PAN Symposia 2023-24

Attempts to standardise the terms of psychological diagnosis used in asylum admissions procedures were a source of a series of debates on psychological classification amongst psychiatrists that commenced in 1864 and continued throughout the Victorian period. The debates were fuelled by quibbles over the definitions of terms in proposed diagnostic frameworks, but also broader differences on the most appropriate philosophical grounds for a clinical classification.

At the same time, psychiatrists engaged in these debates were interested in how the forms of insanity were represented in Victorian popular fiction. Reviews of works that depicted characters afflicted by forms of insanity regularly appeared in medical journals. Some, such as the Welsh writer Rhoda Broughton’s Betty's Visions and Mrs. Smith of Longmains and Charles Reade’s Hard Cash attracted scorn from alienists, with their depictions of insanity dismissed as sensationalist and ‘unmitigated trash’. Others, such as George Henry Burrow’s Lavengro were celebrated as accurately depicting forms of insanity encountered during admissions procedures.

This paper links Victorian debates on psychiatric classification to an assessment of psychiatrists’ responses to literary works to provide insights into practices of diagnosis in asylums. In bringing together literary representations of insanity and clinical debates on classification held in the archives of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, this paper explores how diagnosis was shaped by the complex relationships between Victorian popular culture and medicine.

One of the legacies of Romanticism is the persistent trope of the mad poet or artist - the embodiment of the supposed link between creativity and madness. Throughout the nineteenth century, poetry and insanity were both attributed to excessive feeling and imagination. With the medicalisation of madness, writing poetry itself was often seen as a symptom of varying degree of madness, as the feverish effusions of a distraught mind. As James Whitehead has recently shown in his Madness and the Romantic Poet: A Critical History, the image of the lone, eccentric visionary with a troubled but immensely creative mind was further developed by Victorian biographers of “mad poets” such as Shelley, Blake and Clare. Comparatively little attention has been paid, however, to the mad poets whose names did not make it to the literary cannon.

A significant amount of mental patients’ poetry has been preserved on the pages of asylum periodicals, which were issued from several British institutions from the 1840s onwards. Focusing on the lives and works of a few patient-contributors to such publications, I will reflect on the role of poetry in Victorian asylums and the ways in which the aspiring poets within their walls endorsed and/or subverted the Romantic myth of the mad poet. I will argue that reading the poetry in the asylum periodical has the potential to produce a more human and less romantic image of the mad poet.

Contrary to common perception, the nineteenth-century British asylum was a dynamic space in which patients and staff took part in various recreations and where the cult of domesticity ensured that surroundings became as homelike as possible. Art was one of the many activities on offer, encompassing sketching, drawing and painting. This paper will discuss the role of art as a tool for improving patient agency and for fostering diverse interpersonal relationships. In this context, this paper will also consider aspects of beauty; be it of the objects produced or the environment in which these creative practices took place.

Firstly, I will locate the emergence of art in treatises and parliamentary acts. Secondly, I will explore active patient engagement and artistic expression. Thirdly, this paper will reflect on the particular spaces which patient art embellished and where creative activities were facilitated, such as the recreation hall, wards and day rooms. This links into aspects of material culture and domesticity, as the interior design of asylum spaces became increasingly important. Ultimately this paper argues that the production of objects of art, as well as the physical space designated to their exhibition, was assigned therapeutic qualities, and that the multi-facetted notion of beauty, perhaps hard to envisage in these types of institution, was firmly embedded within.

This talk draws upon on an abandoned mouse from the Art Extraordinary collection to explore the varied geographies of mental ill-health and creativity in nineteenth-century asylum spaces. The Mouse, created by an unknown artist in the late-1800s, and salvaged from a rubbish bin of a closing down psychiatric hospital in Scotland in the 1970s by Art Extraordinary collector Joyce Laing, speaks to wider issues of abandonment, neglect and brokenness associated with mental ill-health, psychiatry and the arts. Through attending to the artwork’s production this talk will demonstrate the varied geographies of art making and asylum spaces that can be revealed, and their significance for considering such art pieces as navigational tools that can guide us into lost and discarded worlds of mental ill-health. In doing so, this talk aims to broaden our debates into psychiatry and the arts and to raise methodological questions for working with asylum remains and the fragments of creative existence.