The boundaries of Her Majesty's Pleasure: discharging child-murderers from Broadmoor and Perth Criminal Lunatic Department, c. 1860-1920

Abstract

Recent literature on the history of infanticide in nineteenth-century Britain has tended to focus on the crime, trial and punishment of offenders. The historiography has generally concentrated on the meaning of the crime for Victorian society, the evolution of medico-legal defences and discourse about infanticide, and the changing relationship between lay and professional ideologies. 1 Historians have also been especially preoccupied with the way in which societal and professional judgments were mediated by gendered views of women, their behaviour and their bodies, and of their roles as mothers and wives, as well as by differences in the way women's crimes were evaluated as against those of male offenders. 2 In regard to offenders adjudged insane, historians have given most attention to the ways in which the insanity defence was adjusted to provide exculpation, the professionafization of forensic psychiatric testimony, and the medicalization of the crime, while concurrently exploring the influence of socio-economic explanations for infanticide, such as poverty, abandonment and spousal 217abuse/unreliability. 3 Most of the existing literature, however, has confined itself primarily to the initial medico-legal and penal arbitration and disposal of offenders. Seldom have historians considered in much depth the longer-term disposal of infanticides, their evaluation whilst under detention within asylums (or prisons), and their discharge and restoration to families and communities. 4