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!