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.

Anna Jamieson is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham

Introduction

Part I: Expectation
1 Viewing virtually: The topographical asylum print
2 On the threshold: Spaces, stereotypes and staff

Part II: Encounter
3 Portraits of the insane: Viewing in the long gallery
4 ‘The matter of my discharge’: Patient agency on the asylum tour
5 Cells, chains and objects of restraint: Material cultures of the asylum

Part III: Reflection
6 Ritual and Recovery: The asylum visitor book

Conclusion: Asylum tourism and its afterlives