Polish Refugees in British Lunatic Asylums, 1836–1879: Authority Figures and Social Control Mechanisms

Abstract Drawing on public and organisational records, private correspondence, memoirs, and asylum documentation, this study seeks to explore responses in Britain to mental health problems among Polish refugees from the 1830 November Uprising, and their pathways into British lunatic asylums. After considering their military and refugee experience as a context for mental distress, the article examines ways in which family, community, and above all British and Polish officialdom reacted to mental illness. It suggests that attitudes of middle-class authority figures, initially interacting with mechanisms of the new Poor Law, played a pivotal role in patterns of institutionalisation. These attitudes were based on disdain for the socially and economically disadvantaged, rather than specific ethnic prejudice, while a part was also played by political discrimination, the desire to preserve a favourable public image of the exiles, or linguistic and cultural barriers to communication.