‘Noble Feelings and Manly Spirit’: Indignation, Public Spirit and the Makings of an Asylum Revolution

Neuendorf, Mark

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-84356-4_6

Mark Neuendorf⁵

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

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Abstract

The first wave of British lunacy reformers viewed their mission as a courageous feat, embodying their strength, resolve and assertiveness. This studied forthrightness and aggression, inculcated by the practices of the ‘Romantic’ system of emotional management, provided the impetus for the uncompromising social reform movements of the early nineteenth century, with new standards of address encouraging the denunciation of authorities that had previously been afforded polite deference. In lunacy advocacy this came to be realised in martial flourishes or indignant accusations of malpractice directed at those who oversaw the mad trade, or managed medical spaces.

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Notes

1.
John Corry, The Mysterious Gentleman Farmer; or, the Disguises of Love, I (London, 1808), 225–233.
2.
Godfrey Higgins, A Letter to the Right Hon. Earl Fitzwilliam (Doncaster, 1814), 14.
3.
John Spurr, ‘England 1649–1750: differences contained?’ In The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650–1740, ed. Steven Zwicker, 27–8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 135; Lawrence Klein, ‘Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, The Historical Journal 32, no. 3 (1989), 586–7.
4.
On eighteenth-century views of polite public spiritedness see Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 134–5; Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 110.
5.
William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 217–8.
6.
Edward Wakefield, ‘To the Governors of Bethlem Hospital’, The Examiner (31 March 1816), 207.
7.
As George Rudé noted many years ago, ‘[t]he years of the Regency were among the most disturbed and riotous in England’s recent history’ (The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964), 79).
8.
Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 259.
9.
Ibid., 228.
10.
Historians of the duel have noted an apparent spike in the practice in the decades following the French Revolution (or at least a renewed anxiety about the practice). See, for example, Victor G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 185–97; Donna T. Andrew, ‘The Code of Honour and its Critics: the Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700–1850’, Social History 5, no. 3 (1980), 410.
11.
Jamison Kantor, ‘The Life of Honor: Individuality and the Communal Impulse in Romanticism (PhD thesis: University of Maryland, 2013), 7, 20.
12.
Michael E. Woods, ‘“The Indignation of Freedom-Loving People”: The Caning of Charles Sumner and Emotion in Antebellum Politics’, Journal of Social History 44, no. 3 (2011), 693. See also idem, ‘A Theory of Moral Outrage: Indignation and Eighteenth-century British Abolitionism’, Slavery and Abolition 36, no. 4 (2015), 662–83.
13.
Wakefield, ‘To the Governors’, 207.
14.
Unsigned review of the Minutes of the Select Committee of Madhouses, Philanthropist 6 (1816), 24.
15.
See Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 102–4, 239–41.
16.
Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 56–95.
17.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico, 2003).
18.
Kathleen Wilson, ‘Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity in the English Provinces, c.1720–1790’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 1 (1995), 72.
19.
David Lemmings, ‘Introduction’, to William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England. Book I: Of the Rights of Persons, General Editor, Wilfred Prest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), xxiv-xxvii.
20.
Rémy Duthille, ‘Richard Price on Patriotism and Universal Benevolence’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 28 (2012), pp. 24–41; Evan Radcliffe, ‘Revolutionary Writing, Moral Philosophy, and Universal Benevolence in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas 52, no. 2 (1993), 221–40.
21.
See below.
22.
On the development of a British (and particularly English) national consciousness, see Colley, Britons; Newman, English Nationalism; Wilson, ‘Citizenship’; Hugh Cunningham, ‘The Language of Patriotism, 1750–1914’, History Workshop Journal 12 (1981), 9–13.
23.
Though, of course, attachment to country had long been recognised as a vital component of social order, and as Elsa Reuter has shown, the production and maintenance of such bonds was of paramount importance during the fractious Restoration. See ‘Treason, Passion and Power in England, 1660–1685’ (PhD thesis: University of Adelaide, 2013), spec. Ch. 3.
24.
The Williamite propagandist Gilbert Burnet, for example, preached that charity would ‘knit us into one Body’, and ‘unite all men … to prevent ruin.’ (A Sermon Preach’d before the Right Honourable the Lord-Mayor, the Aldermen, and Governors of the Several Hospitals of the City of London, at S. Sepulchres Church, On Easter-Monday, 1706 (London, 1706), 23.)
25.
Andrew, Philanthropy and Police, 20.
26.
White Kennet, The Properties of Christian Charity (London, 1714), 12.
27.
Ibid., 7. See also Andrew Snape, A Sermon Preach’d before The Right Honourable the Lord Mayor of London, The Court of Alderman, and the Governors of the several Hospitals of the City; At the Parish Church of St Bride, alias Bridget, On Tuesday in Easter Week, 1731. To which is added, a second edition of two former sermons preach’d by the doctor at the same place, and on the same occasion (London, 1731), 8–9.
28.
Burnet, A Sermon Preach’d … 1706, 45.
29.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 7.
30.
See, for example, Colley, Britons; Stephen Gregg, ‘“A Truly Christian Hero”: Religion, Effeminacy, and Nation in the Writings of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners’, Eighteenth-Century Life 25, no. 1 (2001), 17–28; Jack Lynch, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 78–96.
31.
Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), 139; Roy Porter, Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Lunatics (Stroud: Tempus,2004), 260–8; As Karen Halttunen has shown, such characterisations were also reflected in contemporaneous asylum exposés in the Protestant United States (‘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, eds Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry (Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press, 1998), 52–3). Well into the nineteenth century, reformers and aggrieved ex-patients continued to draw upon these patriotic tropes to characterise the mad-trade, and Sarah Wise has shown that popular support for illegally confined asylum inmates in the nineteenth century was strong, occasionally spilling over into raucous mob justice (Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England (London: Vintage Books, 2013).
32.
Jeremy Gregory, ‘Homo Religiosis: Masculinity and Religion in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in English Masculinities, 1660–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (London: Longman, 1999), 96.
33.
Matthias Mawson, A Sermon Preach’d before the Right Honourable the Lord-Mayor, the Aldermen, and Sheriffs, and the Governors of the several Hospitals within the City of London: In the Parish-Church of St. Bridget, on Monday in Easter-Week, 1741 (London, 1741), 3.
34.
William Van Reyk, ‘Christian Ideals of Manliness in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, The Historical Journal 52, no. 4 (2009), 1053. See also Gregory, ‘Homo Religiosis’, 100–1.
35.
Amanda Bowie Moniz, ‘“Labours in the Cause of Humanity in Every Part of the Globe”: Transatlantic Philanthropic Collaboration and the Cosmopolitan Ideal, 1760–1815’ (PhD thesis: University of Michigan, 2008), 129. As Peter Gay notes, even well into the Victorian era, didactic exemplars appropriating Christ’s vocation would still stress ‘military virtues’ alongside kindness (The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993), 107).
36.
Anon, An Abstract of the Evidence Delivered Before a Select Committee of the House of Commons, in the Years 1790 and 1791; on the Part of the Petitioners for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 2nd Edition (Bury, 1792), 255.
37.
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 11th edition, vol. 4 (London, 1791), 3; Elizabeth Fry, Observations on the Visiting, Superintendence, and Government of Female Prisoners (London, 1827), 71.
38.
Woods, ‘Moral Outrage’, 672.
39.
John Conolly, An Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity (London, 1830), 478–9.
40.
Higgins, Letter, 30 [emphasis added].
41.
Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 99.
42.
Samuel Stennett, The Works of Samuel Stennett, D.D., vol. 2 (London, 1824), 167. Of course, the protection of life and property had long been a primary concern of those responsible for the diagnosis and confinement of the mad. See, for instance, MacDonald, Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 140–2; Jonathan Andrews et al., History of Bethlem (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 331–6; Porter, Madmen, 117–28.
43.
Conolly, Inquiry, 479. On Conolly’s ideological preoccupations see Akihito Suzuki, ‘The Politics and Ideology of Non-Restraint: the Case of the Hanwell Asylum’, Medical History 39, no.1 (1995), 9–14.
44.
The Medico-Chirurgical Review 26 (July-October 1830), 306.
45.
Woods, ‘Moral Outrage’, 668, 672.
46.
Ibid., 668.
47.
Newman, English Nationalism, 129–31.
48.
Ibid., 155, 233–44.
49.
Monique Scheer, ‘Topographies of Emotion’, in Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling, 1700–2000 ed. Ute Frevert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 60. For an authoritative discussion of contemporary evaluations of sincerity and masculine character through oratory see Katie Barclay, Men on trial: Performing emotion, embodiment and identity in Ireland, 1800–1845 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), Ch. 4.
50.
John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997), 99–107; Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 76–96; Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, Ch. 5; Todd, Sensibility.
51.
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (London, 1796), 358.
52.
William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, vol. 1 (London, 1793), 276, 239–41.
53.
Ibid., 241.
54.
A typical Godwinian mantra was: ‘It is by the efforts of a daring temper that improvements and discoveries are made’ (Ibid., 275).
55.
Godwin, Political Justice, 1793, vol. 2, 650, 648.
56.
Ibid., 647.
57.
Ibid., 648.
58.
Ibid., 648–9.
59.
Carter, Polite Society, 135–6. See also Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 117.
60.
Carter, Polite Society, 137.
61.
Godwin, Political Justice, 1793, vol. 1, 242.
62.
Ibid., 274. This point is discussed in more depth in Chap. 5.
63.
Ibid., 242.
64.
Ibid., 242.
65.
John Tosh, ‘Gentlemanly Politeness and Manly Simplicity in Victorian England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002), 460; Michéle Cohen, ‘“Manners” Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750–1830’, Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005), 312–29.
66.
On the imposition of sincerity as the dominant emotional style amongst the eighteenth-century English intelligentsia see Newman, English Nationalism, 87–156
67.
Porter, Madmen, 143–4.
68.
Ibid., 156–7; The London Chronicle: or, Universal Evening Post (20–22 Jan, 1763); The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle 33, no. 1 (Jan., 1763), 25–6.
69.
House of Commons, A Report From The Committee, Appointed (Upon the 27th Day of January, 1763) To Enquire into The State Of The Private Madhouses In This Kingdom. With The Proceedings of the House thereupon (London, 1763); Journal of the House of Commons, Twelfth Parliament of Great Britain: second session (25 November 1762–19 April 1763), 489. The public was said to have voiced ‘inexpressible surprize’ at this apathy, particularly given the committee’s apparent ‘concern and indignation’ at the exposed abuses. See Tobias Smollett, Continuation of the Complete history of England, Vol. 5 (London, 1765), 210. See also Leonard Smith, Private Madhouses in England, 1640–1815: Commercialised Care for the Insane (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 256.
70.
‘Some observations on the Statute of 14 Geo: 3. “For regulating Madhouses”’, [1784], ff. 5–6, Box 12, Series II: Correspondence and Documents, Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney Papers, William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan.
71.
Indeed, Sarah Wise has directly attributed the House of Lords’ perpetual intransigence on the issue to this concern (Inconvenient People, xx).
72.
Parliamentary History, 17, 696 [emphasis added].
73.
Ibid., 696.
74.
Middlesex Journal (28–30 July 1774).
75.
Ibid. [emphasis added].
76.
Nathaniel Wraxall, quoted in Andrew Tink, Lord Sydney: The Life and Times of Tommy Townshend (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011), 107. See also his political opponent Lord North’s characterisation of him as a ‘passionate and prejudiced man’ (Quoted in Ian K. R. Archer, ‘Townshend, Thomas, first Viscount Sydney (1733–1800)’, in ODNB).
77.
Harold C. Hunt, The Life of William Tuke (1733–1822) (London: Friends’ Historical Society, 1937), 14.
78.
For a detailed history of the Orford case see Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), Ch. 4.
79.
Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, vol. 1 (London, 1845), 244.
80.
Horace Walpole to Mary Hamilton, 7 October 1783, in Walpole’s Correspondence, 31, 208.
81.
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 23.
82.
Walpole to Hamilton, Walpole’s Correspondence, 31, 208–9.
83.
On the activism of aggrieved ex-patients of the English mad-trade see, for example, Wise, Inconvenient People; Nick Hervey, ‘Advocacy or Folly: The Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society, 1845–63’, Medical History 30 (1986), 245–75; Elaine Bailey, ‘“The Most Noble of Disorders”: Matilda Betham on the Reformation of the Madhouse’, in Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century, eds Thomas Knowles and Serena Trowbridge (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015), 29–39.
84.
Tobias Smollett, The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (Dublin, 1762), 241–2.
85.
Smollett, Launcelot Greaves, 244.
86.
Alexander Cruden, The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured: or a British Inquisition Display’d, 2nd Edition (London, 1739), 1, 59.
87.
Porter, Madmen, 261.
88.
Lina Minou, ‘Suffering, Emotion and the Claim to Sanity in an Eighteenth-Century Confinement Narrative.’ Cultural History 8, no. 1 (2019), 24–42.
89.
Ibid., 59.
90.
Cruden, London-Citizen, 52.
91.
Samuel Bruckshaw, One More Proof of the Iniquitous Abuse of Private Madhouses (London, 1774), xii, 79.
92.
Ibid., 43–44.
93.
Ibid, 36.
94.
William Belcher, Belcher’s Address to Humanity (London, 1796), 13.
95.
‘[A] trade known to all, and disregarded by all’ is how Belcher described it (Address, 8).
96.
Ibid., 8.
97.
Ibid., 8–9.
98.
Ibid., 9.
99.
Ibid., 9.
100.
On comparable changes in patient advocacy in the United States in this period see Halttunen, ‘Gothic Mystery’, 49.
101.
John Perceval, Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman, During a State of Mental Derangement (London, 1840), 73.
102.
Ibid., 79–80.
103.
Ibid., 48.
104.
Jamison Kantor, ‘Burke, Godwin, and the Politics of Honor’, SEL 54, no. 3 (2014), 686.
105.
Trophimus Fulljames to Robert Peel, 6 January 1823, HO 44/13/2.
106.
Sarah Newell, Facts Connected with the Treatment of Insanity in St. Luke’s Hospital; with Letters on the Subject (London, 1841), 19, 35.
107.
Ibid., 4.
108.
Ibid.
109.
Ibid., 21.
110.
This style of intrepid frankness underpinned the appeals of the most successful female lunacy reformer of the Victorian era, Louisa Lowe, who similarly brushed off the great ‘personal risk’ she faced at exposing the supposed ‘abuses and mal-administration’ of the mad-trade. Lowe asserted that this risk was ‘readily incurred in the sacred cause of humanity’ (The Bastilles of England; or, the Lunacy Laws at Work, vol. 1 (London, 1883), 3).
111.
Roy Porter drily asserted that ‘it would take a bold, not to say foolhardy, psycho-historian to judge whether [the published complaints of asylum inmates] reveal persecution or paranoia, or both’ (‘Reason, Madness, and the French Revolution, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1991), 56).
112.
Roy Porter, ‘The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below’. Theory and Society 14, no. 2 (1985), 175–98.
113.
See, for example, Hervey, ‘Advocacy or Folly’, 253. See also, Peter McCandless, ‘Insanity and Society: A Study of the English Lunacy Reform Movement 1815–1870’ (PhD thesis: University of Wisconsin, 1974), 215.
114.
[John Perceval], Report of the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society, Founded 1845 (London, 1851), 24.
115.
On the history of reform see Anne Digby, ‘Changes in the Asylum: The Case of York, 1777–1815’, The Economic History Review, New Series 36, no. 2 (1983), 218–39; idem, From York Lunatic Asylum to Bootham Park Hospital, No. 69 (Borthwick Publications, York: University of York, 1986); Michael Brown, ‘Rethinking Early Nineteenth-Century Asylum Reform’, The Historical Journal 49, no. 2 (2006), 425–52.
116.
See, for example, Kathleen Jones, Lunacy, Law, and Conscience 1744–1845: The Social History of the Care of the Insane (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998), 79–92.
117.
Digby, ‘Changes in the Asylum’. Leonard Smith, Lunatic Hospitals in Georgian England, 1750–1830 (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 165–91.
118.
Brown, ‘Rethinking’.
119.
‘Trophimus’ [Thomas Wemyss], York Courant (18 October 1813).
120.
Jonathan Gray, History of the York Lunatic Asylum (York, 1815), 91.
121.
Wemyss, York Courant (18 October 1813).
122.
Godfrey Higgins, The Evidence taken before a Committee of the House of Commons Respecting the Asylum at York (Doncaster, 1816), 52.
123.
Corrector, A Few Free Remarks on Mr. Godfrey Higgins’s Publications Respecting the York Lunatic Asylum (York, 1814), 12–13.
124.
Brown, ‘Rethinking’, 430; Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798: The Ford Lectures Delivered in the University of Oxford, 1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 561–9.
125.
Brown, ‘Rethinking’, 444.
126.
When, for example, a committee charged with investigating the finances of London’s Bethlem Hospital in 1805 dressed down the asylum’s Steward, Peter Alavoine, for obstructing their investigation into the institution’s finances, the latter reported being ‘seriously affected’ by the group’s assertions, ‘express[ing] the very deep concern and uneasiness which I have suffered since I was so unhappy as to incur your displeasure, and to subject myself to the dishonour of a reprimand for a very blameable neglect’. In his subsequent remarks he asserted his innocence, and emphasised his desire to clear his name before the institution’s governors (BGC, 31 July, 1805; 11 Nov., 1805).
127.
Corrector, A Few Free Remarks, 6–7.
128.
Digby, York Lunatic Asylum, 23. Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine similarly noted that Dr. Best found ‘attack to be his best method of defence’ (‘Introduction’, in Samuel Tuke’s Description of The Retreat, eds Hunter and Macalpine (London: Dawsons, 1964), 9).
129.
Samuel Tuke, York Chronicle (14 October 1813).
130.
Tuke to Higgins, 26 October 1815, RET 8/1/7/1.
131.
Tuke to Higgins, 7 December 1813a, RET 8/1/7/1.
132.
Daniel Hack Tuke, ‘Retrospective Glance at the Early History of the Retreat, York; its Object and Influence’, The Journal of Mental Science 162, no. 38 (1892), 351.
133.
Brown, ‘Rethinking’, 441. Leonard Smith has simply described him as ‘The intemperate Godfrey Higgins’ (Lunatic Hospitals in Georgian England, 1750–1830 (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 183).
134.
Higgins to Tuke, c. 6 December 1813, RET 8/1/2/1 f.2; Higgins to Tuke, 7 December 1813, RET 8/1/2/1, f.3.
135.
Tuke to Higgins, 8 December 1813, RET 8/1/7/1. In the end, to avoid this label of insincerity, Higgins had his statement published in the York newspapers in the days leading up to the meeting.
136.
Digby, ‘Changes in the Asylum’, 235.
137.
Charles Tylor, Samuel Tuke; His Life, Work, and Thoughts (London, 1900), 24
138.
Ibid., 27.
139.
Ibid., 43.
140.
Anon, ‘The Late Samuel Tuke, Esq., of York’, The Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology 11 (London, 1858), 174.
141.
Ibid., 173.
142.
Tuke to Higgins, 7 December, 1813b, RET 8/1/7/1.
143.
Tuke to Higgins, 9 December 1813, RET 8/1/7/1.
144.
Tuke to Higgins, c. 11 December 1813, RET 8/1/7/1 [emphasis added].
145.
As William Reddy notes, communal ‘penalties such as gossip, exclusion, or demotion’ are effective means of policing ‘emotional regimes’ in such ‘face-to-face communities’ (Jan Plamper, ‘The History of Emotions: an Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory 49 (2010), 243).
146.
Higgins to Tuke, 10 December 1813, RET 8/1/2/1 f.7. Once his actions had achieved nationwide attention, the mere threat of appearing intransigent was enough to prompt Higgins to more zealous exertions. See Higgins to Tuke, c. August 1814, RET 8/1/2/1 f.37.
147.
Godfrey Higgins to George Rose, 10 April 1814, RET 8/1/2/1/ f.27.
148.
Higgins, Evidence, 38–9. Following their victory, Higgins would go on to lament that they were unable to make ‘a more perfect example of the great defaulter of all [Best]’. See Higgins to Tuke, 24 October 1814, RET 8/1/2/1 f.41.
149.
Higgins, Evidence, 49–50; Digby, York Lunatic Asylum, 22.
150.
See, for example, Higgins, Evidence, 50; Tuke to Higgins, 21 June 1814, RET 8/1/7/1.
151.
Samuel Tuke to Samuel Nicoll [Draft], 12 July 1814, RET 8/1/2/2, f.31.
152.
Tuke to Higgins, 4 January 1814, (RET 8/1/7/1).
153.
Michael Davis, ‘The Mob Club? The London Corresponding Society and the Politics of Civility in the 1790s’, in Unrespectable Radicals?: Popular Politics in the Age of Reform, eds Michael Davis and Paul Pickering (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2008), 22.
154.
See Higgins to Tuke, 20 December 1813, RET 8/1/2/1, f.10; Atkinson, Retaliation; Corrector, A Few Free Remarks.
155.
Tuke to Higgins, 20 December, 1813, RET 8/1/7/1.
156.
Tuke to Higgins, c. December, 1813, RET 8/1/7/1. On the civic humanist conception of ‘independence’ and public spirit see J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian’, Daedalus 105, no. 3 (1976), 153–5.
157.
Higgins to Tuke, c.7 December 1813, RET 8/1/2/1 f.4a.
158.
Higgins to Tuke, April 1814, RET 8/1/2/1, f.29.
159.
Tuke to Higgins, c. 3 April 1814, RET 8/1/7/1.
160.
Higgins to Tuke, c. 4 April 1814, RET 8/1/2/1, f.22.
161.
Tuke to Higgins, 11 December, 1813, RET 8/1/7/1; Tuke to Higgins, 20 April 1814, RET 8/1/7/1; [Almyra], Mrs Edwin Gray ed., Papers and Diaries of a York Family, 1764–1839 (London: The Sheldon Press, 1929), 155–9.
162.
Tuke to Higgins, c. March-April 1814, RET 8/1/7/1. Best’s personal attacks in the press also had the unintended effect of easing Higgins’s fear of libel: he recognised that the doctor had relinquished any claim to victimhood. See, for example, Higgins to Tuke, c. 4 April 1814, RET 8/1/2/1, f.22.
163.
Gray, Papers and Diaries, 159.
164.
Ibid., 159.
165.
Higgins to Tuke, 4 May 1815, RET 8/1/2/1 f. 48.
166.
Philanthropist 6 (1816), 38.
167.
Ibid., 51.
168.
J.A.R. Bickford and M.E. Bickford, The Private Lunatic Asylums of the East Riding (Beverley: East Yorkshire Local History Society, 1976), 17; [Robert Beverley], The Elector’s Guide, vol. 3 (York, 1826), 23–4.
169.
Beverley, Elector’s Guide, 23.
170.
Ibid., 24. On the importance of emotional display to manly ‘character’ in the nineteenth century see Barclay, Men on Trial, Ch. 4.

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Neuendorf, M. (2021). ‘Noble Feelings and Manly Spirit’: Indignation, Public Spirit and the Makings of an Asylum Revolution. 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_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84356-4_6
Published: 20 November 2021
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-84355-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-84356-4
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

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