After 1845, anyone who set themselves up to care for more than one lunatic on their premises had to obtain a licence to run an asylum from the Commissioners in Lunacy. The Commissioners mounted prosecutions of those who failed to do so, and the report below, from the Journal of Mental Science in 1864, tells the story of one of the largest illegal asylums that they shut down – Zion House in Turnham Green, west London.

Critics of the Commissioners in Lunacy claimed that the inspectorate only ever went after the minnows – that the illustrious mad-doctors with the expensive asylums were treated more leniently than private individuals such as Mrs Leander. She — it is pretty clear, I think — was trying to operate a safe-house for women who were in mental distress, though perhaps not “clinically insane”. It seems that many of Mrs Leander’s ladies had what we today term learning disabilities (the report uses the contemporary term “idiocy”).

Campaigners against the lunacy laws believed that female proprietors in particular were being driven out of business by the all-male Commissioners in Lunacy, who would not accept that women might be better cared for in female-run establishments. One Miss Elliott had had her eight-patient asylum, Elm Lodge in Chelsea, shut down in 1845, against the wishes of the inmates’ families. She was eventually re-licensed but for the short period of six months, whereafter she had to reapply at six-monthly intervals.

For her part, Mrs Leander is reported in another account of her trial to have rejected any interventions on her behalf by any male: “It is a ladies’ concern and we will not allow men to interfere,” she told the court. . .