Ten Days in a Mad-House: Feigning Insanity in Order to Reveal Asylum Horrors

By Nellie Bly, Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore

Pioneering journalist Nellie Bly went undercover in the late 1800s to shed light on the horrific conditions of Victorian mental asylums. This is the eye-opening account of her experience.

Nellie Bly feigned insanity to be admitted to a mental institution with the intent of exposing its awful conditions first-hand. Her account reveals the institution’s inhumane treatment, abuse of power, and unsanitary environment, demonstrating the unnerving ease with which a sane woman is admitted to the hospital and the struggle she faces to escape. The publication of Ten Days in a Mad-House led to an entirely new journalistic approach and launched the stunt girl reporting era.

The chapters in this compelling volume include:

• A Delicate Mission
• Pronounced Insane
• Inside the Mad-House
• Promenading with Lunatics
• Incidents of Asylum Life
• The Grand Jury Investigation

Breathing new life into this fantastic journalistic expose, Ten Days in a Mad-House has been republished by Read & Co. Books featuring an author biography by Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: May 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528792547

Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly (1864-1922) was an American investigative journalist. Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she was raised in a family of Irish immigrants. In 1879, she attended Indiana Normal School for a year before returning to Pittsburgh, where she began writing anonymously for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. Impressed by her work, the newspaper’s editor offered her a full-time job. Writing under the pseudonym of Nellie Bly, she produced a series of groundbreaking investigative pieces on women factory workers before traveling to Mexico as a foreign correspondent, which led her to report on the arrest of a prominent Mexican journalist and dissident. Returning to America under threat of arrest, she soon left the Pittsburgh Dispatch to undertake a dangerous investigative assignment for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World on the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. After feigning a bout of psychosis in order to get admitted, she spent ten days at the asylum witnessing widespread abuse and neglect. Her two-part series in the New York World later became the book Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887), earning Bly her reputation as a pioneering reporter and leading to widespread reform. The following year, Bly took an assignment aimed at recreating the journey described in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Boarding a steamer in Hoboken, she began a seventy-two day trip around the globe, setting off a popular trend that would be emulated by countless adventurers over the next several decades. After publishing her book on the journey, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (1890), Bly married manufacturer Robert Seaman, whose death in 1904 left Bly in charge of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co. Despite Bly’s best efforts as a manager and inventor, her tenure ultimately resulted in the company’s bankruptcy. In the final years of her life, she continued working as a reporter covering World War I and the women’s suffrage movement, cementing her legacy as a groundbreaking and ambitious figure in American journalism.

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TEN DAYS

IN A MAD-HOUSE

FEIGNING INSANITY

IN ORDER TO REVEAL

ASYLUM HORRORS

By

NELLIE BLY

WITH A BIOGRAPHY

BY FRANCES E. WILLARD

AND MARY A. LIVERMORE

First published in 1887

Copyright © 2020 Read & Co. Books

This edition is published by Read & Co. Books,

an imprint of Read & Co.

This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any

way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd.

For more information visit

www.readandcobooks.co.uk

Contents

ELIZABETH COCHRANE

By Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

A DELICATE MISSION

CHAPTER II

PREPARING FOR THE ORDEAL

CHAPTER III

IN THE TEMPORARY HOME

CHAPTER IV

JUDGE DUFFY AND THE POLICE

CHAPTER V

PRONOUNCED INSANE

CHAPTER VI

IN BELLEVUE HOSPITAL

CHAPTER VII

THE GOAL IN SIGHT

CHAPTER VIII

INSIDE THE MAD-HOUSE

CHAPTER IX

AN EXPERT(?) AT WORK

CHAPTER X

MY FIRST SUPPER

CHAPTER XI

IN THE BATH

CHAPTER XII

PROMENADING WITH LUNATICS

CHAPTER XIII

CHOKING AND BEATING PATIENTS

CHAPTER XIV

SOME UNFORTUNATE STORIES

CHAPTER XV

INCIDENTS OF ASYLUM LIFE

CHAPTER XVI

THE LAST GOOD-BYE

CHAPTER XVII

THE GRAND JURY INVESTIGATION

ELIZABETH COCHRANE

By Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore

Author, journalist and traveller. Known the world over by her pen-name, Nellie Bly. Born in Cochrane Mills. Pa., 5th May, 1867. a place named after her father, who was a lawyer and for several terms filled the office of associate judge of Armstrong county, Pa. She is a descendant on her father's side of Lord Cochrane, the famous English admiral, who was noted for his deeds of daring, and who was never happy unless engaged in some exciting affair. Miss Cochrane's great-grandfather Cochrane was one of a number of men who wrote a declaration of independence in Maryland near the South Mountains a long time before the historic Declaration of Independence was delivered to the world. Her great-grandfather, on her mother's side, was a man of wealth, owning at one time almost all of Somerset county, Pa. His name was Kennedy, and his wife was a nobleman's daughter. They eloped and fled to America. He was an officer, as were his two sons, in the Revolutionary War. Afterward he was sheriff of Somerset county repeatedly until old age compelled him to decline the office. One of his sons. Thomas Kennedy, Miss Cochrane's grand-uncle, made a flying trip around the word, starting from and returning to New York City, where his wife awaited his arrival. It took him three years to make the trip, and he returned in shattered health. He at once set about to write the history of his trip, but his health became so bad that he had to give up his task. Her father died while Elizabeth was yet a child.

She was educated at home until 1880, when she was sent to Indiana, Pa., where she remained in a boarding-school until 1881. Impaired health forced her to leave school, and she returned home. The family moved to Pittsburgh, and there she began her literary career. She saw an article in the Pittsburgh Dispatch entitled What Girls are Good For. She wrote a reply to the article, and though the reply was not published, a paragraph appeared in the Dispatch the day after she sent the communication, asking for the writer's name. Miss Cochrane sent her name and received a letter from the editor, requesting her to write an article on the subject of girls and their spheres in life for the Sunday Dispatch. This she did. The article was printed, and the same week she received a check for it and a request for something else. Her next subject was Divorce, and at the end of the article appeared the now famous signature, Nellie Bly. Miss Cochrane assumed it on the suggestion of George A. Madden, managing editor of the Dispatch. who got it from Stephen Foster's popular song. The divorce article attracted attention. She was invited to the office and made arrangements to accent a salary and devote her time to the Dispatch.

Taking an artist with her, she went through the factories and workshop of Pittsburgh, and described and pictured the condition of the working girls. The articles made a hit. Miss Cochrane became society editor of the Dispatch and also looked after the dramatic and art department, all for a salary of ten dollars per week.

She decided to go to Mexico to write about its people. At that time she was receiving fifteen dollars per week. She went, and her letters printed in the Dispatch were full of interest and were widely copied. She had never been out of her State before, but she travelled everywhere in Mexico that a railroad could take her. Her mother was her companion on that trip.

Returning to Pittsburgh, she became dissatisfied with that held, quit the Dispatch, and went to New York City. She did syndicate work for a while.

One day she lost her pocketbook and all the money she possessed. She was too proud to let her friends know, and she sat down and thought. Before that she had written to the World, asking the privilege of going in the balloon the World was about sending up at St. Louis, but, as final arrangements had been completed, her suggestion was not favourably received, low and finding herself penniless, she made a list of a half-dozen original ideas and went to the World office, determined to see Mr. Pulitzer and offer them to him. Having no letter of introduction and being unknown, she found it almost an impossibility to gain an audience. For three hours she talked and expostulated with different employees, before she finally exhausted their denials and was ushered into the unwilling presence of Mr. Pulitzer and his editor, John A. Cockerill. Once there, they listened to her ideas and immediately offered her twenty-five dollars to give them three days in which to consider her suggestions. At the end of that time she was told that her idea to feign insanity and, as a patient, investigate the treatment of the insane in the Blackwell Island Asylum was accepted. Miss Bly did that with such marked success and originality of treatment, and attracted so much attention, that she secured a permanent place on the World staff. She originated a new field in journalism, which has since been copied all over the world by her many imitators. Her achievements since her asylum expose have been many and brilliant. Scarcely a week passed that she had not some novel feature in the World. Her fame grew and her tasks enlarged, until they culminated in the wonderful tour of the world in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds. That idea she proposed to Mr. Pulitzer one year before he approved and accepted it. Owing to delayed steamers. Miss Bly lost fifteen days on land, but she was the first to conceive and establish a record for a fast trip around the world. Since Miss Cochrane girdled the globe. others have repeated the feat in less time.

Her newspaper work resulted in many reforms. Her expose of asylum abuses procured an appropriation of $3,000,000 for the benefit of the poor insane, in addition to beneficial changes in care and management. Her expose of the King of the Lobby rid Albany of its greatest disgrace; her station-house expose procured matrons for New York police-stations; her expose of a noted electric doctor's secret rid Brooklyn of a notorious swindler. Miss Cochrane left journalism to do literary work for a weekly publication.

A Chapter from

A Woman of the Century, 1893

INTRODUCTION

Since my experiences in Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum were published in the World I have received hundreds of letters in regard to it. The edition containing my story long since ran out, and I have been prevailed upon to allow it to be published in book-form, to satisfy the hundreds who are yet asking for copies.

I am happy to be able to state as a result of my visit to the asylum and the exposures consequent thereon, that the City of New York has appropriated $1,000,000 more per annum than ever before for the care of the insane. So I have at least the satisfaction of knowing that the poor unfortunates will be the better cared for because of my work.

TEN DAYS

IN A MAD-HOUSE

CHAPTER I

A DELICATE MISSION

On the 22d of September I was asked by the World if I could have myself committed to one of the asylums for the insane in New York, with a view to writing a plain and unvarnished narrative of the treatment of the patients therein and the methods of management, etc. Did I think