Sarah Wise, Historian, author, tutor

Published in hardback by Oneworld, April 2024 https://rb.gy/v697lq

‘Staggering… Wise’s book bristles with injustices.’ 5 stars, 
Sunday Telegraph

‘An important, shocking book.’ The Independent

‘A shocking study.’ The Times

‘A gruelling but important book. Wise has uncovered a forgotten and terrible scandal of the not-so-distant past.’ Literary Review

‘A harrowing tale, extremely well told.’ The Tablet,
Catholic weekly magazine


Upcoming talks/reader events

Sunday 2 June daytime, Conway Hall talk and Q&A, in person and online Conway Hall | The Undesirables: The Law that Locked Away a Generation

Wednesday 17 July, FREE talk and Q&A at the London Metropolitan Archives, 5.30pm. Book a place here An Evening with Author Sarah Wise – The Undesirables Tickets, Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 5:30 PM | Eventbrite

Saturday 24 August, 10.30am, Society of Genealogists zoom talk, £10, https://rb.gy/7h56il


Other (non-Undesirables) talks/events

Thursday 30 May, 7.15pm, Brick Lane Book Shop, The Italian Boy – murder & grave-robbery in 1830s Bethnal Green East End Stories at Brick Lane Bookshop Vol. IV – Brick Lane Bookshop, £10. 20 years to the month since my first book was published!



Wednesday 5 June evening, talk at the Ragged School Museum in Bow, East London on Annie Macpherson, one of the main inspirations for Dr Barnardo’s work, ‘Fighting “Satan” in Whitechapel and Bethnal Green’, £5. Annie Macpherson: fighting ‘Satan’ in Whitechapel and Bethnal Green Tickets, Wed, Jun 5, 2024 at 7:00 PM | Eventbrite




ABOUT ME
I am a Victorianist making her first foray into 20th century social history. Info and extra background about my first three books of 19th century history, The Italian Boy, The Blackest Streets and Inconvenient People, can be found on my first website www.sarahwise.co.uk

You can find me on Twitter / X:   @misssarahwise




ABOUT THE UNDESIRABLES

My last book, Inconvenient People, concerned the scandal of Victorians being placed into ‘lunatic’ asylums on very little evidence. It ended with a mention of how, in fact, wrongful detention became a far bigger and more intractable problem in the 20th century. The reviewer for The Independent noted this upsetting ending: ‘After these cheerful late cases comes a devastating epilogue… You put this quite superlative book down, shaken.’

The Undesirables picks up the story, from circa 1900, and is something of a follow-up to Inconvenient People – it is my attempt to reveal how 20th-century policy played out on the ground, in institutions, towns, villages, communities and home life.

This type of persistent misbehaviour was believed by many experts to be an inherited condition. And so the Mental Deficiency Act deemed that ‘moral imbeciles’ must not breed – the institutions they were sent to were sex-segregated for this purpose.

The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act created two new categories, ‘the feeble minded’ and ‘the moral imbecile’. The legislation describes the latter as ‘persons who from an early age display some mental defect coupled with strange, vicious or criminal propensities on which punishment has little or no deterrent effect’. In reality, it led to the scooping up, labelling and institutionalisation of many working-class youngsters who simply didn’t fit in, or who were passing through a perfectly normal time of adolescent rebellion.

This form of preventive detention – for life – had no precedent in England. And it was the closest Britain came to implementing eugenically inspired policy.

The most infamously mislabelled of these people were young unmarried women who found themselves pregnant. But the law impacted on young males, too – those who would not or could not settle down, those who were persistent thieves, vandals, truants or who were sexually out of control. Even the man who ran Rampton admitted that the Mental Deficiency Act impacted on those who had ‘failed to adjust themselves to the social conditions in which they live.’

When the great opening up of the UK’s mental hospitals got under way, from the 1960s onwards, thousands of people, now in their sixties, seventies or eighties, were discovered languishing on the ‘back wards’, having spent their entire adult life in mental institutions, for no reason at all. It was a catastrophic waste of lives, for no good reason at all.

There is a general misconception that they had been ‘put away’ as a result of Victorian attitudes to morality and behaviour. With The Undesirables, I hope to show that this was very much a 20th-century piece of nastiness, piecing together fragments of the experiences of those who underwent such detention.


MAKING CONTACT For telly or any business requests, please contact my agent, Sarah Chalfant, at The Wylie Agency (mail@wylieagency.co.uk)

Or you can get in touch direct, here


My teaching

At the City Lit, the London Metropolitan Archives, the Mary Ward Centre and the Highgate Lit & Sci I teach a number of social history and literature courses.
This year my courses include:

  • The London ‘Lowlife’ in Fiction: 1889-1907, at the City Lit. Exploring the themes of poverty, politics, gender and ethnicity in London at the end of the 19th century/start of the 20th century through the eyes of writers of fiction, but also through the testimony of their non-fiction contemporaries – social investigators, government officials, journalists and philanthropists.
    Dates: 18/10/24 – 06/12/24. Time: 10:30 – 12:30 Fridays. Duration: 8 sessions
    The London ‘Lowlife’ in Fiction: 1889-1907 | History, culture & writing course | London | City Lit

Most recent short writing/chapters

I contributed a chapter about Charles Booth’s influence on late-19th-century fiction to Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End, edited by Diana Maltz (Routledge) https://www.routledge.com/Critical-Essays-on-Arthur-Morrison-and-the-East-End/Maltz/p/book/9781032276762


I wrote the chapter on ‘Morality’ in the LSE / Thames & Hudson book Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps (thamesandhudson.com)


I investigated the mysterious Grace Poole in Jane Eyre in Hektoen International, Journal of Medical Humanities Why “nurse” Grace Poole is the greatest puzzle in Jane Eyre – Hektoen International (hekint.org)


Dr Isaac Baker Brown and female genital mutilation in Victorian London in History Today Removing That Little Knot | History Today


‘Povertyopolis: Beyond the East-West Binary in the Late-Nineteenth-Century London Literary Imagination’ in The London Journal Povertyopolis: Beyond the East-West Binary in the Late-Nineteenth-Century London Literary Imagination: The London Journal: Vol 46 , No 3 – Get Access (tandfonline.com)

I contributed ‘The Stolen Chapter: James Timewell’s Challenge to the Metropolitan Police’ to Rebellious Writing: Contesting Marginalisation in Edwardian Britain (edited by Lauren Alex O’Hagan) Rebellious Writing – Peter Lang Verlag


I have three articles on the London Fictions website, on Joseph Conrad, George Orwell and Arthur Morrison Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent – London Fictions


Most recent telly, radio, podcast appearances

Bad Women podcast, speaking about late-Victorian East London, series 1, episode 3, ‘Polly Walks Out’ S1 E3: Polly Walks Out – Bad Women: The Blackout Ripper (podcast) | Listen Notes


BBC Radio 4 podcast series Killing Victoria, discussing the insanity defence in 19th-century murder trials https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0dtcddd


BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking, episode on the streets of Victorian London BBC Radio 4 – Free Thinking, Victorian Streets


BBC Radio 4, In Our Time, discussing Charles Booth‘s Life and Labour of the People in London BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, Booth’s Life and Labour Survey


BBC2, The Real Peaky Blinders, documentary exploring the London origins of the racetrack villains BBC Two – The Real Peaky Blinders, Series 1, Episode 2


Peter Moore’s Travels Through Time history podcast series, the year 1889 The Blackest Streets of London, 1889 (podcast) | Travels Through Time (tttpodcast.com)