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