The lunatic asylum remains one of the most remarkable institutional
monuments of the modern world, dominating the social landscape of
Victorian Britain and exercising a powerful attraction for social historians
of medicine, an attraction almost as great as the spectre of the madhouse
for contemporary novelists. Our image of the Victorian asylum is still
pervaded to a surprising degree by the gloomy spectacle of the total
institution presented by Michel Foucault, though it has been modified by
a whole range of institutional and philosophical accounts undertaken in
the past three decades. Pioneering studies by researchers such as Andrew
Scull have illuminated not only the power exercised by the new asylum
superintendents, armed with medical discourses of moral treatment and
the early promise of curability, but also the continuing dominance of the
‘mad doctors’ in the sombre years of neo-Darwinian pessimism
and
eugenics doctrines. More recent contributions to the now enormous
literature on the social history of insanity have shifted the focus of
attention from earlier concerns with charting the rise of the asylum and
the elaboration of medical discourses under the psychiatric gaze of
physicians to a detailed reconstruction of the social environment of the
asylum and especially to the interplay between familial circumstances and
the way institutions responded to the insane. Such concerns were also
clearly evident in important earlier studies by Walton, Scull, Digby and
others, which drew on fundamental work by Anderson on the changing
role of the family during industrialization. These scholars drew attention
to the importance of family and kinship relations in the negotiation of
a
lunatic's passage to the Victorian asylum, as well as the role of
wider
forces of economic change, population growth and migration in shaping
the environment in which decisions about the care of the mad were made.
In this article we examine the impact of the policies and practices of the Guardians of the New Poor Law Unions on the management of pauper lunatics in four Devon Poor Law Unions in the critical period 1834-84. The central role of the Victorian Poor Law in provision made for the insane has only recently been recognized in the research literature. Scholars have been much more concerned with the activities of professionalizing physicians and the general project of state management than they have with the micro-politics of the local Poor Law and the magistracy who were responsible for the legal disposition of the insane. In this paper we argue that not only were the Guardians of the Poor Law Unions central in the determination of the lunatic's journey through the institutional systems provided in the mid-nineteenth century, but also that there were significant variations within the Poor Law system which made for contrasting systems of disposal of lunatics as between the Unions themselves. These variations in disposal of lunatics in Devon raise important questions of ideology, policy, and practice which, if repeated elsewhere, point to a need to refine significantly our assumptions regarding the disposal of pauper lunatics in England and Wales in the fifty years following the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.
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