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fits that would have him permanently committed to Earlswood Asylum, a vast institution at Reigate, principally for those with learning disabilities, whose patron was the Queen. According to his mother, Arthur had been an ‘idiot’ from an early age, a condition which the family, but not the doctors, attributed to ‘a blow to the head’. A little while after or perhaps even before the father’s death, the family rented a house in Canterbury at 3 Watling Street – perhaps so as to avoid too many questions from Margate acquaintances. Help for Arthur was sought from two doctors here, both of whom were attached to the Kent and Canterbury Hospital. Dr Hallowes and Dr Andrews signed the 1860 medical certificate that committed the young man to Earlswood, where he lived until his death in 1866. Christiana and her mother may then have moved back to Margate before moving again to those fatal lodgings in Brighton.
    After the death of her father, Christiana herself went through some kind of episode. Around 1853, she was sent to London for treatment. Like a case of hysteria from the annals of Jean-Martin Charcot or the young Freud, she was then paralysed down one side and her feet were so affected that she was unable to walk. In her deposition, her mother emphasizes that Christiana ‘suffered for many years from Hysteria and when a child used to walk in her sleep’. It seems the challenges of becoming a Victorian woman would stop her walking in her twenties when wide awake.
    Whether Christiana’s ‘hysteria’ was in part the effect of an early unrequited love or a way of escaping an unwanted marriage, whether it was due to a lack of opportunities for intelligent women, genteel but poor, or occasioned by a lack of suitable suitors, it is a fact that at one point she chose what would later become known as a ‘flight into illness’, and remained unattached. She became one of those one in four Victorian women classified as ‘spinster’. Meanwhile her younger sisters, though not unaffected by the family’s decline, did marry. Thedynamics of sibling relations, the way their mother may have characterized their successes and failures, the frustrations of the family situation, all inevitably played their role in shaping the rather girlish woman Christiana would become.
    All the Edmunds girls were educated – Christiana at a private school, her later records show – and reached a ‘superior’ level of attainment. Louisa Agnes, four years younger than Christiana, worked for some time as a governess in London. It may have been here that she met the widower and naval surgeon Julian Watson Bradshaw: it was certainly in London that she married him in December 1862, when she was twenty-nine. It’s tempting to speculate that the marriage didn’t go well for her, since in a moment of ‘violent hysteria’ she tried to throw herself out of a window and was only saved by her mother and a servant holding her down. Or it may be that Louisa’s ‘violent hysteria’ happened at a time closer to Christiana’s, before she left home for London. Either way, by 1867, at the age of only thirty-three, four years into her marriage, Louisa was dead, buried in Margate. There was no inquest, so a second suicide attempt can’t be inferred.
    Christiana’s and Louisa’s labile and excessive states seem to have found an echo in their brother William. There are few traces of him in the historical record, but according to the memorial sent to the Home Secretary after Christiana’s trial by Sydney Cornish Harrington of Datchworth, William as a young man had dramatically threatened suicide when he was refused permission to marry Sydney’s sister. So great were the family fears on both sides, that William’s wish was granted. His own family seems to have provided a fertile training ground for his later profession. At the time of Christiana’s trial