Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge

Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge (17 January 1802 – 28 May 1873) was an English barrister, Commissioner in Lunacy and early photographer. He was the uncle of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll.

He joined the Photographic Society of London, later the Royal Photographic Society, in the 1850s.^[1] He passed this interest on to his nephew Charles.^[2][3]

He was one of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy^[4] from 1842 to 1845 and was then appointed the first Secretary to the successor body, the Commissioners in Lunacy, in 1845: he became one of the three Legal Commissioners in 1855.^[5] He died in May 1873 from injuries inflicted by a patient in Fisherton House Asylum, Salisbury, during an inspection.^[5][6]

References

1. Grace Seiberling; Carolyn Bloore (1986). Amateurs, photography, and the mid-Victorian imagination. University of Chicago Press. p. 135. ISBN 0-226-74498-1.
2. Clark (1979) p. 93
3. Cohen, Morton (1995). Lewis Carroll: A Biography. Macmillan. p. 41. ISBN 0-333-62926-4.
4. Brian Watkin (1975). Documents on health and social services, 1834 to the present day. University paperbacks. Vol. 579. Taylor & Francis. p. 357. ISBN 0-416-18080-9.
5. Mellett, D. J. (1981). "Bureaucracy and Mental Illness: The Commissioners in Lunacy 1845-90". Medical History. 25 (3): 221–250. doi:10.1017/s0025727300034566. PMC 1139037. PMID 7022062.
6. Clark (1979) p. 178

• Clark, Ann (1979), Lewis Carroll: A Biography, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, ISBN 0-460-04302-1
• Edwin Fuller Torrey; Judy Miller (2001). The invisible plague: the rise of mental illness from 1750 to the present. Rutgers University Press. pp. 87–93. ISBN 0-8135-3003-2.