Abstract
Victorian society has often been thought of one of upstanding morals, rigid etiquette and sombre tones. Yet the lunacy panics of the nineteenth century in which a wave of mass hysteria swept the nation that at any one point in time, one may be swept off the streets or even in the comforts of your own house and thrown into a lunatic asylum, stands in perfect opposition to this fabrication imagining of what Victorian society must act like. It was a fanatic fear that entrenched itself into the mindset of every Victorian individual and was further perpetuated in the unending wave of sensationalism literature and journalism. The obsession with not ‘seeing’ madness and the fear of having owns own sanity questioned planted itself into the Victorian subconscious. In many ways, the lunacy panics can be understood as an epidemic that nearly turned the entire English population mad over their fear of madness. This essay will hence dissolve this fanatic obsession into its most intrinsic forms, exploring the cultural underpinnings of this phenomenon and examining the literary use of sensationalism and fear-mongering to further spear-head the hysteria of the lunacy panics.
Introduction
Madness and its manifestations have always been an uncomfortable, bordering on untouchable, topic for the general public to reconcile with. Yet no period in history can this cultural anxiety be more astutely observed than that of Victorian England. During this period, lunacy and madness pushed itself into the forefront of the Victorian consciousness, culminating in what is now known as the ‘lunacy panics.’ Victorian England found itself infected with a wave of uncontrollable hysteria and paranoia that, at any one point in time, one may be falsely accused of insanity and condemned into the oblique depths of the asylum. It is no mere exaggeration that the probability of wrongful confinement was deemed a fate worse than death to the Victorians. To have one’s reputation damaged, their sanity impeached upon and their dignity reduced by confining them into the reclusive box of ‘lunatic’ or ‘maniac’ was seen as the worst tragedy an individual may be subjected to. Yet as with today’s contemporary society, it is often tales of tragedy and morbidity that enjoy the most attention and favour amongst the media and its consumers. The newfound accessibility of print media and rise of literacy levels in the nineteenth century meant that wrongful confinement stories were not simply regulated to drawing room gossip but instead propelled into an unprecedented and unfathomable court of public opinion.[1] The sheer magnitude of media coverage regarding wrongful confinement allowed itself to spiral from an initial small nervousness into a full-blow epidemic of mass hysteria and fanatic obsession. Newspapers and tabloids gossiped constantly on the dangers of wrongful confinement, stroking that fear ever-increasingly. Sensational fiction novels were published in rapid succession, understanding this new niche market of public infatuation with the horrors of wrongful confinement. Any individual with means who found themselves experiencing the trauma of wrongful confinement were almost possessed by external forces of need and demand to publish their narratives for reader consumption.
Yet the question remains of what caused this obsessive hysteria in Victorian society regarding the concept of wrongful confinement. The lunacy panics were not simply a wholly unprecedented phenomenon yet can rather be understood as the accumulation of years of attempting to grapple with the moral and ethical complexities of madness as well as the negative stigma and stereotypes enforced by its conception. Some would argue that the main cause of this hysteria was representative of an underlying true problem in the asylums systems and the so called ‘trade in lunacy.’ Wrongful confinement narratives have two main characteristics: that the person is automatically unquestionably sane and they also are a member of the upper to middle class. There was an inherent belief that private asylums were ripe with corruption and that asylum doctors, spurred on by greedy, malicious family members, would confine any sane individual for a fraction of profit.[2] It is no wonder that this belief whipped the Victorian public into a state of uncontrollable frenzy: it had all the hall-marks of a cause celebre of intrigue, corruption, betrayal and the ultimate tragic ending.[3] It hardly mattered that the private asylums had initially been established to cradle the proprietary and respectability of the upper classes by offering a private and discrete sanctuary away from the public eye, it had been transformed in the popular consciousness as a place of irrefutable horror for the same clientele it was built for.[4]
However, the purpose of this essay is not to examine the credibility of this abhorrent belief of private asylums entrapping wealthy patients for monetary greed, but rather to examine the surrounding cultural and literary pillar stones in which the lunacy panics rested upon. As historian Michel Foucault summarised, ‘language is the first and last structure of madness.’[5] Therefore, this essay will hence focus on the language used and manipulated by first-hand narratives, sensationalist journalism and fiction to exacerbate the existing paranoia regarding wrongful confinement. In a large part, this obsessive fear-mongering stems from one underlying cultural anxiety of madness: of the public’s inability to grapple with the concept of intangible madness. By that I mean, the literary media found purchase on the platform of wrongful confinement by selectively choosing to manipulate the greatest fear surrounding it; that there was no discernible physical difference between sanity and insanity and thus anyone could theoretically be accused of madness. The concept of ‘seeing’ madness had been for decades the only thing necessary to draw a line between the ‘other’ of lunatics and the ‘us’ of good, proper society. Yet, as will be discussed, this theory soon began to fray at the edges admis a growing dissonance of psychiatric pessimism and distrust. This cultural anxiety of not ‘seeing’ madness, of it now being a hidden, undetectable virus that may infect anyone on a whim, became the intrinsic point of concern for any rational Victorian individual.[6] As such, the intangibility of madness became the foundational cornerstone of which the media could freely manipulate for their own personal agenda. Therefore, the following chapters will carefully examine and analyse the literary account of wrongful confinement, devolving them into their basic forms of unregulated fear-mongering and sensationalism through the opportunity created by the Victorian obsession of ‘seeing’ madness.
I. ‘Seeing’ Madness Undeniably the most critical aspect of the contemptuous relationship between madness and its surrounding cultural understanding is that of its representation. The Victorian obsession with ‘seeing’ madness was not something unprecedented or unfounded but rather the apotheosis of centuries of cultural anxiety regarding the manifestation of madness. Madness in of itself is something filled with complexities and misunderstandings, and the only conceivable way it could be brought and integrated into popular culture was for it to be reduced down its basest form. Society is a fickle construction and the unimaginable unknown madness presented was inherently far too much for it to accept without creating some tangibility in which it could grasp the concept. If medical bodily diseases presented themselves in a physical manner, it would hence follow suit that madness could be derived from that same physicality. As such, for much of early modern history, a clear distinction has always been made between the mad and the sane. As early as the thirteenth century, madness was represented in art and literature in a way that made it innately obvious that it was something ‘other’ and could be perceived as such.[7] There was an overarching consensus before the nineteenth century that madness was something incredibly tangible and physical. Artistic renditions of the mad ensured that the message that the mad were deviants and ‘others’ to society, that their madness could be discerned from their outward appearance, was hammered home into the popular consciousness.[8] Madness was a manifestation of the bestial side of humanity and, as such, reduced the mad back down to their primordial self. In order for society to rationalise madness, and hence their innate fear of it, they needed to separate it completely from humanity. Furthermore, reducing the mad to a mere beast hence meant that their subsequent treatment and stigma surrounding them was not only rational but morally ethical.[9]
Figure One below is an exemplary imagining of what nineteenth century artists, and indeed the general public who consumed their work, believed madness to look like.
In Figure One, we can see the blatant biases and stereotypes madness was assigned. Madness was a complete divergence from humanity: it was viewed from an almost zoo-like perspective with the insane being mere animals to observe for the entertainment of the public. It was a spectacle in which the sane could observe, comfortable and reassured that a tangible line divides them from the ‘others.’ As such, it was common practice for large gatherings to flock to public asylums, such as the infamous Bethlem Hospital, to gawk at their patients.[10] Doing so fulfilled the latent voyeuristic desire of morbid curiosity whilst serving as an almost prophetic warning to the visitor of what they may succumb to. The image of the Bedlamites, so clearly distinct in their rags and physicality, the very epitome of madness, was fast becoming the stock trade of what madness must look like.[11] Ergo, there was little for the public to worry if they were so evidently on the other line of physical madness. Yet, what can be evident throughout the nineteenth century, is that the line between the physicality of sanity and insanity begins to blur and a new grey area of the borderland of what madness looks like opens up, an area in which the population becomes severely uncomfortable with as it subsequently means that they could now be falsely accused of insanity.
Perhaps one of the most fundamental factors that precipitated the lunacy panic’s hysteria over the inability to recognise madness was the newly emerged field of psychiatry and the societal demands that were placed upon it, most integrally the absolute clarity on what madness entailed. As the lunacy industry began to become industrialised and commercialised, with the establishment of numerous private and public asylums, numbers of alleged lunatics sky-rocketed.[12] While this phenomenon could be caused by several factors, or indeed could have been artificially inflated by the notion that the mad must no longer be confined in the domestic sphere anymore, for nineteenth century society it seemed obvious that the problem was there was a very real and dangerous threat of contagion. The population began to worry that the growth meant that they themselves were now more susceptible to madness, that it lurked under the city like a virus.[13] As a report from the Commissioners in Lunacy stated ‘the opinion generally entertained was that the community are more subject than formerly to attacks of insanity.’[14] With the seemingly obscure and idiopathic disease of lunacy looming in the horizon, paranoia swept English society, specifically on their inability to perceive madness. As anxiety increased over the unseen ‘other’ who threatened to completely dismantle functioning society, the general population had but one choice: to implicitly trust the doctors who were the self-diagnosed experts in ‘seeing’ madness. Asylum doctors were seen as the very pressure point in which Victorian psychiatry was placed: they were trusted implicitly to know what every variant of madness entailed, how best to treat it and how to finally cure it. As psychiatrists defended, it was only them who could properly and accurately detect latent lunacy, and it was only them who could hence purge them from society. If not for them, ‘incipient lunatics’ would ‘pass about the world with a clean bill of mental health,’ and society would all but be ruined.[15] As such, the fulcrum of the popular imaginings of what madness looked like was placed firmly at the pedestal of asylum doctors.
In order to grapple with this monumental cultural pressure, asylum doctors devoted themselves to determining the physical characteristics of madness and thusly representing them. The theory of physiognomy, that of physical characteristics that are indicative of certain genus of madness, began to emerge in the medical discourse as a solution to fix the newfound fear of madness as a latent and chronic disease infecting the nation. Asylum doctors theorised that madness could be distinguished based on certain physical characteristics, such as the shape of the nose, size of the head, positioning of the spine and even skin colour. [16] Doctors such as Cesare Lombroso fuelled this obsession with publishing works that theorised criminal madness could be discerned based on simple anomalies in the patient’s skeleton and face.[17] Manuals that classified a host of mental disorders based on their outward appearances were published for other doctors to examine, such as that of Duncan and Millard of the Eastern Counties Asylum in 1866.[18] This fanaticism with classifying madness on arbitrary physical characteristics had been created as a remedy for the societal anxiety over the perceived infection of lunacy, yet it proved to only further the obsession with visualising madness. By placing the asylum doctors as the only ones with expertise enough to differentiate sanity from insanity, in doing so they created a sense of extreme restlessness for the general public in the unknowability of the perceived differences.[19]This public distrust in psychiatric evaluation to deviate sanity from madness can be seen to be expressed in the following quote from recovered alcoholic William Griggs in 1832:
"Our learned medical men…assert most positively that almost every person afflicted with mental derangement presents a new case, but do not tell us by what means they discover a person to be of unsound mind."[20]
It appears that Victorian society was fundamentally aware that the arbitrary differences between sanity and insanity as lectured by asylum doctors was losing credibility yet seemed unable or unwilling to sunder themselves from the familiar comfort of ‘seeing’ madness. However, when that visualisation could not be made, the consequences were all the more confounding on Victorian anxiety. For instance, John Thomas Perceval was an Englishman who was confined in a private asylum after the traumatic death of his father in the 1830s, leading to a brief psychotic break. Although his initial confinement was sound, Perceval soon found himself recovered of any mental deficiency and as such logically expected his subsequent release. Yet the asylum doctors disagreed and continued to confine him. Finding himself confined in an asylum surrounded by the ‘true’ incurable madmen, Perceval devolved into the fanatic obsession with visualising a physical difference between himself and his surroundings. He began to carry a small pocket mirror in which he would continuously take out to see if his face had unknowingly morphed into that of a madman’s.[21]
Furthermore, the use of photography in the 1850s further enhanced the rapid obsession of visualising lunacy. Unlike previous years, which relied on the artistic embellishments of painters or writers, lunacy could now theoretically be depicted as accurately as possible. Devoid of the dramatics, society was confronted with lunacy that looked innately human as they were. As Hugh Diamond in the Surrey Lunatic Asylum in 1856 describes, photography acted as a mirror for lunacy from which it can finally be freed from the ‘painful caricaturing which so disfigures almost all the published pictures of the insane.’[22] This seemingly pure objectiveness of photography garnered much contemporary medical support and photographs of lunatics were heavily incorporated into medical textbooks.[23] However, to declare photographs of lunatics as distinctly objective would be of the highest ignorance. While they could not physically distort the facial shape or bodily autonomy to something primitive as artistic licence had done so in previous years, they were still focused on producing a very mechanical and biased image of what madness looked like. Diamond, in particular, would pose his subjects and had particular influence on what they wore, how their hair was styled and any props they would use, such as giving the religious monomaniac a cross.[24] Oftentimes, female patients were deliberately styled to represent common cultural understandings of what madness looked like, such as the popular image of Shakespeare’s mad Ophelia, as shown in Figure Two below. Despite Diamond proclaiming that his photographs were truly objective accounts of what lunacy looked like, they were artificial and manufactured. What is further prevalent is that asylum doctors continued to use these manufactured images as almost a manual in which to diagnose mental illness in further patients. Prominent psychiatrist John Conolly published a case study on Diamond’s photographs, in which he commented that the subjects’ donning of a bonnet indicated her full recovery, despite it being a staged ensemble.[25] It seemed that although madness had now been declared as sparing the artistic licence that had painted it as something brutish and animalistic, it was still subjected to the inherent notion that it could still be visualised.
What was inevitably caused by this entrenched obsession with visualising madness was the perfect cornerstone for fear-mongering sensationalism to rest upon. Despite the logical awareness that there was no tangible, physical characteristic between the sane and insane, or at the very least that such a visualisation was so minute and circumstantial that it could only be diagnosed on the arbitrary whims of psychiatric alienists, the public seemed resolute in their obsession that there must be a divide. By reassuring themselves of that imaginary divide, Victorian society could hence soothe themselves that the devastation of madness would never fall upon themselves.[26] Yet what the print media decided was that instead of reassuring the public of the boundaries of physical madness, they could instead push the envelope, so to say, on the horrors of that boundary dissolving. If they were not blatantly fear-mongering, as will be examined in certain texts and articles later on, they still fell prey to the ingrained cultural narrative of the visualisation of madness, ultimately culminating in epidemic spikes of hysteria and paranoia surrounding wrongful confinement.
II. The Undeniably ‘Sane’ The cultural paranoia regarding wrongful confinement did not stem from nowhere, it was instead instilled by two key factors, the dilemma of not being able to ‘see’ madness and the skilful fear-mongering utilised by the sensationalist press, both of which were in of themselves ignited by instances of prolific and actual wrongful confinement. While we have discussed the precursor of the lunacy panics, the rising wave of cultural anxiety regarding the inability to ascertain madness, it is now imperative to examine the real life instances of this inability. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a few notorious cases of wrongful confinement appeared. Wise’s Inconvenient People is perhaps the most detailed piece of work centred around the victims of wrongful confinement in which she estimates that there were 28 alleged cases of wrongful confinement throughout the nineteenth century.[27] For the purposes of this brief enterprise into the hysterics of the lunacy panics, only three notable cases will be discussed. What is important to note is that these cases have one thing in common: the alleged victims of wrongful incarceration are all middle to upper class. Now, whilst one may look at this as indisputable proof that there was a deeper conspiracy ongoing of rapacious family members and corrupt asylum doctors, this is not the direction this essay will be taking. As McCandless highlighted, it was not the fact that the upper classes were more innately prone to being misdiagnosed as insane, for whatever taciturn motive, but rather they had the money and the means to publish and argue their cases.[28] Georgina Weldon, herself a victim of wrongful confinement and a character that will be examined thoroughly shortly, stated that if she had ‘been quite a poor woman, unable to pay printers…I should have been quite ruined long ago.’[29] In fact, people who were declared insane who had monetary asserts or property were automatically entitled to a court inquisition to determine 1) the legitimacy of their insanity and 2) if they were legally, by the jury and judge, and medically, by two qualified physicians, deemed insane, whether their asserts would hence be distributed accordingly to their next of kin.[30] Theoretically, the upper classes would be least likely to be wrongfully declared insane based on the sheer amount of legal and public obstacles needed to be faced. If anything, the bourgeoisie were almost hesitant to confront the publicity of madness as to do so would bring sure ruin and scandal upon one’s own family and name.[31] The very conception of private madhouses was created in the Georgian period to bring discretion and anonymity to madness prevalent in the upper classes.[32] Yet in the latter half of the nineteenth century, madness was pushed to the very forefront of the public eye. It was inherently impossible for any person of relative wealth or class to be secretly enclosed in asylums without a formal, and very publicised, inquisition. Even if no inquisition was held, which often happened when the accused lunatic was released almost instantaneously from the asylum, the victim could then bring their traumatic ordeal to the press or publish it themselves.
These autobiographical accounts of wrongful confinement are an intriguing dive into the mindset of a Victorian individual faced with perhaps the most insidious of brands to hold: that of being, at one point in time, thought of as insane. These accounts oftentimes stood as warnings for the perceived corruption and danger associated with the private warehousing of the insane, yet while they often advocated for tighter restrictions on the certification of insanity, dichotomously they also never once denied that asylums were needed to confine the ‘true’ lunatics. To harken back to the previous chapter, these autobiographical accounts proved inescapable to the hypocrisy of the concern for personal liberty regarding wrongful confinement yet simultaneously insisting that asylums were needed to protect society against the dangers of lunacy.[33] As such, the true inherent purposes of these accounts were not for reform advocacy or an injunction for wrongful confinement, but rather can be seen to be undeniable, legitimate and unquestionable proof of the author’s sanity. By constructing their own narratives of their confinement, they were hence able to save themselves from the brutal scrutiny and judgement the public had towards anyone they believed to be ‘other’.[34] As asylum doctor Noble highlighted, often the victims of wrongfully confinement were never really wrongfully confined but rather possessed an inability or unwillingness to recognise their own mental deviance, that they will ‘content that there had been no insanity.’[35] Take for instance the case of Herman Charles Merivale who was confined in a mental asylum following a depressive break. He went on to publish a record of his time spent in the Ticehurst asylum in 1879 yet intriguingly the title of his account is My Experiences in a Lunatic Asylum by a Sane Patient.[36] From the very outset of his account, Merival finds it imperative to declare to the Victorian public that at no point was he actually suffering from psychosis. There are further discrepancies in his account that conceal his potential latent lunacy, including the exclusion of his suicide attempt as well as the embellishment that he was released on the good, sound advice from two certified doctors rather than the reality which was his mother personally ordering his release.[37] As such, these narratives can hardly be trusted as being an authentic and objective account of wrongful confinement: they will always appear with the underlying cultural bias that insanity is out of the question for the author.
Perhaps one of the most exemplary narratives that underscores this deeply entrenched bias regarding lunacy and the question of wrongful confinement is that of Georgina Weldon’s. Weldon had escaped and hid from a lunacy order in April 1878 that was signed at the bequest of her estranged husband, Harry Weldon, who had grown tired of paying £1,000 a year to fund his wife’s obsession with her orphanage and child choir, as well as rumoured indecent personal relationships with other men and women, which had brought considerable shame onto his family name.[38] Despite never having actually been confined to an asylum, Weldon published an account of her experience in fighting the tyrannical conspiracy of wrongful certification and went on to win a litany of legal cases against her perpetrators, the asylum doctors, all of which was highly covered in the Victorian press.[39]Upon an examination of her account, it is distinctly evident that Weldon was simultaneously a victim as well as a perpetrator of the paranoid fears regarding lunacy. Her account first opens with an unusual self-introduction as a woman who dislikes ‘long dresses and very full skirts,’ who ‘wore [her] hair short’ and who was the very opposite of young, vain woman who amused themselves by ‘making [themselves] look conspicuous.’[40] Here, it can be determined that Weldon is unequivocally asserting her sanity. By describing her physical characteristics, she is subtly suggesting that there is nothing that could possibly be deemed as an indicator for potential latent insanity. She further states that if she were to have fallen into the plot carefully constructed by her husband and the asylum doctors of being confined to an asylum, then she would have been ‘driven mad in an hour.’[41] The most imperative facts Weldon regards in her narrative is that of her unquestionable sanity. While she stipulates in her opening paragraph that the reader is under no obligation to believe her story without necessary proof or evidence, Weldon is determined in her regard to rid herself of any and all association with lunacy.
Weldon’s account is further significant in regard to its sensational impact on society and its deliberate use of fear-mongering. Weldon was a highly infamous and popular figure, especially in that of the Victorian press. She is reported to be somewhat of a celebrity amongst the lunacy discourse, reputed to have command and sway over as many newspaper columns as a cabinet minister.[42] Her publicised case in How I Escaped the Mad-Doctors as well as the ensuing cases against her husband and the doctors who certified her lunacy order propelled her into the pantheon of popularity and Weldon continuously wielded this to her advantage. She was able to sign onto numerous lucrative brand deals, such as the advertisement for Pears’ Soap as shown above. She was distinctly aware of her potential influence over Victorian society, stating openly in her pamphlet that ‘To be accused of “insanity” is, I really believe, a royal road to popularity.’[43] The inherent taboo nature of insanity made it almost ambivalently popular in the Victorian public, yet the only way to avoid scandal and degradation was to legitimise and assert one’s own sanity.[44] What this fundamentally signifies is that the Victorians were keenly aware of the scandalous popularity lunacy issues generated and how that popularity could be utilised to further one's own personal or even a wider societal agenda. Ergo, these personal narratives of wrongful confinement cannot be fully appreciated without understanding first the underlying biases and stereotypes they were built on. These accounts were not personal mementos, they catered and pandered to the public perception of lunacy and its appearances. Even if they declared themselves to be a rallying cry for asylum and certification reform, they proved to only further the mass hysteria and paranoia regarding wrongful confinement. As Weldon writes The object of this Lecture, therefore, is not as some people say, to cater for the public’s pity or sympathy for myself, but it is written and read for the purpose of rousing their indignation, their righteous wrath, and to force Parliament to amend state of things which is so monstrous that it seems fabulous….on behalf of many thousand victims, now lingering in these horrible dens among idiots, raving maniacs and deranged simpletons, of which the sight for half an hour only is enough to drive one out of one’s mind.[45]
This statement can be regarded as being in perfect accordance with the underlying issues of the publicity surrounding wrongful confinement: Weldon admits her writing is specifically designed for the purpose of heightening the reader’s emotions, possibly infringing upon the ethicality of fear-mongering, whilst contradicting herself by calling for Parliamentary reform yet implying that asylums are still deemed necessary to house these ‘raving maniacs.’ Wrongful confinement is not a story about compassion or empathy regarding asylum reform but rather a fanatic obsession amongst the sane to create a superimposed image of the insane and the asylum as something depraved and abhorrent. These ‘survivor’ narratives can therefore be largely considered as sensationalised and dramatic accounts of the horror of one’s sanity being aligned with these hyperbolic imaginings of insanity.
Nevertheless, there is, in fact, one account that does not seem to exude this biased narrative of sanity being impeached by wrongful confinement: that of John Thomas Perceval. In stark contrast to Merivale’s title deliberating prefacing his sanity, Perceval’s title reads A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman, during a State of Mental Derangement.[46]Perceval does not hide that, although he is a ‘gentleman’, he indeed suffered a mental breakdown and was thus justly confined in an asylum. Instead, the nature of his issues with asylums stems from his denial of his freedom and entrapment within the confines of the asylum walls after he deemed himself fully recovered. Perceval advocated for stronger and stricter managerial oversight of asylums and their patients so that those who recovered their sanity could be rightfully released to society. The sheer magnitude of bravery to publish an account of a brief dip into mental illness during a time of heightened fear and stigma surrounding lunacy is remarkable. However, that is not to say that Perceval was completely immune to the aforementioned stigma and instead faced insurmountable backlash upon his publication. He had first published the account anonymously in 1838, which went largely unnoticed, yet his revised second volume published two years later and featured his name was relentlessly torn apart by the print media, with scathing criticisms that Perceval had not taken proper care to distinguish himself from the ‘lunatics of inferior rank.’[47] It seemed that while Perceval was willing to admit his brief descent into mental destitution, the public was not. Society could still not grapple with the fact that someone would willingly and knowingly admit to succumbing to mental illness. Contemporary asylum doctor Granville best showcases the extent of the phenomenon of Perceval’s account as he states that ‘it is inconceivable that a man of position and culture would allow his family to have any connection with an asylum.’[48] To even have one’s name associated with lunacy was guaranteed to make one a social pariah yet Perceval stands against the common grain of wrongful confinement narratives by openly embracing his lapse of mental fortitude.
While the autobiographical accounts of wrongful confinement offer a rare and personal insight into the atmosphere surrounding the lunacy panics, one must be advertently cautious not to fall prey to the ingrained biases and subjectivity evident in these accounts. In large part, these accounts hold all the characteristics of the causes and concerns with these lunacy hysteria. They pander a carefully constructed image to the public of their undeniable sanity being questioned by either indolent doctors or evil family members to avoid any possible defamation in being remotely associated with lunacy. These accounts were primarily written exclusively for the public digestion, creating a controlled narrative that would exonerate the writer from any taint that the mere mention of insanity brought. Yet in doing so, they further the existing paranoia and fanaticism encompassing the issue of wrongful confinement, for the average Victorian reader is unable to separate the truth from the constructed. Furthermore, these accounts proved that there was a ravenous demand amongst the Victorian public for cautionary tales of accused insanity, horror and woe. What this hence created was a platform in which sensationalised fiction and journalism could then leap of from, further distorting the boundaries of reality and fiction, and fuelling the fanatic obsession with the ever-looming threat of wrongful confinement.
III. ‘The Ghosts of Newspaper Writings.’ The emergence of the autobiographical accounts of wrongful confinement created a marketable atmosphere in which writers were now keenly aware of what the rapacious Victorian public so desperately consumed. The ‘reality’ of these accounts helped bring a perceived sense of ensured credibility to the fiction of sensational novels whilst allowing the author the creative freedom to embellish the details to heighten the drama and horror. The late nineteenth century saw the epidemic of the lunacy panics culminate in the emanation of sensational fiction dealing exclusively with madness and the notoriety associated with wrongful confinement. Most prolifically, we see two main sensational works of fiction that perfectly encapsulates the hysteria regarding lunacy: Wilkie Collin’s 1859 The Woman in White and Charles Reade’s 1863 Hard Cash. These authors were able to capitalise on the popular cultural anxiety encompassing madness and wrongful confinement in order to push their works to the forefront of Victorian public discourse and consumption. By utilising the common cultural knowledge of what madness entailed, that has been supplied by the idea of ‘seeing’ madness and only further enhanced by personal publicised narratives, authors were able to create a sense of familiarity whilst simultaneously drawing on an imagined sense of fantasy and horror.[49] It was just real enough to be believed, as it had proven to happen to figures such as Weldon and Merivale, but the added touch of sensationalism propelled the work into the stratosphere of horror and fear. It was not only literary fiction that capitalised on this market; vapid tabloid journalism also deliberately manipulated this cultural paranoia, specifically targeting the unease regarding ‘seeing’ madness. As such, the Victorian public found themselves in an unending cyclical relationship with madness and literature: they had both their concerns tangibly expressed in the writings while that said writing was also fuelling and supplying that concern. As such, if it can be declared that the fear of not recognising madness and the publicised cases of wrongful confinement ignited the lunacy panics, then sensationalist novels and journalism was the fuel that kept it going.
Firstly, let us examine the parallels between fiction and reality evident in these sensational works and how they were utilised to expedite fear-mongering. The wave of publicised first-hand narratives of wrongful confinement meant that the Victorian public became fanatic with drawing parallels between reality and fiction, often blurring the two together so they became indistinguishable. Sensational fiction required a decorum of exaggerated horror or drama and the exploration of madness fulfilled all these necessary requirements.[50] Yet the Victorian population, bombarded with narrative accounts, naturally assumed that hyperbolic sensationalism was not a mere work of fiction but rather indicative of the actuality of the dangers presented by wrongful confinement. It did not help matters that sensational fiction often borrowed storylines from actual cases, further confusing the line between expressive horror and reality. For instance, Collin’s The Woman in White can be seen as loosely based on an infamous French case of wrongful confinement in 1787.[51] Reade’s Hard Cash further utilised real cases to bring a sense of credibility to his work, oftentimes directly citing infamous cases in his novel, thus greatly inflating the impact of its horror.[52]Furthermore, this was not a one-sided relationship between reality and fiction. Whilst sensational fiction borrowed heavily from reality, influenced by the heavily publicised narrative accounts, they were in turn referenced in official documents, legislation and newspaper commentary as the objective mirror of the threat of wrongful confinement.[53] Therefore, the horror tropes used in sensational fiction were often regarded as fact, only exacerbating the cultural tension existent during the lunacy panics.
A predominating theme in sensation novels and journalism revolving around madness that further stroked the fanatical hysteria during the lunacy panics relates back to the early chapter of ‘seeing’ of madness. As what has been previously established, both the Victorian public and the pioneers of psychiatry, the asylum doctors themselves, seemed to have an almost frenzied obsession with identifying the visual cues of madness in a lunatic’s appearance. The inability to do so created a paramount sense of fear and anxiety. This obsession stemming from the inability to visualise madness meant that either the sane were being denied their liberty, dignity and respectability by being wrongfully confined in asylums or that the mad were an unseen, uncontained festering disease of Victorian society. Victorian journalists and authors latched onto this controversial topic, pushing a very deliberate narrative on madness onto the public and using the horror of insanity to garner publicity and popularity.[54] The horror of not ‘seeing’ madness was the perfect cannon fodder to propel an author into the public discourse. In Collin’s The Woman in White, he plays upon this specific trope in very opening chapters of his novel by having the protagonist, Walter, come across a lone woman one night on his way home. Upon meeting her, Walter notes that ‘there was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner,’ thus planting the seed in the reader’s mind that this is a perfectly normal individual.[55] Yet upon his departure from this woman, later known as Anne Catherick, he is informed by two police officers that she is an escaped lunatic. Walter’s statement following this dramatic revelation perfectly encapsulates the trepidation regarding insanity existent in Victorian statement:
"What had I done? Assisted the victim of the most horrible of all false imprisonments to escape, or cast loose on the wide world of London an unfortunate creature whose actions it was my duty, and every man’s duty, mercifully to control?"[56]
It is important to note Collins’ use of the word ‘creature’ here to describe the ascertained lunatic. If Anne is a victim of wrongful confinement, then she is human, an individual to be greatly sympathised with. However, if she is indeed insane, then she is transformed back to that preconceived notion of the bestial lunatic, something ‘other’ that is far removed from humanity. This dichotomous dilemma that Walter undergoes is a direct representation of the fanatic obsession amongst Victorian society and Collins continues to target that anxiety throughout the novel, culminating in the sane character of Laura Fairlie being falsely assumed as the insane Anne and being confined against her will. As such, the truly popular sensational fiction regarding lunacy thrived in their infamy by manipulating the two branches of anxiety amongst Victorian society: the fear of being wrongfully deemed as insane and the sister-prong of not recognising a madman and allowing lunacy to run rampant, undetected, through the streets. To incorporate both of these fears into their fiction, authors were able to heighten the sense of horror and psychological torment evident in their writings. Sensational fiction was not the only media that blatantly engaged in this level of fear-mongering: journalism also became the predominant expression of this fear and obsession. Journalists heavily exploited the theme of seeing madness in their articles, often visiting asylums and writing of the unseen appearance of lunacy. An illustration of this obvious manipulation of cultural obsession can be observed in an article written by Charles Davies in 1875 regarding a visit he paid to the Hanwell asylum during their Christmastime ball. He wrote of a specific lunatic he encountered during his visit:
"He looked, I thought, quite as sane as myself, and played magnificently; but I was informed by the possibly prejudiced officials that he had his occasional weaknesses."[57]
This inclusion of being startled of the seemingly bizarre look of normalcy in lunatic patients can be considered both a product of the paranoia regarding unseen lunacy as well as promotion and exacerbation of that said fear. The use of ‘possibly prejudiced officials’ further suggests to the reader that the asylum keepers themselves could not be trusted with the task of identifying madness. It seems that Davies, in his complete inability to process that the ‘raving lunatics’ he expected to see looked like himself instead, calls into question the credibility of asylum doctors and their self-proclaimed expertise in madness. Perhaps, Davies suggests, this man is not insane at all, for if he were, he would not look as sane as Davies undeniably was. While this may be construed as a newfound aspect of humanising the insane, the underlying tonal shift of these articles make it evidently clear that their agenda is not to bring advocacy or compassion to certified insane, but rather to sow the seeds of dissonance and obsession between the public and the looming threat of madness. This cultivation of the obsession and fear surrounding the lunacy panics can be seen when Davies concludes his essay with the question that ‘would haunt me all the way home was, which are the sane people, and which are the lunatics?’[58] This closing conclusion of asylums and its inhabitants serves an almost ensured propellant into the pantheon of Victorian gossip as it directly targets the obsession with visualising madness. Another journalist, Andrew Wynter, reported his visit to the very same asylum, that he could see ‘No disorder, nor anything that would indicate that the company were lunatics.’[59] In a way, this format of journalism can almost be classified as psychological horror: by tormenting their readers of the growing fine line between insanity and sanity, it appeals directly to the deepest inner obsession and fear of the Victorian public. Reade’s Hard Cash can be seen to further this psychological torment in the concluding sentence in the chapter in which the protagonist, Alfred, is seized and wrongfully confined in an asylum:
"Pray think of it for yourselves, men and women, if you have not sworn never to think over a novel. Think of it for your own sake: Alfred’s turn to-day, it may be yours to-morrow."[60]
Reade here is directly challenging the reader to face the fate deemed almost worse than death: to be wrongfully declared as insane and subsequently confined. It is not simply that these novels and articles were simply reporting on the phenomenon of wrongful confinement: they were deliberating, targeting and manipulating the underlying cultural anxiety of being branded as ‘mad’. Such brazen tactics are a clear marker of fear-mongering.
This influence of sensationalist novels and journalism over stroking the obsession of the Victorian public about the perceived threat of wrongful confinement did not go unnoticed by the practitioners of psychiatry. Many mad-doctors published their own works, condemning the media for deliberating frenzying the Victorian public and thus, in actuality, deterring improvements and developments in the asylum system.[61] If the Victorian public was infected with the obsession of the potential of being victims to wrongful confinement, then the asylum doctors were infected with a similar obsession of disproving this fear through an all-out media war. The editor of the Journal of Mental Science John Charles Bucknill wrote condemning the deliberate fear-mongering evident in novels and newspapers in 1858, stating that ‘the sane people confined in lunatic asylums…are ghosts of newspaper writing.’[62] He further accused authors and journalists of being ‘panic-mongers’ who deceived and misled the ‘too credulous public.’[63] Bucknill was not isolated in his scathing criticism of the fanatic alarmism evident in the print media. Asylum doctor George H. Savage wrote that sensationalism was deliberately creating a ‘state of panic’ in the public opinion surrounding lunacy of which the gullible public were all too ‘easily and falsely…led’ by the melodrama evident in the media.[64]
Yet in the face of the overwhelming saturation of sensationalism and the inherent biases it perpetuated, asylum doctors found their voices lost in the swarm. Little could be done to tide over the epidemic of Victorian hysteria. Victorian society had been all consumed by the obsession of the lunacy panics and until the legislation of the 1890 Lunacy Act was introduced that set up clear, inescapable blockades in the asylum system to prevent wrongful confinement, there was little to no rationality that could be evident. Ironically, in society’s obsession with seeing madness and preventing the alleged threat of wrongful confinement, they had almost driven themselves mad.
Conclusion
The impact lunacy panics had cultivated on society is profound in both the immediate short-term effect as well as ever-lingering in our own contemporary society. Most immediately, the lunacy panics had an extreme detrimental effect on the development and acceptance of psychiatry. The sheer horror of potentially sane individuals being condemned to asylums meant that subsequent asylum legislation and reform was catering towards reforming the certification process and establishing a managerial head/inquisition to ensure no one was wrongfully confined instead of being catered towards reforming the actual treatment of the insane. The lunacy panics themselves were only salved by the asylum reform act of 1890 which stipulated that anyone who wished to have a patient confined privately was required to have a full and thorough examination and inquisition, with the absolute requisite that the certification of lunacy must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.[65] The strict enforcement of these regulations proved to the masses that the probability of wrongful confinement was now far beyond the popular imagination. Yet the same care or consideration was not given to those who were deemed creditably insane as we can see in the continued devolution of asylum care and treatment in the twentieth century. As such, hypocritically, the issue of lunacy transformed into an issue of sanity. The obsession with seeing madness, of seeing the ‘other’, had made the mentally unwell and deficient effectively invisible in the asylum discourse. Advocacy figures such as Perceval, who had been scathingly honest in his brief mental lapse, were side-lined in favour for the more palatable narrative of the innocently wronged individual whose unimpeachable sanity had been questioned, such as that of Weldon or Merivale. Sensationalised fiction and vapid journalism only served to enhance this focus on the discourse of wrongful confinement rather than divulge into the much more controversial, and seemingly improbable, notion of humanising the mentally unwell. It seemed more palatable for Victorian society to fabricate and exaggerate conspiracies of wrongful confinement rather than to confront the fact that there were no inherent distinguishing characteristics between themselves and the ‘raving maniacs’ they were so afraid of.
The lunacy panics like most epidemics only lasted a few years before fading into the popular subconscious and historical obscurity. That is not to say that the harmful stereotypes and stigma perpetuated by these panics did not remain entrenched in societal culture, but rather the rise of paranoia and hysteria eventually dimmed down. Victorian society can be understood as just as vapid and obsessive with popular culture and trends that their disparagingly short attention-span meant that from its inception, wrongful confinement had a set expiry date.[66] The oversaturation of wrongful confinement in the media meant there was an inherent limit on how much one individual could consume before becoming eventually bored with the same old used tropes. As such, by the end of the 1890s, wrongful confinement stories, placated by the legislature of the 1890 reform act, were no longer highly coveted in the media. They had fully run their course in the popular environment of gossip and scandal and no longer carried the ‘shock factor’ necessary to entertain the ravenous Victorian public. As such, while the obsessive flame of the lunacy panics burnt bright in the nineteenth century, they eventually extinguished themselves, fading into the anonymity of history obscurity.
Sarah Brady has just completed a BSc in History and International Relations from University College Dublin.
Notes:
[1] Peter McCandless, ‘Liberty and Lunacy: The Victorians and Wrongful Confinement,’ Journal of Social History, Vol. 11, No. 3, (1978), p. 366. [2] Barbara Fass Leavy, ‘Wilkie Collin’s Cinderella: The History of Psychology and The Woman in White,’ Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 10 (1982), p. 94. [3] Joshua John Schwiesco, ‘’Religious Fanaticism’ and Wrongful Confinement in Victorian England: The Affair of Louisa Nottidge,’ Social History of Medicine: The Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine, Vol. 9, Issue 2 (1996), p. 167. [4] Andrew Scull, Madness and Civilisation: A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine, (London, 2015), p. 134. [5] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, (New York, 1965), p. 100. [6] Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad-Business, (London, 1969), p. 277. [7] Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS, (London, 1988), p. 19 [8] Simon Cross, ‘Laughing at Lunacy: Othering and Comic Ambiguity in Popular Humour about Mental Distress,’ Social Semiotics, Vol. 23, No. 1, (2013), p. 2. [9] Jennifer Eisenhauer, ‘A Visual Culture of Stigma: Critically Examining Representations of Mental Illness,’ Art Education, Vol. 61, No. 5 (2008), p. 15. [10] Laura R. Kremmel, ‘The Asylum’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, ed. Clive Bloom (New York, 2020), p. 451. [11] Simon Cross, Mediating Madness: Mental Distress and Cultural Representation, (New York, 2010), p. 51. [12] Jane Shepherd, ‘“I am Very Glad and Cheered when I hear the Flute,”: The Treatment of Criminal Lunatics in Late Victorian Broadmoor,’ Medical History, Vol. 60, No. 4, p. 484 [13] Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain 1700-1900, (New Haven, 1993), p. 110. [14] Commissioners in Lunacy, 15th Annual Report, (London, 1861), p. 84. [15] Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980, (London, 1987), p. 105. [16] Eisenhauer, ‘A Visual Culture of Stigma,’ p. 16. [17] Susanna Bennett, ‘Representation and Manifestations of Madness in Victorian Fiction,’ Published Dissertation, The University of Waikato, (Hamilton, 2015), p. 39. [18] Mark Jackson, ‘Images of Deviance: Visual Representation of Mental Defectives in Early Twentieth Century Medical Texts,’ The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 28, No. 3, (1995), p. 322. [19] Cara Dobbing and Alannah Tomkins, ‘Sexual Abuse by Superintending Staff in the Nineteenth Century Lunatic Asylum: Medical Practice, Complaint and Risk,’ History of Psychiatry, Vol. 32, No. 1, (2020), p. 75. [20] William Griggs, Lunacy Versus Liberty: A Letter to the Lord Chancellor, on the Defective State of Law, as Regards Insane Persons, and Private Asylum for Their Reception: With Remarks, Original and Select, including the Author’s Own Case and Other’s, (London, 1832), p. 5. [21] Sarah Wise, Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England, (London, 2012), p. 60. [22] Cross, Mediating Madness, p. 58. [23] Jackson, ‘Images of Deviance’, p. 322. [24] Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 87. [25] Sharrona Pearl, ‘Through a Mediated Mirror: The Photographic Physiognomy of Dr Hugh Welch Diamond,’ History of Photography, Vol. 33, No. 3, (2009), p. 298. [26] Cross, Mediating Madness, p. 131. [27] Wise, Inconvenient People, pp. 395-399. [28] Peter McCandless, ‘Dangerous to Themselves and Others: The Victorian Debate over the Prevention of Wrongful Confinement,’ Journal of British Studies, (1983), Vol. 23, No. 1, p. 95. [29] Georgina Weldon, How I Escaped the Mad Doctors, (London, 1879), p. 22. [30] McCandless, ‘Dangerous to Themselves’, p. 85. [31] Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Fame, Notoriety and Madness: Edward Bulwer-Lytton Paying the Price of Greatness,’ Critical Survey, Vol. 13, No. 2, (2001), p. 123. [32] Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions, p. 5. [33] McCandless, ‘Liberty and Lunacy’, p. 367. [34] R.A Houston, ‘Rights and Wrongs in the Confinement of the Mentally Incapable in Eighteenth Century Scotland,’ Continuity and Change, Vol. 18, No. 3, (2003), p. 374. [35] David Noble, ‘On Certain Residual Prejudices of the Convalescent and the Recovered Insane,’ Asylum Journal of Mental Science, Vol. 3 (22), (1857), p. 433. [36] Cristina Hanganu-Bresch and Carol Berkenkotter, ‘Narrative Survival: Personal and Institutional Accounts of Asylum Confinement,’ Literature and Medicine, Vol. 30, No. 1, (2012), p. 26. [37] Hanganu-Bresch and Berkenkotter, ‘Narrative Survival,’ p. 27. [38] Wise, Inconvenient People, p. 251. [39] Wise, Inconvenient People, p. 353. [40] Weldon, How I Escaped the Mad-Doctors, p. 5. [41] Weldon, How I Escaped the Mad-Doctors, p. 17. [42] Mary Madden, ‘Stories about a Storyteller: Reading the Radical in Scenes from the ‘Disastrous’ Life of Georgina Weldon,’ Women’s History Review, Vol. 15, No. 2, (2006), p. 215. [43] Weldon, How I Escaped the Mad-Doctors, p. 21. [44] Mulvey-Roberts, p. 123. [45] Weldon, How I Escaped the Mad-Doctors, p. 20. [46] Thomas Szasz, The Age of Madness: The History of Involuntary Mental Hospitalisation Presented in Selected Texts, (London, 1973), p. 89. [47] Wise, Inconvenient People, p. 63. [48] Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 104. [49] Ray Nairn, Sara Coverdale, John F. Coverdale, ‘A Framework for Understanding Media Depictions of Mental Illness,’ Academic Psychiatry, Vol. 35, No. 3, (2011), p. 204. [50] Helen Small, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel and Female Insanity 1800-1865, (New York, 1996), p. 182. [51] Cristina Hanganu-Bresch and Carol Berkenkotter, Diagnosing Madness: The Discursive Construction of the Psychiatric Patient, 1850-1920, (Colombia, 2019), p. 37. [52] Christine L. Krueger, ‘Agency, Equity, Publicity: Compos Mentis in Charles Reade’s Hard Cash and Lunacy Commission Reports,’ Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism, Vol. 275, (2013), p. 185. [53] Wise, Inconvenient People, p. 199. [54] Small, Love’s Madness, pp. 182-5. [55] Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, (Surrey, 2016: first published in 1860), p. 24. [56] Collins, The Woman in White, p. 31. [57] Charles Davies, Mystic London, (London, 1875), p. 40. [58] Davies, Mystic London, p. 51. [59] Andrew Wynter, ‘Lunatic Asylums,’ Quarterly Review 101, (1857), p. 375. [60] Charles Reade, Hard Cash, (San Jose, 2017: originally published in 1863), p. 160. [61] Anne Grisby, ‘Charles Reade’s Hard Cash: Lunacy Reform Through Sensationalism,’ Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 25, (1996), p. 150. [62] John Charles Bucknill, ‘The Newspaper Attack on Private Lunatic Asylums,’ Journal of Mental Science, Vol. 5, Vol. 27 (1858), p. 146. [63] Bucknill, ‘The Newspaper Attack,’ p. 153. [64] George H. Savage, ‘Our Duties in Reference to the Signing of Lunacy Certificates,’ British Medical Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 1266, (1885), p. 692. [65] Wise, Inconvenient People, p. 376. [66] McCandless, ‘Liberty and Lunacy,’ p. 368.
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