Pauper Lunatics Research Articles

FIT OBJECTS of BENEFICENCE: CHARITY, INSANITY AND THE MIDDLE-CLASS CAUSE IN MID-VICTORIAN ENGLAND

This article explores Victorian concerns about the middle-class insane after the 1845 Lunacy Acts which promoted rate-supported provision for pauper lunatics. Calls for appropriate and affordable care for those of middle-class status grew after 1845 and encompassed public, charitable and private initiatives. A key priority was to ensure that insanity did not pauperise those from the middle class but also that they could access support without losing their sense of independence and respectability. This usually meant there was an expectation that those from the middle class would contribute to the cost of care and not be totally reliant on the charity of others. The article finishes by looking at how one charitable hospital, the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (later renamed St Andrew’s Hospital) developed and accommodated appropriate charitable support for the middle-class insane.

Workhouse or asylum? Accommodating pauper lunatics in nineteenth-century England.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of pauper lunatics being admitted to institutions and many mentally-ill paupers found their way into workhouses. The range of options existing for the admission of paupers, who at the time were described as lunatics or insane, included private madhouses, charitable asylums, public asylums as well as workhouses. Legislation relating to transfer from a workhouse to a one of these other institutions was ambiguous and depended on the concept of dangerousness and whether a workhouse inmate was manageable, rather than the nature of their illness. Because demand exceeded the space available because of overcrowding, workhouses and public asylums continually needed to increase provision by means of converting existing facilities or erecting new buildings. Nevertheless, the transfer of patients between asylums was commonplace and extensive. This article will explore the interface between two urban workhouses in the West Midlands of England and their local asylums from the late eighteenth until the end of the nineteenth century. It will demonstrate that, although local circumstances at any one time may have contributed to decisions on transfer, the overriding difficulty in the correct placement of pauper lunatics throughout the time period was institutional overcrowding, mainly driven by the increasing numbers of pauper lunatics.

‘Biteing Another Pauper with WHOM She Slept’: Lunatics, Idiots and Imbeciles Under the New Poor Law, C.1836–1852

This article examines the experiences of care and relief for paupers deemed lunatics, idiots and imbeciles during the initial decades of the New Poor Law. Analysis focusses on two Lincolnshire Poor Law Unions (the Sleaford and Lincoln) and is structured around three loci of care: the parish, the asylum and the workhouse. Although the parish continued to be the primary locus of care throughout the early New Poor Law period, this article notes a growing willingness to admit paupers into asylums as the 1830 s and 1840 s progressed. Indeed, the geography of asylum provision within the unions of study became increasingly non-local through the use of institutions outside of Lincolnshire during the 1840 s. Similarly, the institutional experience of the union workhouse is stressed, particularly for paupers deemed idiots and imbeciles who were often inmates for decades. Such mirrored local practice pre-1834, with the unions of study continuing to utilise a developed Old Poor Law workhouse infrastructure to provide in-door relief in the transitional period between unionisation in 1836 and the opening of union workhouses in 1838. However, institutional care generally sat against previous experiences of support within the parish and was often only sought due to the ability or inclination of families to provide for mentally ill and cognitively disabled relatives. Here, individual life cycles of support could permeate differing loci of care, showing that binary designations of institutional versus non-institutional relief often simplify the complexity of holistic lived experience. An emphasis on life cycles of support has also highlighted a demographic continuity in receipt between the Old and New Poor Laws, with many paupers deemed lunatics, idiots and imbeciles receiving relief before and after 1834. Moreover, evidence suggests that those labelled as pauper lunatics, idiots and imbeciles were far from passive, demonstrating opinions on relief offered and received albeit with the potential for agency often constrained due to their categorisation. As such, this article has tried to place pauper voice at its centre, examining how poor law relief recipients categorised as lunatics, idiots and imbeciles traversed support options during the early New Poor Law period.

Back to Bedlam: is mental health nursing going backwards?

Back to Bedlam: is mental health nursing going backwards?

London and Its Asylums, 1888-1914: Politics and Madness, by Robert Ellis

Reviewed by: London and Its Asylums, 1888-1914: Politics and Madness by Robert Ellis Leslie Topp (bio) London and Its Asylums, 1888-1914: Politics and Madness, by Robert Ellis; pp. viii + 296. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $119.99, $89.00 ebook. Scholars of Victorian asylums are often faced with archival and primary sources that are if anything too rich and interesting: case notes, daily logs, photographs, and inspectors' reports that bring these immense institutions to life in all their problematic human complexity. Robert Ellis, by contrast, has been brave enough to tackle a very different set of sources, much drier and more impenetrable. London and Its Asylums, 1888-1914: Politics and Madness is not, despite its title, directly concerned with the British capital's psychiatric institutions, but rather with the bureaucratic structures that oversaw them (and poor people's mental healthcare more generally) at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The sources that Ellis digests and deploys [End Page 512] are the products of administrative bureaucracy, above all the carefully compiled minutes of twenty-six-years' worth of committee meetings. The result of this herculean task is an account that, while requiring some effort and persistence to read, offers an original and compelling angle on the history of mental healthcare, particularly as it was affected by electoral politics. The Local Government Act of 1888 created the London County Council (LCC), setting up for the first time a municipal government for all of London. In one stroke, this new body became responsible for the institutional care and treatment of residents who were deemed to need confinement due to mental disturbance and who could not pay for their maintenance, a group of people who were still referred to throughout this period as "pauper lunatics" (10). The LCC took on responsibility for the management and funding of four existing asylums, completed one which had been in the planning stages, and built six further asylums. Altogether, by 1914, this group of institutions housed thousands of patients. The Local Government Act meant that for the first time in England, institutional mental healthcare was the responsibility of a democratically elected body. Ellis's decision to focus on London and the LCC results in an in-depth study of how this combination of democratic local politics and the provision for (and control of) this large, growing, and very vulnerable group worked in practice. London's exceptional status as a world city and capital of empire, and its vast scale, give his findings wide relevance. Central to Ellis's argument is his insistence that the sources show that mental healthcare in the period was not the "non-contentious" science-led area of public policy it was often presented to be later in the twentieth century (49). (Indeed, Ellis points out that the neglect of mental healthcare under the Conservative austerity politics of the 2010s in the UK shows that this area still cannot be separated from political positions.) The years covered by the book witnessed two distinct party-political regimes within the LCC: the Progressives, who were aligned with the Liberals at the national level, had a majority until they lost the 1907 election to the Municipal Reformers, who were aligned with the Conservatives. The contrasting approaches of the two parties allow Ellis to open up new key insights into why asylums and asylum-based practices developed in the ways they did. And, often, this had nothing to do with internal psychiatric debates. For instance, the Municipal Reformers had as a central plank of their platform control over spending and keeping taxes down. The very large asylums they built represented not an impressive commitment to a marginalized group, but, in the context of laws that compelled local councils to build asylums, an attempt at savings through economies of scale and a deprioritization of patients' and their families' needs to have institutions closer to their homes and accessible for visiting. Ellis also shows that the Council made itself aware (through impressive transnational networks) of international tendencies in asylum design toward the so-called villa asylum, but instead chose to persist with outmoded corridor-system designs in order to control budgets. Under the...

The Circulation of Pauper Lunatics and the Transitory Nature of Mental Health Provision in Late Nineteenth Century Cumberland and Westmorland

Following the implementation of legislation in 1845 which required every county and borough throughout England and Wales to build an institution for the treatment of mentally ill paupers, there was a surge in the number of people classed as insane. This created situations of overcrowding, and pauper lunatics were constantly pushed and pulled between the asylum and the workhouse in an attempt to alleviate pressure on accommodation. This paper explores the experience of pauper lunatic patients at the County Asylum of Cumberland and Westmorland, and recounts the experience of its pauper patients as they entered and departed from the institution, thereby portraying the transitionary process of mental health provision in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

High Royds Hospital, Menston, Ilkley.

High Royds Hospital was the third of four large hospitals built by the West Riding of Yorkshire County Council to accommodate ‘pauper lunatics'. The hospital was designed by the county engineer J. Vickers Edwards, work began in 1884 and the hospital was opened in 1888. Pavilions were arranged in an echelon formation with the administrative block, which included a tower and clock, at the centre and the service area behind, the whole linked by covered corridors. There were wards designated for the care of patients with epilepsy and other special groups. Subsequently there were many additions to the hospital which included an infirmary, long-stay wards detached from the hospital and a ‘neurosis unit’ built in the modern style in 1938.

‘Pauper Lunatics and their Treatment’, by Joshua Harrison Stallard (1870)

Little is known of Joshua Harrison Stallard other than that he was a provincial medical practitioner who moved to London and campaigned for improvement in metropolitan workhouses. In the pamphlet reproduced here, Stallard draws attention to the build-up of lunatics in workhouses due to lack of asylum beds. He also argues for the increased use of home care for lunatics instead of continually expanding asylum provision, and points to the need for training of asylum doctors.

English pauper lunatics in the era of the old poor law

Many of those considered to be insane in the past were regarded as paupers and so came within the ambit of the poor law. Little work has yet been published on the ways in which the poor law dealt with the psychologically disturbed during the era of the old poor law ( c.1601–1834). The present paper outlines the old poor law which said very little about madness as a specific problem, with the general implication that they were to be dealt with in the same way as others considered to be in need of relief. It appears that this was generally the case with the exception that the insane were sometimes sent to asylums. They were also liable to be treated as vagrants. Some limitations and problems with primary sources are also noted.

Death and the dead-house in Victorian asylums: necroscopy versus mourning at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, c. 1832–1901

This article examines the management and meaning of post-mortem examinations, and the spatial ordering of patients' death, dissection and burial at the Victorian asylum, referencing a range of institutional contexts and exploiting a case study of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum. The routinizing of dissection and the development of the dead-house from a more marginal asylum sector to a lynchpin of laboratory medicine is stressed. External and internal pressure to modernize pathological research facilities is assessed alongside governmental, public and professional critiques of variable necroscopy practices. This is contextualized against wider issues and attitudes surrounding consent and funereal rituals. Onus is placed on tendencies in anatomizing insanity towards the conversion of deceased lunatics--pauper lunatics especially--into mere pathological specimens. On the other hand, significant but compromised resistance on the part of a minority of practitioners, relatives and the wider public is also identified.

'Those, that die by reason of their madness': dying insane in London, 1629-1830.

Dying insane provoked ‘great fear, and apprehension’ in the minds of men and women. Death as a lunatic disrupted deathbed performance and rendered the victim incapable at law. This article examines lunacy as a cause of death in the metropolis between 1629 and 1830. It draws on new material from the admission registers of St Luke’s Hospital, existing data from Bethlem and the London Bills of Mortality and unique biographical data on pauper lunatics dying in the parish of St Martin in the Fields. The article argues that lunacy being ascribed as a cause of death had a distinctive chronology in this period. Those most vulnerable to the stigma of lunacy at death were those dying as parish paupers and those who inhabited metropolitan institutions.

The 1815 Act to Regulate Madhouses in Scotland: A Reinterpretation

The 1815 Act to Regulate Madhouses in Scotland: A Reinterpretation

Distinguishing between Shell-shocked Veterans and Pauper Lunatics: The Ex-Services' Welfare Society and Mentally Wounded Veterans after the Great War

This article sets out to contribute to the growing debate on the treatment of shell-shocked men after the Great War. So far, the work of the voluntary sector in this sphere has been neglected but the Ex-Services' Welfare Society (ESWS), the charity dedicated to caring for shell-shocked men and their families, ensured that the plight of mentally wounded veterans achieved a high public profile during the 1920s. Initially the ESWS attempted to link the needs of the mentally wounded soldier with the wider issue of lunacy reform. This ensured a high level of publicity but also resulted in political controversy and a loss of support. By the mid-1920s the ESWS wanted to disassociate itself from lunacy reform. This benefited mentally wounded veterans in the short term but unwittingly cemented a clear distinction between psychologically damaged servicemen and `ordinary lunatics', and so failed to dispel the widespread misapprehension and misunderstanding which clouded attitudes towards mental illness in general.

Family, community and the Victorian asylum: a case study of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum and its pauper lunatics

This article explores how the medicalization of poverty in 19th-century aetiologies of insanity provided the basis for which the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum became an option for the relief and treatment of the poor. It is argued that the poor, their communities and poor law officials, by being key to the process of committal, were partially responsible for the asylum population and the role that the asylum played in the local community. The article explores how important poverty was in asylum admissions and, from an analysis of the length of stay of those entering the asylum, the number of patients for whom the asylum provided short-term respite. Using case histories of patients, the article argues for the asylum to be seen as part of the poor law process that discriminated between the deserving and undeserving poor.

Review: The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-Nineteenth Century England

Review: The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-Nineteenth Century England

Review: The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-Nineteenth Century England

Review: The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-Nineteenth Century England

The Poor Law of Lunacy. The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-nineteenth-Century England. By P. Bartlett. (Pp. 310; £55.00.) Leicester University Press: Leicester. 1999.

<i>The Poor Law of Lunacy. The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-nineteenth-Century England</i>. By P. Bartlett. (Pp. 310; £55.00.) Leicester University Press: Leicester. 1999.

Workhouse or asylum: the nineteenth century battle for the care of the pauper insane

Throughout the 19th century some 20–25% of all known pauper lunatics in England and Wales were accommodated in workhouses. Early on, the lunacy commissioners considered that all pauper lunatics should be admitted to asylums and were highly critical of the conditions under which they were kept in workhouses. As the century progressed the lunacy commissioners were forced to compromise because of the lack of space in asylums and diminishing confidence in the results of asylum treatment. By the end of the century the lunacy commissioners were reconciled to the accommodation of feeble-minded, imbecile, idiot, chronic psychotic and demented paupers in workhouses, but held to the view that the acute pauper insane should be admitted to asylums.

The pauper insane of Leicester in 1844.

In 1844 the Poor Law Commissioners followed up a dispute with the Guardians of Leicester Union regarding the care of Pauper Lunatics by appointing Dr Samuel Hitch, an Assistant Poor Law Commissioner, to survey the treatment and condition of the pauper insane in Leicester and Birmingham Workhouses. At Leicester he exceeded his brief and surveyed the 13 insane on outdoor relief, 29 in the workhouse and 23 in the asylum. As such it is one of the earliest surveys of an area. This paper describes the dispute, the report and considers its aftermath.

The New Poor Law and the County Pauper Lunatic Asylum--the Devon experience 1834-1884.

In this article we examine the impact of the policies and practices of the Guardians of the New Poor Law Unions on the management of pauper lunatics in four Devon Poor Law Unions in the critical period 1834-84. The central role of the Victorian Poor Law in provision made for the insane has only recently been recognized in the research literature. Scholars have been much more concerned with the activities of professionalizing physicians and the general project of state management than they have with the micro-politics of the local Poor Law and the magistracy who were responsible for the legal disposition of the insane. In this paper we argue that not only were the Guardians of the Poor Law Unions central in the determination of the lunatic's journey through the institutional systems provided in the mid-nineteenth century, but also that there were significant variations within the Poor Law system which made for contrasting systems of disposal of lunatics as between the Unions themselves. These variations in disposal of lunatics in Devon raise important questions of ideology, policy, and practice which, if repeated elsewhere, point to a need to refine significantly our assumptions regarding the disposal of pauper lunatics in England and Wales in the fifty years following the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.