At Home in the Institution

Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England

J. Hamlett

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137322395
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

At Home in the Institution examines space and material culture in asylums, lodging houses and schools in Victorian and Edwardian England, and explores the powerful influence of domesticity on all three institutional types.

1

Public Asylums

In 1889, George E., a patient described as ‘feeble minded’ in his late nineteenth-century notes, was transferred from Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum to Brookwood, Surrey’s second county lunatic asylum. He had been at Broadmoor for 24 years, presumably as a criminal patient, after setting fire to a barn and a rick in 1864.¹ By the 1880s, the asylum authorities did not consider him dangerous, and this was the second attempt to get him back into the county system. Unusually, E. left a record of his feelings about his transfer as he wrote a letter back to Dr Nicholson, the medical superintendent at Broadmoor. The letter conveys a powerful attachment. He professed warm feelings for Dr Nicholson, Dr Orange (the former superintendent) and the head attendant. It is clear that over his long stay he came to think of Broadmoor as a home. He compared the move to emigration to Australia or America, and described it as ‘being amongst strangers in a strange land’. He had been homesick, he said, but the new doctor at Brookwood had helped him with brandy and arrowroot. He also derived some consolation from the social set up at Brookwood: ‘I gets down to meals along plenty of company about 50 or more. The living is very good here.’ He appreciates the efforts that have been made for his entertainment: ‘fine gold fish here, canary birds, flower pot good plants in them’. And he was impressed by the interior, particularly the floor: ‘I thought the floor was wet when I come in it is done over with like oil cloth.’ Letters written by patients were usually read before they were sent. Writing inmates would have been very aware of this, but it is unlikely that E. was compelled to write back to Broadmoor. If we take the letter at face value, it shows that one patient was able to feel at home in the asylum, and how material provisions there helped him do this.

From 1845, the government made it compulsory for all counties and boroughs to construct and maintain lunatic asylums. While earlier legislation enabled local authorities to build, relatively few did so. In the years that followed, asylums were put up thick and fast. In 1850 there were 24 county and city asylums, housing 7,140 patients. By 1910 this had shot up to 91 institutions, which attempted to care for 97,580 inmates.² Some county asylums provided for private patients, but the majority were paupers, usually referred by Poor Law Guardians.³ These new institutional material worlds were built and managed by local authorities (local magistrates or quarter sessions before 1890, and by county or county borough councils after that).⁴ But the government also tried to control them centrally, through the Lunacy Commission that inspected and reported on all asylums, hospitals for the insane and licensed houses in England and Wales on a yearly basis.⁵ The treatment E. received was typical of the ideal in public asylums in the second half of the nineteenth century. The idea that the insane could be helped by ‘moral treatment’ – and participation in normal routines and behaviours – was popularised by Samuel Tuke at the Quaker asylum the Retreat in York in the late eighteenth century.⁶ Moral treatment involved an attempt to return to normal domestic routines – the asylum environment therefore had to provide spaces for work, for entertainment and for religious consolation. Asylums were built with workshops, entertainment rooms and chapels, as well as wards and dayrooms. The material environment could itself support the right kind of behaviour through domestic rituals – as John Conolly, the resident physician at Hanwell, put it:

he [the patient] is then led to the day-room, and offered good and well prepared food. The very plates, the knife and fork, and all the simple furniture of the table, are cleaner by far than what he has lately been accustomed to, or perhaps in his miserable struggling life he never knew before.⁷

This mode of treatment was gradually more widespread during the first part of the nineteenth century. The idea that patients should be kept in freedom from restraint also started to take hold among medical practitioners, and was pioneered at the Lincoln Asylum in the early 1830s.⁸

Historians have debated the meaning of these changes in treatment, and their relationship to domesticity. It has been argued that the creation of a domestic regime, modelled on the family, in the asylum, was a means of exerting control. Michel Foucault argues that institutional organisation could draw on the power structures of the family, and authorities might take on something of the parental role.⁹ For Andrew Scull, the entire project of asylum building was one of domestication, of ‘attempts to transform the company of the deranged into at least a facsimile of bourgeois family life’.¹⁰ The growing influence of domesticity on asylum decoration and the role that furnishings and goods were expected to play in routines associated with moral treatment are both well established.¹¹ Their disciplinary role has often been emphasised.¹² This chapter explores how and why domesticity became important to the creators of asylums, and the roles both material things and patients were supposed to perform to bring about a return to health. Moving away from an emphasis on discipline and control, instead I suggest that we need to pay attention to the way in which asylum authorities positioned their regimes in opposition to carceral institutions, and the emphasis they placed on the importance of the emotional role of the environment. Considering the material world reveals the restraints and constrictions on domesticity within the asylum when it was played out in everyday material practices.

This chapter explores the material life of four different asylums in the south east of England. Hanwell Asylum was set up by the Middlesex Justices, empowered by 1808 legislation. Built in 1831 it initially accommodated 300 patients, but expanded rapidly in the decades that followed.¹³ By 1840 there were almost 1,000 inmates.¹⁴ The asylum was built on a variation of the corridor plan – it was arranged in a square courtyard of two-storey buildings with pavilions at the centre and each end. Long wings on each side were added later.¹⁵ Viewed from a distance, it would have been imposing, and perhaps forbidding. In contrast, Brookwood, opened in 1867, was described by doctor and authority on lunacy Joseph Mortimer Granville as ‘a cheery hamlet of almshouses’.¹⁶ This was perhaps overstating it – the large asylum was built in a three-storied block with nearby laundry and workshop blocks linked by covered walkways.¹⁷ Further wards were added in 1872 and a new female annex, Florence House, was opened in 1888.¹⁸ In 1869 there were 244 male and 291 female patients,¹⁹ the total gradually expanding to just over 1,000 in the early 1880s.²⁰ Nonetheless, the exterior of the building, with its English vernacular style chimneys and gables, was more domestic looking than Hanwell. Shortly before this, in 1863, Broadmoor, England’s first purpose-built asylum expressly for criminal lunatics, had been opened near Crowthorne in Berkshire. The building consisted of four separate blocks for male patients and one for females, and was designed to house around 400 men and 100 women.²¹ Broadmoor inmates had been found not guilty due to insanity at trial (and were known as Her Majesty’s Pleasure patients), or had become insane in prison, or were declared so after further investigation.²² The HMP patients were expected to stay almost indefinitely and this made their position quite different from public asylum patients, who, ideally only remained in the institution for a short period. Finally, the chapter considers Long Grove Asylum, opened in 1907. Long Grove was one of the huge asylums created by the LCC on the periphery of the capital in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and formed part of the Epsom Cluster, a group of five large hospitals in Surrey. Unlike the other asylums in this chapter, it was massive from the first, housing 2,013 patients in its first year.²³ It also differed in that its plan, in part, followed the new villa system with eight detached villas as well as a main building for patients and administration.

From domesticity to medicalisation

By the early nineteenth century, authorities on lunacy stressed the need for comfort and cheerfulness in the asylum. Philanthropist and mental-health reformer Samuel Tuke argued in 1819 that four major objectives secured the ‘welfare and comfort’ of patients; one of these was that accommodation should be made as ‘cheerful’ as possible.²⁴ Comfort was a watchword for both W.A.F. Browne, in his What Asylums Were, Are and Ought to Be (1837) and William Ellis, Conolly’s predecessor at Hanwell.²⁵ It was to be secured through cleanliness and good order, and the provision of decent food, bedding, clothing, and occupation. But it did not mean elaborate décor. When Hanwell was built, the Committee of Visiting Justices specified that day rooms ‘should be fitted up with a cheerful and neat appearance’.²⁶ The planned building was quite austere, however. The interior was to be plain, but good quality. Most of the rooms were to be paved, internal walls twice limed in white, and the doors, shutters and frames painted oak colour.²⁷ There were 200 iron bedsteads, copied from the county House of Correction.²⁸ The 12 day rooms were to have tables made of dry elm or beech, with iron legs and seats set into the floor.²⁹ A sense of the asylum as domestic came not from homely furnishings, but from its alignment with the idea of the household family, in the early modern sense of a community living under one roof rather than held together by blood ties.³⁰ This is prevalent in the early nineteenth-century literature on how asylums should be constructed.³¹ This idea continued to influence Brookwood and even the massive Long Grove later in the century. It was often played out through the role of the superintendent’s wife, and by placing couples in charge of wards, or villas for patients.³²

From the 1830s and 1840s, there was a growing emphasis not just on basic decencies, but a material environment that resembled a middle-class home of the period. Some new or reformed facilities had paid attention to decoration earlier in the century, especially if they were keen to attract private patients.³³ Len Smith argues that the ethos of non-restraint and growing emphasis on everyday therapeutics led to more domestic things being brought into wards and galleries.³⁴ From the 1850s asylum decoration became increasingly domestic. This was due in part to the fact that more asylums were built. But it was also because a nationwide organisation was set up that tried to impose a common standard on them. As a part of the 1845 Lunacy Act, the Lunacy Commission was established to inspect asylums on a yearly basis. The Commissioners increasingly called for domestic furnishing, and stressed its importance in their early reports on Broadmoor, Brookwood and Hanwell in the late 1850s and 1860s. Some medical authorities spoke about this too, with Opert (1867) calling for day rooms with open fireplaces, curtains, hearthrugs, flower stands and aviaries.³⁵ The introduction of domestic decoration, furniture and ornaments to the asylum coincided with a period in which middle-class consumption of domestic goods was increasing. It was at this point that Victorian homes became more lavishly furnished, densely decorated and filled with things. This was partly brought about by rising middle-class incomes and the mass production of goods – but also, as Deborah Cohen suggests, was accompanied by a growing stress on the moral meaning of things, and their power to exert good.³⁶ The shift in home and asylum furnishing was simultaneous, perhaps indicating a wider sea change in attitudes towards the importance of the material world of the home, or at the very least a shared response to the new availability of these goods.

The interiors of Brookwood epitomised this new trend. Superintendent Thomas Naudald Brushfield was closely involved in choosing furniture.³⁷ He rejected iron beds on a standard model that a Birmingham manufacturer had supplied to other asylums.³⁸ The day rooms boasted 80 stained mahogany cane seated chairs, and ten stained mahogany smoking chairs, both French polish...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Public Asylums
• 2 Asylums for the Middle and Upper Classes
• 3 Schools for Boys
• 4 Schools for Girls
• 5 Common Lodging Houses
• 6 Model Lodging Houses
• Conclusion: At Home in the Institution
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index