Introduction

Despite the rapid and extensive growth in the history of psychiatry and mental health care as a field of scholarship, no full-length study exists of the history of a private asylum in England. Parry-Jones's survey of The trade in lunacy provides an informative overview of the development of private madhouses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but one which leaves some wider historical questions unexplored. ¹ The object of this book is not only to provide a more detailed history of one private asylum, but to identify the way in which that story can be used to illuminate aspects of social, as well as medical, history. Through the work of historians like Foucault, Rothman and Doerner, the growth of public and voluntary institutions for the insane from the late eighteenth century has long been associated with the bourgeoisie's desire for social order and social control in a period of rapid economic and political change. ² In addition, Scull has emphasized the importance of psychiatrists' quest for professional status and security as a motor of institutional proliferation and expansion throughout the nineteenth century. ³ However, neither of these models is easily applicable to the development of the private sector. Private madhouses catered for a predominantly middle- and upper-class clientele, and are known to have existed before the eighteenth century; in addition, they were often owned and managed by lay, rather than medical, proprietors.