Lunacy in the Industrial Revolution: A Study of Asylum Admissions in Lancashire, 1848-50

Variations in the official prevalence and disposal of the insane in England under the poor law, 1850-1900

“…That the textile towns in Walton's (1979) study show a relatively low rate of asylum admission fi ts in with the present fi ndings, although the higher rates for Manchester and Liverpool do not. What complicates any comparison of Walton's data with those of the present study is that Walton was only concerned with those admitted to asylums and not the overall rates of insanity which would include those with other disposals.…”

“…Of greater potential relevance in relation to the present fi ndings is Walton's (1979) analysis of admissions to the two county asylums then existing in Lancashire (Haydock Lodge and Lancaster) for the years 1848-50 according to the previous place of abode or settlement. The latter was subdivided into four categories.…”

“…The public lunatic asylums of the nineteenth century which followed the 1808 and 1845 Acts, were designed to cater principally for the pauper insane. In 1845 over 80% of those regarded as insane were paupers, and this proportion increased further throughout the rest of the century (Walton, 1979). While these proportions refer to England and Wales combined, they are highly likely to be typical of the English counties outside the metropolis which form the focus of the analyses presented in this paper.…”

Constructing the Disabled Child in England, 1800–18601

“…Public and private asylums for the insane were supplemented with institutions for the blind, deaf, dumb, idiots and unruly, while the workhouses of the Old and New Poor Law served as a backbone of institutional provision at the most local level (Carpenter, 2000;King, 2013). Most of those with physical and mental impairments spent the majority of their lives outside such places, but institutional sojourns nonetheless became increasingly common as the nineteenth-century progressed (Walton, 1979).…”

Family matters? Psychiatry, kinship and domestic responses to insanity in nineteenth-century England

“…Scull (1993) suggested that family bonds were weakened as labouring families sought to maximize their household income by depositing unproductive, dependent and disruptive members in the new institutions. Walton (1979) addressed the claims both of Scull and of Michael Anderson (1971) on the calculations made by labouring households struggling to cope with multiple demands on its human and material resources. Walton's subtle argument that tighter kinship groups and industrial communities with stable resources were more adept at using the asylum to cope with limited and short-term periods of diffi culty have been widely noted.…”