#sarah wise

[dandelioncasey]

Book the fourth complete!

This year’s bingo can be found on @2026-book-bingo; if you want to play along, you can get a clean version here.

You can check out the rest of my main entries for the book bingo here and my bonus reads here.

Title: The Undesirables

Author: Sarah Wise

Square: Microhistory

~~~

Through the early twentieth century, 'liberal' England locked away over tens of thousands of innocent people. This is their story.

By 1950, an estimated 50,000 people had been deemed 'defective' by the British government and detained indefinitely under a little-known law. Their 'crimes' were various: single mothers; rebellious teenagers; children with disabilities; and many more who were simply 'different'.

Forcibly removed from families and confined to a shadow world of specialist facilities in the countryside, they were hidden away and forgotten – out of sight, out of mind.

Through painstaking archival research, award-winning historian Sarah Wise provides a compelling study of how early twentieth-century attitudes to class, gender, and disability resulted in a nationwide scandal – and how they continue to shape social policy to this day.

~~~

I’m just frontloading my bingo sheet this year with a bunch of happy-go-lucky cheerful stories with super happy endings, aren’t I? And this one is probably the darkest of the four I’ve read so far – I’ve studied this time period and these laws in at least two different history classes (once as part of GCSE ‘medicine through time’, once as part of A-Level British political and social history) and I was still shocked by the sheer inhumanity and tragedy of the cases that were covered.

As a psychology graduate, I’m ashamed to even be associated with the kinds of people who would have supported these (or any!) eugenicist policies, especially when the problem they were designed to ‘solve’ didn’t actually exist; as a person with a heart, I cried real tears at the fact that most of these people will have died without ever seeing their families again, without ever getting answers as to why they were imprisoned, and without their names ever being known.

Content warnings for ableism, adult/minor relationship (mentioned only), child abuse, classism, confinement, eugenics, forced institutionalisation, forced sterilisation, incest (mentioned only), mental illness, misogyny, murder, racism, rape, sexism, and sexual assault.

[khaaji]

Inconvenient People - Lunacy, Liberty and the mad-doctors in victorian England, Sarah Wise

[semper-legens]

99. The Blackest Streets, by Sarah Wise

Owned: No, library Page count: 281 My summary: The life and death of a late Victorian slum called the Nichol, from the desperate poverty of the inhabitants to the people who were nominally trying to help them. It’s a turbulent time in the history of London, through all the echelons of society. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

You know, it's funny how little coincidences can just happen. The day I first cracked open this book, documenting life and death in the Victorian slum known as the Nichol, I happened to be in the front room when my mother was watching the news. I had just read about a couple of cases from this book - a baby who died because of how unsanitary conditions in the slum, a child who died when the ceiling fell in over the bed he shared with his family - and there in front of me was a report about council housing in England today. Featuring a case of a small boy who died after his asthma was triggered by the mould in his council home, and a woman living in a council flat whose ceiling fell in over her bed. The more things change, the more they stay the same. By which I mean that the government does not care about poor people, and never has. They give aid to those in poverty begrudgingly, if at all, and care not for those who starve to death on street corners because those people are evil poors. Ugh.

Victorian philanthropy absolutely fascinates me, if only because it's so contradictory. The Victorians saw it almost as a moral imperative for the middle and upper classes to help out the poor, but only if they were the 'deserving' poor, i.e. clean-living, sober, and either obviously disabled or in work. Which, you know, it's hard to be clean-living when your absolute maximum space is one room, which is filthy due to the polluted London air, and all the jobs are getting mechanised so you're either out of work or criminally underpaid, and the landlord is hiking up the price to above anything you can reasonably afford, and there's little entertainment available to you outside of the pub. What gets me is that this way of thinking still pervades the welfare system today - how often do you hear people talking about 'benefit scroungers', or people who 'don't deserve' welfare, or are just 'cheating the system'? This mentality had Victorian moralising at its core, and this book is a great eye-opener as to just how messed up that way of thinking is, and how squalid the conditions for poor Victorian families were. It's an engaging if brutal read, and I'd very much recommend it.

Next up, a nurse working in a prison finds a face from her past.

[khaaji]

I got this second-hand book for cheap titled Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-doctors in victorian England by Sarah Wise and I'm already in love with it.

[andletforsakendidodie]

The man to whom Dr Bate reported directly, Joseph Jacobs, head of the Vestry Sanitary Committee and a vestryman since 1864, had been running one of the most lucrative pubs in the Nichol – the Victory, at 65 Nelson Street – for forty years. As a chairman of the Bethnal Green Licenced Victuallers' Associaton, Jacobs was a tireless campaigner in the cause of drinkers' and publicans' rights; he spoke passionately at the Victory's club room against parliamentary attempts in 1886 and 1887 to close pubs on Sundays and to ban the sale of alcohol to children under thirteen. It was better that children came to the public house to take out beer and spirits than their mothers, who would then be neglecting their domestic duties, Jacobs declared.

The Blackest Streets by Sarah Wise

[scwise]

Orchid #1

Watercolor on Coldpress, 2016

[scwise]

When you can’t come up with something specific to draw, just use a stamp you carved over the summer and add some things to it.  This stamp was carved to make mini printed gifts for Alchemy, 2015.  It’s a Ba, the Egyptian symbol for the part of the human soul that can travel between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

[scwise]

January painting: check.