Family commitments

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.