Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum
Mark Stevens
A short book on a relatively obscure topic, Broadmoor Revealed has been a surprise hit over the autumn, reaching the top ten free books for Amazon’s Kindle, where I found it while perusing for books on the Christmas train home. Behind the grand title are careful accounts of several patients in the hospital for the “not guilty, but insane” in the decades after its opening in 1863.
Set in picturesque Berkshire countryside, Broadmoor hospital, originally known as Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, treats those criminals who have been spared prison because they have been diagnosed as mentally ill. The author, Mark Stevens, is an archivist at the Berkshire record office, and has used the detailed medical records and newspaper reports of the time to tell the sensational tales in a concise and elegant style.
As well as relaying terrifying and lurid tales such as those of William Bisgrove - the only murderer to escape Broadmoor and remain free - and Christina Edmunds - who poisoned chocolates in Brighton as revenge for unrequited love - the book provides a sense of daily life at the institution. Broadmoor is not painted as a place of violence, but of calm and domesticity. The Victorian hospital had a large farm and was largely self-sufficient, and though not an easy place to live, it provided a better life than the poverty many patients came from.
A chapter on women who gave birth at the hospital is a partly successful attempt to replace the popular image of the women of Broadmoor as child-killers and temptresses, although almost every example given is of a woman who killed one or more of her children. One patient - Catherine Jones - was sent from another hospital to Broadmoor because she was pregnant, but on arrival hospital staff discovered she spoke only Welsh. Since none of the hospital staff knew the language, as soon as she had given birth Mrs Jones was sent back to Wales, and baby William sent to his loving father.
The book was originally written as publicity material for the Broadmoor archives, and is not a fully edited or in-depth account of the Victorian hospital. Instead, it is a thoughtful introduction to Victorian psychiatry, when the field began to lean towards its modern direction, treating mental illness with counselling and looking to a patient’s past for reasons for their illness.
Stevens only occasionally attempts to impose modern diagnoses on the patients, and these are always couched with warnings of their speculative nature. Treating patients with mental health problems is not simple – prescribing a pill does not work – yet even 150 years ago, patients were released from Broadmoor, considered “cured”.
Being concise is, as the length of this review might indicate, one of my favourite qualities in a writer, and I found Broadmoor Revealed two hours well spent - a primer on Victorian psychiatry, combined with a thriller, all told in Stevens’ clear and distanced tone.
Broadmoor Revealed can be downloaded from the Berkshire record office.
Image of the male staff of Broadmoor in 1885 is courtesy of Berkshire Records Office and West London mental health NHS trust.
