As m any commentators have observed throughout the city's history, London drives some of its citizens insane.^ We are able to gain some insight into the lives of the w om en in this chapter because they were, at some point and for some time in their
' LMA ST/M /BG/134/4 - LMA ST/M /BG/134/4
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lives, confined w ithin the walls of a lunatic asylum. Foucault w arned that these symbolic w om en could easily become nightm arish silhouettes," b u t like all the other w om en w e will encounter, they should not be seen as only embodied w ithin the institutions in which the archives locate them. As Roy Porter has explained, medical events, such as entry into an asylum, were complex social events that involved families and communities, as well as the sufferers and their physicians.^ So although the voices of the insane are incredibly difficult to hear, w e m ust rem em ber that they w ere also h eard outside the walls of the institutions where we first encounter them.
A longside the institutions of social conscience which developed throughout the nineteenth century, the num ber of people confined in asylum s increased dram atically from around 5000 in 1800 to almost 100 000 in 1900.^ Between 1854 and 1884 a quarter of paupers certified as insane were inmates of workhouses,^ and betw een 1873 and 1898 there were a third more lunatic w om en than men.® By the m id-nineteenth century the rate of insanity in London had trebled.’ The increases were in a large p art due to the whole new classes of insanity introduced throughout the century, that included alcoholics, sex maniacs, paralytics and the criminally i n s a n e . T o m any Victorians the new categories were seen to be the result of scientific advances that showed people for w h at they really were, highlighting diseases that had previously been unrecognised." In the Commissioners of Lunacy Annual Report for 1861, the commissioners w rote that although the developing system of observation and inquiry was still imperfect, it had led to the detection and classification of people as insane, people w ho had formerly been considered 'ordinary' paupers."
The relationship between 'the asylum' and 'the public' also changed throughout the century. In its earlier years the asylum was a place of public spectacle. On Sundays people w ould stand outside hospitals conversing w ith the patients." St M ary of Bethlehem in Liverpool Street, had been a hospital since 1247. It treated its first insane patients in the early iT*" century, and became synonymous, both as 'Bethlem H ospital' and 'Bedlam', w ith the insane. The hospital rem ained at the site on Liverpool Street
Michel Foucault, 2001 ^ Roy P orter, 1985 Roy Porter, 1999 ^ Felix Driver, 1993 V ieda Skultans, 1979 P e te r Ackroyd 2000 Roy Porter, 1999 " Andrew Scull, 1979 '■ Andrew Scull, 1979 Lenord Smith, 1999
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until 1676 w hen it moved to a new building at Moorfield, the first custom built hospital for the insane in Britain." D uring the m id eighteenth century it was to become one of the British asylums that actively encouraged the association and the sense of spectacle that surrounded asylums, as it displayed its patients for financial gain. The initial price of adm ission w as one penny, and for this the visitors could walk along the corridors in each floor of the hospital's galleries and view the patients in their cells, an iron gate placed in the m iddle of the w ards separated the male and female patients.’^ One report to the H ouse of Commons w ritten in 1815 claimed that Bethlehem hospital attracted 96 000 visitors a year.’^
From the beginning of the nineteenth century reformers attem pted to have changes to the asylum system implemented. A parliam entary committee was established to investigate the experiences of the insane and the asylum system in 1807, b u t it was short lived. It w as followed by a far more rigorous attem pt by the committee that sat 1815-16. It w as this committee's conclusion that the neglect and m altreatm ent of lunatics was endemic in all the various types of institutions in the asylum system.’^ They called for the introduction of national public asylum institutions that w ould at least care for all pauper lunatics, as well as a vigorous system of inspection that w ould also operate on a national scale. For various political reasons this bill was defeated, and it w asn't until 1827 w ith the creation of yet another committee that the issues resurfaced. This committee m anaged to get an act of some reform passed in 1828. A lthough far more diluted than its forerunner, unlike the previous bill its passage through the House of Lords w as secured.’®
In 1842 the need for more public asylums and the importance of inspection was reiterated, and eventually a substantial overhaul of the system came in the form of the 1845 Lunatic Asylums Act. As part of this, every county and borough in the country h ad a statutory obligation to provide adequate asylum accommodation for its pauper lunatic populations. The new system of asylums was to be completed, at public cost, w ithin three years of the passing of the act. There was some initial resistance, but by the end of 1847, 36 out of 52 boroughs and counties had complied w ith the legislation.’^
Patricia Allderidge, 1997, px P e te r Ackroyd, 2000 Michel Foucault, 2001 Andrew Scull, 1979 Andrew Scull, 1979 Andrew Scull, 1979
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A lthough, contrary to the spirit of the act, a significant proportion of pauper lunatics continued to be housed in workhouses.^
These facts highlight some of the material aspects of the w orkhouse system. They form an im portant part of geographical research that has come to be know n as 'institutional geography'. In this instance, and others throughout this thesis, I am using w h at has been identified as a 'traditional' understanding of an institution, by looking at built environm ents that sought to control, treat, and produce particular bodies.^’ W ithin geography, the deconstruction of these spaces in this sense, has mainly occurred in two ways. Firstly, through the investigation of the 'geography of institutions', that is exam ining the institutions as containers, and through examining a physical presence of 'difference', perhaps because of illness, deviance or poverty
The second has been concerned w ith the geography inside institutions, deconstructing the internal spatial arrangem ents of such places, and interrogating their meanings and influence on society.^ There has been very little on the biographies of the people w ho actually lived in these spaces as patients, prisoners or paupers. This chapter is not about relations of power and discipline, or difference in the 'traditional' sense. It is instead an attem pt to rediscover some of the biographies of w om en w ho found themselves w ithin these geographies; it is an attem pt to focus on the lives and geographies of the patients, rather than the geographies of the institutions.
The four w om en in this chapter were for at least some part of their lives resident in London. Even if the city did not drive them mad, they were labelled 'insane' and treated for their 'disorders' in the city's asylums. The voices of the 'insane', black or w hite, are incredibly difficult to retrieve.^^ This is perhaps not surprising. In fact, it is perhaps inevitable that the choices and desires of the insane should be obscured in medical and other records, since it was because of their inability to recognise and comply w ith the rules, both of their local communities and society at large, that they found themselves segregated in the first place.^^
J o s e p h Mailing and Robert Turner, 1999 Chris Philo and H ester Parr, 2000 " Chris Philo and H ester Parr, 2000 Chris Philo and H ester Parr, 2000 Chris Philo and H ester Parr, 2000
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