Posts
Browse some recent posts or click on one of the three books below to read articles / extra stuff relating to each book. You can also use the search box (right) to look for specific topics.
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Review in La Repubblica
Oliver Twist and the organ harvesters: a review from the Italian newspaper La Repubblica — in Italian. ‘L’Oliver Twist italiano e i trafficanti d’organi’ “Londra in una notte nebbiosa…
Getting lost in ever-changing London
One of Karl Marx’s close associates, William Liebknecht (1826-1900), was absent from London between 1862 and 1878 (he had returned to his native Germany). On his return, he was astonished…
The Sad Tale of Mrs Sheberras and the ‘vampyres’ of Chancery
Because I went well over my word-count, I had to delete the following passage from the penultimate chapter of Inconvenient People. The formidable singer, music teacher and lunacy-law campaigner Georgina…
Winslow vs Windham, Wise vs Croft
Author Russell Croft has come to a different conclusion to mine regarding the soundness of mind of William Windham. In Inconvenient People, I briefly cover the “Windham Lunacy Commission” to…
Henry Maudsley – Feminist Icon?
I give Dr Maudsley (1835-1918) a bit of a hard time in Inconvenient People. He was famously inconsistent, and indeed believed that “consistency signifies prejudice and stagnation”; but by the…
Stafford Hospital – and what it replaced . . .
In the news for all the wrong reasons a few years ago, and the subject of Channel 4 docu-drama The Cure in 2019, Stafford General’s least important failing is its…
‘The Peasant’s Uncultivated Mind’: the Case of the Devon Witch
Jean Charles Bucknill (pictured below), superintendent of the Devon County Asylum, found among his patients a woman admitted to the institution in 1859, with her lunacy certificate stating the evidence…
‘The Fatal Venom’; or ‘Henry Maudsley’s Inflammation’
Throughout the nineteenth century, doctors and epidemiologists struggled to analyse the nature of syphilis, the course that it ran, its impact on an unborn child, and the disease’s relation to…
Karl Marx in the Workhouse, ‘A Sort of Low Pandemonium’
Karl Marx interested himself in the care of the insane. In an article entitled “The Increase of Lunacy in Great Britain” for the New York Tribune of 20 August 1858,…
The Museum of St Bernard’s Hospital
Local historian and author Paul Lang contacted me to tell me about a fascinating museum at which he used to volunteer. Paul was the hospital librarian at St Bernard’s Hospital…