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.

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 .