Abstract
Drawing on official papers, press reports, and asylum and prison records, this chapter examines the movement of mentally disturbed Irish patients into and through the expanding Lancashire asylum system in the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing particularly on Rainhill Asylum in Liverpool. This is a story of what was described by observers as excessive mobility that prompted mental breakdown, followed for many by the abrupt halting of mobility. Numerous Irish migrants ended up in asylums for many years or until their deaths, after prolonged periods spent “wandering” across Lancashire, England, or the globe. Many were moved between institutions of confinement, or spent time in prison, and a number of Irish patients were transported from overseas institutions back to Liverpool. The chapter reflects on asylum medical superintendents’ evocation of “wandering”, rootlessness, and poverty as prompting the mental decline of male and female migrants. It also explores the impact of the stereotyping of Irish people and how this was reflected in asylum diagnoses, including proneness to violence, criminal behaviour, or end-stage syphilis. Finally, the chapter investigates the ways in which migration itself was depicted as debilitating, disappointing, and likely to lead to mental distress.
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Notes
- 1.
Materials taken from the Liverpool Record Office, the Lancashire Archives, and the Wellcome Library are listed according to the archive or library’s name and the date of the respective source in this chapter. The Liverpool Record Office will be abbreviated hereafter as LRO.
- 2.
From the late 1860s, the Lancashire County Council produced a set of notebooks intended to record the settlement of Irish patients for the purpose of chargeability. We were able to link patients in the asylum casebooks to entries in the council notebooks, which provided more information on patients’ experiences prior to confinement.
- 3.
For the scale of admissions of Irish “lunatics” to local workhouses and negotiations and disputes between the Poor Law and asylum authorities over admissions, see Cox and Marland (2015, 263–287).
- 4.
- 5.
For discussions of mental health and illness and their entanglements with mobility in nineteenth-century literature, see Heidi Lucja Liedke’s and Stefanie John’s chapters in this volume.
- 6.
For stress models and the impact of theories of heredity in asylum practices, see Ray (1981).
- 7.
Dementia during this period was widely utilised to label a state of deterioration in mental state and unresponsiveness to treatment, often regarded as irreversible, but was less strongly associated with elderly patients than today.
- 8.
For consideration of integration amongst the Irish middle classes in Britain, see Pooley (1989) and essays in Belchem (2000). For a case of an asylum patient speaking Gaelic, see Bridget Nicholson, a 52-year-old married “housewife” admitted to Rainhill in January 1871. She was “constantly talking incoherently in her native tongue, the only word that can be made out is ‘accoushila’” (LRO Jan. 1870–Oct. 1873). The case notes are not clear on whether these patients lapsed into Gaelic as a result of mental illness or spoke little English at all. “Accoushila” is probably a phonetic spelling of A chuisle mo chroí (“My heart’s beloved”) or Mo chuisle (“My beloved”).
- 9.
For women in Liverpool Prison, see Cox and Marland (2019).
- 10.
- 11.
See Cox and Marland (2015).
- 12.
By contrast, Markku Hokkanen’s chapter in this volume examines instances of positive stereotyping of the mobilities of British colonisers.
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Cox, C., Marland, H. (2023). The Wandering Irish: Mobility and Lunacy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Lancashire. In: Dinter, S., Schäfer-Althaus, S. (eds) Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture. Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_9
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