Asylum, Prison, and Poor, and Poorhouse: The Writings and Reform Work of Dorothea Dix in Illinois

Asylum, Prison, and Poorhouse: the Writings and Reform Work of Dix in Illinois. By David L. Lightner. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Pp. xi, 161. Illustrations, notes, index, $19.95). Dix (1802-1887) from age 39 until her death traveled extensively in the United States and several foreign countries imploring legislative bodies to provide better facilities for the insane, the poor, and prisoners. By 1846 her work was so well known that when she came to Illinois she attracted a large following of citizens and public officials who worked to promote these types of institutions in the early years of the Prairie State. David L. Lightner, a Professor of American History at the University of Alberta, gives us a detailed account of Miss Dix's efforts in Illinois. He had access to the Dix papers in Harvard's Houghton Library. These papers have only recently been generally available and are the basis of two recent biographies: David Gollaher's Voice for the Mad: the Life of Dix (1995), and Thomas J. Brown's Dix: New England Reformer (1998). Dix's efforts to establish a state mental hospital in Illinois have been previously discussed in Miroslav Velek's monograph on the history of the Jacksonville State published by the Pearson Museum at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine (1982), and in my recent article, Dorothea Dix and the Founding of Illinois' First Mental Hospital (Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 92:1 [Spring, 1999]). Dix's effort to improve the state's penitentiary system is less well-known, and Lightner's account of this is comprehensive. The Illinois State Penitentiary at Alton had been established in 1833 and it had deficiencies in location, design, maintenance, and administration. Dix made use of her own observations plus the reports of the Board of Penitentiary Inspectors to document the failings of this institution. She prepared a memorial to the Illinois Legislature in 1847 outlining the insoluble problems with the Alton Penitentiary and concluding that the only remedy was to build another penitentiary elsewhere. This memorial has not been generally known, and Lightner indicates it had never been republished until he included it in this book. In contrast to the memorial concerning the Insane Asylum, this was less well received by the Legislature itself. Although Dix's Memorial suggested that adding more cells to the existing prison would be useless, that is exactly what the legislators did. The prison continued in operation until 1860 when the state built a new penitentiary at joliet. The third section of the book contains much information about Dix's visits to county jails and poorhouses throughout central and southern Illinois. She had inspected these facilities in 1846 and wrote up her observations in a series of eight articles in The Sangamo Journal, a Springfield newspaper. The articles are on microfilm in the Illinois State Historical Library, and are difficult to read. …

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