The New Poor Law and the County Pauper Lunatic Asylum--the Devon experience 1834-1884

In this article we examine the impact of the policies and practices of the Guardians of the New Poor Law Unions on the management of pauper lunatics in four Devon Poor Law Unions in the critical period 1834-84. The central role of the Victorian Poor Law in provision made for the insane has only recently been recognized in the research literature. Scholars have been much more concerned with the activities of professionalizing physicians and the general project of state management than they have with the micro-politics of the local Poor Law and the magistracy who were responsible for the legal disposition of the insane. In this paper we argue that not only were the Guardians of the Poor Law Unions central in the determination of the lunatic's journey through the institutional systems provided in the mid-nineteenth century, but also that there were significant variations within the Poor Law system which made for contrasting systems of disposal of lunatics as between the Unions themselves. These variations in disposal of lunatics in Devon raise important questions of ideology, policy, and practice which, if repeated elsewhere, point to a need to refine significantly our assumptions regarding the disposal of pauper lunatics in England and Wales in the fifty years following the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.