Reading meaning

'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'

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

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

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

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.

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)

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.

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)

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.

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

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*

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.