Tracing the experiences of women who were designated insane by judicial
processes from 1850 to 1900, this book considers the ideas and purposes
of incarceration in three dedicated facilities: Bethlem, Fisherton House
and Broadmoor. The majority of these patients had murdered, or attempted
to murder, their own children but were not necessarily condemned as
incurably evil by medical and legal authorities, nor by general society.
Alison C. Pedley explores how insanity gave the Victorians an acceptable
explanation for these dreadful crimes, and as a result, how admission to
a dedicated asylum was viewed as the safest and most human solution for
the 'madwomen' as well as for society as a whole.
Mothers, Criminal Insanity and the Asylum in Victorian England
considers the experiences, treatments and regimes women underwent in an
attempt to redeem and rehabilitate them, and return them to into a
patriarchal society. It shows how society's views of the institutions
and insanity were not necessarily negative or coloured by fear and
revulsion, and highlights the changes in attitudes to female criminal
lunacy in the second half of the 19th century. Through extensive and
detailed research into the three asylums' archives and in legal,
governmental, press and genealogical records, this book sheds new light
on the views of the patients themselves, and contributes to the
historiography of Victorian criminal lunatic asylums, conceptualising
them as places of recovery, rehabilitation and restitution.
