[PDF] Broadmoor Revealed eBook

Author : Mark Stevens
Publisher : Casemate Publishers
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 29,95 MB
Release : 2013-06-19
Category : True Crime
ISBN : 1783462361

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“A fascinating insight into the country’s most famous asylum for criminals” which reveals Victorian England’s care and management of the mentally ill (Your Family Tree). On 27 May 1863, three coaches pulled up at the gates of a new asylum, built amongst the tall, dense pines of Windsor Forest. Broadmoor’s first patients had arrived. In Broadmoor Revealed, Mark Stevens writes about what life was like for the criminally insane, over one hundred years ago. From fresh research into the Broadmoor archives, Mark has uncovered the lost lives of patients whose mental illnesses led them to become involved in crime. Discover the five women who went on to become mothers in Broadmoor, giving birth to new life when three of them had previously taken it. Find out how several Victorian immigrants ended their hopeful journeys to England in madness and disaster. And follow the numerous escapes, actual and attempted, as the first doctors tried to assert control over the residents. As well as bringing the lives of forgotten patients to light, this thrilling book reveals new perspectives on some of the hospital’s most famous Victorian residents: Edward Oxford, the bar boy who shot at Queen Victoria. Richard Dadd, the brilliant artist and murderer of his own father. William Chester Minor, veteran of the American Civil War who went on to play a key part in the first Oxford English Dictionary. Christiana Edmunds, The Chocolate Cream Poisoner and frustrated lover from Brighton. “Detailed and thoughtful.” —Times Literary Supplement “It challenges preconceptions about mental illness and public reaction to shocking crimes.” —Bracknell Forest Standard

Author : Kim E Thomas
Publisher : Pen and Sword History
Page : 183 pages
File Size : 32,96 MB
Release : 2022-05-19
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1526794276

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Broadmoor, Britain’s first asylum for criminal lunatics, was founded in 1863. In the first years of its existence, one in five patients was female. Most had been tried for terrible crimes and sent to Broadmoor after being found not guilty by virtue of insanity. Many had murdered their own children, while others had killed husbands or other family members. Drawing on Broadmoor’s rich archive, this book tells the story of seven of those women, ranging from a farmer’s daughter in her 20s who shot dead her own mother to a middle-class housewife who drowned her baby daughter. Their moving stories give a glimpse into what nineteenth-century life was like for ordinary women, often struggling with poverty, domestic abuse and repeated childbearing. For some, Broadmoor, with its regime of plain food, fresh air and garden walks, was a respite from the hardships of their previous life. Others were desperate to return to their families. All but one of the women whose stories are recounted in this book recovered and were released. Their bout of insanity was temporary. Yet the causes of their condition were poorly understood and the treatment rudimentary. As well as providing an in-depth look at the lives of women in Victorian England, the book offers a fascinating insight into the medical profession’s emerging understanding of the causes and treatment of mental illness.

Author : Sarah Ogilvie
Publisher : Random House
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 29,81 MB
Release : 2024-10-15
Category : History
ISBN : 0593469984

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A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A history and celebration of the many far-flung volunteers who helped define the English language, word by word. “Enthralling and exuberant, Sarah Ogilvie tells the surprising story of the making of the OED. Philologists, fantasists, crackpots, criminals, career spinsters, suffragists, and Australians: here is a wonder book for word lovers.” —Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit The Oxford English Dictionary is one of mankind’s greatest achievements, and yet, curiously, its creators are almost never considered. Who were the people behind this unprecedented book? As Sarah Ogilvie reveals, they include three murderers, a collector of pornography, the daughter of Karl Marx, a president of Yale, a radical suffragette, a vicar who was later found dead in the cupboard of his chapel, an inventor of the first American subway, a female anti-slavery activist in Philadelphia . . . and thousands of others. Of deep transgenerational and broad appeal, a thrilling literary detective story that, for the first time, unravels the mystery of the endlessly fascinating contributors the world over who, for over seventy years, helped to codify the way we read and write and speak. It was the greatest crowdsourcing endeavor in human history, the Wikipedia of its time. The Dictionary People is a celebration of words, language, and people, whose eccentricities and obsessions, triumphs, and failures enriched the English language.

Author : Kate Summerscale
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 20,50 MB
Release : 2016-07-12
Category : True Crime
ISBN : 0698135008

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Winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Book! From the internationally bestselling author, a deeply researched and atmospheric murder mystery of late Victorian-era London In the summer of 1895, Robert Coombes (age 13) and his brother Nattie (age 12) were seen spending lavishly around the docklands of East London -- for ten days in July, they ate out at coffee houses and took trips to the seaside and the theater. The boys told neighbors they had been left home alone while their mother visited family in Liverpool, but their aunt was suspicious. When she eventually forced the brothers to open the house to her, she found the badly decomposed body of their mother in a bedroom upstairs. Robert and Nattie were arrested for matricide and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. Robert confessed to having stabbed his mother, but his lawyers argued that he was insane. Nattie struck a plea and gave evidence against his brother. The court heard testimony about Robert's severe headaches, his fascination with violent criminals and his passion for 'penny dreadfuls', the pulp fiction of the day. He seemed to feel no remorse for what he had done, and neither the prosecution nor the defense could find a motive for the murder. The judge sentenced the thirteen-year-old to detention in Broadmoor, the most infamous criminal lunatic asylum in the land. Yet Broadmoor turned out to be the beginning of a new life for Robert--one that would have profoundly shocked anyone who thought they understood the Wicked Boy. At a time of great tumult and uncertainty, Robert Coombes's case crystallized contemporary anxieties about the education of the working classes, the dangers of pulp fiction, and evolving theories of criminality, childhood, and insanity. With riveting detail and rich atmosphere, Kate Summerscale recreates this terrible crime and its aftermath, uncovering an extraordinary story of man's capacity to overcome the past.

Author : Lisa Appignanesi
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 31,98 MB
Release : 2015-07-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1605988154

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A journey into the heart of dark passions and the crimes they impel. When passion is in the picture, what is criminal, what is sane, what is mad or simply bad? Through court and asylum records, letters and newspaper accounts, this book brings to life some sensational trials between 1870 and 1914, a period when the psychiatric professions were consolidating their hold on our understanding of what is human. Outside fiction, individual emotions and the inner life had rarely been publicly discussed: now, in an increasingly popular press and its courtroom reports, people avidly consumed accounts of transgressive sexuality, savage jealousy and forbidden desires. These stood revealed as aspects not only of those labelled mad, but potentially, of everyone. With great story-telling flair and a wealth of historical detail, Lisa Appignanesi teases out the vagaries of passion and the clashes between the law and the clinic as they stumble towards a (sometimes reviled) collaboration. Sexual etiquette and class roles, attitudes to love, madness and gender, notions of respectability and honor, insanity and lunacy, all are at play in that vital forum in which public opinion is shaped—the theater of the courtroom.

Author : Barrie Charles
Publisher : Amberley Publishing Limited
Page : 311 pages
File Size : 31,71 MB
Release : 2012-05-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1445612674

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An account of the eight assassination attempts on the life of Queen Victoria.

Author : Catherine Cox
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 38,33 MB
Release : 2022-03-10
Category : History
ISBN : 1108834558

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The first historical study to offer an in-depth exploration of the complex relationship between the prison and mental breakdown.

Author : Taylor, Paul
Publisher : Policy Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 26,79 MB
Release : 2014-10-22
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1447312627

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Within the domains of criminal justice and mental health care, critical debate concerning ‘care’ versus ‘control’ and ‘therapy’ versus ‘security’ is now commonplace. Indeed, the ‘hybridisation’ of these areas is now a familiar theme. This unique and topical text provides an array of expert analyses from key contributors in the field that explore the interface between criminal justice and mental health. Using concise yet robust definitions of key terms and concepts, it consolidates scholarly analysis of theory, policy and practice. Readers are provided with practical debates, in addition to the theoretical and ideological concerns surrounding the risk assessment, treatment, control and risk management in a cross-disciplinary context. Included in this book is recommended further reading and an index of legislation, making it an ideal resource for students at undergraduate and postgraduate level, together with researchers and practitioners in the field.

Author : Anna Shepherd
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 35,79 MB
Release : 2015-10-06
Category : History
ISBN : 1317319052

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The nineteenth century brought an increased awareness of mental disorder, epitomized in the Asylum Acts of 1808 and 1845. Shepherd looks at two very different institutions to provide a nuanced account of the nineteenth-century mental health system.

Author : Alison C. Pedley
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 10,55 MB
Release : 2023-07-13
Category : History
ISBN : 1350275344

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Tracing the experiences of women who were designated insane by judicial processes from 1850 to 1900, this book considers the ideas and purposes of incarceration in three dedicated facilities: Bethlem, Fisherton House and Broadmoor. The majority of these patients had murdered, or attempted to murder, their own children but were not necessarily condemned as incurably evil by medical and legal authorities, nor by general society. Alison C. Pedley explores how insanity gave the Victorians an acceptable explanation for these dreadful crimes, and as a result, how admission to a dedicated asylum was viewed as the safest and most human solution for the 'madwomen' as well as for society as a whole. Mothers, Criminal Insanity and the Asylum in Victorian England considers the experiences, treatments and regimes women underwent in an attempt to redeem and rehabilitate them, and return them to into a patriarchal society. It shows how society's views of the institutions and insanity were not necessarily negative or coloured by fear and revulsion, and highlights the changes in attitudes to female criminal lunacy in the second half of the 19th century. Through extensive and detailed research into the three asylums' archives and in legal, governmental, press and genealogical records, this book sheds new light on the views of the patients themselves, and contributes to the historiography of Victorian criminal lunatic asylums, conceptualising them as places of recovery, rehabilitation and restitution.