Mental Disability in Victorian England: The Earlswood Asylum, 1847-1901 (review)

Summing up historians' approaches to the history of mental illness, David Wright quotes Roy Porter's statement that "madness continues to exercise its magic, but mindlessness holds no mystique" (p. 3). While there is a wealth of literature on lunacy, mental disabilities present from birth—termed "idiocy" and "imbecility" in the nineteenth century—have received much less attention. Wright addresses this imbalance in his social history of the Earlswood Asylum, England's first charitable asylum for mentally disabled children and adults, which included mostly cases from the "deserving" poor, but also some paying middle-class patients. His case study of Earlswood makes important contributions to the growing history of disabilities as well as to debates on Victorian asylums and social welfare.

Although this is primarily a study of a single institution, its most notable finding is that the literature on mental asylums has wrongly deemphasized the role of family involvement in the care of disabled children by focusing instead on the institutions. Most families, Wright explains, did not use the Earlswood Asylum as a "dumping ground" for unwanted relatives. Instead, institutionalization in Earlswood was merely one of many ways in which families struggled to care for disabled children over a lifetime. Through careful, innovative research linking patients' admissions records to household reports for the 1861, 1871, and 1881 census years, Wright reveals that most children at Earlswood came from nuclear families. The typical parents of charitable admissions were at the height of life-cycle poverty (with an interquartile age of thirty-six to forty-five years), were more likely to have migrated away from relations, and were less likely to have older children who could help with childcare at home. The average length of stay at Earlswood ranged from two to ten years, suggesting that families did not envision the asylum as a permanent resting place for disabled children. By arguing that poor families turned to the asylum in periods of crisis, Wright builds on scholarship in his own field by Mark Finnane and Nancy Tomes, among others, and contributes to related scholarship on Victorian social welfare as a strategic bargaining process between the poor and welfare officials.

In addition to reassessing life outside the walls of the institution, Wright revises the image of the dehumanizing, prisonlike Victorian asylum. While he is willing to accept that Earlswood exemplified certain regimentation characteristic of what Erving Goffman termed "total institutions"—such as rigid time schedules, organized drills, and vocational training—his overall portrayal of asylum life is more compassionate than that presented in the classic critiques of mental institutions by Michel Foucault, Thomas Szasz, and Andrew Scull. ¹ In a manner uncritical of post-Enlightenment, "Age of Improvement" thought, Wright hails the optimism of Earlswood's founders, the Nonconformist minister Andrew Reed and the preeminent Victorian alienist John Conolly, who believed that idiot children could be educated and integrated back into society. Using employment records, he also argues that the men and women who staffed the asylum were neither "unemployable" nor "faceless instruments of social control," but rather upwardly mobile workers who found new opportunities in the Victorian expansion of psychiatric and general hospitals (pp. 116, 117). Most significantly, Wright notes that the image of the custodial, oppressive asylum is too often based on its imaginary binary opposite: the ideal of independent, liberated care within the community. Aid from extended relatives and neighbors was rare in the case of idiot children and adults, who demanded vast resources, and the care that these individuals received within homes was often no kinder, no less violent or confining, than within institutions. For example, a Commission in Lunacy's report that a six-year-old mentally disabled girl "had been during the past two years kept in restraint day and night" by her "respectable and kindly" parents was...