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.
