Abstract
Recently, a different picture has emerged of lunatic asylums as humane, curative, and enlightened. It has shown that, lessons learned, by the mid-nineteenth century they were modelled on middle-class family homes, with daily routines of useful employment, recreational pursuits, and sports. This chapter explores the patient experience and demonstrates that individuals could become ‘at home’ in the asylum, attached to their lives within the institutional walls. Using patient case records, it shows that individuals sometimes preferred patient life, for it offered a higher standard of living, and a familial framework they lacked at home. Indeed, evidence shall be presented that shows individuals could be, and were, willing participants in the committal process, recognising the asylum as sanctuary, away from their troubled home lives.
In delightful weather, eight hundred ladies and gentlemen… took part in the formal opening of the new London County Lunatic Asylum at Claybury… the comfort, pleasure, and wellbeing of the patient seems assured. It seems, indeed, more a home than an asylum, and the conditions under which the poor people will live is striking proof of the great advance of humanity since the last century.
—Anon., ‘Opening of Claybury Lunatic Asylum’, London Daily News, June 19, 1893
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Notes
- 1.
See M. Guyatt, ‘A Semblance of Home: Mental Asylum Interiors, 1880–1914’, in S. McKellar and P. Sparke, Interior Design and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 48–71; J. Hamlett, At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
- 2.
K. D. M. Snell, ‘Belonging and Community: Understandings of “Home” and “Friends” among the English Poor, 1750–1850’, Economic History Review, 65:1 (2012), p. 8.
- 3.
For recent work on working class voices and institutional experiences, see A. Tomkins, ‘Poor Law Institutions through Working-Class Eyes: Autobiography, Emotion, and Family Context, 1834–1914’, Journal of British Studies, 60 (2021), pp. 285–309.
- 4.
S. Eastoe, Idiocy, Imbecility and Insanity in Victorian Society: Caterham Asylum, 1867–1911 (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 17–18. See also J. Andrews, ‘Case Notes, Case Histories, and the Patient’s Experience of Insanity at Gartnavel Royal Asylum, Glasgow, in the Nineteenth Century’, Social History of Medicine, 11 (1998), pp. 255–281.
- 5.
A. Blunt and R. Dowling, Home (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 10.
- 6.
Snell, ‘Belonging and Community’, p. 10.
- 7.
For instance see A. Suzuki, Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family in England, 1820–1860 (Berkerley: University of California Press, 2006); R. Adair, B. Forsythe, and J. Melling, ‘Families, Communities and the Legal Regulation of Lunacy in Victorian England: Assessments of Crime, Violence and Welfare in Admissions to the Devon Asylum, 1845–1914’, in P. Bartlett and D. Wright (eds), Outside the Walls of the Asylum: the History of Care in the Community 1750–2000 (London: Athlone Press, 1999), p. 162.
- 8.
A. Scull, ‘The Domestication of Madness’, Medical History, 27 (1983), p. 247.
- 9.
See A. Scull, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Harmondsworth, 1982); M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge, 2001).
- 10.
R. Porter, ‘The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below’, Theory and Society, 14 (1985), pp. 175–198.
- 11.
See C. Dobbing, ‘Review Article: Pauper Agency Among the Sick Poor in the Long Nineteenth Century’, History, 105 (2020), pp. 107–117. Also E. C. Casella, The Archaeology of Institutional Confinement (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2007).
- 12.
Also useful as a starting point is Guyatt, ‘A Semblance of Home’.
- 13.
For a discussion of patient surveillance see E. Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and other Inmates (London: Aldine Transaction, 2007).
- 14.
As it became a legal requirement for each county in England and Wales to provide one.
- 15.
J. Laite, ‘The Emmet’s Inch: Small History in a Digital Age’, Journal of Social History, 53:4 (2020), p. 966.
- 16.
It is important to contextualise the language used throughout this chapter to denote those who resided in lunatic asylums and those who suffered with mental conditions. Insanity is the all-encompassing word used to denote mental illness. If you were certified insane, you were considered to be mentally unwell. Under the umbrella of insanity, two distinct terms were used to denote the length and curability of a person’s condition. The first, lunacy, referred to those suffering with what were considered ‘curable’ illnesses, such as mania, melancholia, or puerperal insanity (today, post-natal depression). If you were a lunatic, you were considered to some extent curable and it was likely that you would have developed the condition after puberty. The second distinct term, imbecility (also idiocy) referred to those who were judged to have life-long mental illness, usually from birth or childhood. All these given terms will be used throughout the chapter in their contemporary sense, and are not used to cause offence or to refer to individuals in a derogatory manner.
- 17.
Keith Snell reinforces this, as he states that for a variety of reasons up to 50% of a parish’s population could be classed as paupers as they claimed poor relief. Snell, ‘Belonging and community’, p. 1, note 2.
- 18.
Much existing work on lunatic asylums focuses on London’s institutions, for instance C. Arnold, Bedlam: London and its Mad (London: Simon & Schuster Ltd, 2008); A. Shepherd, Institutionalising the Insane in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014). Also widely written about are those of Lancashire and Yorkshire. See J.K. Walton, ‘Lunacy in the Industrial Revolution: A Study of Asylum Admissions in Lancashire, 1848–50’, Journal of Social History, 13 (1979), pp. 1–22. Also, R. Ellis, ‘The Asylum, The Poor Law and the Growth of County Asylums in Nineteenth Century Yorkshire’, Northern History, 45 (2008), pp. 279–293.
- 19.
See the following for discussions of recorded incidents and how this shapes narratives of patients, Goffman, Asylums.
- 20.
C. Philo, A Geographical History of the Institutional Provision for the Insane from Medieval Times to the 1860s in England and Wales: The Space Reserved for Insanity (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press Ltd, 2004), pp. 540–543.
- 21.
For an example of this, see V. Holmes, ‘Accommodating the Lodger: The Domestic Arrangements of Lodgers in Working-Class Dwellings in a Victorian Provincial Town’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 19 (2008), pp. 328–330.
- 22.
K. Jones, Asylums and After: A Revised History of the Mental Health Services from the Early 18th Century to the 1990s (London: Athlone Press, 1993), pp. 87–92.
- 23.
Dining halls were repurposed for concerts, performances and balls, see R. Golding, ‘“Appeasing the Unstrung Mental Faculties”: Listening to Music in Nineteenth-Century Lunatic Asylums’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 17 (2020), p. 414.
- 24.
K. Fennelly, An Archaeology of Lunacy: Managing Madness in Early Nineteenth-Century Asylums (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), p. 20.
- 25.
Cumbria Archive Centre Carlisle (CACC), Forty-Third Annual Report of the Cumberland and Westmorland Lunatic Asylum, 1904, THOS 8/1/3/1/42, p. 8.
- 26.
Hamlett, At Home in the Institution, p. 19.
- 27.
CACC, Third Annual Report of the Cumberland and Westmorland Lunatic Asylum, 1864, THOS 8/1/3/1/2, p. 14.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 10.
- 29.
J. Harley, ‘Material Lives of the Poor and their Strategic use of the Workhouse during the final decades of the English Old Poor Law’, Continuity and Change, 30 (2015), pp. 84–85.
- 30.
Anon. (1885), Annual Report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the Insane, 1885, Morningside: Royal Edinburgh Asylum, pp. 23–24.
- 31.
Fennelly, An Archaeology of Lunacy, p. 13. Many former asylum sites have been redeveloped into residential dwellings. See S. Peters and R. Chaplin, ‘Executives have Taken Over the Asylum: The Fate of 71 Psychiatric Hospitals’, Psychiatric Bulletin, 27 (2003), pp. 227–229. Also, C. Gibbeson, ‘Place Attachment and Negative Places: A Qualitative Approach to Historic Former Mental Asylums, Stigma and Place-Protectionism’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 71 (2020), pp. 1–8.
- 32.
Guyatt, ‘A Semblance of Home’, pp. 52–53.
- 33.
Digby, Madness, Morality and Medicine, p. 59.
- 34.
CACC, Third Annual Report, p. 8.
- 35.
See Goffman, Asylums; Scull, Museums of Madness; Foucault, Madness and Civilisation.
- 36.
This issue has been widely documented. For instance see Scull, Museums of Madness, pp. 222–253; L. Smith, ‘“A Sad Spectacle of Hopeless Mental Degradation”: The Management of the Insane in West Midlands Workhouses, 1815–1860’, in J. Reinarz and L. Schwarz (eds), Medicine and the Workhouse (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2013), pp. 103–120.
- 37.
Hamlett, At Home in the Institution, p. 1.
- 38.
CACC, Forty-Fifth Annual Report of the Cumberland and Westmorland Lunatic Asylum, 1906, THOS 8/1/3/1/44, pp. 13–14.
- 39.
For instance see Scull, Museum of Madness.
- 40.
For more on this see C. Dobbing, ‘The Circulation of Pauper Lunatics and the Transitory Nature of Mental Health Provision in Late Nineteenth Century Cumberland and Westmorland’, Local Population Studies, 99 (2017), pp. 56–65.
- 41.
CACC, Twentieth Annual Report, p. 16.
- 42.
CACC, Casebook 1882–1884, THOS 8/4/38/8, admission no. 2334.
- 43.
See D. M. MacRaild, Culture, Conflict and Migration: The Irish in Victorian Cumbria (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), chapter 3.
- 44.
TNA RG9/3925, f. 85, p. 15. Notably, the elderly couple with whom he lodged were also Irish. It has been stated that for migrants, lodging with others from their home country allowed them to create a sense of home.
- 45.
Carlisle Journal, Friday 28 April 1865.
- 46.
A. Wallis, ‘Driven to Insanity: Marital Cruelty and the Female Patients at the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum, 1858–1908’, LIMINA: A Journal of Historical & Cultural Studies, 24 (2019), pp. 1–16.
- 47.
Levine-Clark, ‘Dysfunctional Domesticity’. See also C. Dobbing, ‘The Family and Insanity: The Experience of the Garlands Asylum, 1862–1890’, in C. Beardmore, C. Dobbing, and S. King (eds), Family Life in Britain, 1650–1910 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 135–154.
- 48.
CACC, Female Casebook 1895–1899, THOS 8/4/40/4, admission no. 4743.
- 49.
TNA RG12/4333, f. 13, p. 19.
- 50.
CACC, Female Casebook 1895–1899, admission no. 4743
- 51.
M. Levine-Clark, ‘Dysfunctional Domesticity: Female Insanity and Family Relationships Among the West Riding Poor in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Family History, 25 (2000), pp. 341–361.
- 52.
See R. Richardson, Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
- 53.
An example of a visit made to St Lukes Hospital was reported in 1851, C. Dickens, ‘A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree’, Household Words, Vol. 4, No. 95 (1852), pp. 385–389.
- 54.
C. Dickens, ‘The Cure of Sick Minds’, Household Words, Vol. 19, No. 471 (1859), p. 416.
- 55.
CACC, Third Annual Report, p. 9.
- 56.
For instance the case of Sarah M. in Dobbing, ‘The Circulation of Pauper Lunatics’, pp. 63–64.
- 57.
See R. Adair, J. Melling, and B. Forsythe, ‘Migration, Family Structure and Pauper Lunacy in Victorian England, admissions to the Devon County Pauper Lunatic Asylum, 1845–1900’, Continuity and Change, 12 (1997), pp. 373–401.
- 58.
CACC, Female Casebook 1884–1888, THOS 8/4/40/1, admission no. 2687.
- 59.
See D. Wright, ‘The Discharge of Pauper Lunatics from County Asylums in Mid-Victorian England: The case of Buckinghamshire, 1853–1872’, in J. Melling and B. Forsythe (eds), Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800–1914: A Social History of Madness in Comparative Perspective (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 93–112.
- 60.
See TNA RG11/5193, f. 84, p. 77.; General Register Office (GRO), England & Wales, Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1837–1915, 1884, Jul-Aug-Sep, Penzance, Vol. 5c, p. 408. For discussions on asylums offering familial support to patients who lacked it elsewhere see C. Dobbing, ‘The Circulation of Pauper Lunatics and the Transitory Nature of Mental Health Provision in Late Nineteenth Century Cumberland and Westmorland’, Local Population Studies, 99 (2017), p. 63.
- 61.
CACC, Female Casebook 1884–1888, admission no. 2687.
- 62.
S. York, ‘Alienists, Attendants and the Containment of Suicide in Public Lunatic Asylums, 1845–1890’, Social History of Medicine, 25 (2012), p. 329.
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Thanks go to the editors of this volume for constructive comments in relation to this chapter.
Some cases alluded to in this chapter can also be found in the following unpublished PhD thesis, C. Dobbing, ‘The Circulation of the Insane: The Pauper Lunatic Experience of the Garlands Asylum, 1862–1913’, (University of Leicester, 2019).
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Dobbing, C. (2022). Pauper Lunatics at Home in the Asylum, 1845–1906. In: Harley, J., Holmes, V., Nevalainen, L. (eds) The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9_9
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