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obdurate personality was well known and frequently commented on by his few friends and many enemies, shadowy is the best description of his only son, Francis Spurzheim Craig. Almost everything that is known about him comes from other people’s insubstantial descriptions of him and from the fleeting penumbra he cast on his surroundings. A great deal is known about his parents but Francis, who had no brothers or sisters and no known descendants, left little of himself behind except in such of his journalistic output that can definitely be attributed to him – and that is little enough. It is probable that this absence of a written legacy is largely due to his parents’ deliberate sheltering of their awkward son from the normalities of the outside world. For Francis himself was far from being a normal man.
    From surviving descriptions of Francis by the few people who knew him at all well and with the benefit of modern psychiatric knowledge it is evident that he suffered from what today would be known as a severe personality disorder. He may possibly have had high-performing Asperger syndrome but, if so, it was certainly overlaid with psychotic features. At his inquest in 1903 he was described as ‘most eccentric’ and ‘very nervous’, although his ex-employer, Arthur Lane, also saw another, darker side to him. He was a man, said Lane, who ‘took antipathies to people for no apparent cause’. He was given to erratic and unpredictable behaviour, jumping up in the middle of a meal and rushing out into the street shouting, ‘I’m off!’ In later life he also had what his acquaintances recognised as delusions, fancying that all the world was against him and even – ominously – that the police were after him for murder.
    Today his behaviour would be recognised as falling somewhere in the hinterland between ‘psychopathy’ and a true ‘psychosis’ on the schizophrenia spectrum. He was a highly intelligent man and with adequate support which, during their lifetimes, he received from his parents, he was capable of functioning almost normally. The problems came when he tried to exist independently.For most of his life he lived under his parents’ roof and they appear to have handled his financial affairs and his day-to-day needs whilst he earned a living as a reporter and, later, an editor. Surprisingly, he seems to have been a good journalist and surviving pieces that he wrote show an intelligent, witty mind that was completely at odds with his face-to-face persona.
    At such a distance it is difficult today to put a single label on Francis’s specific psychosis. The most likely diagnosis by current standards is probably ‘schizotypal personality disorder’ (STPD). The main diagnostic features of STPD are behaviour or appearance that others find odd, eccentric or peculiar; suspiciousness or paranoid ideas; poor rapport with others; a tendency to withdraw socially; and obsessive ruminations, often with sexual or aggressive content. All of these are characteristics that can easily be discerned in what little is known about Francis Spurzheim Craig.
    This was the man that Elizabeth encountered late in 1884. Possibly they met and talked as they strolled the gardens of Kelmscott House before the start of a meeting. Despite his age Francis was unmarried and had probably never had a normal relationship with a woman other than his strong-minded mother. He found conversation difficult and his few friends and acquaintances described his curious habit of breaking off in mid-sentence and fleeing the scene when the pressure of making small talk became too much for him 37 . Only when he was talking about a topic that interested him did he become less tongue-tied and capable of sustaining a proper exchange. One such subject was travel, especially to foreign countries 38 .
    In 1864 Francis had left the sanctuary of his family home for what may have been the first of the only three occasions that he did so in his adult life. It is