Abstract
Historians have debated the growth of asylums as either a movement towards social
control or as a benevolent reform; yet commitment was primarily initiated by kin. The
rapid overcrowding of asylums reflected the success of institutions in responding to
family crises. Through analysis of 1,134 case histories of a private asylum, the
Homewood Retreat of Guelph, Ontario, the dynamics of the late Victorian and
Edwardian middle-class household are evident in the circumstances which culminated in
the decision to commit. Urban industrialization and the declining birth rate rendered
households less able to care for the insane, while the permeation of capitalist relations
into family life rendered the heads of households less willing to care for nonproductive
adult members, particularly socially redundant women. The diagnosis of neurasthenia
enabled members of the middle class to institutionalize kin for behaviour which,
although not violent or destructive, was irritating and antagonistic, thereby reflecting the
high standard of middle-class proprieties.
The First Mrs. Rochester: Wrongful Confinement, Social Redundancy, and Commitment to the Private Asylum, 1883‑1923
