Read Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum for Free Online

May
1880. John Oxford was named as the man who shot at the Queen many
years ago, and had subsequently been a patient in an asylum before
he was discharged to Australia. He had recently been convicted of
stealing a shirt and spent a week in jail. Upon his release, the
prison governor had asked the police to keep an eye on him, ‘in
consequence of the old man’s eccentric conduct’. To that end the
police had arrested Oxford for vagrancy, and the article reported
that he was up before the bench again. He was remanded for further
medical examination. Haydon’s update ended there.
    Sources
indicate that there is further correspondence from Haydon elsewhere
to suggest that Oxford later changed his name to John Freeman, and
published a book called Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life in
1888. Certainly the book exists, but there is nothing in the
Broadmoor archive which confirms that he was its author. These
other sources quote Haydon as reporting that Oxford was a house
painter by trade (carrying on the skills he learnt in hospital) and
had married at some point before 1888. Oxford’s suggested date of
death is 1900.
    Queen Victoria
suffered several other assassination attempts during her reign,
mostly from subjects who, if not legally insane, were certainly
considered by the general population to be mad. One of those was
another Broadmoor patient, Roderick MacLean, who shot at her at
Windsor Railway Station on 2nd March 1882. MacLean was sent to
Broadmoor after his trial, but unlike Oxford he did not recover,
and remained there until his death in 1921. It was MacLean’s case
that resulted in a change in sentence for those found to be
criminal lunatics, from the traditional ‘not guilty by reason of
insanity’, to the more condemnatory ‘guilty, but insane’. The
motivation for the law change is always levelled at the Queen’s
response to MacLean’s not guilty verdict: ‘Insane he may have been,
but not guilty he most certainly was not, as I saw him fire the
pistol myself.’ This is not entirely true: the Queen did not see
MacLean shoot, though she did hear the report of his pistol.
However, her displeasure at MacLean’s innocence was real, and she
pressurised Prime Minister Gladstone to change the law. It is
unclear exactly what Victoria hoped to achieve by this, though she
alluded to the view that if Edward Oxford had been hanged all those
years ago, it might have deterred those potential regicides who
came after him. Forty years of being shot at had not mellowed Her
Majesty.
     
     
     

 
     
Richard
Dadd:
Artist of
Repute

     
    For many
years, Dadd has been perhaps the most celebrated Victorian resident
of Broadmoor. An artist of some repute, the quality of his fairy
paintings was acknowledged during his lifetime, and he continued to
paint remarkable works during his time in asylums. Many of these
works survive, and quite apart from any sensational interest in
Dadd’s circumstances, it is acknowledged that Dadd possessed a rare
talent.
    His artistic
endeavours had benefitted from conducive surroundings. Dadd’s
father, Robert, was an intellectual man, a chemist and the first
curator of the Chatham and Rochester Literary and Philosophical
Institution’s museum, and Dadd himself attended The King’s School
at Rochester. When he was seventeen, the family moved to London,
and at nineteen he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools where
he completed his training as an artist.
    Dadd had been
born on 1st August 1817 in Chatham. He was the fourth of seven
children borne by his mother Mary, a total of four of whom would
eventually die insane. The young Dadd was influenced by both
literary and classical themes, and by the early 1840s had begun to
create the fairy paintings for which he would become best known. In
due course, his work attracted the patronage of Sir Thomas
Phillips, a solicitor from South Wales who had been knighted for
his part in ending a Chartist riot, and who had money to burn.
Phillips decided