Abstract
This chapter will argue that Victorian labouring men in London who were sent to the Middlesex County Asylum at Hanwell during 1845–50 suffered from intense fear of poverty and deep anxiety about their economic future. Such fear and anxiety were not given prominent place in the writings of middle-class social commentators or psychiatric authors at that time, but were reported by the patients’ families to be the major cause of each man’s insanity. I suggest that these fears and anxieties were the psychological price of the new working-class respectability and the concomitant notion of manhood.
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Notes
Works relevant to the history of Victorian psychiatry are now numerous. See Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe, eds, Insanity, Institutions, and Society, 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 1999);
Peter Bartlett and David Wright, eds, Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in Community 1750–2000 (London: Athlone Press, 1999).
See, among others, Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and its Interpretations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
For a pioneering work on women’s sense of their identity seen through asylum case entries, see Marjorie Levine-Clark, ‘“Embarrassed Circumstances”: Gender, Poverty, and Insanity in the West Riding of England in the Early Victorian Years’, in Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby, eds, Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish Psychiatry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 123–48. Other essays in this volume present solidly based social history of gender and insanity.
For Conolly’s life, see among others Andrew Scull, ‘A Victorian Alienist: John Conolly, FRCP, DCL (1794–1866)’, in W. F. Bynum et al., eds, The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, 3 vols. (London: Tavistock, 1985–8), 1, pp. 103–50;
Akihito Suzuki, ‘Politics and Ideology of Non-Restraint: The Case of the Hanwell Asylum’, Medical History 39 (1995): 1–17.
An astute contemporary criticism of psychiatric etiology and statistics in the early nineteenth century is found in Isaac Ray, Contributions to Mental Pathology (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1873), ‘The Causes of Insanity’ and ‘The Statistics of Insanity’, which had been published originally in 1863–4 and 1849 respectively.
Barbara Duden, The Women beneath the Skin: a Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, transl. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
See also the discussion in Mark S. R. Jenner and Bertrand O. Taithe, ‘The Historiographical Body’, in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone, eds, Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 187–200.
Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
Sander Gilman, Seeing the Insane (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1982).
Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, intro. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), p. 56.
See, for instance, John Charles Bucknill and Daniel H. Tuke, A Manual of Psychological Medicine (Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea, 1858), pp. 240ff;
J. E. D. Esquirol, A Treatise on Insanity, transl. E. K. Hunt (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), pp. 45–54.
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (London: Abacus, 1977), pp. 60–4.
For the coexistence of different views in public health in this period, see John V. Pickstone, ‘Dearth, Dirt and Fever Epidemics: Rewriting the History of British “Public Health”’, in Terence Ranger and Paul Slack, eds, Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 125–48;
Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–1854 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. and Foreword Victor Keirnan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987).
For occupational diseases, see Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London: Dent, 1987), pp. 257–84.
Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), ed. and intro. M. W. Flinn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965), pp. 190–204 and 335–49.
Gareth Steadman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 241–61.
Consequently, many took precautionary means of saving bank, membership in a friendly society, and so on. See Paul Johnson, Saving and Spending: The Working-Class Economy in Britain 1870–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
M. A. Crowther, The Workhouse System 1834–1929: The History of an English Social Institution (London: Methuen, 1983).
For the restructuring of consciousness and behavior of the working-class in the early nineteenth century, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian England 1830–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).
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Suzuki, A. (2007). Lunacy and Labouring Men: Narratives of Male Vulnerability in Mid-Victorian London. In: Bivins, R., Pickstone, J.V. (eds) Medicine, Madness and Social History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235359_10
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