William Godwin’s Mandeville (1817) as a critical contribution to the early history of psychiatry

What is it about?

The article is a literary-studies contribution to the history of psychiatry in Britain. To be more precise, it tries to shed some additional light on the historical moment in which psychiatry only began to come into being. It did so in the shape of an approach that contemporaries at the turn of the 19th century referred to as ‘moral management’. However, the article does not deal with the history of psychiatry by looking at it from within the psychiatric discourse. Rather, it asks in which ways new ideas about how to conceptualise, diagnose and treat mental conditions were discussed, negotiated, challenged and actively formed in the wider cultural domain. To this end, one particular novel serves as a case study, namely William Godwin’s Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England, first published in 1817. While the novel does not even explicitly name moral management, it indirectly offers an important assessment because, as in moral management, it insists on the necessity of contextualising each case of mental illness, of looking at the exact circumstances that have shaped an individual’s life. Looking back from a temporal distance, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Charles Mandeville, recounts his own history from childhood until early adulthood. He gives an account of how he suffered a series of traumatic experiences, beginning with the slaughter of his English parents by Irish insurgents during the Ulster Rebellion of 1641 when he was three years old; at one point, he even ends up in a ‘madhouse’. Mandeville’s urge to be an impartial ‘historian’ jars with the fact that he, as the object of the story he is telling, is a traumatized individual with a very subjective view of what happened and why. In other words, the article addresses the difficulties that arise from Mandeville’s double role as diagnosing psychiatrist and diagnosed patient. In addition, not least by way of reference to William Godwin’s materialist philosophy as developed in his influential treatise Political Justice, the article elaborates on how individual histories are always embedded and formed by larger social, political, and gendered contexts: this is a view Godwin shared with the early practitioners and theorists of moral management. Ultimately, the article shows how Godwin both stressed the progressive potential of moral management yet at the same time laid bare its problematic complicity with the suppressive ideology of the prevailing order.

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Photo by Teena Lalawat on Unsplash

Photo by Teena Lalawat on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The article shows, firstly, that the theory and praxis of psychiatry did not come into being in isolation. On the contrary, psychiatric knowledge was (and has always been) embedded within and formed by larger social, political, and cultural discourses. Secondly, in these discursive fields, the philosopher, political commentator, and novelist William Godwin was one of the most formative British voices at the turn of the 19th century. As the present reading of his novel Mandeville demonstrates, he was also a significant contributor to the proto-psychological and proto-psychiatric debates of his time. Thirdly, the article analyses how and why Godwin evaluated the proto-psychiatric approach of moral management as a deeply ambiguous one.

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