Writing out (of) darkness: The Bastilles of England; or, The Lunacy Law at Work by Louisa Lowe (1883)

Louisa Lowe's The Bastilles of England; or, the Lunacy Law at Work (1883) details the conditions of patients before, during and after their confinement in mental asylums. Based on Lowe's personal experience, the text helped draw public attention to institutional and medical practices which claimed to act in the interest of patients (and of their health), while it kept them "out of sight, out of mind", thereby relegating them to "dark corners of the land" – the mental asylums. Whether private or pauper, English madhouses recalled atrocious places of confinement and torture such as the Bastilles of pre-revolutionary France had been. Drawing upon a popular analogy, that between the French jail and the English mental asylum, Lowe exposed and sought to dismantle a profoundly and dangerously corrupted system. Page after page, she depicted the intricacies of one of Britain's most embarrassing and execrable legal practices – the operation of the lunacy laws, and to such an aim, images of darkness proved crucial. Lowe wrote about them; she wrote out of and against them and shed light on ideological as well as cultural and gender-related darknesses. Her treatise helped pave the way towards social responsibility, mutual help and understanding, honesty and moral integrity to vindicate that primary right to individual freedom which the lunacy laws at work – the Bastilles of late-Victorian England – were yet to recognise. This study investigates Lowe's narrative and narrative strategy in a text that is a precious, however largely neglected testimony of fin de siècle cultural and social activism.