Introduction

This book is concerned with the growth of asylum care for those certified as insane in Victorian and Edwardian England. The rise in the numbers of people admitted to specialist institutions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been the subject of vigorous debate in the past four decades. The purpose of our study is to examine these arguments in the light of recent scholarship and original evidence drawn primarily from Devon in the period 1845–1914. There has been a broad agreement that the nineteenth century saw a remarkable rise in insane people known to the British state, growing from two or three persons in every 10,000 in England and Wales identified as lunatics in the early nineteenth century to about 13 per 10,000 by the time the Lunacy Act of 1845 was passed, and perhaps 30 per 10,000 at the time that a new Lunacy Act came into force in 1890. The growth in the numbers of the known insane was widely discussed by eminent and well-informed contemporaries such as Henry Maudsley and remained the subject of searching discussion at the Lunacy Commission, which had been established in 1845 to oversee the provision of asylum accommodation. While population generally increased by about 80 per cent between the seminal legislation of 1845 and 1890, the numbers of certified insane quadrupled. ¹ It is true, as Andrew Scull has pointed out, that the rate ofadmissions to asylums per head of the population grew less dramatically than did the total numbers of those certified in the five decades after 1845, though the steep incline in those institutionalised remains a striking feature of the period. ² To understand the origins and trend of this increase we need to consider the pattern of provision made for the insane in the eighteenth century.