Books
Phase
Victorian Asylums and Private Madhouses
1837–1901
The nineteenth century saw major growth in public asylums, private madhouses and medical systems for classifying mental illness. These institutions could offer care, restraint or abandonment depending on class, diagnosis, family interest and the authority of doctors.
Women were especially vulnerable to confinement when sexuality, inheritance, disobedience or emotional distress were interpreted as madness. Fiction often uses the asylum to examine how legal and medical power could be used to silence inconvenient people.
Fingersmith makes the threat of institutional confinement central to its plot of fraud and identity exchange.
