My Experiences in a Lunatic Asylum is one of many similar tales (e.g. Clarissa Caldwell Lathrop's A Secret Institution, 1890) which echoed and fed the fear rife in Victorian Britain of being falsely confined in such private asylums. Merivale's pamphlet perhaps stands out from others, however, in its literary stature, coming from the pen of an author who counted amongst his friends William Makepeace Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens and others.
The barrister and author Herman Charles Merivale (1839-1906) was committed, in February 1875, to...