It was a sad fact that some families would place a relative in a lunatic asylum and then neglect to visit them regularly; in some cases, contact ceased altogether as the years passed. I found this paragraph in a letter by Lunacy Commissioner Bryan Waller Procter in the Forster Collection housed at the V&A. Lunacy Commissioner (and Charles Dickens’ best friend) John Forster bequeathed his library and papers to the Museum, hence some interesting information on 19th-century mental healthcare is to be found in what might seem at first sight to be an unlikely place.

No matter how I peered, and held the paper up to the light, I couldn’t see through the thick black ink that obliterated the names of some patients in the Procter-Forster correspondence.

In a letter dated 3 September 1861, Procter (to whom, by the way, Wilkie Collins dedicated The Woman in White) tells colleague Forster: ‘I have several times, if you remember, said that they ought to go and see poor _________ more frequently, but people are ashamed of their mad relative, and leave them to the care of chance. You know of course in what condition [Lunacy Commissioners] Wilkes and Lutwidge found _________’s brother. Your acquaintance ________ never going to see his daughter inflamed my indignation. What humbugs we all are.’