Pictures of Peter Pan: Institutions, Local Definitions of ‘Mental Deficiency’, and the Filtering of Children in Early Twentieth-Century England1

Abstract

The Mental Deficiency Act (1913) was prompted by the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded. Two Birmingham figures, Ellen Pinsent and Dr William Potts, were part of and witnesses to the Commission, ensuring that the city and their pioneering diagnostics influenced national legislation. Against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century institutional landscape, this article explores how the apparently clear definitions and medical terminology (now obsolete and considered insulting) engineered through the legislation, gave way locally to more nuanced understandings. Using the case study of Monyhull Colony, this article considers how these local interpretations funnelled children into, through, and rarely out of the specialist mental deficiency facility in England between c.1913 and c.1940. During each stage of this filtering process - in education, in the community, at Mental Deficiency Committees, on admission to the colony, at the colony school, and on reaching the age of sixteen - it will show that a dense and ever-expanding panoply of descriptors and organising principles was employed.