Rebels and eccentrics can be labelled 'mad', especially when they are proving inconvenient to others.

The 19th century saw a series of scandals concerning sane individuals being locked away in lunatic asylums by their families and supposed friends. In tonight's lecture, historian Sarah Wise brings to life a number of these cases, revealing the surprisingly wide variety of people whose eccentricities landed them in a 'madhouse' — she shows how their brave battles for freedom aroused huge public support and challenged the medical definitions of (in)sanity.

Sarah Wise is a wonderful speaker, and her talk is drawn from her work on Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England. Her other books include The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave Robbery in 1830s London, and The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum.