Twice in my career, in very remote places, I encountered lunatics who had been chained for many years to the wall or to posts in the ground. The reasons why they were so enchained had been lost in the sands of time, but their keepers were convinced that they were far too dangerous to be released. By now they were certainly mad, but whether they were mad because they had been tied up, or tied up because they had been mad, it was impossible to say. And in one of the institutions — a prison — I found prisoners who had been acquitted or whose release had been ordered by a judge ten years before, but who did not have enough money to pay their gaolers to release them.
I could not help but recall these experiences as I read Sarah Wise’s excellent new book, Inconvenient People, about the supposedly therapeutic incarceration during the 19th century of people of doubtful madness in various asylums in Britain. Grasping families, eager to lay their hands on the alleged lunatics’ money, and doctors with pecuniary interests in admitting and retaining those alleged lunatics to their establishment, connived at wrongful detention. Several such cases became causes célèbres during that period, and the problem of wrongful certification of madness excited interest far beyond its merely numerical importance. Literary men were deeply involved in the question: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, for example, as a perpetrator, trying to confine his wife to an asylum after she attacked his character during a parliamentary election, and Charles Reade who wrote a novel, Hard Cash, about the problem.
Sarah Wise is an excellent writer, and those who pick up this book will not lightly put it down. Her ten chapters read like short novels and she has the true social historian’s ability to make her period come alive. She selects and compresses the salient details beautifully; one often feels as if one is actually present at the scenes she describes. There can be no higher praise.
Who could resist a chapter entitled ‘The Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society’, about a group of former incarcerees who believed themselves to have been badly abused by their families and the mad-doctors, and who joined together to expose abuses of a similar nature to those that they had suffered?
Or the story of the Nottidge sisters, who attached themselves to a weird evangelical sect called the Agepemonites, run by a charismatic clergyman who believed that he was the vehicle of the Holy Spirit, and who arranged for what he called the Great Manifestation, which seemed to consist of him having intercourse with a virgin on the altar of his community’s chapel in front of all the other believers, after which he denounced the resultant pregnancy as being that of Satan (later changing his mind)? He arranged for the Nottidge sisters, each with a trust fund of £6,000 (perhaps £600,000 in today’s money), to marry one of his followers, whereupon the money became the husband’s and thus soon found its way into the coffers of the community, known as the Abode of Love. California is a haven of sanity — using the word loosely — by comparison with Victorian England.
The distinction between eccentricity and outright insanity is not easy to draw, even today, and most of the author’s examples were either genuinely mad, at least for a time, or very odd indeed. John Perceval, son of the only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated, Spencer Perceval, and founder and honorary secretary of the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society, admitted that he had indeed been mad when he was certified insane; his complaint was that he had been cruelly treated in the asylum in which he had been held, and then not released well after he recovered his sanity, for the most sordid of pecuniary reasons.
There are occasional inconsistences in the book. In the first chapter, for example, we read that Edward Davies, a prosperous City tea-merchant of Welsh origin, was so much in thrall to his mother (who later had him declared a lunatic) that he had to apply to her for money for the most trivial expense, as if she were doling out pocket money; but a couple of pages later he buys a country house in still-rural Crouch End for £7,000. Could it be that the author has swallowed Davies’ protestations whole? Certainly the description of his behaviour suggests that even today he might be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
The author does somewhat under-estimate the difficulties of doctors in Victorian times, who were called upon to act while their ignorance, by today’s standards, was almost total. In addition, organic conditions causing madness must have been very common. To take only two examples, General Paralysis of the Insane, one of the last stages of syphilis, and myxoedema madness, caused by hypothyroidism, the second most common endocrine disorder, must have been frequent, but doctors would have had no methods of diagnosing them. The last chapter is slightly marred by a tone of moral superiority, as if we today had reached a state of final enlightenment thanks to our own unaided efforts.
But this does not detract from my overall judgment: that Inconvenient People is as interesting a work of social history as you are ever likely to read.