Spectacles ‘Too Shocking for Description’: Sensationalism and the Politics of Lunacy Reform in Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain

Neuendorf, Mark

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-84356-4_5

Mark Neuendorf⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions ((PSHE))

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Abstract

Following the erosion of the sentimental emotional regime from the late eighteenth century, sensational pain came to supplant pleasing affection as the primary source of truth and sympathy. Influenced by popular conceptions of embodied intuition, articulated in Gothic literature from the late nineteenth century, social reformers—including advocates for the insane—came to appreciate bodily sensations as reliable sources of moral and intellectual discovery. Even as a preoccupation with quantification theoretically stripped emotional rhetoric of its authority, the intense feelings produced by sensational representations of abused or neglected bodies carried a ‘reality effect’, which could be operationalised to validate political claims. This emotional authority proved instrumental to the success of lunacy reform efforts, with the reformers effectively deploying visceral spectacles of suffering—supposedly enacted behind the madhouse walls—to legitimise their interventionism.

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Notes

1.
The Times (9 November 1807).
2.
Thomas Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative’, in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 176–7. Haskell identified the genesis of this sensibility in the proliferation of calculating habits inherent to capitalism’s ‘market-oriented form of life’ (Thomas Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2’, The American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (1985), 548).
3.
Laqueur, ‘Bodies’, 179. On the utilisation of humanitarian narratives in British political discourse in the nineteenth century see Tony Ballantyne, ‘Humanitarian Narratives: Knowledge and the Politics of Mission and Empire’, Social Sciences and Missions 24 (2011), 233–64; idem, ‘Moving Texts and ‘Humane Sentiment’: Materiality, Mobility, and the Emotions of Imperial Humanitarianism’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17, no.1 (2016); Mike Sanders, ‘Manufacturing Accident: Industrialism and the Worker’s Body in Early Victorian Fiction’, Victorian Literature and Culture (2000), 313–29.
4.
Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (2012), 210.
5.
Laqueur, ‘Bodies’, 180. See also Teresa Goddu, ‘ “To Thrill the Land with Horror”: Antislavery Discourse and the Gothic Imagination’, in Gothic Topographies: Language, Nation Building and ‘Race’, ed. P.M. Mehtonen and Matti Savolainen (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 74–5.
6.
Bertrand Taithe, ‘“Cold Calculation in the Faces of Horrors?” Pity, Compassion and the Making of Humanitarian Protocols’, in Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700–1950, ed. Fay Bound Alberti (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 87.
7.
Coral Ann Howells, Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 7–8 (qtd. 8).
8.
Mario Klarer, ‘Humanitarian Pornography: John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolting Negroes of Surinam (1796)’, New Literary History 36, no. 4 (2005), 560.
9.
Jonathan Andrews et al., The History of Bethlem (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 417–24 (qtd. 422); Kathleen Jones, Lunacy, Law, and Conscience 1744–1845: The Social History of the Care of the Insane (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998), 79, 86–92; Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 134–5.
10.
See, for example, Michael E. Woods, ‘A Theory of Moral Outrage: Indignation and Eighteenth-century British Abolitionism’, Slavery and Abolition 36, no. 4 (2015), 666–8.
11.
John Jervis, Sensational Subjects: The Dramatization of Experience in the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 49.
12.
See, for example, Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick (N.J.): Rutgers University Press, 1992).
13.
Leila Dawney, ‘Affective War: Wounded Bodies as Political Technologies’, Body & Society 25, no. 3 (2019), 49–72. On the politics of corporeal representation in the nineteenth century see, for example, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
14.
For a comprehensive survey of the politics of the so-called age of reform, see Joanna Innes and Arthur Binns, ‘Introduction’, in Rethinking the Age of Reform, eds Arthur Binns and Joanna Innes, 1–70 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
15.
See, for example, Leonard Smith, Lunatic Hospitals in Georgian England, 1750–1830 (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 181–5.
16.
Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat, an Institution near York, for Insane Persons of the Society of Friends (York, 1813).
17.
On the history of the Retreat, and its influence see Anne Digby, Madness, Morality and Medicine: A Study of the York Retreat 1796–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); idem, ‘Moral Treatment at the Retreat, 1796–1846’, in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, Vol. II: Institutions and Society, eds W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, 52–72 (London and New York: Tavistock, 1985); Roy Porter, Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Lunatics (Stroud: Tempus, 2004), 224–7; Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions, 96–103; Louis Charland, ‘Benevolent Theory: Moral Treatment at the York Retreat’, History of Psychiatry 18, no. 1 (2007), 61–80. For a less optimistic appraisal see Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Khalfa (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 463–512.
18.
For instance, the Staffordshire mad-doctor Thomas Bakewell, addressing the 1815–1816 parliamentary Select Committee on Madhouses, described lengthy, frequently crippling coercion as ‘The great moral and physical evil of Insanity’. For Bakewell, confinement under perpetual restraint was ‘incontestably wrong’, as it meant that many potentially ‘useful, safe, and happy members of society’ were consigned to this ‘physical’ decline. This was a particular outrage, as the cost of maintaining ‘incurable Lunatics’ (‘about six hundred pounds each upon an average’) paled in comparison of the material benefits of effecting a cure: a cost of ‘forty pounds only, besides the advantage of a subject restored’. (A Letter, Addressed to the Chairman of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, Appointed to Enquire into the State of Mad-Houses: to which is Subjoined, Remarks on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of Mental Derangement (Stafford, 1815), 7–8). On Bakewell’s vocal criticism of public asylums in particular see Rebecca Wynter, ‘“Horrible Dens of Deception”: Thomas Bakewell, Thomas Mulock and Anti-Asylum Sentiments, c. 1815–60’, in Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century, eds Thomas Knowles and Serena Trowbridge, 11–27 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015).
19.
Samuel Tuke to Godfrey Higgins, 23 December 1815, RET 8/1/7/1.
20.
On the quantification of medicine from the eighteenth century see Ulrich Tröhler, ‘Quantifying Experience and Beating Biases: A New Culture in Eighteenth-Century British Clinical Medicine’, in Body Counts: Medical Quantification in Historical and Sociological Perspectives/La quantification medicale, perspectives historiques et sociologiques, eds. Gérald Jorland, Annick Opinel and George Weisz, 19–50 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005); idem, ‘“To Improve the Evidence of Medicine”: Arithmetic Observation in Clinical Medicine in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 10: Supplement: Medicine and Epistemology (1988), 31–40; Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 65–78.
21.
Sanders, ‘Manufacturing Accident’, 313–4.
22.
S[amuel] T[uke], ‘On the State of the Insane Poor’, in Philanthropist 1 (1811), 360.
23.
Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions, 134–5.
24.
Laqueur, ‘Bodies’, 176.
25.
Ibid., 178. See also Goddu, ‘To Thrill the Land with Horror’, 78–80.
26.
Taithe, ‘Cold Calculation’, 88.
27.
Ibid., 94.
28.
Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. Ch. 5; G.J. Barker Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), Ch. 1.
29.
Bakewell, Letter, 38. On the use of ‘shock treatment’ in mental therapeutics see Paul Laffey, ‘Psychiatric therapy in Georgian Britain’, Psychological Medicine 33 (2003), 1290–1; Porter, Madmen, 223; Leonard Smith, Cure, Comfort, and Safe Custody: Public Lunatic Asylums in Early Nineteenth-Century England (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999), 203–6.
30.
Marc Djaballah, Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 56–7.
31.
For more comprehensive analyses of Godwin’s ambiguous treatment of reason, instinct, and emotions see Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 93–107 (qtd. 95); Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 109–17.
32.
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, 3rd Ed., vol. 1 (London, 1798), 73.
33.
William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, vol. 1 (London, 1793), 274 [emphasis added].
34.
Eugenia DeLamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 48.
35.
Ibid., 49.
36.
Ibid., 47.
37.
Ibid., 46–8.
38.
Karen Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture’, American Historical Review 100 (1995), 313; idem, ‘Gothic Mystery and the Birth of the Asylum: The Cultural Construction of Deviance in Early-Nineteenth-Century America’, in Moral Problems in American Life: New Perspectives on Cultural History, Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry eds (Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press, 1998), 41–57.
39.
Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, 72. See also Jervis, Sensational Subjects, 29.
40.
See, for example, David Durant, ‘Ann Radcliffe and the Conservative Gothic’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 22, no. 3 (1982), 519–30.
41.
Chris Baldrick and Robert Mighall, ‘Gothic Criticism’, in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 278. See also Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996) 49, 63–4.
42.
Barbara Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 203.
43.
Benedict, Curiosity, 229.
44.
Ibid., 244. See also Angela Wright, ‘Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis’, in The Cambridge history of the Gothic. Volume 1: Gothic in the long eighteenth century, eds Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 309.
45.
Anne Humphreys, ‘Generic Strands and Urban Twists: The Victorian Mysteries Novel’, Victorian Studies 34, no. 4 (1991), 455.
46.
As Benedict argues, the ‘authorial personae’ of these texts ‘increasingly insist that the reader make moral choices. Readers become more than witnesses of culture; their reading implicates them in its formation’ (Curiosity, 204).
47.
Godfrey Higgins, A Letter to the Right Honourable Earl Fitzwilliam… Respecting the Investigation which has lately taken Place, into the Abuses at the York Lunatic Asylum (Doncaster, 1814), 13.
48.
Ibid., 13–4.
49.
Parliamentary History, vol. 17 (1813), columns 696–7.
50.
The great concern presented by the madhouse, as represented in this later rhetoric, was not the bodily pain the patients were subjected to, but the anguish that a reasoning agent might feel if improperly confined in such ‘miserable receptacles of wretchedness.’ Such thoughts were ‘certainly affecting’, Townshend advised, ‘and should be guarded against with the most careful attention’. See Parliamentary History, vol. 17, column 837.
51.
Middlesex Journal, (17–19 February 1774).
52.
Ibid.
53.
A Friend to the Injured, ‘Letter to Thomas Townshend. On Private Madhouses’, Middlesex Journal (March 1–3, 1774). See also the parliamentarian and prison reformer Gilbert Elliot’s response to Meredith’s speech, reported in Middlesex Journal (24–26 February 1774).
54.
See, for example, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 30 (28 April 1815); Parliamentary Debates., vol. 18 (19 February 1828), 578.
55.
Stevenson Macgill, On Lunatic Asylums: A Discourse Delivered on 2d August, 1810, Previous to the Foundation Stone of the Glasgow Lunatic Asylum (Glasgow, 1810), 21.
56.
See, for example, Andrew Halliday, A Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Binning, M.P. &c. &c. &c. containing Some Remarks on the State of Lunatic Asylums, and on The Number and Condition of the Insane Poor in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1816), 3; idem, A General View of the Present State of Lunatics, and Lunatic Asylums, in Great Britain and Ireland, and in some Other Kingdoms (London, 1828), 74; Susanna Corder ed., Life of Elizabeth Fry (London, 1853), 279.
57.
See, for example, Edward Wakefield’s notes of meetings with Matthews, in the Wakefield MS.
58.
Porter, Madmen, 131. On the reform party’s campaigning see Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey, Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 31–5.
59.
Scull, Most Solitary of Afflictions, 134.
60.
Halttunen, ‘Pornography of Pain’, 304.
61.
Ibid., 318–25; Klarer, ‘Humanitarian Pornography’.
62.
On the sensationalised portrayals of women in contemporaneous humanitarian literature see Barker-Benfield, ‘The Origins of Anglo-American Sensibility’. In Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, eds by Lawrence Friedman and Mark McGarvie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 79–80; Elizabeth B. Clark, ‘“The Sacred Rights of the Weak”: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America’, Journal of American History 82 (1995), 483–4; Halttunen, ‘Pornography of Pain’.
63.
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 10. See, for example, Ann Mary Crowe, A Letter to Robert Darling Willis (London, 1811), 19–20.
64.
See, for instance, Edward Wakefield’s comments on the sensibility and rationality of Bethlem’s inmates, in the House of Commons Report of the Select Committee on Madhouses (London, 1815), 45–8. Similar claims were made by reformers in York, who condemned the medical staff at the York Lunatic Asylum for mistreating the ‘quiet and manageable’ William Vickers (or Vicars), a patient who was originally admitted for assaulting an old woman. See ‘Granada Hutchinson & Sarah Vicars Statement N’, RET 8/1/1/1; Godfrey Higgins’ testimony, RET 8/1/1/1; Godfrey Higgins, York Herald, 27 November 1813.
65.
Howells, Love, Mystery, and Misery, 15.
66.
Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 4.
67.
Halttunen, ‘Pornography of Pain’, 329.
68.
Francis Place to James Mill, 8 September 1815, British Library Add. MS. 35152, Place Papers vol. LXXXIII, f.167v.
69.
Trophimus Fulljames to Robert Peel, 15 December 1822, HO 44/12/139 ff. 434, 437.
70.
HO 44/12/139 f. 438.
71.
HO 44/12/139 ff. 437.
72.
HO 44/12/139 f. 441.
73.
HO 44/12/139 f. 431.
74.
Laqueur, ‘Bodies’, 177.
75.
Ibid., 177, 194–5.
76.
Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, 23.
77.
Jervis, Sensational Subjects, 23.
78.
Thomas Hancock to Samuel Tuke, 3 June 1815, Royal College of Psychiatrists Archives, N-009: Tuke Letters.
79.
Sarah Wise, ‘A tale of whistle-blowing and the English lunacy laws’, The Lancet 384, no. 9939 (2014), 226.
80.
John Coakley Lettsom, ‘Letter XVIII. On Prisons’, Gentleman’s Magazine (1805), 396.
81.
John Carr, The Stranger in Ireland: or, a Tour in the Southern and Western Parts of that Country, in the Year 1805 (Philadelphia, 1806), 200.
82.
Andrew Halliday, Remarks on the Present State of Lunatic Asylums in Ireland, and on the Number and Condition of the Insane Paupers in that Kingdom (London, 1808), 9.
83.
Ibid., 21.
84.
Tuke, ‘Insane Poor’, 360.
85.
The Edinburgh Review 10 (1807), 52.
86.
‘Mrs Schorrey’s case & A Bridgewaters’ confirmation—Z’, RET 8/1/1/1.
87.
Jonathan Gray, History of the York Lunatic Asylum (York, 1815), Appendix, 22–3.
88.
Higgins, Letter, 11.
89.
Accounts of Arundel and Kidd, RET 8/1/1/1.
90.
In Joseph Kidd’s first letter to Higgins, he complained about the theft of his wife’s clothes by the keepers, who left her in a bare shift; as stated, he ‘ha[d] often observed her bare thighs thro’ the rags, when she left the asylum she was about naked’. See Godfrey Higgins to Samuel Tuke, 10 December 1813, RET 8/1/2/1 f.7.
91.
Gray, History, Appendix, 8–13.
92.
Ibid., Appendix, 15.
93.
Tuke to Higgins, 20 December 1813, RET 8/1/7/1.
94.
Gray, History, Appendix, 14–5.
95.
A New Governor, A Vindication of Mr. Higgins, from the Charges of Corrector (York, 1814), 14.
96.
See Tuke to Higgins, 20 December 1813, RET 8/1/7/1.
97.
A New Governor, Vindication of Mr. Higgins, 13–4.
98.
Gray, History, Appendix, 14.
99.
Ibid., Appendix, 17–20.
100.
Ibid., Appendix, 20 [emphasis added].
101.
Michael Brown, ‘Rethinking Early Nineteenth-Century Asylum Reform’, The Historical Journal 49, no. 2 (2006), 447. This will be discussed further in the next chapter.
102.
Charles Atkinson, Retaliation; or, Hints to Some of the Governors of the York Lunatic Asylum (York, 1814), 13.
103.
Ibid., 13–5 [emphasis added].
104.
Ibid., 15.
105.
It should be noted that Atkinson actively sought to portray himself as a delicate victim of oppression—the David to the reformers’ Goliath (Higgins). This strategy is reminiscent of the ‘sentimental diversion’ that Brycchan Carey has identified in the writings of slavery’s advocates in this period (British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 41).
106.
Tuke was amongst the first writers to include detailed statistical tables to support his therapeutic claims. See Description of the Retreat, 189–220.
107.
[Samuel Tuke], Review of the Early History of The Retreat, near York (York, 1846), 36 [emphasis added].
108.
Taithe, ‘Cold Calculation’, 94.
109.
William Reddy, ‘The Unavoidable Intentionality of Affect: The History of Emotions and the Neurosciences of the Present Day’, Emotion Review 12, no. 3 (2020), 176. On the eighteenth-century construction of ‘reason’ see, for example, Amy Milka and David Lemmings, ‘Narratives of Feeling and Majesty: Mediated Emotions in the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Courtroom’, The Journal of Legal History 38, no. 2 (2017), 161.
110.
Scheer, ‘Emotions’, 206. For a critical evaluation of the concept of ‘agency’ in the history of emotions see Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 51–2.
111.
Taithe, ‘Cold Calculation’, 95.

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Neuendorf, M. (2021). Spectacles ‘Too Shocking for Description’: Sensationalism and the Politics of Lunacy Reform in Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain. In: Emotions and the Making of Psychiatric Reform in Britain, c. 1770-1820. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84356-4_5

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