Public Asylums

Abstract

In 1889, George E., a patient described as ‘feeble minded’ in his late nine-teenth-century notes, was transferred from Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum to Brookwood, Surrey’s second county lunatic asylum. He had been at Broadmoor for 24 years, presumably as a criminal patient, after setting fire to a barn and a rick in 1864.¹ By the 1880s, the asylum authorities did not consider him dangerous, and this was the second attempt to get him back into the county system. Unusually, E. left a record of his feelings about his transfer as he wrote a letter back to Dr Nicholson, the medical superintendent at Broadmoor. The letter conveys a powerful attachment. He professed warm feelings for Dr Nicholson, Dr Orange (the former superintendent) and the head attendant. It is clear that over his long stay he came to think of Broadmoor as a home. He compared the move to emigration to Australia or America, and described it as ‘being amongst strangers in a strange land’. He had been homesick, he said, but the new doctor at Brookwood had helped him with brandy and arrowroot. He also derived some consolation from the social set up at Brookwood: ‘I gets down to meals along plenty of company about 50 or more. The living is very good here.’ He appreciates the efforts that have been made for his entertainment: ‘fine gold fish here, canary birds, flower pot good plants in them’. And he was impressed by the interior, particularly the floor: ‘I thought the floor was wet when I come in it is done over with like oil cloth.’ Letters written by patients were usually read before they were sent. Writing inmates would have been very aware of this, but it is unlikely that E. was compelled to write back to Broadmoor. If we take the letter at face value, it shows that one patient was able to feel at home in the asylum, and how material provisions there helped him do this.