Domesticating Insanity 33 of the successful application of nonrestraint 29 In the 1830s and 1840s, the nonrestraint system well, was put which housed nearly made it a into practice by John Conolly at Hanit was Conolly who thousand patients, and "a world-known success." 30 By 1854, twenty-seven of the thirty county asylums had adopted the new method, and nonrestraint became the symbol of Victorian psychiatric leadership straint," Sir first among "The Benjamin Ward Richardson proclaimed, all abolition of re has placed us the nations as physicians of mental disease." 31 Ultimately, the goal of moral the prospect of cure was management was to cure insanity, new asylum the major attraction of the niques Conolly's vision of the reformed asylum tribute to the " power of moral management was to bring the and tech- most eloquent about general social peace: Calmness will come; hope will revive; satisfaction will prevail unmanageable tempers, some violent or sullen patients, there Some must always be; but much of the violence, much of the ill-humour, almost all the disposition to meditate mischievous or fatal revenge, or self- destruction, will disappear Cleanliness and decency will be main- tained or restored; and despair itself will sometimes be found to give place to cheerfulness or secure tranquillity This therapeutic optimism had clear 32 affinities with the mid- Victorian and expansion, no belief in progress; in a period of British prosperity conquest seemed impossible All of the promises and expectations of Victorian psychiatry centered on the asylum By controlling the lunatic's environment down to the last detail, doctors and administrators hoped to make the new public asylums instruments as well as places of therapy; the building itself was a "special apparatus for the cure of lunacy." Reformers asylums that would reflect also those domestic values celebrated in Victorian fiction "fitting receptacles" would The concept of moral dreamed of not only the best of Victorian medicine but truly be refuge, retreat, and art; these and home 33 architecture shaped the vast new enterprise of asylum construction Victorian psychiatrists gave endless thought to asylum location, interior design, and decor Conolly's book The Construction and Government of Lunatic Asylums (1847) missed no might be relevant to the patients' comfort and detail that care, describing not only the dimensions, materials, and organization of the model asylum but