On June 8, 1858, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton climbed the hustings at Hertford, the open-air platform where candidates faced the voters, to accept his return to Parliament. He was one of England's best-selling novelists and its new Colonial Secretary, a post that required him to stand for his seat again. Nobody ran against him. Overnight, posters attacking him had gone up around the town. His wife had paid for them.
Their marriage had been a public war for decades. By Rosina's account, he went at her with a carving knife in 1834, and she kept the written apology he sent afterward. In 1836 she caught him with a mistress, and they were legally separated. Two years later he took custody of both children. She answered with a novel that made him its villain and kept attacking him in print. Their daughter died of typhus in a boarding house in 1848, at nineteen, and in the 1850s he had Rosina watched, hoping to prove adultery and divorce her.
At Hertford she arrived late, after he had already spoken, and by nearly every account he left the platform in a hurry while she addressed the voters in his place. Her own version survives in a letter she wrote to a friend three days later. In it, she says she opened with a prediction: the papers would either print nothing about the day, or spread the story that she had behaved like a madwoman. The historian Sarah Wise notes that no independent source confirms her words. The Times printed his speech in full and left her out.
Two weeks later, on June 22, she went to the London house of a surgeon named Frederick Hale Thomson, expecting an answer to her terms for ending her campaign against Sir Edward. Instead she found an asylum keeper, his assistant, two women attendants, and a certificate of insanity already signed. The second signature, she later wrote, belonged to a druggist from Fenchurch Street who had never met her. When two policemen were brought in, she warned, by her own account, that "the very stones of London will rise up against them."
She was taken to Inverness Lodge, a private asylum house in Brentford. Her friends got the story into the papers, and her supporters in Taunton held public meetings. She walked out on July 17, twenty-five days later, under a settlement that sent her abroad with their son. Her own account adds one more detail. The asylum's proprietor let his fourteen-year-old daughter spend her days with his new patient, and sometimes go driving with her alone.
The law written for wives
Rosina had something most women in her position didn't: a scandal big enough to embarrass a cabinet minister. Most had only the law, and Illinois had already written down what it allowed. Its 1851 statute, the one Elizabeth Packard's husband used in 1860, allowed a married woman to be admitted to the state hospital on her husband's request and the superintendent's judgment,
"without the evidence of insanity required in other cases."
Packard's answer was An Act for the Protection of Personal Liberty, passed on March 5, 1867. No one could be committed in Illinois without a jury, and everyone already confined got the right to one. In April 1872, the Muscatine Evening Journal reported her in Des Moines lobbying Iowa's lawmakers, and called her no more insane than the husband who'd committed her. That June, at the Iowa Press Association's meeting in Mount Pleasant, she was given ten minutes to explain Iowa's new law creating visitors to look after asylum patients. The Burlington Hawk-Eye reported that the time limit was thought "a wise precaution."
What a jury could and couldn't do
A jury guaranteed a hearing. It didn't guarantee a careful one. On May 19, 1875, under Packard's law, a Cook County jury heard Robert Todd Lincoln's petition against his mother, Mary Todd Lincoln. Several of the physicians who testified had never examined her and relied on what her son had told them. The Chicago Tribune reported that the jury needed only a few minutes. She was sent to a private sanitarium in Batavia, released that September, and declared restored by a second jury in June 1876. Historians still disagree about her mental health.
Much of the medical profession opposed the jury from the start. In 1869, the editor of the leading American asylum journal dismissed Packard in print as insane and overly fond of talking. The Illinois State Medical Society spent years lobbying to change her law, and in 1893 it largely succeeded: a jury now had to be requested, a judge could otherwise appoint two physicians to decide, and any jury of six had to include a doctor. That July, the Journal of the American Medical Association welcomed the new bill, explaining that the jury requirement had been enacted "at the instance of a female paranoiac." By 1947, only Mississippi and Texas still required a jury in every commitment.
Nobody counted
How many wives were committed by husbands who simply wanted them gone? Nobody kept that count, and the counts that exist don't settle it. On January 1, 1910, American institutions held 98,695 men and 89,096 women as insane. In England and Wales that same day, women made up about 54 percent of certified patients. Men were committed by their families too. In the same summer that Rosina's case filled the papers, so did that of a young man whose mother had confined him to stop a marriage.
What the record does show is a difference in the paperwork. For years, an American state's own statute named one kind of adult who could be committed on another person's word, without the evidence demanded for everyone else, and that adult was a married woman. When a woman won every adult in Illinois the right to a jury, the profession that ran the asylums called her a paranoiac, and within twenty-six years it had taken most of that right back.
That's the thread through this whole exhibit. Elizabeth Packard's husband in 1860. Isaac Baker Brown in the 1860s. Rosemary Kennedy's father in 1941. Alberta Lessard's county judge in 1971. The question was never only whether a woman was ill. It was who got to decide, and how much proof they owed anyone. Rosina Bulwer-Lytton got out because she was famous, well connected, and willing to make a scene in public — and because her friends could get a story into print. For over a century, a wife without those things had no recourse at all.
