An Inconvenient Nuance 2

The Archivist here continues the review of Inconvenient People which he started late last month:

An attentive reading of the preface to Sarah Wise’s book alerts us, not only to the major contribution it purports to make to the literature on Victorian lunacy, but also to its blind spot.

‘Oh yes, all those Victorian husbands getting their wives put away,’ said a good friend, when I told her my plans for a book about sane people being declared mad in the nineteenth century. Many others subsequently came out with something similar. But I hadn’t got very far into my initial archival dig when the variety of victims of malicious asylum incarceration became apparent; and it appeared that, anecdotally at least, this was slightly more likely to have been a problem for men than for women… As for those people who were indisputably mentally disordered, the mysterious lunatic in the attic was as likely to have been Bert as Bertha.¹

As has been previously noted, Wise’s research led her to question the extent to which gender configured the phenomenon that has become the stuff of urban legend – “all those Victorian husbands getting their wives put away”. But the popular assumption concerning the ubiquity of “malicious asylum incarceration” and treatment of the sane in the nineteenth century (illustrated by the phrase ‘All those Victorian husbands…’) is effectively left unaddressed in her book. True, Wise does cite the mid-century assertions of John Perceval of the Alleged Lunatics’ Friends Society (on the one hand) and of John Charles Bucknill, the editor of the Journal of Mental Science (on the other) on the subject:

‘I do not know and have never pretended…that cases of unjust confinement were general, as compared with the number of persons confined as insane. But I believe that cases of unjust confinement and still more of unjust detention are very frequent and numerous.’ ²

From around 140 individuals in England and Wales who were licensed to receive insane people into their private institutions, just one ‘unhappy person has been found unworthy of the trust reposed in him,’ Bucknill wrote. ‘Ought they [the press] not rather have dwelt upon the fact…that this has been the solitary instance in which foul language and harsh conduct has been brought home to [i.e. proved against] any one of them.’ ³

However, it is more difficult to ascertain what Wise herself thinks about what proportion of people certified under Victorian lunacy legislation were anything other than “indisputably mentally disordered”.⁴ She might fairly object that the significance of her narratives of unjust confinement is not tied to a calculation of their prevalence, and that in any case there is no way of making such a calculation. The question of proportion is nevertheless an important one. To take an analogy, which I trust will be illuminating: the history of Victorian railway accidents is a legitimate and important study in its own right, and one which is bound to involve stories of irreducible human tragedy. It is also a study that is likely to illuminate the development of the Victorian railways. Yet if the railways are viewed solely within the prism of such accidents, and the question of whether they constituted the rule or the exception is never satisfactorily addressed, a highly jaundiced view of the subject is the likely result.

[to be continued]

¹ S. Wise, Inconvenient People (London: The Bodley Head, 2012), p. xvii.

² ibid., p. 287.

³ ibid., p. 266.

⁴ ibid., p. xvii.

An Inconvenient Nuance 1

Here is the first instalment of the Archivist’s promised review of Inconvenient People: Lunacy Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England.

Inconvenient People by Sarah Wise is an important new work of non-fiction, with one principal virtue and one major oversight. It is important in that it retells, in an accessible manner, a set of stories that once enjoyed a high public profile, but have now been all but forgotten: those of people who (with a considerable degree of success) challenged their detention under the lunacy laws of Victorian England.

Although Bethlem only features incidentally in this work, Wise might as well have conceived it as a commentary on some throwaway lines in the Hospital’s recent scholarly history (lines which have an eerily contemporary ring to them):

“Zealous mid-Victorians loved to bring ‘evils’ to light, usually through ‘scandals’. In the 1850s public opinion, stirred by a lively press, focused on a wide range of institutional and governmental ‘abuses’. The rhetoric could be overpowering.”¹

Authorial quotation marks notwithstanding, the abuses were real enough, as illustrated by the cases Wise highlights, sometimes in reliance on already-published (often highly-charged) accounts, at other times supported by her archival digging into unpublished reports and correspondence. So, too, were the scandals. The fact that abuses retained the power to shock once found out, and at length precipitated changes in legislation and governance, might be taken as an indication that, however messy the English mental health regime of the nineteenth century was, it was at least capable of correction, perhaps even of improvement. By her narrative style, Wise invites her readers to consider the minutiae, the ins and outs, the ambiguities of the stories she tells: those of Edward Bywater, Edward Peithman, Louisa Nottidge, Catherine Cumming, Louisa Lowe and Georgina Weldon among others. Acceptance of this invitation involves giving up any notion of Victorian lunacy provision as constituting an unremitting reign of terror, simply sustained by greed and neglect, sadism and Schadenfreude. This reminder of historical nuance makes Inconvenient People important, as has already been noted; but what of its principal strength, and how does it disappoint?

In the opening lines of the book’s preface, Sarah Wise highlights what I consider to be the principal virtue of her book, at the same time (unwittingly) providing a clue to its one noteworthy failing.

‘Oh yes, all those Victorian husbands getting their wives put away,’ said a good friend, when I told her my plans for a book about sane people being declared mad in the nineteenth century. Many others subsequently came out with something similar. But I hadn’t got very far into my initial archival dig when the variety of victims of malicious asylum incarceration became apparent; and it appeared that, anecdotally at least, this was slightly more likely to have been a problem for men than for women…As for those people who were indisputably mentally disordered, the mysterious lunatic in the attic was as likely to have been Bert as Bertha.²

First, the virtue. Wise regards Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady (1985) as “part of the wave of academic work that rightly refocused historical studies on to the female experience” but offers her own work, not as a “backlash”, but “an attempt to reposition the discussion”.³ It is, in fact, a popularisation and extension of the approach taken by Joan Busfield in a response to Showalter entitled, appropriately if not imaginatively, ‘The Female Malady?’ Busfield discovered a fin-de-siècle ratio of 55:45 women to men in British asylums, and admission figures roughly equal between the sexes, the difference arising from a higher mortality rate among men, and a longer average length of stay among women, who were resident in asylums.⁴ For her part, Wise discovered nothing by way of “gender bias” in the phenomenon her work highlights: that of unjustified asylum admissions, or “doubtful certification”.⁵

So how to explain the perception of gross gender imbalance in Victorian lunacy practice that lies behind the comment reported in the preface to Inconvenient People? Wise attributes the trope of “mad wives in the attic; or sane wives to be driven mad” to the popular currency that “torture the heroine” narratives enjoyed in Victorian fiction, in preference to stories of “highly strung or unorthodox male…victim[s] of lunacy conspirators”. She cites Wilkie Collins, the author of The Woman in White, to this effect – “The victim to be interesting must be a woman, to be very interesting she must be a lady, [and] as there is a person to be injured – innocent and beautiful, of course – there must be a villan”.⁶ Once established, the trope became a focus of women’s rights campaigners, for whom “the asylum – its deprivations and entrapment, its insistence on a narrow range of acceptable behaviour, its thwarting of autonomy – writ large the lack of freedom that women, and wives in particular, experienced in everyday life”.⁷ It lived on, writes Wise, in plays and films of the early twentieth century, prompting “feminist academics” to “pick up this ball and…run with it”, privileging literary sources over other forms of evidence concerning lived experience with the result that “some distortion has crept in”.

Here is no attempt to overthrow the achievements of feminist historiography in “heroically retrieving from unjust neglect Victorian women’s novels, diaries and poetry and placing them centrally in any serious consideration of the period”.⁸ The strength of Wise’s contribution is as a corrective to and a consolidation (rather than rebuttal) of the feminist advance, within a larger narrative concerning the operation of England’s nineteenth century lunacy laws on both men and women. Its strength lies precisely in the recognition of nuance. Yet Inconvenient People does not offer a perfect depiction of its subject; its recognition of nuance does not extend quite far enough, as we shall see.

[to be continued]

¹ Jonathan Andrews et al, The History of Bethlem (Routledge, 1997), p. 464.

² S. Wise, Inconvenient People (London: The Bodley Head, 2012), p. xvii.

³ ibid., p. 409.

⁴ ibid., pp. 300, 393.

⁵ ibid., p. 312.

⁶ ibid., pp. 198-201.

⁷ ibid., p. 312.

⁸ ibid., p. 198-199.

The Unbroken Seal

Within the pages of Bethlem’s Victorian medical casebooks a large number of letters are preserved – letters to, from and about many of its patients. These letters offer multiple perspectives on the experiences of patients that would be inaccessible from a reading of the hospital’s casenotes alone. They bring the personal dimensions of clinical encounters to the fore. A good example of this is the letters which formed the basis for our recent thread entitled His Powers of Walking.

There is another layer of poignancy attaching to these letters, which arises from the very fact of their preservation in Bethlem’s casebooks. The presence of incoming letters from friends, family, doctors and employers within these pages is unremarkable. The books were simply being used as a filing system. But what of correspondence that was written by patients and addressed to friends and family? The presence of letters such as these in the casebooks testifies to the Hospital’s practice of reading all outgoing letters and deciding which could (and which could not) be sent. The only letters that were not vulnerable to interception were those addressed to the Commissioners in Lunacy (the regulator of the day, to whom all certified patients had a right of appeal against their detention). Put simply, we may presume from the presence of letters written by patients within their Bethlem medical records that in Victorian times an unknown proportion of patients’ letters – whether tender, hurt, confused or threatening in tone – never reached their intended destinations. Such letters may give the researchers of today a measure of access to patients’ voices, but they do so by virtue of a practice which consciously limited the range of their audience at the time of writing.

The piquancy of a recent chance discovery by a visiting researcher is so intense as to be tantalising. Sitting within one of Bethlem’s late Victorian casebooks is a sealed envelope marked ‘confidential’, around which coloured string has been delicately tied. This envelope appears to have been addressed by a female patient to a non-conformist minister of her acquaintance, to whom (it is reported in her medical record) she had previously sent letters of considerable length and amorous intent. In common with other letters written by patients contained in Bethlem’s Victorian casebooks, this envelope was never delivered; but unusually (uniquely, we think, within Bethlem’s holdings) it remains sealed. What confidences are locked inside it? Whatever motives the hospital authorities of the day had in stopping this letter, yet making an exception to their usual rule by not breaking its seal, our researcher did not think that opening the letter was any business of hers. Nor do we really consider it to be any part of ours. Readers familiar with A.S. Byatt’s Possession may recall the (contrived) set of circumstances in which a sealed envelope from a previous century was opened, supplying the novel with an appropriately dramatic conclusion; but only, it will be remembered, by a descendant of the correspondent with the closest and (as it turned out) the most legitimate of interests in its contents.

Insanity and the Nineteenth-Century Asylum: Birmingham City University

As previously reported on this blog, a conference in Birmingham recently explored nineteenth-century asylums. One researcher, Jennifer Wallis, kindly provided us with a few details of the day along with photos of the old asylum in which it took place. She writes:

“It’s Friday the 13^th and I’m on my way to an ex-asylum chapel for Birmingham City University’s conference, ‘Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century’. It all sounds a bit like a schlocky horror movie plot, and my taxi driver looks dubious at my request to be dropped off here. The building that houses the chapel is now owned by the Ministry of Justice and is attached to Birmingham Prison; coming up the drive I see an elegant Victorian building that looks out onto a large expanse of green, windows glinting in the sunlight. Things are certainly looking up.

“Today’s one-day conference is an interdisciplinary look at the nineteenth-century asylum, its patients, methods and representations – and with four sets of parallel sessions, I can see myself having to make some tough decisions. We start the morning in the asylum chapel which – though retaining its original stained-glass windows and basic woodwork – has perhaps lost some of its old character in its new guise as a meeting room. Professor John Goodridge provides the first plenary lecture and a strong start to the day; his discussion of the changing interpretations of poet John Clare’s ‘madness’ is thought-provoking and highlights the often challenging nature of working in the history of psychiatry, as he draws a distinction between madness as cultural phenomenon and clinical diagnosis.

“Goodridge’s lecture nicely sets up the rest of the day. The issue of defining madness runs through many of the papers, from Gerald Sedlmayr’s (Würzburg) examination of mania and melancholia to Claire Mendes’ (Leicester) fascinating look at discussions of the asylum in the women’s press of the 1890s. It’s both refreshing and stimulating to wander from papers on the depiction of insanity in the Victorian novel (Helen Goodman, RHUL), to the architecture of the asylum (Katherine Fennelly, Manchester), right through to a ‘bioarchaeological’ study of inmate experiences at America’s Oneida Asylum (Shawn Phillips, Indiana State).

“The day ends, appropriately enough, back in the chapel with Dr Jonathan Andrews delivering a lecture on the role of the asylum chaplain. His paper reminds us of the multiple avenues of investigation that can be pursued by studying the nineteenth-century asylum: the staff within it, the often changing and competing explanations of what it meant to be ‘insane’, and of course the experiences of the patients themselves. We leave an enthused and enlightened group; the broad scope of the conference means I’ve met people whose work I might never have stumbled across otherwise, and I only hope that we’ll see a similar conference soon.”

For the full conference programme, visit the Birmingham City University website.

Cane Hill Hospital: Its History and People

Next month, the excellent Croydon Clocktower will be hosting an illustrated talk by Pam Buttrey, author of Cane Hill: the Tower on the Hill. This local psychiatric hospital opened in 1882, as the Third Surrey County Lunatic Asylum (in addition to Brookwood Hospital and Springfield Hospital, Wandsworth). A century later, the 2,000 patient hospital was almost empty, and all but the secure unit was closed in 1991.

The recent date of both closure and demolition of the site (the clock tower was still standing until November last year, when a fire broke out in the administration block) means that the iconic building, pictured below, remains recognisable to many local residents, SLaM staff and service users. Pam Buttrey’s talk on the history and people of the hospital will thus evoke memories for many.

As a county asylum (built, pre-NHS, for the treatment of “pauper” patients who could not afford to pay for their care), Cane Hill also held a historical connection with Bethlem. At the time the asylum opened, patients admitted to Bethlem usually received a year’s free treatment. Many were discharged as cured: but others were transferred to private asylums or, as was often the case, one of the enormous county asylums which ringed London at the time, including Cane Hill. What’s more, one patient frequently (incorrectly) cited as having been treated at Bethlem was, in fact, admitted to Cane Hill: Charlie Chaplin’s mother, Hannah, of whom more will be said in an In the Spotlight later this year.

Cane Hill Hospital: Its History and People takes place in the Clocktower Activities Room, Croydon Clocktower, at 7.30pm on Wednesday 30 March. Admission is free: contact the Clocktower Box Office for your ticket on 020 8253 1030 or ticketoffice@croydon.gov.uk

Croydon Clocktower website