Wrongful confinement

Introduction

In Charles Reade’s Hard Cash, a young man called Alfred Hardie discovers that his banker father, Richard Hardie, has stolen his clients’ life savings. His son, Alfred, discovers his crime. To prevent exposure (and to acquire his son’s life savings in the process), his father ensures that Alfred is illegally incarcerated in a private lunatic asylum, with no prospect of release or escape. When Hard Cash was first published in 1863, it caused a sensation. While Reade emphasized that the novel was based on fact, its critics vehemently denounced the novel’s ‘falsehoods’.

The excerpt covers a range of pertinent topics, including the prison/asylum analogy, the important role that ‘appearance’ was to play in the debates about wrongful confinement, and the central position that the asylum proprietor was to take in these debates. Hard Cash is an important text, especially when read in light of newspaper accounts and tracts such as A Blighted Life.

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