So, we come to Copse Style and Mrs Elizabeth Humfrey Fuller.  She bursts into our attention, in medias res, as we read of her frenzied trip to Brighton.  This woman has broken up the engagement of her daughter to Henry Slade, and he has left for Swan River.  For a long time after this, Mrs Fuller went into a low.  Charlotte Slade and Priscilla, Mrs Fuller Senior’s servant, took her to Brighton and its restorative sea air.  The trip had not succeeded and Mrs Fuller insisted on returning immediately.  As a result they take the night mail train to London, the early morning train to Twyford and then the fly back to Aston.  In the event, Charlotte Slade found herself in London for the first and perhaps only time in her life.  Matters go from bad to worse, for Anne Fuller, her daughter, dies soon after, apparently of a similar affliction as that which killed Deborah Slade a few weeks prior.  Mrs Fuller becomes so unbalanced that Dr Workman and Mr Fuller, probably her brother, went to London and brought home a proper person from the lunatic asylum to take care of her.  Within a few days she has tried to take her own life.  She sent secretly to a chemist in Wallingford and received laudanum from him.  They found her nearly gone, black in the face.

After this shock, everyone watches Mrs Fuller very closely.  They filter her mail to prevent her from receiving further upsets.  She expects to hear from Henry Slade in Swan River and becomes distraught when no letters arrive for her, but others receive letters addressed to them.  Throughout the letters we hear of her constantly pacing up and down in her parlour, becoming upset at the slightest news or absence of news.  Clearly highly strung, she cries when the Workmans sell up to leave for Cricklade.  Dr Workman had attended her throughout her problems.  She gives up management of the farm to her sons and others.  It seems that absence of letters from Henry Slade causes the biggest problem.  Gradually a pattern develops.  She thought he must have got married, else why would he not write to her?  She worries that Captain Dring might bring his daughter out to India for Henry.  Suddenly comes the truly astonishing news that Henry will return and plans to marry Mrs Fuller.

Mrs Fuller drank tea here about three weeks ago and called me upstairs for a private audience and then I was surprised to find you were coming home to marry her.  It has caused such a stir in the village: you can have no idea.  She said you would leave Calcutta in December and come overland and she expected your arrival the next week but you are not yet arrived, but still she remains as comfortable and happy as though you were on the threshold.  She has really got all her wedding things ready and have had a milliner from Wallingford to alter some of poor Anne’s capes to be married in.  Some people talk of waylaying you at Southampton and reason with you on the subject, and some says her money leaves her directly she is married, but no one speaks to her on the subject and she has not been here since, but I hear she is going to Reading next week and from thence to London and, I expect, to be there when the March mail comes in, thinking to see you first and get married in London.

As Charlotte says, doubtless still reeling from the shock although she writes three weeks after hearing the news, how is it you have never mentioned the subject to me?  Charlotte perhaps unconsciously exposes her own vulnerability here.

What do we make of this?  Seasoned watchers of Mrs Fuller will have probably seen this as just another in her series of delusions, more madness.  Notice, for example, that Charlotte waits for three weeks before confronting Henry with this news in her letter.  Unnerved, she may have waited for Henry to arrive, since Mrs Fuller believed that he would return at the beginning of February, having left India in December.  Even when Henry did not appear, perhaps she needed time to pluck up the courage to write.  She may have tried to test the validity of the claim from other sources.  On the other hand, she may have just written it off as another one of Mrs Fuller’s insanities.  Of course, our view of Mrs Fuller depends largely on Charlotte herself, so an initial feeling that Mrs Fuller has clearly gone off the deep end should be tempered by objectivity.  Nevertheless, without any other evidence, we would probably have seen it as nonsense, particularly since Henry married somebody else eventually.  Here, then, we turn to the letters written by Mrs Fuller.

A letter written in 1843 tells her cousin about her daughter’s death and the terrible blow it dealt.  Although prepared for such an event by the previous death of her husband, and although she claims to have shed no tears at Anne’s death, for three years I was completely laid aside from active duties.  Now, in 1843 she has taken up the reins, but everything seems changed, my house, my garden, even my children that are left.  The next letter in the sequence belongs to 1845, date marked 28^th May, in other words written three months after the bombshell letter written by Charlotte Slade to Henry.  In that letter, two crucial passages appear.

I wrote in September from Homerton and mentioned circumstances relative to myself, which might take place as I am at a great uncertainty still about myself.

I am looking with great interest for a letter from India, which will decide my prospects.

The passages are separated a good deal from each other.  The second one directly mentions India and her expectation of new prospects.  We must assume that she refers to Henry Slade.  In the letter written by Charlotte, Mrs Fuller had timed her announcement well, assuming Henry to return the following week.  Here some months later, she still believes that positive news will arrive from the east.  This timetable makes sense of the first passage, given the speed with which letters travel to and from India.  According to this, they had probably had correspondence in September that led her to believe Henry would return to claim her as his bride.

Of course, if we believe the hypothesis that Mrs Fuller constantly lived in a world of self-delusion, then this letter simply confirms it.  On the other hand, we might want to believe that no smoke exists without fire.  We will never know without additional evidence.

We do, however, have Mrs Fuller to thank for the only portrait we possess of Henry Slade.  In 1854 she describes him thus: he now wears a horrid moustache and imperial, making himself the butt of every company, it is a perfect fright.  She also provides a description of his wife, her rival for his affections.  In 1849 she described Frances Pool as an accomplished lady, but has no domestic thoroughness. I know not what she will do with a baby.  By the 1854 letter her prognosis seems to have come true, for Mr Henry has four children and it is such a muddle no one cares to go there.  We might write this down to the jealousy of a spurned woman, but the 1851 Census suggests that some truth might lie in it after all.  There we see that Eliza Pool, born in Liverpool, as was Frances, visits the Slade residence.  Presumably Eliza, aged forty and unmarried, was the elder sister and had come to help with the children, for Frances had a two month old second child at the time of the Census.

To define somebody as insane is a type of social imperialism.  Everybody has his or her reality, a perspective made from genetics mixed with experience.  Charlotte Slade had a clear understanding of Mrs Fuller: she was mad and the cause went back to her mother. She is considered to be partly deranged, altho’ she is capable of holding conversation with anyone.  It appears to be a family complaint on her mother’s side.  We do not know the maiden name of Ann Fuller, her mother.  Presumably, she was as inbred as the rest of the Fullers and the Lousley-Caudwell-Humfrey-Boham families.  Certainly, she continued the practice through her own marriage to Thomas Humfrey Fuller.

We will leave it with a passage from a letter written by Mrs Fuller in 1854.  She discusses her brother’s son by his first marriage:

A sad object to look upon … pious and well disposed … he cannot walk at all, nor speak distinctly … those who are used to him can understand him.

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