The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (review)

The early historiography of mental disorder was dominated by two themes: first, clinical psychiatry and psychiatrists, and second, the rise of the nineteenth-century public asylum as society's preferred response. The place of the insane in public welfare provision was located within the reforming zeal of the county magistrates, the mid-Victorian Lunatics Acts and the central inspectorate for policing the acts, the Commissioners in Lunacy. The literature underplayed the mundane legal and administrative context within which insanity was managed and paid only glancing attention to the influence of the state and the growth of central government administration. Perhaps this is understandable, given the impact of Foucault's engaging but flawed polemic on the origins of institutions and Scull's brilliant and convincing revisionist interpretation linking the growth of asylums to the expanding market economy and an unattractive bid for power and status by an insecure embryonic psychiatric profession.

The Poor Law, however, was the administrative rock on which the system of care for the insane was constructed. Bartlett's monograph explores the context of care and demonstrates that the legal framework determined the local and national structures, in which asylums played only one modest part. Broadly adhering to the revisionist notion of asylum as a phenomenon of "social control," Bartlett wonderfully guides the reader through the labyrinthine and competing administrative models of the punitive New Poor Law and the high moral paternalism of the Lunatics Acts and the Lunacy Commissioners, illustrating with his studies in Leicestershire and Rutland that there was no hierarchical power structure but a complex web of influence between union boards of guardians, Poor Law commissioners, Lunacy Commissioners, and asylum doctors and administrators. Families also had opinions and exerted some influence, although clearly at the bottom of the power hierarchy. Asylums were one option for the seriously disruptive lunatic, but workhouses remained a very important part of the care economy, and the majority of insane remained at home, maintained by their families, with or without help from the parish poor relief budget.

Bartlett's book is a good and convincing read. The reviewer's copy is already nearly thumbed into extinction because of the invaluable tables of cases and statutes from 1324 to 1983 and an exemplary bibliography. He rehabilitates the Poor Law administrators, "vaguely trying to do a good job" (p. 242), and the union doctors do not come out of it as badly as they might either, juggling their reports of dangerousness and manageability to get the patients suitably placed. If the reviewer has a criticism it is Bartlett's overreliance on casebooks and admission registers, which supports a fascination with the processes and procedures of admission and discharge but fosters relatively little analysis of the Boards of Guardians' policies on lunacy. Nevertheless Bartlett's monograph is an indispensable "must" for social and legal historians of mental health care.