Wrongful confinement and the spectre of colonial despotism: a political history of madness in New South Wales, 1843

Abstract

In a penal colony, replete with anxieties of liberty and mobility, admission to a lunatic asylum carried particular significance. This article takes up the trope of wrongful confinement – the institutionalisation of the sane in institutions for the insane – in order to explore the aims and methods of a new field, the political history of madness. Elsewhere wrongful confinement registered cultural anxieties of the loss of rights and social death, inflected along existing fault lines in the body politic. But in New South Wales, in the immediate aftermath of convict transportation and in the search for responsible government, the prospect of wrongful confinement was used to raise the spectre of colonial despotism. In November 1843 a group of reformers gathered around the Australian newspaper lent their support to a suit brought by Charles Robertson Hyndman against the visiting magistrate and superintendent of Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum. Magistrates, lawyers and newly elected politicians, they first had Hyndman freed and then used his case to attack irresponsible power in the colony. A potent metaphor for colonial politics, here wrongful confinement is used to show the potential of the political history of madness.

Keywords:

• Wrongful confinement
• Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum
• political history of madness
• colonial despotism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

About the author

Dr James Dunk is a Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. In his research, writing and teaching he works between the history of medicine, health and psychology and the environmental humanities.

Notes

1 James Dunk, Bedlam at Botany Bay (Sydney: NewSouth, 2019), 210–33.

2 Laure Murat, The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Toward a Political History of Madness, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

3 Ibid., 19.

4 Robert Castel, The Regulation of Madness: The Origins of Incarceration in France (Cambridge: Polity, 1988); Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

5 Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York: Zone Books, 2012).

6 Frank M. Snowden, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 178–9.

7 Jennifer L. Lambe, Madhouse: Psychiatry and Politics in Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 1–2.

8 Jonathan H. Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Sally Swartz, ‘The Regulation of British Colonial Lunatic Asylums and the Origins of Colonial Psychiatry, 1860–1864’, History of Psychology 13, no. 2 (2010): 160–77.

9 Jaqueline Leckie, Colonizing Madness: Asylum and Community in Fiji (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019).

10 Dunk, Bedlam at Botany Bay, 7.

11 Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

12 Andrew Scull, ‘The Asylum, Hospital and Clinic’, in The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health, ed. Greg Eghigian (London: Routledge, 2017), 103–4.

13 Peter McCandless, ‘Liberty and Lunacy: the Victorians and Wrongful Confinement’, Journal of Social History 11, no. 3 (1978): 366–86; and ‘Dangerous to Themselves and Others: The Victorian Debate over the Prevention of Wrongful Confinement’, Journal of British Studies 23, no. 1 (1983): 84–104.

14 William L. Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: A Study of Private Madhouses in England and Wales in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 222–42.

15 Daniel Defoe, Augusta Triumphans, or the Way to Make London the Most Flourishing City in the Universe (London: J. Roberts, 1728), 30.

16 Henry Cockton, The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, the Ventriloquist (London: Robert Tyas, 1840), x, vi–vii.

17 R. A. Houston, ‘Rights and Wrongs in the Confinement of the Mentally Incapable in Eighteenth–Century Scotland’, Continuity and Change 18, no. 3 (2003): 373–94.

18 Pauline M. Prior, ‘Dangerous Lunacy: The Misuse of Mental Health Law in Nineteenth-century Ireland’, Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology 14, no. 3 (2003): 535.

19 Sally Swartz, Homeless Wanderers: Movement and Mental Illness in the Cape Colony in the Nineteenth Century (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2013), 87.

20 Dunk, Bedlam at Botany Bay, 78–100.

21 McCandless, ‘Liberty and Lunacy’, 340.

22 Ibid.

23 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961).

24 Margaret Alissa Homberger, ‘Wrongful Confinement and Victorian Psychiatry, 1840–1880’ (PhD thesis, Queen Mary College, University of London, 2001), 2.

25 ‘Editorial’, The Times (London), 19 August 1858, 6; syndicated: ‘Lunatic Asylums’, The Hobart Town Daily Mercury, 10 November 1858, 2.

26 Catharine Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 25–6.

27 James Dunk, ‘The Liability of Madness and the Commission of Lunacy in New South Wales, 1805–12’, History Australia 15, no. 1 (2017): 130–50.

28 The phrase ‘crown colony’ was introduced in 1828, but it had existed in various forms for fifty years: John M. Ward, Colonial Self-Government: The British Experience, 1759–1856 (London: Macmillan, 1976), 82–83.

29 Jeremy Bentham, A Plea for the Constitution (London: Wilks and Taylor, 1803).

30 Alan Atkinson, ‘Jeremy Bentham and the Rum Rebellion’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 64, no. 1 (1978): 65–75; Grace Karskens and Richard Waterhouse, ‘“Too Sacred to be Taken Away”: Property, Liberty, Tyranny and the “Rum Rebellion”’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 12 (2010): 1–22.

31 William Charles Wentworth, A Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colonies (London: G. and W.B. Whittaker, 1819), 172–73.

32 Lisa Ford and David Andrew Roberts, ‘Expansion’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, vol. 1, eds. A. Bashford and S. Macintyre (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 123.

33 William Wentworth, quoted in K. R. Cramp, William Charles Wentworth of Vaucluse House (Sydney: Vaucluse Park Trust), 11.

34 Cramp, William Charles Wentworth, 14–16, 22–23; David Neal, The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony: Law and Power in Early New South Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 20–22; Bruce Kercher, An Unruly Child: A History of Law in Australia (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995), 82–102.

35 Ralph Darling to Earl Bathurst, 15 December 1826, Historical Records of Australia, Series I, vol. 12 (Sydney: Government Printer, 1919), 750.

36 G. P. Walsh, ‘Nichols, George Robert (Bob) (1809–1857)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, accessed 13 March 2019, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/nichols-george-robert-bob-4296/text6957.

37 On William Bland, see Penny Russell, Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2010), 165–89.

38 D. E. Fifer, ‘The Australian Patriotic Association 1835–1841’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 73, no. 3 (1987): 155.

39 New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land Act 1842 (UK) 5 & 6 Vict. c 76.

40 M. M. H. Thompson, The Seeds of Democracy: Early Elections in Colonial New South Wales (Sydney: Federation Press, 2006), 4.

41 Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law 1800–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 32–3.

42 See Kirsten McKenzie, Imperial Underworld: An Escaped Convict and the Transformation of the British Colonial Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 2016).

43 Thompson, The Seeds of Democracy.

44 ‘Editorial’, Australian, 9 April 1840, 2; Henry Stooks Smith, An Alphabetical List of the Officers of the Eleventh, or Prince Albert's Own, Regiment of Hussars, from 1800 to 1850 (London: Simkin Marshall and Co., 1850), 14–15.

45 ‘Title Deeds’, Sydney Gazette, 3 June 1837, 4; ‘Law Intelligence’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 November 1843, 2; ‘Advertising’, Sydney Monitor, 9 February 1838, Evening, 2.

46 ‘Country News’, Australian, 13 February 1841, 2; ‘Port Macquarie’, New South Wales Examiner, 4 June 1842, 3; ‘Port Macquarie’, Australian, 10 February 1843, 2.

47 ‘Sydney News’, Maitland Mercury, 8 July 1843, 4; ‘County of Cumberland Election’, Australasian Chronicle, 4 July 1843, 2; and see ‘The Cumberland Election’, Australian, 10 July 1843, 2.

48 The title may have been borrowed from the fiery churchman John Dunmore Lang, also elected to the Legislative Council in 1843: ‘The situation of an editor of a newspaper is a peculiarly arduous one; he possesses no legally-constituted right to become the censor morum of the community, such as is possessed by a judge on the bench of a clergyman in the pulpit; the law does not throw that shield around him’: John Dunmore Lang, An Historical and Statistical Account of New South Wales: Both as a Penal Settlement and as a British Colony, vol. 2 (London: A.J. Valpy, 1837), 441–2. Hyndman ‘wisely abandoned’ the newspaper in February 1844 and returned to Port Macquarie: ‘Port Macquarie’, Australian, 7 March 1844, 3.

49 ‘Law Intelligence’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 November 1843, 2.

50 ‘Hyndman v Innes and Another’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 November 1843, 2.

51 ‘Law Intelligence’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 November 1843, 2.

52 J. N. Creighton, Narrative of the Siege and Capture of Bhurtpore: In the province of Agra, upper Hindoostan by the forces under the command of… Lord Combermere, in the latter end of 1825, and beginning of 1826 (London: J.N. Creighton, 1830).

53 Aristocratic visitor Godfrey Mundy (who had, incidentally, been aide-de-camp to Combermere at Bharatpur), noted that the ‘Cabbage Tree Mob’ was not an actual gang but slang for ‘an unruly set of young fellows’ in the habit of wearing cabbage palm hats: Godfrey Mundy, Our Antipodes; Or, Residence and Rambles in the Australian Colonies, vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), 53–4.

54 ‘Law Intelligence’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 November 1843, 2.

55 Ibid.

56 ‘Captain Hyndman’s Case’, Dispatch, 18 November 1843, 3.

57 Like wrongful confinement, moral therapy would soon be taken up to attack the power structures of the colony: James Dunk, ‘Work, Paperwork and the Imaginary Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum, 1846’, Rethinking History 22, no. 3 (2018): 326–55.

58 ‘Legislative Council’, Weekly Register of Politics, Facts and General Literature, 9 December 1843, 308.

59 ‘Cumberland Election’, Australian, 10 July 1843, 3. Lawson and Wentworth had, with Gregory Blaxland, crossed the Blue Mountains in 1813 – an act of symbolic and actual significance for the expanding colony and an act of lasting violence for the Gundungurra, Dharug, and Wiradjuri people who would be dispossessed.

60 ‘Sydney Quarter Sessions’, Sydney Gazette, 29 February 1840, 2.

61 Walsh, ‘Nichols, George Robert (Bob) (1809–1857)’.

62 R. B. Walker, The Newspaper Press in New South Wales 1803–1920 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1976), 23; Walsh, ‘Nichols, George Robert (Bob) (1809–1857)’.

63 J. B. Windeyer, ‘Windeyer, Richard (1806–1847)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, 17 October 2015, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/windeyer-richard-1060/text4017; J. M. Bennett, ‘The Establishment of Jury Trial in New South Wales’, Sydney Law Review 3, no. 3 (1961): 480.

64 ‘Public meeting’, Sydney Gazette, 1 March 1842, 2; ‘Second Public Meeting’, Courier, 1 April 1842, 4.

65 ‘Original Correspondence’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 February 1850, 4.

66 Joseph Digby to Colonial Secretary, 25 November 1843, quoted in Peter Shea, Defining Madness (Sydney: Hawkins Press, 1999), 26.

67 Shea, Defining Madness, 26.

68 Dangerous Lunatics Act 1843 (NSW) 7 Vic. No. 14; Shea, Defining Madness, 26–7.

69 ‘Legislative Council’, Weekly Register of Politics, Facts and General Literature, 9 December 1843, 308.

70 ‘Legislative Council—Progress of the Session’, Australian, 2 December 1843, 2.

71 Sic. ‘Thursday, December 7, 1843’, Australian, 9 December 1843, 3.

72 Original emphasis. ‘Legislative Council’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 December 1843, 2.

73 ‘Captain Hyndman’s Case’, Dispatch, 18 November 1843, 3.

74 Criminal Lunatics (Ireland) Act 1838 (UK) 1 & 2 Vict. c. 27; ‘Thursday, December 7, 1843’, Australian, 9 December 1843, 3.

75 ‘Inquiry into the State of the Jails and Hospitals’, Britannia, and Trades Advocate, 12 February 1846, 2; ‘Jails and Asylums’, The Courier, 7 November 1855, 3.

76 Cockton, Valentine Vox, 174.

77 Marilyn J. Kurata, ‘Wrongful Confinement: The Betrayal of Women by Men, Medicine, and Law’, in Victorian Scandals: Representations of Gender and Class, ed. Kristine Ottesen Garrigan (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 63.

78 Valerie Pedlar, The Most Dreadful Visitation: Male Madness in Victorian Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 108.

79 James Dunk, ‘Authority and the Treatment of the Insane at Castle Hill Asylum, 1811–25’, Health and History 19, no. 2 (2017): 17–40.

80 Casenotes of Francis Campbell, quoted in Graham A. Edwards, ‘The Mental Illness of Captain Hyndman’, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 13, no. 2 (June 1979): 151.

81 ‘Departures’, Morning Chronicle, 31 January 1844, 3.

82 R. Jones, solicitor, quoted in Edwards, ‘The Mental Illness of Captain Hyndman’, 151.

83 Edwards, ‘The Mental Illness of Captain Hyndman’, 150.

84 Dunk, ‘Work, Paperwork and the Imaginary Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum’.

85 Samuel Sidney, The Three Colonies of Australia: New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, 2nd ed. (London: Ingram, Cooke and Co., 1853), 119–20.

86 Ibid., 120.