The Asylum in the Long Nineteenth Century: Volume I: Lunacy and Lunatic Asylums

This volume is concerned with the public and private lunatics asylums of England in the long nineteenth century, focusing on transcriptions of unusual and difficult-to-access primary source materials. The Introduction to the volume deals broadly with the state of the literature in the field and details the complex primary materials. Our sources include letters written by or about the ‘mad poor’ as they were circulated between homes, workhouses, private and public asylums and domestic dwellings; the administrative records of local bodies which decided who ended up in asylums and who did not, including a unique set of certificates formally committing people to asylums; family letters; private asylum inspection records; under-utilised pauper lunatic asylum patient records inclusive of admission and post-mortem documents; and, material from management that lifts the veil on everyday life within asylums. We have transcribed these sources faithful to the original, with all of their misspellings, orthographic variation and emendations, providing a unique resource for those interested in the histories of people with mental illnesses, institutional cultures, literacy and cultures of community care.

About the Author

Steven King is a modern British historian with primary research interests in the period from 1750 to the present. He is best known as an historian of welfare, writing on topics such as regional welfare regimes, the agency of poor people and welfare claimants, advocacy for the poor, and the particular experiences of the sick and disabled under the British welfare system from 1601.Professor King joined Nottingham Trent University in 2020. He has previously held posts at the University of Leicester, Oxford Brookes University, the University of Central Lancashire and the Institute of Historical Research.

Steven Taylor, University College Dublin, is a historian of health, medicine, and welfare with a focus on drinking culture and substance use amongst the Irish communities of London and New York. He has previously taught at the University of Kent (Lecturer in the History of Medicine) and University of Leicester (Teaching Fellow) where his modules have focused on medicine, health, disability, and welfare from the eighteenth century.