ABSTRACT
On 13 June 1827 the lunacy question came to the fore again, when a Select Committee was appointed to consider the state of pauper lunatics from the metropolitan parishes. The immediate cause of this action was the renewed investigation by Lord Robert Seymour of the conditions of Warburton’s madhouses. The Committee had thirty members, but a quorum of only five. Mr John Hall, a Guardian of the poor for the parish of St Marylebone, stated that he visited the White House in order to inspect the pauper lunatics from his own parish, whom the parish was maintaining at a cost of nine or ten shillings a week per patient. A footnote to the conditions at the White House is provided by the evidence of two Commissioners who were still operating under the defective Act of 1774. The Acts of 1828 dealt respectively with private madhouses and with county asylums.
