Lunatics Dancing at Blackwell’s Island, New York in 1865

Most asylums tried to incorporate decorations and festive activities into their patients’ lives during the Christmas season; the cheerfulness helped many patients and also brightened the morale of staff. Dances were popular entertainments at asylums, and many undoubtedly held special New Year’s Eve dances as an end to the holiday season.

Article About a Dance

A reporter attending a New Year’s Eve dance at Middlesex Madhouse in Hanwell (1842) described the participants as looking and behaving like “a crowd of children.” He described the dancing as being of the kind one saw at village fairs, and that the patients didn’t wear uniforms or “workhouse” dresses. Many of the patients definitely enjoyed the activity and talked avidly and gaily, but others seemed anxious, disturbed, melancholy, or uneasy.

There had evidently been a change of management or policy, because the reporter described a girl who had formerly been restrained a great deal of the time and had just recently been released from that treatment. “Her wrists were deformed by the hard leather cases in which they had been confined; and so habituated had she been to wear them at night, that for some time after they had been removed she held up her hands to be bound whenever she went to bed.”

A Twelfth Night Party at Hanwell Lunatic Asylum

Though his article was laudatory, the sad picture he painted at the end was the reality many patients at asylums faced. One night of comparative fun and freedom could scarcely make up for it.