Collins’s reading public would be aware that asylums run for profit and catering for those with cash were more likely to hold on to their patients than a county asylum keen to keep costs to a minimum by discharging promptly when sanity appeared to have returned. Put crudely, the richer you were, the more reason there appeared to be to keep you under lock and key. The Woman in White 1948 Directed by Peter Godfrey Synopsis CAUGHT IN THE BLACK SPELL OF TERROR A young painter stumbles upon an assortment of odd characters at an English estate where he has been hired to give art lessons to beautiful Laura Fairlie. Of Chancery lunatics (that’s the very wealthiest and most socially elite group, whose affairs were overseen by the Lord Chancellor), only 1% found themselves at liberty again. By contrast, if you were in a private asylum, discharge rates were a mere 10-14%. In the state system, recovery and discharge rates ran at 37% of admissions – a figure that holds pretty steady across the nineteenth century.
And this is another revealing detail by Collins: the 1859 Select Committee on the lunacy laws made public in crude statistical detail how much harder it was to get discharged from a private asylum than from a county (ie state-run) one. Anne’s colluding mother insists on a private asylum for Anne, not a county asylum, where paupers are sent.
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