Buildings and Society

Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment

Anthony D. King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135795283
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Social History

Buildings are essentially social and cultural products. They result from social needs and accommodate a variety of functions - economic. social. political. religious. Their size. appearance. location and form result not simply from physical factors such as mat­erials. climate or technology. nor from architects· designs. but from a society's ideas. its forms of economic and social organisation. and the beliefs and values which prevail at any one time. Society produces its buildings and the buildings help to maintain many of its social forms.

Part I

1 A convenient place to get rid of inconvenient people: the Victorian lunatic asylum*

Andrew Scull

Were we to draw our opinions on the treatment of insanity from the construction of the buildings destined to the reception of patients, we should conclude that the great principle adopted in recovering the faculties of the mind was to immure the demented in gloomy and iron-bound fastnesses; that these were the means best adapted for restoring the wandering intellect, correcting its illusions, or quickening its torpidity: that the depraved or lost social affections were to be corrected or removed by coldness or monotony.¹

Scattered widely across the English landscape, sometimes surrounded now by urban and suburban sprawl, sometimes still incongruously installed in the midst of sylvan countryside, are to be found one of the most notable architectural curiosities inherited from the nineteenth century, the Victorian ‘loony bins’. Huge, ramshackle, decaying structures, once hailed as ‘the most blessed manifestation of true civilization the world can present’,² they now apparently exist on borrowed time—a collection of ‘doomed institutions’ merely awaiting the setting of ‘the torch to the funeral pyre’.³ Not that they go unused in the meanwhile: on the contrary, mental hospital admission rates have seldom been higher. But the number of patients under treatment on any given day falls remorselessly, as the mentally disturbed are processed and discharged at an ever more rapid rate. And as the targets of a mounting attack on their therapeutic failings and harmful effects on those they treat, the asylums steadily lose ground to newer, ‘community-based’ alternatives.

Still, the association between mental disorder and these grim relics of Victorian humanitarianism remains indelibly fixed in our minds. For almost two centuries, madness and the built form within which it has been contained have been virtually synonymous. The link will not easily be obliterated. Nor, I suspect, will the buildings themselves. In this chapter, I shall examine the social forces which lay behind the emergence of asylums as the dominant response to madness, and I shall explore some of the factors which led to the transformation of these institutions into museums for the collection of the unwanted.

Capitalism and the transformation of society

The rise of the asylum forms part of a much larger transformation in social control styles and practices which took place in England roughly between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Prior to this, the control of deviants of all sorts had been an essentially communal and family affair. The amorphous class of the morally disreputable, the indigent, and the helpless— including such elements as vagrants, minor criminals, the insane and the physically handicapped—was managed in essentially similar ways. Characteristically, little effort was made to segregate such ‘problem populations’ into separate receptacles designed to keep them apart from the rest of society. Instead, they were dealt with in a variety of ways which left them at large in the community. Most of the time, families were held liable to provide for their own, if necessary with the aid of temporary assistance or a more permanent subsidy from the community. Lunatics were generally treated no differently from other deviants:⁴ only a few of the most violent or troublesome cases might find themselves confined in a specially constructed cell or as part of the heterogeneous population of the local gaol.

By the mid-nineteenth century, however, virtually no aspect of this traditional response remained intact. In the course of a century or so, a remarkable change in social practices and a highly significant redefinition of the moral boundaries of English society had taken place. Insanity had been transformed from a vague, culturally defined phenomenon affecting an unknown, but probably small, proportion of the population into a condition which could be authoritatively diagnosed, certified, and dealt with only by a group of legally recognized experts; and which was now seen as one of the major forms of deviance in English society. Finally, and of critical importance for my present concerns, whereas in the eighteenth century only the most violent and destructive among those now labelled insane would have been segregated and confined apart from the rest of the community, with the achievement of what is conventionally called ‘lunacy reform’, the asylum was endorsed as the sole officially approved response to the problems posed by mental illness. Throughout the length and breadth of the country, huge specialized buildings had been built or were in the process of being built to accommodate the legions of the mad.

What had happened to bring about these profound changes? It is frequently suggested that the shift towards institutional modes of handling deviance represents no more than a quasi-automatic response to the realities of life in an urban-industrial society. Supposedly, the sheer scale of the problems associated with the advent of the Industrial Revolution proved beyond the adaptive capacity of a community and household-based relief system, prompting the resort to the asylum and the workhouse. In practice, however, not only is this account excessively mechanistic, but, in addition, no clear-cut connection exists between the rise of asylums and the growth of large cities. The drive to institutionalize the lunatic begins too soon to be simply a response to the problems created by urbanization; and at a very early stage in the process rural areas exhibit a marked enthusiasm for the asylum solution.

Instead, as I have argued at greater length elsewhere,⁵ the main driving force behind the rise of a segregative response to madness (and to other forms of deviance, come to that) can much more plausibly be asserted to lie in the direct and indirect effects of the advent of a mature capitalist market economy and the associated ever more thoroughgoing commercialization of existence. While the urban conditions created by industrialization initially had an impact which was quite limited in geographical scope, the market obeyed few such restrictions. Rather, it had increasingly subversive effects on the whole traditional rural and urban social structure—changes which, as I shall suggest below, in turn prompted the abandonment of long-established techniques for coping with the poor and troublesome.

Quite obviously, of course, the origins of capitalism in England lie much further back in time than the end of the eighteenth century. One may trace commercialized production back at least as far as the 1400s, and by 1750 England was already on some definitions a single national market economy.⁶ But for all the importance of these earlier developments, it remains incontrovertible that, until the latter part of the eighteenth century, the market continued to exercise ‘only a weak pull on the economy’ and had only a limited impact on English social structure.⁷ This, in turn, allowed the persistence, until well into the eighteenth century, of a relatively unchanging agriculture and a social order which exhibited substantial continuities with the past. The mass of workers were not yet fully proletarianized; and notions of the just price and the just wage co-existed with and at times inhibited market determination of wages and prices.⁸ Put another way, though the rationalizing impact of capitalism was present, it operated only within strict limits.⁹

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, however, capitalism broke the social bonds which had formerly held it in check. There occurred a massive reorganization of society as a whole along market principles—a development Karl Polanyi has termed ‘the running of society as an adjunct to the market’.¹⁰ The old social order was undermined and then destroyed, and profound shifts took place in the relationships between superordinate and subordinate classes: changes which we may sum up as the movement from a paternalistic social order dominated by rank, order and degree to a society based on class.¹¹ The sources of this transformation are too many and complex to go into here,¹² particularly since my present concern is rather with the social impact of the process than with its origins. Turning to these consequences, in the first place, the rationalization of production increasingly forced the closing off of all alternatives except wage work as a means of providing for subsistence. And wage-earners, whether agricultural labourers or industrial workers, shared a similar incapacity to make adequate provision for periods of economic depression. Yet employers increasingly convinced themselves that they owed the workers only wages, and that once these had been paid the men had no further claim on them.¹³ To make matters worse, one of the most notable features of the economy in this period was its tendency to oscillate wildly between conditions of boom and slump. Thus, for the lower classes, family members unable to contribute to their own subsistence became a serious drain on resources. Such dependent groups as the aged and children became a much greater burden—as, of course, did the insane.

These changes in structures, perceptions and outlook provided a direct source of bourgeois dissatisfaction with the traditional, non-institutional response to the indigent. There were others, however. Most notably, the dislocations of the social structure associated with the transition to an industrial economy led to a sizeable rise in the proportion of the population in receipt of poor relief—at precisely the time when the growing power of the bourgeoisie and their increasing dominance of intellectual and cultural life was reducing the inclination to tolerate this. In the circumstances, the upper classes readily convinced themselves that laxly administered household relief promotedpoverty rather than relieved it (a position for which they found ample ideological support in the writings of Malthus and others).¹⁴ In its place, they were increasingly attracted towards an institutionally based system. For, in theory at least, workhouses and the like enabled a close and continuing watch to be kept on who was admitted. They could be used to punish idleness. Moreover, their quasi-military authority structure seemed ideally suited to instil ‘proper’ work habits among those resisting the monotony, routine and regularity of industrialized labour. In Bentham’s caustic phrase,¹⁵ they would function as ‘a mill to grind rogues honest and idle men industrious’; and in this way the whole system would be rendered efficient and economical.

If the general receptivity of the English ruling class to institutional responses to indigence can be traced to these underlying structural transformations of their society, what in turn accounts for the tendency not merely to institutionalize, but to divide up and categorize the previously amorphous class of the indigent, the troublesome and the morally disreputable? More specifically for our present concerns, how and why was insanity differentiated in this way? The establishment of a market economy, and, more especially, a market in labour, provided the initial incentive to distinguish far more carefully than hitherto between different categories of deviance. If nothing else, under these conditions, stress had to be laid for the first time on the importance of distinguishing the able-bodied and non-able-bodied poor. For a labour market was a basic prerequisite of capitalism,¹⁶ and to provide aid to the able-bodied threatened to undermine that market in a radical fashion and on many different levels. As Adam Smith pointed out,¹⁷ relief to the able-bodied interfered with labour mobility; it created cost differentials between one town and region and another; and it had a wholly pernicious effect on labour discipline and productivity. Instead, it was felt that want ought to be the stimulus to the capable, who must therefore be distinguished from the helpless. The significance of this distinction thus increases i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV