5/24/2023 0 Comments The woman in white novel![]() Put crudely, the richer you were, the more reason there appeared to be to keep you under lock and key. Of Chancery lunatics (that’s the very wealthiest and most socially elite group, whose affairs were overseen by the Lord Chancellor), only 1% found themselves at liberty again. By contrast, if you were in a private asylum, discharge rates were a mere 10-14%. ![]() In the state system, recovery and discharge rates ran at 37% of admissions – a figure that holds pretty steady across the nineteenth century. And this is another revealing detail by Collins: the 1859 Select Committee on the lunacy laws made public in crude statistical detail how much harder it was to get discharged from a private asylum than from a county (ie state-run) one. Anne’s colluding mother insists on a private asylum for Anne, not a county asylum, where paupers are sent. ![]()
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