Sarah Wise

In 1919 ‘Bessie B.’, aged 24, was committed to Abingdon Workhouse, known locally as ‘the Grubber’, under the Mental Deficiency Act (MDA) of 1913. She was unmarried, had given birth to four children each with a different father, had syphilis and appeared to be destitute even though she had earned her own living without needing to fall back on Poor Relief. While Bessie showed no signs of mental deficiency, she was certified as a ‘moral imbecile’. Doubts were cast on whether or not she should be detained simply because of her ‘bad character’, but the workhouse medical officer believed that it would be ‘in her own interest’ in order to treat her syphilis. She left the institution five years later, one of the ‘lucky’ few to have got out.

Bessie B. was among the tens of thousands of children and young adults who were labelled ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’, ‘feeble minded’ or ‘moral imbeciles’ and forcibly confined in institutions when the MDA came into force on 1 April 1914. The practice of sequestering away young women and men for social and moral infractions such as getting pregnant out of wedlock, petty thieving, vandalism, persistent drunkenness and vagrancy has always been known about, but historians have struggled to ascertain the full extent to which it took place mainly because many records were lost, destroyed or closed under a 100-year rule to protect patient confidentiality.

The social historian Sarah Wise faced these obstacles too. Yet in her work to expose the shocking consequences of the MDA, particularly as it was applied to those who were identified as ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘moral imbeciles’, she has dug deep into the archives to show how a single act of Parliament wrecked tens of thousands of lives in the first half of the 20th century. The Undesirables is as compelling as it is shocking, advancing our knowledge of this shameful episode in leaps and bounds.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Louise Hide is a Wellcome Trust Fellow in Medical Humanities and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London.… (mais)

Sarah Wise writes a detailed and varied account of the Old Nichol, a 15 acre East End slum in Victorian London, a place of desperate poverty yet brave and stoic community. She uses personal stories and varied sources to chronicle the depths of the problems: from filthy sewage contaminated streets and houses, to rising child mortality, malnutrition and overcrowding, whole families often forced into single room accommodations below ground and sharing with their donkeys and animals. She also exposes the ironic fact that the landlords making money out of this abysmal poverty were often London’s richest, including members of the peerage, lawyers and churchmen.

“The Nichol’s thirty or so streets and courts of more or less rotten early-nineteenth-century houses were home to around 5,700 people, of whom four-fifths were children. Its death rate was almost double that of the rest of Bethnal Green, the very poor East London parish at whose western boundary the Nichol stood….The annual mortality rate of the Nichol in the late 1880s was 40 per 1,000 people; Bethnal Green’s hovered between 22 and 23 per 1,000 for these years, not much above the London (and, indeed, the national) figure of 19 to 20 per 1,000. (Today, the death rate for England and Wales is 5.94 per 1,000.) One-third of all these London deaths were those of babies and infants. Bethnal Green’s death rate for babies under the age of one was in line with the average figure for England and Wales of 150 per 1,000 live births; in the Nichol it was a horrific 252 per 1,000….the Nichol was for many an East Ender a final stopping-off point before entry into the dreaded workhouse, and the less-dreaded death therein.”

Wide also turns her attentions to the efforts of the wealthy to “rescue” the poor, a scope which spans from the ludicrous and self-aggrandizing to the truly altruistic. The philosophies range from socialism, religious fervour, to a belief that the poor are so because of their own moral vices, a hatred and contempt towards them, sometimes backed up by pseudoscience such as eugenics. She looks at various characters working within the Old Nichol such as the larger-than-life Father Jay of Holy Trinity with his boxing clubs and shelters. Finally the only plausible solution seemed to be demolition. The London City Council was created and began the building of a model new housing called Boundary Estate, which ironically when it was finally built, displacing thousands from the Old Nichol, only housed eleven of the original inhabitants due to being either unaffordable for them or unsuited to their needs.

I found this to be a highly informative, honest and sympathetic account which I appreciated as an insight into the real day-to-day lives of some of my ancestors who were unfortunate enough to live in the Old Nichol. Thank you Sarah Wise.… (mais)

First, I want to emphasise that unfortunately this pays very little attention to the fate of poorer "lunatics" and pretty much nothing about the public asylum system in general. It focuses instead on a series of cases by richer people involved in the private system and their struggles to change it etc. As long as you're aware of those limitations though it's absolutely fascinating. Every story was incredibly readable and interesting.

One of the most fascinating stories is John Perceval, son of the PM Spencer Perceval, who wrote an account of his time in an asylum he was confined to after a breakdown possibly triggered by his involvement in the Irvingites, a Christian religious sect. After finally being released he founded the Alleged Lunatics' Friend Society, which agitated for reform of the lunacy law as well as advocating for those felt to be unlawfully or unfairly confined, a cause he dedicated the rest of his life too. The book gives a good account of his experiences and his ideas, promoting an idea of recovery based on a patient's internal life and understanding that still seems fresh today. He comes across as an impressive character, with an unusual blend of a highly aristocratic sense of hierarchy combined with strong sympathy and material support for those of the "lower orders" treated badly.… (mais)

Taking place only 3 years after the exploits of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh...John Bishop, James May and Thomas Williams are arrested for the murder of Carlo Ferrari for the purpose of selling his body for dissection. The worst of the lot, John Bishop, was a veteran resurrectionist of 12 years! The bodies he and May had been selling were barely fresh enough, so they preyed on London's most vulnerable for higher gain. They only got caught because the anatomist thought Carlo's body was TOO fresh...

Wise takes you down to the criminal underbelly of London. Wise examines how a unforgiving civil government allowed the poor and desperate to be taken advantage of. You learn about the underground tunnels and passages connecting various pubs that acted as guild halls. How resurrectionist wives would pretend to be a relative of a dying pauper to obtain their body for their husbands. How a body could go to an anatomist, but the teeth and scalp might go to a dentist or wigmaker. Through the subsequent trial, Wise then demonstrates just how elaborate this system was and every notable surgeon was in on it. Sir Astley Cooper, King's College, Guy's Hospital, all of them.

I'm glad Wise decided to focus on Carlo, because he was also a victim of rampant child-trafficking in Italy at that time, and it's a rare thing for historians to dive into that. The "padroni" would buy children from peasants in northern Italy and use the child to beg for them. And thankfully, the result of this trial led to legislation dictating the rights of a corpse and the eventual downfall of the resurrectionist trade.… (mais)