Emotional writing and the appeal to readers' compassion as arguments against wrongful incarceration

What is it about?

This paper discusses one of the earliest personal accounts written to expose the cruel conditions of keeping in private asylums and to petition for reform. The text has been analysed with a focus on its legal merits and perspective. By contrast, this discussion argues that it is emotion - and more specifically, the compassion expressed by the writer and the appeal to his readers' compassion - that helps the writer to establish social connectedness and show his confinement as wrongful.

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Why is it important?

The text analysed is one of the earliest first-person accounts of the experience of mental illness. The discussion also helps show how attitudes towards confinement as a way of managing mental illness changed in parallel with changes in social mentality and emotion - specifically the increase in the social desirability of compassion