The undesirables

Hear from author Sarah Wise as she launches her latest book, The Undesirables, which explores the history of the incarceration of people labelled with a new diagnosis - moral imbecility - and therefore deemed ‘undesirable’ by the state. 

Book description

Through the early twentieth century, ‘liberal’ Britain locked away thousands of innocent people.

By 1950, an estimated 50,000 people had been deemed ‘defective’ by the government and detained for life under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Their ‘crimes’ were various: women with children born outside of wedlock; rebellious teenagers caught shoplifting; those with learning disorders, speech impediments and chronic illnesses who had struggled in school; and, of course, those who were simply ‘different’. Forcibly removed from their families and confined to a shadow world of specialist facilities in the countryside, they were hidden away and forgotten about – out of sight, out of mind.

Through painstaking archival research, award-winning historian Sarah Wise pieces together the lives irrevocably changed by this devastating legislation and provides a compelling study of how early twentieth-century attitudes to class, gender and disability resulted in a nationwide scandal. Horrifyingly, she reveals how these archaic practices and assumptions continue to shape social policy and have led to the unnecessary detention of countless young people with autism and learning disabilities in the present day.
Chair and speaker
Sarah Wise (@MissSarahWise) is a historian and author. 

Johann Koehler (@KoehlerJA) is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Policy at LSE. 

The Mannheim Centre for Criminology (@mannheimcrim) at the London School of Economics and Political Science is an interdisciplinary centre providing a forum for criminology.

The British Library of Political and Economic Science (@LSELibrary) was founded in 1896, a year after the London School of Economics and Political Science. It has been based in the Lionel Robbins Building since 1978 and houses many world class collections, including the Women's Library and Hall-Carpenter Archives.