Lyddie, Chapter 15: Rachel Arrives, and What 1840s Asylums Were Like

The Vermont Asylum for the Insane at Brattleboro, a home for people with mental illness whose families could not care for them. Daguerreotype by Thomas Martin Easterly, 1845.

In chapter 15 of the novel Lyddie, bad news arrives with a visitor — and so does Lyddie's little sister.

What happens in the chapter

• A week after Lyddie writes to her mother, Uncle Judah turns up at the boardinghouse. He and Aunt Clarissa have sent Lyddie's mother to an asylum, because they could no longer care for her, and they plan to sell the family farm to pay for her care. Lyddie is outraged, and vows to bring her mother home and return the family to the farm.
• When she asks about her younger sister, Rachel, Lyddie learns to her shock that Rachel is sitting outside. Rachel is malnourished, frightened and too young for mill work, but Lyddie begs Mrs. Bedlow to let her stay. Meanwhile she writes to Charlie, hoping he can stop Judah selling the farm.
• At work, Brigid isn't keeping up, and the overseer warns that she'll be fired unless she improves. Lyddie combines their looms and tends them together until Brigid is up to speed.
• Back at the boardinghouse, Lyddie struggles with having Rachel there, but hopes Rachel might work in the mill as a doffer.

Was it real? Sending a relative to an asylum

Yes — in the 1840s, families might send a troubled relative to an asylum. Residents suffered from a wide range of medical and social problems that weren't fully understood. Some asylums treated them badly, little better than jails meant to keep people away from society, by force if necessary.

But the social reform movements of the early nineteenth century included asylum reform, and the Brattleboro asylum was part of it: its goal was to cure its patients, not simply to contain them. Doctors encouraged residents to be physically active, to spend time outdoors every day, and to eat their meals together, like a family.

A "Fourth Annual Report," printed in the Vermont Telegraph in 1840, described the range of patients:

"…During this time two hundred and thirty-nine patients have received the benefits of the asylum. Among these we have had patients manifesting every condition…from the lowest state…by which he is incapable of attending even to the wants of life, to the violent and furious…"

Not every patient felt cared for. Phebe B. Davis, in an 1855 account of two years and three months in the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica, wrote:

"Dr. Benedict could very easily have relieved me from all I suffered by a few words that sounded like humanity. … he appeared to think that authority was far better than humanity. … They tried to drive me out of that state of mind with brute force."

What historians say

• Constance M. McGovern describes the Brattleboro superintendent, Rockwell, as holding the most advanced ideas of the day about treating mental illness. Like other superintendents, he assured families that the hospital was nothing like a place of confinement and that harsh treatment would never be allowed. Some patients shared his family's social life, and all were meant to benefit from a "truly parental" atmosphere and his daily visits. At first, men worked on the farm and garden while women rode out in carriages on fair days, took walks or sewed together; in the evenings patients joined in family worship, read in the library, or played battledore, chess or draughts on the lawn.
• Benjamin Reiss describes a utopian movement, from the early 1830s until just before the Civil War, that built dozens of publicly funded asylums, mostly in the North. Medical staff controlled patients' diet, exercise, drugs and cultural life — reading, worship, handicrafts. Doctors held that insanity was at root a disease of the brain needing medical treatment, but also that it often had a psychological or "moral" cause, so a carefully controlled environment was as essential to a cure as medicine.

More

"Mental Illness", an essay by Nancy Tomes, Distinguished Professor of History at Stony Brook University.

Sources

Based on "Lyddie: Chapter 15 - Rachel," from the National Park Service Books to Parks series (Lowell National Historical Park), a work of the United States government in the public domain. Quotations are from sources of 1840 and 1855: a "Fourth Annual Report" printed in the Vermont Telegraph (1840) and Phebe B. Davis's Two Years and Three Months in the N.Y. State Lunatic Asylum, at Utica (1855). Constance M. McGovern's "The Insane, the Asylum, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Vermont" (1984) and Benjamin Reiss's Theaters of Madness (2008) are paraphrased. Lyddie is a novel; this page summarizes the chapter. The lesson's questions and a portrait of Professor Tomes are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.