Disability History Month: “But this here softening of the brain—well—”
Disability History Month: “But this here softening of the brain—well—”[i]
In this final post of the year, we return to disability and old age, but this time focused on cognitive decline and with an eye out for who is doing the caring – a role often hard to discern in the records.
I want to start by whisking you back to the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. A crisis suddenly descends on a Midlands family business as the founder begins to experience cognitive decline. The doctors offer a limited prognosis and press him to agree to cease engagement in all business affairs. His son is expected to step in to his father’s shoes, and that means administrative changes, such as whose signatures are accepted at the bank, and having to grapple with incomplete paperwork for some business arrangements which had been based on gentleman’s agreements. We know as much as we do about all this because this is the Clayhanger printing business from the novelistic imagination of Arnold Bennett.[ii] The situation, however, is clearly not an unbelievable one, and reminds us that disability may be lurking in the gaps and silences of business records.
For now, however, I want to dig a little into Bennett’s representation of Darius’ decline and the experience of the adult children having their roles changed to caregivers – as a window into what may often have gone undocumented in real life. With the first signs of change we find the son, Edwin, realising “I shall have to treat this man like a blooming child!” He now has to assist his father to stand, and to move from room to room, to climb stairs, and prepare for bed. He exchanges meaningful glances with his sister, whose manner now suggests her father “might have been a helpless and half-daft invalid for years.” Consulting the doctor, Edwin is informed that the patient is “’in his right mind.’ But he gave the reply in a tone so peculiar that the affirmative was almost as disconcerting as a negative would have been.” Edwin finds himself getting more useful information about his father’s condition from non-medics, who had personal experience and, seeing him as a result “condemned, cut off, helpless at the last, pitiable at the last”, he learns to understand “All this is part of his disease.” Nonetheless, he keeps being surprised by further twists in his father’s decline, including a profane outburst which came as “a brilliant and appalling revelation. It comprised words which were strange to him, and strange perversions that renewed the vigour of decrepit words. For Edwin, it was a whole series of fresh formulae, brutal and shameless beyond his experience, full of images and similes of the most startling candour, and drawing its inspiration always from the sickening bases of life. Darius had remembered with ease the vocabulary to which he was hourly accustomed when he began life as a man of seven.”
The idea of late old age as “second childishness” is perhaps familiar from Jaques’ Seven Ages of Man speech, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (see preview image), ending with this bleak description of “mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” – a further deterioration from “the lean and slippered pantaloon” with “shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound.” Darius Clayhanger, however, was experiencing this age prematurely and out of sequence, due to disease. Edwin may have been spared much of the day-to-day difficulties, by attending to the duties of the family business, but it is evidently not all left to his sister.
I closed a previous blog with reference to Mary Walker and the 1891 census[iii]. At that time, her immediate neighbour is shown as Henry Purdey. By 1901 they are clearly living in the same two room cottage as two households, and both were described as being of “no occupation”[iv]. While that may have been true in his case – Ford Madox Ford described him as “a particularly disagreeable old man… He sat all day in a grandfather’s chair, grumbling and swearing at Mary whenever she came in” – we have Ford’s testimony that, now in her seventies, Mary continued “tying hops, heating ovens, picking up stones, keeping a hen or two” as well as taking care of Purdey who “had no claim whatever upon her and he never paid her a penny of money.”[v] Having identified cancer at the age of seventy-eight, Mary, “the wisest… and most estimable human being”, died. Ford reports Mary Walker’s last words as “Who’s going to look after old Purdey?” Now aged 90, he was admitted to the workhouse.
It is important to note that the official record gives only a very partial picture of Mary’s labour as a disabled old woman. In particular, her role as a non-familial carer for a cantankerous older man would be completely invisible without the supplement of a local novelist’s memoir. This would perhaps also be true of a familial carer, like Mary’s friend Mary Spratt who had married James Spratford when he was in his seventies. In the next census, he was nonetheless still listed as a General Labourer.[vi] By the time Ford knew them, they were living “in a little brick cottage not much larger than a dog kennel.” When the husband died in 1899, he did so “raving on the mud floor of his hut”. His wife now in her early eighties, had “gnarled, rheumatic fingers” (a condition which also affected her shoulders and legs), so it is no surprise that she “had not the strength to lift him into bed.” Ford mentions that “four men who had held him down during the night had had to go to work in the morning.” Although they had many adult children, Ford’s choice of words again, suggests unpaid, non-familiar carers (from the local community).
With those from the upper middle classes and above, however, the role of carer for an older disabled individual has perhaps often been taken by members of the domestic service staff in a household {regardless of any occupation given in a census). In the fictional world of the Forstye Saga, for example, Uncle Timothy, once he has “resumed his babyhood”, lives alone but for a cook and a maid: “he's quite deaf. And a mercy, I always think. For what we should have done with him in the air-raids, I don't know… We just left him in his bed, and had the bell run down into the cellar, so that Cook and I could hear him if he rang. It would never have done to let him know there was a war on. As I said to Cook, 'If Mr. Timothy rings, they may do what they like—I'm going up… But he slept through them all beautiful. And the one in the daytime he was having his bath. It was a mercy, because he might have noticed the people in the street all looking up—he often looks out of the window…Now that he can't worry about things, he quite enjoys his life, really he does. As I say to Cook, Mr. Timothy is more of a man than he ever was. You see, when he's not walkin', or takin' his bath, he's eatin', and when he's not eatin', he's sleepin'. and there it is. There isn't an ache or a care about him anywhere.”[vii]
[i] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/21249/pg21249-images.html
[ii] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/21249/pg21249-images.html
[iii] https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/6598/records/25215537
[iv] https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/7814/records/5730013
[v] Return to Yesterday, Reminiscences 1894-1914
[vi] https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/6598/records/14638851
[vii] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4397/4397-h/4397-h.htm