In August 1883, Matthew Jackson Hunter, a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, wrote to his sister:

It is a splendid block of buildings… has an extensive view and is very healthy… the patients spend most of their time… exercising in the gardens, reading the daily papers, monthly periodicals etc., there is also a well selected library… a cricket club, billiards, cards and other amusements. In the wintertime we have entertainments given by the patients, such as plays, singing, etc. [We] have a good brass band which gives selections of music every Monday evening during the summer months on the terrace opposite the chapel… [We] are treat[ed] with kindness by the officials placed over us, [and] have free conversation among the other patients.Footnote 1

Scholarship charting the transition from therapeutic positivism to psychiatric pessimism within nineteenth-century psychiatry suggests that, when Hunter was writing, Victorian asylums were shrouded in pessimism: authoritarian superintendents, who had abandoned all hope of curing insanity, ruled over-populated institutions within which patients were forced to endure a life sentence.Footnote 2 Hunter’s testimony does not sit comfortably within this narrative, and he was not alone in his positive representation of Broadmoor.

Twenty years before Hunter wrote this letter, Broadmoor, the first criminal lunatic asylum in England and Wales, opened its doors. The opening of the asylum followed decades of unease regarding the proper treatment of criminal lunatics: individuals who had committed crimes while insane, or who had developed insanity in prison. The early to mid- nineteenth century saw much debate concerning provision for criminal lunatics, most of whom were held in county asylums and prisons.Footnote 3 Concern intensified in the 1850s when rising patient numbers, and increasing concern about the association of criminal lunatics with ordinary lunatics, came to a head.Footnote 4 At Bethlem, all criminal lunatics were confined together regardless of offence or mental condition and some physicians expressed concern. Bethlem’s superintendent, W.D. Hood, believed this practice disturbed the discipline and treatment of ordinary lunatics.Footnote 5 Eminent alienist, John Charles Bucknill, expressed concern that the wretched condition of Bethlem’s galleries and yards meant that treatment was impossible.Footnote 6 The Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane, to which Bucknill belonged, called for the removal of criminal lunatics from Bethlem, a place judged so tedious that it inspired them to quote Italian poet, Dante: ‘Who enters here must leave all hope behind.’Footnote 7 They wished to see in England a criminal lunatic asylum similar to that in Dundrum, Ireland, which opened in 1850. Dundrum’s patients were surrounded by acres of land, worked at their trades and were provided with various amusements.Footnote 8

In 1857, the government announced plans to build Broadmoor and, in 1860, the Criminal Lunatics Bill was drawn up to make ‘better provision for the custody and care of criminal lunatics’.Footnote 9 The Bill provided for the Lunacy Commissioners’ annual inspection of Broadmoor, and it empowered the Home Secretary to appoint a Council of Supervision to manage the asylum and the treatment of patients. Under the Council reigned the superintendent whose job it was to ‘superintend… the medical and moral treatment of the asylum’. He controlled all other officers, attendants and servants.Footnote 10 Broadmoor opened to ninety-eight female patients in 1863 and to 221 male patients in 1864. There was one female block with space for one hundred patients and six male blocks with space for 400 patients.Footnote 11 There were two classes of patient: Queen’s pleasure patients, who had been found insane before or during their trial; and insane convicts, who had become insane while undergoing a term of penal servitude and were transferred to Broadmoor from prison until their sentences expired and they were discharged to another asylum or released, or they were declared sane and sent back to prison until their sentences expired. Broadmoor was run like any ordinary asylum, and its patients were treated like ordinary patients – it did not matter that they had committed crimes.Footnote 12

Scholarly work on Broadmoor has hitherto tended to focus on the asylum’s establishment and architecture and on the published works of its superintendents and, while there is much scholarship detailing the crimes and trials of individuals who were found insane and committed into Broadmoor, patients’ experiences inside the asylum have not been thoroughly examined.Footnote 13 The opening of the Broadmoor archive in 2008 revealed sources that help to shed new light on Broadmoor and the experience of its patients. This article is based upon an examination of this archive: annual reports, minutes of meetings, correspondence between the asylum and the Home Office and patient case files. The latter included medical reports, brief notes and memorandums written by the asylum’s attendants, usually to the superintendent, and letters to and from patients, patients’ relatives and friends and the authorities. Approximately 550 patient case files were examined, each of which contained the documents just outlined, but in varying numbers; some, for instance, contained two letters, others over one hundred.

Following Roy Porter’s call for a history of madness from below, historians have undertaken much wonderful research into the social history of madness and asylums, including the patient experience.Footnote 14 Alongside art, medical diaries, autobiographies, manifestos and ‘asylum scribbles’, patients’ letters have been instrumental for numerous scholars when examining what patients and their families felt about the asylum and insanity.Footnote 15 As Jonathan Andrews has suggested, when using personal correspondence to reconstruct beliefs and experiences, we need to be aware of ‘sins of omission’, bias, censorship and the intended audience.Footnote 16 Nevertheless, patients’ letters are valuable because they allow us to hear from the patient directly, rather than through physicians’ descriptions.Footnote 17 Although Marjorie Levine-Clark has noted that ‘the thorny question of how we hear a patient’s voice… is especially difficult with the insane, whose rational ability to represent themselves is an issue’, patients’ letters should not be dismissed as meaningless ramblings.Footnote 18 Broadmoor patients’ letters are often intelligible and articulate accounts of asylum life.Footnote 19 There were patients in Broadmoor who, according to medical testimony, had lost all reason, but there were also two other types of patient who wrote letters: those who were deemed only partially insane and those who were sane but refused discharge because they did not have anyone willing or able to care for them, or because their crime was so heinous that the authorities were waiting for a period of time to pass before they sanctioned their discharge.Footnote 20

Accessing patients’ letters is notoriously difficult. They rarely survive in the archive, and those that do remain tend to have been written by the middle- and upper-class patients.Footnote 21 Moreover, because some asylum authorities tended to retain letters that portrayed the asylum negatively, treating them as demonstrative of a patient’s insanity, we are left with a disproportionately bleak portrayal of asylum life.Footnote 22 The Broadmoor archive is unusual in three ways: first, the existence of patients’ correspondence marks it out from some other depositaries; second, the majority of the asylum’s patients belonged to the working classes, a vast group whose asylum and life experiences tend to be otherwise less documented; third, in contrast to what happened at some other asylums, Broadmoor’s superintendents retained letters displaying both positive and negative responses to the asylum. In the case of positive depictions, copies were sometimes made before the original was posted. While negative representations might have been retained as a demonstration of patients’ mental state or cooperation with treatment, letters in which patients or their friends and family praised the care and treatment received at Broadmoor might have been kept because they could be used in official reports and publications to promote the institution. As it is impossible to establish what proportion of positive and negative letters were retained, and important to remember that illiteracy prevented some patients from recording their thoughts, the letters do not lend themselves to a systematic assessment of patient satisfaction or lay opinion; but that is not the intention here.Footnote 23 Certainly, some patients and their families objected to confinement but, while some of the letters included in this article represented Broadmoor negatively, the majority are positive reflections of, and responses to, the asylum. It is not possible to know how widely such opinions were held, but the letters utilised here show us how some individuals represented asylum life, and they help to qualify the gloomy representations of the late Victorian asylum that historians have constructed based upon patients’ (negative) accounts.

I examine the treatment of Queen’s pleasure patients and insane convicts at Broadmoor between 1863 and 1900, staking a place for the asylum within the broader history of regimes of treatment in British asylums. In the process of examining treatment at Broadmoor, the article lends support to scholars such as Anne Digby and Nancy Tomes who have questioned Michel Foucault’s contention that moral treatment functioned as a form of social control.Footnote 24 I put forth two main arguments. The first relates to the evolution of treatment in Victorian asylums, re-examining the broad assumption that psychiatric pessimism affected all asylums simultaneously. Historians tend to agree that in the 1860s and 1870s psychiatric pessimism took hold, as the optimism that had accompanied the growth of moral treatment along with its promise of a cure for insanity abated. Moreover, historians tend to write in general terms when describing psychiatric pessimism: it was this ‘spectre of chronicity, this horde of the hopeless, which… dominate[d] Victorian psychiatric theorizing and practice’.Footnote 25 An examination of the Broadmoor sources, patients’ letters especially, helps to enrich understandings of the transition from positivism to psychiatric pessimism within Victorian asylums. I argue that Broadmoor does not sit neatly within the current framework and that, when pessimism eventually crept into the regime, it was not all encompassing. Second, I show that, in Broadmoor’s case, moral treatment was determined not so much by the distinction between the sexes as the two different classes of patient – Queen’s pleasure patients and insane convicts – in the asylum. This distinction between patients not only led to different modes of treatment within Broadmoor, but had an impact on patients’ asylum experiences.Footnote 26

2 Treating Insane Convicts Between 1863 and 1900, thirty-six per cent of women and fifty-one per cent of men committed into Broadmoor were insane convicts, transferred to the asylum from prison.Footnote 91 Most were male recidivists, and they are the focus of this section.Footnote 92 Under John Meyer, and upon the recommendation of the Lunacy Commissioners who believed ‘it is the matter of the gravest doubt whether insane persons of the criminal class… should be treated differently from other patients’, convicts and Queen’s pleasure patients were housed side by side.Footnote 93 Moreover, the language of moral treatment, along with practical efforts to treat patients with kindness, patience and various amusements, was applied to both classes. This changed when Orange became superintendent in 1870. Orange took starkly different approaches towards insane convicts and Queen’s pleasure patients; so too did Nicolson. From the early 1870s onwards, Broadmoor’s criminal class were considered physically and mentally degenerate, and incurable. Although this shift might appear to oppose the argument that Broadmoor’s regime remained optimistic, it is not as simple as it might seem, as I will now demonstrate. It is perhaps no coincidence that the stance towards convicts at Broadmoor corresponded to the increasingly damning image of the male criminal that emerged in scientific and legal discourse during the late 1860s and early 1870s, when representations of recidivists became couched in the language of science, sociology, and anthropology.Footnote 94 Some late Victorian alienists and criminologists associated recidivism with mental illness, and it was also considered to be incurable.Footnote 95 To Maudsley, the mere existence of the recidivist proved the existence of a ‘tyranny of organization’: ‘they go criminal as the mad go mad, because they cannot help it’.Footnote 96 In addition, recidivists belonged to the so-called ‘underclass’, and they were deficient in self-control, insubordinate, and unable to ‘apply themselves to steady and systematic work’.Footnote 97 The assumed inherited and incurable nature of their condition meant that no time in prison would reform them.Footnote 98 Such representations were echoed at Broadmoor, where the crimes that recidivists had committed served to illustrate their inability and unwillingness to function in society: burglary, forgery, fraud and embezzlement, housebreaking, receiving stolen goods and robbery.Footnote 99 Moreover, recidivists’ incurable mental weakness, cunning, and disruptive nature posed issues for their treatment. In theory, leisure, religious and secular teaching, and employment were initially expected to treat both classes of patient but, in practice, this proved difficult. In the early 1870s, the reportedly unteachable and disruptive nature of recidivists brought an end to secular teaching.Footnote 100 In contrast to the positive comments he made about female patients’ susceptibility to religious teaching, in 1869 Burt warned the Council of Supervision: ‘There is a danger of desecrating sacred service if disorderly [convict] patients should be admitted to chapel as part of medical treatment.’Footnote 101 Convicts were eventually prohibited from attending chapel. Recidivist William Heaps arrived for his second stint at Broadmoor in 1888 and discovered that things had changed since his discharge in 1874: ‘I found it hard when told… that the convicts “could not be allowed to go to chapel”.’ He demanded ‘a removal back to prison where I shall be allowed… to follow my religion’.Footnote 102 Broadmoor’s convicts were represented as abusive, dirty, childish, and manipulative, and their behaviour was deemed contagious. In 1874, it was declared in the British Medical Journal: ‘These lunatic convicts contaminate and offend… all the other patients with whom they come into contact.’Footnote 103 Echoing such observations, Orange believed that Queen’s pleasure patients would be ‘contaminated by the degraded habits and conversation of the criminal class’ and, upon becoming superintendent, he increased the hours convicts spent in seclusion and separated the two classes.Footnote 104 Queen’s pleasure patients, many of whom reportedly ‘expressed their strong disapproval of having to associate with convicts’, might have welcomed such changes, but some convicts viewed Orange’s regime in terms of punishment rather than treatment.Footnote 105 Recidivist Abraham Thompson wrote the ‘Broadmoor Prisoner’s Prayer’: Eternal God from heaven send Thy curses on this place Stretch forth thine hand omnipotent This Broadmoor-hell erase The demon Orange Lord blot out His minions Lord destroy Blast with Thy all-devouring breath These imps of devilryFootnote 106 Thompson’s prayer highlights the conflict that existed between some convicts and the asylum and it contradicts the positive representations of Orange found in Queen’s pleasure patients’ correspondence. The prayer might have been kept as evidence of Thompson’s perceived obstinate and insane behaviour; indeed he was notoriously troublesome. Such evidence must not be disregarded because a patient was considered insane. As Sander L. Gilman stated: ‘The private worlds created by the insane in their anguish are quite real. They are expressions about the myths they cast into the world and the fears they project into it.’Footnote 107 Regardless of whether Thompson’s feelings were justified, the poem must be viewed as a reflection of his perception of his treatment at Broadmoor. The other documents contained in Thompson’s file suggest that he was deemed irrational and disruptive. It was behaviour such as Thompson’s that justified Orange’s separation of the two classes at Broadmoor. The separation of the classes was soon deemed insufficient. The Lunacy Commissioners reported: The forced association of honest and well-conducted persons who, solely owing to mental disease have broken the law, with convicts… is evidently unjust, and there is every reason to believe that the successful management and treatment of both classes should be more safely and efficiently conducted in separate institutions, with different rules and modes of treatment.Footnote 108 In 1874, the Home Office, influenced by the Lunacy Commissioners and Orange, decided to incarcerate convicts at Woking Prison instead of Broadmoor.Footnote 109 Intellectual distinctions between different types of insanity and criminality thus mapped onto logistical, practical and physical acts of segregation. Removing convicts from Broadmoor better enabled the treatment and care of Queen’s pleasure patients who, the Lunacy Commissioners reported, became ‘more manageable’.Footnote 110 They continued to make such observations as the years passed, and thus all but directly confirming Orange’s contention that the two classes could not be treated at the same institution.Footnote 111 This separation was not to last, however. Doubts about the legality of housing insane convicts in a prison rather than a legally recognised criminal asylum, and the belief that Woking was unsuitable for treatment, led to the construction of a new block at Broadmoor specifically for convicts.Footnote 112 They returned to the asylum, under Nicolson’s charge, in 1888.Footnote 113 The asylum reportedly witnessed an immediate increase in the proportion of disruptive patients and, in 1889, a convict attacked Nicolson in the airing court.Footnote 114 As a result, the convict airing courts were asphalted.Footnote 115 The block thus became increasingly gloomy and prison-like simultaneously to the authorities promoting bright and cheery surroundings for Queen’s pleasure patients, as previously discussed.Footnote 116 Like Orange, under whom he had been deputy superintendent, Nicolson noted the ‘contagious evil influence’ of recidivists.Footnote 117 Moreover, he had previously pointed out the peculiarity of the criminal mind in numerous articles written while a Prison Medical Officer.Footnote 118 While Nicolson did not support the assumption that insanity was unavoidable, as discussed earlier, he did draw from Maudsley when he advised that the existence of an ‘unavoidable “tyranny of (criminal) organisation”’ must be considered.Footnote 119 Nicolson’s views seemingly had an impact on his approach at Broadmoor. His annual reports highlight his damning perception of the criminal, and convicts’ letters suggest bitterness towards the approach of Nicolson and the chaplain under his charge. William Heaps complained: ‘I was told before I came here that Nicolson would treat all alike, well such a prediction is… untrue.’Footnote 120 While reading was considered therapeutic, Heaps claimed he was denied access to the same material offered to Queen’s pleasure patients: ‘I asked the chaplain for a vol. of PE. He informed me that there was only one vol. in the block. A pleasure man… asked him for one and the chaplain sent the gentleman two vols.’Footnote 121 The separation of Broadmoor’s two classes of patient reflected an increasingly antagonistic discourse regarding the criminal that began to emerge during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and it suggests two things. First, it indicates how broader societal concerns from the 1880s regarding the existence of a residuum were reflected at the institution, as Peter Bartlett has shown also happened elsewhere.Footnote 122 The criminal man, whose innate idle and cunning nature was deemed contagious and a threat to the functioning of society, was also deemed a threat to the recovery of previously industrious men (as Queen’s pleasure patients were deemed to be) at Broadmoor, as well as to the general running of the asylum. The irredeemable recidivist was thus separated from hard-working individuals in both social and anthropological discourse and at the asylum. Second, Orange and Nicolson not only separated the insane and the criminal physically, but their publications and reports indicate that both men viewed the criminal and the insane to be two distinct groups requiring different modes of treatment and confinement, something which seemingly affected the experience of some convicts at the asylum.Footnote 123 Orange and Nicolson’s concern about the criminal class highlights their continued optimism about the potential to treat and care for the insane. To them, the presence of the criminal at Broadmoor hindered the asylum’s function as a curative institution in which the insane could receive proper supervision and care.

3 Psychiatric Pessimism at Broadmoor Broadmoor was not immediately affected by broader changes in psychiatry but it did eventually succumb; albeit thirty years after historians usually suggest psychiatric pessimism took hold. No definite shift towards pessimism at Broadmoor is evident until after Richard Brayn [1896–1910] was appointed superintendent in 1896. Over the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Broadmoor’s patient population increased steadily resulting in the construction of further accommodation blocks. By the end of the century, there was space for 187 females and 481 males. Between 1893 and 1898, admissions outnumbered deaths and discharges combined by an average of seven per cent.Footnote 124 In 1899, Brayn reported to the Home Office that there was no room for any more male patients and declared that he had no choice but to house ‘turbulent and dangerous lunatics with those of a quieter disposition’, so hindering treatment.Footnote 125 As had happened at other asylums, it was only once patient numbers increased that Broadmoor’s staff were responsive to ideas of incurability and degeneration that had been expressed since the late 1860s. In direct contrast to Orange’s view that patients were sent to Broadmoor to be cured, Brayn told the Home Office: There is no reason to believe that treatment will be more successful in the future… The majority of Male inmates of this Asylum are not favourable subjects for treatment. By far the greater number are chronic and incurable lunatics.Footnote 126 Brayn, like the county asylum superintendents of the 1860s and 1870s, seemingly had little choice but to alter the treatment of patients accordingly. Unlike some county asylum superintendents, he did not reintroduce mechanical restraint, and thus marked out the asylum from some county asylums.Footnote 127 Instead, the number of hours patients spent in seclusion soared. In 1896 and 1900, 200,000 hours of seclusion were logged, with 177,000 in 1899.Footnote 128 These figures were in stark contrast to those under Orange: 16,893 in the year 1877–78 and 3,339 in the year 1878–79.Footnote 129 The Lunacy Commissioners expressed their concern about Brayn’s heavy use of seclusion to the Home Secretary, who considered it to be a medical matter and refused to intervene.Footnote 130 Brayn’s previous employment may have influenced his approach. Unlike previous superintendents, he had not been deputy superintendent of Broadmoor but had worked in the increasingly regulated Victorian prison system, within which a growing number of institutions adopted seclusion and restraint to treat and subdue criminals.Footnote 131 However, it is unlikely that the Council of Supervision, who recommended a candidate for superintendent to the Home Office, chose Brayn because there was already a shift to pessimism at the asylum: they were an optimistic group of men. Despite increasing patient numbers, the Council opposed the changes occurring under Brayn and fought to promote Broadmoor as a curative institution. When the Home Office suggested constructing another block to reduce overcrowding in the late 1890s, the Council argued, unsuccessfully, for the construction of a new asylum because they feared an increase in patient numbers would prevent the superintendent from having the ‘intimate personal knowledge of the bodily and mental state of each individual patient’ that they felt was necessary for treatment.Footnote 132 It is perhaps no coincidence that the Council’s objections echoed the paternal ethos of Broadmoor’s former superintendent William Orange who had previously stressed both the importance of ‘doctoring the patients’ and the curative nature of Broadmoor: between 1892 and 1904 he was a member of the Council.Footnote 133 Writers and scholars have previously suggested that Brayn viewed Broadmoor as a prison not an asylum and that his regime was one of terror, surveillance and strict regulation within which he discouraged ‘any feeling of common humanity’ between staff and patients.Footnote 134 The Broadmoor archive contains sources that offer a new perspective of Brayn’s regime. Away from the overcrowded male refractory blocks, which Brayn expressed concern about, a different image of Brayn, and of Broadmoor, emerges. Brayn’s approach was certainly more pessimistic than any that had preceded it, but it was not one he applied to all (Queen’s pleasure) patients. Under Brayn, the language and practice of moral treatment persisted and provisions for entertainments, which Brayn acknowledged were ‘a valuable and necessary means of treatment for the insane’, increased.Footnote 135 Rather than keeping patients and staff apart, Brayn played cricket with them; something he observed provided ‘a fund of interest and amusement’ for all involved.Footnote 136 The evidence suggests that while Brayn’s regime was extremely tough for some, aspects of it remained focused upon the successful treatment of insanity. This finding therefore qualifies the recent suggestion that late Victorian alienists lost confidence in the treatment they could offer.Footnote 137 As Louise Hide noted: ‘Alienists attempted to find a compromise between sifting out and treating a minority, while managing large numbers of the chronically disordered who would spend the rest of their lives in one institution or another.’Footnote 138 Patients’ letters further enrich and complicate the transition from positivism to pessimism at Broadmoor. Even once psychiatric pessimism had all but replaced therapeutic optimism, some patients and their families continued to represent the asylum positively. Like his predecessors, Brayn received letters thanking him for his kindness and support as well as for the (sometimes successful) treatment received.Footnote 139 It was not the case for all patients, but the letters indicate that, even if there was no hope of a cure, Broadmoor continued to offer refuge, comfort and opportunities for companionship. Unlike what historians have suggested happened at other asylums following the onset of pessimism, Broadmoor was not an institution within which all patients were forced to endure a ‘crushing and cruel’ life sentence as a result of an incurable illness.Footnote 140