An Archaeology of Lunacy: Managing Madness in Early Nineteenth-Century Asylums, by Katherine Fennelly

Abstract

Reviewed by: An Archaeology of Lunacy: Managing Madness in Early Nineteenth-Century Asylums by Katherine Fennelly Andrew Scull (bio) An Archaeology of Lunacy: Managing Madness in Early Nineteenth-Century Asylums, by Katherine Fennelly; pp. xviii + 177. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, $120.00. Katherine Fennelly’s book, An Archaeology of Lunacy: Managing Madness in Early Nineteenth-Century Asylums, analyzes the Georgian and early Victorian asylum through a lens that incorporates architecture, archaeology, and history. Her primary focus is on asylums built in Ireland during the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century, but she also includes some detailed references to a handful of English asylums, most notably the West Riding Asylum in Wakefield, Yorkshire, and the Lincoln City Asylum in Lincolnshire, where she teaches. Fennelly discusses three main areas: the management of these institutions (including the lives and experiences of employees at lower levels of the asylum hierarchy); the administration of these establishments; and the relationship between the characteristics of the buildings that were constructed on the one hand, and the problems of how to control and oversee the movement of patients and staff in these still-novel institutions, on the other hand. Fennelly notes at the outset that the Irish district asylums were all constructed within a relatively tight time frame—in the 1820s and 1830s—and were built to similar, indeed virtually identical plans. This pattern was in sharp contrast to the situation in England, where many counties declined to build asylums before they were compelled to do so after 1845, and where those counties that elected to move forward with tax-supported asylums were left to their own devices when it came to asylum design. Unfortunately, Fennelly does not address the possible sources of this discrepancy—the English County Asylums Act of 1808 was discretionary because of fierce opposition to centralized control, while the semi-colonial situation in Ireland allowed Westminster to proceed as rapidly as it wished and impose a single, uniform pattern on Irish asylums. In recent decades, following the lead of the late Roy Porter, many historians of psychiatry have sought to recover the patient’s point of view. Fennelly extends the analysis to the asylum workforce, especially those on the lower end of the hierarchy. In principle, this is an admirable idea. As with the attempts to recover the experiences of patients, however, it produces disappointingly meager results, since only fragmentary materials illuminating these issues have survived. I found a great deal of this portion of the book repetitious, as when Fennelly acknowledges that “keepers and nurses . . . are rarely mentioned in the historical record in any detail” (47), or that “it is difficult to know what brought most of them to the asylum for employment” (49). The archaeological focus of Fennelly’s account involves close attention to asylum architecture, and to such of the physical contents of these buildings as has survived. We learn, for example, of modifications to the cutlery given to patients, designed to decrease the potential of knives and forks to be used as weapons. Some asylum buildings survive, though many have decayed or been demolished, while others have been modified beyond recognition into (for example) housing for the affluent, where deliberate attempts have been made to disguise the buildings’ stigmatized past. By necessity, therefore, Fennelly must rely on surviving architectural plans as a primary resource. I would have liked to see her devote more attention to the careers and backgrounds of the handful of architects who created these designs. That approach would have allowed for a more [End Page 436] informed discussion of how these new forms of moral architecture came into being, and the influences on their design. There are limits, too, to the inferences one can draw from these surviving records, and Fennelly is forced, more often than not, to speculate about how to translate what she can derive from two-dimensional plans into defensible conclusions about asylum life. She is honest about the speculative character of these inferences, but the repeated invocation of “may have beens” indicates just how difficult it is to move from material traces to experiential realities (87). Fennelly more than once alludes to the parallel construction of penitentiaries, and it is...