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Child Insanity in England, 1845-1907 pp 139–171Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Beyond the Asylum: Dealing with Insane Children

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood ((PSHC))

Abstract

The focus in Chap. 5 moves beyond the asylum to explore alternative methods of dealing with mental illness and disability between the years 1845–1907. It specifically considers the importance of education and development of special schools, hospital provision, the domestic sphere, and charity. By doing so new avenues of dealing with insane children emerge and a broader understanding of the topic is gained.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See the collection of essays in P. Bartlett and D. Wright (eds.), Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in the Community 1750–2000 (London: Athlone, 1999); Also: A. Suzuki, ‘The Household and the Care of Lunatics in Eighteenth Century London,’ in P. Horden and R. Smith (eds.), The Locus of Care, pp. 153–17; and A. Suzuki, ‘Enclosing and Disclosing Lunatics within the Family Walls: Domestic Psychiatric Regime and the Public Sphere in Early Nineteenth-Century England,’ in Bartlett and Wright (eds.), Outside the Walls, pp. 115–131.

  2. 2.

    T. Lacqueur, ‘Working Class Demand and the Growth of English Elementary Education,’ in L. Stone (ed.), Schooling and Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 193; E. Hopkins, Childhood Transformed: Working-Class Children in Nineteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 233.

  3. 3.

    J. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industiral Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 310–312; Humphries, ‘Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution,’ The Economic History Review, 66/2 (2013), pp. 395–418.

  4. 4.

    Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 365; H. Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (London: Longman, 1995), p. 102.

  5. 5.

    Hopkins, Childhood Transformed, p. 237.

  6. 6.

    D. Pritchard, Education of the Handicapped, 1760–1960 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1963), p. 116.

  7. 7.

    Hopkins, Childhood Transformed, p. 246.

  8. 8.

    D. Wright, ‘“Childlike in his Innocence”: Lay Attitudes Towards “Idiots” and “Imbeciles” in Victorian England,’ in D. Wright and A. Digby (eds.), From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 118–133; A. Digby and P. Searby, Children, School and Society in Nineteenth-Century England (London: The Macmillan Press, 1981), p. 13.

  9. 9.

    A. Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood,’ History Workshop Journal, 5 (1978), pp. 9–65.

  10. 10.

    Hopkins, Childhood Transformed, p. 247.

  11. 11.

    S. Wright, ‘Moral Instruction, Urban Poverty and English Elementary Schools in the Late Nineteenth Century,’ in N. Goose and K. Honeyman (eds.), Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England: Diversity and Agency, 1750–1900 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 227–296, p. 295.

  12. 12.

    Pritchard, Education of the Handicapped, p. 115.

  13. 13.

    Pritchard, Education of the Handicapped, p. 58.

  14. 14.

    P. Potts, ‘Medicine, Morals and Mental Deficiency: The Contribution of Doctors to the Development of Special Education in England,’ Oxford Review of Education, 9/3 (1983), pp. 181–196, p. 182.

  15. 15.

    Cited in Pritchard, Education of the Handicapped, p. 122.

  16. 16.

    BCA, SB/B11/1/1/1, Birmingham Education Committee Speical Schools Committee of the School Board Minutes, 10 February 1898–17 March 1903, p. 1; Pritchard, Education of the Handicapped, pp. 122–127.

  17. 17.

    ‘The Education of Defective Children,’ The Manchester Guardian, 19 May 1898, p. 12.

  18. 18.

    ‘Care of the Feeble-Minded,’ The Manchester Guardian, 17 October 1898, p. 9.

  19. 19.

    Pritchard, Education of the Handicapped, p. 131.

  20. 20.

    LMA, Friern Hospital (Colney Hatch), Male Casebook 44, H12/CH/B/13/044, William Hill, Admission no. 12674, p. 134.

  21. 21.

    ‘The Care of Feeble-Minded Children: Address by Sir Douglas Galton,’ The Manchester Guardian, 11 October 1898, p. 8.

  22. 22.

    F. Galton, Essays in Eugenics (London: The Eugenics Education Society, 1909), p. 42.

  23. 23.

    Ibid.

  24. 24.

    A discussion of the contemporary classification is provided by Potts, ‘Medicine, Morals, and Mental Deficiency,’ p. 184; also J. Goodman, ‘Pedagogy and Sex: Mary Dendy (1855–1933), Feeble-Minded Girls and the Sandlebridge Schools, 1902–33,’ History of Education, 34/2 (2005), pp. 171–187, p. 173.

  25. 25.

    Pritchard, Education of the Handicapped, p. 61.

  26. 26.

    M. Jackson, The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

  27. 27.

    Cunningham, Children and Childhood, pp. 103–106.

  28. 28.

    NRO, St Crispin Collection, Out of County Casebook 2, NCLA/6/2/3/2, James Dennis, Admission no., p.; LMA, Friern Hospital (Colney Hatch), Male Casebook 33, H12/CH/B/13/033, Syndey Wright, Admission no. 9149, p. 237; LMA, Friern Hospital (Colney Hatch), Female Casebook 42, H12/CH/B/11/042, Marian Glover, Admission no. 9443, p. 42; LMA, Friern Hospital (Colney Hatch), Male Casebook 45, H12/CH/B/13/045, Robert Hawkins, Admission no. 12207, p. 267.

  29. 29.

    LMA, Sydney Wright, p. 237.

  30. 30.

    BLA, Three Counties, Male Casebook 6, LF31/6, John Hook, Admission no. 3914, p. 133; LMA, Friern Hospital (Colney Hatch), Male Casebook 38, H12/CH/B/13/038, Edward Woods, Admission no. 10770.

  31. 31.

    ‘Idiot Children and Epileptics under the Poor Law,’ 24 January 1894, p. 13.

  32. 32.

    NRO, St Crispin collection, Male Patient Casebook 10, NCLA/6/2/1/10, Bernard Perry, Admission no. 5388, p. 155.

  33. 33.

    BLAS, Three Counties, Female Casebook 3, LF29/3, Alice Popper, Admission no. 2589, p. 310.

  34. 34.

    R. Porter, ‘The Gift Relation: Philanthropy and Provincial Hospitals in Eighteenth Century England,’ in L. Granshaw and R, Porter (eds.), The Hospital in History (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 149–178.

  35. 35.

    J. Reinarz, ‘Investigating the “Deserving” Poor: Charity and the Voluntary Hospitals in Nineteenth-Century Birmingham,’ in A. Borsay and P. Shapely (eds.), Medicine, Charity and Mutual Aid: The Consumption of Health and Welfare in Britain, c.1550–1950 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 111–134, p. 111; Reinarz, Healthcare in Birmingham: A History of the Birmingham Teaching Hospitals, 1779–1939 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2009).

  36. 36.

    J. Lane, A social History of Medicine: Health, Healing and Disease in England, 1750–1950 (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 87; E. Lomax, Small and Special: The Development of Hospitals for Children in Victorian Britain (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1996), pp. 8–9; Reinarz, ‘Investigating the “Deserving” Poor,’ p. 122.

  37. 37.

    A. Tanner, ‘Choice and the Children’s Hospital: Great Orond Street Hospital and their Families 1855–1900,’ in Borsay and Shapely (eds.), Medicine, Charity and Mutual Aid, pp. 135–162, p. 142.

  38. 38.

    Lomax, Small and Special, p. 79; Reinarz, ‘Investigating the “Deserving” Poor,’ p. 113; Lane, Social History of Medicine, p. 88; Tanner, ‘Choice and the Children’s Hospital,’ p. 144.

  39. 39.

    Lane, Social History of Medicine, p. 83.

  40. 40.

    F. Nightingale, Notes on Nursing: What it is and What it is Not (London: Duckworth, 1952, first published 1859).

  41. 41.

    F.F. Waddy, A History of Northampton General Hospital, 1743–1948 (Northampton: Gildhall Press, 1974), p. 46.

  42. 42.

    D. Wright, Mental Disability in Victorian England: The Earlswood Asylum 1847–1901 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001).

  43. 43.

    Reinarz, ‘Investigating the “Deserving” Poor,’ pp. 119–120.

  44. 44.

    Lomax, Small and Special, p. 13.

  45. 45.

    Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the Hospital for Sick Children (London, 1876), p. 5.

  46. 46.

    The records are available at www.hharp.org

  47. 47.

    Tanner, Choice and the Children’s Hospital, p. 152.

  48. 48.

    E. Hurren, ‘Belonging, Settlement and the New Poor Law in England and Wales 1870s-1900s,’ in S. King and A. Winter (eds.), Migration, Settlement and Belonging in Europe 1500–1930s: Comparative Perspectives (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), pp. 127–152, p. 134.

  49. 49.

    G. Mooney, ‘Diagnostic Spaces: Workhouse, Hospital, and Home in Mid-Victorian London,’ Social Science History, 33/3 (2009), pp. 357–390.

  50. 50.

    A. Tomkins, ‘Paupers and the Infirmary in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Shrewsbury,’ Medical History, 43/2 (1999), pp. 208–227.

  51. 51.

    BLA, Three Counties, Admission Register 1, LF27/1, Kate Steggles, Admission no. 1277.

  52. 52.

    C. Smith, ‘Living with Insanity: Narratives of Poverty, Pauperism and Sickness in Asylum Records 1840–76,’ in A. Gestrich, E. Hurren, and S. King (eds.), Poverty and Sickness in Modern Europe: Narratives of the Sick Poor, 1780–1938 (London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 117–142.

  53. 53.

    http://www.hharp.org/admissions/fd4fb6c7/29182?item=18, Percy Jones, accessed 03/12/2012; www.hharp.org David Halford was admitted to Earlswood, accessed 15/01/2014.

  54. 54.

    www.hharp.org Bessie Newman, accessed 15/01/2014.

  55. 55.

    David Wright, Earlswood.

  56. 56.

    www.hharp.org John Steer, Admitted 29/08/1871, accessed 15/01/2014.

  57. 57.

    Pritchard, Education of the Handicapped, p. 57.

  58. 58.

    Scull, Museums of Madness.

  59. 59.

    Hollen Lees, ‘The Survival of the Unfit: Welfare Policies and Family Maintenance in Nineteenth-Century London,’ in P. Mandler (ed.), The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 68–91, p. 69.

  60. 60.

    C. Smith, ‘Living with Insanity,’ pp. 126–127; N. Tomes, A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum Keeping, 1840–83 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 109; Wright, ‘Familial Care of Idiot Children’; Melling et.al., ‘“A Proper Lunatic for Two Years”: Pauper Lunatic Children in Victorian and Edwardian England. Child Admissions to the Devon County Lunatic Asylum, 1845–1914,’ Journal of Social History, 31/2 (1997), pp. 371–405.

  61. 61.

    Suzuki, ‘Enclosing and Disclosing Lunatics’; Suzuki, Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient and the Family in England, 1820–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

  62. 62.

    Shuttleworth, BMJ, 1886, pp. 183–184.

  63. 63.

    Shuttleworth, BMJ, 1886, pp. 183–184.

  64. 64.

    E. Higgs, Making Sense of the Census: The Manuscript Returns for England and Wales, 1801–1901 (London: Public Record Office, 1989), pp. 74–75.

  65. 65.

    Cunningham, Children and Childhood, p. 160.

  66. 66.

    L. Davidoff, Thicker than Water: Siblings and their Relations, 1780–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 22.

  67. 67.

    Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1950 (London: Routledge, 2002).

  68. 68.

    H. Bosanquet, The Family (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 222.

  69. 69.

    J. Lewis, ‘Family Provision of Health and Welfare in the Mixed Economy of Care in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,’ Social History of Medicine, 8/1 (1995), pp. 1–16, p. 5.

  70. 70.

    Cunningham, Children of the Poor, p. 133.

  71. 71.

    Hollen Lees, ‘Survival of the Unfit,’ p. 81.

  72. 72.

    P. Mandler, ‘Poverty and Charity in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis: An Introduction,’ in Mandler (ed.), The Uses of Charity, Introduction, p. 7.

  73. 73.

    Mandler, ‘Poverty and Charity,’ p. 13.

  74. 74.

    Cunningham, Children of the Poor, pp. 134–135.

  75. 75.

    E. Ross, ‘Hungry Children: Housewives and London Charity, 1870–1918,’ in Mandler, The Uses of Charity, pp. 161–196, p. 164.

  76. 76.

    ‘The National Association for Promoting the Welfare of the Feeble-Minded,’ British Medical Journal, 18 June 1898, p. 1617.

  77. 77.

    BMJ, ibid.

  78. 78.

    Pritchard, Education of the Mentally Handicapped, p. 180.

  79. 79.

    ‘National Association for Promoting the Welfare of the Feeble Minded,’ BMJ, 14 July 1900, p. 100.

  80. 80.

    ‘National Association,’ BMJ, 14 July 1900, p. 100.

  81. 81.

    Goodman, ‘Pedagogy and Sex,’ p. 172; Pritchard, Education of the Mentally Handicapped, p. 181; Jackson, The Borderland of Imbecility, p. 67.

  82. 82.

    Pritchard, Education of the Mentally Handicapped, p. 181.

  83. 83.

    Ibid., p. 182.

  84. 84.

    A. Brown, ‘Ellen Pinsent: Including the ‘Feebleminded’ in Birmingham, 1900–1913,’ History of Education, 34/5 (2005), pp. 535–546; Goodman, ‘Pedagogy and Sex’.

  85. 85.

    J. Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924 (London: Croom Helm, 1980), p. 27.

  86. 86.

    MCL, Annual Report of the Manchester and Salford Boys’ and Girls’ Refuge, 1886, p. 14.

  87. 87.

    MCL, Annual Report of Manchester and Salford Boys’ and Girls’ Refuge, 1889, p. 14.

  88. 88.

    I. Dowbiggin, ‘“Keep this Young Country Sane”: C.K. Clarke, Immigration Restriction, and Canadian Psychiatry, 1890–1925,’ Canadian Historical Review, 76/4 (1995), pp. 598–627, p. 605; also A. Bashford, ‘Insanity and Immigration Restriction,’ in C. Cox and H. Marland (eds.), Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 14–35, p. 20.

  89. 89.

    S. Taylor, ‘Insanity, Philanthropy and Emigration: Dealing with Insane Children in Late-Nineteenth-Century North-West England,’ History of Psychiatry, 25/2 (2014), pp. 224–236.

  90. 90.

    GMCRO, Manchester & Salford Refuge, Emigration Files, M189/7/2/3/006.

  91. 91.

    GMCRO, Manchester & Salford Refuge, Emigration Files, M189/7/2/5/009.

  92. 92.

    GMCRO, Manchester & Salford Refuge, Emigration Files, M189/7/2/5/048-54.

  93. 93.

    GMCRO, Manchester & Salford Refuge, Emigration Files, M189/7/3/19/239-241.

  94. 94.

    BCA, Middlemore Emigration Homes, Entrance Book Boys, MS517/472, p. 71.

  95. 95.

    BCA, Middlemore Emigration Homes, Entrance Book Girls, MS517/471, p. 61.

  96. 96.

    http://www.barnardos.org.uk/what_we_do/our_history/history_faqs.htm, accessed 12/02/2014.

  97. 97.

    LMA, Friern Hospital (Colney Hatch), Male Casebook 48, H12/Ch/B/13/048, Thomas Burcombe, Admission no. 13215, p. 80.

  98. 98.

    Tanner, ‘Choice and the Children’s Hospital,’ p. 137.

  99. 99.

    Cunningham, Children and Childhood, p. 152.

  100. 100.

    Cunningham, Children and Childhood, p. 157.

  101. 101.

    Scull, Museums of Madness; Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions.

  102. 102.

    For example see the collection of essays contained in: Bartlett and Wright, Outside the Walls; Melling et al., ‘Proper Lunatic’.

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    Steven J. Taylor

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Taylor, S.J. (2017). Beyond the Asylum: Dealing with Insane Children. In: Child Insanity in England, 1845-1907. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-60027-1_5

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