Abstract
How did English lawmakers and legal experts understand the legal situations of people who were considered to be mentally unwell but whose circumstances had them moving around, sometimes over considerable distances beyond England’s political boundaries? In an age of extensive population movement, throughout the British Empire and beyond, to what extent did a person’s location affect English courts’ findings? The subject of migration and madness has captured the interest of historians who have arrived at the subject by following a wide range of historical threads. Thus, an exploration of migration and mental health brings us to the intersections of several historical sub disciplines: migration history, mental health/illness history, legal history, and not least, the history of empire.
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Notes
- 1.
Catherine Cox, Hilary Marland and Sarah York, ‘Emaciated, Exhausted, and Excited: The Bodies and Minds of the Irish in Late Nineteenth-Century Lancashire Asylums’, Journal of Social History, 46:2 (2012), 500–24; Catherine Cox, Hilary Marland and Sarah York, ‘Itineraries and Experiences of Insanity: Irish Migration and the Management of Mental Illness in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire’, in Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland (eds), Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 36–60. See also Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘ “A Most Miserable Looking Object”—The Irish in English Asylums, 1851–1901: Migration, Poverty and Prejudice’, in John Belchem and Klaus Tenfelde (eds), Irish and Polish Migration in Comparative Perspective (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2003), 115–26; and John Walton, ‘Casting Out and Bringing Back in Victorian England: Pauper Lunatics, 1840–70’, in William F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (eds), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, volume 2 (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985), 137–41.
- 2.
See for example: David Wright, James Moran and Sean Gouglas, ‘The Confinement of the Mad in Victorian Canada’, in Roy Porter and David Wright (eds), The Confinement of the Insane, 1800–1965: International Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 100–28; and the articles by David Wright and Tom Themeles, Elizabeth Malcolm, Angela McCarthy, and Catharine Coleborne, in Angela McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne (eds), Migration, Ethnicity, and Mental Health. International Perspectives, 1840–2010 (Routledge: New York and London, 2012).
- 3.
Ian Dowbiggin, Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880–1940 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Robert Menzies, ‘Governing Mentalities: The Deportation of ‘Insane’ and ‘Feebleminded’ Immigrants out of British Columbia from Confederation to World War II’, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 13: 2 (Fall 1998), 135–73; Fiona Alice Miller, ‘Making Citizens, Banishing Immigrants: The Discipline of Deportation Investigations, 1908–1913’, Left History, 7:1 (2000): 62–88; Barbara Roberts, Whence They Came: Deportation from Canada, 1900–1935 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988).
- 4.
See Keller’s aptly entitled Chapter 6, ‘Underdevelopment, Migration and Dislocations: Postcolonial Histories of Colonial Psychiatry’, in Richard Keller (eds), Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 191.
- 5.
Keller, ‘Underdevelopment’.
- 6.
Waltraud Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj: Colonial Psychiatry in South Asia, 1800–58 (London and New York: Anthem, 2010), 27. Originally published as Mad Tales from the Raj: The European Insane in British India, 1800–1858 (London: Routledge, 1991).
- 7.
Ernst, Mad Tales.
- 8.
Ernst, Mad Tales, xv.
- 9.
Ian Hacking, ‘Les Aliénés Voyageurs: how Fugue became a medical entity’, History of Psychiatry, vii (1996), 425–49.
- 10.
Case of John Davies, 1851, English Reports, 42 E.R. 268.
- 11.
Case of John Davies.
- 12.
Case of John Davies.
- 13.
Case of Richard Herbert Graydon, 1850, English Reports, 47 E.R. 1648.
- 14.
Richard Graydon.
- 15.
Details of this case can be found in: Case of Thomas Southcote, 1751, English Reports, 47 E.R. 1105; and 27 E.R., 71.
- 16.
Case of Thomas Southcote, 1751, English Reports, 47 E.R. 1105.
- 17.
Case of Thomas Southcote.
- 18.
Case of Thomas Southcote.
- 19.
Case of Thomas Southcote.
- 20.
Case of Thomas Southcote.
- 21.
Case of Thomas Southcote.
- 22.
Draft of a Clause to be inserted in the instructions to Governors in America, 29 July 1772, in Archives of the State of New Jersey, First Series, volume X, Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey, Frederick Ricord and William Nelson (eds), volume X, Administration of Governor William Franklin, 1767–1776 (Newark: Daily Advertiser Printing House, 1886), 382–3.
- 23.
Draft of a Clause to be inserted in the instructions to Governers in America.
- 24.
Draft of a Clause to be inserted in the instructions to Governers in America.
- 25.
See Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey, volume 21, Calendar of the Records in the Office of the Secretary of State, 1664–1703, edited by William Nelson (Paterson, NJ: The Press Printing and Publishing Company, 1899), 193–4. See also Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey, volume 23, Calendar of New Jersey Wills, volume 1, 1670–1730, edited with an Introductory Note on the Testamentary Laws and Customs of New Jersey by William Nelson (Paterson, NJ: The Press Printing and Publishing Company, 1901), XXXVIII. In this series, editor, William Nelson notes that ‘the authority to take proofs of wills and inventories and appraisements was usually exercised by someone designated for the purpose by the Governor. In some cases, however, original jurisdiction was exercised by the Governor and Council, as the following extracts from their records will show’. Included in this list was the abovementioned example of madness. Further research has demonstrated that as these two colonies consolidated and, after the American Revolution, became the State of New Jersey, the use of lunacy investigation law not only weathered the storm of American independence, but also thrived as a principal mechanism for dealing with the mad.
- 26.
Case of John Houstoun, 1826, English Reports, 38 E.R. 121. This narrative was also partly reconstructed with the help of the John Houstoun entry of University College London’s Legacies of British Slave-Ownership website. See: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146633522 (date accessed 28 August 2015).
- 27.
Case of John Houstoun, 1826, English Reports, 38 E. R. 121.
- 28.
Case of John Houstoun.
- 29.
Case of John Houstoun.
- 30.
Although the intervening fate of Thomas Richard Halse is uncertain, upon his death, Halse Hall and Mountain sugar plantations were left by his will to Francis Sadler. As Higman, Aarons, Karklins and Reitz note, by the 1750s Sadler had become a major player in the economic and political life of the colony. See Barry W. Higman, George A. Aarons, Karlis Karklins, and Elizabeth Jean Reitz, Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912 (Mona, Jamaica: The University of the West Indies Press, 1998).
- 31.
In the case of John Webb, one can see this same desire to exert the legal control beyond English borders, this time with an outcome more satisfying to English jurisprudence. Case of John Webb, 1826, English Reports, 47 E.R. 1095.
- 32.
Case of Princess Bariatinski, 1843, English Reports, 41 E. R. 674.
- 33.
Case of Princess Bariatinski.
- 34.
Case of Princess Bariatinski.
- 35.
Case of Princess Bariatinski.
- 36.
Undaunted, the Chancellor stated that ‘The list of foreign which I have been furnished is not quite conclusive of the jurisdiction to grant a commission against an alien; but it is very improbable that all those parties should have been subjects of this country’. Princess Bariatinski.
- 37.
Case of Princess Bariatinski.
- 38.
Case of Princess Bariatinski.
- 39.
Case of Princess Bariatinski.
- 40.
This option was likely more unpleasant than it was represented to be in the English Report. One aspect of the trial not highlighted in the English Report was the Lord Chancellor’s repeated criticism of the domestic conditions in which Bariatinski was being kept, and the lack of opportunity for her to get out into the fresh air and to be in the company of others. Several months after the verdict of insanity, and after his recommendation about her care, the Lord Chancellor discovered that her guardians were asking her Russian relatives to use equity from her property there to pay for improved conditions for the princess. This nickel and diming over the establishment of proper conditions for Bariatinski’s care did not please the Lord Chancellor. See ‘The Reports. Equity Courts. Lord Chancellor’s Court. 30 May and 2 December 1844; 18 April and 24 July 1845, Re. Bariatinski, a Lunatic’, in the Law Times, and Journal of Property, from October 1845 to March 1846, volume VI (London: Office of the Law Times, 1846), 17–18.
- 41.
Dyce Sombre, Mr. Dyce Sombre’s Refutation of the Charges of Lunacy Brought Against Him in the Court of Chancery (Paris: Dyce Sombre, 1849).
- 42.
See for example, Michael Fisher, The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre: Victorian Anglo-Indian MP and Chancery ‘Lunatic’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Michael Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004). For a radical neurological explanation of Sombre’s odd behaviour see Ronald Pies, Michael H. Fisher and C. V. Haldipur, ‘The Mysterious Illness of Dyce Sombre’, Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience, 9: 3 (March 2012), 10–12.
- 43.
Fisher, The Inordinately Strange Life, 2.
- 44.
Case of David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre, English Reports, E. R. 1419. Zerbonissa Sombre is named differently in the various primary and secondary sources that include information about her life. In Fisher’s book on Dyce Sombre she is named Farzana.
- 45.
Details concerning this history may be found in Fisher, The Inordinately Strange Life, 71–7.
- 46.
Case of David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre, 1856, English Reports, 14, E. R. 480.
- 47.
Case of Dyce Sombre.
- 48.
Case of Dyce Sombre.
- 49.
Case of Dyce Sombre.
- 50.
Fisher, The Inordinately Strange Life, 316.
- 51.
Case of Dyce Sombre. See also Fisher, The Inordinately Strange Life, 263.
- 52.
Case of Dyce Sombre. Fisher, The Inordinately Strange Life.
- 53.
Case of Dyce Sombre. Fisher, The Inordinately Strange Life.
- 54.
Case of Dyce Sombre. Fisher, The Inordinately Strange Life.
- 55.
Case of Dyce Sombre. Fisher, The Inordinately Strange Life.
- 56.
Case of Dyce Sombre. Fisher, The Inordinately Strange Life.
- 57.
Case of Dyce Sombre. Fisher, The Inordinately Strange Life.
- 58.
There is a substantial body of literature that deals with this subject, especially as it relates to gender relations that diverged from those considered typically ‘British’. For a summary of the key themes in this literature, see Philippa Levine, ‘Sexuality, Gender, and Empire’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
- 59.
Christopher Tomlins, ‘Law’s Empire: Chartering English Colonies on the American Mainland in the Seventeenth Century’, in Diane Kirby and Catharine Coleborne (eds), Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 28, 27.
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Moran, J., Chilton, L. (2016). Mad Migrants and the Reach of English Civil Law. In: Harper, M. (eds) Migration and Mental Health. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52968-8_8
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