Institutionalization of the Insane: “Of Right Mind” and The Woman in White

By J. T.

All the Year Round, a Victorian periodical by Charles Dickens, was published weekly throughout the United Kingdom from 1859 to 1893. All the Year Round replaced Dickens’s former magazine, Household Words, which focused on social issues of the time, after Dickens had a dispute with his publishers, Bradbury and Evans. All the Year Round included serialized novels, having “the opening page always contain[ing] one of the two serial installments of novels then running” and proved a “vehicle for novelists” rather than journalists (Allingham). All the Year Round also emphasized foreign and cultural affairs, as compared to the issues Household Words focused on, particularly those of the poor and working class (Drew 10). The Woman in White first appeared in forty weekly installments in All the Year Round, from 26 November, 1859, until 25 August, 1860 (Bachman and Cox 41). All the Year Round dealt with cultural affairs similar to those discussed in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, topics such as insanity, and the institutionalization of the insane. In “Of Right Mind,” an article published in All The Year Round, Volume 3, on September 22, 1860, the author challenges the Victorian view of insanity, claiming perfect mental health does not exist, a hefty statement considering the common Victorian mind set on insanity.

We’re All a Little Insane: Asylums and Wrongful Committals in The Woman in White

By A. Thompson

Published on September 22, 1860 in All the Year Round, “Of Right Mind” comments on the changing attitudes toward insanity and the role of asylums in Victorian England. The article argues that most people have some form of mental health problem and that the ways in which society deals with mental health should appropriately reflect this. The author believes that “complete health of body is rare” and “it is that to the men whose minds are not whole, round, and perfect, we owe all the progress of the world” (“Of Right Mind” 557). The author believes lunatics to be those who are a danger to themselves or others and who “are incapable of managing their own affairs” (“Of Right Mind” 558). The latter condition he or she sees as a common trait among many men, not just among those who are deemed to be insane. The author subsequently advises caution in the use of an insanity plea in legal cases and prefers to see mental illness as occurring often and to varying degrees within society. The author also comments on the ability to remedy a “disease of the mind” with intervention during the earliest stages of affliction. On the subject of asylums to provide this early treatment, the author advocates a system that would create some institutions that cater to milder cases and others that cater to more severe cases. Finally, the author advocates “[dismissing]…the old vague horror of insanity” (“Of Right Mind” 559).