'They Used to Carry a Strait Jacket With Them'

A lady rides an omnibus in London and remembers her father saying: “You are more thoughtful than us” -- a seemingly loving thing for a father to say of his daughter. The second stanza of Stevie Smith’s “Northumberland House” (The Frog Prince and Other Poems, 1966) confirms our sense of the lady’s sensitive nature: “I used to cry if a fly / Stuck in the hatch.” And the third: 

“Mother always said,

Elsie is too good,

There’ll never be another like Elsie,

Touch wood.”

 

That final line raises questions. Smith writes the first five stanzas in the first-person. Only in the sixth and seventh, which switch from first- to third-person, do we learn that all has been coded euphemism:

 

“The poor lady now burst out crying

And I saw her friend was not a friend but a nurse

For she said, Cheer up duckie the next stop is ours,

They got off at Northumberland House.”

 

“This great House of the Percies

Is now a lunatic asylum,

But over the gate there still stands

The great Northumberland Lion.”

 

Smith is having a little fun here. Northumberland House opened in 1829 as an exclusive lunatic asylum. The building was closed in 1954 and torn down the following year. Its most famous patient, from 1938 until her death in 1947, was Vivienne Haigh-Wood, T.S. Eliot’s first wife. The other Northumberland House, built in 1605, was the London townhouse of the wealthy, prominent Percy family. It was demolished in 1874.

Elsie and her nurse on the way to Northumberland House remind me of that saddest of literary scenes – Charles Lamb escorting his sister, “Mad” Mary Lamb, to what we euphemize as a mental hospital. On September 22, 1796, Mary had fatally stabbed her mother and wounded her father. Charles became her legal custodian and for the remainder of her life she was subject to “fits” of madness, and Charles would accompany her back to the madhouse.

 

Bryan Waller Procter (1787-1874) was a poet who wrote under the name Barry Cornwall. For thirty years he served as London’s metropolitan Commissioner of Lunacy (a title worthy of Monty Python’s Flying Circus). In 1866 he published Charles Lamb: A Memoir, which contains this melancholy snapshot of Charles and Mary:

 

“Whenever the approach of one of her fits of insanity was announced by some irritability or change of manner, he would take her, under his arm, to Hoxton Asylum. It was very affecting to encounter the young brother and his sister walking together (weeping together) on this painful errand; Mary herself, although very sad, very conscious of the necessity for temporary separation from her only friend. They used to carry a strait jacket with them.”