Death and Mr. Pickwick (78 page)

The response was a harsh: ‘No!'

No, not for Stott the company of those who drank brandy neat. His keenest pleasure in life – the closest he came to an enjoyable diversion from study – was itself an area of study: the medical uses of electricity. When a current was applied to a dead frog and its leg twitched, Ely Stott felt the presence of the Lord. He had since boyhood been in awe of the power of lightning storms, and the first time he saw a spark produced by a Leyden jar, he believed he had witnessed the Godhead's will, in miniature.

There formed in Stott's mind the notion that all human ailments might be cured by the skilful application of electricity. He sketched plans for electrical apparatus, and devised imaginary experiments upon living and dead subjects, both animal and human.

Though his professors pointed out the speculative nature of his interests, and endeavoured to steer him towards traditional cures, Stott would not listen. He was in the world to do God's will. He would make the blind see, the deaf hear, and – once, when especially angered by a smirk from a professor – he said he would raise the dead if it were not blasphemy.

‘I could make cold lips move and tell the story of their life,' he remarked.

After leaving St Thomas's, Stott established a practice at Bishopsgate Street, in the north-east of the City, where he attracted patients by the novelty of his methods. One of his first was a young woman brought in by an elder brother. She had a desire to eat earth.

‘It is hysteria,' was Stott's diagnosis. He sat the girl down on a chair with glass legs, and then he touched her with a long metal wire, connected to a Leyden jar. As her hair stood on end, he said: ‘Do you feel warm?' Sweat came down her face.

He took her brother aside. ‘Is she cunning?' he asked.

‘Never!' replied her brother.

‘Does she persuade – by a smile – by a sad eye – by little ways? These can be manifestations of hysteria.'

‘Last Sunday, she did smile and say the weather was nice for a picnic.'

‘And did you go?'

‘We did.'

‘Tell me – what did you eat? Be precise, if you can remember.'

‘Pigeon pie – lobsters – veal – ham, I think – salad – washed down with wine, plenty of wine.'

‘Did she choose the food?'

‘The wine was her choice. In the event, she ate little. She said she wanted carp, and lobster was a poor substitute. She asked a gentleman present, who is a keen angler, to catch one for her.'

‘Who was this gentleman?'

‘A friend of mine.'

‘And she was pleasant with him?'

‘Very.'

‘Flirtatious?'

‘She is quite spirited at times.'

‘Spirited!' He brought the brother closer. ‘Contact me immediately if there are more signs of this nature.'

A regular caller was the glassblower's delivery boy, with the latest piece of apparatus, blown according to Stott's instructions.

‘Heh heh,' said Stott with evident glee as the boy unwrapped, from a piece of baize, a curved glass tube with an exposed copper wire. ‘I bet your master enjoys the challenge of working on my inventions,' said Stott.

‘He says it's a change from blowing tumblers for lodging houses, sir.'

‘Do you know what this is for, my boy?' said Stott, glorying in the beauties of the tube. ‘Cold sores and cankers will shrivel when it's applied. It will go right to the heart of an ulcer! Heh heh! Well, we will add it to the cabinet.'

After the affectionate stroking of the boy's head, and the passing over of payment, Stott took the tube and opened the doors of a specially made cabinet in which holes held various types of apparatus in upright display. Although it would be an absurdity to make a club out of glass, that was the appearance of many items within – some even bore vicious nodules, like vitreous nail heads, for insertion in orifices – while in the lower section were drawers for miscellaneous items, including a skeletal shoe, enabling a gouty foot to be electrocuted directly at the toe, and reticular bags for shocking a breast or a knee or a chin. There was also a device which Stott regarded as his favourite, intended for the treatment of toothache: it consisted of a small wooden box, which was placed in the mouth, and an adjustable wire which could be touched against the tooth. ‘Go to the barber if you want it pulled, or eat your sandwiches forever in pain,' he told patients as he placed the box in the mouth. ‘But come to me for a cure.' There was a glorious adaptability to this device, as well. This was demonstrated when a husband once brought in a wife who, he told Stott, chattered too much – to treat this form of hysteria, Stott applied the wire straight to her tongue.

And if there happened to be some strange medical condition which did not yet have its own specialised piece of medical equipment, there was always Stott's miraculous electric bandage, a silk sash with a brass knob, which could be tied around the patient. It could even administer the healing spark to the pupil of the eye.

As more patients received the charges of two huge Leyden jars, Stott naturally accumulated charges for himself, which accrued to his bank account. However, by his appearance, he gave no evidence of his growing wealth, and he usually wore a dusty unfashionable jacket. Such shabbiness was seen as proof of genius. Great men, said one patient, are rarely concerned with matters of dress. But a concern for show did manifest itself in Stott's work, for he preferred to treat in the dark, so that the sparks were displayed to best effect – a secondary effect being that patients thought they got value for money.

It was not long before Stott moved to a larger practice in Hart Street, Bloomsbury. Here he built an annexe, with a barrel containing electrified water. The patient, usually female, would sit half-immersed to be treated for haemorrhoids, and many other conditions. Women's monthly problems were a regular source of income to Stott.

Yet his relations with women outside his practice remain as obscure as his earlier history, and the details of courtship, and most of the particulars of his married life, are unknown. It appears a certain female entered holy wedlock with Stott not because she consented, but because Stott told her of their imminent marriage, and once that plan was established, she was too scared to object.

His wife went into labour on a bitterly cold morning in November 1788. Stott came downstairs in a blood-stained shirt, carrying his newborn daughter, whom he had delivered himself. As soon as an excited servant girl came rushing forward to see the babe, he instructed her to fetch a bowl of water from the butt, as the mother needed washing.

‘There is ice forming on it, sir,' said the servant.

‘Then break the ice.'

‘It should be warmed up in a kettle, sir.'

‘Under
no
circumstances do that.' His eyes narrowed with distrust. ‘I shall rake out the fire,' he said. Giving the servant another suspicious look, he then took the kettle and locked it in a cupboard.

‘This is weather for skating and wrapping up,' she protested. ‘I will not do it, sir.'

‘Then I shall fetch the water myself. She must be cleansed.'

The mother pleaded with Stott, but insisting all the time she must be cleansed, he forced her to stand, weak as she was, in a tub of icy water as he dowsed her with a flannel. The water was so cold she cried out. She said she feared she was injured, and surely that was more important than washing. Stott's response was to rub the freezing flannel between her legs, rinse it out in the tub, and squeeze it over her head.

Later that day, Stott's wife began to shiver uncontrollably. The servant girl ran downstairs to inform Stott, who sat before the fire with his daughter.

‘If my wife is shivering,' he said, ‘it is because she is vain about her hair, and has a habit of sitting combing it while naked. It is just punishment for vanity.'

Within a few days his wife was dead.

Immediately after the funeral, the servant told Stott that she was leaving his employment.

‘My wife's death was no fault of mine,' he said. ‘It was vanity.'

‘God help your daughter if this is the house she must grow up in.'

*   *   *

The servants who came to know the daughter in her earliest years saw a beautiful child with the most endearing nature. Who would not adore this girl? And, in those earliest years, Ely Stott was a doting father.

But when the girl was about seven, Stott saw her in a different light. Some said the reason was that she had refused a bowl of porridge. Others that he had noticed how tall she had grown, and visions of womanhood entered Stott's mind. Still others said that she had been caught giggling while reading the Bible. Whatever the explanation, a seed of hatred grew in Stott's mind. Before long, an immovable idea took root – that this daughter had no love for her father. She became to him the worst of females.

As he made her read the Bible aloud, he said to her, full of spite: ‘Thou wicked and slothful servant!' And: ‘You stubborn heifer!' And in the sternest voice: ‘Child, obey your father in everything, for this pleases the Lord.'

Sometimes Ely Stott wept, and he cried out: ‘I am wretched, wretched,
wretched
to have so depraved a daughter!'

The effect of this was observed when the girl was of an age to enter employment, and she became her father's medical assistant. Patients saw her enter the room – subdued, meek and attentive. She stood obediently in the corner, her head held down in a modest pose. If her father asked her to fetch a piece of apparatus, she did so without the merest indication of wilfulness. When she helped with the straps on the apparatus, she made certain each buckle was fastened. Then she worked the cylinder machines which supplied electricity.

But when Stott sent the girl out of the room on an errand, he would present a very different view of her behaviour to his patients. One patient, a Quaker lady, was sitting in the glass-legged chair while Stott wired her up, and he said: ‘My daughter is not well – and it is a sickness even I cannot cure.'

‘I am sorry to hear that,' said the lady. ‘What is the matter?'

‘She has the most depraved mind,' said Stott. ‘The trouble she causes me, it makes me weep. Yet I love her, no father could be fonder of a daughter. She is ungrateful to the core for everything I have done!' He shook his head in deep distress. ‘She is a wicked, wicked girl. Violent. Deceitful. Obstinate. She is not fit to be placed in any house where a man resides. She cannot even look at a man without thinking of him between her legs. Wicked creature! She would have been a whore when she was ten years old if I hadn't stopped her and tried –
oh tried
! – to teach her God's will.'

The Quaker lady was utterly shocked. ‘I have never seen anything to indicate such tendencies.'

‘Have you noticed a scar upon her hand?'

‘I have. I asked her about it when you were out of the room once. She seemed so meek, and I didn't know what else to say for conversation. She told me she burnt herself when she was cooking dinner one Sunday.'

‘Another lie!' He looked behind himself to check that his daughter had not returned. ‘It is the scar of Satan. He is her guardian.'

The Quaker lady looked at Stott in bewilderment. Was this man mad? The electricity tingling her flesh disconcerted her more than usual, and as Stott came close to inspect the wires, she drew back, to avoid close proximity to his flesh. At the end of the session, when Stott asked when she would like her next appointment, she said: ‘I shall let you know, Mr Stott.'

‘Do not let my daughter frighten you,' he replied.

When the consulting hours were over, Stott summoned his daughter. The tone of his voice alone set her shaking.

‘I may have lost a patient today because she does not wish to be associated with such depravity as you exhibit,' he said. ‘That is not all. In between the second and third patients today, I asked you to clean the floor. You did not clean it fast enough. And this morning, when you were cooking breakfast, you left a window open. Those two things are true, are they not?'

She lowered her head.

‘Do you hesitate to answer straight away, daughter? Is it because the truth is a food that tastes bad in your vile mouth?'

‘They are true, Father.'

‘So once again I find you have not accommodated yourself to the domestic arrangements I require. And yesterday we had a delivery from the butcher, did we not?'

‘We did, Father.'

‘Did you weigh the beef?'

‘I did.'

‘But did you weigh it as soon as it came into the house?'

She moved a little on the spot.

‘I see,' he said. ‘The spirit of idleness entered. Tell me, daughter, did you salt the beef?'

‘I did!'

‘But it was not as soon as the beef came into the house, was it? Once again you have offended against the domestic arrangements required.'

She began to whimper, for fear.

‘Idle – obstinate – deceitful. Depraved wretch! Base, wicked girl! Trying to pretend, by saying you salted and weighed the beef, that I would not notice that you did not do these when the beef was first delivered to the house! No daughter who loved her father would behave in such a way. You do not love me.'

‘I do love you, Father, I do. Believe me, I do.'

‘You do not! You do not, in spite of all the kindness and tenderness I bestow.
Me
– the kindest and tenderest of parents it is possible for a child to have!'

A rage built up in his entire frame. He slapped the table, and kicked its leg, and raised up the Bible, and held it aloft, and called for the Lord's help to endure his misery.

‘That is not all, daughter. When I went to see the glassblower, you wished that I would never come back.'

‘I did not, Father.'

‘Do not deny it, vessel of Satan!' He opened the cupboard and removed a wooden rod from one of the holes, around which was twisted a length of thick copper wire, which he uncoiled. ‘Upstairs!'