Itineraries and Experiences of Insanity: Irish Migration and the Management of Mental Illness in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire

Abstract

The Irish and Irish migrants have been depicted as particularly prone to mental illness and institutionalisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on a global scale.1 Yet there has been only limited work on this phenomenon in the case of Irish migration to England.2 Across the period of our study, the relationship of Ireland, part of the British state until 1922, as well as Irish migrants’ relationship with the British Empire has been contested and debated.3 Irish migrant labourers were regarded as an important and necessary resource for the British Empire and Industrial Revolution. Throughout the nineteenth century — in comparison with the situation outlined in Alison Bashford’s chapter — there was a largely unmanaged movement of Irish migrants from Ireland to Britain, unchecked by immigration controls or medical examinations.4 Yet this migration prompted anxieties in terms of welfare provision and the obligations of the English Poor Law to provide for Irish paupers, and the Irish were blamed for exacerbating already dire conditions in many communities and for spreading disease. Large numbers of Irish migrants would also end up as patients in England’s growing asylum system, where, as in many other parts of the British Empire, they made up one of the largest — and in many years the largest — ethnic group.KeywordsAnnual ReportLate Nineteenth CenturyIrish PatientReception OrderMedical SuperintendentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.