page_title: Augusta Triumphans
section_title: Reforming the madhouse system
hierarchical_section_title: Augusta Triumphans / Andrew Moreton's proposals for the improvement of London / Reforming the madhouse system
caption_attribution_description: English: In The Madhouse — Plate 8, A Rake's Progress, William Hogarth. Engraving, 35.5 x 41cm. This is a scan of a print from the plate after Hogarth retouched it in 1763 by adding the Britannia emblem.
context_page_description: Augusta Triumphans: or, the Way to Make London the Most Flourishing City in the Universe by Daniel Defoe was first published on 16 March 1728. The fictitious speaker of this pamphlet, Andrew Moreton, is a man in his sixties who offers suggestions for the improvement of London. In particular, he fosters the establishment of a university, an academy of music, a hospital for foundlings and licensed institutions for the treatment of mental diseases. Moreover, he encourages the introduction of measures to prevent moral corruption and street robbery.
  Augusta Triumphans is part of a group of works which were issued under the nom-de-plume of Andrew Moreton. It includes also Every-body's Business, Is No-body's Business, The Protestant Monastery, Parochial Tyranny, and Second Thoughts are Best. They respectively deal with high salary of servants, disrespect towards elders, corruption of parishes, and crime prevention. They all revisit themes which their author, Daniel Defoe, had already discussed in An Essay Upon Projects.
  Compared to this earlier work, however, they are more project-oriented than focused on moral criticism.
context_section_description: Andrew Moreton reflects also upon the contemporary system of private madhouses and denounces its inefficiency. In the first place, he notices that it allows the institutionalisation of individuals who are affected by no mental disease. For instance, they frequently admit healthy wives. confined by abusive husbands for the sole purpose of getting rid of them. In the second place, he points out that they do not guarantee adequate treatment of patients in that their staffs neglect or abuse them. In the light of this, he suggests substituting them with “licensed madhouses” which are “subject to proper visitation and inspection” and where nobody can be “sent […] without due reason, inquiry, and authority”.
  In the eighteenth century, private madhouses were much discussed. Nicholas Hervey points out that Defoe was “among the first to question the practice of these institutions in Augusta Triumphans (1728)”. He was late followed by Tobias Smollett who wrote the novel Sir Lancelot Greaves (1762). in which the hero of the title criticises unfair detention in madhouses. and reflects upon the difference between sanity and mental illness. In 1763, the Gentleman’s Magazine also denounced the abuse of a series of patients in asylums.
  Nicholas Hervey also notices that Defoe “attacked the way husbands were able to confine their wives for the most spurious of reasons”. This practice was later also denounced by Mary Wollstonecraft in The Wrongs of Woman (1798). On this point, Elizabeth Foyster claims that this “was an issue which caused much concern in eighteenth-century England”.  Men’s right to confine their wives was frequently debated. In the essay At the Limits of Liberty: Married Women and Confinement in eighteenth-century England (2002), she argues that husbands’ detention of their spouses in family dwellings and madhouses had become a new form of conjugal violence. Her study is based on documents of the King’s Bench, the court which held jurisdiction over this issue.
caption: In the Madhouse - Plate 8 in A Rake's Progress (1735) by William Hogarth
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