Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England by Sarah Wise

Paperback:  The nineteenth century saw repeated panics about sane individuals being locked away in lunatic asylums.

With the rise of the 'mad-doctor' profession, English liberty seemed to be threatened by a new generation of medical men willing to incarcerate difficult family members in return for the high fees paid by an unscrupulous spouse or friend.

But who were the victims of this trade? And to what extent was it carried on? Why was it a problem for the wealthy and less so for the poor?

Sarah Wise uncovers twelve shocking lunacy cases - ranging from the 1820s to the 1890s - in Inconvenient People (2012), some untold for over a century, which reveal the darker side of the Victorian upper and middle classes - their sexuality, fears of inherited madness, financial greed and fraud, the various types of persons who came under threat of incarceration, the support that their plight aroused in the public mind and the newspapers, and doctors' shifting arguments about what constituted insanity - and chillingly evoke the black motives at the heart of the phenomenon of the 'inconvenient person'.

About the author:  "I live in central London and as well as writing my non-fiction books, I am currently working on a screenplay of Inconvenient People. I lecture regularly on London history and the history of 19th-century mental health.

I also teach 19th-century social history via fiction.  Details of my courses can be found here: www.bishopsgate.org.uk/Courses and type in course codes LN15101 or WR15118.

I grew up in West London and went to school in Wood Lane, White City. After graduation in English Literature, I worked as a journalist, mostly for arts, architecture and design titles, including the Guardian arts desk and Space magazine — the Guardian's design and architecture supplement.

I did a Master's degree in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck, University of London – jumping ship from Engish Literature to History. A chance discovery (a throwaway quote in a piece of Edwardian journalism) led to the writing of The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave Robbery in 1830s London (2004). I followed this up with The Blackest Streets: the Life and Death of a Victorian Slum in 2008.
The Italian Boy won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. The Blackest Streets was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize for evocation of a location/landscape.

My third book, Inconvenient People, was shortlisted for the 2014 Wellcome Book Prize and was a book of the year in the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Guardian and Spectator."