Child Insanity in England, 1845–1907 by Steven J. Taylor (review)

In this new volume for the series Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, edited by George Rousseau and Laurence Brockliss, Steven Taylor examines the history of child insanity in England. Primarily concerned with assessing the extent of the institutionalization of children in public institutions, given that scholarship to date has focused largely on children in private institutions, Taylor seeks to plot a larger history and pattern the meanings of child insanity in order to address a missing part of the historiography of insanity, and also of childhood. Overall, Taylor convincingly advances the topic as worthy of far greater attention in the field: overlooking the children inside the pauper asylum and the workhouse has had the effect of rendering these children as a silent, and, as his use of chapter titles conveys, objectified group.

The study rests on empirical data from five nineteenth-century pauper lunatic asylums: Prestwich Asylum, Manchester; Winson Green Asylum, Birmingham; Berrywood Asylum, Northamptonshire; Three Counties Asylum, for Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, and Huntingdonshire; and Colney Hatch, Middlesex. Taylor's examination of the presence of children inside asylums as institutions stops short of the Children's Act of 1908. As he explains, our "modern" concept of the vulnerability of children in the care of the state tends to shape our thinking about these past institutional worlds and their populations of the very young; it perhaps surprises us to find out how many children were constructed as "insane" in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Taylor's deft account of the legislative landscape—cotton mills and factory acts, acts regulating child labor, and inquiries into child labor, as well as investigations into the industrial workforce, when read alongside Poor Laws and the Elementary Education Act of 1870—shows that the confinement of insane children happened not in isolation, but was part of a raft of considerations of "the child" as a category of person. In this section of his introduction (2–5), Taylor sets out a tantalizing possible future study of the interplay between institutions such as pauper asylums and other social institutions and laws. The historiography of these themes is also the subject of Taylor's important overview of the topic and helps him to define "child" in the context of this period for his own study; he also usefully outlines historians' perspectives on the language of insanity and mental deficiency and the ways in which historical accounts of idiocy therefore function in the wider discussion of histories of the insane.

Arguing that the "narratives, experiences, and diagnoses of childhood mental illness … [were] constructed at a formative time for psychological and psychiatric medicine," Taylor seeks first to plot the constructions of childhood insanity through a discussion of pauper lunacy (23). The wide-ranging diagnostic categories used to label the insane also applied to children in pauper asylums. However, children more often attracted the diagnoses of "idiocy" and "imbecility," with boys admitted more frequently than girls. The peaks in admissions of these categories of patient in the late 1880s and 1890s suggests that the label was available in the context of debates about mental deficiency: as Taylor puts it, "the rise in eugenic influence" (30). He also points to the capacity of institutions, as well as regional welfare practices. This again reminds us of the need to see the whole picture here as a situated debate about welfarism and insanity and the role played by social institutions. Other analytical categories, such as age and location, shaped the institutional populations. Viewed through the "prism" of idiocy (45), these populations of the insane tell us more about the utility of available understandings of the causes of mental deficiency, including heredity and acquired conditions.

In recent years the roles played by families have contributed to revisionist histories of asylums and insanity. Taylor also examines the "domestic sphere," finding that family ties, as well as illness, economic conditions at home, and emotions, all contributed to certification and admission, as with adult insanity...