Family Backdrop

Of course, we have no real idea whether Harriett Wombwell and the Robinson clan were in St. Paul’s Shadwell on the day of the wedding, and whether Henry’s elopement plans were shelved in favour of a more conventional approach to his marriage. Equally, we have little to go on with regards to Henry’s own father, Thomas Bradley (Hetty Jane Owen’s great-grandfather).

But, to review what we do know: He married Henry’s mother, Elizabeth Hounsell, of Bristol in St. Dunstan, Stepney in 1813. He is recorded in the 1841 census with his family in Robinhood Lane, Poplar, and is a baker. His burial is recorded in 1851, at St. Matthews, Bethnal Green, with his age given as sixty, and his address as the ‘Madhouse’.

This madhouse is most likely to have been Bethnal House Asylum. This privately run lunatic asylum had caused a certain amount of scandal in its time. In 1827, a Parliamentary Select Committee reported that:

...for each 50 inmates, there was one member of staff.  Patients who were incontinent at night were made to sleep in cribs - bedsteads filled with straw - and with just a blanket for covering.  Most were naked.  Their arms and legs were secured by chains from 3 o'clock in the afternoon until 9 o'clock the following morning.  At meal times their food was brought to them and their arms freed sufficiently to allow them to eat.  At weekends they were secured from 3 o'clock on Saturday until 9 o'clock on Monday morning, when they would be taken out to the yard and their excrement removed from them with a mop dipped in cold water.

(see: http://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/bethnalhouse.html)

Conditions were subsequently vastly improved, and by the 1st January, 1849, as Henry was writing his New Year greetings to Maria, his father was probably one of 272 male patients in the so-called ‘Red House’. 175 0f these patients were paupers, and 97 ‘private’. There was a charge of just over 9 shillings for weekly maintenance.

It seems highly likely that the following admission entry to Bethnal House Asylum from 1850 is indeed Henry’s father, and that Henry had therefore been named after him:

Thomas was dead within a year of his admission, whether of early-dementia, madness, or some other ailment that the family preferred not to mention, is unclear. As mentioned earlier however, having a father in a lunatic asylum would not have improved Henry’s social standing in the eyes of the likes of Harriett Wombwell, particularly with the dubious and shady possibilities of venereal disease lurking in the background.