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LIFE FOR THE FAMILIES OF THE VICTORIAN CRIMINALLY INSANE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2019

JADE SHEPHERD Open the ORCID record for JADE SHEPHERD [Opens in a new window]
JADE SHEPHERD*
Affiliation:
University of Lincoln
*
School of History and Heritage, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, LN6 7TSjshepherd@lincoln.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article uses hundreds of letters written by the families of patients committed to Victorian Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum to provide the first sustained examination of the effects of asylum committal on patients’ individual family members. It shows that, despite what historians have previously suggested, the effect on families was not solely, or even necessarily primarily, economic; it had significant emotional effects, and affected family members’ sense of self and relationships outside the asylum. It also shows that family ties and affective relationships mattered a great deal to working-class Victorians. Some found new ways to give meaning to their relationship with, and the life of, their incarcerated relative, despite the costs this entailed. By taking a new approach – engaging with the history of the family, shifting focus from patients to their individual family members, and considering factors including age, class, gender, change over time, and life stage – this article demonstrates the breadth and depth of the effects of asylum committal, and in doing so provides new and significant insights into the history of the Victorian asylum. It also enriches the history of the family by providing an insight into working-class quotidian lives, bonds, and emotions.

Type
Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 63 , Issue 3 , June 2020 , pp. 603 - 632
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Joel Morley for reading multiple drafts of this article, the three anonymous reviewers for their very kind and generous feedback, and Emma Griffin for her swift and helpful communication.

References

1 Berkshire Record Office (BRO), D/H14/D2/2/1/373/6. All references beginning ‘D/H14’ are from the BRO; all are to letters unless stated otherwise, with sender/recipient omitted if evident in the text. Errors of spelling and punctuation are retained in the transcriptions.

2 Wannell, Louise, ‘Patients’ relatives and psychiatric doctors: letter writing in the York Retreat, 1875–1910’, Social History of Medicine, 20 (2007), pp. 297–313CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, at p. 299.

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7 Smith, Cathy, ‘Living with insanity: narratives of poverty, pauperism and sickness in asylum records 1840–76’, in Gestrich, A., Hurren, E., and King, S., eds., Poverty and sickness in modern Europe: narratives of the sick poor, 1780–1938 (London, 2012), pp. 117–41Google Scholar.

8 Ross, Ellen, Love and toil: motherhood in outcast London 1870–1918 (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar; Strange, Julie-Marie, Fatherhood and the British working class 1865–1914 (Cambridge, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Dobbing established what proportion of the first hundred entries in Garlands’ 1900–4 visitors' book were spouses, siblings, or parents, and suggested that this revealed the significance of sibling bonds. However, as it is unclear whether a distinction was made between unique and repeat visitors, the statistical basis of this observation may be unreliable. Dobbing, ‘Family and insanity’, pp. 143–4.

10 Cox, Catherine, Negotiating insanity in the southeast of Ireland, 1820–1900 (Manchester, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mauger, Alice, The cost of insanity in nineteenth-century Ireland: public, voluntary and private asylum care (Basingstoke, 2017)Google ScholarPubMed.

11 Coleborne, Catharine, ‘Families, patients and emotions: asylums for the insane in colonial Australia and New Zealand, c. 1880–1910’, Social History of Medicine, 19 (2006), pp. 425–42Google Scholar; eadem, Madness in the family: insanity and institutions in the Australasian colonial world, 1860–1914 (Basingstoke, 2010)Google Scholar; Kelm, Mary-Ellen, ‘Women, families and the Provincial Hospital for the Insane, British Columbia, 1905–1915’, Journal of Family History, 19 (1994), pp. 177–93CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Labrum, Bronwyn, ‘Looking beyond the asylum: gender and the process of committal in Auckland, 1870–1910’, New Zealand Journal of History, 26 (1992), pp. 125–44Google Scholar.

12 Coleborne, ‘Families, patients and emotions’, pp. 428, 434.

13 For Broadmoor's patients, see Shepherd, Jade, ‘“One of the best fathers until he went out of his mind”: paternal child-murder, 1864–1900’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18 (2013), pp. 17–35CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; eadem, ‘“I am not very well I feel nearly mad when I think of you”: male jealousy, murder and Broadmoor in late-Victorian Britain’, Social History of Medicine, 30 (2017), pp. 277–98Google Scholar; eadem, ‘“I am very glad and cheered when I hear the flute”: the treatment of criminal lunatics in late Victorian Broadmoor’, Medical History, 60 (2016), pp. 473–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Some came from Scotland, Ireland, and the colonies.

15 Some county asylum patients were far from home. See Cox, Catherine, Marland, Hilary, and York, Sarah, ‘Emaciated, exhausted and excited: the bodies and minds of the Irish in nineteenth-century Lancashire asylums’, Journal of Social History, 46 (2012), pp. 500–24CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

16 Essays in Bartlett and Wright, eds., Outside the walls of the asylum; Coleborne, Madness in the family; Coleborne, ‘Families, patients and emotions’.

17 Dobbing, ‘Family and insanity’.

18 Andrews, Jonathan, ‘Case notes, case histories, and the patient's experience of insanity at Gartnavel Royal Asylum, Glasgow, in the nineteenth century’, Social History of Medicine, 11 (1998), pp. 255–81CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

19 More case files pertaining to Queen's pleasure patients contained letters from family members and in greater quantities than those for insane convicts.

20 Priestley, Philip, Victorian prison lives (London, 1999), p. 198Google Scholar.

21 Jade Shepherd, ‘Victorian madmen: Broadmoor, masculinity and the experiences of the criminally insane, 1863–1900’ (Ph.D. thesis, Queen Mary University of London, 2013), pp. 59–62.

22 King, Steven, Writing the lives of the English poor 1750s–1830s (Montreal, 2019), p. 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Summerfield, Penny, Histories of the self: personal narratives and historical practice (London, 2019), p. 23Google Scholar.

23 In this respect, they resemble the pauper letters that Steven King and Lindsey Earner-Byrne examined. See King, Writing the lives of the English poor, pp. 35–7; Earner-Byrne, Lindsey, ‘“Dear father my health has broken down”: writing health in Irish charity letters, 1922–1940’, Social History of Medicine, 28 (2015), pp. 849–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 852.

24 As the asylum did not retain all letters, quantitative analysis has limited utility.

25 Summerfield, Histories of the self, p. 28.

26 Bailey, Joanne (Begiato), ‘Masculinity and fatherhood in England c.1760–1830’, in Arnold, John H. and Brady, Sean, eds., What is masculinity? Historical dynamics from antiquity to the contemporary world (New York, NY, 2011), pp. 167–86Google Scholar; eadem, Parenting in England, 1760–1830: emotion, identity, and generation (Oxford, 2012); Doolittle, Megan, ‘Fatherhood and family shame: masculinity, welfare and the workhouse in late nineteenth-century England’, in Delap, Lucy, Griffin, Ben, and Wills, Abigail, eds., The politics of domestic authority in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 84–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Griffin, Emma, ‘The emotions of motherhood: love, culture and poverty in Victorian Britain’, American Historical Review, 123 (2018), pp. 60–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Bailey (Begiato), Parenting in England, p. 143.

28 Shepherd, ‘Victorian madmen’, p. 123.

29 Victor Bailey identifies this age as prime of life: see ‘This rash act’: suicide across the life cycle in the Victorian city (Stanford, CA, 1998), p. 186.

30 Ross, Love and toil; Roberts, Elizabeth, A woman's place: an oral history of working-class women 1890–1940 (Oxford, 1984), p. 136Google Scholar; Lewis, Jane, ‘The working-class mother and state intervention, 1870–1918’, in Lewis, Jane, ed., Labour and love: women's experience of home and family (New York, NY, 1986), pp. 99–120Google Scholar, at p. 107.

31 D/H14/D2/2/2/175/53, to superintendent.

32 D/H14/D2/2/2/178/5.

33 D/H14/D2/2/2/183/7; D/H14/D2/2/2/164/7; D/H14/D2/2/2/398/14.

34 D/H14/D2/2/2/184/6.

35 D/H14/D2/2/2/183/4, to superintendent.

36 Bailey, ‘This rash act’, pp. 234–5.

37 D/H14/D2/2/2/183.

38 D/H14/D2/2/2/101.

39 Rogers, Helen, ‘“First in the house”: daughters on working-class fathers and fatherhood’, in Broughton, Trev and Rogers, Helen, eds., Gender and fatherhood in the nineteenth century (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 126–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 128.

40 D/H14/D2/2/1/1102/71.

41 Essays in Broughton and Rogers, eds., Gender and fatherhood; Gordon, Eleanor and Nair, Gwyneth, ‘Domestic fathers and the Victorian parental role’, Women's History Review, 15 (2006), pp. 551–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holmes, Vicky, In bed with the Victorians: the life-cycle of working-class marriage (Basingstoke, 2017), p. 104CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strange, Julie-Marie, ‘Fatherhood, providing and attachment in late Victorian and Edwardian working-class families’, Historical Journal, 55 (2012), pp. 1007–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Ross, Love and toil; Strange, Fatherhood and the British working class, p. 51.

43 D/H14/D2/2/1/905/18; D/H14/D2/2/1/887/5–17; D/H14/D2/2/1/811.

44 Davin, Anna, Growing up poor: home, school and street in London, 1870–1914 (London, 1996)Google Scholar.

45 Chinn, Carl, They worked all their lives: women of the urban poor in England, 1880–1939 (Manchester, 1988), pp. 86–8Google Scholar.

46 Nineteenth-century society ‘assumed female dependency’ to be the norm. Lewis, ‘Working-class mother’, p. 106.

47 D/H14/D2/2/1/799/4 and 11; D/H14/D2/2/1/1689; D/H14/D2/2/1/1085/26; D/H14/D2/2/1/599/4. Bourke, Joanna, Working-class cultures in Britain 1890–1960 (London, 1994), pp. 71–81Google Scholar; Strange, Julie-Marie, Death, grief and poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, 2005), p. 194CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strange, Fatherhood and the British working class, p. 56.

48 D/H14/D2/2/1/830/8, to superintendent; D/H14/D2/2/1/1102/33. Women often used lodgers to supplement their income: see Roberts, A woman's place, p. 141.

49 For example, D/H14/D2/2/1/829; D/H14/D2/2/1/900/9.

50 D/H14/D2/2/1310.

51 D/H14/D2/2/1/1680, to superintendent.

52 D/H14/D2/2/1/599/4, to superintendent.

53 D/H14/D2/2/1/599/6. The Poor Law Guardians recognized that this alone, the maximum most received, was barely enough to keep families from the workhouse. Frost, Ginger, Victorian childhoods (London, 2009), p. 124Google Scholar.

54 From 1866 onwards, ‘destitute children of a serving prisoner’ could be admitted to industrial schools. Godfrey, Barry, Cox, Pamela, Shore, Heather, and Alker, Zoe, Young criminal lives: life courses and life chances from 1850 (Oxford, 2017), p. 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 D/H14/D2/2/1936a.

56 Ross, Love and toil, p. 156. People who struggled expected family members to help: see King, Writing the lives of the English poor, pp. 75–81.

57 Some families requested privacy when committing relatives to asylums. Suzuki, Akihito, Madness at home: the psychiatrist, the patient and the family in England, 1820–1860 (Berkeley, CA, 2006), p. 121Google Scholar.

58 Suzuki, Akihito, ‘Lunacy and labouring men: narratives of male vulnerability in mid-Victorian London’, in Bivins, Roberta and Pickstone, John V., eds., Medicine, madness and social history: essays in honour of Roy Porter (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 118–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Thane, Pat, Old age in English history: past experience, present issues (Oxford, 2000), p. 297Google Scholar.

60 D/H14/D2/2/1/1092/15; also D/H14/D2/2/1/900/5. The expectation that children might help ageing parents is also evident in cases where patients’ adult children offered their homes to them: see D/H14/D2/2/1/1085/21 and 23–8, to superintendent. Elderly men found themselves unemployed and in the workhouse sooner than women: see Davin, Growing up poor, p. 25.

61 Bailey, ‘This rash act’, p. 211.

62 D/H14/D2/2/1/900/4, to patient Ball; D/H14/D2/2/1/900/5, to superintendent. Many parents were in almost constant contact with the superintendent: see D/H14/D2/2/1/1068/22–56; D/H14/D2/2/1/901/5–25.

63 D/H14/D2/2/2/101/12.

64 D/H14/D2/2/1/974/3, to superintendent; Nelson, Claudia, Family ties in Victorian England (London, 2007), p. 91Google Scholar.

65 Bailey, ‘This rash act’, p. 212.

66 To access Victorian children's experiences, historians have used trial transcripts, official documents, autobiographies, fiction, and, when possible, letters. See essays in Baxter, Jane Eva and Ellis, Meredith A. B., eds., Nineteenth century childhoods in interdisciplinary and international perspectives (Oxford, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 D/H14/D2/2/2/184/9, to superintendent; D/H14/D2/2/1/1076/11, to George Varschagen; D/H14/D2/2/1/925/7, Christmas card.

68 D/H14/D2/2/2/175/22. Grandparents had a long history of providing ‘substitute parenting’. Bailey (Begiato), Parenting in England, p. 204.

69 D/H14/D2/2/1/936a/204; D/H14/D2/2/1/936b/28.

70 Shepherd, ‘One of the best fathers’.

71 Strange, Fatherhood and the British working class, p. 80.

72 D/H14/D2/2/1/936c.

73 Davin, Growing up poor, p. 26; Griffin, ‘Emotions of motherhood’.

74 D/H14/D2/2/1/936c/104, to Dodwell.

75 Strange, Fatherhood and the British working class, p. 41.

76 D/H14/D2/2/1/765/23.

77 D/H14/D2/2/1/936b/166.

78 Nelson, Family ties in Victorian England, p. 93.

79 D/H14/D2/2/2/183/33, to superintendent.

80 D/H14/D2/2/1/936b/28.

81 D/H14/D2/2/1/936b/195.

82 Olsen, Stephanie, ‘The authority of motherhood in question: fatherhood and the moral education of children in England, c. 1870–1900’, Women's History Review, 18 (2009), pp. 765–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 772.

83 D/H14/D2/2/1/936a/209–10.

84 He visited his father thirty-five times in February 1885. D/H14/D2/2/1/936b/67, memorandum; for Dodwell's letters, see, for example, D/H14/D2/2/1/936b/47, letter to ‘undutiful’ daughter.

85 Strange develops the idea of a ‘fragile’ father in Fatherhood and the British working class, pp. 49–81.

86 D/H14/D2/2/1/963.

87 Strange, Fatherhood and the British working class, p. 81.

88 Thane, Old age in English history, p. 299; Cooper, D. and Donald, M., ‘Households and “hidden” kin in early-nineteenth-century England’: four case studies in suburban Exeter, 1821–1861’, Continuity and Change, 10 (1995), pp. 257–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 D/H14/D2/2/2/175/48.

90 D/H14/D2/2/1/918/16.

91 D/H14/D2/2/1/1076/18.

92 D/H14/D2/2/1/918/16–17, to superintendent.

93 D/H14/D2/2/1/1254/56, medical report.

94 D/H14/D2/2/1/901/4–5; D/H14/D2/2/2/174/20; D/H14/D2/2/2/173/5; D/H14/D2/2/1/1102/58; D/H14/D2/2/1/791/6, all to superintendent.

95 D/H14/D2/2/1/936a/241, to Dodwell; D/H14/D2/2/2/101/7, to Dyson; D/H14/D2/2/1/569/2, to Jones. Numerous family members referred to their ‘Dear’ relative. It was not merely a formality but, as David Fitzpatrick noted in his study of Irish and Australian migrant letters, was used to assure ‘the reader that familial solidarity was intact’: Oceans of consolation: personal accounts of Irish migration to Australia (Cork, 1994), p. 22.

96 D/H12/D2/2/1/963/18.

97 D/H14/D2/2/1/963/31.

98 D/H14/D2/2/1/175/51.

99 D/H14/D2/2/2/175/11.

100 This also happened elsewhere. Wannell, ‘Patients’ relatives’, pp. 307–8; Smith, ‘Your very thankful inmate’, pp. 239–42.

101 Gerber, David, ‘Epistolary masquerades: acts of deceiving and withholding in immigrant letters’, in Elliot, Bruce, Gerber, David, and Sinke, Suzanne, eds., Letters across borders: the epistolary practice of international migrants (London, 2006), pp. 144–57Google Scholar.

102 As Michael Roper suggested of soldiers omitting danger in their letters to their mothers: The secret battle: emotional survival in the Great War (Manchester, 2009), pp. 63–8.

103 D/H14/D2/2/1/1116; D/H14/D2/2/1/905/12; D/H14/D2/2/1/836/6. Wannell, ‘Patients’ relatives’; Coleborne, ‘Families, patients and emotions’.

104 D/H14/D2/2/1/175/45, to superintendent. Also D/H14/D2/2/1/1092/15; D/H14/D2/2/1/901/10. This happened elsewhere: see Coleborne, Madness in the family, p. 82; Oonagh Walsh, ‘Lunatic and criminal alliances in nineteenth-century Ireland’, in Bartlett and Wright, eds., Outside the walls of the asylum, pp. 132–52.

105 As Oonagh Walsh found: Walsh, ‘Lunatic and criminal alliances’, p. 145.

106 D/H14/D2/2/2/178/7; D/H14/D2/2/2/212/16; D/H14/D2/2/1/975/13; D/H14/D1/2/1/936b/208; D/H14/D2/2/1/975/13.

107 D/H14/D2/2/1/918/3.

108 Wurgler, Andreas, ‘Voices from amongst the “silent masses”: humble petitions and social conflicts in early modern central Europe’, in van Voss, L.-H., ed., Petitions in social history (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 11–34Google Scholar, cited in King, Writing the lives of the English poor, p. 49.

109 Coleborne, ‘Families, patients and emotions’, p. 437.

110 Mooney, Graham and Reinarz, Jonathan, ‘Hospital and asylum visiting in historical perspective: themes and issues’, in Mooney, Graham and Reinarz, Jonathan, eds., Permeable walls: historical perspectives on hospital and asylum visiting (Amsterdam, 2009), pp. 7–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 9.

111 D/H14/D2/2/1/761/5.

112 D/H14/D2/2/1/1254/56.

113 ‘A visit to the Criminal Lunatic Asylum’, Times, 13 Jan. 1865, p. 10.

114 Some family members expressed relief that they had encountered their relatives in a good condition.

115 Frederick Crawley's sister ‘was grieved to find him so low and ill’: D/H14/D2/2/1/698/7, to superintendent; D/H14/D2/2/1/761/5. See also Catharine Coleborne, ‘Challenging institutional hegemony: family visitors to hospitals for the insane in Australia and New Zealand, 1880s–1890s’, in Mooney and Reinarz, eds., Permeable walls, pp. 289–308, at p. 301; Reaume, Geoffrey, Remembrance of patients past: patient life at Toronto Hospital for the Insane, 1870–1940 (Oxford, 2000, p. 189Google Scholar.

116 D/H14/D2/2/1/936c/51, attendant's note.

117 D/H14/D2/2/1/1256/14, attendant's note.

118 William Orange, Reports of the superintendent and chaplain of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum for the year 1875 (London, 1876), p. 44.

119 D/H14/D2/2/1/936b/57, to attendant; D/H14/D2/2/1/936c/10, from Dodwell to son. Reaume, Remembrance of patients past, p. 196.

120 D/H14/D2/2/1/1310, medical report.

121 D/H14/D2/2/1/969/8; D/H14/D2/2/1/1230/2; D/H14/D2/2/1/918/9, all to superintendent.

122 D/H14/D2/2/1/1102/70.

123 D/H14/D2/2/2/183/9, to superintendent.

124 D/H14/D2/2/1/659/9.

125 D/H14/D2/2/1/1705.

126 Not all families had room for a wage-earner, carer, or parent whose role in the home was rendered void by their committal to Broadmoor, and some refused to care for them should they be released. Jonathan Andrews found that some families were ‘less tolerant of the presence or return of allegedly mad infanticidals into their mix’: see ‘The boundaries of Her Majesty's pleasure: discharging child-murderers from Broadmoor and Perth Criminal Lunatic Department c. 1860–1920’, in Mark Jackson, ed., Infanticide: historical perspectives on child murder and concealment, 1550–2000 (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 216–48, at p. 244. My research shows that patients’ crimes did not always deter families from keeping in touch or seeking discharge. Space constraints prevent this being unpacked here.

127 Smith, ‘Living with insanity’; Smith, ‘Your very thankful inmate’, pp. 246–8. Families of the Irish insane highlighted their financial burdens: see Mauger, Cost of insanity, pp. 74 and 100.

128 For example, cases D/H14/D2/2/1/976/39; D/H14/D2/2/1/1085; D/H14/D2/2/1/974/3; D/H14/D2/2/1/366; D/H14/D2/2/1/1076; D/H14/D2/2/1/186; D/H14/D2/2/1/999/15.

129 Shepherd, ‘I am very glad and cheered’, p. 476.

130 D/H14/D2/2/1/1102/58, to superintendent; D/H14/D2/2/1/714/7, to superintendent.

131 Coleborne, ‘Families, patients and emotions’, p. 438.

132 D/H14/D2/2/1/186/26, to superintendent.

133 Davidoff, Léonore, Thicker than water: siblings and their relations, 1780–1920 (Oxford, 2012), p. 131Google Scholar.

134 Wright, David, of, ‘Familial care “idiot” children in Victorian England’, in Hordon, Peregrine and Smith, Richard, eds., The locus of care: families, communities, institutions, and the provision of welfare since antiquity (London, 1998), pp. 176–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 182–3.

135 Nelson, Family ties in Victorian England, pp. 110–11; Frost, Victorian childhoods, p. 18.

136 D/H14/D2/2/1/1284/28. See also D/H14/D2//2/1/714/7.

137 For example, D/H14/D2/2/1/976/39; D/H14/D2/2/1/1085; D/H14/D2/2/1/974/3; D/H14/D2/2/1/366; D/H14/D2/2/1/1076; D/H14/D2/2/1/186; D/H14/D2/2/1/999/15.

138 D/H14/D2/2/2/107/5–6.

139 Wright, ‘Discharge of pauper lunatics’, p. 98.

140 D/H14/D2/2/1/1738, from police constable to superintendent.

141 D/H14/D2/2/1/388/11; William Orange, Reports of the superintendent and chaplain of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum for the year 1885 (London, 1886), p. 6.

142 For example, the following letters to the superintendent: D/H14/D2/2/1/905/33; D/H14/D2/2/366/177; D/H14/D2/2/1/975/2; D/H14/D2/2/2/107/5; D/H14/D2/2/2/100/25; D/H14/D2/2/2/398/41; D/H14/D2/2/2/164/19–20. See also Smith, ‘Your very thankful inmate’, p. 248.

143 D/H14/D2/2/2174/35.

144 Lucy Thompson's brother requested her recommittal after she attacked him and his wife: D/H14/D2/2/2/105. Similarly, D/H14/D2/2/1/1705.

145 D/H14/D2/2/2/146/6–7; D/H14/D2/2/1/1013.

146 D/H14/D2/2/1/1013.

147 Historians agree that families viewed asylums as a last resort. For example, Hilary Marland, ‘At home with puerperal mania: the domestic treatment of the insanity of childbirth in the nineteenth century’, in Bartlett and Wright, eds., Outside the walls of the asylum, pp. 45–65; Suzuki, Madness at home; Wright, ‘Discharge of pauper lunatics’.

148 Taylor, Steven, ‘“She was frightened while pregnant by a monkey at the zoo”: constructing the mentally-imperfect child in nineteenth-century England’, Social History of Medicine, 30 (2017), pp. 748–66Google Scholar, at p. 765.

149 Foucault, History of madness, p. 485.

150 Peter Bartlett and David Wright, ‘Community care and its antecedents’, in Bartlett and Wright, eds., Outside the walls of the asylum, pp. 1–16, at pp. 1–8, 13.

151 Marland, ‘At home with puerperal mania’; Suzuki, Madness at home.

152 D/H14/D2/2/1/1705.

153 D/H14/D2/2/2/105.

154 D/H14/D2/2/2/105/16; D/H14/D2/2/1/1565.

155 D/H14/D2/2/1/918/7, to superintendent.

156 Family members were invited to visit and stay with their dying relatives. Rules for the guidance of the officers of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum (London, 1863).

157 D/H14/D2/2/1/973/5, to Thornley.

158 D/H14/D2/2/1/605/5.

159 D/H14/D2/2/1/739/11, to superintendent.

160 Strange, Death, grief and poverty in Britain, p. 50.

161 D/H14/D2/2/2/183/67; D/H14/D2/2/1/743/6; D/H14/D2/2/1/743; D/H14/D2/2/1/964/15.

162 D/H14/D2/2/1/936c/216.

163 D/H14/D2/2/1/936c/217.

164 D/H14/D2/2/2/178/36; D/H14/D2/2/1/973/9; D/H14/D2/2/1/1075/14; D/H14/D2/2/1/569/12; D/H14/D2/2/2/178/36; D/H14/D2/2/2/1075/14; D/H14/D2/2/2/183/67, all to superintendent.

165 D/H14/D2/2/2/2/183/67.

166 D/H14/D2/2/1/400; D/H14/D2/2/2/166/10; D/H14/D2/2/1/740/28; D/H14/D2/2/1/996/29–30; D/H14/D2/2/1/659/12; D/H14/D2/2/1/964/15; D/H14/D2/2/1/760/38 and 23; D/H14/D2/2/2/178/30.

167 Strange, Death, grief and poverty in Britain, p. 192.

168 Some family members thanked the superintendent for the service: D/H14/D2/2/1/918/22–3.

169 D/H14/D2/2/1/963/48–52, to superintendent.

170 D/H14/D2/2/2/178/30, to superintendent.

171 D/H14/D2/2/1/1689.

172 D/H14/D2/2/1/936c/216, to superintendent.