I

In the early 1890s Mrs Cooper, seemingly fraught and worn-down, replied to a letter from her husband who had been incarcerated in Broadmoor, England and Wales's first criminal lunatic asylum, for twenty-five years:

She declared she was leaving her home and ‘there will be no one to take any more letters in so its no use writing’.Footnote ¹

Only fragments of this letter remain; how Mrs Cooper addressed her husband or ended the letter is unknown. Nevertheless, what is there is visceral, reflecting years of distress and hardship. Other documents in Cooper's case file suggest that his family severed ties with him. Years later, when Cooper was gravely ill, Broadmoor's staff wrote a note to inform his loved ones. They failed to locate them, and ‘no friends’ was scribbled on the note. Such cases highlight the long-term pain and hardship that some families experienced through having a breadwinner, father, and husband committed to Broadmoor. Family letters allow historians to view asylums from the bottom up, providing a glimpse of ‘the human and emotional side of patient and family lives, an aspect that is often missing from official bureaucratic sources’.Footnote ² These rare, valuable sources enable new and significant insights into the Victorian asylum.

The 1845 Asylums Act required each county in England and Wales to have an asylum for its pauper insane. Scholars and historians of psychiatry have debated the role and significance of the Victorian asylum. Much attention has been paid to why asylums emerged, why patients were admitted and how they were treated, why patients were discharged, and the experiences of those who worked and lived inside them.Footnote ³ Over the last thirty years, historians have responded to Roy Porter's call to write medical history ‘from below’, with a focus on patients. Doing so has helped to develop our understanding of the role and reach of the asylum.Footnote ⁴ Given that many families were involved in the committal of insane relatives to asylums, it stands to reason that most patients had at least one family member affected by their committal. There are swathes of the population – the spouses, children, parents, and siblings of the insane, as well as their friends and neighbours – whose lives were affected by the existence of these institutions. Yet we know little about how patients’ families in England and Wales were affected by, responded to, and overcame a relative's asylum committal. Work thus remains to be done if we are to understand the full impact and reach of the asylum.

While excellent studies do exist, what we know about patients’ families represents the tip of the iceberg. We know that families wrote to asylums to request information or express concern about their relatives' well-being, to ask about an asylum's procedures, or to obtain their relatives' discharge.Footnote ⁵ Yet historians’ considerations of these points rarely include the broader social and familial context of such requests and concerns. Historians have acknowledged that asylum records are useful for exploring family life, but their focus tends towards the (domestic) reasons why individuals developed insanity; how families coped with caring for an insane relative at home; families’ roles in admission and discharge; and families’ relationships with asylum doctors, and their role in shaping medical care.Footnote ⁶ When the impact on families is explicitly considered, the focus tends towards the material effect upon the household.Footnote ⁷

But focusing on economics does not go far enough. It paints Victorian families as primarily pragmatic units of domestic economics rather than the living, feeling people that historians of the family have uncovered.Footnote ⁸ Moreover, approaches which consider the household rather than its constituents ignore the fact that effects were not contained within single households and, more importantly, that different family members were affected differently and found different ways to overcome the loss of a relative to the asylum. Overlooking these things underplays the significance and impact of the Victorian asylum, and misrepresents the Victorian working-class families trying to navigate life without a spouse, parent, child, or sibling.Footnote ⁹ Recent work on Irish asylums undertaken by Catherine Cox and Alice Mauger provides some evidence of affective familial bonds,Footnote ¹⁰ and scholars working on colonial asylums have illuminated how families were affected emotionally.Footnote ¹¹ Catharine Coleborne has used families’ correspondence with asylums in Australasia to examine the relationship between the colonial family and the asylum, observing that letters ‘afford us a glimpse of emotional responses to managing mental breakdown’ and insights ‘into the lives of families’.Footnote ¹² Like Coleborne, I use families’ correspondence to move beyond the walls of the asylum and unite the histories of the asylum and the family. I do this within the context of late Victorian England, and with a focus on the day-to-day lives and experiences of the families of approximately 525 patients committed to Broadmoor between 1863 and 1900.

Broadmoor opened in 1863 in Berkshire. It housed Queen's pleasure patients, who had committed a crime and were found insane when tried, and insane convicts, who had been convicted of a crime and imprisoned before developing insanity in prison.Footnote ¹³ Its patients came from all over England and Wales,Footnote ¹⁴ and, unlike many patients in county asylums, most were a long way from their families.Footnote ¹⁵ Like other Victorian asylums, Broadmoor was not an impenetrable walled fortress.Footnote ¹⁶ By writing and visiting, families were almost ever-present within the asylum.

Using hundreds of letters, which survive in patients’ case files, I explore the material and emotional effects that having a relative committed to Broadmoor had on individual family members. Historians have lamented the scarcity of such sources,Footnote ¹⁷ and have extracted lay commentary from medical case notes and physicians’ casebooks but, as Jonathan Andrews highlights, these documents report lay voices through the biased gaze of the physician.Footnote ¹⁸ The quantity, content, and context of the Broadmoor letters make them an unusually rich and unmediated source for examining the impacts of asylum committal on families. We can read their emotions and see glimpses of their day-to-day lives and actions. Families of Queen's pleasure patients seemingly wrote the most letters and are thus the main focus, but families of insane convict patients occasionally feature.Footnote ¹⁹ While fewer letters from the latter appear to exist, this does not mean that they were uncaring. Some convicts were transferred to Broadmoor without their families’ knowledge; some did not have the same familial networks as Queen's pleasure patients; and such networks – and/or the inclination to write letters – may have been diminished by constraints on letter writing while in prison, which ‘greatly reduced [letters’] usefulness to anyone genuinely seeking to keep alive emotional attachment to someone outside’.Footnote ²⁰

The surviving letters reveal the practical significance of family members’ relationships with their incarcerated relatives and the effects on families, both during a relative's committal and after their discharge. Because 84 per cent of those committed to Broadmoor between 1863 and 1900 were working class, the letters also provide an unusual window into working-class family life, emotions, and subjectivities.Footnote ²¹ In normal circumstances, working-class families did not typically exchange (or keep) regular letters,Footnote ²² but the enforced separation of committal encouraged epistolary correspondence, and the oral quality of the letters suggests that the poor were typically writing for themselves.Footnote ²³ Both male and female family members, sometimes from within the same family, wrote to Broadmoor. Letters often appear to have acted as substitutes for conversations that we can imagine would have taken place in the home or in the superintendent's office, had distance not necessitated written communication.

Access to the original correspondence is, however, partial; why particular letters were kept or duplicated is indeterminable, but often only one side of the conversation remains, only portions of some letters were retained, and occasionally legibility is an issue.Footnote ²⁴ Nevertheless, they are a highly valuable qualitative source. The presence of patients’ replies to family members’ letters shows that some reached their intended recipients. Whether or not the superintendent censored letters either by not passing them on or by reading them to patients, they do show what family members wanted to communicate. They are ideal for exploring questions of family ties, agency, and emotion.Footnote ²⁵ Letters between family members and to Broadmoor's superintendent provide an intimate insight into families’ emotional worlds in nineteenth-century England. They display life, emotions, and relationships as they were lived in real time, rather than as they were reimagined in the composed autobiographical accounts that historians tend to rely upon to examine family life and subjectivities.Footnote ²⁶

This article offers the first sustained examination of the effects of asylum committal on patients’ individual family members. By shifting focus from the effects on patients to the effects on families, and by taking a new approach – engaging with the history of the family, and focusing on individual family members, considering factors including age, class, gender, change over time, and stage in life cycle – the article examines the reach and significance of the asylum further beyond its walls. It tells an important, untold narrative from the perspective of family members and opens new insights into the histories of the asylum and family life in the late nineteenth century.

In the first half of the article, it is shown that effects of asylum committal on families were not solely or even primarily economic. It affected their relationships outside the asylum, and their sense of self; one's role in the family ‘played an important part in the … formulation of personal identity’,Footnote ²⁷ and the loss of a relative to Broadmoor forced some family members to reconfigure their role. Nevertheless, despite the material and emotional hardships that some family members faced and the challenges posed to their day-to-day lives and identities, the second half of the article shows that family ties and affective relationships mattered a great deal to working-class Victorians. Some found new ways to give meaning to their relationship with their incarcerated relative despite the distance between them, and they sought to give meaning – via their words and actions – to their relative's life despite the hardships that their committal to Broadmoor had caused. Yet this continued attachment had further costs for families. Where familial solidarity persisted, the asylum had long-lasting and far-reaching effects, including being policed by the asylum as long as their relative lived, even if they were discharged.

II

Committal to Broadmoor often resulted in long-distance, long-term separation between families and their incarcerated relatives. Between 1863 and 1900, just 9 per cent of male patients and 25 per cent of female patients were released from the asylum. A total of 40 per cent of male and 36 per cent of female patients died there, and 38 per cent of male patients and 30 per cent of female patients were transferred to their local county asylum.Footnote ²⁸ How many were later released from their local asylum is unknown. The immediate effects of losing a relative to Broadmoor were burdensome, but the long-term impacts were often devastating. The effects were contingent upon, and evolved over, the course of the life cycle. Some family members overcame the difficulties they faced, but others did not, and here we see the influence that gender, class, age, and relationship with their incarcerated relative and others had on individuals’ ability to withstand having a relative institutionalized far from home.

Most patients entered Broadmoor during the prime of their lives, between their mid-twenties and early forties (see Tables 1 and 2), when the entire family was dependent on men's earnings and on women's domestic work, including childcare.Footnote ²⁹ Many families thus found the absence of a spouse, parent, or child both financially and emotionally difficult. Both husbands and wives were thrust into the dual role of homemaker and provider, and each struggled. Family historians have shown how instrumental women were to the Victorian home; they were wage-earners, homemakers, and carers.Footnote ³⁰ Yet female patients’ families rarely sought to retrieve money. One family sought money for their relative's young daughter but perhaps only because the child's father was absent.Footnote ³¹ It is unsurprising, given how central managing the home and caring for children was to working-class wives, that the loss of a homemaker and mother concerned families. One patient's mother asked the superintendent: ‘do you think she will ever be able to manage her family anymore?’Footnote ³² Many ‘distressed’ husbands told Broadmoor's superintendent that they were ‘very anxious’ to have their wives ‘home again’.Footnote ³³ Some worried that their wives were not seeing their children enough. Bridget Hart's husband could not afford to take his five children to Broadmoor and asked the superintendent whether she could be transferred to their local asylum so ‘that she could see her children often’.Footnote ³⁴ But husbands also missed their companions. Their letters make their love and attachment clear; Annie Ingham's husband longed to maintain correspondence with his wife.Footnote ³⁵ That the loss of female relatives was felt in such ways demonstrates the strength of affective bonds.

Table 1

The ages of men committed to Broadmoor as a percentage of Broadmoor's male population

Source: Based on an analysis of Broadmoor's admissions registers: D/H14/D1/1/1/1, 1863–1871; D/H14/D1/1/1/2, 1868–1900.

Table 2

The ages of women committed to Broadmoor as a percentage of Broadmoor's female population

Source: Based on an analysis of Broadmoor's admissions registers: D/H14/D1/1/1/1, 1863–1871; D/H14/D1/1/1/2, 1868–1900.

While their income would not always stretch to covering the return train fare to Broadmoor, patients’ husbands were not ordinarily thrust into poverty as a result of their wife's committal. In his study of Victorian suicide, Victor Bailey argues that the loss of a spouse disrupted men's domestic lives more than women's.Footnote ³⁶ An absent wife was challenging for husbands, and certainly caused emotional distress, but, although some moved away to work, sometimes abroad,Footnote ³⁷ and others started new families,Footnote ³⁸ husbands were seemingly more willing and (financially) able to preserve their homes than patients’ wives. Their ability to remain a breadwinner, particularly by relying upon their sisters or sisters-in-law to help care for their children, meant that they had less need to reformulate their own role in the family, or the family structure, than patients’ wives, who appear to have suffered more, according to the correspondence.

In the late nineteenth century, being a husband and father meant leading and exerting authority over the household, and providing financially. Their husbands’ absence forced some patients’ wives to reformulate their identities by assuming these responsibilities. In some ordinary working-class households, ‘mothers made a point of their husbands’ authority’; fathers were ‘judge and arbiters of rewards and punishments’.Footnote ³⁹ Patients’ wives could hardly threaten ‘you wait till your father gets home’, but some did request that their incarcerated husbands perform an aspect of their paternal duty by exerting authority and influence over their (older and generally male) children. Joseph Redding's wife wrote to him regarding their son:

In conjunction with recent studies on fatherhood, such correspondence indicates that working-class fathers were understood to be more than providers, their loss felt in non-material ways.Footnote ⁴¹

Nevertheless, money was a concern. What many wives needed from their husbands was money to support themselves and their children.Footnote ⁴² Some survived without their husband's wages or physical presence. One continued her husband's rope-making business, and others claimed their pensions or savings.Footnote ⁴³ But such cases were rare because most male patients did not have these things. Financial survival was easier for wives with few or no dependent children, or with older children who could contribute to the household economy.Footnote ⁴⁴ But most wives were left to care and provide for their young children alone, with devastating consequences. Low wages and seasonal work disproportionately affected women, so, even if women were in or found work, their earnings would not have matched those of their husbands,Footnote ⁴⁵ and employment would not necessarily have significantly reduced their anxieties: they still had homes to maintain and children to care for.

The limited agency that working-class wives possessed, and in particular their inability to live independently of their husbands,Footnote ⁴⁶ meant that the loss of a husband was in many ways more traumatic than the loss of a wife. Numerous ‘anxious’ and ‘desolate’ wives begged the superintendent for their husbands’ release because they feared starvation and poverty, as also happened following the death or prolonged un- or underemployment of a breadwinner.Footnote ⁴⁷ To survive, some sought poor relief or took in lodgers.Footnote ⁴⁸ Others had little choice but to dismantle their homes. Some considered selling their belongings, but others remarried or cohabited.Footnote ⁴⁹ Patient Arthur Ludlow's wife had an illegitimate child, and his sister informed him that ‘[your wife] considers she is utterly free from you and tends doing the best for herself and children’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Some wives made hard decisions. Unable to support all of their children, Robert Jones's wife sent their ten-year-old daughter to a home for waifs and strays because it was deemed ‘best for [the] child as she will have training as well as [the] comforts of a good home’, which her mother could not provide.Footnote ⁵¹ Patient Joseph Mallon's wife was ‘very anxious’ about her husband, who ‘was always good and dutiful to me being a provider to 3 helpless children’.Footnote ⁵² After the superintendent explained that her husband's release was not imminent, Mallon's wife told him that the ‘one shilling and six pence and one loaf of bread’ that her local parish gave her was inadequate. She asked whether Broadmoor had a school for patients’ children because ‘I am not able to support them … I think they would be better in a school I was told there was a school now open for them.’ He replied that there was ‘no such school’; what happened to the children is unknown.Footnote ⁵³ Mallon's wife was likely thinking of schools for convicts’ children.Footnote ⁵⁴ Other patients’ wives sent their children to such schools; because they were gendered, this sometimes meant separating siblings.Footnote ⁵⁵

These cases suggest that, unlike some patients’ husbands, and unlike the case in some areas of the country, not all women had access to familial or community support networks within which ‘auxiliary parents’ – relatives and neighbours – operated.Footnote ⁵⁶ To avoid the workhouse they had to choose; they could not be both breadwinner and homemaker. Some families relocated, which explains the lack of kinship support. The stigma of having a criminal lunatic for a relative – and the shame attached to both criminality and insanity – might have led to some families being shunned by their communities or might have discouraged them from asking for help. Unlike ordinary asylum patients, who were sometimes secretly admitted by their families,Footnote ⁵⁷ Queen's pleasure patients were rarely sent to Broadmoor without their neighbours’ knowledge; press coverage of their crime and trial, or being called to the witness stand, made sure of that.

Patients’ parents were both grief-stricken and threatened by the loss of a male wage-earner. While they might have initially managed financially, long-term detention was more likely to have noticeable material effects on their lives. Financing old age was a pressing concern for the ageing working class, for whom reduced employment opportunities ensured that the spectre of the workhouse loomed large.Footnote ⁵⁸ Without state pensions, many depended upon their wage-earning children.Footnote ⁵⁹ One patient's father told Broadmoor's superintendent: ‘I am … getting old and if I could only obtain his liberty he would be of great assistance to me.’Footnote ⁶⁰ However, and despite the material hardships some feared, while some patients’ spouses had little choice but to reframe their role in the family, patients’ parents might have achieved a renewed sense of purpose. In ordinary life, some ageing men and women struggled with their loss of parental identity as their children became independent.Footnote ⁶¹ Efforts to assist their now-dependent adult child may have provided patients’ parents with the opportunity to continue (or resume) their parental role. Some tried to influence their child's experience at Broadmoor, to provide reassurance, and promised to care for them if released.Footnote ⁶² Patient Mary Dyson's father told her that her husband had started a new family, but in a powerful statement of attachment he reminded her that she was not alone: ‘You have a good mother and a good father … you have four brothers and two sisters.’ He reassured his ‘Dear Daughter’, ‘if you get your liberty myself and your brother has a home and a good one for you as long as we live’.Footnote ⁶³ Fathers of sons demonstrated their attachment in traditional ways, promising to provide work or vocational instruction upon release, much as they might have done when they were on the cusp of adulthood.Footnote ⁶⁴ Of course, meeting the needs of grown children infantilized by insanity may have been an additional stress for parents facing the ‘myriad losses’ of old age – earnings, physical ability, and their spouse.Footnote ⁶⁵

Establishing how patients’ young children felt about losing a parent to the asylum is difficult.Footnote ⁶⁶ Young children's guardians often communicated messages from them to their incarcerated relative: ‘goodnight kisses’ and wishes, and a Happy Christmas and New Year.Footnote ⁶⁷ The difficulty of cajoling young children into verbalizing messages might have encouraged the author to embellish with the aim of improving a relative's morale. Certainly, some young children did not appear to understand what had happened, or the importance of their well wishes or news of their well-being to their detained parent. Mary Ann Daniels's young daughter was being cared for by the child's grandmother, who sent Daniels a photograph (a ‘likeness’) of her. Whether in addition to visiting or to compensate for an inability to do so, the provision of this keepsake can be read as an act of care, intended to comfort and reassure, yet the child's energy caused a need for written reassurance: ‘you must not think anything about that black that is upon one of her eyes because she wood not sit still … we could not get her to sit still’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Older children were more conscious of a parent's absence, especially at particular points in the year, including Christmas and birthdays.Footnote ⁶⁹

We can assume that, for some, having a parent detained at Broadmoor was devastating and confusing, shaking any semblance of stability or normality. For some, this began from the moment their parent committed a crime: some lost a sibling or parent; some testified at their parent's trial.Footnote ⁷⁰ A parent's committal to Broadmoor disrupted a child's home life. Not only was (at least) one parent absent, but stepparents, stepsiblings, or half-siblings sometimes appeared. Some children were sent away from home, or were affected by the poverty and starvation feared or felt within their home. This also had emotional consequences. In her study of Victorian working-class autobiographies, Julie-Marie Strange observed that ‘some children were undoubtedly contemptuous in adulthood of fathers who had not done enough to support families’.Footnote ⁷¹ This appears in the Broadmoor correspondence, too. As they aged, and perhaps having had time to reflect upon their childhood, some older children criticized their fathers for leaving their mothers destitute. Many years after he was confined, Dodwell sent numerous letters home accusing his wife of infidelity.Footnote ⁷² Like other Victorian children who retrospectively viewed their poor and hard-working mothers as ‘self-sacrificing’ and ‘heroic’,Footnote ⁷³ his eldest son, Henry, defended his mother and, in doing so, highlighted Dodwell's failure as a father to provide: ‘mother has behaved in a way that would be a model to another woman left with a family of four young children, owing the last 16 years of her life has been one of anxiety and misery, and times scarcely not knowing where the next meal was to come’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Some child–parent relationships were maintained through correspondence, evolving as children aged. As also occurred in ordinary circumstances, when children became less reliant upon parents for provision, they instead sought advice.Footnote ⁷⁵ Sons in particular detailed their daily struggles to their fathers, perhaps hoping to receive some guidance.Footnote ⁷⁶ Other sons rejected their father's attempts to guide them. Dodwell wrote to Henry at work, relating his grievances and advising him to change employment. Henry responded: ‘I think I told you once before that there were no letters allowed in the stores, but within this last week I have received two notes, which I thank you for nearly getting me discharged.’ He continued, ‘I don't wish to receive any more worrying letters … neither am I going to be talked over by anyone to do what I do not wish to do.’Footnote ⁷⁷ Such attempts to deny fathers the opportunity to fulfil their paternal role were not necessarily the result of hard feelings caused by their incarceration, but mirrored tensions between ordinary Victorian fathers and their sons.Footnote ⁷⁸

Some families were determined to protect children from the trauma of visiting or hearing from their relative, but this could result in family tension. Patient Annie Ingham's seven-year-old son was told she had died, only to discover the truth ten years later.Footnote ⁷⁹ We can only imagine the subsequent tension between him and his father, who had kept the secret. In other cases, the tension caused by efforts to protect children is explicit. By their own accounts, Dodwell's children missed him terribly when they were young, but his daughter later confessed to her father that their mother had encouraged them not to write,Footnote ⁸⁰ and their mother asked the superintendent to send letters intended for the children to her because ‘they prove to be of disadvantage to the young people’.Footnote ⁸¹ Dodwell's case is unusual because it was assumed that his children were better off without him. The chaplain and master at Emmanuel Hospital explained his concerns to Broadmoor's superintendent, echoing the message of Religious Tract Society stories in which absent or inadequate fathers needed replacing with an appropriate male role model:Footnote ⁸²

He expressed his fears clearly: ‘I think the first thing is to protect this poor family from the … utter [devastation] that would ensue if the father were set free.’Footnote ⁸³

The confusion and distress that resulted from having an incarcerated parent, and the subsequent efforts of family and friends to protect children, appeared to inspire within some children (who were coming of age and perhaps longing to exercise some independence) a desire to demonstrate their filial duty, a notion grounded in scripture: the honouring of one's mother and father. Unlike some patients’ spouses who reconfigured their identities or assumed new roles in order to survive, patients’ young children retained their identities as dutiful children. Dodwell's youngest son, Edward, ran away from school to visit his father, perhaps influenced by his father's numerous letters demanding that he and his siblings remain ‘faithful’ to him.Footnote ⁸⁴ As some children aged, an evolution in the child–parent relationship is evident in their correspondence (or lack thereof). Edward stopped writing to and visiting his father, but his brother, Henry, despite the angry letters he had previously sent to his father, continued to correspond with him and Broadmoor's superintendents. As he aged, Henry indulged his father's quirks and demands, expressing compassion and pity for a father whom he came to perceive as ‘fragile’ rather than failing.Footnote ⁸⁵

It is clear that having a parent at Broadmoor, a situation akin to having a neglectful or absent father, did not always strain parent–child relationships beyond repair. Anthony Owston's sons were very young when he murdered their mother and was sent to Broadmoor, but they remained a constant and supportive presence in his life until his death.Footnote ⁸⁶ This research supports what Strange found in her examination of autobiographies: ‘when providing faltered, father–child dynamics might come under strain but, in a long view, could survive and become manifest in alternative ways’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Moreover, the fact that correspondence allows us to see this in real time confirms that this is not an effect of rose-tinted autobiographical writing, but evidence of resilient parent–child bonds.

Having a relative committed to Broadmoor had effects that spread far beyond the asylum walls and into the wider family and community. During the nineteenth century, poor families often lived in close proximity to one another and provided mutual support.Footnote ⁸⁸ This helped to relieve the burden on some families who, without access to formal or charitable support networks for the families of the insane, united to support and protect each other financially and emotionally. Efforts to protect those directly affected drew others into correspondence with the asylum. One patient's brother begged the superintendent to release his sister because he was concerned about their ‘disparing’ mother,Footnote ⁸⁹ and a friend of a patient's wife – aware that she was ‘sometimes subject to violent hysterical fits’ – asked the superintendent to prevent ‘the poor woman much misery’ by dissuading her from visiting Broadmoor.Footnote ⁹⁰

Some family members tried to survive and move forward in their own way: the father who told his son his mother was dead; the mother who tried to stop her children from communicating with their father; the spouses who remarried; the worried daughter-in-law who secretly begged the superintendent to reject her husband's petition for the release of his father.Footnote ⁹¹ But each of these methods of survival potentially carried further damaging consequences: tension, conflict, and secrecy within the home. Correspondence reveals struggles between family members that might not have ordinarily existed. Patient Charles Cornish's wife was admonished by her ‘pig-headed old mother-in-law’, who ‘reproaches her with neglect’ because she was reluctant to visit her husband.Footnote ⁹² Such cases were not unusual,Footnote ⁹³ and patients became the subject of tension between marital and blood relations which, in normal circumstances, they might have mediated.

The preceding discussion shows that losing a wage-earner or homemaker had significant effects on the family, potentially not only causing poverty but also bringing about the temporary or permanent reconfiguration of the family, developing reliance upon kinship networks to maintain the family's health and integrity, and shaping familial relationships. Importantly, it demonstrates that who entered the asylum mattered: the effects on and concerns of family members depended on their relationship with the patient. For spouses, gender and class affected the significance of the impacts, but an individual's life stage and ability to access support networks were also important. Unsurprisingly, those with limited agency felt the impacts of losing a relative to Broadmoor the most. Some wives and parents not only felt effects immediately, but also forfeited their imagined financially secure future because that expectation was premised upon provision by their spouse or child. Wives also faced the greatest challenge to their sense of self, particularly if they had to dismantle their home, allow others to care for their children, or assume an unexpected role. This may explain why marriage appears to have been the most fragile bond, while blood kinship proved more resilient. Examining tangible, structural effects on patients’ families also reveals the emotional impacts. While family members’ responses were complex and often contradictory, changing over time and in relation to their own life stages, they suggest the importance and resilience of familial ties. Cutting across the differences in experience is the way in which family members expressed their loss: they were ‘bereaved’, ‘heartbroken’, and ‘anxious’.Footnote ⁹⁴ But, irrespective of the heartache and hardships their relatives’ incarceration had caused, some families were unwilling to abandon them to Broadmoor.

III

Families’ anger, fear, and sadness at how their lives had turned out, and love and affection towards the relative who had caused those feelings, were not mutually exclusive. This section examines families’ words and actions, including visiting, to show how some united to support one another and to demonstrate their continued attachment to their relatives.

Letter writing was an important means by which families communicated with relatives in asylums. In an effort to keep them part of the home, they shared exciting and mundane family news, sought advice, consoled relatives when they were ill or scared, admonished them if they misbehaved, and communicated their affection explicitly in their salutations.Footnote ⁹⁵ Family members placed emotional value on their letters, which could lessen the emotional if not physical distance between them. Upon hearing that his father was ‘very depressed and restless in mind’, Anthony Owston's son told the superintendent: ‘I am writing to my father and trust that the letter may be handed to him as I think that a letter from home may be of great value to him at the present crisis.’Footnote ⁹⁶ He described another letter to his father as ‘cheering’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Letters were not simply cheering platitudes, however, but sincere, intimate communication between and about relatives.

Some family members sent their relative upbeat, comforting letters while simultaneously writing anxiety-ridden letters to the superintendent, suggesting a clear awareness of audience and the performativity involved in writing. One patient's mother begged the superintendent to ‘take pity on her poor aged mother … I cannot express my hartfelt grief … relieve me of this distress and restore my daughter to me again or I will bring my gray hare and sorrow to the grave’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Although clearly feeling wretched, this mother still encouraged her daughter to ‘keep your spirits up’.Footnote ⁹⁹ For some family members, Broadmoor's superintendent became a confidant;Footnote ¹⁰⁰ they shared their troubles and some confessed that they were keeping concerns or circumstances from their relatives, a situation akin to what David Gerber called an ‘epistolary masquerade’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Given that they omitted bad news or worries or embellished the family's well-being to protect their relative, however, this should be read as an act of care and love.Footnote ¹⁰²

Letters to the superintendent highlight the existence of anxieties shared by family members around the world; they sought reassurance that relatives were eating, healthy, and well treated, particularly if they had not heard from them.Footnote ¹⁰³ Families who received ‘rational’ and ‘sane’ letters from relatives struggled to understand or accept their medical diagnosis.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Others asked about their relatives’ illness or chances of release.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Requests for information suggest concern and attachment, as do requests for the superintendent's assistance. Some asked him to do something on their behalf, such as compassionately delivering sad news to a relative.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Others asked if they could send items – photographs, musical instruments, and clothing – to help their relatives make a home for themselves.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Regardless of how much they cared, family members’ letters to the superintendent were ‘supplications’; they sought action but ‘recognised the discretionary power of the recipient’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Supplications to medical men contained an emotional performance, and it is fruitful to see them, like Coleborne does, as a ‘theatre of emotions’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The superintendent's power incentivized family members’ expressions of their emotional and practical need for his assistance. Attentiveness to this dynamic reveals family members’ attempts to exercise agency and that they understood their agency as circumscribed by the power of the superintendent. Such emotional performances also illustrate the strength of their familial attachment, explicitly in what was revealed to the superintendent, and implicitly in the decision to communicate that they missed and cared for their relatives without burdening them with their own heartache and difficulties.

Some families performed their attachment by visiting asylums, yet few historians have explicitly considered what this reveals about family life and emotions. As Jonathan Reinarz and Graham Mooney write, visiting institutions offered support to patients and ‘provided an intimate link to a familiar world that is temporarily, or even permanently, out of reach’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Of course, families visited Broadmoor to reassure relatives that they had not been forgotten. Patient William Lloyd's father was desperate to know if his son remembered that his mother and brothers had visited him, and asked the superintendent to ‘please let him know … that some one else will come soon’.Footnote ¹¹¹ In a note suggesting that families’ actions were monitored, the superintendent told the Home Office that one patient's wife ‘has all along been most kind and attentive to her husband in every way and she rented a house in this neighbourhood so that she should be able to come and see him frequently’.Footnote ¹¹² But visiting also benefited families. Unlike at ordinary asylums, where families might have encountered the asylum upon their relatives' admission, the families of Broadmoor's patients might only have read about the asylum in the press, which sometimes printed sensational images of its ‘Frankenstein’-like patients.Footnote ¹¹³ Visiting may have relieved fears about who relatives were living alongside, and enabled families to witness the kindness and respect (they hoped) that relatives received.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It also helped to ease emotional distress by temporarily reuniting families.

As elsewhere though, many found the prospect and the act of visiting emotionally testing. They might have (or have feared) a distressing encounter with a relative whom they found in a worse condition than expected, or they might receive abuse from a previously loving relative.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The asylum's visitors’ room sometimes became a site of domestic tension. Dodwell's daughter left the visitors’ room ‘in tears’ after he scolded her for questioning him.Footnote ¹¹⁶ One patient entered the visitors’ room and ‘embraced the children, but he motioned with his hand for his wife to keep back’ and told her, ‘you beast keep back, or I will floor you’. She told the supervising attendant, ‘I will go it only irritates him my being here.’Footnote ¹¹⁷

That some family members visited despite the practical and emotional challenges that it posed indicates the strength of their attachment and the significance that they placed upon the act. The devotion of one patient's husband is evidenced by his visits. The superintendent recorded, ‘when her husband visited her, and spent the portions of three days with her, she refused to speak to him’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Despite his wife's silence, he returned to sit with her every day for three days. We cannot know why he returned, but, unlike other relatives who asked the superintendent whether visiting was worthwhile (would the patient recognize them? would they speak to them?), this husband appears to have been unconcerned with such matters. He might have hoped that his wife would talk to him, but, when faced with the possibility that each day would be the same, it appears that he preferred to sit with her in silence than not at all. We do not have access to his conversations with the superintendent or medical officers; we do not know what words, if any, he spoke to his wife. There is no explicit record of emotion in this case; there are no references to sadness, anger, or fear, as in some other accounts. This does not mean that the husband did not feel them of course; if other family members’ accounts of visiting are considered, it is possible that, rather than taking solace from being in his wife's presence, he found his visits heartbreaking.

Some patients’ case files contain visitors' slips detailing who visited and when. They do not all have them, and it might be assumed that those patients received no visitors and were, as some patients complained and feared (and as some historians have deduced), ‘abandoned’ by their families.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Certainly not all families were willing to visit a relative whose crime and asylum committal had caused them misery,Footnote ¹²⁰ but the existence of few, no, or a dwindling number of visitors’ slips is not necessarily evidence of desertion. Not only might some have been lost in the record-keeping process, but examining correspondence to the superintendent reveals various reasons why families could not or would not visit, significantly adding to our understandings of the reach and impact of the asylum, while simultaneously highlighting affective familial relationships. There are the expected practical reasons: it required money and time, both of which many families lacked, to make the (often long) journey to Broadmoor.Footnote ¹²¹ Joseph Redding's wife could not visit for ‘two reasons. I have not had the means as I was left with six children and myself to provide for. I have also been suffering with change of life. There as been many obsticles in my way which I have not wanted to trouble him with.’Footnote ¹²² The need to hide troubles formed part of Redding's justification; as with omissions in letters, not visiting was framed as an act of care.

Practical barriers could be insurmountable, but emotional barriers could be too. Some family members tried to pre-empt (and avoid) emotionally difficult visits. Many worried that their relative had lost their sense of self, and the potential heartbreak of encountering someone they did not recognize deterred some from visiting.Footnote ¹²³ Others resisted visiting because they dreaded saying goodbye. Following his father's death, one man told the superintendent:

It was not always the visit itself that families disliked, but the near inevitability of travelling home, alone, at the end of the day.Footnote ¹²⁵

IV

Some family members petitioned for their relatives’ release, seeking to reduce the material and emotional burdens that writing to or visiting Broadmoor (or the inability to do so) had caused. But doing so, and the realities of family life post-discharge, sometimes caused further heartache, and further curtailed families’ agency.

Applying for release was a bureaucratic, time-consuming process. Patients’ families petitioned the Home Office, which requested a medical report and the superintendent's opinion. This exposed the family to scrutiny and judgement, and it was usually unsuccessful. That many families did it anyway, sometimes often and over many years, suggests the strength of their attachment.Footnote ¹²⁶ Correspondence reveals various reasons why families wanted a relative to come home. Looking at other asylums, historians have argued that economic concerns drove families’ petitions, but this misrepresents the complexity of families’ lives and feelings.Footnote ¹²⁷ While poverty motivated some petitions to Broadmoor, economic concerns were not always the driving or only factor. Families wanted relatives home because they loved and missed them and ‘did not like’ the thought of them dying at Broadmoor; moreover, they offered to financially support their relatives upon release.Footnote ¹²⁸ Additionally, these motivations are not mutually exclusive, and strong emotional attachments persisted despite financial hardship.

Successful petitions usually resulted in a conditional discharge, which legally obligated the petitioning family member to care for their relative and to report changes in their mental and physical condition to the Home Office and to Broadmoor indefinitely. Even if patients exhibited ‘sane’ traits, including the ability to work and self-control, their discharge could be refused,Footnote ¹²⁹ because the superintendent was unconvinced about the petitioning family member's character or ability to care for and supervise their relative. Applications were thus a stage upon which family members performed their emotions and their lives. Clearly aware of the expectations placed upon them, some described their homes, supportive family networks, their employment, and their relative financial stability.Footnote ¹³⁰ Just as patients might have performed their recoveries in an effort to secure release, as Coleborne notes, family members might also have performed to help secure the release of a relative they needed at home.Footnote ¹³¹

Petitions emphasized familial bonds, particularly the (alleged) willingness of female family members, especially sisters and sisters-in-law, to care for discharged relatives.Footnote ¹³² Women, seen as the moral cornerstone of familial life,Footnote ¹³³ typically bore the responsibility for familial care in Victorian society,Footnote ¹³⁴ with sisters expected to assume a parental role if required.Footnote ¹³⁵ When trying to secure the release of his brother-in-law, John Mellor emphasized the strength of sibling bonds to the superintendent:

Other families offered to make space for and care for their relative in their often already overcrowded homes.Footnote ¹³⁷ It is telling that some families were willing and able to open their homes to a relative whose crime and committal had caused them suffering, but some were even prepared to welcome unrelated criminal lunatics. One former patient's husband, perhaps recognizing that it would increase the happiness of his discharged wife, offered a home and financial support to a patient whom she had befriended in Broadmoor and towards whom she held ‘a sisterly regard’.Footnote ¹³⁸ Such evidence further challenges the assumption that families only sought the release of relatives who could contribute to the running of the household, and highlights the strength of emotional bonds.

Strong familial bonds alone would not persuade the superintendent to recommend discharge. Unlike at other asylums, Broadmoor's patients’ families could not simply demand their release and expect a positive outcome.Footnote ¹³⁹ Petitions were denied because families’ homes or incomes were deemed unable to accommodate or support another member,Footnote ¹⁴⁰ because family members drank or were unemployed, or because the superintendent doubted that they could supervise and control the patient if they relapsed.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Those with low levels of agency – women, the elderly, and the poor – not only felt the effect of a relative's incarceration most keenly but were also less likely to be deemed able guardians.

For some, a relative's return home was and remained (as far as the records suggest) a joyous occasion. As at other asylums, former patients and their families wrote to Broadmoor's superintendent describing their delight, relief, and gratitude, and detailing their successful transition back into society.Footnote ¹⁴² Some reunions did not quell the anguish, fear, sadness, and grief that some family members felt during their relatives' institutionalization, even if it was something they had longed for. Some found it difficult to care for and supervise their relatives, particularly alongside working, maintaining a household, or parenting. If relatives were amenable post-release, and if families had some financial independence, minor difficulties, including loss of space within the home, could be managed. Five months after his sister's release, one man informed the superintendent that she was no longer ‘residing with us’. He and other relatives had ‘furnished her a nice little home at her own choice … as it is more convenient for us’.Footnote ¹⁴³

But some families were unable to cope, particularly if their relative became violent or intemperate.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In such cases, family members had little choice but to inform the superintendent, knowing that their relative would be recommitted. These cases, can, however, indicate strong emotional bonds. Despite the havoc that their relatives’ relapses into intemperance wrought upon their homes, Mary Ann Mellor's husband – whose wife had pawned their belongings – and Matthew Cook's sister – who had lent Cook money he could not repay – both waited four months before informing the superintendent, hoping that they would recover at home.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Even then, Cook's sister wrote to the superintendent with ‘heartfelt sorrow’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Unlike at ordinary asylums, families played no role in their relatives' initial admission to Broadmoor, but as at ordinary asylums some families decided to (re)commit only after a prolonged period of distress, when they could no longer manage their relative at home.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ This suggests, as Steven Taylor notes in his study of child insanity, that families had ‘strong emotional bonds’ with their ill relatives ‘and were eager to preserve these’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Examining petitioning, discharge, and post-asylum life demonstrates the extent to which persistent observation rendered families both victims and quasi-patients of a system designed to confine, control, and rehabilitate criminal lunatics. Foucauldian approaches to the history of psychiatry position asylums as instruments of social control, focusing on the surveillance and remodelling of patients into ideal (bourgeois) members of society.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Scholars have highlighted the ‘long history of surveillance’ outside the institution, and that families policed, watched, and controlled insane relatives within the home, sometimes before their asylum committal.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ This policing was supplemented and encouraged by doctors entering the domestic sphere, and by neighbours whose curiosity and gossiping led some families to hide their ill relatives.Footnote ¹⁵¹

The role of English county asylums (and thus the state) in policing patients’ families during and after their relatives' asylum stay has rarely been examined, however. Yet Broadmoor extended the surveillance typically associated with inside institutions to the family and the family home both before and after patients’ discharge. Families’ actions and health were observed to determine whether their relatives should be discharged. If they were, the price of release was accepting the roles of actor and subject in continued surveillance. Families had to police and report their relatives’ behaviour, or the police would enquire.Footnote ¹⁵² The Discharged Prisoner's Aid Society watched some former patients and their families and reported their behaviour to Broadmoor.Footnote ¹⁵³ Former patients watched their family members, too; some reported their misdeeds to the superintendent, particularly if they wanted to move out of their home.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Families’ agency was thus limited by their relatives’ committal and further curtailed by their release. Families remained supervised and in limbo as long as their relatives lived, and for as long as they remained committed to them, even if they were eventually discharged. This was not lost on some of their friends: ‘I can't help but wishing that the poor fellow may die, for it seems such a wretched life for the poor little woman to go on hoping against hope.’Footnote ¹⁵⁵ For family members who wished to remain in contact with their relative, any semblance of agency would only return upon their relative's death.

V

The extension of the family and familial support into Broadmoor lasted over the course of some patients’ lives. When their relatives were dying, some families were shocked and saddened, especially if they were unable to visit the asylum.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Some appeared fearful, particularly if they had strong religious faith. Perhaps in an effort to support them on their final journey, such family members beseeched their relatives to atone before it was too late.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ As well as relying on tangible support networks, some found solace in the prospect of an afterlife. One dying patient's brother asked the superintendent:

Families’ letters to Broadmoor during and after their relatives’ final illnesses suggest strong familial bonds. The bereaved sometimes expressed sorrow and regret, particularly if they had been unable to visit their relative while they were alive, and especially if they had been absent at their death.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ In Victorian society, witnessing a relative's death provided a sense of control and (it was hoped) the comfort of knowing that their final hours were painless.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Family members unable to be at their dying relative's side, or those informed of a sudden death, sought comfort; they asked the superintendent about their final days, presumably seeking reassurance that they were not alone or in pain.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Some family members might have been indifferent to a relative's death, particularly if their relationship had been fraught, yet even when relationships had been fractious sorrow still materialized. When Dodwell died in 1900, he had not seen his daughters or seen or heard from his previously dutiful son Edward for many years. Until his death, Dodwell's relationship with his family seemed irreparable, yet his son Henry's final letter to the superintendent described his love and sorrow, and declared, ‘I shall ever deeply regret my absence from his side at the last.’Footnote ¹⁶² Perhaps trying to console Henry, the superintendent replied that he was the only person whom Dodwell had wished to see before his death but he had not known where a telegram might reach him in time.Footnote ¹⁶³ Many bereaved family members, including Henry, also expressed relief; the end of relatives’ ‘pain and sorrow’ was a ‘great blessing’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Given the emotional and financial burdens that patients’ families carried, a relative's death released all involved. Families no longer had to worry about visiting or writing, or about their relatives’ health or treatment, and they were no longer policed. It might also have eased any familial tension outside Broadmoor.

Most patients who died at Broadmoor were buried there because it cost families nothing. Some families regretted this. Isobel Taylor told the superintendent: ‘I should [have] liked [my aunt] to have been buried at Armitage Bridge Church, but I find it will be expensive and I have my aged father to live [with] me having only lately lost my mother.’Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Like other Victorian women, Taylor had assumed the duty of caring for her elderly father; the cost of fulfilling her filial duty prevented her doing as she wished for her aunt. Many family members, including Taylor, also regretted their inability to attend their relatives’ funerals; the cost and distance remained too great.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

While usual Victorian burial sites ‘represented a locus for expressions of grief and commemoration through the installation of headstones, gifts of flowers, and visits to the grave’, Broadmoor's was comparatively austere.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ But empty, unadorned gravesides represented not a life unloved or forgotten, but the hardships and insurmountable responsibilities faced by the working families of the Victorian criminally insane. Although Broadmoor's burial space undoubtedly received fewer mourners than a typical Victorian cemetery, some family members were able to visit to grieve and remember.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Following a relative's funeral, some families continued to demonstrate their love. Anthony Owston's sons sent wreaths to be placed upon his grave each Christmas and Easter, and on the anniversary of his death, prolonging their emotional connection with the asylum where their father had spent the majority of their lives.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Some families rejected a private burial because they believed that, after years of incarceration, Broadmoor was their relatives’ rightful resting place.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Others seized the opportunity to arrange a funeral away from the asylum. George Thomas Pett's wife told the superintendent that he was ‘laid to rest where I know he longed to be with our little girl Lillian’.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Dodwell was buried in Woking Cemetery, ‘far from that place that has so cruelly held him for over 22 long years from those that loved him so dearly’.Footnote ¹⁷² After years of trying and failing to liberate their loved ones, exercising the power to remove their bodies from Broadmoor was one way that families demonstrated their love and attachment. It also meant that they could finally fulfil their (often years’ old) promise, without the agreement of the Home Office and the asylum's superintendent, to bring their relatives home.

VI

The Broadmoor archive is a repository of love, sorrow, and hope, alive with stories of loss, poverty, desperation, and kinship. Analysis of families’ correspondence to the asylum has enabled the first in-depth examination of the effects of asylum committal on individual family members. The findings demonstrate the value of considering the lives, experiences, and subjective identities of individual family members, focusing on their words and actions – and sometimes their silence – and paying close attention to factors including class, life stage (and age), and, in cases of long-term committal, change over time. This article has shown that asylums affected patients’ families in more varied and complex ways than has previously been acknowledged. We see the financial and emotional distress caused, especially to wives; how individual identities were challenged and reconfigured; and the curtailment of individuals’ (often already limited) agency, not least because the asylum observed them, too. But kinship also proved resilient: despite these difficulties, family members strove to maintain relationships with, and to care for, their relatives during and after their incarceration. Crucially, we see that their motivations were not limited to, or even primarily, financial ones, but were shaped by a desire to preserve familial bonds, even if in circumscribed form. Evidently, some families tried and managed to give meaning to relationships altered by the asylum. The Broadmoor correspondence demonstrates families’ presence within the asylum but also highlights the need for more nuanced readings of their absence: this did not necessarily mean abandonment, but poverty, love, fear, and sadness.

The significance and resilience of affective family bonds for patients’ family members found here shows that, to fully understand how the impacts of committal reverberated beyond the asylum's walls, we must re-evaluate other collections of correspondence with a closer engagement with the history of the family. Doing so will allow existing assumptions about the (most significant) effects on families to be reviewed, and will further illuminate the effects of asylum committal on conceptions of the self and the family. Although outside the scope of this article, comparing how families in different regions appeared to cope with losing a relative to the asylum may reveal the role that regional social and cultural differences, and localized understandings of kinship, played in a family's ability to withstand the committal of a relative, and shed further light on the history of the family. Historians must continue to look beyond the asylum's walls. Only when we understand the broader social impacts of (long-term, long-distance) asylum committal will we start to understand the full extent of the role and significance of the Victorian asylum.