Ernest Jones's 1906 trial for indecent assault

What is it about?

In March 1906 Dr. (Alfred) Ernest Jones was put on trial for indecently assaulting two young “mentally defective” girls at a special school in South East London. Jones claimed it was “the most disagreeable experience in [his] life.” A detailed reconstruction of the trial, drawn from contemporaneous records, reveals significant f laws in Jones’s autobiographical account. Reading those contemporaneous records in the light of early psychoanalytic theory and also of recent British “political” texts on child sexual abuse—from “Cleveland,” “Orkney,” and “Jason Dabbs” through to “Lost in Care”— helps illuminate the dominant medico-legal ideologies that informed Jones’s trial. Adapting Leo Strauss’s concept of persecution reveals how details of the children’s allegations were occluded from the trial reports. A jigsaw reconstruction of these silences offers a restitutive narrative of the children’s persecuted speech.

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Why is it important?

'Romancing With a Wealth of Detail' is a companion piece to my 2015 paper 'In "the dark regions of the Mind:" Readings for the indecent assault in Ernest Jones's 1908 Dismissal from the West End Hospital for Nervous Diseases.' Both papers, when read together, suggest disturbing similarities between the two sets of allegations levelled against Jones.