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Children, poverty and mental health in rural and urban England (1850–1907)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Steven J. Taylor
Steven J. Taylor*
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
*
Email: sjt48@leicester.ac.uk
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Abstract

Over the course of the nineteenth century children increasingly became social, economic and scientific concerns. Their physical and mental well-being was deemed intrinsic to the future development of Britain and its Empire, and thus maintaining healthy youngsters was, by the turn of the twentieth century, considered a national priority. This article explores the interconnectivity between poverty and the child residents of pauper lunatic asylums in England. It draws on a corpus of extant patient case files from four pauper lunatic asylums between 1851 and 1907 and engages with detailed information about the children and their mental conditions. Additionally, there will be a focus on understanding family backgrounds, parental occupations, the correlation between diagnoses and class, and methods of ‘treatment’ designed to equip children for independent working lifestyles. The overarching objective is to consider the socio-economic ramifications of child mental illness for parents and families and better understand how Victorian institutions accommodated this specific class of patient.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , October 2020 , pp. 151 - 164
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Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

References

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Foucault, M. 1961. Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Paris, repr. London, 2001), originally Histoire de la folie á l’age classique.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenall, R. 2000. A History of Northamptonshire and the Soke of Peterborough (Chichester).Google Scholar
Hide, L. 2014. Gender and Class in English Asylums, 1890–1914 (Basingstoke).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Higgs, E. 1996. A Clearer Sense of the Census: The Victorian Censuses and Historical Research (London).Google Scholar
Hurren, E. 2008. Protesting about Pauperism: Poverty, Politics and Poor Relief in Late-Victorian England, 1870–1900 (Woodbridge).Google Scholar
Humphries, J. 2010. Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, P. and King, S. 2015. ‘From Petition to Pauper Letter: The Development of an Epistolary Form’, in Jones, P. and King, S., eds, Obligation, Entitlement and Dispute under the English Poor Laws, 1600–1900 (Newcastle), pp. 263–91.Google Scholar
King, S. and Taylor, S. 2017. ‘Imperfect children in historical perspective’, Social History of Medicine, 30:4, 718–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKenzie, C. 1992. Psychiatry for the Rich: A History of Ticehurst Private Asylum, 1792–1917 (London).Google Scholar
MacKenzie, C. 1985. ‘Social Factors in the Admission, Discharge, and Continuing Stay of Patients at Ticehurst Asylum, 1845–1917’, in Porter, R., Bynum, W. F. and Shepherd, M. eds., The Anatomy of Madness, Vol. II: Institutions and Society (London), pp. 147–74.Google Scholar
Mellet, D. 1982. The Prerogative of Asylumdom: Social, Cultural and Administrative Aspects of the Institutional Treatment of the Insane in Nineteenth Century Britain (London).Google Scholar
Melling, J., Adair, R. and Forsythe, B. 1997. ‘“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, 371–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Melling, J. and Forsythe, B. 2006. The Politics of Madness: The State, Insanity, and Society in England, 1845–1914 (London).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murdoch, L. 2006. Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (London).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parr, J. 1980. Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924 (London).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Porter, R. 1987 Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from Restoration to Regency (London).Google Scholar
Porter, R. 1985. ‘The patient’s view: doing medical history from below’, Theory and Society, 14: 175–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rebok Rosenthal, A. 2012. ‘Insanity, Family and Community in Late-Victorian Britain’, in Borsay, A. and Dale, P., eds, Disabled Children: Contested Caring, 1850–1979 (London), pp. 29–42.Google Scholar
Rousseau, J. 1782. Émile, or on Education, trans. Bloom, A. (repr. New York, 1979).Google Scholar
Scull, A. 1979. Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England (London).Google Scholar
Seguin, E. 1866. Idiocy: And its Treatment by the Physiological Method (repr. New York, 1907).Google Scholar
Shepherd, A. 2016. Institutionalizing the Insane in Nineteenth-Century England (London).Google Scholar
Shepherd, A. 2007. ‘Mental Health Care and Charity for the Middling Sort: Holloway Sanatorium, 1885–1900’, in Borsay, A. and Shapely, P., eds, Medicine, Charity and Mutual Aid: The Consumption of Health in Britain, c. 1550–1950 (Ashgate), pp. 163–82.Google Scholar
Shepherd, J. 2013. ‘“One of the best fathers until he went out of his mind”: paternal child-murder, 1864–1900’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18:1, 17–35.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shorter, E. 1997. A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (London).Google Scholar
Showalter, E. 1987. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London).Google Scholar
Smith, C. 2006. ‘Family, community and the Victorian asylum: a case study of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum and its pauper lunatics’, Family and Community History, 9: 109–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, C. 2012. ‘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), pp. 117–42.Google Scholar
Smith, C. 2007. ‘Parsimony, power, and prescriptive legislation: the politics of pauper lunacy in Northamptonshire’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 81:2, 359–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, L. 2014. Insanity, Race and Colonialism: Managing Mental Disorder in the Post-Emancipation British Caribbean, 1838–1914 (Basingstoke).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, L. 2008. ‘“Your very thankful inmate”: discovering the patients of an early county lunatic asylum’, Social History of Medicine, 21: 237–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spierenburg, P. 1984. ‘The Sociogenesis of Confinement and its Development in Early Modern Europe’, in Spierenburg, P., ed., Emergence of Carceral Institutions: Prisons, Galleys and Lunatic Asylums (Rotterdam), pp. 9–77.Google Scholar
Steedman, C. 1992. ‘Bodies, Figures and Physiology: Margaret McMillan and the Late Nineteenth-Century Remaking of Working-Class Childhood’, in Cooter, R., ed., In the Name of the Child: Health and Welfare, 1880–1940 (London), pp. 19–44.Google Scholar
Suzuki, A. 1997. ‘The Household and the Care of Lunatics in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Horden, P. and Smith, R., eds, The Locus of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions and the Provision of Welfare since Antiquity (London).Google Scholar
Suzuki, A. 1999. ‘Enclosing and Disclosing Lunatics within the Family Walls: Domestic Psychiatric Regimes and the Public Sphere in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, in Bartlett, P. and Wright, D., Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in the Community, 1750–2000 (London), pp. 115–31.Google Scholar
Taylor, S. 2017a. Child Insanity in England, 1845–1907 (Basingstoke).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, S. 2017b. ‘“She was frightened while pregnant by a monkey at the zoo”: constructing the mentally imperfect child in nineteenth-century England’, Social History of Medicine, 30:4, 748–66.Google Scholar
Thomson, M. 1998. The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain, c. 1870–1959 (Oxford).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walton, J. K. 1979. ‘Lunacy in the industrial revolution: a study of asylum admissions in Lancashire, 1848–1850’, Journal of Social History, 13: 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, D. 1997. ‘Familial Care of “Idiot” Children in Victorian England’, in Horden and Smith, eds, The Locus of Care, pp. 176–97.Google Scholar
Wright, D. 1998. ‘Family strategies and the institutional confinement of “idiot” children in Victorian England’, Journal of Family History, 23:2, 190–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, D. 2001. Mental Disability in Victorian England: The Earlswood Asylum, 1847–1901 (Oxford).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bedford and Luton Archive Service (hereafter BLAS), Three Counties, Male Casebook 12, LF 31/12, Creighton, Admission no. 6716, p. 5.Google Scholar
BLAS, Three Counties, Female Casebook 5, LF 29/5, Liberty, Admission no. 3244, p. 72.Google Scholar
Birmingham City Archive (BCA), All Saints Asylum, Male Casebook 29, MS 344/12/29, Walford, pp. 633–4.Google Scholar
BCA, All Saints Asylum,Male Casebook 9, MS 344/12/9, Felton, pp. 421–4.Google Scholar
BCA, All Saints Asylum,Male Casebook 12, MS 344/12/12, pp. 673–6.Google Scholar
Northamptonshire Record Office (hereafter NRO), St Crispin Collection (Berrywood Asylum), Female Casebook 9, Ayres, NCLA 6/2/1/9, Admission no. 4887, p. 223.Google Scholar
NRO, St Crispin Collection,Male Casebook 1, NCLA 6/2/2/1, Weed, Admission no. 419, p. 210.Google Scholar
NRO, St Crispin Collection,Female Casebook 9, NCLA 6/2/1/9, Shatford, Female casebook 9, Admission no. 4400, p. 13.Google Scholar
The National Archives (hereafter TNA), Census Returns of England and Wales, RG 10/1481, 1871, fol. 100, p. 18, GSU roll. 828792 <ancestry.co.uk> [11th December 2017].+[11th+December+2017].>Google Scholar
TNA, Census Returns of England and Wales, RG 12/2992, 1891a, fol. 144, p. 33, GSU roll. 6098102 <ancestry.co.uk> [11th December 2017].+[11th+December+2017].>Google Scholar
TNA, Census Returns of England and Wales, RG 11/1550, 1881a, fol. 81, p. 30, GSU roll. 1341374 <ancestry.co.uk> [11th December 2017].+[11th+December+2017].>Google Scholar
TNA, Census Returns of England and Wales, RG 13/1416, 1901a, fol. 66, p. 15 <ancestry.co.uk> [12th December 2017].+[12th+December+2017].>Google Scholar
TNA, Census Returns of England and Wales, RG 11/1550, 1881b, fol. 81, p. 30, GSU roll. 1341374 <ancestry.co.uk> [11th December 2017].+[11th+December+2017].>Google Scholar
TNA, Census Returns of England and Wales, RG 12/1195, 1891c, fol. 14, p. 21, GSU roll. 6096305 <ancestry.co.uk> [13th December 2017].+[13th+December+2017].>Google Scholar
TNA, Census Returns of England and Wales, RG 13/1411, 1901b, fol. 59, p. 15 <ancestry.co.uk> [13th December 2017].+[13th+December+2017].>Google Scholar
TNA, Census Returns of England and Wales, RG 11/2991, 1881b, fol. 81, p. 22, GSU roll. 1341715 <ancestry.co.uk> [13th December 2017].+[13th+December+2017].>Google Scholar
TNA, Census Returns of England and Wales, RG 12/2382, 1891d, fol. 61, p. 30, GSU roll. 6097492 <ancestry.co.uk> [13th December 2017].+[13th+December+2017].>Google Scholar
TNA, Census Returns of England and Wales, RG 13/2821, 1901c, fol. 161, p. 3 <ancestry.co.uk> [13th December 2017].+[13th+December+2017].>Google Scholar
The Industrial Heritage of Northampton, Listing 7 <http://www.northants-iag.org.uk/walkNptonBandS1.html site> [16th January 2018], 14.47.+[16th+January+2018],+14.47.>Google Scholar
Bartlett, P. 1999a. ‘The Asylum and the Poor Law: The Productive Alliance’, in Melling, J. and Forsythe, B., eds, Insanity Institutions and Society, 1800–1914: A Social History of Madness in Comparative Perspective (Abingdon), pp. 48–67.Google Scholar
Bartlett, P. 1999b. The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (London).Google Scholar
Bartlett, P. and Wright, D. 1999. Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in the Community, 1750–2000 (London).Google Scholar
Brown, M. 2017. ‘“Cold steel, weak flesh”: mechanism, masculinity, and the anxieties of late Victorian empire’, Cultural and Social History, 14:2, 155–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Coleborne, C. 2009. ‘Families, insanity, and institutions, 1860–1914’, Health and History, 11:1, 65–82.Google ScholarPubMed
Coleborne, C. 2015. Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910 (Manchester).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cox, C. and Marland, H. 2015. ‘“A burden on the county”: madness, institutions of confinement and the Irish patient in Victorian Lancashire’, Social History of Medicine, 28:2, 263–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cox, C., Marland, H. and York, S. 2012. ‘Emaciated, exhausted, and excited: the bodies and minds of the Irish in late nineteenth-century Lancashire asylums’, Journal of Social History, 46:2, 500–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cox, C., Marland, H. and York, S. 2013. ‘Itineraries and Experiences of Insanity: Irish Migration and the Management of Mental Illness in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire’, in Cox, C. and Marland, H., eds, Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World (Basingstoke), pp. 36–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cunningham, H. 1995. Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (London).Google Scholar
Finnane, M. 1985. ‘Asylums, families, and the state’, History Workshop Journal, 20: 134–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, M. 1961. Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Paris, repr. London, 2001), originally Histoire de la folie á l’age classique.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenall, R. 2000. A History of Northamptonshire and the Soke of Peterborough (Chichester).Google Scholar
Hide, L. 2014. Gender and Class in English Asylums, 1890–1914 (Basingstoke).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Higgs, E. 1996. A Clearer Sense of the Census: The Victorian Censuses and Historical Research (London).Google Scholar
Hurren, E. 2008. Protesting about Pauperism: Poverty, Politics and Poor Relief in Late-Victorian England, 1870–1900 (Woodbridge).Google Scholar
Humphries, J. 2010. Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, P. and King, S. 2015. ‘From Petition to Pauper Letter: The Development of an Epistolary Form’, in Jones, P. and King, S., eds, Obligation, Entitlement and Dispute under the English Poor Laws, 1600–1900 (Newcastle), pp. 263–91.Google Scholar
King, S. and Taylor, S. 2017. ‘Imperfect children in historical perspective’, Social History of Medicine, 30:4, 718–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKenzie, C. 1992. Psychiatry for the Rich: A History of Ticehurst Private Asylum, 1792–1917 (London).Google Scholar
MacKenzie, C. 1985. ‘Social Factors in the Admission, Discharge, and Continuing Stay of Patients at Ticehurst Asylum, 1845–1917’, in Porter, R., Bynum, W. F. and Shepherd, M. eds., The Anatomy of Madness, Vol. II: Institutions and Society (London), pp. 147–74.Google Scholar
Mellet, D. 1982. The Prerogative of Asylumdom: Social, Cultural and Administrative Aspects of the Institutional Treatment of the Insane in Nineteenth Century Britain (London).Google Scholar
Melling, J., Adair, R. and Forsythe, B. 1997. ‘“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, 371–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Melling, J. and Forsythe, B. 2006. The Politics of Madness: The State, Insanity, and Society in England, 1845–1914 (London).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murdoch, L. 2006. Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (London).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parr, J. 1980. Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924 (London).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Porter, R. 1987 Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from Restoration to Regency (London).Google Scholar
Porter, R. 1985. ‘The patient’s view: doing medical history from below’, Theory and Society, 14: 175–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rebok Rosenthal, A. 2012. ‘Insanity, Family and Community in Late-Victorian Britain’, in Borsay, A. and Dale, P., eds, Disabled Children: Contested Caring, 1850–1979 (London), pp. 29–42.Google Scholar
Rousseau, J. 1782. Émile, or on Education, trans. Bloom, A. (repr. New York, 1979).Google Scholar
Scull, A. 1979. Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England (London).Google Scholar
Seguin, E. 1866. Idiocy: And its Treatment by the Physiological Method (repr. New York, 1907).Google Scholar
Shepherd, A. 2016. Institutionalizing the Insane in Nineteenth-Century England (London).Google Scholar
Shepherd, A. 2007. ‘Mental Health Care and Charity for the Middling Sort: Holloway Sanatorium, 1885–1900’, in Borsay, A. and Shapely, P., eds, Medicine, Charity and Mutual Aid: The Consumption of Health in Britain, c. 1550–1950 (Ashgate), pp. 163–82.Google Scholar
Shepherd, J. 2013. ‘“One of the best fathers until he went out of his mind”: paternal child-murder, 1864–1900’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18:1, 17–35.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shorter, E. 1997. A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (London).Google Scholar
Showalter, E. 1987. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London).Google Scholar
Smith, C. 2006. ‘Family, community and the Victorian asylum: a case study of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum and its pauper lunatics’, Family and Community History, 9: 109–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, C. 2012. ‘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), pp. 117–42.Google Scholar
Smith, C. 2007. ‘Parsimony, power, and prescriptive legislation: the politics of pauper lunacy in Northamptonshire’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 81:2, 359–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, L. 2014. Insanity, Race and Colonialism: Managing Mental Disorder in the Post-Emancipation British Caribbean, 1838–1914 (Basingstoke).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, L. 2008. ‘“Your very thankful inmate”: discovering the patients of an early county lunatic asylum’, Social History of Medicine, 21: 237–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spierenburg, P. 1984. ‘The Sociogenesis of Confinement and its Development in Early Modern Europe’, in Spierenburg, P., ed., Emergence of Carceral Institutions: Prisons, Galleys and Lunatic Asylums (Rotterdam), pp. 9–77.Google Scholar
Steedman, C. 1992. ‘Bodies, Figures and Physiology: Margaret McMillan and the Late Nineteenth-Century Remaking of Working-Class Childhood’, in Cooter, R., ed., In the Name of the Child: Health and Welfare, 1880–1940 (London), pp. 19–44.Google Scholar
Suzuki, A. 1997. ‘The Household and the Care of Lunatics in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Horden, P. and Smith, R., eds, The Locus of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions and the Provision of Welfare since Antiquity (London).Google Scholar
Suzuki, A. 1999. ‘Enclosing and Disclosing Lunatics within the Family Walls: Domestic Psychiatric Regimes and the Public Sphere in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, in Bartlett, P. and Wright, D., Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in the Community, 1750–2000 (London), pp. 115–31.Google Scholar
Taylor, S. 2017a. Child Insanity in England, 1845–1907 (Basingstoke).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, S. 2017b. ‘“She was frightened while pregnant by a monkey at the zoo”: constructing the mentally imperfect child in nineteenth-century England’, Social History of Medicine, 30:4, 748–66.Google Scholar
Thomson, M. 1998. The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain, c. 1870–1959 (Oxford).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walton, J. K. 1979. ‘Lunacy in the industrial revolution: a study of asylum admissions in Lancashire, 1848–1850’, Journal of Social History, 13: 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, D. 1997. ‘Familial Care of “Idiot” Children in Victorian England’, in Horden and Smith, eds, The Locus of Care, pp. 176–97.Google Scholar
Wright, D. 1998. ‘Family strategies and the institutional confinement of “idiot” children in Victorian England’, Journal of Family History, 23:2, 190–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, D. 2001. Mental Disability in Victorian England: The Earlswood Asylum, 1847–1901 (Oxford).CrossRefGoogle Scholar