Because I went well over my word-count, I had to delete the following passage from the penultimate chapter of Inconvenient People. The formidable singer, music teacher and lunacy-law campaigner Georgina Weldon got herself involved in the tragic story of Mrs Sheberras, whose case convinced Mrs Weldon that a sinister network lay at the heart of Chancery lunatic care. . .

Mrs Weldon asserted that former employees of the Ashley dynasty (Lord Shaftesbury’s family name) were benefiting from payments made to them to be keepers of Chancery “single patients” (the monies being paid out of the wealthy “lunatic’s” own funds). Mrs Weldon illustrated this point with the tale of Miss Platt and Mrs Sheberras.

Miss Platt had been discharged as sane from Camberwell House Asylum in south-east London, in which she had been kept for several years; she had entered the institution in 1873 a fairly wealthy woman, wrote Mrs Weldon, but her money had been used up by the private asylum care into which she had been placed by the Lord Chancellor’s office. The Lord Chancellor had chosen a “cheap” asylum in selecting Camberwell House, claimed Mrs Weldon, but nevertheless, the costs had eaten up Miss Platt’s entire estate. Once the money was gone, the Lord Chancellor pronounced Miss Platt sane, and she was thrown upon the world. She had nowhere to go and was friendless. She and her sister, Mrs Sheberras, had years earlier travelled to Britain from their native Australia, and none of their friends or relations in their home country had ever heard from them since.

Mrs Weldon heard of Miss Platt’s case and took her in at her Tavistock House home. Mrs Weldon’s friend Mr Hurry, of the Lunacy Law Amendment Society, had managed to locate her sister, Mrs Sheberras, in the hope that she might be able to help Miss Platt. However, he discovered that she too had become insane, after having had to observe the fatal injuries upon the body of her husband, Captain Rinaldo Sheberras, during a Sikh uprising in the Punjab in 1845. Miss Platt had, apparently, lost her soldier sweetheart during the same battle.

Miss Platt, according to Mrs Weldon, was in her seventies and had perfectly white smooth hair, was prim and neat, and had a yearly income of £75; Mrs Sheberras had a similar income and an Army widow’s pension. Mrs Sheberras had been lodged as a single patient with the former butler and maid of a family “connected to Lord Shaftesbury”, alleged Mrs Weldon.

During conversations at Tavistock House, Miss Platt enlightened Mrs Weldon about the role of a “lunatic’s” committee members (the people entrusted to look after the affairs of someone declared insane): they were paid anything from £10 to £1,000 a year to visit a lunatic a certain number of times a year, and since it was possible to visit twenty or more lunatics in a year, a very good income could be enjoyed.

She said that Mrs Sheberras’s committee included a Mrs M____, an elderly governess with some connection to the Ashley family. Mrs Weldon deduced from this, that although he was unpaid, Shaftesbury’s role as head of the governmental Commissioners In Lunacy was nevertheless a lucrative one. She claimed that he took a percentage of the salaries of the lunatic committee of such people as Mrs Sheberras and had pensioned off his poorer relations, former servants, governesses and so on by giving them Chancery lunatics to board, or by making them committee members. Mrs Weldon believed that she had made a breakthrough in discovering how this occult cabal functioned. In fact, she used the word “vampyres” to describe figures connected with Chancery.

Mrs Weldon noted that Miss Platt was always restless and came out with strange observations, but seemed otherwise rational. She lent Miss Platt a few pounds one day so that she could travel to Sydenham, South London, to visit another former patient of the asylum. A few days later Mrs Weldon received a letter from Miss Platt stating that she had gone instead to stay with her sister, Mrs Sheberras, at Matlock in Derbyshire, but that now “the hounds are after me”, and would Mrs Weldon come to help her?

Mrs Weldon travelled at once by train to Matlock, arriving after dark, and engaged some youths to help her search the hills of Derbyshire for a likely cottage, and at last found the remote house where Mrs Sheberras was being lodged with the former Shaftesbury servants. Mrs Sheberras was clearly suffering from delusions and hallucinations, Mrs Weldon decided, and noted that though elderly, she was still a beauty. However, Mrs Sheberras’s keepers told Mrs Weldon that Miss Platt was, in fact, the more psychologically troubled of the two, and that she had fled earlier that day.

Mrs Weldon telegraphed to Tavistock House the next morning, and by reply learned that Miss Platt had returned there and was in good spirits. But when Mrs Weldon reached Euston Station, she was met by one of her servants who said that Miss Platt had begun raving and had tried to jump out of a third-floor window at Tavistock House in the belief that asylum-keepers were after her. It had taken three people to hold her down and she had been taken away to the nearest workhouse lunatic ward.

Mrs Weldon went along to the workhouse the next day, and explained all she knew, and it was arranged for Miss Platt to be taken back to Camberwell House Asylum. She died there in 1889.

Mrs Weldon then heartlessly added to her account of the story her wish that Miss Platt had managed to throw herself out of the window, because that would have caused a true “sensation” – and this was the only thing that the public ever responded to. If Miss Platt had killed herself, Mrs Weldon would have used the case to “cause a searching inquiry into events which would have stirred up so much mud that Chancery, high and mighty as it is, would have been properly besmirched, and have received thrusts far more deadly than Dickens ever levelled at the whole infernal structure”.

It is difficult to know what to make of Mrs Weldon’s sinister conclusions about how Chancery lunacy administration worked. There are some obvious inconsistencies in her beliefs about the Platt story: Miss Platt still had an income of £75 a year, and so it isn’t true that the Lord Chancellor had overseen the using-up of her entire fortune.

As for her allegations of Lord Shaftesbury taking advantage of the single-patient system, Mrs Weldon did not appear to appreciate that in an era so far from “equal opportunities”, and where personal recommendation was the glue of public life, it was a wise idea to lodge vulnerable people with those who were known to be trustworthy and kind. Shaftesbury would have been able to recommend his former servants with confidence.

But to Mrs Weldon, Shaftesbury “does not wish for any reform in laws which answer his and his colleagues’ purpose so well. He does not want the light thrown on so much hideous wrong and cruelty. Not he! Charity is a very good cry, and it enables some pauper lords to live sumptuously, and to pay countless myrmidons.”