Abstract
In 1889, George E., a patient described as ‘feeble minded’ in his late nine-teenth-century notes, was transferred from Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum to Brookwood, Surrey’s second county lunatic asylum. He had been at Broadmoor for 24 years, presumably as a criminal patient, after setting fire to a barn and a rick in 1864.1 By the 1880s, the asylum authorities did not consider him dangerous, and this was the second attempt to get him back into the county system. Unusually, E. left a record of his feelings about his transfer as he wrote a letter back to Dr Nicholson, the medical superintendent at Broadmoor. The letter conveys a powerful attachment. He professed warm feelings for Dr Nicholson, Dr Orange (the former superintendent) and the head attendant. It is clear that over his long stay he came to think of Broadmoor as a home. He compared the move to emigration to Australia or America, and described it as ‘being amongst strangers in a strange land’. He had been homesick, he said, but the new doctor at Brookwood had helped him with brandy and arrowroot. He also derived some consolation from the social set up at Brookwood: ‘I gets down to meals along plenty of company about 50 or more. The living is very good here.’ He appreciates the efforts that have been made for his entertainment: ‘fine gold fish here, canary birds, flower pot good plants in them’. And he was impressed by the interior, particularly the floor: ‘I thought the floor was wet when I come in it is done over with like oil cloth.’ Letters written by patients were usually read before they were sent. Writing inmates would have been very aware of this, but it is unlikely that E. was compelled to write back to Broadmoor. If we take the letter at face value, it shows that one patient was able to feel at home in the asylum, and how material provisions there helped him do this.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
K. Jones, Asylums and After: A Revised History of the Mental Health Services (London: The Athlone Press, 1993), p. 116.
P. Bartlett, The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (London and Washington: Leicester University Press, 1999), p. 2.
A. Digby, ‘Moral Treatment at the Retreat’, in W.F. Bynum, R. Porter and M. Shepherd (eds), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, People and Ideas (London: Routledge, 1985), pp. 52–72.
L. D. Smith, Cure, Comfort and Safe Custody: Public Lunatic Asylums in Early Nineteenth-Century England (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), p. 3.
J. Conolly, The Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Constraints (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1973 [first published 1856]), p. 39.
M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated from the French by A. Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977, reprint 1991), pp. 293–294.
A. Scull, ‘The Domestication of Madness’, Medical History 27 (1983), p. 233.
L. Hide, Gender and Class in English Asylums, 1890–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 93
M. Guyatt, ‘A Semblance of Home: Mental Asylum Interiors, 1880–1914’, in S. McKellar and P. Sparke (eds), Interior Design and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 48–71.
Anne Digby suggests expectations around this increased in the second half of the century, as patient numbers grew and doctors became more reliant on inanimate objects to help in the process of ‘moral management’. A. Digby, Madness, Morality and Medicine: A Study of the York Retreat, 1796–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 40
J. Taylor, Hospital and Asylum Architecture in England, 1840–1914: Building for Health Care (London: Mansell, 1991), p. 135.
J. Mortimer Granville, The Care and Cure of the Insane: Being the Reports of The Lancet Commission on Lunatic Asylums, 1875–6–7 (London: Hardewicke and Bogue, 1877), p. 18.
W.A.F. Browne, What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought To Be (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1837), p. 71
Sir W.C. Ellis M.D., A Treatise On the Nature, Symptoms, Causes, and Treatment of Insanity with Practical Observations on Lunatic Asylums and a Description of the Pauper Lunatic Asylum for the County of Middlesex at Hanwell with a Detailed Account of its Management (London: Samuel Holdsworth, 1838).
Dr Maximilian Jacobi, On the Construction and Management of Hospitals for the Insane (London: John Churchill, 1841), p. 56.
Naomi Tadmor, ‘The Concept of the Household Family in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present 151, 1 (1996), pp. 111–140.
F. Oppert, M.D., L.R.C.P.L., Hospitals, Infirmaries and Dispensaries: their Construction, Interior Arrangement, and Management, with Descriptions of Existing Institutions, and Remarks on the Present System of Affording Medical Relief to the Sick Poor (London: John Churchill and Sons, 1867) p. 72.
D. Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (London: Yale, 2006)
J. Hamlett, Material Relations: Middle-Class Families and Domestic Interiors in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 90–92.
H. Rogers, ‘Kindness and Reciprocity: Liberated Prisoners and Christian Charity in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, Journal of Social History, 47: 4 (Spring 2014), pp. 721–745.
Clare Hickman has shown that the term cheerful was also often applied to asylum gardens. C. Hickman, ‘Cheerful Prospects and Tranquil Restoration: The Visual Experience of Landscape as part of the Therapeutic Regime of the British Asylum, 1800–1860’, History of Psychiatry, 20, 4 (2009), p. 7.
J. Conolly, The Construction and Government of Lunatic Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane (London: John Churchill, 1847), p. 33.
E. Murphy, ‘The Administration of Insanity in England 1800–1870’, in R. Porter and D. Wright (eds), The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 340.
There was also a tussle between Conolly and the magistrates. A. Suzuki, ‘The Politics and Ideology of Non-Restraint: The Case of Hanwell Asylum’, Medical History, 39 (1995), pp. 1–2.
C. Lockart Robertson, ‘A Descriptive Notice of the Sussex Lunatic Asylum, Hayward’s Heath (opened 25th July, 1859)’, Journal of Mental Science, Vol. VI, No. 33 (April 1860), p. 270.
A. R. Urquhart, ‘On Decoration and Furnishing of Asylums’, Journal of Mental Science, Vol. XXVIII (July 1882), pp. 167–168.
L. Granshaw, ‘The Rise of the Modern Hospital in Britain’, in A. Wear (ed.), Medicine in Society: Historical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 211.
L. Hide, ‘From Asylum to Mental Hospital: Gender, Space and the Patient Experience in London County Council Asylums, 1890–1910’, in J. Hamlett, L. Hoskins and R. Preston (eds), Residential Institutions in Britain 1725–1970: Inmates and Environments (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), pp. 54–58.
J. Neiswander, The Cosmopolitan Interior: Liberalism and the British Home, 1870–1914 (London: Yale, 2008), p. 64.
Urquhart, ‘On Decoration’, p. 169; R. Jones, ‘The London County Council Asylum at Claybury, and a Sketch of its First Working Year’, Journal of Mental Science, 43 (1897), pp. 47–58.
J. Gloag, John Gloag’s Dictionary of Furniture (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), pp. 567–568.
J. Moran and L. Topp, ‘Introduction: Interpreting Psychiatric Spaces’, in L. Topp, J. E. Moran and J. Andrews (eds), Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment: Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 9.
D. O’Donnell, The Locked Ward: Memoirs of a Psychiatric Orderly (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012), p. 17.
C. Philo, ‘“Enough to Drive One Mad”: The Organisation of Space in Nineteenth-Century Lunatic Asylums’, in J. Wolch and M. Dear (eds), The Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 271–273.
D.R. Green, ‘Pauper Protests: Power and Resistance in Early Nineteenth-Century London Workhouses’, Social History, 31:2 (2006), pp. 151
J. Hamlett and L. Hoskins, ‘Comfort in Small Things? Clothing, Control and Agency in County Lunatic Asylums in Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-Century England’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18:1 (2013), pp. 93–114.
Mrs Loudon, Domestic Pets: Their Habits and Management; with Illustrative Anecdotes (London: Grant and Griffith, 1851), p. 68.
N. Tromans, Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), pp. 161–164.
D.E.B. Weiner, ‘“This Coy and Secluded Dwelling”: Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane’, in L. Topp, J.E. Moran and J. Andrews (eds) Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment: Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 142.
M. Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival and the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 163–167.
Copyright information
© 2015 Jane Hamlett
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hamlett, J. (2015). Public Asylums. In: At Home in the Institution. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322395_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322395_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45833-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-32239-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)