The Night Side of London by James Ewing Ritchie

A few miles from the terminus of one of our metropolitan railways is an immense plot of buildings, looking more like a town than a single house. It is a stately pile, beautifully situated, and I doubt not many a care-worn Cockney, as he has been hurried past it by the rail, has often wished that he had a little niche in it where he could come of a night after the day's toil was over, and smell the sweet flowers and the fresh grass; yet the place is a lunatic asylum, and whilst I write there are in it fourteen hundred men and women bereft of reason, unaccountable for their actions, and shut up away from their fellows. Very often the number is much greater, and yet this does not contain all the pauper lunatics of the metropolitan county. There is another equally large on another line of railway, and there are Wandsworth, Bedlam, and others in London itself.

It would do some of the noisy poor, who waste their time in low pot-houses talking of their rights -- when all that a man has a right to is what he can get -- good to look over such a place as Colney Hatch. There are pauper lunatics lodged in a palace, waited on by skilful male and female attendants, living in light and airy galleries, as clean as wax-work, with four meals a day, and with every want supplied. I am sure every Englishman must confess that our asylums and hospitals are the glory of our land. None can deny the active and practical character of the philanthropy of our days. You may depend upon it, nine-tenths of the men and women here were never so well fed, lodged, and cared for before. Their day commences at six, and terminates at eight. Such of them as can be usefully employed are, in cleaning the wards, and in various domestic duties; but they have plenty of spare time -- the women for sewing or knitting, and the men for out-door exercise or reading. In one ward I found some good books on the table, such as Boswell's Johnson, Gibbon's Life, popular works on science, and _Punch_ and several magazines. The only woman I saw reading was an old one, with a Bible before her. The women are by far more troublesome than the men. Directly I went into one ward, a middle-aged woman advanced towards me, with one arm uplifted, exclaiming, "Here comes my husband, King John. " Another female, still plainer and more elderly, seemed inclined to address to me endearments of a still tenderer character. It was clear that they retained the instincts of their sex without its clearness. Yet there were some to whom the novelty of a stranger offered no excitement -- who sat huddled up by the window, with scowling eyes and dishevelled hair, flesh-and-blood pictures of despair.