In G.F. Watts’s former sculpture studio in the Surrey village of Compton, a monstrous presence has interposed itself between the dusty plaster models of ‘Alfred, Lord Tennyson’ and ‘Physical Energy’. Standing 14ft tall, the brightly painted soldier with fez and sabre is a replica of a colossal puppet made by James Henry Pullen (1835–1916) while an inmate of the Royal Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Redhill. So terrifying was Pullen’s ‘Giant’ to the local children that it was confined to quarters after causing a rout at a Guy Fawkes procession. Its maker was inside, operating a system of pulleys and levers that batted the eyelids, waggled the ears, rattled the sabre and, through a mechanical larynx, emitted amplified shrieks.
Born in the Ball’s Pond Road, Islington, Pullen entered his first asylum, Essex Hall in Colchester, at the age of 12. An early report describes him as ‘unsociable, passionate, self-willed, and… nearly deaf and dumb’, but despite being unable to string a sentence together he showed a remarkable aptitude for making model boats. At 15 he was transferred to Earlswood, an enlightened institution under the direction of Dr John Langdon Down (the identifier of Down’s syndrome) designed to care for a new class of patient diagnosed as ‘idiots’ rather than ‘lunatics’. A doctor’s report soon notes that Pullen has made great progress in drawing and carpentry, and ‘from the history given me lately it appears that he possessed from an early period considerable intelligence’, adding in brackets: ‘Is he an idiot?’ After the French psychiatrist Édouard Séguin coined the term ‘idiot savant’, Pullen went to the top of the idiot class.
‘Moral management’ was the keynote of Victorian psychotherapy, with the emphasis on productive use of a patient’s time. Pullen was set to work as a hospital carpenter, for which he was paid 3s a week and given his own workshop, but as time went on there were complaints that instead of making hospital furniture he was increasingly absorbed in his own projects.
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