to counter the suggestion that Dickenson was of unsound mind; indeed, most of the testimony regarding her poverty, desperation and depression was offered by witnesses testifying for the prosecution, and the prosecution did not challenge defence witnesses who provided further evidence of Dickenson's depression. But when a physician at Joseph Speed's trial stated that his crime could have been the product of depression, the prosecution immediately challenged him and forced him to acknowledge that perfectly sane people could also suffer from low spirits and headaches. Dickenson's jury acquitted her on ground of insanity; Joseph Speed was convicted of murder.(28)

Men could at least try to cite poverty as playing a role in their crimes, but one significant source of female madness was limited to women. Medical experts pointed to the strains that women's reproductive cycles placed upon their bodies as a cause of women' s insanity, linking female insanity to abnormalities in women' s reproductive systems, or to women's failure to marry young, bear children, and breastfeed, and filled their textbooks with descriptions of adolescent girls who became hysterical due to irregular menstruation, and unmarried women who developed both menstrual problems and turned to self-mutilation and masturbation because they lacked an appropriate outlet for their "active sexual feelings."(29) Menstrual dysfunction was blamed in the case of Martha Brixey, an eighteen year old servant accused of murdering her employers' baby. On the morning of May 4, 1845 John Drake Ffinch, a solicitor who lived in a comfortable home in Greenwich, was breakfasting with his wife and a family friend when "mild-looking" Martha Brixey entered the room in what Ffinch later described as "a very excited state." "Oh, Sir," she gasped, "what have I done? What have I done? Will you forgive me? Will you forgive me? I am a murderer. I have murdered the dear baby. I have cut the dear baby's throat." Mr. and Mrs. Ffinch found their young son Robert dead. In court, Ffinch described Brixey' s behaviour as "quiet, harmless and inoffensive" but noted that "she was at the time under a course of treatment by the family surgeon for a disease or stoppage to which women, especially young women, are subject." This condition, he explained, had made Brixey "dull and restless" since early April.(30)

Although doctors argued that childbirth was essential to an adult woman's physical and mental health, they attributed some cases of insanity to pregnancy and also diagnosed a significant number of women as suffering from puerperal mania, which usually manifested itself immediately after labour and, if not dealt with swiftly, could, as with any type of madness, result in violence. Puerperal mania accounted for 75 per cent of the cases in which a biological cause was identified. Sarah Dobbins, well advanced in her second pregnancy, suffered "a severe attack of melancholia" during which she murdered her three year old daughter. Both Mary Ann Payne's previous pregnancies had plunged her into "very low and desponding spirits." This perplexed her since, as she noted, "she had a comfortable home and good husband." While pregnant with her third child she cut her son's throat and then jumped out a second storey window in a failed suicide attempt; she later said she had no recollection of either the murder or her attempted suicide, as she had taken laudanum that clay. Catherine Hall fatally stabbed her eighteen month old daughter a mere three weeks after giving birth to a stillborn child. Soon after she gave birth to her fifth child Louisa Felton cut the throat of one of her older daughters.(31)

In some cases women struggled with feelings of despair and despondency for months before articulating these feelings through violent acts. Kate Barrow, the wife of a respectable tradesman at Slough, drowned her five year old daughter Dora in the bath seven months after giving birth to a "deformed" and short-lived baby. Louisa Proud, a happily married mother of three, became depressed after giving birth to her youngest daughter Dorothy, and sixteen months later she stuffed newspapers and rags under a bed and started a fire; a fireman rescued two of her children, but the baby died. Hannah Johnson Cox gave birth in December 1900 and her health deteriorated immediately; the following June this twenty-eight year old mother of five drowned two of her daughters. The birth of twins in 1828 compromised the health of Maria Spurlock, who "complained almost constantly of confusion in her head" for the next four years, until she fatally stabbed her husband George. Jane Tinkler, the twenty-four year old wife of a County Durham miner, developed acute puerperal mania after giving birth to her daughter Ethel in 1892. Her illness deteriorated into melancholia and her doctor advised Tinkler's husband to commit Jane to an asylum. Her husband disregarded this advice, probably because he did not feel able to break up his home, and in October 1895 Jane strangled Ethel with her apron string, and disposed of her body in the River Wear.(32)

Undoubtedly the men who sat in judgement on these women sympathized with their situations, but in ascribing their crimes to individual mental illness the legal system, the medical profession, and the press colluded in a process of delegitimizing both the defendant and her crime. Acquitting a woman on ground of insanity may have saved her from the gallows, or a lengthy prison term, but it also stripped her crime of meaning. Labelling a woman' s crime "as the product of individual disorder ... diverted attention from any possible social content -- overt or symbolic -- in the violence," Roger Smith has noted. The insanity verdict "emptied her act of meaning; she, and not society, had a problem."(33) By definition, of course, the insanity verdict meant that the accused was not responsible for her actions, and had committed a crime without having a legitimate reason for doing so. Several of the accused women spoke of their despair at finding themselves unable to support their children, and explained that they had resolved to murder their families and then commit suicide rather than enter the workhouse. The courts concluded not that these women were, consciously or subconsciously, indicting a mean-spirited and entirely inadequate system of poor relief, but that the physical deprivations attendant upon impoverished circumstances had weakened their minds and made them incapable of understanding the consequences of their actions, in spite of the fact that the women themselves often demonstrated a keen awareness of their crimes. Similarly, whatever the working-class woman was trying to communicate when she picked up a razor and slashed one of her children's throats after giving birth to her fifth, sixth, or seventh child, could be ignored because she was simply the victim of unpredictable biological forces. A few defendants even objected to the suggestion that they were insane, recognizing that an insanity acquittal denied the legitimacy of whatever motives they may have identified.(34)

The insanity acquittal turned the women concerned from agents who made decisions about their situations and then acted upon those decisions, however disastrous and misguided their actions may have seemed to outside observers, into helpless victims of their emotions and bodies, and transformed threatening and dangerous women into patients who could be confined, subdued and cured of their illness, as two conflicting representations of Martha Bradish, confined to Fisherton House after she cut her stepsister's throat, illustrate. At her trial in 1861, The Times described Bradish as "a tall, powerful" woman of forty-two, the wife of a sergeant-major stationed at Kingston who had invited her stepsister to come to visit and, a few weeks later, took her husband's razor and murdered her stepsister while she slept on a sofa in the front room. Bradish immediately confessed her crime, telling a sergeant that she must have been mad as she had always loved her stepsister. Three years after Bradish's jury acquitted her on ground of insanity, a lawyer interested in the treatment of insane lunatics visited Fisherton House, and later published an account of his visit in the Cornhill; he intended his piece to serve both as a defence of the legitimacy of the insanity acquittal and an advertisement for the benefits of separate facilities for the criminally insane, and he chose Martha Bradish to illustrate those benefits. His description of her physical appearance differed strikingly from the way The Times reporter saw her. Bradish was not physically intimidating, but "amiable," "mild" and "nice-looking." Moreover, her time in Fisherton House had miraculously restored her youth: although Bradish would have been forty-five years old, this lawyer perceived her as looking "about thirty."(35)

III

The "extraordinary and perplexing" case of Christiana Edmunds, whom the press predictably dubbed "The Brighton Poisoner," is an anomalous one not only in the annals of women's insanity acquittals but also in the history of Victorian murderesses, yet it illustrates the lengths to which the legal system would go to deny the agency of a woman accused of murder. In the autumn of 1871 and winter of 1872 the Edmunds case gripped the public imagination; the case received so much attention that her trial was moved from Lewes to London, and a London physician who shared the same surname requested The Times to advise its readers that he bore no relationship to the accused woman.(36) A Times editorial called Edmunds' attempt to "scatter death throughout a town in the pursuit of a selfish aim" an act of "cold-blooded indifference" typical of"the most vicious and cruel forms of criminality."(37) Yet the case is an obscure one, and neither academics nor the small army of amateur criminologists who have penned innumerable books on famous, notorious or bizarre trials have ranked Edmunds among the handful of celebrated female poisoners, an omission which may have something to do with the fact that, ultimately, Edmunds was declared not responsible for file elaborate poison plot she devised and carried out. The few who have written about her case have accepted the psychiatric diagnosis of Edmunds at face value, declaring, as the author of a recent study does, that Edmunds "was so obviously insane that, although she did not qualify under the McNaughten Rules, the home secretary intervened after the trial and sent her to a lunatic asylum instead of the gallows."(38)

In fact, Edmunds's insanity was anything but obvious: in the weeks leading up to her trial few considered her sanity an issue; indeed, a brief notice in The Times confidently (but inaccurately) assured its readers that a recent rumour about madness in Edmunds's immediate family "is not founded on fact" and neither the judge nor the jury at her trial accepted the defence's claim that Edmunds laboured under an "impaired intellect."(39) When the Home Secretary reprieved Edmunds's death sentence on ground of insanity many believed he based this decision on her gender and class. The Home Secretary reprieved Edmunds on ground of insanity not simply because she was a middle-class woman whom no one wanted to hang, but also because declaring her insane and therefore not responsible for her actions provided a bizarre and unprecedented crime with a relatively simple explanation. Labelling Edmunds insane was much less disturbing than considering the possibility that her "cold indifference" and "skilful artifices" were the products of a sane if ruthless mind, particularly of the mind of a middle-class woman who prided herself on having been "brought up as a lady."(40)

The Brighton poisonings began in March 1871, when various shopkeepers became sick after eating chocolates they found in their shops, apparently left behind by a forgetful customer. A woman offered a bag of chocolates to two teenage boys playing in a Brighton street, but the unpleasant "hot" taste of the chocolates deterred the boys from eating them. In April nine year old Emily Baker accepted a bag of sweets from a strange woman, and although she spat out the unpleasant candy she was sick for two days. In June four year old Sidney Barker, vacationing in Brighton with his parents and uncle, ate a chocolate cream and swiftly sickened. His limbs stiffened, and he died minutes after a physician arrived. Finally, in August two respectable Brighton matrons, Mrs. Boys and Mrs. Beard, received anonymous gifts of boxes of arsenic-laced fruit and cake at their homes; Isaac Garrett, a Brighton chemist, also received a box of arsenic-laced fruit.

Mrs. Beard was the wife of Charles Beard, a well-respected Brighton physician who told the police that the previous autumn his wife had suffered two days of extreme nausea and pain after eating a piece of a Maynard's chocolate cream. A female acquaintance, a patient of his, had given the chocolates to his wife, Dr. Beard explained: in fact, this woman fed the chocolate to his wife herself. He suspected this friend of poisoning the chocolates with the intention of murdering his wife, but he did not pursue the matter at the time, claiming he had no actual proof. He believed this woman had sent his wife and Mrs. Boys the poisoned cake and fruit, and was also responsible for Sidney Barker's death. The woman's name was Christiana Edmunds. Although Dr. Beard denied it, the prosecutor at Edmunds's trial in January 1872 stated that Beard's professional relationship with Edmunds had "ripened into a state of things which did not ordinarily exist between a medical adviser and his patient."(41) The "intimacy subsisted" in September 1870, and soon afterwards Edmunds visited the Beard home, bearing a gift of chocolates for the doctor's wife.

Once he believed Edmunds had attempted to murder his wife, Dr. Beard said, he declined to have anything further to do with her. According to the prosecution, Edmunds was so anxious to repair the relationship that she conceived a second plan, one which would, she hoped, deflect suspicion from her to John Maynard, the chocolate seller. In early 1871 she paid various boys to purchase bags of Maynard's chocolates on her behalf, tainted them with strychnine purchased pseudonymously from Isaac Garrett, a local chemist, and left them in various Brighton shops with the hope that unwitting customers or shopkeepers might eat the chocolates, sicken and die.(42) When this failed to result in Maynard's arrest, Edmunds became more determined. She gave chocolates to children she met in the streets and planted poisoned chocolates in Maynard's shop. These chocolates poisoned Sidney Barker.

Edmunds assumed Barker's death would result in the swift arrest of Maynard, and even testified against Maynard at Barker's inquest, claiming to have purchased and been made violently ill by Maynard's chocolates herself. After the jury at the Barker inquest returned a verdict of accidental death, Edmunds wrote three pseudonymous letters to Sidney's father, signing the first "An Old Inhabitant and a Seeker for Justice," the second "C.G.B.," and the third "A London Tradesman and Now a Visitor at Brighton," in which she urged Barker to "take proceedings against Mr. Maynard" and suggested that if he did not he, Barker, would be a negligent parent and complicit in future poisonings. "No parent could let the loss of his child be passed over in this cursory way. The Brighton public earnestly hope you will do something, for who knows where this may end?"

Edmunds was initially arrested on the charge of attempting to murder Mrs. Boys and Mrs. Beard, but once the police linked her to Sidney Barker's death the prosecution decided to act on the murder charge. In December 1871 Edmunds was taken to London, and in January 1872 her trial began at the Central Criminal Court. The prosecution marshalled considerable evidence against her: numerous witnesses identified her as the woman who had pseudonymously purchased strychnine, given poisoned candy to children, and paid various boys to run errands for her to and from John Maynard's shop. A handwriting expert stated that Edmunds had written the three letters sent to Sidney Barker's father. Not surprisingly, Edmunds's defence team did not attempt to challenge any of this damning evidence. Instead, as Serjeant Parry told the court in his opening address, he consulted a few of his colleagues and concluded that the only thing he could do was to draw the jury's attention to what he identified as the "real issue" in the case: his client's sanity.

Miss Edmunds, Serjeant Parry informed the court, suffered from an "impaired intellect" inherited from her father, a victim of "suicidal and homicidal mania" who died in a lunatic asylum. Edmunds's brother, "an epileptic idiot," had also died in an asylum. Moreover, her maternal and paternal grandfathers had died in middle-age as a result of their insanity, and her sister, who died at age thirty-six, had been afflicted with "constant hysteria." At age twenty-four Edmunds herself was "seized with paralysis" and for several months before the trial her strange behaviour had "excited attention among her friends." Parry placed four medical experts on the witness stand to state that Edmunds was mad and argued, based on his own encounters with his client, that Edmunds had founded the entire crime, to borrow a descriptive phrase applied to another case, on "delusions rather than upon actual facts."(43) Edmunds's "idiotic vanity" clearly revealed her delusional state, Parry declared. Although Edmunds claimed to be thirty-four, she was actually forty-three. Upon her arrival at Newgate, in preparation for her trial, Edmunds "required in somewhat peremptory terms to have an interview with the visiting magistrates, her avowed purpose being to protest against what she described as the improper treatment to which the regulations of the metropolitan prison subjected her." While in custody at Lewes, Edmunds said, she had lived in the matron's apartment, away from the other convicts, and was permitted to wear her own clothes. She arrived at Newgate with a wardrobe of velvet and silk dresses, and demanded, unsuccessfully, to wear them. Edmunds "declared that she had always been brought up as a lady" and could not possibly attend chapel without a bonnet, as the prison regulations stipulated.(44) Parry did not explicitly refer to Edmunds' fixation with Dr. Beard, as the judge had declared that he wanted to keep the Beards out of the case, but his emphasis on delusion implied that Edmunds's claim to a sexual relationship with her doctor was as without foundation as her pathetic attempt to cling to a long vanished youth.

Little hard evidence exists to support Parry's representation of his client as insane. One must wonder why, if Edmunds had exhibited bizarre behaviour for at least a year, as one of her female friends testified, Dr. Beard had not recommended that she receive psychiatric care, particularly given her family history and her supposed delusions about him. The psychiatric evaluations themselves are unconvincing: Dr. Charles Lockhart Robinson concluded that Edmunds' preoccupation with "her letters to Dr. Beard, on his conduct in allowing his wife to read them after all that had passed between them, and on the horror she would feel, not on being tried for murder, but at these letters being read in court" proved she was insane. Henry Maudsley rested his diagnosis on his firm belief that "it was a very probable thing that the children of the insane would be predisposed to insane acts," particularly "when there had been insanity on both sides" of the family.(45) Certainly nothing about Edmunds's elaborate and sustained poison plot suggested that she laboured under an "impaired intellect" as her attorney claimed. As with most convicted criminals, she made several foolish mistakes, but these can hardly be conflated with insanity. The prosecution accurately described her as "a woman exhibiting powers of great contrivance and considerable cunning" and the judge implied that the medical experts had based their diagnoses on Edmunds's gender and class, noting (quite without foundation) that while insanity "seldom afflicted" poor defendants "it was common to raise a defence of that kind when people of means were charged with the commission of crime."(46) Edmunds'sjury agreed, and convicted her. In the days that followed, the medical experts whose authority the judge had impugned wrote letters of protest to the press and the Home Office, the judge himself requested that Edmunds be examined by additional doctors, and the Home Secretary soon reprieved Edmunds' s death sentence on ground of insanity.

That the Home Secretary reprieved Edmunds on ground of insanity rather than simply commuting her death sentence to a life term (the far more common response to a death sentence) is intriguing. Except for the fact that she had murdered a child, nothing about her case met the requirements of the commonsense criterion or the M'Naghten Rules. The crime required too much premeditation, time and effort to be considered remotely impulsive, and Edmunds had used poison, the hallmark of deliberate, secretive killer who hoped to escape detection, and accordingly the method least likely to figure in insanity cases. Her alleged motive may have seemed bizarre and inadequate to those who followed the story in the newspapers, but it was no more bizarre and inadequate than the motive of the late-Victorian serial killer Thomas Neill Cream, who administered "pills" stuffed with strychnine to Lambeth prostitutes apparently because he despised women, and who tried but failed to have his death sentence reprieved on ground of insanity.(47) "The press warned Home Secretary Asquith not to give vent to any `sentimental nonsense"'(48) when considering Cream's appeal, but the press greeted news of Edmunds' reprieve with approval: the Pall Mall Gazette expressed its relief at the Home Secretary's decision, although the paper admitted that "we have no better reason than the rest of the world for our satisfaction -- namely, because she is a woman."(49)

Identifying Edmunds as a victim of insanity who could not be held responsible for the intricate plot she had conceived and carried out not only saved her from the gallows but turned her from a dark and menacing figure who stalked the streets of Brighton and had the ability to poison anyone with a sweet tooth, into a pathetic, deluded spinster, and this version of events has endured. Those who have examined the Edmunds case have regarded her claim to a sexual relationship with Beard as further proof of her madness, depicting Edmunds as sexually frustrated and predisposed to insanity by her unfortunate family history, a woman so desperate for love that, according to one imaginative account, she first became convinced that Beard was in love with her when he happened to glance at her while walking at the seafront and feigned illness in order to meet him;(50) a woman whose deranged mind became so irrationally obsessed with a man who "had not paid her any undue attention" that she went to enormous lengths to fabricate an intimate relationship with him, and convinced herself that the fantasy was real.(51)

Edmunds herself was undoubtedly quite relieved to have her death sentence reprieved, even at the price of having her motive invalidated, but the legal system's willingness to conflate shocking acts of female violence with mental illness was, at best, a mixed blessing for women. Although the insanity acquittal figured in relatively few trials for violent crimes, it gave rise to the concern that the insanity acquittal was little more than a legal strategy by which the unquestionably guilty could avoid being held accountable for their actions. Examining the insanity acquittal in practice, however, suggests that the acquittal was not explicitly regarded as a legal strategy and thus commonly employed as a means of sparing unquestionably sane defendants from prison or death. While the majority of women who pleaded insanity did so successfully, the bulk of their cases shared common characteristics and this indicates that the insanity plea was made only in specific circumstances. However, the legal system's willingness to grant insanity acquittals to women, and reluctance to grant these acquittals to men, suggests that juries were heavily influenced by preconceived notions of how women and men should respond to stressful situations. The insanity acquittal may have saved many women from the gallows, but it also reinforced an image of women as weak-willed, emotional and irrational; at the same time, the relative difficulty with which men secured insanity acquittals underlined the extent to which men were held to be responsible for their actions under any circumstances. Moreover, the ostensible benefits of the insanity acquittal were not limited to those defendants who secured this verdict. The insanity acquittal's prominence in women's murder trials, particularly trials concerning the unexpected and brutal murder of children, the willingness of juries to ignore the M'Naghten Rules when assessing the criminal responsibility of female defendants, and the tendency of both lawyers and physicians to point to the crimes as ample evidence of the defendant's insanity, suggests that juries frequently based their decisions on a conflation of female violence with mental illness, and indeed preferred to believe that only mentally disturbed women could commit shocking violent crimes.

At the conclusion of the very popular mid-Victorian novel Lady Audley's Secret, a physician is summoned to assess the mental condition of Lady Audley, a charming and beautiful woman who has transcended her modest beginnings to become the wife of the wealthy, aging Sir Michael. The physician is told that Lady Audley has facilitated her social rise by abandoning her child, assuming a new identity, bigamously marrying Sir Michael and then faking her own death, but declines to conclude that these acts prove Lady Audley's mental incapacity. However, once he is informed that Lady Audley is also suspected of having murdered her first husband and attempting to murder other men who threatened to expose her past, he promptly diagnoses her as suffering from "latent insanity," and Lady Audley is dispatched to a continental lunatic asylum. Although the physician insists that his diagnosis is quite legitimate, he also acknowledges that ascribing Lady Audley's actions to insanity is little more than an excuse. "You would wish to prove that this lady is mad, and therefore irresponsible for her actions," he says to Lady Audley's suspicious nephew. "Yes," responds Robert Audley, who can find no other way to comprehend her behaviour. "I would rather, if possible, think her mad.(52)

University of Durham

(1) Mary Ann Brough, Times (London) 10 August 1854, p. 11. See also Public Record Office, Kew, ASSI 36/8.

(2) Forbes Winslow, "Recent trials in lunacy," Journal of Psychological Medicine, 7 (1854), 617, quoted in R. Smith, Trial by Medicine. p. 59.

(3) J.C. Bucknill, Unsoundness of Mind in Relation to Criminal Acts (London, 1857), p. 136. Bucknill was not calling for the execution of Brough, but for the provision of a category of crime between wilful murder and manslaughter which would enable juries to convict those defendants who had committed murders under extenuating circumstances.

(4) Infanticide, generally defined as the, murder of a child under the age of one year by its mother but most commonly the intentional or accidental killing of a newborn, is not included in this study, for few Victorians conflated infanticide with murder, and infanticide, like the criminal trials resulting from botched abortions, is better dealt with as a separate issue.

(5) For example, in 1897, three women, or 33 per cent of female defendants that year, received an insanity acquittal, but ten men, or 8 per cent of male defendants did that year.

(6) For example, in his careful study of the insanity plea in the Victorian period, Roger Smith does not attempt to determine how commonly the insanity defence was used or its rate of success, let alone consider the possibility that the insanity acquittal was gendered, citing unspecified "difficulties in measuring the incidence of the defence." Smith, Trial By Medicine, p. 3. An examination of the role of the Home Office in reprieving condemned prisoners can be found in R. Chadwick's Bureaucratic Mercy: The Home Office and the Treatment of Capital Cases in Victorian Britain (New York and London, 1992).

(7) Both the women's and men's cases are part of larger samples. I collected data on 1,260 cases of women tried for violent crimes between 1832 and 1901, and data on 1,231 cases of men tried for violent crimes for selected years from the beginning, middle and end of the period. The years studied for men's cases were: 1832, 1837; 1842; 1847; 1862, 1867; 1882, 1887; and 1892, 1897. The bulk of this research involved newspaper reports and, to a lesser extent, extant legal records -- two discourses which give the appearance of objectivity and neutrality but in fact present partial and biassed accounts. Thus both sources must be read with the knowledge that a complete and coherent truth can never be fully retrieved.

(8) E. Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980 (New York, 1985).

(9) J. Busfield, "The Female Malady? Men, Women and Madness in Nineteenth-Century Britain," Sociology ,V. 28, 1 (February 1994), 259.

(10) Ibid., p. 265.

(11) Ibid., pp. 265, 273.

(12) As noted, this study does not include infanticide cases. Although infanticide trials commonly ended in a conviction for the lesser crime of concealment of a birth or a straight acquittal, some infanticidal mothers were acquitted on ground of insanity.

(13) See N. Walker, Crime and Insanity in England (Edinburgh, 1968).

(14) G.W. Keeton, Guilty But Insane (London, 1961), pp. 102-4.

(15) "`Acquitted on Ground of Insanity,'" Cornhill, XII (1865), 427.

(16) H. Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease (New York, 1876), pp. 98, 102.

(17) "`Acquitted on the Ground of Insanity,'" p. 426.

(18) The likelihood that a woman would be acquitted on ground of insanity increased as the century progressed. From the beginning of the 1840s until the end of the 1870s, 7 per cent of women charged with a violent crime received an acquittal on ground of insanity. By the end of the 1880s, however, the proportion had climbed to 11 per cent, and in the 1890s it increased to 17 per cent. These figures reflect the broad shift in explanations of female criminality that L. Zedner has identified, "from the moral analyses favoured around the middle of the nineteenth century, to a growing tendency to interpret criminality as indicative of biological or psychological disorder." L. Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford, 1991), p. 3.

(19) For Sarah Dobbins, see Times (London), 20 July 1885, p. 6; for Annie Jackson, see Times (London), 10 February 1882, p. 12, for Sarah Chiswell, see Times (London), 30 May 1883, p. 12; for Adelaide Cole, see Times (London), 25 September 1862, p. 11; for Ann Amess, see Times (London), 26 March 1878, p. 4; or Lucy Mills, see Times (London), 26 July 1889, p. 11; for Martha Bacon, see Times (London), 14 May 1857, p. 10; for Sarah Jane Calendar, see P.R.O. CRIM 10/80, CRIM 1/32/9, and Times (London), 6 February 1890, p. 12.

(20) "M.D. and M.A.D.," All the Year Round, VI (1862), 513.

(21) Smith, Trial by Medicine, p. 62.

(22) Certainly some of the unsuccessful cases were unpremeditated, impulsive and apparently motiveless, and their defendants' failure to secure an insanity acquittal demonstrates how the success or failure of the plea could depend upon the whim of the jury, but most unsuccessful cases failed to meet the commonsense criterion in one respect or another. Mary Holliday failed to secure an insanity acquittal after she murdered her nine year old daughter because she killed the child after telling her employer, whom she hoped to marry, that she had no illegitimate children. In the eyes of the jury, this constituted premeditation and provided Holliday with a motive. Times (London), 5 May 1888, p. 13.

(23) The throat cutting of children was almost exclusive to women's insanity cases. Of the twenty-four instances of throat cutting (63 per cent of which were not fatal to the victim) in which the insanity acquittal did not figure, only six of the victims were children, and only two of these children died. Similarly, the majority of mothers (56 per cent) charged with the murders of their children were acquitted on ground of insanity. These findings explicitly contradict Judith Knelman's recent assertion that the Victorian legal system "balked at extending this legal leniency [an insanity acquittal] to child murder" unless the accused "could not distinguish between right and wrong." J. Knelman, Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (Toronto, 1998), p. 137.

(24) A profile of the typical male defendant who successfully pleaded insanity cannot be drawn so easily, for unlike the women's cases, the men's cases included a broad range of victim-defendant-relationships, methods and motives, but significant differences between women's and men's insanity cases and crimes in general can be discerned. 47 per cent of men who sought an insanity acquittal had committed a violent crime against an immediate or extended family member. However, acquaintances/friends/neighbours, who figured in very few women's insanity cases, comprised the single largest victim group in men's insanity acquittals, accounting for 26 per cent of cases; similarly, although husbands were not prominent in women's insanity cases, wives accounted for 23 per cent of men's cases, and children, the most common victim group in women's cases, accounted for 18 per cent of men's cases. That said, similarities between men's and women's cases did exist. The most common methods in men's insanity acquittals were battery (27 per cent), throat cutting (26 per cent), stabbing (18 per cent) and shooting (13 per cent). Throat cutting was the single most common method used against wives (50 per cent of cases) and children (45 per cent of cases), while acquaintances/friends/neighbours were most likely to have been battered (31 per cent), stabbed (16 per cent), or shot (16 per cent).

(25) Eleanor Bell, Times (London), 14 June 1867, p. 11.

(26) Maudsley, Responsibility, p. 187.

(27) For Elizabeth Harpham, see Times (London), 10 May 1881, p. 4; for Maria Chitty, see Times (London), 4 August 1852, p. 7; for Mary Ann Dyson, see Times (London), 18 August 1864, p. 10; for Sarah Freeman, see Times (London), 28 May 1878, p. 6.

(28) For Joseph Speed, see Times (London), 18 December 1847, p. 6; for Sarah Dickenson, see P.R.O. CRIM 10/19.

(29) H. Maudsley, The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind (London, 1867), p. 355.

(30) For Martha Brixey, see P.R.O. CRIM 10/22 and Times (London), 17 May 1845, p. 7.

(31) For Sarah Dobbins, see Times (London), 20 July 1885, p. 6; for Mary Ann Payne, see Times (London), 15 July 1863, p. 10; for Catherine Hail, see Times (London), 18 June 1900, p. 14; for Louisa Felton, see Times (London), 4 December 1901, p. 7.

(32) For Kate Barrow, see Times (London), 27 October 1881, p. 7; for Louisa Proud, see Times (London), 6 May 1883, p. 6; for Hannah Johnson Cox, see Times (London), 29 July 1901 p. 3, for Maria Spurlock, see Times (London), 20 August 1832, p. 3; for Jane Tinkler, see Times (London), 25 November 1895, p. 12.

(33) Smith, Trial by Medicine, pp. 149-50.

(34) In one case, correspondence documents the resistance of one defendant and her mother to the suggestion that the defendant was insane; the women recognized that acceptance of an insanity acquittal would be tantamount to denying the legitimacy of the motive. CRIM 1/68/1, undated letter from Emma Dyer to Caroline Dyer, received 3 August 1901. The defendant, Caroline Dyer, was charged with murder and attempted murder after she became convinced that she had been drugged and raped, and acted to revenge herself on the perpetrators. No one in authority who heard her allegations took her seriously, and, although she insisted that she was perfectly sane, she was judged mentally unfit to stand trial and sent to an asylum. Her brother, who was her accomplice, was considered fit to plead; he stood trial, and was acquitted on ground of insanity.

(35) Times (London), 6 August 1861, p. 9 and "A Visit to a Convict Asylum," Cornhill, X (1864), 457. See also P.R.O. ASSI 36/10.

(36) Times (London), 9 September 1871, p. 6.

(37) Times (London), 17 January 1872, p. 9.

(38) Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, p 138.

(39) Times (London), 21 September 1871, p. 5.

(40) Times (London), 17 January 1872, p. 9; 30 December 1871, p. 9.

(41) Times (London), 16 January 1872, p. 11.

(42) Edmunds not only attempted to murder the one witness who could definitively link her with strychnine, but she had also tampered with the book in which Garrett recorded all sales of poisonous drugs. After making three strychnine purchases from him, Edmunds surmized he would refuse to sell her any more, and so she wrote him a letter in which she posed as a partner in another Brighton chemist shop and requested Garrett to send over a "drachm" of strychnine. He did. Times (London), 16 January 1872, p. 11.

(43) Report of Dr. Bastian regarding Caroline Dyer, P.R.O. CRIM 1/68/1.

(44) Times (London), 30 December 1871, p. 9.

(45) Times (London), 17 January 1872, p. 12; 18 January 1872, p. 5.

(46) Times (London), 17 January 1872, p. 12.

(47) See A. McLaren, A Prescription for Murder: The Victorian Serial Killings of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (Chicago, 1993). Perhaps Cream's bid for a reprieve on ground of insanity would have succeeded if his defence lawyers had, like Edmunds's defence team, argued at his trial that Cream was not responsible for his actions by reason of insanity, but instead the defence sought a straight acquittal. McLaren notes several similarities between the Edmunds and Cream cases, particularly the shared predilection for strychnine and writing pseudonymous letters.

(48) McLaren, p. 60.

(49) Pall Mall Gazette, reprinted in the Times (London), 26 January 1872, p. 5.

(50) C. Kingston, Famous Judges and Famous Trials (London, 1923), p. 218.

(51) Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, p. 138. Unfortunately, Beard destroyed all but one of the letters Edmunds wrote to him, and we have only his word that these letters proved that Edmunds had fantasized the entire relationship. Roger Chadwick refers to the Edmunds case in his chapter "The Home Office and Insanity," but his short account of the case is highly inaccurate and extremely simplistic, thus making Edmunds seem far more inept than she was. Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy, pp. 263-64.

(52) M.E. Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford and New York, 1987), pp. 376-77.