Profits of Madness
Sarah Wise admires an assessment of lunacy in 19th-century London.
If you had the great misfortune to become mentally ill and required institutionalisation in the 19th century you could – depending on the depth of your pocket – find yourself in the workhouse lunatic ward, in a county asylum, a charitable hospital or an expensive private ‘retreat’. But, as Elaine Murphy revealed in the pages of History Today in September 2001, for over a century the pauper insane of London and the south-east of England had a different option: to be sent to one of the private asylums of Bethnal Green and Hoxton, with the bill for their ‘care’ paid by the local parish.
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