Abstract
Through an examination of previously unseen archival records, including patients’ letters, this article examines the treatment and experiences of patients in late Victorian Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum and stakes the place of this institution within the broader history of therapeutic regimes in British asylums. Two main arguments are put forth. The first relates to the evolution of treatment in Victorian asylums. Historians tend to agree that in the 1860s and 1870s ‘psychiatric pessimism’ took hold, as the optimism that had accompanied the growth of moral treatment, along with its promise of a cure for insanity, abated. It has hitherto been taken for granted that all asylums reflected this change. I question this assumption by showing that Broadmoor did not sit neatly within this framework. Rather, the continued emphasis on work, leisure and kindness privileged at this institution into the late Victorian period was often welcomed positively by patients and physicians alike. Second, I show that, in Broadmoor’s case, moral treatment was determined not so much by the distinction between the sexes as the two different classes of patients – Queen’s pleasure patients and insane convicts – in the asylum. This distinction between patients not only led to different modes of treatment within Broadmoor, but had an impact on patients’ asylum experiences. The privileged access to patients’ letters that the Broadmoor records provide not only offers a new perspective on the evolution of treatment in Victorian asylums, but also reveals the rarely accessible views of asylum patients and their families on asylum care.
Highlights
Through an examination of previously unseen archival records, including patients’ letters, this article examines the treatment and experiences of patients in late Victorian Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum and stakes the place of this institution within the broader history of therapeutic regimes in British asylums
Jade Shepherd In August 1883, Matthew Jackson Hunter, a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, wrote to his sister: It is a splendid block of buildings. . . has an extensive view and is very healthy. . . the patients spend most of their time. . . exercising in the gardens, reading the daily papers, monthly periodicals etc., there is a well selected library. . . a cricket club, billiards, cards and other amusements
Scholarship charting the transition from therapeutic positivism to psychiatric pessimism within nineteenth-century psychiatry suggests that, when Hunter was writing, Victorian asylums were shrouded in pessimism: authoritarian superintendents, who had abandoned all hope of curing insanity, ruled over-populated institutions within which patients were forced to endure a life sentence.[2]
Summary
In August 1883, Matthew Jackson Hunter, a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, wrote to his sister: It is a splendid block of buildings. . . has an extensive view and is very healthy. . . the patients spend most of their time. . . exercising in the gardens, reading the daily papers, monthly periodicals etc., there is a well selected library. . . a cricket club, billiards, cards and other amusements. As a close friend and colleague of Orange, and a strong proponent of the value of the criminal asylum, Nicolson was unlikely to have written anything uncomplimentary.[68] the report suggests that Broadmoor gained a reputation as a world-class institution within which patients were treated properly, and this is noteworthy for two reasons It marks a change from the beginning of the nineteenth century when no attempt to treat criminal lunatics was made in Britain. Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd (eds), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1985–88), VII (1985), 132–146: 142; Catherine Cox, Hilary Marland and Sarah York, ‘Emaciated, Exhausted and Excited: The Bodies and Minds of the Irish in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire Asylums’, Journal of Social History, 46, 2 (2012), 500–24: 511; Steven Cherry, Mental Health Care in Modern England: The Norfolk Lunatic Asylum/St Andrews Hospital 1810–1998 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), 89– 90.
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