A. Sane Patient

My Experiences in a Lunatic Asylum is one of many similar tales (e.g. Clarissa Caldwell Lathrop's A Secret Institution, 1890) which echoed and fed the fear rife in Victorian Britain of being falsely confined in such private asylums. Merivale's pamphlet perhaps stands out from others, however, in its literary stature, coming from the pen of an author who counted amongst his friends William Makepeace Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens and others. The barrister and author Herman Charles Merivale (1839-1906) was committed, in February 1875, to Ticehurst in Sussex, a private lunatic asylum owned and run by the Newington family since 1792. Having suffered from what would nowadays be deemed as depression, Merivale spent almost seven months at Ticehurst where his mental state, intake of food, as well as his sleeping habits were recorded in a casebook. After initially being released in September 1875, he returned to the asylum within a year on account of suicidal tendencies and was later transferred out of the hospital in 1877 although his condition had not improved. In his book, published in 1879 under the pseudonym of "A Sane Patient", Merivale tells of his first night: I was therefore 'removed, ' half-dying, in a state of semi-consciousness, I can scarcely remember how, to the castellated mansion mentioned in my first chapter. The wrong should have been impossible, of course; but it is possible, and it is law. My liberty, and my very existence as an individual being, had been signed away behind my back. In my weakened perceptions I at first thought that the mansion was an hotel. Left alone in a big room on the first evening, I was puzzled by the entrance of a wild-looking man, who described figures in the air with his hand, to an accompaniment of gibber, ate a pudding with his fingers at the other end of a long table, and retired. My nerve was shaken to its weakest, remember; and I was alone with him It was not an hotel. It was a lunatic asylum.

Thank you for checking out this book by Theophania Publishing. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you soon. We have thousands of titles available, and we invite you to search for us by name, contact us via our website, or download our most recent catalogues. Sitting at my desk as I am sitting now, with the comforting pipe and jug of beer by my side (deadly poisons to me, both of them, I have been often assured), and with a profound and grateful sense of extreme physical wellbeing, it is difficult for me to believe that not so long ago I was pronounced to be suffering at different times or all at once from epilepsy, partial paralysis, fits, delusions, suicidal and homicidal mania, 'voices' (a very professional and dangerous piece of humbug, of which I shall have more to say presently), 'visions' (Anglic , dreams), and the Lord knows what beside. As I was utterly prostrate from weakness, it reads like a dangerous complication; and I feel with pride that I may safely challenge Maria Jolly herself to the proof. It is something to have lived through all these maladies, and to be engaged in replenishing the welcome beer-glass, or, like the moralist of Thackeravian memory, Alive and merry at-year, Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine. But it is not too much to say, -and I speak again the wise words of my good friend and doctor, not my own, -that there are at this present moment languishing in these places many men who might well have been rescued, may be even now (and a mob attack, Bastille fashion, upon the whole body of private asylums would, to my mind, do as much good as harm), -men who might well have been spared and saved to do good work in the world, but who now lie as helpless as the enchanter at the feet of Vivien in the hollow oak- Lost to life and use, and name and fame.