Family commitments

Twice in my career, in very remote places, I encountered lunatics who had been chained for many years to the wall or to posts in the ground. The reasons why they were so enchained had been lost in the sands of time, but their keepers were convinced that they were far too dangerous to be released. By now they were certainly mad, but whether they were mad because they had been tied up, or tied up because they had been mad, it was impossible to say. And in one of the institutions — a prison — I found prisoners who had been acquitted or whose release had been ordered by a judge ten years before, but who did not have enough money to pay their gaolers to release them.

I could not help but recall these experiences as I read Sarah Wise’s excellent new book, Inconvenient People, about the supposedly therapeutic incarceration during the 19th century of people of doubtful madness in various asylums in Britain.