In 1842, whilst he was staying in New York, Charles Dickens visited a lunatic asylum on Long Island or Rhode Island (‘I forget which’). He depicts the scene graphically:

The moping idiot, cowering down with long, dishevelled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails; there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror.¹

In part his horror at the sight of these mad people is inspired by the dreary, dirty, ill-ordered conditions in which...

‘It is something to look upon enjoyment, so that it be free and wild and in the face of nature, though it is but the enjoyment of an idiot,’ says the narrator ofBarnaby Rudge. ‘Who would not rather see a poor idiot happy in the sunlight, than a wise man pining in a darkened jail!’¹ Dickens’s representations of idiocy and insanity are permeated by images of light and darkness, confinement and liberty. Although his fictional work makes little reference to the institutions of madness, a range of mad and eccentric men and women contribute their individuality to the panorama...

Both the despairing protagonist (significantly unnamed) of Tennyson’sMaudand the eponymous protagonist of Wilkie Collins’sBasilare acutely aware of their shaky masculinity.¹ Narrated with the particular intensity and intimacy of a first-person perspective, both novel and poem are able to convey vividly the psychic dimension of identity as well as the material circumstances of its construction. The two texts that form the basis for this chapter focus on young men who admire a woman from a distance, fall in love with her, find themselves fighting a rival, suffer a breakdown and finally, arguably, recover.² As Helen Small has...

Even before the large-scale building of county asylums promoted by the 1845 Lunatics Act, the fear of wrongful confinement was apparent. In 1728 Daniel Defoe castigated the ‘vile Practice now so much in vogue among the better Sort, as they are called, but the worst sort in fact, namely, the sending their Wives to Mad-Houses at every Whim or Dislike, that they may be more secure and undisturb’d in their Debaucheries’.¹ John Conolly voiced a similar anxiety over the possible abuse of the system in 1830:

The facts which have been alluded to in the foregoing Inquiry, show, that the...

In 1858 Robert and Charlotte Bostock appealed to the new Divorce Court for judicial separation, one of the first cases to be heard after the Divorce Act of 1857. The differences between them derived from problems in negotiating a course between authority and its abuse on the part of the husband, and between defiance and submission on the part of the wife. At one stage of their quarrels, surgeons who had been called in by Charlotte advised her that her husband should be tended by a ‘keeper’ because of the danger of sudden attack. There were signs that Robert was...

Max Nordau’s evocation of the spirit of the age at the end of the nineteenth century caused a sensation when it was first published. He tapped into a rich vein of commentary in which cultural and moral criticism were intertwined, as the trial of Oscar Wilde so poignantly demonstrates. Nordau’s journalistic flamboyance feeds off the very culture it attacks. For Nordau, inspired by the work of Lombroso and Morel, the period was one of degeneration, which he defines as a disease affiliated with hysteria. Both are associated with the nervousness that is part of life in modern industrial society. Like...

It is now twenty years since Elaine Showalter’s ground-breaking studyThe Female Maladywas published. This wonderfully rich and suggestive book advances the thesis that ‘madness, even when experienced by men, is metaphorically and symbolically represented as feminine: a female malady’ (p. 4). Showalter’s study of the cultural history of madness as a female malady covers the representation of madwomen in literary, clinical and legal texts, and in visual media. I have confined my area of research to the nineteenth century and furthermore to literary representations of mad men, in an attempt to investigate her claim that madness is a...