ABSTRACT
The middle decades of nineteenth century in England saw a great expansion of the county and borough asylum system for pauper lunatics. In terms of the wider society, it was much easier to be ‘cast out’ as a pauper lunatic than to be reclaimed, although actual mechanism of ‘casting out’, with its important implications for the workings of early and mid-Victorian society, remains tanta-lizingly difficult to unravel. The ‘social control’ dimension is clearly very important to our understanding of the rise of the pauper asylum system. The efforts made by asylum superintendents in the 1840s to correlate environmental conditions with insanity might have disturbed the cosy state of affairs, but these were soon abandoned as impracticable. Many female patients were discharged from Lancaster Asylum ‘not improved’, at the request of husbands who were presumably desperate for whatever help and comfort they could get; and this is itself an eloquent commentary on the problems faced by the families of pauper lunatics.
