The criminal / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The criminal / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and from the first displayed no emotion ; he ate and slept well, and was a good, docile boy. The judge who tried him (Lord Coleridge) was evidently in favour of a verdict of manslaughter. The jury fell in with this suggestion, although the authority of Dr. Savage was in favour of insanity, and the boy was condemned to ten years' penal servitude.^ Such a case shows very well the inaccuracy of our hard and fast lines of demarcation. Here was a person clearly of abnormal or degenerate character, and liable to sudden violent impulses; he would nowhere be popularly recognised as insane, and possibly it is not desirable that he should be so recognised. On the other hand, he cannot correctly be termed an instinc- tive criminal; he is on the borderland between the two groups, and a touch may send him in either direction. Let us take another illustration. Miss B., nineteen years of age, the daughter of a captain in the army, is described as a tall robust-looking girl of lively tem- perament. When a few months old she had an attack of meningitis. As a child she was always wilful and troublesome. When she was eighteen years old she developed new instincts of mischief. She would sometimes take off her clothes, stuff them up the chimney, and set fire to them. When the servants rushed in she would be sitting on the hearth clapping her hands : What a fine blaze I She had frequently destroyed furniture, clothing, and books ; she liked to cut carefully the strings binding a book, so that it would fall to pieces in the hands of the unsuspecting person who took it up. She drenched a baby, and frequently her own room, with water, '^Journal of Mental Science, October 1889. This case may be com- pared with that of Maria Koster, given in the Appendix D, vi.