‘Unfit for reform or punishment’: mental disorder and discipline in Liverpool Borough Prison in the late nineteenth century

This article examines how Liverpool Borough Prison, opened in 1855 as one of the largest local prisons in England to adopt the separate system, categorized and dealt with mental distress and disorder amongst its prison population in the late nineteenth century. High prison committal rates in Liverpool, alongside high levels of recidivism, especially among female prisoners, led to severe overcrowding and encouraged a harsh disciplinary regime. Exacerbated by the poor physical and mental condition of the prisoners, this produced a challenging environment for maintaining the separate system of confinement and prisoners’ mental well-being. While official figures for the rates of mental disorder in local prisons are not readily available, Liverpool Prison’s diverse and under-exploited archives and official reports indicate that insanity caused prison officials and visiting justices great concern, and many prisoners were declared unfit for the rigours of prison discipline. Our article explores the implications of the ever more punitive, deterrent and physically taxing penal policy implemented in the late nineteenth century on the minds of prisoners. Despite the heavy toll on prisoners’ mental well-being, such cases were often retained by prison medical officers reluctant to acknowledge the failure of the prison to deter, reform and redeem.     

The origins of the ‘creative class’: provincial urban society,scientific culture and socio-political marginality in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries1

Recent historiography has revealed the importance of scientific culture in British society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with scientific knowledge shown to have been central in a wide range of sites and contexts, from botanical gardens to mechanics’ institutes. The article draws upon the insights of historians of science, urban historians and others to argue that the concept of the English ‘urban renaissance’, the Habermasean model of the public sphere, various aspects of post-structural, post-modern and feminist theory, and attention to ‘the space’ and geography can all be used to enhance the understanding of this culture. Given that scientific culture has often been associated with social groups that have sometimes been described as ‘marginal’, the article explores the historiography of various aspects of what it defines as the ‘marginal model’ of cultural expression. Aspects of its various manifestations are explored with special reference to groups often perceived as ‘alternative’ or ‘peripheral’ to ‘dominant’ or majority culture, such as women, dissenters, gays or immigrants, including recent work in the United States concerning the activities of the ‘creative class’. It is contended that this can illuminate our understanding of British scientific culture, for instance through its emphasis on urban and regional differentiation and on the irrational aspects of intellectual endeavour. The study assesses how successfully models of social marginality account for the varied character and geography of this culture, using case-studies of scientific societies in different types of English town and a review of Scottish Enlightenment science.