Introduction

The social history of insanity has proved a seductive paradigm for students of the management of the dependent poor in nineteenth-century England. The insane have been perceived as ‘casualties’ of class and gender power relations during the transformation from a paternalistic rural economy into an industrialized capitalist state. While the Elizabethan Poor Law legislation of 1601 was the administrative foundation on which the system of care was constructed, until recently two other themes dominated the historiography of mental disorder: first, that of the rise of psychiatry and psychiatrists; and second, the expansion of the Victorian asylum as society's preferred response. A reappraisal of the ‘revisionist’ interpretation of events is now underway, however, and a more complex picture is emerging. Mad paupers are no longer so readily annexed to political dogma.

Scull's ‘deeply researched and provocative account of the growth of public asylums’ in nineteenth-century England, published as Museums of Madness in 1979, attributed the expansion of ‘asylumdom’ to the emerging commercial market economy and the consequent extrusion of inconvenient non-working people from the mainstream of family and community life. Scull interpreted the growing interest in madness by specialist mad-doctors as an unattractive bid for power and status by a group of financially insecure members of a profession still on the threshold of respectability.

Looking back twenty years later, Scull acknowledged that his work was stimulated in part by Foucault's brilliant but flawed essays on power relations, Madness and Civilisation.