The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society, and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (review)

In the past decade, historians of psychiatry have begun to expand their field of interest to encompass problem populations on the borderlands of their field, just as the psychiatric profession itself began to do in the late nineteenth century. The mentally deficient—people the Victorians blithely referred to as idiots, imbeciles, and the feebleminded (representing points on a continuum from the most to the least incompetent)—have been a particular focus of inquiry, and Mark Jackson's new book is a welcome and useful addition to this burgeoning literature. It began life as a doctoral dissertation devoted to the work of Miss Mary Dendy, the fearsome female moral entrepreneur who did much to alert late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britons to the menace of the feebleminded, and it was focused upon the Sandlebridge Boarding School and Colony in Cheshire, to which she consigned many of the unfortunates who drew her attention. (It was Sandlebridge, ironically enough, where Dendy herself spent her declining years, surrounded by those she called—when she wasn't calling them "dangerous," "defective stock," and "pitiful specimens of humanity" blessed with a "total lack of moral sense" [pp. 65, 67]—her "little dullards" [p. 223].) In book form, as its subtitle signals, Jackson's analysis now tackles the issue in a broader arena.

The 1890s, on Jackson's account, saw a steadily mounting hysteria among some segments of Britain's ruling elements, as well as among the middling and professional classes, about the menace of the feebleminded. An earlier generation had consigned the most severely retarded to a small number of asylums, but their successors were far more concerned about the far larger, if ill-defined, group that lay on the margins of normality and might pass for normal—but who were in fact, it was solemnly averred, a frightful biologically and morally degenerate lot whose loose morals, lack of forethought, and unbridled propensity to breed threatened to swamp the respectable classes beneath a rising tide of pathology, a massive epidemic of incapacity that was "surreptitiously subverting the health and wealth of the nation" (p. 38). The activists were convinced that, left unchecked, such defectives would bring civilization to ruin, and Dendy and her allies thus spent a quarter-century persuading others of the need for a rigorous program of quarantine, some form of permanent segregation of those they regarded as wholly unfit to ever be at large. They were apparently successful when, following the report from a Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble Minded on which they and their allies were heavily represented, they secured in 1913 and 1914 the passage of a pair of Acts of Parliament dealing with mental deficiency.

In successive chapters, Jackson examines the creation of a moral panic over the problems of the feebleminded; the mobilization of "science" to legitimize their lifelong incarceration; the growing emphasis on the physical distinctiveness of this dangerous class (in a chapter that includes and examines contemporary photographs of those the psychiatrist Alfred Tredgold called "stunted, misshapen, hideous and bestial specimens of mankind that . . . arouse feelings of horror and revulsion" [p. 102]); the influence of class and racial stereotypes in the fabrication of feeblemindedness; and the temporary success of what he bluntly terms "despotic attempts to curtail the liberty of the feebleminded from the cradle to the grave" (p. 188). Early on, he promises to pay attention to the new Holy Trinity of class/race/gender, and does indeed demonstrate their relevance to the debates he concerns himself with. Less convincing is his equally fashionable insistence that he will avoid "top-down" history, and provide evidence of the "agency" of the feebleminded and their...