Viewing the asylum

Viewing the asylum takes readers into the Georgian and Regency asylum for the first time. Exploring how past cultures managed, navigated and responded to the display of mental illness, Jamieson sheds essential light on the politics and practices of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century asylum tourism and spectatorship. Viewing the asylum is the first book-length study to interrogate the cultural phenomenon of asylum tourism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. By the final decades of the 1700s, asylums had become mainstays of England’s philanthropic tourist circuit, being spaces where visitors could encounter human suffering and demonstrate their humanity. Structured around the key experiences of visitation – expectation, encounter and reflection – this book takes readers on a journey through the historical asylum.Steering readers across thresholds and along corridors, through galleries and into cells, the book introduces the reader to topographical asylum prints and ends with an innovative analysis of the asylum visitor book. Along the way, it contemplates the cocktail of emotions that asylums, staff, patients and objects stirred in tourists and argues that an assemblage of cultural material influenced and instructed the ways that tourists responded to the different spectacles on display.In uniting the history of psychiatry with debates on spectatorship and display, these chapters offer a fresh perspective on visual and material cultures of the asylum while highlighting the essential role that asylum patients played in shaping the tour. Exploring debates – both modern and historical – surrounding the practices and politics of looking at difference, the book characterises asylum tourism as a more enlightening, explorative and emotional cultural activity than previously acknowledged. In these ways, it breaks new ground in histories of mental illness and display, revealing how Georgian and Regency society staged, understood, exhibited and responded to spectacles of suffering. Viewing the asylum takes readers on a unique tour of the Georgian and Regency asylum. Moving through a series of physical spaces, from thresholds and corridors to galleries and cells, it provides innovative analysis on topographical asylum prints, alms-boxes, objects of restraint and asylum visitor books. Analysing how tourist impressions were shaped by staff, patients and an array of cultural material, it interrogates the different and sometimes conflicting ways that tourists looked at asylums and their patients within an era of pressurised philanthropy and sensibility. In exploring how past cultures managed and navigated the display of mental illness, Jamieson sheds essential light on the politics and practices of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century asylum tourism and spectatorship.