Fruits and Farinacea: or, the asylum kitchen

A table of the fruit and vegetables used at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum in the year 1866.

The links between digestion, or disrupted digestion, and mental disease were considered extremely strong by asylum practitioners of the nineteenth-century. A researcher working with asylum records will inevitably be faced by extensive dietary tables, long discussions of force-feeding, and detailed accounts of patient bowel movements. As such, the asylum kitchen was one of the most important parts of the institution. Staff, and often female patients, worked to provide the patients and attendants with food largely sourced from within the asylum grounds itself as institutions because increasingly self-sufficient. Patients’ work was positioned as beneficial for their convalescence, but also played a significant role in reducing the running costs of institutions.

Patient diet was seen as an important part of care, and it was recognised by doctors that malnutrition and poverty played a significant role in diminishing mental health. D. C. Campbell, Superintendent at the Essex Asylum, even encouraged the formation of funds for discharged patients of County Asylums, in order to support healthier living and better opportunity on their release from the asylum; ‘scanty diet’ being one of the challenges in maintaining recovery.¹

“A large proportion of the recent cases arrived in a state of ill health, or so much exhausted and reduced in condition that any mode of treatment directed specially to their mental improvement would have been nugatory, until the strength was recruited by a generous diet, and health re-established by remedial or hygienic measures.”

— Henry Oxley Stephens, Medical Superintendent, Bristol Asylum, 1862

Food was, then, an essential element of treatment. Thomas Clouston became well known for his ‘Gospel of Fatness’, an extraordinary-sounding food-based approach to treatment which saw patients fed enormous quantities of food in order to increase their weight. Allan Beveridge has revealed how this approach was even the focus of some patients’ letters, complaining of being unable to keep up with the eating required of them.² Rich diets were also used at later so-called imbecile asylums, such as at Caterham - Stef Estoe notes the feeding of custard to patients in the late nineteenth century.³

Nineteenth-century discussions of diet, and its ethics, were linked to religion, philanthropy, and arguments about health and social reform - of which asylums, and moral treatment, were a result. It’s therefore interesting that in the asylum, a place so concerned with moral and physical health, wider debates about consumption and morality seem to have had little impact on medical directive. Meat-eating was facing newly organised criticism in Britain in the nineteenth century. A growing faction of vegans and vegetarians linked the consumption of meat to the consumption of alcohol in what Gregory James has called ‘ultra-temperance.’⁴ Eating animal products was a gateway to poor moral health, and thus eventually poor physical health.

‘Grand Show of Prize Vegetarians’, John Leech, Punch, 1852 (via the John Leech Archive)

As today, nineteenth-century vegans and vegetarians met with harsh criticism. Some was relatively mild, such as a piece by Punch cartoonist John Leech, who satirised the vegetarian movement in 1852. Others, however, drew on degenerationist concerns that a change in the Victorian diet might disadvantage the ‘race’ as a whole. The Illustrated London News declared that to “preserve the integrity and enterprise of the Anglo-Saxon race, the first medical authorities declare that a full meat diet must be used.” ⁵

However, the press also allowed proponents of the movement to spread their message: for example, The Vegetarian Messenger was produced by the Vegetarian Society from 1849. Others publications also promoted abstinence from meat and animal products. Martha Brotherton’s Vegetable Cookery was the first vegetarian cookbook, produced in 1812. ⁶ Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was famously vegetarian, writing in defence of his ‘natural diet’ in 1813 . ⁷ Vegetarian writing especially proliferated in the late nineteenth-century, with further cookbooks, tracts and books endorsing the practice. And it seems that some vegetarian publications even found their way into the asylums: the Royal Edinburgh Asylum’s library contained John Smith’s Fruits and Farinacea: The Proper Food of Man, published in 1845. This text was an influential one in the world of vegetarianism. It isn’t clear exactly how this book ended up on the shelves of the library, but given that so many texts were received as gifts it seems possible it may have come from a donor. Perhaps the donor, as a supporter of the ‘humane’ treatment of the mentally ill, also considered animals worthy of kinder treatment? Or perhaps they thought that asylum patients – with lunacy so often linked to intemperance – could benefit from encouragement to live according to principles of ‘ultra-temperance’?

An illustration (possibly by R. T. Trall), from the 1854 New York edition of Fruits and Farinacea published by Fowler and Wells (held by Cornell University, digitised by HathiTrust).

Whatever their reasons for donating the book, Fruits and Farinacea made little impact on the Royal Edinburgh’s dietary. Whilst the temperance movement might have had an influence, vegetarianism never seems to have been considered as a path to convalescence. According to the dietary tables and reports by the Commissioners, patients did get their fair share of vegetables, often grown within the asylum grounds. But animal products were common fare - meat and its quality was a regular topic of discussion by both patients and staff. The Committee of the Isle of Ely and Borough of Cambridge Asylum investigated patient diets across several asylums in 1862; one of the results being a comparison of the amount of meat provided. At the Essex asylum, male patients received 42 ounces of uncooked meat per week; Wiltshire gave around half that, at 19.5 ounces; Nottingham provided their patients three vegetarian dinners per week. George W. Lawrence attributes the Cambridge Asylum’s high percentage of recoveries “chiefly to diet,” and goes to far as to include a table comparing ten asylums’ recovery rates with their spending on provisions.⁸

Other animal products, such as milk and eggs, were also important. Clouston’s ‘Gospel of Fatness’ would have been impossible to implement without them. The pauper diet in Inverness was a cause for concern for staff at the asylum, who worried about the low nutritive value of food due to over-reliance on potato, and fretted about the milk supply. “Nothing is more necessary for the proper treatment of the inmates of this asylum than a full supply of milk,” wrote Scottish Lunacy Commissioner John Sibbald. “It is not going too far to say that a deficient supply will, in many cases, prevent the recovery of the patients […]”⁹

Digestive system: twelve figures, including teeth, intestines and colon. Line engraving by Kirkwood & Son, 1813. (Wellcome Collection)

In the medical sphere, texts like Smith’s Fruits and Farinacea had received a largely negative response – few were convinced by Smith’s claims that meat was "prejudicial to man’s health and well-being.”¹⁰ Whilst the book was commented on by medical journals such as The Medico-Chirurgical Review, it seems to have made little impact on the world of the asylum doctor. In the asylum, the patient diet should be nourishing, wholesome, and sufficient to maintain weight and challenge the impact of malnutrition. Little explanation is made as to why meat or fish are chosen; the question of why John Sibbald was quite so enamoured with milk, is not clearly answered in any of his reports. It may have been the fact that vegetable matter, harder to digest, was seen by some as requiring “greater power of the gastric organs,” which those suffering from lunacy were often deemed not to have.¹¹

“It is undoubtedly true that food prepared in the form of Soup or Stew is not generally relished by the labouring classes in this country. [The Stew] contains an abundance of meat, yet [the Commissioners] correctly remarked that some patients refused it wholly or in part. Probably this may be dependent to some extent on an idea that refused articles of food are again employed in the preparation of Soup.”

— Henry Oxley Stephens, Medical Superintendent, Bristol Asylum, 1867

On the whole, discussions of patient nutrition focused how much patients should be given, rather than what exactly they should eat; and Commissioners’ complaints about asylum dietaries revolved around whether patients liked the food enough to eat it. Ultimately, much of the patients’ experience with food was decided by practicality rather than morality: what could be produced in-house, what would be cheap, and what wouldn’t be wasted.

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Sources:

(1) D. C. Campbell, Report of the Medical Superintendent, Annual Report of the Essex Asylum for the year 1856, p. 15.

(2) Allan Beveridge, ‘Life in the Asylum: patients’ letters from Morningside, 1873-1908’, History of Psychiatry, ix (1998), p. 440.

(3) Stef Estoe, Idiocy, Imbecility and Insanity in Victorian Society: Caterham Asylum, 1867-1911 (Palgrave, 2020), p. 81.

(4) James Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-century Britain (Tauris Academic Studies, 2008), p. 5.

(5) llustrated London News, 15 June 1851, p. 560.

(6) Martha Brotherton, Vegetable Cookery (E Wilson, 1833), first published in periodical form in 1812.

(7) Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Vindication of the Natural Diet (1813)

(8) George W. Lawrence, Report of the Committee, Annual Report of the Cambridge & Ely Asylum, 1862, p. 9.

(9) Thomas Aitken, Report of the Medical Superintendent, pp. 14-15; John Sibbald, Report of the Commissioners, p. 4; Annual Report of the Inverness District Asylum for the year 1889.

(10) John Smith, Fruits and Farinacea: The Proper Food of Man (Fowler & Wells, 1854), p. vii.

(11) Jonathan Pereira, A Treatise on Food (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1843), p. 525.

Other useful material:

Onno Oerlemans, ‘Shelley's Ideal Body: Vegetarianism and Nature,’ Studies in Romanticism 34.4 (1995) 531-52.

Madeline Bourque Kearin, ‘Dirty Bread, Forced Feeding, and Tea Parties: the Uses and Abuses of Food in Nineteenth-Century Insane Asylums’, Journal of Medical Humanities (2020) (open access)

Sarah Chaney, “Fat and Well”: Force-Feeding and Emotion in the Nineteenth-Century Asylum, The History of Emotions Blog, 2012

Glenside Museum, ‘Good roast beef with potatoes, cabbage and gravy’: Asylum food 1861-1900

Beggars, thieves, and escape artists

When it came to providing suitable reading for their patients, the Scottish Royal asylums took a relatively traditional approach. Fiction made up the biggest proportion of the libraries at the Crichton Royal Asylum, the Royal Edinburgh Asylum and the Murray Royal Asylum. Religious texts formed a smaller proportion (around half that of fiction at the Royal Edinburgh and the Murray Royal), flanked with scientific texts, works on travel and geography, and history. Biographies formed a signficant part of the libraries too - about 7% on average. These texts offered patients many ‘respectable’ individuals upon whom they might model their own lives. Featured were reverends, writers, and royals: from Bunyan to John Knox to Charles II. Many of these were classics, likely bought second hand or donated from the bookshelves of benefactors of the asylums. However, sitting amongst the more serious texts of the catalogue are a few racier additions to the patients’ reading material. These characters were certainly not examples for patients to follow, so how did they come to be in the library?

Bampfylde Moore Carew, by John Faber Jr after Richard Phelps. Mezzotint, 1750 (NPG D1226, (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

The Murray Royal Institution - The Life and Adventures of Mr. Bampfylde Moore Carew, commonly called the King of the Beggars (1782)

This book, first published in 1745, recounts the life of Bampfylde Moore Carew, an English ‘rogue’. Whilst hailing from a wealthy family, Carew made a name for himself as the ‘King of the Beggars’, spinning tales of (mostly) harmless pranks, tricks, and petty crimes. Beginning with his time at boarding school, where he apparently mastered Latin and Greek alongside making considerable athletic achievements in hunting, the narrative follows a wild life. Joining a band of vagabonds, a trip to Newfoundland, marriage, being crowned ‘King of the Gypsies’, transportation to Virginia, friendship with a group of Native Americans, various escapades across the United States, simulating smallpox to avoid Navy service, and time spent with the ‘Young Pretender’, Bonnie Prince Charlie - all feature in Carew’s narrative. The book was probably not written by Carew himself, and most of the experiences recounted were likely fictional; the researchers at All Things Georgian tracked down some evidence of the ‘real’ Carew which calls into question the authenticity of his claims (aside from the fact of them being hugely outlandish to begin with!) Nevertheless, Life and Adventures was an entertaining read for the eighteenth and nineteenth-century audience and Carew became a notable cultural figure, featuring in print well into the 1800s. It could have been deemed a little fast-paced for the readers of the Murray Royal Asylum - perhaps it was one of the editions which had Carew reflect on his ‘idle’ and unproductive life, in a manner rather incongruous with the rest of the tale, giving it a more ‘moral’ tone.

The Caledonian Mercury reported on Semple Lisle’s defrauding of two women in June 1807.

Crichton Royal Institution - The life of Major J. G. Semple Lisle: containing a faithful narrative of his alternative vicissitudes of splendor and misfortune (1799)

Another interesting autobiography contained in a patient library was held at Crichton, which offered its patients James George Semple Lisle’s own account of his life, written and published during a stay at Tothill Fields prison in Middlesex. The book might have had a familiar tone for asylum patients, as ‘wrongful confinement’ narratives became more numerous during the nineteenth century. It is interesting that Semple Lisle was permitted this luxury whilst in prison. Perhaps surprisingly, Semple describes Mr Fenwick, the prison Governor, as “formed by nature for softening the rigours of captivity.” Semple’s account of his life features his early life, marriage, adventures, affairs, and friendships with European Royals during travels on the continent. However, his fortunes turn. Following an arrest for ‘obtaining goods by false pretenses’ he was sentenced to transportation for the first time, though managed to avoid it. He continued his criminal behaviour, and was sentenced again. His entry in the 1885-1900 volume of the Dictionary of National Biography notes that Semple Lisle went so far as to stab himself and starve himself in attempts to avoid his second transportation. During the journey, a mutiny occurred, and Semple recounts his escape and subsequent travels. This wasn’t his last brush with the law, though - even after another return to England and the prison stay in which he produced his autobiography, he appears in newspaper reports throughout the early 1800s, using confidence tricks to steal money and jewellery from unsuspecting victims across Britain. His Life claimed that “perhaps there exists not another individual who has been so much the play-thing of Fortune as himself,” decrying the “despicable scriblers, who […] have dared to publish their anonymous libels” about him.

‘Magraret Catchpole Stealing the Horse’, from the 1846 edition.

The Murray Royal Institution - The History and Extraordinary Adventures of Margaret Catchpole, a Suffolk Girl, Richard Cobbold (1845)

A biography rather than an autobiography, The History of Margaret Catchpole was a biographical novel written by Richard Cobbold, featuring transported convict Margaret Catchpole. Cobbold did however have a connection to Catchpole: she was employed by his family in Ipswich, and it was her theft of their horse which led to her being held in Ipswich Gaol, sentenced initially to death and then to transportation. Cobbold paints a picture of a strong, sensible young girl whose fortunes turned. Out of love for an unfortunate sailor-turned-smuggler-turned-navyman, she was persuaded to steal a horse, and was arrested. Her escape from Gaol - impressive considering it required scaling a nearly seven metre tall wall - earned her a second death sentence, and a second commutation, and she was sent to Australia. Here, she flourished, becoming a respectable member of society, eventually working as a midwife and owning a farm. Here, though, is where Cobbold’s story ventures from biography into fiction. Perhaps unable to imagine his heroine unmarried post-redemption, he has her marry the virtuous man whose affections she previously spurned in England; they have a son; and she dies aged 68 with her son by her side in 1841. Cobbold’s maths isn’t quite right on several points, and evidence suggests that she actually died unmarried, in 1819. Cobbold declared that her story was instructive of the “necessity of early and religious instruction,” and that without these, even the cleverest would not be able to “resist the temptations of passion” which might lead to “great crimes as well as great virtues.” Cobbold’s tale was a cautionary one, far more so than Carew or Semple’s works - and this is probably why it ended up on the shelves of the asylum library at the Murray Royal.

The Asylum Libraries Catalogue: process

In my last post, I wrote about the three library catalogues that have provided me detailed information about exactly what was on offer for patients at the Crichton Royal Institution, the Murray Royal Asylum, and the Royal Edinburgh Asylum. These sources have been invaluable - but they were also incredibly unwieldy! Getting them into a shape where I’d be able to analyse their contents was a very long process.

An example page of the Crichton Royal Institution’s library catalogue. Dumfries and Galloway Archives and Local Studies, DGH1/6/17/1 (digitised by the Wellcome Library).

Today I finally finished one of the biggest tasks of my PhD. 3875 items collated from three asylum catalogues: each transcribed, sorted, cleaned up, individually researched to maximise information, & recategorised. Not too pretty, but ready for analysis! pic.twitter.com/L6CaLFq93l

— Laura Gray Blair (@lauragrayblair) September 21, 2020

First, there was the task of simply transcribing the catalogues. How long could it possibly take to turn approximately a hundred pages of book titles into a workable format? It turns out, quite a long time. For a while, I felt that I’d lost all sense of the meaning of the letters of the alphabet. I’m only glad that I was working with printed sources, and ‘only’ just under four thousand items, rather than the incredible numbers some of my fellow book historians have worked on (for example, Henning Hansen’s 18,000 items from a bookshop in Gothenburg!)

It turned out that it was after the transcription that my work would really begin. Unfortunately for me, cataloguing practices in the asylums of the nineteenth century were sadly not particularly uniform!

M. W. J., cataloguer of the Murray Royal Asylum’s library, scores a solid 9/10 for consistency. They separated their library’s contents into various useful genre categories, nearly always provide an author, and frequently include a publication date. The catalogue is helpfully arranged with books of the same genre by the same author appearing together. The 1863 copy is nicely laid out, with columns for each piece of information about the nearly 750 titles in the library. The Crichton Royal Institution’s catalogue provides a slightly more haphazard insight into the asylum’s holdings. Like the Murray Royal, it splits the library by genre: however, it provides little detail about the books. It eschews publication date, shortens titles considerably, and avoids giving author names almost entirely. With over 1500 items, this made identifying Crichton’s books with such minimal information a considerable task. The Royal Edinburgh Asylum’s catalogue, compiled by Assistant Physicians John Sibbald and T. S. Clouston, took cataloguing chaos to new heights. In an alphabetical system, should an item be catalogued by the author’s name, the book’s full title, or the key word in the title? As it turns out, Clouston and Sibbald appear not to have made this decision - or at least not discussed it with each other. Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York appears under ‘K’, ‘I’ and ‘N’, to provide one example of many.

A spread from the Murray Royal Asylum’s library catalogue, compiled by M. W. J. and published in 1863. University of Dundee Archive Services, THB29/11/2/1 (digitised by Google Books)

Clouston and Sibbald threw rather a wrench in my plan of looking at titles where multiple copies or editions of one text were kept - with it impossible to tell whether there genuinely were three copies of everything in the asylum’s library, or whether it was down to miscommunication on the part of the cataloguers, for now I’m focusing simply on the titles available. Removing ‘duplicate’ (or potentially duplicate) items from the catalogues reduced my standardisation workload a small amount, and also resulted in a revealing portrait of the asylum libraries. The Murray Royal lost only five titles to duplicate removal (good work, M. W. J.); Crichton’s library was reduced by 45 items (not bad - probably genuine examples of where the asylum held multiple copies); but the Royal Edinburgh’s library was reduced by a staggering 35%, from 1426 items to 925. This raises a question which is difficult to answer: was the catalogue accurate, or an inflation of the library’s true holdings? And was it accidental, or deliberate? I’m yet to find out.

After all of that, my next step was to get my combined catalogue in a state fit for analysing the contents of the three asylum libraries. I’ve probably provided a huge percentage of WorldCat’s site visits over the last few months, as I looked up every one of the remaining 3204 items in an attempt to identify missing authors and fill out vaguely-recorded book titles. Then came standardisation: turning every ‘W. Scott’, ‘Sir Walter Scott’, ‘Walter Scott’, and ‘Sir Scott’ into ‘Walter Scott’; wrangling wordy nineteenth-century titles and their alternatives into something manageable; making sure publishers were accurate, and assigning each text its new, standardised genre. I now have a spreadsheet (which yes, probably should be a database - but I haven’t had time yet, even in lockdown) so monstrous that my laptop audibly groans whenever I open it. After six months’ work, it’s ready for analysis!

The Asylum Libraries Catalogue: sources

It’s clear that asylums took differing approaches to distributing the material that their libraries held: some developed more formal reading rooms where patients could access their collection, or took to spreading books and periodicals around shared areas of the asylum; others required patients to make requests for reading material to the chaplain or other staff members; several institutions instituted their own versions of 'circulating’ libraries, whether freely accessible or in a designated bookcase under lock and key. But one of the most difficult aspects of the asylum library to research is exactly what material was available to patients via these various means. What could the patients actually read? Staff often liked to talk about how patients should read, but less often give examples of such ‘ideal’ reading. Piecing together examples of the asylums’ library holdings has required combing through hundreds of years’ worth of reports written by medical and pastoral asylum staff, patient magazines, and financial records such as invoices.

Some asylums, though, were more dedicated to library practice than might be assumed. The Cornwall County Asylum’s Chaplain, William Iago, officially took on the title of Librarian, and the Chaplain at the Bristol Asylum was required to act as such as part of his general duties.¹ At the Dundee Royal Asylum, an ‘intelligent epileptic patient’ took the role of Librarian, and is noted to have ‘marked and catalogued the books’ as well as recording the books issued to other patients.² The Middlesex County Asylum at Hanwell had its own printing press, which by 1846 was used by patients to produce “almost every printed form required in the Asylum.” ³ As at Dundee, patients produced a catalogue for the library; they also printed it themselves to be “kept in every Ward, so that Patients can make their selection at leisure.” ⁴ Unfortunately, these productions do not appear to have survived. However, the seeming tendency of Scottish asylums to keep everything has proven a huge benefit to my project. (Whilst Dundee’s catalogue did not survive, a section of graffitied wooden window frame remains in the archive.)

View fullsize

A spread from Easterbrook’s scrapbook. Dumfries and Galloway Archives and Local Studies, DGH1/6/17/1 (digitised by the Wellcome Library)

During his time as the Superintendent of the Crichton Royal Asylum, Dr. Charles Cromhall Easterbrook took the time to collect a huge number of historical items relating to the asylum and its history. A scrapbook he compiled contains over six hundred pieces: it features newspaper cuttings relating to the asylum, its staff and patients; photographs and illustrations of the building and grounds; hospital records and forms; and various ephemeral pieces produced at the asylum’s press, such as playbills. Among these items is also the small pamphlet forming the library catalogue of the institution, dated to Spring 1853 by Easterbrook. As at Hanwell, the pamphlet was printed by a patient, W. Shields.⁵

The catalogue for the Murray Royal Asylum seems to have been interesting enough to make its way out of the asylum and into various libraries around the world: copies of it are held at the National Library of Scotland, the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the Widener Library at Harvard, and McGill University in Montreal, as well as at University of Dundee Archive Services with the rest of the Murray Royal’s archive. It was not printed at the asylum, but by Robert Whittet, a successful Perth printer, in 1863. The catalogue was compiled by ‘M. W. J.’; the use of semi-anonymising initials suggests that they may have been a patient.⁶

Sir Thomas Smith Clouston, photogravure after G. Fiddes Watt, 1909 (Wellcome Library); Sir John Sibbald, photogravure by Swan Electric Engraving Co. after Sir G. Reid (Wellcome Library)

The Royal Edinburgh Asylum provides the final located library catalogue. A small booklet, it is kept as part of a collection relating to the Superintendents of the asylum rather than the main archive. This is possibly due to the fact that it was compiled by John Sibbald and Thomas Clouston - two very significant names in nineteenth-century psychiatric history - in 1861, whilst they were mere Assistant Physicians at the asylum. Sibbald left the asylum shortly after the catalogue’s publication to take up a post as Superintendent of the Argyll District Asylum; he later became a Commissioner of Lunacy for Scotland. Clouston departed for a post at the Carlisle Asylum, but returned to the Royal Edinburgh in 1873 to serve as Superintendent for the next thirty-five years.⁷ A catalogue is first being mentioned as being produced at the Royal Edinburgh as early as 1849, “prepared and printed by the inmates,” before being reissued in 1855 (8) - but Sibbald and Clouston’s work seems to have supplanted the earlier efforts by patients.⁹

In the next post: some haphazard cataloguing, suspicious duplicates, and a monster spreadsheet.

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¹ William Iago, Chaplain’s Report, Annual report of the Cornwall County Asylum for the year 1865, p. 9; Henry Oxley Stephens, Superintendent’s Report, Annual report of he Bristol Asylum for the year 1869, p. 11.

² Annual report of the Dundee Royal Asylum for the year 1854-55, pp. 9-10.

³ John Conolly, Physician’s Report, Annual Report of the Middlesex County Asylum at Hanwell for the year 1846, p. 27.

⁴ Catherine M. E. Macfie, Matron’s Report, Annual Report of the Middlesex County Asylum at Hanwell for the year 1860, pp, 58-59.

⁵ [Catalogue of the Library of the Crichton Royal Institution] (Dumfries: Crichton Press, [1853]), Dumfries and Galloway Archives and Local Studies, DGH1/6/17/1; digitised by the Wellcome Library.

⁶ Catalogue of the Library of Murray’s Royal Institution, Perth, compiled by M. W. J. (Perth: Robert Whittet, 1863), University of Dundee Archive Services, THB29/11/2/1; digitised by Google from the Harvard original.

⁷ Details about Clouston and Sibbald’s careers are found in David Skae’s Physician’s Reports, in annual reports for the Royal Edinburgh from the years 1857, 1861 and 1863.

⁸ Earlier mentions of the first library catalogue can be found in David Skae, Physician’s Report, Annual Report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the Year 1848, p. 30, and Statement of works, Annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the year 1855, p. 40.

⁹ Catalogue of the Library of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum (Morningside, Edinburgh: Royal Asylum Press, 1861), Lothian Health Services Archive, GD16/52.

'Bookcase credibility' in the asylum

During the pandemic many of us have been given a rare insight into the homes of our friends and colleagues via the magic of video calling. We might be surprised by an unexpectedly bold paint choice, pretend not to see the drying washing shoved not-quite-off-camera, wonder just how many of us have the same IKEA wall unit. The choices we make - or the choices we’re unable to make - in our home decor have taken on new significance. One aspect of presentation has come under particular scrutiny during the pandemic: book organisation.

“The book backdrop is both a handy representation of symbolic knowledge, a marker of cultural cachet and a source of analysis for those seeking to understand the particular individual who occupies the foreground.”

— David Beer, 'The Case of Bookcases'

Salman Rushdie gives us a long, sombre bookcase thundering past like a great goods train filled with credibility. His dome is bathed in the glow of understanding. A lamp pops brilliantly in the distance. Salman's lesson is that thought illuminates fact. Without it, all is murky. pic.twitter.com/AAMxQJaP0y

— Bookcase Credibility (@BCredibility) July 17, 2020

Long before Coronavirus necessitated these digital meetings, there was a clear sense that books meant something, as David Beer neatly summarises. It’s the reason why job sites suggested that having your books on display during a video interview might not be a good choice, or why we often see ‘experts’ of various kinds interviewed in front of a backdrop of shelves (real or not). In 2017 the Senate Press Gallery had a false bookshelf created by gluing book spines to a dark background, used as a backdrop by Senators during TV interviews; Dominic Raab was ridiculed across the internet following his somewhat conspicious windowsill display during a BBC interview in 2019. Since lockdown began, there has been a wider discussion of the meaning of the bookshelves lurking in the back of our meetings, from serious debate about the contents of Michael Gove’s, to the more lighthearted ‘Bookcase Credibility’ Twitter account. The New York Times dubbed the ‘credibility bookshelf’ ‘quarantine’s hottest accessory’, and Curbed shared images of bookcases ‘carefully selected to look sufficiently realistic’ for use as Zoom call backgrounds. Book historians have been glued to the discussion - and so in November we have a whole conference dedicated to the topic, run by the Open University.

All of this discussion about the conscious presentation of books got me thinking about my own research. What was the nineteenth-century approach to ‘bookcase credibility’? Though books were becoming more accessible to the everyday person, they certainly weren’t as ubiquitous as they are in homes today. Take a working-class home like that of Pearl of Days author Barbara Farquhar, for example, where reading material was collected with a ‘take what you can get’ approach due to financial and geographical restraints. How would Farquhar’s family be judged by their bookshelves? Moving the discussion into the lunatic asylum complicates matters further.

An interior corridor at Craig House, Royal Edinburgh Asylum, c. 1897

Earlier in the nineteenth century, the asylum was conceived of by many as a domestic space - a household headed up by the Superintendent, and the patients requiring discipline and guidance like children might. Asylum interiors began to reflect these notions of domesticity, and the setup of the interior space was believed to assist in producing ideal patient behaviour. Despite changing approaches to asylum treatment as the century wore on, by the early twentieth century many asylums still retained some of their domestic character.¹

Henry Oxley Stephens, Superintendent of the Bristol Lunatic Asylum, admitted in 1863 that some might doubt the impact of the trappings of Victorian domesticity on the insane, ‘especially of the humbler classes’, who wouldn’t necessarily have access to ‘pictures, vases, flowers, singing birds, &c.’ in their own homes.² However, the Commissioners in Lunacy provided an answer in their own report, which Stephens quotes: these objects ‘serve to engage their attention, occupy their thoughts, and exercise them in habits of care and self-control.’ This is much the same rationale used by some asylum staff to justify encouraging patients to read, teaching them literacy from scratch, and giving them access to quality books.

“The Commissioners in Lunacy, on their recent visit, mentioned that “in the Acute wards there was rather a scanty supply of books, &c.,” and suggested that the issuing of a number of volumes in good condition, instead of “old and well-worn ones,” would have a good moral effect, and that the destruction of books (which had caused the scanty supply) would cease.”

— James Fountaine, Chaplain, Bristol Asylum, 1897

Images of asylum interiors provide some amazing insight into choices made for the patients’ environment. Spaces, particularly those for middle and upper class patients, were often highly decorated and filled with the ‘objects of interest’ as advocated by the Commissioners. These images present a clean, tidy, domestic institution, punctuated appropriately with potted plants, framed pictures, and ornaments, and in classic late Victorian fashion, often a number of chairs verging on hazardous. In many ways, the interiors are like those which might be found outside the asylum. For instance, take the drawing room of Terregles House near Dumfries, photographed by John Rutherford of Jardington in 1889. Rutherford also took many photographs of the Crichton Royal Institution.

Mrs Maxwell’s room at Terregles House, 1889

Images of asylums were almost always produced at the behest of the institution itself, published in annual reports, or even reproduced as postcards. Their agenda was presumably to present the asylums in a positive light, and to challenge presumptions of dark and cheerless interiors filled with gloomy patients and inattentive staff. They present the ‘ideal’ asylum. In the same way that some of us might curate our backdrops on Microsoft Teams to convey to others our legitimacy, intelligence, or values (or to avoid them being obvious), these images aimed to cement specific ideas of the asylum in a viewer’s mind.

As books formed part of this domestic environment - and since staff were often so keen to emphasise their provision - one might expect to see reading material among the mix. Yet in late-nineteenth century images of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, even in spaces for wealthy patients, they are conspicuously absent. By this point the asylum must have had a considerable library, growing from a catalogue of over 1500 volumes at the start of the 1860s; yet the room marked as the ‘Library’ of the South Craig Villa does not have a single book visible (see the third image in the slideshow below). The lack of books in these photographs raises two questions: where are the books, and why were they apparently excluded from the recreational spaces photographed?

Rutherford’s images of the Crichton Royal Institution’s main spaces paint a similar picture to those produced of the Royal Edinburgh’s: the dormitory, corridors, dining room, and recreation hall are bare of books. However, images of more intimate spaces, such as the women’s sitting rooms, provide the first visual proof of the existence of reading material within the asylum walls. Two photographs of the same sitting room from Rutherford’s collection give a better understanding of the process of creating these images. The obvious change is the unknown woman in the second shot, but other differences are visible. The placing of framed photographs is altered slightly; an ornament on the sideboard is turned to face the opposite direction; an armchair and cushion are removed; the book is exchanged for another. Clearly, small details matter.

Two views of a lady’s sitting room, Crichton Royal Institution

“[...] it is proposed to supply the wards with a small glazed book-case, fitting with a simple lock, and to provide each patient who desires it, and is able to take charge of it, with a key, thus enabling one to take a book out for perusal when wanted, and to put it back again when done with.”

— W. G. Davies, Chaplain, Joint Counties Asylum Abergavenny, 1864

These images reveal the staging decisions made by the photographer (or perhaps an assisting member of asylum staff) in representing this space. Staging was likely applied to many, if not most, images created of asylum spaces in the period. It is a crucial reminder that these representations likely do not show the rooms as they would truly have looked whilst in use by patients, and it also perhaps explains why books are not seen in so many images. Though it is often mentioned in reports that books and periodicals are placed throughout the asylum for patients to look at, they were likely tidied away for the purposes of a staged image where each object was consciously chosen for display. In addition, whilst each asylum had a slightly different approach to storage and distribution, the bulk of patients’ reading material seems to have been kept elsewhere, in rooms not photographed - such as an old Attendant’s room at Bristol in 1890. Instead, it became common for small bookcases (often under lock and key) to be situated in the wards, forming a ‘circulating library’ of sorts. These are often visible in images from other asylums: the small lockable bookcase above a female attendant at the Lancaster County Asylum, filled with small volumes; the ornamented bookcase at The Retreat’s house in Scarborough; or the built-in case featured in a room likely belonging to the Montrose Lunatic Asylum.*

Unfortunately, even with enhancement, the images aren’t detailed enough to ascertain which books were chosen for display in bookcases in these images; a level of analysis like that faced by Michael Gove isn’t possible. Instead, the books included in these images, especially on the rare occasions they are positioned outside of a case, take on a symbolic and cultural meaning more like that described by David Beer. They reflect less on the asylum’s inhabitants (for they usually had little input in reading choice) and more on the values of those who were in command of the institution - or at least the values they sought to project.

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Sources:

¹ Jane Hamlett, At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England, pp. 19-28.

² Henry Oxley Stephens, Medical Superintendent’s Report, Report of the Committee of Visitors for the Lunatic Asylum for the City and Council of Bristol, for the year 1863, pp. 9-10 (digitised by the Wellcome Library).

³ James Fountaine, Chaplain’s Report, Report of the Committee of Visitors for the Lunatic Asylum for the City and Council of Bristol, for the year 1897, pp. 16-17 (held by the Glenside Hospital Museum, Bristol).

⁴ W. G. Davies, Chaplain’s Report, Twelfth Annual report of the Joint Lunatic Asylum at Abergavenny, for the year 1864, p. 20 (digitised by the Wellcome Library).

Images:

1. An interior corridor at Craig House, Royal Edinburgh Asylum, c. 1897 (Eighty-fifth annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the insane: for the year 1897, digitised by the Wellcome Library)

2. Mrs Maxwell’s room at Terregles House, photographed in 1889 by John Rutherford of Jardington (Dumfries and Galloway Archives and Local Studies DGH1/8/1/2, digitised by the Wellcome Library)

3. Carousel 1: all at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, c. 1897 (Eighty-fifth annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the insane: for the year 1897, digitised by the Wellcome Library)

   1. The Drawing Room, Craig House

   2. The Great Hall, Craig House

   3. The Library in South Craig Villa

4. Two views of a lady’s sitting room at the Crichton Royal Institution, photographed by John Rutherford of Jardington, c. 1890s (Dumfries and Galloway Archives and Local Studies, DGH1/8/1/4, digitised by the Wellcome Library)

5. Carousel 2: various

   1. An unknown room at the Lancaster County Asylum, late Victorian or Edwardian (print bought from a private collection)

   2. The Smoke Room at Throxenby Hall, Scarborough, used by patients at The Retreat, Yorkshire (Borthwick Institute for Archives, the University of York, RET/1/8/9/1, digitised by the Wellcome Library)

   3. Unknown room, likely at the Montrose Lunatic Asylum. *This photograph was found among others, some identified as representing Montrose Lunatic Asylum; it is presumed to belong to this set but is not explicitly indicated as such. (University of Dundee Archive Services, THB 23/19/5/20, photographed at the archive)

Books of the asylum: The Pearl of Days

This post is the first in a series, ‘Books of the Asylum’, which will examine some of the titles which are known to have been held in asylum libraries across Britain and Ireland.

Towards the end of 1847, Glasgow-based Evangelical publisher John Henderson announced an essay competition. This was a competition specifically aimed at the working classes, and the aim was to create a body of literature which could be used as proof that the working classes were supportive of Sabbatarian aims, rather than seeing it as simply a secular day for amusement. Henderson announced the competition for working men towards the end of 1847, with prizes of £25, £15, and £10 for the best three essays. By the end of March 1848, 1045 essays had been received. Prizes were won by John Allan Quinton (a printer), John Younger (a shoemaker), and David Farquhar (a mechanic). Yet the most successful entry to the competition was one which was disqualified from it.

‘The Pearl of Days: or, advantages of the Sabbath to the Working Classes’ was widely praised, and sold over thirty thousand copies in the first few months; but it was not eligible for the competition by virtue of being written by a woman, rather than a man. This ‘Scottish Maiden’s Essay’ was authored by ‘A Labourer’s Daughter’, a pseudonym of Barbara H. Farquhar. Farquhar had seemingly anticipated the possibility of being considered ineligible for the competition, as she sent a letter with her entry.

Barbara H. Farquhar, British Museum number 1943,0410.606, © The Trustees of the British Museum (CC-BY)

“I have thought it unnecessary to inquire whether a female might be permitted to enter […] The subject of the Essay is of equal interest to woman as to man; and this being the case, I have looked upon your restriction as merely confining this effort to the working classes. Whether I judge rightly or not, matters but little […]”

— Barbara Farquhar, Pearl of Days

Farquhar had not, unfortunately, judged rightly. The essay, however, appears to have been the favourite, and its disqualification more a matter of formality. In The Spectator for December 1848 it is described as ‘the prize essay’, and it was even commented on directly by Prince Albert in correspondence to Lord Ashley. Whilst it could not be a prize-winner, it was apparently considered by the judges to be ‘a production which ought not to be withheld from the world’, and it was their duty to humanity, as well as the ‘Labourer’s Daughter’, to have it published independent of the competition essays.

Competition entrants were asked to provide a ‘sketch’ of their life alongside their essays, and Farquhar obliged. Farquhar was Scottish, the daughter of a gardener, and had spent much of her life in domestic service in the family home and that of her father’s master. She had received little formal education, taking turns with her sister to attend a sewing-school over the course of two years; her education was ‘at the fireside of hard-working parents’. At the time of writing, she lived in a small house with her widowed mother, four of her nine siblings, and two relatives, having dealt with significant illness in the family and the death of her father and sister.

Martin Spence notes that in most of the autobiographies received alongside competition entries, authors sought to portray themselves as ‘archetypes of Sabbath-keeping working-class respectability’. Farquhar is no different. The author of the introduction praises her for avoiding ‘the opportunity for and danger of egotism’ which comes with autobiography. Instead, ‘to sink self, and to elevate principles, should be the sole object’. Farquhar uses her sketch, as well as her essay, to promote traditional notions of Victorian domesticity. She presents the ‘ideal’ female figure: companion, friend, and adviser to her husband, and a mother, nurse, instructor and guide to her children. She praises her mother’s belief that it was ‘improper to be bustling about when the father was within’, and that a home was to be a quiet refuge for a labouring husband. This echoes arguments made by those such as James Booth, who presented the example of a ‘young mechanic or artisan’, driven to the gin palace with its ‘good fire and penny newspaper’ by his wife’s inability to provide a neat and tidy home. The principles that Farquhar chooses to ‘elevate’ in her autobiography are clearly that of a respectable, domestic, working-class woman.

Farquhar’s essay presents the Sabbath as an essential day of rest for those whose lives are shaped by ‘severe and unremitting toil’. It is central to the wellbeing of the working classes both physically and mentally, and even as a solely secular institution, a necessary limitation of the power of exploitative employers. Her argument promotes what Spence categorises as the ‘democratic Sabbath’, and holds the ‘radical tinge’ he ascribes to many of these essays. Farquhar does not believe, however, that the Sabbath was merely a day for physical rest. Rather, it should be used for ‘the improvement of ourselves and others in holiness, virtue, and intelligence' – linking cultural and literary progress with spiritual growth.

Considering the asylum system’s preoccupation with self-improvement and the development of ‘moral and intellectual powers’, it is perhaps not surprising that The Pearl of Days might be considered an ideal text for an asylum patient. The book was held by the Crichton Royal Asylum in their library, and is listed in the catalogue for 1853. Farquhar’s life as she described it was in many ways the ideal aspired to for asylum patients: a family unit led by caring parents, with teachings ‘calculated to form and strengthen in [children] a habit of self-restraint’; education with the goal of understanding religious teaching better; ‘active and healthful amusement’ and ‘useful and necessary employment’. Interestingly, the book also presents a blueprint for ‘ideal’ reading. She describes in her ‘Sketch’ the importance of reading to her family, accompanied by illustrations of idyllic scenes. Children retire to various spots in the garden to read on the Sabbath, or a woman (presumably the ‘Labourer’s Daughter’ herself) reposes in front of a fire, engrossed in a book and with a cat at her feet. In her essay, she outlines the importance of reading philosophy, theology, and history, and the dangers of ‘exciting’ novels to exhausted minds.

“Our Sabbaths were our happiest days [...] when we would sally forth, book in hand, in different directions, one to stretch himself upon the soft grass in the field close by, another to pace backward and forward on the pleasure walk, or to find a seat in the bough of an old bushy tree; while another would seek a little summer-house our father have made of heather, and seated round with the twisted boughts of the glossy birch, each reading aloud till the allotted lesson was thoroughly fixed upon our minds. [...] During the afternoon, mother would read to us, or all of us, father and mother included, read by turns; questions were then asked, and conversation entered into, about what we had been reading. ”

— Barbarah H. Farquhar, The Pearl of Days

The relative freedom in their reading could, she admitted, be condemned by some for its ‘laxity’ – but she emphasised that with learning of Scripture underpinning their knowledge, they were ‘led to analyse what we read […] to receive nothing as truth, until it had been put to the test of the Divine word’. But the variety in their reading was often a matter of necessity: without a library nearby, being far from a town or village, and having limited funds, Farquhar’s family largely had to ‘make do’ with the books they could access with their geographical and financial restrictions. A school-book washed downstream in a storm was a ‘prize’ for the children.

This echoes the experience of many working class readers, and also those living within the asylum system, who would have to rely on libraries developed through donation and second-hand purchase.   No records exist in terms of borrowing at the Crichton Royal Institution, so we cannot be sure whether asylum patients ever read this text; but is interesting to consider how patients might have related to Farquhar’s mode of living and reading whilst they were in the asylum. The book provides a useful lens through which the subjects of gender norms, class struggle, education and leisure can be examined, especially in the context of ‘ideal’ asylum reading.

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Sources:

[Barbara H. Farquhar], The Pearl of Days: or, advantages of the Sabbath to the Working Classes, (London: Partridge and Oakey; Glasgow: D. Robertson, 1849).

Martin Spence, ‘Writing the Sabbath: The Literature of the Nineteenth-Century Sunday Observance Debate’, Studies in Church History, 48 (2012), pp. 283-295.

John Jordan, 'Sabbath Essays by British Workmen', Evangelical Christendom Volumes 3 & 4, (1850), 281-7 .

James Booth, On the Female Education of the Industrial Classes (London: Bell and Daldy, 1855), p. 16.

‘Miscellaneous’, The Spectator, 23 December 1868, Volume 21, p. 1227.

The Crichton Royal Institution Library Catalogue survives as part of a scrapbook compiled by Charles Cromhall Easterbrook, who was Physician Superintendent of the Crichton Royal Institution from 1908 to 1937. C. R. I. Scrapbook, DGH1/6/17/1, Dumfries and Galloway Archives and Local Studies, pasted to p. 16.

Teresa Gerrard and Alexis Weedon, ‘Working-Class Women's Education in Huddersfield: A Case Study of the Female Educational Institute Library, 1856-1857’, Information & Culture, 49 (2014), 234-264 .

Reading anxiety(ies)

Across the world, many people are currently in lockdown to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Frontline workers and essential services deal with the realities of a pandemic head-on; the rest of us find ourselves in a situation many have never faced before. Some of us are trying to do our jobs from home, often shouldering new responsibilities and worries; many others have watched their livelihoods shrink or disappear. From my house I’ve watched articles and discussions pop up about what might help us cope with our new socially and geographically limited lives. We’ve downloaded Houseparty, we’re holding virtual pub quizzes, we’re playing Animal Crossing. A lot of us are also reading.

So here is my #quarantine book list/ books chosen either because they are about being in a lockdown situation- or they will help you to (mentally) escape -
1.Room-Emma Donoghue
2.A Gentleman in Moscow -Amor Towes
3.The Count of Monte Cristo-Alexander Dumas
1/3 @thenovelcure

— Ella Berthoud (@Ellaberthoud) March 24, 2020

Time provided a list of thirty books and series to read during social distancing. Vanity Fair asked staff to contribute ‘the most absorbing, distracting, engaging’ books they could think of. The critics at the Independent drew up a list of forty , featuring a range of writers from Dickens to Harper Lee. Ella Berthoud , bibliotherapist at the School of Life, made some suggestions for ‘quaratine reading’ on Twitter, chosen because ‘they are about being in a lockdown situation’, or will ‘help you to (mentally) escape’. Even in isolation, and with reading a particularly solitary habit in our society, we’re finding ways to make it social. Lauren O’Neill, at Vice, set up a ‘Corona Book Club’ , starting with Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The Bethlem Museum of the Mind is hosting The Anatomy of Melancholy Book Club , group-reading an abridged version of Robert Burton’s 1621 text, a 'treasure trove of esoteric learning’.

A 1628 edition of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (Wellcome Library)

Our turn to books hinges on the comforting notion that in times of stress, uncertainty, and isolation, reading can act as a lifeline - to distract us, amuse us, and connect us with worlds we are shut out of through time, imagination or situation. Patients in nineteenth-century asylums, coping with often difficult psychiatric symptoms whilst isolated from wider society, seem to have had the same recognisable impulse to self-soothe with reading. The anonymous author of Scenes from the Life of a Sufferer: Being the Narrative of a Residence in Morningside Asylum places clear emphasis on the importance of books during his stay in the asylum following a suicide attempt. ¹ He seeks out ‘rational companionship and literary conversation’, looks over newspapers and periodicals with breakfast each morning, and reads in his bed during the early hours when he struggles to sleep. The Royal Edinburgh Asylum’s patient library, consisting of well over one thousand volumes at the point of our narrator’s stay, offers him a world to escape into.

“Shut up within the walls of this little world, one day was exactly like another in its monotonous course; but I now had a new world of books in the small library of the Asylum, and a most novel and most interesting world of life in the strange society around me.”

— Anonymous, Scenes from the Life of a Sufferer, 1855

Likewise, asylum staff appreciated the immense importance which reading held for those in isolation. J. Burchell Spring, Chaplain at the Bristol Asylum, reminds the readers of his report in 1874 that for asylum patients, books were even more of a lifeline than for those outside asylum walls. "When it is remembered how much consolation well chosen books bring to the healthy and the sane," he writes, "we need not be surprised if they should be valued by those who are shattered in mind and body, and who, in a measure, are shut out from those thousand distractions which meet us in the busy world."²

A small pile of my post-apocalyptic and dystopian books.

My own reading habits in times of stress have always tended toward the post-apocalyptic and dystopian. Reading about other worlds which have been torn apart by zombie hordes (Max Brooks’ World War Z), overcome with sleeplessness (Kenneth Calhoun’s Black Moon), or shattered by human language becoming poisonous (Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet) somehow made my own anxieties feel less intense. Stories about the end of the world as we know it via nuclear war (Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow), plant extinction (John Christopher’s The Death of Grass) or climate change (J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World) hit a little more close to home. In looking for reading material during the last few weeks, I couldn’t help but feel that picking up something like Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel), Blindness (José Saramago), or Find Me (Laura van den Berg), might make for a more anxiety-provoking than anxiety-relieving experience.

It seems a lot of us are struggling to choose our reading topics. Haaretz’s ‘Coronavirus Quarantine Reading List’ is comprised of fifteen apocalyptic novels. Time’s list included nine books or series which are post-apocalyptic, and seven about emotional or physical solitude. Moshfegh’s novel, Vice’s choice, is what they call “big self-isolation vibes”. The Bethlem Museum choose to approach their concern about the ‘mental health effects’ of our social isolation measures by reading a text exploring melancholia. Penguin Classics, publishers of Albert Camus’ The Plague, have reported a huge upswing in orders for the novel, loosely based on an 1849 cholera epidemic. Staff at Guardian Australia, meanwhile, shared “good books which make us feel good. Books about none of that other stuff. Books that we can really, truly escape into,” and readers suggested their own ‘comfort reads’. Berthoud’s own recommendations present an interesting dichotomy: do we read the books which deal directly with the ideas and situations which preoccupy us? Or do we read around them, looking for distraction?

Asylum doctors in the nineteenth century faced a similar quandary. Should patients be reading books which dealt directly with their issues, or would those texts prove harmful? Physician George Man Burrows railed against the ‘“teeming and cheap press” which gave readers “lamentable proofs of the degradation of humanity,” detailing grisly crimes. When a person began to show the first symptoms of mental illness, he believed, they should be prevented from reading the newspapers.³ Burrows also advocated the restriction of books. ‘Hypochondriasis’, familiar to us today as a chronic anxiety regarding health, was long considered a physical disease.⁴ But in 1828, Burrows begins to suggest this might be a mental illness, and suggested that 'nervous' individuals could induce it in themselves through reading. Burrows writes of Rousseau, the "unhappy vapourer", who "fanc[ied] himself afflicted with every [disease] of which he read". Philosophers and the "unlearned" were not the only readers at risk: even doctors could fall prey to hypochondria through their medical reading.⁵ Reading on the subject of religion could also “prove hurtful, and aggravate the insane” where religious delusion was a driving factor in a patient’s illness. Samuel Tuke, grandson of the founder of the York Retreat, likewise suggested patients should be prevented from reading material related to their “peculiar notions.”⁶

Honoré Daumier’s painting, The Imaginary Illness (La Malade Imaginaire), 1860-62

Doctors most often suggested that reading should be instructive, or at least distracting. W. A. F. Browne, at the Crichton Royal Asylum, reports on various patients who have been successfully distracted from their concerns. A suicidal patient was “seduced into a temporary forgetfulness of his woes” through translating Guizot and Vertot; another, a “morose misanthrope”, applies himself to Hume’s History of England. But Browne, unlike other doctors, also suggests that reading on-topic could be beneficial for patients. One man at the asylum, convinced that he was the husband of the queen, was encouraged to read the Morning Chronicle which brought headlines of the Queen’s real marriage. A patient who had been “seduced […] from the region of fact, reality and reason” was given ten volumes of Malte Brun’s Physical Geography to wade through, challenging his “morbid suggestions.” Molière’s Malade Imaginaire, featuring a hypochondriac protagonist, was read and translated by another patient, encouraged by Browne with no apparent concern that reading works about hypochondria might influence an already-vulnerable patient to it. Directly confronting a patient’s problems, challenging them through their reading material, was an alternative to using the library for simple distraction - and could form part of the regime intended to help them cope with their situation.⁷

Some of us seek escape from the everyday realities of living in a pandemic; like the anonymous asylum patient who wrote Scenes from the Life of a Sufferer, reading offers us a way out of the ‘monotonous course’ of isolation. Others of us seem to be turning to novels about disease and destruction as a way of understanding our own predicament more deeply. “We are not responsible for the coronavirus,” Albert Camus’ daughter Catherine says, “but we can be responsible in the way we respond to it.” Perhaps novels which feature world-ending worst case scenarios, can offer us a way to imagine what could happen if the response to our own current crisis is one of selfishness and greed; and encourage us, through the anxiety, to think of the bigger picture when it comes to our own actions.

*downloads Ling Ma’s Severance*

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Sources:

¹ J. Burchell Spring, Chaplain's Report, Annual Report of the Bristol Lunatic Asylum (1875).

² Anonymous, Scenes from the Life of a Sufferer: Being the Narrative of a Residence in Morningside Asylum (Royal Edinburgh Asylum Press, 1855).

³ George Man Burrows, Commentaries on the causes, forms, symptoms, and treatment, moral and medical, of insanity (T. and G. Underwood, 1828), pp. 448-49.

⁴ Esther Fischer-Homberger, ‘Hypochondriasis of the Eighteenth Century - Neurosis of the Present Century’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 46 (1972), 391-401.

⁵ Burrows, pp. 466-470.

⁶ Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat (Isaac Pierce, 1813).

⁷ W. A. F. Browne, various reports from Crichton Royal Asylum, 1839-1844.

Reclaiming/Rejecting the Asylum

This is the second part of a two-part post: read the first here.

Many of the ideas promoted by nineteenth-century asylum doctors are ones which today we recognise to have some truth in terms of improving our wellbeing. It seems a common sense idea that having access to a good diet, education, outdoor space, meaningful occupation, and time for recreation and leisure, might provide a positive impact on our wellbeing. It’s easy to see how legitimate frustration around the current system might lead to a temptation to romanticise systems of the past. In Britain, people can wait months or even years to access therapy, which is often inadequately short-term, even for those with long-term and complex mental health problems. There are instances of children forced to travel hundreds of miles from their families to receive treatment. Between 2007-8 and 2016-17, mental health beds in England were cut by 40%. At the same time, an estimated 1 in 4 people will experience mental health problems over the course of their lifetime; suicide remains the second leading cause of death globally for people aged 15-29.¹

In this context, the idea of an ‘asylum’ - a safe place of refuge, which provides us with the care we need to recover, without the incredible financial cost which comes with private healthcare, can easily seem appealing. The Wellcome Collection’s 2016-17 exhibition ‘Bedlam: the asylum and beyond’ (produced in partnership with South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, the Maudsley Charity, Bethlem Gallery and Museum and the Adamson Collection Trust) questioned this original ideal, and asked whether it might be reclaimed in some way. The exhibition examined the history of psychiatric care, with emphasis on the importance of including those with lived experience, especially visible through the inclusion of patient artwork. Closing the exhibit was Madlove: A Designer Asylum, produced by artists The Vacuum Cleaner and Hannah Hull, in collaboration with Benjamin Koslowski, James Christian and Rosie Cunningham, and over three hundred people with experience of mental health issues. Madlove reimagined a ‘safe place to go mad’ - and to me it was notable that many aspects which people today believed could be helpful for their mental health, and treatment, were also considered essential to the ‘ideal’ asylum back in the nineteenth century.

Madlove: A Designer Asylum, produced by The Vacuum Cleaner and Hannah Hull, in collaboration with Benjamin Koslowski, James Christian and Rosie Cunningham, and mental health service users. (Thomas S. G. Farnetti/Wellcome Collection)

It’s important to note here that the author of the tweets which inspired these posts represents a service user network, and also tweeted that part of the basis for these tweets was discussion with elderly service users, who communicated their positive experiences within an institutional environment and disappointment with current services. Listening to service users themselves is an essential and often neglected part of mental health treatment, as well as its history.² These tweets represent an aspect of studying the history of mental health treatment which is essential to consider - how should we use and interpret evidence? Who do we listen to, and who should we listen to, when we are writing our histories? How do we represent contrasting experiences, and discuss those experiences without erasing others?

Whilst the author of the original tweet discussed in the first part of this post was correct on a surface level, and the aspects which were highlighted could be helpful for those dealing with mental health issues, the less romantic reality of the asylum system was entirely obscured. Those ‘grand old mansions’ were often bare, draughty, and cold, and became increasingly overcrowded as the nineteenth century wore on. Whilst some physical treatments such as electro-convulsive therapy and lobotomies didn’t yet exist, other painful and uncomfortable ‘therapies’ were used alongside the more palatable aspects of moral treatment. The ‘rotary motion machine’ or ‘Cox’s chair’, was popularised by Joseph Cox, physician and owner of the Fishponds Asylum in Bristol. Cox introduced the practice of ‘swinging’ patients. Initially, this practice had produced a more natural rock or swing, but Cox aimed for his contraption to induce vomiting and nausea, as well as attempting to ‘shock’ the patient to their senses.³ Cold water was used as treatment and sometimes punishment. In the patient magazine of the Murray Royal Asylum in Perth, one patient wrote that a cold water treatment used at the Sussex County Asylum "involved the most decided and most objectionable form of Mechanical Restraint which we have encountered in any part of the world!”⁴

Nimmo & Mackintosh detail their use of blistering on a patient, 19th Annual Report for the Dundee Royal Lunatic Asylum, 1839.

So-called ‘depletive’ therapies were frequently utilised, especially at the beginning of the century. Bloodletting and blistering were commonly resorted to. Blistering involved the use of irritants such as mustard powder or powdered Spanish fly to produce blisters on the patients’ skin, usually the head or neck. William Smith, a patient at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, avoided the usual bloodletting but had leeches applied to his eye for a bout of conjunctivitis, as well as receiving a blister.⁵ Patrick Nimmo, Physician, and A. Mackintosh, Superintendent, even partly credit blistering for the recovery of a patient at the Dundee Royal Asylum in around 1838.⁶ Mary de Young’s Encyclopaedia of Asylum Therapeutics notes that whilst this practice was largely abandoned by the mid-nineteenth century in Britain, it was used for far longer in Colonial asylums as ‘both a counterirritation treatment and as a punishment’.⁷

“We are far too apt to forget the relation between mind and body, to consider the former as apart from, and independent of, the latter – only to recognise the transmission of physical deformities, whilst it is well known to those who have undertaken such investigations, that not only these, but mental and moral defects are equally transmissible, or appear in descendants in other forms, as talents, aptitudes, genius, vices, or peculiarities.”

— Thomas Aitken, Superintendent of the Inverness District Asylum, 1872

Fundamentally, aside from the brutal treatments used by asylum doctors, most of the patients came to the asylum against their will. They were at the mercy of asylum authorities, who decided when they would be able to leave. An obsession with the ‘hereditary taint’ of insanity led doctors to discuss the merits of allowing those deemed ‘insane’ to reproduce.⁸ W. A. F. Browne, who advocates empathetically for moral treatment (including games, books and sports) describes one woman as a ‘squinting, hideous, dirty, drunken imbecile’, and puts forward the fact that she is still at ‘liberty’ and having children as evidence that the authorities are not eager enough to seclude ‘lunatics’.⁹ Many of the most ‘enlightened’ asylum doctors who promoted moral treatment were also deeply invested in theories such as phrenology, which have resulted in untold social harm; some of these myths persist to this day and remain used to defend white supremacy.¹⁰ The entire system - theory, diagnosis, treatment - and its practitioners were steeped in misogyny, racism, ableism and eugenicism. The asylum system can only be romanticised when its context is removed.

Detail of lithograph by C. Ingrey: The human head, divided according to the system of phrenology, 1824 (Wellcome Collection)

In my research, I aim to work with first-person accounts of asylum life wherever possible. Some patients write of very positive experiences within the asylum environment and credit it for their recovery; others considered it a prison. Largely, and understandably, the experiences of the latter group of patients have been instrumental in constructing the ‘patient view’. My research engages with a side of asylum life which could be deemed a ‘positive’ aspect of the system - the power of reading to ‘soothe the soul’ or cheer us up is something which most book lovers would consider themselves familiar with, and it seems to have been a lifeline for some patients. Reading provided a link to their families, to their homes, to the wider world, as well as a purposeful activity, mode of distraction or joyful entertainment. It’s important to me that all experiences of patients, both positive and negative, are considered and valued (a point which the author of the tweet thread in question emphasises.) However: I don’t want my research to be used support a romantic view of asylums, or seen as an apologia for the institutional system. I’m grateful to the author of that tweet for making me think more carefully about the wider purpose of my research and to anticipate how it might be perceived and used.

Expanding and complicating our understanding of the history of mental health care - its failures and successes - is essential in forging better paths for the future. We can, and need, to do better than twenty-first-century mental healthcare; but we don’t need to go back in time to do so.

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Sources:

¹ Mind’s ‘We Still Need To Talk’ report on access to talking therapies, published in 2013, still remains relevant to issues of access today.

² Roy Porter’s ‘The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below’, Theory and Society (1985), pp. 175-198, is an essential text in foregrounding the fact that all medical encounters involve two parties - doctor and patient - and that the experience of the latter is often obscured in the history of medicine.

³ See Nicholas Wade et al, ‘Cox's chair: 'a moral and a medical mean in the treatment of maniacs', History of Psychiatry (2005), pp. 73-88, and Sheila Dickson, ‘Rotation therapy for maniacs, melancholics and idiots: theory, practice and perception in European medical and literary case histories’, History of Psychiatry (2018), pp. 22-37.

⁴ Excelsior, No. 36, January 1876, p. 4. (University of Dundee Archives Services, THB 29/12/1/1).

⁵ Case notes of William Smith (Lothian Health Services Archive, LHB 7/51/1, March 1840 - September 1842), p. 180.

⁶ Nineteenth annual report of the directors of the Dundee Royal Asylum for Lunatics (Dundee Advertiser Office, 1839), p. 29.

⁷ Mary de Young, Encyclopaedia of Asylum Therapeutics (McFarland, 2015).

⁸ Eighth Annual Report of the Inverness District Asylum, for the year ending May 1872 (Highland Archive Centre, Inverness, HHB/3/2/1/3), p. 14.

⁹ Second Annual Report of the General Board of Commissioners in Lunacy for Scotland (Thomas Constable, 1860), p. 198 (Highland Archive Centre, Iverness, HHB/3/19/1/1).

¹⁰ Tom Whyman’s article for The Outline, “People keep trying to bring back phrenology”, covers some of the current attempts to defend ‘race science’ and the phrenological logic of AI facial recognition.

Fact or fantasy?

In a previous post I’ve talked a little about the nineteenth-century asylum being something of an anomaly when it comes to the public perception of asylums. In culture and media, stereotypical elements of pre- and post-ninteenth-century treatment are merged to create the asylum’s defining characteristics, and we tend to think of lobotomies, electro-convulsive therapy, or chains. But some tweets I saw recently swung the pendulum to the other side, to a perspective I see far less often: romanticisation.*

The thread opened:

Continuing, the author added that patients weren’t locked up; they were encouraged to go outdoors, and engage in activities such as crafts and gardening; they were allowed to smoke, and to keep pets. The kind of asylum life described in the tweet thread is more in keeping with nineteenth-century asylums, rather than twentieth-century asylums which patients alive today would remember. But these aspects of the nineteenth-century asylum system are actually accurate - at least on a surface level - and they are things I remain surprised by as I undertake the research for this project.

Asylum managers were encouraged to equip the wards with means of entertainment - bagatelle boards were a regular feature, and were highly encouraged by the Commissioners in Lunacy, such as at the North Wales County Asylum in 1871.¹ Some asylums had billiards tables, though usually for the wealthier patients. Books and periodicals, as my research examines, were considered an essential feature of a well-run asylum. Patients were absolutely encouraged to spend time outside - institutions built in this period were often situated in the countryside, and asylum authorities spent considerable sums on landscaping, providing covered walks, even ornamental gardens. Throughout 1878, visiting Commissioners in Lunacy who visited the Inverness Asylum complained of the ‘bare’ appearance of the grounds, repeatedly instructing the managers to plant trees and shrubs in order to improve the gardens and to provide shelter to patients walking in rain or sunshine.² Claire Hickman’s work on the visual experience of asylum landscapes is particularly interesting, as she highlights the therapeutic potential of viewing the landscape alongside its use as a recreational space.³

A plan of Hanwell Asylum, from William Ellis’ A treatise on the nature, symptoms, causes, and treatment of insanity (London: Samuel Holdsworth, 1838); digitised by Wellcome Library, originals held by Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

A large part of the outdoor space in many asylums was made up of farmland, which many patients would work on. This became a key part of patients’ activities under the moral treatment regime. W. A. F. Browne wrote in his description of the ‘ideal’ asylum that ‘Gardens, grounds, farms, must be attached to each establishment, and must be cultivated by or under the direction of lunatics.’⁴ Vegetables, meat, milk, and even beer were produced in the asylum, and many became semi-self-sufficient. William Ellis, Superintendent at Hanwell Asylum in London, describes the agricultural activity of the asylum in his Treatise on the nature, symptoms, causes, and treatment of insanity in 1838. There is an ‘abundant’ supply of vegetables, meat from the pigs and milk from the cows, and the entirety of the bread and beer are produced in-house.⁵ In many asylums, tobacco was provided to patients who worked outdoors as a reward for industriousness. Patients at the Birmingham Asylum, originally housed in London asylums, complained to the Commissioners in 1897 that the amount of tobacco they were allowed in exchange for working was smaller than in London, and the Commissioners agree that this seems unfair.⁶ Beer was regularly given to patients as part of their diet, sometimes with extra given to those working outdoors. Birmingham Asylum set up a brewery in 1854, to supply patients and staff with their regular allowance.⁷

James Hadfield, Epitaph of my poor Jack, c. 1834 (© Bethlem Museum of the Mind)

The cheering influence of animals was well acknowledged, and this blog by Lesley Hoskins at Pet Histories explores the significance which relationships with animals could hold for patients. At the Glasgow Royal Asylum, gulls were introduced into the airing courts for the men;⁸ the Murthly Asylum in Perth kept goldfish;⁹ and Commissioners in Lunacy who visited asylums repeatedly suggested the addition of singing birds. The Crichton Royal Institution had a veritable zoo of their own, including squirrels, jackdaws, owls,¹⁰ and even tortoises.¹¹ James Hadfield, held at Bethlem for trying to assassinate King George III, had several pets: two dogs, three cats, several birds, and finally his squirrel, Jack. He apparently also preserved his pets as taxidermy specimens.¹²

“Pets occupy the leisure time of others. Another lady has succeeded in securing the confidence of a robin to such an extent as to induce it to feed from her hands in the grounds. To our usual stock we have to add a cargo of tortoises, recently received.”

— Annual Report of the Crichton Royal Institution & Southern Counties Asylum, Dumfries

Some patients of the period, envisioning the ‘ideal’ asylum, produced plans including features rather like those discussed above. James Tilly Matthews was a patient at Bethlem, institutionalised for his belief that he (and others) were being subjected to torture and mind control via a machine called the ‘Air Loom’, and his case became well known through John Haslam’s publication Illustrations of Madness. Matthews’ family and several doctors argued that he was sane, and he was eventually moved to a private asylum. However, whilst he was a patient at Bethlem, he produced detailed architectural plans to submit to the public competition held by the Governors in 1810 to find a design for the new building. The forty-six pages of research and drawings (which earned him an unofficial £30 prize) detailed some of his ideas for the asylum: that patients should be allowed to grow vegetables, help with chores, and look after other patients.

James Tilly Matthews’ plan for Bethlem, 1810 (© Bethlem Museum of the Mind)

Discussing Bethlem in her chapter ‘Bedlam: fact or fantasy’, Patricia Alleridge draws attention to the way that Bethlem was often used as a ‘reach-me-down historical cliche’, a recognisable image often used to ‘fill in odd gaps in the picture’. ‘The reading public’, she writes, ‘seems preconditioned to accept that if it is bad enough, it is bound to be true.’¹³ The realities of asylums are more complex than even many historians make clear - Alleridge contrasts the cases of Matthews and James Norris. Norris was the famous case of a man who had been chained for years, which condemned Bethlem as a place of brutality. Whilst Norris was chained in an undoubtedly appalling fashion (largely due to the asylum authorities’ inability to deal with his extreme violence), he was also encouraged to read, and had a pet cat. He was also a patient at the same time as Matthews, who was drawing, writing, and even publishing from Bethlem. Norris has garnered much attention, whilst Matthews is rarely discussed - largely because one fit the stereotype of Bedlam, and the other does not. Alleridge is correct when she writes that:

“A Bethlem that contains both [Norris and Matthews], together with all the gradations in between, is likely to make a more rewarding subject for study, and to tell us more about, for example, attitudes to the insane, than a Bethlem dedicated to brutality and inhumanity as its sole policy.”

— Patricia Alleridge

It is worth considering the often less-discussed aspects of asylums, and many historians have produced excellent work engaging further with wider aspects of the asylum system since Alleridge’s chapter was first published in 1985. In the wider public, however, the tendency to slip into a dichotomy remains. In the second part of this post, I’ll discuss some of the things this tweet thread glossed over, and how I see my own research fitting into the puzzle.

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* The author has since partially deleted this thread as a result of criticism for it, so I won’t link to their account or the tweets themselves. The tweet pictured here via screenshot no longer exists.

Sources:

¹ The Twenty Third Annual Report of the North Wales Counties Lunatic Asylum, Denbigh: for the year 1871 (William Hughes, 1872), p. 8.

² Commissioners in Lunacy Patients’ Book, 1873-1893 (Highland Archive Centre, Inverness, HHB/3/2/2/2).

³ Claire Hickman, ‘Cheerful prospects and tranquil restoration: the visual experience of landscape as part of the therapeutic regime of the British asylum, 1800-60’, History of Psychiatry (2009), pp. 425-441.

⁴ W. A. F. Browne, What asylums were, are, and ought to be, (Adam and Charles Black, 1837), p. 192.

⁵ William Ellis, A treatise on the nature, symptoms, causes, and treatment of insanity (Samuel Holdsworth, 1838), p. 304-5.

⁶ Report of the Visiting Committee of the Lunatic Asylum for the City and County of Bristol (J. W. Arrowsmith, 1898), p. 7 (Glenside Hospital Museum).

⁷ Report of the Committee of Visitors of the Lunatic Asylum for the Borough of Birmingham (Benjamin Hunt & Sons, 1855), [for the year 1854], p. 7.

⁸ Seventh Annual Report of the General Board of Commissioners in Lunacy for Scotland (Thomas Constable, 1865); visit to Glasgow Royal Asylum, 14th May 1864, p. 166 (Highland Archive Centre, Inverness, HHB/3/19/1/3).

⁹ Seventh Annual Report of the General Board of Commissioners in Lunacy for Scotland; visit to Murthly Asylum, Perth, 30th July 1864, p. 179 (HHB/3/19/1/3).

¹⁰ Thirty-Second Annual Report of the Crichton Royal Institution and Southern Counties’ Asylum for the year 1871, [p. 6].

¹¹ Thirty-First Annual Report of the Crichton Royal Institution and Southern Counties’ Asylum for the year 1870, p. 5.

¹² Flora Tristan, Promenades dans Londres (Flora Tristan’s London Journal), trans. by Dennis Palmer and Giselle Pincetl (George Prior, 1980), via Yale Center for British Art.

¹³ Patricia Alleridge, ‘Bedlam: fact or fantasy’, in Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, Volume II: Institutions and Society, ed. by W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd (Routledge, 2004) (first published 1985).

Network Analysis at DHSI

This June I was grateful to receive a scholarship to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, held at the University of Victoria in Canada. I first attended in 2017, whilst I was still studying for my Master’s degree in Book History and during the very early stages of researching asylum libraries. This time round, I had more of a handle on my project and its needs, so it was great to go back with a real purpose.

DHSI is a wide community - it brings together historians, librarians, literary scholars and academics from other disciplines - and it’s sometimes affectionately referred to as ‘summer camp for nerds’. It’s a great place to learn about the potential that Digital Humanities holds for research, and it also forms a hub for some very important discussions about approaching these methods in ways which are ethical and accessible, and acknowledge the many inequalities which currently exist. (The #RaceDH, #FemDH, and #QueerDH class hashtags on Twitter form an excellent resource).

Look at what @ZZcollier @lauragrayblair and the rest of the Party of Five made in #NetDH! I call it "Samuel Pepys: Business, or Pleasure?" Here Pepys spends his week being a gossip, a frequenter of jam sessions, a debtor, and a sexual predator #DHSI19 pic.twitter.com/K5REsvw7vw

— Julia King (@julialilinoe) June 13, 2019

I started off with Making Choices About Your Data, an excellent introductory class from Paige Morgan and Yvonne Lam. I spent most of my week working on data for the Asylums Map, tidying up and exploring some mapping software which might make it a little more stylish than good old Google Maps might be able to (watch this space). My second week was spent learning about Network Analysis with Jessica Otis, who introduced us to (some of) the mathematics behind networks, and how they might be useful for humanists. We got through the maths, we figured out how to structure data properly for network analysis, and we practiced collecting data and making networks using Samuel Pepys’ diary as a source. We chose a single week to work with and mapped Pepys’ social network. From Monday 23rd June to Monday 30th June 1662, Pepys did manage to get some work done - but he also spent a fair bit of time gossiping over drinks, getting boats around London, and having musical meet ups with his friends. He also encounters an unpleasantly wormy fish at dinner, and in true Pepys style, sexually harasses an employee. My classmate, Julia King, posted the network we made in class on Twitter (see left!) When I got back to my dorm room that evening, I couldn’t help but continue messing around with the data - looking at directionality and coding the nodes with Pepys’ social relation to the person. Gephi wasn’t having it that day and the colours are a little incorrect, but overall a really fun way of visualising social networks in a way that’s difficult to do in plain writing.

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Each edge’s colour represents a different kind of social interaction; each node’s colour represents a different social relationship Pepys holds to that person. Edge weight (and arrow size) represents the number of interactions between Pepys and that person; edge arrows also represent the directionality of the interaction (for example, whether someone is gossiped about or does the gossiping, owes or is owed money.)

As anyone who works on asylum history knows, there’s a lot of potential for collecting data. The nineteenth century loved statistics (though often in an extremely problematic way). Asylum doctors collected a wealth of information about their patients, filtered through their own preconceptions, and took great care in collating and presenting it. This can be very useful for those of us who want to study asylums, but sometimes those numbers need to be taken with a pinch of salt. However, it’s not just the numerical data which is interesting for Digital Humanities techniques. Social networks, like Pepys’ above, show that qualitative data can work well too.

As I’d worked on the Asylums Map data during the previous week, I’d been reminded of some patterns which I thought might be nice to produce networks of: one of these patterns was the connections between asylums and their architects. I took a small sample of English asylums to work with, and produced a small network showing the overlap between architects and asylums. It’s a pretty rough visualisation, but it does pick out some of the major players in nineteenth-century asylum architecture - for example, Albert Edward Gough and John Giles, who worked together, and George Thomas Hine. Others, such as William Lambie Moffat, would pop up as more data is added to the network - Moffat designed the Stafforshire County Asylum in England, but later designed several Scottish asylums including the asylum at Montrose.

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Pink nodes represent architects, green nodes represent asylums. Here, node size represents the ‘degree’ - i.e. how many connections the node has to others. I’d have liked to only apply this to the architects’ nodes.

My next plan is working on visualising the network of asylum libraries. Which periodicals, books and authors pop up most frequently in asylum libraries? As I’m working with my data, I can pick out a few that I think will be influential (Scottish asylums are stuffed full of Walter Scott) - but it’ll be interesting to run some analysis on the data too.

Many thanks to the DHSI organisers, our generous instructors, and the community who made it a productive couple of weeks!

Mapping public asylums

Detail of the Asylums Map, January 2019.

The number of public asylums in Britain and Ireland increased dramatically during the nineteenth century, owing in large part due to legislation which required counties to provide care for those deemed ‘pauper lunatics’, who could not afford to pay themselves. It quickly became clear that to study the development of library provision and the facilitation of reading in asylums of this era in the three-year time frame of the PhD, I’d need to use case studies. My central aim for developing my sample was to ensure that it was as representative as possible: covering not just England but also Ireland, Scotland and Wales, with an appropriate number of case studies per country, and as geographically diverse as possible.

With well over one hundred asylums to choose from, I began by mapping the rough locations of each asylum in Google Maps, to visualise the spread of asylums across Britain and Ireland and assist in choosing a varied set from across the countries. The number of asylums included in the study for each country roughly relates to the ratio of the number of public asylums in that country to the number of public asylums in the whole of the British Isles during the nineteenth century. My aim is that through these case studies, I will be able to provide a more complex picture of the ideologies at play and practices utilised in proto-bibliotherapy across the British Isles.

I also hope to develop the map further, to include private, charitable, and subscription institutions and to increase functionality, in order for it to be potentially useful to other researchers. If there is an asylum you’d like to see added to the map, please email l.e.g.blair@qmul.ac.uk!

Twenty asylums make up my anticipated case studies (these are marked with a star icon on the map):

• Wales: North Wales Counties Asylum, Denbigh; Joint Counties Asylum, Abergavenny

• Ireland: Londonderry District Lunatic Asylum; Belfast District Asylum; Limerick District Asylum; Richmond District Asylum, Dublin

• Scotland: Inverness District Asylum; Montrose Lunatic Asylum; Perth District Asylum; Glasgow Royal Asylum; Royal Edinburgh Asylum; Crichton Royal Institution, Dumfries

• England: Birmingham City Asylum; Bristol City and County Lunatic Asylum; Isle of Ely and Borough of Cambridge Asylum; Cornwall County Asylum; Essex County Asylum; Newcastle-upon-Tyne City Asylum; West Riding Asylum, Yorkshire; London County Asylum, Hanwell

Restorative reading

Back in 2016, a post which featured an image listing various reasons for admission to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia went viral on social media. Among the more usual suspects such as the death of family members, injuries sustained through war, and venereal disease - ‘novel reading’ was listed. These ‘reasons for admission’ are more accurately the situation which caused the mental illness with which patients were diagnosed, rather than the sole reason for their admission - but it shows how reading could be considered injurious to a person’s mental health to the point of requiring institutionalisation. Roy Porter gives other examples: a woman named Sarah Oakey was admitted to Gloucester Asylum with melancholia due to novel reading; John Daft supposedly drove his mind ‘morbid’ through reading too much Carlyle.¹ However, if reading the wrong things in the wrong way could have a powerful negative effect on the mind, it stands to reason that reading the right things in the right way might be able to produce positive results, too.

Men reading at Bethlem Hospital. The Hospital of Bethlem [Bedlam], St. George's Fields, Lambeth: the men's ward of the infirmary. Wood engraving by F. Vizetelly, 1860 (Wellcome Collection CC BY)

This was the thought that appealed to many asylum practitioners. Under moral treatment, patients were to be taught discipline, self-improvement, and given moral guidance by asylum staff. Books, with their powerful influence over the mind and morals of a reader, could therefore became an ideal addition to the alienist’s arsenal. Samuel Tuke, grandson of the founder of the York Retreat, encouraged reading (especially ‘useful knowledge’) as a form of amusement but specifies that ‘works of imagination’ and anything connected to a patient’s delusions would be ‘decidedly objectionable’.² Asylum keeper George Man Burrows likewise encouraged controlled reading. He believed that ‘nervous’ patients could induce hypochondria in themselves through reading, and blamed the periodical press’ reporting on coroners’ inquests for normalising suicide and describing successful methods.³ This is an issue the press remains criticised for; the Samaritans now provide guidelines for the reporting of suicides.

At Colney Hatch Asylum in 1857, Superintendent W. G. Marshall takes a more lenient view. Reading shouldn’t be simply an informative pursuit; rather, it is a primary means of entertainment, aiding in providing a ‘homely’ atmosphere and engendering patients’ positive feelings towards their treatment.⁴ It also had the additional benefit of calming patients down, presumably appreciated by the staff. The Royal Edinburgh Asylum’s David Skae sees reading as a socially and morally acceptable form of amusement, labelling it as a ‘constant source of intellectual improvement and recreation’.⁵

“[Books] solace many a discontented and dejected spirit, to place the deluded and misanthropic in connection with real events […] and even more directly to act the part of a remedy, for whenever the judgement can be brought to receive and derive interest from the contemplations of other and these healthy minds, it is less attentive to, and less actuated by its own suggestions.”

— W. A. F Browne

Anne Campbell, Bethlem 20 May 1841, ‘monomania with pride’, illustration by C. Gow (Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh, RCPE Artefacts DEP/MOR/4/95) - with thanks to Isla Macfarlane, whose work brought me to this illustration.

W. A. F. Browne, Superintendent at Crichton Royal Institution, writes at length about the activities of the library, and provides perhaps the most enthusiastic endorsement of the power of reading. Browne’s reports encapsulate the potential that some practitioners felt reading offered not just as a casual activity, but as part of a mode of treatment: it is ‘as expedient’, Browne writes, ‘to bestow care upon the Library as upon the Laboratory’. Lists of patients soothed by the Library occur regularly: the ‘silent, solitary being’ who consistently steals books from other patients to have enough to read; the man plagued by delusions of persecution ‘laughs merrily over Harry Lorrequer’; the ‘well-educated gentleman’ over-applying himself to the ‘severer studies’ of Greek and Hebrew persuaded to learn French instead; the suicidal patient ‘seduced into temporary forgetfulness of his woes’ through translating Guizot and Vertot; the ‘reveriest’ who was ‘tempted from his dream, and from his corner and carpet’ through the provision of his favourite literature.⁶

My PhD project seeks to examine the wider views of asylum practitioners from across Britain and Ireland; to establish how these views (along with external factors) were framed as medical directives for patients; how reading was facilitated for patients within the asylums; and how patients experienced print culture within the walls of their institutions.

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Sources:

¹ Roy Porter, ‘Reading is Bad for your Health’, Longman/History Today Lecture (1998) - available online.

² Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat (Isaac Pierce, 1813).

³ George Man Burrows, Commentaries on the causes, forms, symptoms, and treatment, moral and medical, of insanity (Thomas and George Underwood, 1828).

⁴ W. G. Marshall, ‘Medical Report of the Female Side’, Annual Report of Colney Hatch Asylum, 1857.

⁵ David Skae, ‘Physician’s Report’, Annual Report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, 1852.

⁶ W. A. F. Browne, ‘Physician’s Report’, Annual Report of Crichton Royal Institution, years 1839-1845.

Dangerous reading

Illustration showing incorrect reading posture, Nicolas Andry de Boisregard, L'orthopedie, 1741 (Wellcome Collection CC BY)

As long as reading has existed, there has been concern that it will do people harm. As literacy rates increased and the number of readers grew, they were warned about the terrible damage they might do to their posture, or their digestive systems - Robert Burton cautioned that students might be struck down by all kinds of bodily complaints due to their study.¹ Outbreaks of ‘overpressure’ were reported at schools throughout the nineteenth-century, and well-known asylum doctors were concerned with the phenomenon. Overseer of the York Retreat James Hack Tuke gave a speech relating to overpressure to the British Medical Association in 1879; James Crichton-Browne, former superintendent of the West Riding Asylum, produced a report on the subject in 1884 (though the Government later denied commissioning it). Women were seen by some as particularly at risk of physical consequences of their mental efforts. John Conolly, asylum doctor and pioneer of non-restraint in British asylums, suggested that over-study could cause damage to women’s reproductive organs and cause them to give birth to weak children.² However, though overpressure was traditionally associated with women and girls, most occurrences of overpressure took place in boys’ schools. Instead, class was a decisive factor; some took the existence of overpressure as an indication that the working classes were not naturally suited to schooling.³

“[...] hard students are commonly troubled with gouts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradiopepsia, bad eyes, stone and colic, crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases as come by overmuch sitting; they are most part lean, dry, ill-coloured, spend their fortunes, lose their wits, and many times their lives, and all through immoderate pains, and extraordinary studies”

— Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Much like the modern moral panics we’ve seen (Metal music indoctrinates teenagers into Satanism! Video games turn children into mass murderers!), the development of a mass reading public in the nineteenth century also stirred concern for the moral wellbeing of society. This anxiety provoked a flood of essays and articles about the ‘right kind’ of reading, and all the ways in which people were failing to engage in it. Wilkie Collins lamented that the ‘Unknown Public’, reading penny magazines rather than Literature, simply hadn’t been taught ‘the difference between a good book and a bad’.⁴ This was somewhat ironic, given Collins was the author of The Woman in White, one of the most famous pieces of sensation fiction; this genre was criticised by highbrow critics for what they considered a lack of true literary value.

It wasn’t just an issue of taste: the wrong things read the wrong way also posed a risk to the reader’s mind and spirit. Poet John Ferriar described the addictive ‘book-disease’ of upper class collectors in his poem ‘Bibliomania’ - perhaps this might have been the diagnosis of a nineteenth-century physician if they’d been faced with 1990’s Book Bandit, Stephen Blumberg. For those at the other end of the social classes, especially women, an obsession with reading wasn’t considered as acceptably eccentric. John Kellogg (of anti-masturbatory cereal fame) compared the ‘pernicious habit’ of novel-reading to the consumption of alcohol or opium.⁵ Reading excessively was not just an addiction, but a disease - Johann Gottfried Hoche described reading addiction as ‘a truly large evil as contagious as the yellow fever in Philadelphia’.⁶

There were also sexual undertones, as the ‘promiscuous’ circulation of texts was particularly damaging to the morality of women.⁷ One article entitled ‘Novel Reading: a cause of female depravity’, reprinted several times in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, suggested that books could make young women ‘slaves of vice(s)’ such as extra-marital sex and adultery.⁸ The overconsumption of printed material and the effects of such a habit were described in terms of ingestion, painting pictures of the gluttonous reader gobbling texts, unable to control their appetite.⁹ The problem of the voracious reader was one of primal urges, lack of self-control and discipline - exactly like the problem of the ‘lunatic’ under the moral theory of insanity.

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Sources:

¹ Alexander Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published 1621 - 1883 edition via Archive.org & the Library of Congress.

² Katharina Rowold, The Educated Woman: Minds, Bodies, and Women’s Higher Education in Britain, Germany, and Spain, 1865-1914 (Routledge, 2010).

³ J. Middleton, ‘The overpressure epidemic of 1884 and the culture of nineteenth-century schooling’, History of Education (2004).

⁴ Wilkie Collins, ‘The Unknown Public’, Household Words, 21 August 1858.

⁵ Kelly J. Mays, ‘The disease of reading and Victorian periodicals’, in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-century British publishing and reading practices, ed. by John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge University, 1995).

⁶ Stefan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (Zone Books/MIT, 2013).

⁷ [A. Innes Shand], ‘Contemporary Literature, VII: Readers’, Blackwoods Magazine (1879).

⁸ Anonymous, ‘Novel Reading: a cause of female depravity’, originally published in 1797 and reprinted in La Belle Assemblée (1817), available to read online (p. 172).

⁹ Janice Radway, ‘Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor’, Book Research Quarterly (1986).

Nineteenth-century print culture

A mechanized, shaft-driven printing-press. Wood engraving by H. Linton after E. Bourdelin, mid-1800s. (Wellcome Collection CC BY)

The nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of technological advancements, and for print culture this signalled some of the most important developments since Gutenberg brought together the elements required to create the printing press in around 1450. New iron printing presses were developed, giving greater stability in printing and allowing the introduction of steam power to vastly speed up production times. Processes for creating metal type, previously relying on hand labour, were automated. Paper could be made at greater quantities and far faster than before. After a £1000 reward was offered by The Times in 1854 for a cheap alternative to rags, esparto grass provided less expensive - though lower quality - paper throughout the nineteenth century (experiments using wood pulp, today’s most recognisable paper ingredient, were ongoing).¹

William Johnson Neale, The Captain’s Wife (Routledge Railway Library, 1862), digitised by Emory University Libraries.

It wasn’t just printing-related technology which impacted the trade: the railway system was instrumental in spreading printed material across Britain. Trains could heavy printing machines, metal type, or large amounts of paper. Metropolitan papers could now reach across the country in a timeframe where they were still relevant, and provincial presses could be set up to serve local areas.² As commuting increased, passengers also needed entertainment: this provided a greater demand for newspapers and magazines, and cheap entertaining books for longer journeys. W. H. Smiths became a household name through their railway news stands, beginning in Euston and spreading across the network - these carried cheaper titles often called ‘yellowbacks’, for their distinctive cover designs.

These factors led to greater production of books, newspapers, magazines and ephemera than ever before. Between 1800 and 1835, twenty-five thousand titles were published in Britain; between 1835 and 1862, this figure more than doubled, at 64,000. In 1801, the number of copies of stamped newspapers was 16 million, but by 1849 newspapers numbered at 78 million. Still, books weren’t cheap enough for everyone to be buying them for their own collections. The ‘triple decker’ novel of the early nineteenth century, published in three volumes, might cost between fifteen and eighteen shillings - over half the weekly wage of a printer, and nearly all of a teacher’s. Even the cheaper yellowbacks weren’t appealing to everyone as a purchase item.

Customers in Mr Mudie’s new hall, from the Illustrated London News, 29th December 1860, p. 619 (Wellcome Collection CC BY)

Readers across Britain were keen to find ways to access printed material, even if they didn’t have the money to purchase themselves. Whilst the term ‘literacy’ has some complicated connotations, the nineteenth century provided a growing literate audience - in part due to the improvement of education provision.³ It can be estimated that around two thirds of men and half of women were literate by 1840, giving an audience of roughly more than ten million.⁴ Even prior to the establishment of the first public library system, readers had options. Those with a little more cash to spare could join book clubs or subscription libraries. Circulating libraries like Mudie’s often satisfied more ‘popular’ tastes, and offered cheaper subscriptions for varying periods. Philanthropic efforts resulted in libraries for the benefit of the working classes, such as the Mechanics’ Institutes. However, working class readers also pooled their resources to purchase texts of their own choice, setting up reading rooms and libraries within their own communities.⁵

Whilst widespread literacy today is usually considered a benchmark of an equal and progressive society, historically the idea has proven contentious with those holding societal power. There was concern that giving the working classes access to printed material could educate them above their accepted station, or even inspire revolutionary action. However, utilitarian principles ultimately won out. Wider education could reduce the time that the working classes spent on ‘base’ pleasures and induct them into a more morally disciplined lifestyle, conducive to the wider success of industrial society. An early supporter of the public library system even described it as ‘the cheapest police that could be established’.⁶

But would reading cure the unruly working classes of their taste for the pub? The reality, as ever, was more complex. Middle class readers devoured ‘sensation’ fiction, gripped by crime and questionable romance; the working classes, whose tastes supposedly tended naturally toward the immoral, frequently sought out the ‘classic’ Literature-with-a-capital-L.⁷ Readers are notoriously rebellious, and for those who were worried about the public, no one (working class or not) ever seemed to be reading what they ought to be.

Reading for self-improvement might have unintended consequences on your other duties! ‘The rise, and fall, of literature’, T. L. Busby, 1826 (Wellcome Collection CC BY)

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Sources:

¹ For excellent overviews, see Rob Banham, ‘The Industrialisation of the Book’, in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Blackwell, 2007), and James Raven, ‘The industrial revolution of the book’, in The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, ed. by Leslie Howsam (Cambridge University, 2015).

² Simon Eliot, ‘From Few and Expensive to Many and Cheap: The British Book Market 1800-1900’, in A Companion to the History of the Book.

³ The British Library’s explanation of education in Victorian Britain gives a good summary of changes in the nineteenth century.

⁴ Lawrence Stone, ‘Literacy and Education in England, 1640-1900’, Past and Present, (1969).

⁵ Chris Baggs, ‘Radical reading? Working-class libraries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland Volume 3: 1850–2000 (Cambridge University, 2006).

⁶ Joseph Brotherton in the Parliamentary Debate on the Public Libraries Act, quoted in Alistair Black, Simon Pepper, and Kaye Bagshaw, Books, Buildings and Social Engineering: Early Public Libraries in Britain from Past to Present (Ashgate, 2009).

⁷ Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale University, 2001).

Other interesting resources:

• Tom Shillam’s post for the National Railway Museum about yellowbacks; ‘The Yellowback: Sensational Stories on the Railways’

• Matthew Taunton’s post, ‘Print Culture’, for the British Library

The 'exceptional' asylum?

Photograph of a corridor at the Crichton Royal Institution, taken by John Rutherford of Jardington some time in the 1890s. (Wellcome Library DHG1/8/1/4)

Due to the general impression of the historic asylum system, most of us don’t imagine an asylum as a place where people would have been allowed recreation and entertainment. We picture dim rooms, manacles, straitjackets. Most people I’ve spoken to about my research certainly wouldn’t think of large grounds, farms or sports facilities, or libraries. But, under the developing regime of ‘moral treatment’, the nineteenth century saw new approaches in the architecture and management of asylums, and the therapeutic approaches utilised within their walls. Of course, many problems still existed in institutional mental health care, and much was still to be learned about mental illness - but much of the nineteenth century remains somewhat an anomaly in the context of our conception of the history of the asylum.

W. A. F. Browne’s What asylums were, are, and ought to be, 1837 (Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University, digitised by the Hathi Trust)

The formation of ‘moral treatment’ is generally attributed to Phillipe Pinel, who in the late eighteenth century France revolutionised attitudes towards mental health treatment.¹ Until this point, patients were frequently treated as closer to animals than humans, responding better to punishment than to reason, and requiring control through physical restraint. Pinel promoted the idea that mental illness was often curable, and that doctors should take more time to understand each patient personally in order to provide effective treatment. Doctors such as Robert Gardiner Hill, John Conolly, and William Alexander Francis Browne were influenced by these ideas, and helped introduce them to to the medical establishment in Britain and Ireland. Among others, these doctors eventually prompted huge change in the asylum system.

Legislative reform in the British Isles during the early to mid nineteenth century paved the way for a new asylum system - one supported and inspected by the state. In England in 1808, the first County Asylums Act allowed counties to use local taxes to build asylums; the 1845 Act compelled them to do so.² Further Acts affecting the rest of the British Isles followed, resulting in widespread building programs. The new asylums were modelled on new ideas, and reformers embedded moral treatment into the buildings from the ground up, literally. The asylum environment was able to influence the behaviour of the patients within, and so architecture and design required careful consideration.³ In developing the Retreat at York, the Tuke family believed that replacing a dark, dingy, prison-like atmosphere with one which exuded familiarity and homeliness would put patients at ease and allow their minds to heal. As new asylums sprang up around the British Isles, ‘cheerfulness’ was a key aspect. Inspecting Commissioners of Lunacy criticised poorly lit and ventilated wards and praised decorative efforts such as wallpapers, prints and illustrations.

Men at the Crichton Royal Institution on the curling lake, 20th century. Curling was a regular activity at Crichton from the nineteenth century, often written about in the Superintendents’ reports. (Wellcome Library, DGH1/8/5)

A central element of the ‘moral treatment’ system was the provision of occupation for patients (as well as leisure time.) Michel Foucault characterised this element as essential to the ‘tethering of the spirit’ which he argued moral treatment aimed to enact: by forcing patients to engage in work with no ‘production value’, imposed on a strict timetable, those running the asylum would control patients’ liberty mentally, rather than physically as previously.⁴ However, things were more complex in practice. Patients were encouraged, but not forced, to work, and usually on more flexible timetables.⁵ In a report for The Lancet in 1877, J. M. Granville noted that work in asylums should not have the ‘measured haste of an industrial regime, nor the monotony of prison discipline.’⁶ In many asylums, such as at Hanwell Asylum in London, considerable effort was made to provide a large variety of options - from farm work and gardening to upholstery, shoemaking and even printing and bookbinding. Those who chose not to work, or were unable, did not have to. Leisure activities were available in most institutions, and encouraged. The Crichton Royal Institution had space for cricket and even curling; The Royal Edinburgh Asylum had its own collection of natural history specimens and held educational lectures.⁷ Crucially for my research, most asylums of this period also developed their own, often sizeable, libraries for patient use, as well as providing newspapers and periodicals.

Moral treatment is now largely dismissed as a ‘failure’, due to an intense focus of both asylum authorities of the time and their successors on the notion of ‘cure’. Its existence has largely disappeared from mainstream discussions of the asylum. However, the evidence within asylum archives can provide a more nuanced view, and a growing body of historical scholarship challenges some of the assumptions of the past. Whilst curative effects weren’t necessarily gained, and motivations were contested, many practitioners did aim to improve the lives of their patients humanely, and the day to day experiences of many patients were much more positive than they had been decades earlier.

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Sources:

¹ Dora B. Weiner, ‘Phillipe Pinel’s “Memoir on Madness” of December 11th, 1794: A Fundamental Text of Modern Psychiatry’, American Journal of Psychiatry (1992)

² Leonard D. Smith, Cure, Comfort and Safe Custody: Public Lunatic Asylums in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Leicester University Press, 1999)

³ Barry Edginton, ‘The Design of Moral Architecture at The York Retreat’, Journal of Design History (2003)

⁴ Michel Foucault, History of Madness, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (Routledge, 2006)

⁵ Pranjali Srivastava, ‘“Work as Therapy” in the Asylums of Colonial India, 1858-1910’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress (2014)

⁶ J. M. Granville, The Care and Cure of the Insane: Being the Reports of The Lancet Commission on Lunatic Asylums, 1875-6-7 (Hardewicke and Bogue, 1877)

⁷ Maureen Park and Robert Hamilton, ‘Moral treatment of the insane: Provisions for lifelong learning, cultural engagement, and creativity in nineteenth-century asylums’, Journal of Adult and Continuing Education (2010)

Cultural conceptions of the asylum

'Hogarth's The Rake's Progress; scene at Bedlam.' by T. Cook. (Wellcome Collection, CC BY)

Our cultural conception of the asylum paints it - often fairly - as a place of unjust confinement and institutional abuse. When we talk about something being in a state of chaos or irrationality, we might describe it as ‘Bedlam’ - a word derived directly from the name of London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital.¹ Long before the advent of ‘moral treatment’ in the late eighteenth century, and its widespread use in the nineteenth century, the asylum had already gained a reputation as either somewhere to be feared, or for the more fortunate, somewhere to visit on a day trip to gawp at ‘lunatics’.

Samuel Bruckshaw, One More Proof, written in 1774 following what he considered to be an unjust confinement in a private madhouse in Lancashire. (Stanford University Library, digitised by Google)

Historically, those deemed to have mental illnesses and intellectual disabilities might have been looked after in their communities, by family or charity - or, as the case was for many poorer people, not looked after at all, ending up on the street, in prison, or the workhouse. As the ‘trade in lunacy’ developed considerably through the eighteenth century, private madhouses began taking over responsibility for those deemed mentally ill.² These for-profit institutions tended to operate under policies of discretion, allowing families who could afford it to limit their caring responsibilities and avoid the stigma associated with having a relative with mental illness. However, the secrecy surrounding private madhouses could enable abuse, with patients treated inhumanely and kept in dire conditions.³ Wrongful confinement was at the forefront of public imagination and remained so throughout the nineteenth century, exemplified by public interest in cases such as Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s and captured in literature like Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White.⁴ Public institutions, growing in number throughout the century, also provided the public with plenty of anxiety; many faced criticism and public exposés of their treatment of patients and use of mechanical restraint.

Electroconvulsive Therapy Machine, (Science Museum, London. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.) Source: Wellcome Collection.

Twentieth century asylum-based treatments moved increasingly towards medicinal and surgical intervention. Physical treatments were used in asylums prior to this point, but methods became even more experimental as asylums became training centres for students and doctors aimed to provide cutting edge treatments.⁵ Techniques such as electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), insulin shock therapy, and the now infamous prefrontal lobotomy gained traction. However, many of these procedures are now widely recognised to be both inhumane and largely ineffectual in most cases. Over the course of the century, deinstitutionalisation grew in popularity as part of an antipsychiatry and disability rights movement, and asylums began to close. In the UK, this process began wholesale in the 1980s with Thatcher’s ‘Care in the Community’ - though whether this change has been successful in improving conditions for mentally ill people in Britain is contested.⁶

In the twenty-first century, with the asylum system largely long gone, the ghost of the institution retains its strong influence on culture - and the abuses of previous eras are certainly not forgotten. Mention the word ‘asylum’ and most people’s minds will jump to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or possibly DC’s Arkham Asylum. Wrongful confinement remains a common trope for the thriller and horror genres, such the committal of lesbian journalist Lana Winters to the terrifying Briarcliff Manor of American Horror Story. With many asylum buildings in Britain and Europe now simply abandoned, they have also become an object of fascination for ‘urban exploration’ photographers documenting the remnants of our institutional history, and paranormal enthusiasts convinced they’ll find apparitions of patients past. Most media now relies on three stereotypes of the asylum: the ‘olden days’ of Bedlam-like institutions and shackled patients; the drastic medical interventions of early twentieth-century; and the abandoned ruin, relic of a time gone by. But is this terrifying picture of the asylum a complete one?

Grant Morrison, Arkham Asylum: a serious house on serious earth, illustrated by Dave McKean (DC Comics, 2014)

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Sources:

¹ Jonathan Andrews, Asa Briggs, Roy Porter, Penny Tucker and Keir Waddington, The History of Bethlem (Hove: Psychology Press, 1997).

² William Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: A Study of Private Madhouses in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Routledge, 1972).

³ Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Penguin Books, 1990).

⁴ Rosina Bulwer Lytton, A Blighted Life (The London Publishing Office, 1880), full text available online at Wikisource.

⁵ The Mental Health History Timeline, developed by Andrew Roberts at Middlesex University, provides a very thorough outline of the history of mental health treatment from pre-history to the present day.

⁶ Robin Means, Sally Richards and Randall Smith, Community Care: Policy and Practice, 4th edition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Other interesting reading:

• Birkbeck’s excellent teaching resource, ‘Deviance, Disorder & the Self’, in particular the ‘Wrongful Confinement’ section

• Jade Shepherd’s blog, ‘Voices from Broadmoor’, including these posts focusing on wrongful confinement at the institution

• This post by Jennifer Crane for Warwick University’s Centre for the History of Medicine, on patients’ perceptions of their confinements

Why asylum libraries?

By design, the focus of research for a PhD is niche. As most PhD researchers will know, mentioning your topic to anyone outside academia will very often get you an ‘oh! That’s very… specific!’ Even talking to other academics, I’m always curious about how they ended up researching their subject. “But how did you get here?” is what I want to ask everyone I meet.

I come from a family fascinated by history. However, obviously, as a teenager I immediately resisted the idea of following in anyone’s footsteps. This, coupled with the fact that my history teacher routinely had me shaking in my seat with terror, led to me abandoning the subject the moment I had the chance. But in the intervening years, history wrapped itself around my life, working its way back - and now, here I am, doing a PhD in History. Starting my Master’s degree three years ago, I was convinced I’d end up studying the contemporary or the medieval, and nothing in between. I’ve ended up a Victorianist (albeit one who dedicatedly lurks the goings-on over at Medieval Twitter).

So, why asylum libraries? The blame can be traced to one William Chester Minor. Missionaries’ son, Yale graduate, US army surgeon, ‘lunatic’, killer and… one of the most significant contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary. Following a breakdown and a period of admission to the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington DC, Minor moved to London in 1871. Here he continued to suffer from delusions of persecution, which eventually led to his fatal shooting of George Merrett, a father of seven with no connection to Minor, who was simply on his way to work. Minor was found not guilty by reason of insanity and detained in Broadmoor.

Illustration of Broadmoor from an 1867 Illustrated London News (Wellcome Collection. CC BY)

I was fascinated to find out that during his near forty-year stay on Broadmoor’s Block 2, Minor was allowed a host of privileges. In particular, he was given the use of an additional room as a ‘day room’, where he amassed his own library. It was from this library that he came across James Murray’s 1879 appeal for volunteers to assist with the creation of what would become the first Oxford English Dictionary, and set about contributing.

Whilst Minor clearly benefited from his rank, class, and diagnostic category (he maintained a US Army pension, financial support from family, and was apparently not deemed dangerous), it was a surprise to me that a 19th-century patient in Broadmoor would be allowed such ‘luxuries’, particularly given the cultural conception of the Victorian asylum we are exposed to in contemporary society. I was hooked on the idea that reading might have been allowed and even encouraged in asylums of the period, and after a few months camped in the archives at the Wellcome Library and the Lothian Health Services Archive (with the invaluable help of the excellent and endlessly helpful archivists and librarians) I had thousands of words of primary material on asylum libraries and very clearly not enough room in my MA thesis.

So, here I am. Over the next three years I’m going to be looking at the records of asylums across the British Isles, researching how and why reading and writing were used in the asylum system of the nineteenth century. Hopefully (for everyone’s sake) it’ll be an interesting journey!