Margaret Farrington: Sociability and Sanity in Georgian England

Abstract

Margaret Farrington was a single woman declared to be a lunatic in 1765 and moved with legal authority from a fashionable London residence to lodgings in her home town, Newcastle upon Tyne. Analysis of her possessions in an inventory and biographical details recovered by subsequent research suggest a life immersed in the sociability of the metropolis before her illness. Her subsequent care by her relatives is documented; this may have been a more typical form of care than institutional provision for people with mental illness, although the latter has received much more attention in previous literature.