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Carsten Anker Dines with the Younger George Dance, and Visits St Luke's Hospital for theInsaneAuthor(s): Christine StevensonSource: Architectural History, Vol. 44, Essays in Architectural History Presented to JohnNewman (2001), pp. 153-161Published by: SAHGB Publications LimitedStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1568744 .

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Carsten Anker Dines with the

Younger George Dance, and

Vitsits St Luke's Hospitalfor the

Insane by CHRISTINE STEVENSON

In 1792, Copenhagen's St Hans Hospital, for those afflicted by insanity (including alcoholism), venereal disease, and a variety of other, incurable, infirmities, received a gift of money specifically for its repair. Thirty years earlier St Hans had been described as holding the 'very oldest, weakest, wretchedest, and unsightliest' of the Copenhagen Poor Board's charges, and by 1792 its buildings were in similar shape. This gift ultimately resulted in an investigation into asylum planning that extended from St Petersburg to Finsbury, where the new St Luke's Hospital (Fig. I) opened in 1787.1

In 1802, members of a commission formed eight years earlier to oversee St Hans's reconstruction decided to repair the old buildings for the infirm and venereal, but to build new quarters for the insane. They accordingly scrapped plans for a total reconstruction, and one of them, the master-builder Philip Lange (1756-I805), submitted a sketch of a cylindrical asylum with a circular central well. This was powerfully influenced by the example of the so-called Narrenturm (the 'fools' tower'), built in 1784 at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus in Vienna, though Lange improved on his model, which had soon attracted criticism as a nasty exercise in the neo-Gothic.2 Lange's colleagues requested him to work up his sketch into drawings for presentation to King Christian VII (who was, as it happened, quite mad), and at the same time resolved to obtain 'reliable and detailed drawings' of the Narrenturm and St Luke's, which they believed was still under construction.3 They would gather material about four other asylums abroad, but it was those in London and Vienna which interested them first and foremost, and it was from London that they got their most detailed report.

Why St Luke's, given that the St Hans commissioners knew little about it, and that they were already interested enough in the Narrenturm to pursue its peculiar geometry further? The international reputation of its design had been fixed by the MImoires sur les hdpitaux de Paris (1788) by the surgeon Jacques Tenon (I724-1816), who in the early summer of 1787 visited St Luke's among other English institutions at the behest



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156 ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 44: 2001

of his colleagues on a Paris Academie des Sciences committee entrusted with the replanning there of the H6tel-Dieu. Tenon was unequivocal: St Luke's in Old Street Road and Bethlem, in Robert Hooke's building (1674-76) in Lower Moorfields, were the 'two best designed mental hospitals that we know of. .. we should consider them as models'.4 He sent copies of his book all over Europe: one went to the Copenhagen Medical Society, and another to St Luke's Life Governor and architect George Dance the Younger (1741-1845), whom Tenon held in great esteem.s

In 1802, the Danish representative in London turned the assignment over to Carsten Anker (1747-1824). From Berlin the commissioners received notes and journal cuttings about an asylum there; from Toledo, Ltibeck, Vienna, and St Petersburg drawings or sketches too.6 But Anker, a former director of Copenhagen's Royal Furniture Emporium, where he had obtained English model drawings for Danish chair-makers to copy,7 knew the level of detail required for any study, at a distance, of three-dimensional objects. A hospital for 300 insane is bigger than a chair, and Anker anyway became an enthusiast for this hospital. In August 1803 he sent from London what he called a summary description of St Luke's, in twenty long sheets organized as item-by-item responses to the commission's questions about its financing and organization, and eleven sheets of drawings, now lost, along with a fifteen-page explanation of them that includes more information about institutional procedures.8 He also shipped a model of a cell on an inch-to-a-foot scale; a set of bedclothes ('Bowlster' and blankets) and samples of a strait-waistcoat, handcuffs, a 'Leglock', and a 'Wristlock'; and an invoice totalling ?13.i8s. 6d., which includes los. 6d. 'To the Surveyor's Clark for his trouble in meeting Mr Anker at the Hospital' (part of the account is in English), and a shilling for the man who showed him the way to Dance's office.

Anker explained at length the time and trouble everyone concerned had taken to assemble the drawings (?5-15s. 6d., to the draughtsman George Pepys).9 After a prolonged search Dance had failed to find even sketches of the building, and the entire hospital had to be surveyed on the commissioners' behalf (they would find, Anker wrote, that this was done with the utmost precision).10 After all this effort, it would have been strange if duplicates were not made. The drawings of St Luke's now in Sir John Soane's Museum include the very large sheets that comprised part of the contract set of 1782, but also relatively small line drawings, all pricked for transfer and many closely annotated with measurements. They fall into two groups, one on paper with a 1794 watermark and the other, by a different draughtsman, with a watermark from 18oi (Fig. 2).1 Most suggestively, Anker's set included, and the Museum now holds two copies of, a sheet with eight cross-sections, of which seven have the same line indicators- that is, the letters ('LM', for example) marking the section line on a corresponding plan.12 Yet the drawings sent to Copenhagen included items (among them site and basement plans) which have no equivalents among those in Soane's Museum now. Conversely, the 1794-watermark group comprises at least three sheets corresponding to nothing in the 18oi -watermark group, or Anker's. The circum- stances surrounding the Soane drawings' production remain puzzling, especially since we have no reason to think that anyone involved was lying when it was said that no drawings of the hospital as it had been built could be found in 1803.



ST LUKE'S HOSPITAL 157

'St Luke's Hospital for Lunaticks', which took its name from its parish, had been founded in 1750. London already had a hospital for the insane, Bethlem ('Bedlam'), but even after Hooke's building was expanded (it had 275 cells by 1783), it was not big enough, or so St Luke's claimed. Yet the new hospital was no mere supplement to the old. Its early publications draw wide-ranging and specific comparisons between the financing, medical aims, and domestic organizations of the ancient, 'royal' foundation and the new hospital maintained by 'voluntary' gifts and subscriptions.'13 In particular, the 'Patients in this Hospital shall not be exposed to publick View'. Bethlem's Governors did not begin to restrict the casual visiting with which their asylum is always associated until 1770, but the custom had long been criticized.14

In one respect, these pointed contrasts did St Luke's no favour in the long run. Historians of psychiatry have begun to acknowledge its importance, not just as the prototypical voluntary public asylum, but as a model for specific managerial and medical practices at the provincial institutions founded and built in England after the 1760s, notably the Friends' Retreat in York (1794-96). The Retreat's architect John Bevans and founder William Tuke both made study visits to St Luke's, then considered (as Bevans wrote) the most 'compleat' building of its type in the country.'15 Even its distinctive external patterning of lunettes - the cell windows - set into blind arches was copied at some of the institutions later established under the terms of the County Asylum Act (1808).16 But it is its scandalous older sister Bethlem, to whose reputation St Luke's made its own demure contribution, that has always attracted scholars. That the (admittedly unpicturesque) plan of St Luke's should be published here for the first time, as Figure 2, indicates the relative neglect into which it has fallen. And yet this was a hospital which was soon thought to have transcended its type: in 1847 James Elmes described it as showing 'how far genius may use even the plainest of materials

... few buildings in our metropolis, or perhaps in Europe, surpass this for unity and appropriateness of style.'17

The first St Luke's, in Upper Moorfields, remains mysterious: between January 1751 and March 1753 the elder George Dance (1695-1768) somehow managed to transform it from a huddle of 'very Old' tenements to the rather handsome and substantial 'Building' which is known only from popular prints."8 We do know that when, in September 1750, the General Committee of the new foundation visited its future site together with the elder Dance, 'from thence they went and viewed the Hospitall of Bethlem', on the other side of Moorfields.19 Like Bethlem, the first St Luke's offered individual cells (the word did not yet have penal associations) for its patients, and its successor effectively replicated Bethlem's planning.20 Though native observers like John Howard (1726-90) did not remark on the resemblances (which perhaps just goes to show how successfully St Luke's had distanced itself from the other, in institutional terms),21 Tenon praised the buildings in the same breath because for him they were, essentially, identical.

In a formulation of significance for the future of their design, Tenon wrote that, unlike general hospitals ('mere auxiliary means'), asylums are

in themselves a remedy. During the period of treatment, it is essential that the insane man or woman should not be thwarted and, while under observation, he should be able to leave his




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cell, walk around the gallery, go to the promenade and take exercise that relaxes him and that nature requires. That is what happens in both hospitals for the insane in London22 - for both were organized around enormous galleries, which ran their full length, though interrupted (as Fig. 2 shows) on each floor by the central pavilion and its offices and stairs. Anker described the St Luke's galleries as, simply, places where the patients walked all day, after being let out of their cells in the morning and before being locked in again in the evening. In A. C. Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson's well-known aquatint of 1809 (Fig. 3) we are placed on the women's side of the building, at the junction of a gallery and one of the short end wings. The gallery, stretching off to the right, is terminated by an iron gate, beyond which were the central offices, and beyond them the men's side of the building. Bethlem used identical gates. Supplemented, weather permitting, by the exercise yards outside, Tenon's 'promenade', the galleries were the main ingredient of the remedy that was the asylum.

Also essential were the cells, or rather the isolation they afforded was. A little smaller, but higher, than Bethlem's,23 St Luke's cells, unlike those at its prototype, at points lined both sides of the galleries: in the wings and at the ends of the galleries immediately adjacent to them, and at their other ends, by the central block. This doubling was economical, of attendants' time and the hospital's money: this was a




wealthy charity, but the 178os were hard years for London hospitals and St Luke's' governors were cautious about building. Elmes rightly commended Dance's genius with plainness, but the ingenuity did not stop with the faqades. Above the cell doors, for example, were lunettes which were open, for air's sake, but barred, for security's, as Anker reported; sixteen years earlier, Tenon was shown how the bars had latticework behind, so that the patients could not hang themselves, 'as has happened at other hospitals'.24 Best seen at the extreme left of Figure 3, they matched the cells' windows, also unglazed, for which Dance devised remarkable semicircular shutters. We know from his office's drawing of a cell section that these began eight feet above the floor, and hence also know that in depicting the gallery Pugin took some liberties with the lunettes' height, to terrific effect.

Dance was very apologetic about delays in getting the drawings made - he was often in the country where, Anker wrote, his competence and good taste were much in demand - and would accept no recompense for his trouble. At dinner in Anker's home, after his host's repeated protestations, Dance however acknowledged that he would not mind owning a copy of Den danske Vitruvius, Lauritz de Thurah's two- volume compilation (1746-49) of Danish architecture, a courteous choice. Anker asked the commissioners to find a set and have it handsomely bound for Dance.25 A friendship had evidently been formed. Anker was a witty anglophile,26 and even if Dance had not been the affable and cosmopolitan man that he was, no architect and Life Governor could have resisted the admiration for the building, and the institution, apparent in the Dane's account of St Luke's.

NOTES

I Christine Stevenson, 'Plans for Reaccommodating Lunatics at St Hans Hospital, 1794-1808', Architectura

[Copenhagen], 8 (1986), pp. 82-112 describes the history of the St Hans projects (for the gift and the

quotation, pp. 85, 82), as does my more readily available 'Madness and the Picturesque in the Kingdom of Denmark', pp. I13-47 in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, vol. 3, The Asylum and its

Psychiatry, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (London and New York, 1988), on

pp. 20-28. Both essays use material from my PhD dissertation, 'The Design of Prisons and Hospitals in the Neo-classical Period, with Special Reference to the Work of C. F. Hansen (1756-1845)', Courtauld Institute of Art, 1986, prepared with the unstinting help of my supervisorJohn Newman. 2 Stevenson, 'Plans', pp. 96, 98-105; Stevenson, 'Madness', pp. 25-38. 3 Copenhagen, Stadsarkivet (Municipal Archives), vii. St Hans Hospital. Kommissionen af 27.11.1794 for Sct. Hans Hospitals Nye Bygninger 1792-1804, 4. Kommissionsprotokol 1794-1804, for I May 1802: 'paalidelige og omnstendelige Tegninger'. 4 Jacques Tenon, Memoirs on Paris Hospitals, transl. anon., ed. Dora B. Weiner ([Canton, Mass.], 1996), p. 334; compare p. 17, from his summary preface. 5 Michel Foucault et al., Les Machines a guerir: aux origines de l'h6pital moderne (Brussels, 1979), P. 156, transcribe

part of an undated copy of a letter from Tenon to Dance, whose phrasing suggests that it accompanied a copy of the book in 1788. For Tenon, Dance (who showed him around his Newgate Prison) was that 'homme habile, obligeant', 'habile architecte, . .. de qui nous avons requ toutes sortes d'honn&tes':Journal d'Observations

suir les principaux hdpitaux et sur quelques prisons d'Angleterre, ed. Jacques Carr' (Clermont-Ferrand, 1992), pp. 43, 58. 6 Stevenson, 'Plans', pp. 95, 97, 99; since its publication the Narrenturm drawings have turned up in the architectural drawings collection of the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen.




7 Christine Stevenson, 'Paesi Scandinavi: Promozione delle Arti e dell' Industria', pp. 196-211 I in Storie del

Disegno Industriale, vol. I, 1750-1850: L'EtM della Rivoluzione Industriale, ed. Alessandra Ponte (Milan, 1989), on

pp. 197, 208. 8 Copenhagen, Stadsarkivet, vii. St. Hans Hospital. Kommissionen af27. I.1794 for Sct. Hans Hospitals Nye Bygninger 1792-1804, 5. Dokumenter, 64.C. The documents in this set (henceforth cited as SA, St Hans 5, 64.C) include the questionnaire, Anker's covering letter and invoice, and the 'Beskrivelse' (description) of the

drawings and model, all dated 4 August 1803. The site plan 'A', for example (see the next note) had been lettered in English and Anker's 'Beskrivelse' provides translations and amplifications. Thus the 'Dead House, or Straw Barn' is explained: Dance had designed a mortuary, but the deceased were now kept in their cells until burial, which took place very quickly. 9 The drawings Anker sent from London were, 'A' (his lettering), a general site plan; B, C, D, and E, basement and ground-, first- and second-floor plans; F and G, front (south) and rear (north) elevations; H, a sheet with eight sections; I, a sheet with three drawings of the wall and 'Colonnade' in front of the building; K and L, drawings of an individual cell. SA, St Hans 5, 64.C, 'Beskrivelse'. 10 'Bygmesteren kunde ikke efter lang Tids Sbgning ikke finde, end ikke, Concept-tegningerne, og den hele

Bygning maatte paa nyt opmaales, hvilken den Kongelige Commission vil finde at vere skeed med stbrste

N6yagtighed': SA, St Hans 5, 64.C, Anker's letter. ii Six of the seventeen sheets that originally accompanied the contract of 30 May 1782 survive. The 1794-watermark group comprises nine sheets, compared to four in the 180oi-watermark group. Jill Lever's

catalogue of the Dance drawings in Sir John Soane's Museum is expected to be published in 2003; Fig. 2 shows her cat. 12 (SM, Dance 4/1/9). Jill Lever gave me a copy of her draft catalogue of the St Luke's

drawings, and drew my attention to the Tuke-Bevans investigations mentioned below, and I am deeply grateful for this indispensable help with the present essay. 12 The other section is across the very centre of the building and so, Anker explained, needed no special indication. He however listed his sections in an order that would be odd if they were arranged the way they are on the Soane sheets (cat. 25, 1794 watermark [Dance 4/1/16] and cat. 26, I8oi watermark [Dance 4/I/ 17]), which have them in four columns. If they were, his numbering would run from the far left column to the far right, then to the inner left and inner right columns. 13 See St Luke's' many appearances (indexed) in Jonathan Andrews et al., The History of Bethlem (London, 1997) which explores the ramifications of the institutional rivalry. 14 St Luke's 'Rules and Orders' were freely adapted by compilers of London's historical topographies, beginning with William Maitland, The History of London from its Foundation to the Present Time, 2 vols (London, 1756), 2, p. 1315, from which I have taken this quotation. For visiting, Andrews et al., History of Bethlem, especially pp. 178-99. 15 Letter from Tuke to Bevans, 2oJanuary 1794 (Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York); see Anne

Digby, Madness, Morality and Medicine: A Study of the York Retreat, 1796-1914 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 18, 37-38. Jill Lever proposes linking some of the Soane drawings with the Retreat's planning (the 1794 watermark is suggestive), and this cannot be ruled out, though Anne Digby reports that there is no evidence that drawings were sent up to York, and another of Bevans's letters (26 February 1794) uses lengthy descriptions, and a couple of sketches, to explain St Luke's arrangements instead. 16 Leonard D. Smith, 'Cure, Comfort, and Safe Custody': Public Lunatic Asylums in early Nineteenth-century England (London, 1999), pp. 14-15, 33, 53, 143. Christine Stevenson, Medicine and Magnificence: British Hospital and Asylum Architecture 166o-1815 (London, 2000), pp. 99-o100o, 101-05 explains the rationales for, and appeal of, the lunettes. 17 James Elmes, 'History of Architecture in Great Britain. A Brief Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Architecture in Great Britain', Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal, Io (1847), pp. 166-70, 209-IO, 234-38, 268-71, 300-02, 337-41, 378-83, on p. 379. See also David Watkin, 'Adam, Dance and the Expression of Character in Architecture', pp. 50-54 in Adam in Context: Papers given at the Georgian Group Symposium 1992, ed. Giles Worsley (London, 1993), on p. 52. 18 St Luke's Woodside (Muswell Hill, London), 'General Committee Book of St Luke's Hospital from Sept 19th 1750 to Decr 7th 1774' (unpaginated; henceforth cited as SLW, Gen. Comm. Book 1750-1774), for 23 January 1751 and 7 March 1753; my thanks to Sylvia Manning for making my day at St Luke's Woodside so informative, and enjoyable. The most revealing view of the building is that in Enthusiasm Displayed (c. 1755, Robert Pranker after John Griffiths), reproduced by David Bindman, Hogarth and his Times: Serious Comedy




(London, 1997), p. 123, cat. 65, though the fenestration differs a little from that shown in other prints. On this

building, see C. N. French, The Story of St Luke's Hospital (London, 1951), pp. 9-13 (who was mistaken in

believing that it replaced John Wesley's 'Foundery' meeting-house, which was adjacent) and Dorothy Stroud, George Dance, Architect 1741-1825 (London, 1971), pp. 49-50. 19 SLW, Gen. Comm. Book 1750-1774, for 26 September 1750. 20 No plan of Hooke's building has survived, but this is a safe conclusion. For Bethlem's architecture, see Andrews et al., History of Bethlem, pp. 230-59; on the resemblance, p. 250. For the first St Luke's cells, SLW, Gen. Comm. Book 1750-1774, for 8 May 1754, for example, when ten beds plus bedding were ordered for the 'Ten Cells that are fitted up for Uncured Patients'. 21 Howard did describe both as 'three long galleries and wings', with their cells, which at Bethlem were 'very properly' on one side of the galleries only. An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe... (London, 1789), pp. 139-40. 22 Tenon, Memoirs, p. 197; see also pp. 17, 28. 23 According to Howard, Account, p. 139, Bethlem's cells were I2 ft x 8 ft IO in, and I2 ft IO in high; St Luke's, 10 ft 4 in x 8 ft, and 13 ft 3 in high. 24 SA, St Hans 5, 64.C, 'Beskrivelse' ('Jern gitterverk til Luft og Sikkerhed');

Tenon,.]ournal, pp. 44-45 ('Au- dessus de la porte sont des barreaux de fer, avec treillage de fer mis en dedans pour 6viter que les fous se

pendent, ce qui est arrive dans certains h6pitaux.') 25 'Hr Dance spiste hos mig, og kort efter at have igentaget min ... Undskyldning. ., saget han mig, dog med sand Verdighed, at han onske nok at eje den danske Vitruvius'. SA, St Hans 5, 64.C, Anker's letter. The

request does not seem to have been carried out. 26 In 1807, his house near Copenhagen, then under siege, was ordered untouched by British officers who 'no

longer felt themselves on hostile ground' after consuming his beef, ale, porter, and Cheshire cheese: Jens Wolff, Sketches on a Tour to Copenhagen through Norway and Sweden (London, 1814), pp. 174-75.



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