John Howard's (1726-1790) motives as a prison reformer appear obscure and
a sense of his personality remains elusive. Biographies and contemporary texts
suggest this is not merely the effect of historical distance: John Howard was
considered eccentric by many of his contemporaries. It is suggested that Howard
suffered from Asperger's Syndrome (AS), a disorder allied to autism. Sufferers
may have high intelligence but characteristically manifest impairments in social,
communicative and imaginative furtctioning with inflexible thinking and an
often fanatical preoccupation with a narrow special interest. The hypothesis may
help explain enigmatic aspects of Howard's career and personal life, as well as
our difficulty forming a sense of his identity. The correspondence between
Howard's idiosyncratic perspective, putatively related to AS, and the direction
of the profound 'disciplinary' transformation of eighteenth-century society is
highlighted.
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References
1.
Roy Porter, 'Howard's beginning: prisons, disease, hygiene', in R. Creese, W. F. Bynum, J. Beam (eds), The Health of Prisoners: Historical Essays5-25 (Amsterdam - Atlanta GA: Editions Rodopi B.V, 1995), 8.
2.
John Aikin, A.View of the Character and Public Services of the Late JohnHoward (London, 1792).
3.
James Baldwin Brown, Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of John Howard, the Philanthropist; Compiled from his own Diary, in the Possession of his Family; his Confidential Letters; the Communications of his Surviving Relatives and Friends; and other Authentic Sources of Information (London, 1818).
4.
Cited in the present article are: Thomas Taylor, Memoirs of John Howard (London: Hatchard, 1836); William Hepworth Dixon, John Howard: a Memoir, 2nd edn (London: Jackson & Walford, 1854); John Field, Correspondence of John Howard, the Philanthropist, Not Before Published (London, 1855); William Guy, John Howard's Winter's Journey (London: Thomas de la Rue, 1882); Edgar Gibson, John Howard (London: Methuen, 1901); L. Orman-Cooper John Howard: the Prisoners' Friend. His Home Life and his Work (London: The Sunday School Union, 1904).
5.
Guy, op. cit., 56.
6.
D.L. Howard, John Howard, Prison Reformer (London: Christopher Johnson, 1958).
7.
Martin Southward, John Howard, Prison Reformer: an Account of his Life and Travels (London : Independent Press, 1958).
8.
Rod Morgan, 'Divine philanthropy: John Howard reconsidered', History , (1977), 206: 388-410; John Freeman, Prisons Past and Future: in Commemoration of the Bicentenary of John Howard's the State of the Prisons (London: Heinemann, 1977); Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: the Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 (London: Penguin, 1978).
9.
Anonymous, 'Obituary of John Howard', Gentleman's Magazine, (1790), LX: 276-9.
10.
Anonymous, 'Address to Dr Aikin, on the biography of Mr Howard', Gentleman's Magazine , (1790) LX: 416-18.
11.
John Aikin, 'Letter to one of Mr Urban's biographers', Gentleman's Magazine (1790) LX: 491-2.
12.
Steven Marcus , 'Psychoanalytic biography and its problems: the case of Wilhelm Reich', in A. M. Cooper , O. F. Kernberg and E. S. Person, Psychoanalysis: Towards the Second Century35-51 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 35. Brown declared Howard's character, 'one of the most excellent on earth, both in his private relations and his public labours', Memoirs of the Public and Private Life, xi.
13.
Marcus, op. cit., 35-6.
14.
Field, op. cit.; Southwood, op. cit., 11.
15.
R.W. England , 'Who wrote John Howard's text? The state of the prisons as a dissenting enterprise', British Journal of Criminology, xxxiii (1993), 203-15, see 207n.
16.
Southwood, op. cit., 11; Morgan, op. cit., 389.
17.
Guy, op. cit., 33.
18.
Tom Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style ( London: Faber & Faber, 1998) 11.
19.
John Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with Preliminary Observations, and an Account of some Foreign Prisons (Warrington: Eyres, 1777). The first (1777) edition is cited unless otherwise specified.
20.
John Howard, An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe; with Various Papers relative to the Plague: together with further Observations on some Foreign Prisons and Hospitals: and additional Remarks on those in Great Britain and Ireland (Warrington: Eyres, 1789).
21.
Anonymous, Obituary of John Howard, 276.
22.
Townsend, cited in Brown, op. cit, 680. See also: Bedfordshire County Council, John Howard: Prison Reformer (Bedford: County Record Office, 1973), 1; M. Green, 'Letter to the Editor', The Gentleman's Magazine, lxiii ( 1793), 513.
23.
Fothergill was said to have died proudly declaring his virginity. See Ignatieff, op. cit., 50.
24.
Aikin, A.View of the Character, 16.
25.
Hepworth Dixon , op. cit, 8, original italics. See also R.W. England, 'John Howard and his influence in America', in J. Freeman , Prisorts Past and Future: in Commemoration of the Bicentenary of John Howard's the State of the Prisons (London: Heinemann, 1977), 25-33, 26; Taylor , op. cit, 433; Guy, op. cit, 68-9
26.
American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (4th Edition) (Washington DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994) 75-7.
27.
M.L. Berthier , 'Corticocallosal abnormalities in Asperger Syndrome ' American Journal of Roentgenology, clxii (1994), 236-7. H.D. Ellis et al., 'A preliminary study of right hemisphere cognitive defects and impaired social judgments among young people with Asperger Syndrome', European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, iii (1994), 255-66.
28.
R. Goodman and S. Scott, Child Psychiatry (Oxford: Blackwell Science, 1997), 47.
29.
Uta Frith, 'Asperger and his Syndrome', in U.Frith , Autism and Asperger Syndrome (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1991 ),1-36, 4-5. Recent approaches to AS from a psychoanalytic and a developmental perspective have emphasized both the differences between individual sufferers and the common clinical picture they present. See Anne Alvarez and Sue Reid, Autism and Personality: Findings from the Tavistock Autism Workshop (London: Routledge, 1999).
30.
W. F., Letter to the Editor, The Gentleman's Magazine, lx (1790), 287-9; Brown, Memoirs of the Public and Private Life , 663-5.
31.
Brown, Memoirs of the Public and Private Life, 4.
32.
Aikin, A.View of the Character, 26-7, original italics. Also, 'His own language and manners were invariably pure and delicate, and the freedoms which pass uncensured or even applauded in the promiscuous companies of men would have affected him with sensations of disgust', ibid., 235.
33.
Gibson, op. cit, 160.
34.
John Howard, cited in D.L. Howard , op. cit, 93.
35.
Southwood, op. cit, 124.
36.
Hans Asperger , '"Autistic psychopathy" in childhood' (orginally published in German in 1942) translated by Uta Frith. in U.Frith, Autism and Asperger Syndrome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 37-92, 82.
37.
Anonymous, 'Authentic memoirs of life and philanthropic labours of the late John Howard Esq. F.R.S', Universal Magazine, lxxxvi (1790), 169-74 and 255-63. See page 171. See also Brown, op. cit, 12.
38.
D.L. Howard, op. cit, 166.
39.
Dixon, op. cit, 11.
40.
For examples see Gibson, op. cit, 195-6 and Southwood, op. cit, 123.
41.
Anonymous, Authentic Memoirs of Life and Philanthropic Labours, 171-2. See also Guy, op. cit, 39 and England, John Howard and his Influence in America, 27. Howard's first wife's maiden name appears as both Lardeau and Loidore in contemporary documents.
42.
Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Revised edition) ( London: Penguin, 1990), 146.
43.
Tony Attwood, Asperger's Syndrome: a Guide for Parents and Professionals ( London: Jessica Kingsley, 1998), 167. See also Digby Tantam, 'Asperger syndrome in adulthood', in Uta Frith, Autism and Asperger Syndrome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 177.
44.
Simon Baron-Cohen, 'An assessment of violence in a young man with Asperger's Syndrome', Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, xxix (1988), 351-60.
45.
Aikin, A.View of the Character, 28.
46.
Brown, op. cit, 55.
47.
Aikin, A.View of the Character, 28.
48.
England, 'Who wrote John Howard's Text?', 208.
49.
Ignatieff, op. cit, 50.
50.
Southwood, op. cit, 110.
51.
Chronic symptoms of tertiary syphilis were long thought unrelated to early genital manifestations and were also confused with the effects of mercury treatment. Mid nineteenth-century biographers such as Dixon, reporting that treatment drastically exacerbated Howard junior's condition, seem to have misunderstood the cause of his insanity. The five years from infection in 1783 to incarceration in Leicester asylum in 1788, is compatible with the course of cerebral syphilis, a manifestation of tertiary syphilis. Southwood was the first of Howard's biographers to name the venereal disease afflicting young John, 'the curse of madness was only too certainly not cruelty but dementia praecox (sic)' erroneously using a term for schizophrenia while possibly intending 'dementia paralytica' (general paralysis of the insane). See Dixon, op. cit., 236; Southwood, op. cit., 99; A. M. Brandt, 'Sexually transmitted diseases' in W. F. Bynum and R. Porter, Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 562-84, 567; Claude Quetel, History of Syphilis (Cambridge: Polity Press 1990), 86; Peter Gay, The Tender Passion: the Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 379; Gilbert Pleuger, John Howard and the Prisons (Bedford: Sempringham, 1990), 20; W. A. Lishman, Organic Psychiatry: the Psychological Consequences of Cerebral Disorder (3rd edn) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 340.
52.
Ignatieff, op. cit, 60-1.
53.
Guy, op. cit, 58.
54.
54. 'This fancy of dungeons for children was a sprout from Howard's brain; for which (saving reverence due to holy Paul) methinks I could willingly spit on his statue' (Charles Lamb, cited in Guy, op. cit., 56).
Aikin, 'Letter to Mr Urban' (the editor), Gentleman's Magazine, lx (1790), 289-90. See page 289, italics in original. See also Brown, op. cit, 58.
59.
Aikin, A.View of the Character, 44.
60.
Aikin, Letter to one of Mr Urban's Biographers, 491.
61.
Ignatieff, op. cit, 48.
62.
Anonymous, Address to Dr Aikin, on the Biography of Mr Howard, 416, italics in original.
63.
Aikin, Letter to one of Mr Urban's Biographers, 491.
64.
John Howard's resignation letter to the Lord President of the Privy Council, January 1781, cited in Anonymous, Authentic Memoirs of Life and Philanthropic Labours, 256.
65.
D.L. Howard, op. cit, 118.
66.
England, JohnHoward and his Influence in America, 33.
67.
Gibson, op. cit, 205. See also Guy, op. cit, 69; England , JohnHoward and his Influence in America, 32-3. Attwood suggests that team situations can be particularly stressful for sufferers from AS (op. cit, 121).
68.
Arthur Young, The Autobiography of Arthur Young, ed. M. Betham-Edwards (London, 1898), 59 (cited in Morgan, op. cit, 391).
69.
Aikin, Letter to Mr Urban , 233.
70.
Aikin, A View of the Character , 13.
71.
Frith, op. cit, 5.
72.
Barbara Kluger , 'The differentiation between autism and Asperger Syndrome', Autism, ii (1998), 11-32. See page 18.
73.
Christopher Gillberg 'Clinical and neurobiological aspects of Asperger Syndrome in six families', in U. Frith (ed.), Autism and Asperger Syndrome ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 122-46, 139.
74.
Francesca Happé 'The autobiographical writings of three Asperger syndrome adults: problems of interpretation and implications for theory', in U. Frith (ed.), Autism and Asperger Syndrome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 207-42.
75.
Ibid., 210.
76.
England, 'Who wrote John Howard's Text?', 203. See also the entry 'John Howard' in the Dictionary of National Biography (London: Smith & Elder, 1908).
77.
John Aikin, Thoughts on Hospitals (London: Joseph Johnson, 1771); Howard, The State of the Prisons, 4th edn (London : Johnson, Dilly & Cadell, 1792 ); Howard, An Account of the Principal Lazarettos,, 2nd edn (London: Johnson , 1791).
78.
Aikin, A View of the Character , 12.
79.
Brown, op. cit, 8.
80.
Aikin, A View of the Character, 13, italics added.
81.
Ibid, 13.
82.
England, 'Who wrote John Howard's Text?', 207.
83.
Citedibid, 208.
84.
Cited in Southwood, op. cit., 100.
85.
England, 'Who wrote John Howard's Text?', 207.
86.
Compare Happé: 'some expression they use which may seem to show startling social skill [may be] simply an echoed phrase' op. cit., 219.
87.
Morgan, op. cit, 388.
88.
John Howard, The State of the Prisons, cited in John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of the Mind in Eighteenth Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987), 218. See also England, 'Who Wrote John Howard's Text?', 206, for another well-written passage from The State of the Prisons.
89.
Bender, op. cit, 218.
90.
Gibson, op. cit, 52-3.
91.
Aikin, A View of the Character , 65.
92.
No reference to the collective process occurs in either of the cited obituaries (Obituary of John Howard and Authentic Memoirs of Life and Philanthropic Labours). See also England, 'Who wrote John Howard's Text?', 211.
93.
Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon. Postscript ii; 2, (London, 1791 ) cited in Southwood, op. cit, 138.
94.
Aikin in Howard, An Account of the Principal Lazarettos, 2nd edn (1791), 2.
95.
Howard, The State of the Prisons, 5.
96.
Ibid, 487.
97.
Paulin, op. cit,73.
98.
Ibid., 110.
99.
England, 'Who wrote John Howard's Text?', 203.
100.
Ignatieff, op. cit, 57-8.
101.
Morgan, op. cit, 390.
102.
W. F., Letter to the editor. The Gentleman's Magazine, lx (1790), 288.
103.
John Howard , 'An account of the degree of cold observed in Bedfordshire', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, liv (1764), 118.
104.
John Howard , 'On the heat of the waters at Bath, containing a table of the waters of the different baths', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, lvii (1767), 201; John Howard, 'Observations on the heat of the ground at Mount Vesuvius', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, lxi (1771), 53.
105.
Cited in Gibson, op. cit, 24-5.
106.
R.W. England , 'The cluster potato: John Howard's achievement in scientific farming', The Agricultural History Review, xxiv (1976) 144-8.
107.
Joyce Godber, John Howard, the Phtlanthropist (Bedford: Bedford County Council, 1977), 7-8.
108.
Aikin, A View of the Character, 21. For an opposing view, see Guy, op. cit, 21.
109.
Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, 274.
110.
Attwood, op. cit, 90.
111.
Attwood, op. cit, 90-4. Frith, op cit, 61.
112.
Taylor, op. cit, viii.
113.
England, 'Who wrote John Howard's Text?', 204.
114.
L. Orman-Cooper , John Howard: the Prisoners' Friend. His Home Life and his Work (London: The Sunday School Union, 1904), 99-100.
115.
Attwood, op. cit, 93-4.
116.
Howard, The State of the Prisons, 11, italics added.
117.
Eric Stockdale , 'John Howard and Bedford Prison' in John Freeman (ed.), Prisoizs Past and Future: in Commemoration of the Bicentenary of John Howard's the State of the Prisons (London: Heinemann, 1977), 15-24, 15-16.
118.
Howard, The State of the Prisons, 4.
119.
'By contrast, in situations where almost everybody is baffled by expectations, autistic people are less obviously misfits. They may do well traveling abroad, for example, seeming just a bit more odd than other tourists ' Margaret Dewey , 'Living with Asperger's Syndrome' in U. Frith (ed.), Autism and Asperger Syndrome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 184-206,195.
120.
Descriptions of 'Asperger' thinking include 'one-track mind' (Minshow et al., 'Neuropsychological functioning in nonmentally retarded autistic individuals', Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology , xiv (1992), 749-61). 'rigid and not to adapt to change or failure ... one approach to a problem' (Attwood, op. cit, 117) 'predominantly visual' (ibid.,125).
121.
Frith, op. cit, 25; Attwood, op. cit, 32.
122.
Tantam, op. cit, 148; Attwood, op. cit, 136.
123.
Tantam, op. cit, 170; Attwood, op. cit, 26.
124.
American Psychiatric Association, op. cit, 77; Tantam, op. cit, 180.
125.
Aikin, A View of the Character, 211.
126.
Aikin, ibid., 225-6.
127.
Jeremy Bentham , The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Timothy Sprigge vol. ii ( London, 1968), letter to Rev. John Forrester1778, 106 (cited in Morgan, op. cit, 391).
128.
Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture 1750-1840 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 424.
129.
Aikin, A View of the Character, 227.
130.
Brown, op. cit, 304.
131.
Gibson, op. cit, 204.
132.
Howard, The State of the Prisons, 18.
133.
Ibid., 18.
134.
Morgan, op. cit, 399.
135.
England, John Howard and his Influence in America, 25.
136.
Randall McGowen, 'The well ordered prison: England 1780-1865', in N. Morris and D. J. Rothman (eds), The Oxford History of the Prison (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1998), 71-99, 79-80, italics added.
137.
Ignatieff, op. cit, 50. See also Aikin, A View of the Character, 221-3.
138.
Tantam, op. cit, 170.
139.
Anonymous, Authentic Memoirs of Life and Philanthropic Labours, 171. See also Hepworth Dixon, who recorded that in the early 1750s, Howard suffered 'nervous fever attended by threats of a break-up of the whole physical system', op., cit, 13.
140.
D.L. Howard, op. cit, 22.
141.
American Psychiatric Association, op. cit., 77. 'Looking at people's faces, particularly into their eyes, is one of the hardest things for me to do ... It is almost as bad having other people looking at me as it is me looking at them.' T. Jolliffe et al., 'Autism: a personal account', Communication, Journal of the National Autistic Society, xxvi (1992), 12-19 (cited in Attwood1998: 55). See also Tantam, op. cit, 8; Tony David, 'Mindblindness: an essay on autism and theory of mind', Psychological Medicine, xxviii (1998), 749.
142.
Gibson, op. cit, 187.
143.
Southwood, op. cit, 123.
144.
Jenny Uglow, Dr. Johnson, His Club and Other Friends (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1998),6.
145.
Aikin, A View of the Character, 144. His letter to Samuel Whitbread in 1786 suggests Howard is as upset by the idea of a statue as by the news of his son's insanity. (cited in Field, op. cit, 120).
146.
Hepworth Dixon , cited in George Ives, A History of Penal Methods (London, 1914), 185.
147.
Porter, Howard's Beginning, 8.
148.
Vanessa Thorpe , 'Was autism the secret of Warhol's art?', Observer, 14 March 1999, 3.
149.
Ignatieff, op. cit, 51.
150.
Alvarez and Reid, op. cit, 1. However, they continue, 'each patient ... has, interwoven with their autism, an intact, non-autistic part of their personality.'
151.
England, John Howard and his Influence in America, 27.
152.
Ignatieff, op. cit, 55-6.
153.
'[Howard's] plan is original; and it is as full of genius as it is of humanity', cited in Southwood, op. cit, 86.
154.
See E.P. Thompson, 'Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism', Past and Present, xxxviii (1967), 56-97; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (Published as Surveiller et Punir, 1975. Éditions Gallimard) (London: Penguin, 1979); Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords ( Oxford: Opus, Oxford University Press, 1997).
155.
Simon Baron-Cohen et al., 'Is there a link between engineering and autism?' Autism, i (1997), 101-9.
