Detail from James Henry Pullen, State Barge, 1866–67 (plate 3). Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Eastern, nearly 700 feet long and over 100 feet wide, was designed to carry 4,000 passengers from London to Bombay without stopping. 1 Launched in 1859, the ship exemplified the Victorian fascination with technology. The Illustrated London News reminded readers that it was ‘nearly three times the length of the Great Western – the giant of 1838 having become the pigmy of 1857’. 2 A series of reportage photographs taken for the London Illustrated Times by Robert Howlett (1831–58) underscores its physical presence, workmen and top-hatted administrators appearing as Lilliputians beside the ship's looming hull (plate 1). Indeed, much of the language surrounding the Great Eastern gestured towards a world more imaginative than scientific. The Illustrated London News looked to Milton's Paradise Lost to describe the cavernous interiors of ‘that mighty vessel, “hugest of all that swim the ocean deep”’, the unacknowledged quotation also an oblique allusion to the ship's original, biblical name, SS Leviathan. 3 Such porous relationships between fact and fantasy have led Douglas R. Burgess Jr. to characterize the Victorian steamship, with reference to the spectacular magic lantern shows of the period, as ‘a phantasmagoria of science and showmanship’, a term that also inevitably also evokes the steamship's status as emblem of nineteenth-century capitalistic culture. 4 One of Brunel's most fascinated contemporary observers was a young man named James Henry Pullen (1835–1916). Like many of his coevals, Pullen ‘worship[ed] mechanical and scientific knowledge’. 5 However, unlike most of them, he did so from behind the walls of the Royal Earlswood Asylum for Idiots. Diagnosed as an ‘idiot savant’, and confined for nearly seventy years, by 1876 Pullen had used the technical information widely circulated to the Victorian public to construct a scale reproduction of the Great Eastern, ‘10 feet long, 18⅝ inches wide and 13⅝ inches in depth [… containing] 5,585 copper rivets [… and] complete to the most minute detail’. 6 To his Earlswood doctors, the Great Eastern exemplified Pullen's ‘special faculties’, both creation and maker being meticulously measured and analysed, the latter being ‘5ft 7¼ inches […] 9 stone 11 pounds, cranial circumference 21⅝ inches’. 7 In so far as Pullen is remembered today, it is for this Great Eastern, which was exhibited at the 1883 Fisheries Exhibition in South Kensington, and on open days at Earlswood, where its maker would, in one contemporary account, ‘cheerily and volubly explai[n it] to visitors’. 8 However, the Great Eastern was only one of a series of art objects Pullen created during his institutionalization. He also designed and executed a group of smaller ‘fantasy’ boats, explicitly combining science and imagination in a manner similar to Burgess's ‘phantasmagoria’ steamship, but also evoking the shifting mental states often invoked in discussions of the magic lantern show to which the term literally refers. 9 Three are preserved at the Langdon Down Museum of Learning Disability, along with several drawings. The most significant of the latter is Pullen's Pictorial Autobiography (plate 2), a sequence of forty-one visual panels recalling Pullen's life and work up to 1878, the probable date of its creation. Though it is drawn, rather than written, the Pictorial Autobiography is at once a ‘patient record’ of the kind Roy Porter described in his Social History of Madness, and an almost unique example of an autobiographical narrative from someone identified specifically not as a lunatic, but as an idiot. 10 Many of Pullen's other creations, though significantly excepting the Pictorial Autobiography, were photographed and discussed in their time, along with the Great Eastern, but they, like Pullen himself, have been generally absent both from histories of nineteenth-century art generally, and from specific discussions about historical artists with disabilities. 11 Perhaps more surprisingly, Pullen has also been largely omitted from the discourse surrounding ‘outsider art’, a term often used to refer to untrained and/or institutionalized artists, which has been gathering momentum since its first coinage by Roger Cardinal in 1972. 12 This may reflect Pullen's historical position. Originally simply a translation of ‘art brut’, the nomenclature used by the French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901–85) to refer to his own collection of work ‘emanating from obscure personalities, maniacs […] animated by fantasy, even delirium, and strangers to the beaten track of catalogued art’, the designation ‘outsider art’ is usually applied to artists contemporary, or roughly contemporary, with Dubuffet himself, and with the term's other champions, the surrealists. 13 The tenor of much of Pullen's work is evoked by Dubuffet's emphasis on ‘fantasy’, and in general those nineteenth-century artists who have been addressed by historians of ‘outsider art’ have, indeed, tended to be those who were formally institutionalized. However, the focus has usually been on those considered lunatics, in line with the tendency of ‘art brut’ adherents to ‘magnif[y] the powers of the unconscious, sanctifying dementia and thus the works of the mentally ill’. 14 Examples include Jean Mar (1831–1911) and Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930), both collected by Dubuffet; or, in nineteenth-century Britain, Richard Dadd (1817–86) and Louis Wain (1860–1939). 15 By contrast, Pullen's critical history is comparable to that of the Swiss artist Gottfried Mind (1768–1814), also dubbed a ‘savant’, and also the subject of nineteenth-century interest (in his case, an 1887 biography), but from the twentieth century onwards primarily a subject for psychiatrists. 16 This may reflect a perception within the field of ‘outsider art’ studies that (as Lyle Rexer put it) ‘so-called savants’ are mere ‘rendering machines’ whose work ‘cannot be regarded as purposeful, symbolic communication’. 17 Implicit in Rexer's characterization is the idea that the artist's natural state is that of the expressive ‘maniac’, a criterion Pullen (and Mind) cannot fulfil. This essay seeks to redress Pullen's absence from art-historical discussion. Drawing on contemporary sources, many not previously examined, it addresses Pullen's work, particularly his fantastical productions, and places them in their nineteenth-century social, cultural and artistic context. This includes a brief introduction to Earlswood and the nineteenth-century idiocy movement from which it arose. However, I also juxtapose contemporary institutional and journalistic reports of Pullen and his work with his own account as represented in his Pictorial Autobiography. As I have suggested, the story that emerges has obvious affinities with modern concepts and diagnoses such as autism, savant syndrome, and intellectual or learning disability. 18 However, it is not my intention to enter into retrospective diagnosis. 19 Moreover, as Patrick McDonagh has argued, ‘idiocy’, along with looser conceptions of ‘folly’, ‘innocence’ and ‘imbecility’, and the modern language of disability, cannot be considered consistent names for a ‘trans-historically stable subject’; they rather ‘designated different manifestations of a set of related ideas, which are then embodied in specific individuals’. 20 Although terms such as ‘idiocy’ are (rightfully) uncomfortable to modern ears, I therefore leave them here as found. While considering Pullen's artworks within the inevitable framework of the artist as Victorian medicalized subject, I will address how the Victorian idiot asylum was implicated in such terms, the ideas behind them, and their manifestation through a particular kind of diagnostic knowledge. However, I also seek to move beyond conceptions of Pullen as an emblematic figure in nineteenth-century asylum history. By placing him in the context of contemporary developments in science, technology and periodical culture, I show how, far from being excluded from the world beyond the asylum walls, he engaged with popular culture as enthusiastically as any of his contemporaries. At the same time, beyond asking what his Victorian context can tell us about Pullen, I also want to ask what Pullen, with his distinctive diagnostic status, can tell us about his Victorian context: both the broader visual and scientific culture that Pullen himself consumed, and commented upon; and its particular perceptions of the ‘outsider’, and the outsider as artist. The Royal Earlswood Asylum in Redhill, Surrey, formally opened in 1848, one of the earliest, and largest, examples of the nineteenth-century idiot asylum. 21 In one sense, this was a natural extension of the contemporary establishment of other kinds of disciplinary institution, such as prisons and psychiatric asylums. However, idiot asylums were the specific result of the 1845 National Lunacy Act, which distinguished for the first time between ‘lunatics, idiots, and persons of unsound mind’. 22 Responding to this diagnostic division, psychiatrists and reformers increasingly became convinced that ‘the idiot requires a special treatment, and one totally distinct from the lunatic, being in fact absolutely injured by his contact with the insane’. 23 Leading figures in the field such as the Swiss doctor Dr Johann Guggenbuehl (1816–63), the Scottish social reformer Andrew Reed (1787–1862), and the French psychiatrist Édouard Séguin (1812–80), argued that (as one philanthropist put it), ‘the idiot […] had powers of mind, but that these powers were veiled, were locked up, and the object was to find the key to develop that power’. 24 Earlswood, and institutions like it, therefore focused on occupational, and potentially commercially useful, tasks, such as ‘basket making, shoe making, netting, and bonnet making’, a kind of proto-occupational therapy that emphasized the benefits of order and industry over minds perceived as chaotic. 25 That these minds were primarily drawn from among the working classes reflects the idiot asylum's declaredly charitable aims, but also highlights its paternalism, the desire for control that animated it, as well as, incidentally, the point that effective treatment of the idiot was linked from the beginning to increased national economic productivity. The Pictorial Autobiography marks the beginning of Pullen's contact with the asylum system through his arrival at Essex Hall, a school for idiot children in Colchester, which occurs in the sixth panel (‘1847-HALL’). 26 This is followed by his transfer to Earlswood in the ninth, dated 1850. The dates, painstakingly noted by Pullen himself, were significant for his doctors, since his life and career thereby overlapped almost exactly with the development of the asylum movement itself. His case was transferred to Earlswood the same year that institution opened, though the date ‘1850’ in the relevant panel suggests he did not physically move until three years later, marking a disjuncture between the administrative world underpinning the system, and the patient's experience of it. However, the Autobiography begins before this, focusing on Pullen's childhood and the modest family in Islington into which he was born in 1835. The first panel, dated to 1841–42, shows the then-six-year-old artist rigging a ship in his parents' front room. His mother, who sits next to him, does not interact with her son, but the coincidence of their activity – she knitting, he threading his boat – indicates a delicate connection between them. His father, who appears in the second panel, is likewise shown at a distance, but faces his son across a pond as they sail a boat together. The sense thereby conveyed of Pullen existing at a remove from those around him is underlined in the third panel, which shows him looking over a wall at a passer-by carrying a boat. The world of the Pictorial Autobiography is punctuated with such walls, fences and barriers, which physically mark him off from others. Despite Earlswood's proud insistence on outdoor exercise, once he arrives there, Pullen always shows himself indoors. Just as boat-making inaugurates the Pictorial Autobiography, so Pullen's particular carpentry skills singled him out within the asylum from the beginning. As a result, references to him, primarily anonymous, abound in early discussions of Victorian idiocy. In 1864, an article by Andrew Halliday for All the Year Round described how though ‘[h]e was, I was assured, a true idiot […] he could draw admirably, and had made this wonderful ship’. 27 William Millard's history of Essex Hall, published the same year, recalled how, though initially ‘unsociable, passionate, and self-willed’, Pullen had ‘by judicious training’ become ‘nicely behaved and sweetly confiding’, a formulation that emphasizes the disciplinary force of an institution that sought, like Foucault's asylum, to confine madness, or idiocy, ‘entirely in the hands of the pedagogy of good sense, of truth, and of morality’. 28 Pullen appeared again in an anonymous report published in the Edinburgh Review the following year, described similarly as ‘passionate in temper’ but ‘conscientious, gentle, and generally well behaved’. 29 Pullen's presence in these accounts indicates that their writers all considered him a useful example of the new diagnostic category ‘idiot’. However, there was, and remains, little consensus about what his condition was; the case notes that survive from Earlswood reveal contradictions and confusions, undoubtedly compounded by the sporadic nature of official record-keeping in the period of Pullen's early residence. 30At his first admission, doctors diagnosed him as congenitally ‘Idiotic’, but the unnamed writer added under the heading ‘Intellect – Capacity?’: ‘Can draw & seems intelligent but very deaf’. 31 Pullen's deafness was frequently mentioned, and it was an impairment apparently shared with his younger brother William Arthur Pullen (1855–93), also a sporadic resident at Earlswood. 32 Yet, while William Arthur seems to have learnt sign language, James Henry Pullen, described in his teens as ‘wild, sullen, and with scarcely any speech’, was still characterized in the 1890s, in his sixties, as ‘almost inarticulate, since every effort to teach him to frame a continuous sentence has failed’. 33 These barriers to communication, which the Pictorial Autobiography apparently seeks to transcend, might explain why the first sustained voice in the case notes sounds so uncertain of itself. In a discursive entry on Pullen, written nearly a decade after his admission, the doctor notes: ‘[…] it appears that he possessed from an early period considerable intelligence. (Is he an idiot?)’. 34 Alice Terry, a writer for the American magazine The Silent Worker, ‘for the deaf, by the deaf’, later expressed a similar scepticism about his ‘idiocy’ and, writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, the psychiatrist Alfred Tredgold suggested he simply had the language impairment aphasia. 35 The format of Pullen's Pictorial Autobiography demonstrates its maker's confidence in the image over the written word. Moreover, comparison with the official record suggests that, while contemporaries emphasized Pullen's mental difficulties in ironic contrast to the precision of his creations, Pullen himself saw his career as a story of triumph and achievement. Despite its sense of physical remove, the Pictorial Autobiography gives only one indication of mental struggle, in the panel for 1851, which shows the artist, described by doctors as ‘anxious to learn’, weeping over some schoolwork. 36 The adult comforting him is gratefully presented with a ship (‘No 2’) a year later. Even this narrative is implicitly celebratory, sharing its maker's difficulties only to commemorate his technical achievements. Such commemoration in fact appears to be the main aim of the Autobiography, whose narrative unfolds around a photograph of Pullen himself, pasted onto the page beside a drawing of the cradle on which he constructed his magnum opus. This is proudly captioned: ‘1870. GREAT EASTERN. 1871. 1872. J. H. PULLEN’. The origins of the photograph are obscure, but it is typical of the pictures of Pullen, and of Earlswood life, created and circulated by hospital staff and journalists from the 1860s onwards (another, also showing Pullen with a boat, is in the Wellcome Library). Whatever the circumstances of its original creation, Pullen has physically altered it for the Autobiography, by cutting it down so that he himself is the main focus. It reappeared, uncropped, in Pearson's Magazine for 1898, where the Great Eastern can be seen in full. Particularly in its cropped form, which gives more prominence to Pullen himself, elements of the photograph recall the 1857 picture of Brunel in front of the launching chains of the Great Eastern, taken by Howlett at the same period he was recording Brunel's ship for the Illustrated Times. Both photographs juxtapose man with maritime construction. Like Brunel, Pullen is shown in formal dress – in his case, the admiral's uniform he was given by the asylum authorities in the 1860s – and surrounded by the implements of his trade, notably an elaborately coiled rope. 37 The visual similarities may in themselves be the reason for the photograph's inclusion in the Autobiography, but its juxtaposition with the drawn elements, together with Pullen's decision to render them entirely in black and white, also makes the work visually reminiscent of contemporary illustrated journalism, such as the Illustrated Times, and imparts to this pictorial record a similar air of authority to that which inheres in the printed, published word. It was around this time that Pullen began to be adduced by doctors as an exemplar of a new diagnostic sub-category again. The term ‘idiot savant’ was first used in 1869 by Édouard Séguin to describe the ‘useless protrusion of a single faculty accompanied by a woeful general incompetence’. 38 It was taken up in England, and applied to Pullen, by Earlswood's Medical Superintendent and admirer of Séguin, John Langdon Down (1828–96), who, in 1866, had also been the first to identify what is now called ‘Down's Syndrome’. 39 In his 1887 Lettsomian Lecture to the Medical Society of London, Langdon Down described studying children at Earlswood who ‘while feeble-minded, exhibit special faculties which are capable of being cultivated to a very great extent’. Pullen, a youth ‘who could build exquisite model ships […] who yet could not understand a sentence’ was the example that he gave. 40 Apparently having disregarded the question ‘is he an idiot?’, Pullen's case notes accordingly describe him as an ‘[o]ne of our “savants” (Sequin) [sic]’ in September 1874. 41 In 1882, he is, again, ‘A good case of “Idiot savant”’. The sequence of dates suggests that Langdon Down's 1887 lecture merely made public a designation that had been of long standing. Indeed, the allusion to ‘Sequin’/Séguin in the first reference suggests that Pullen may have been first identified as a ‘savant’ around the time of the term's original coinage in 1869. This was also the year that Langdon Down left Earlswood to establish his own private idiot asylum, Normansfield, and in fact while Pullen's doctors were presumably following Langdon Down's original assessment of the patient's case, from the 1870s onwards the term as used has the air of a convenient shorthand to indicate Pullen's distinctiveness. As such it reflects a broader ambiguity about his status within the asylum, since, from 1855, he was no longer technically a patient, but a carpenter. 42 This change is reflected in the Pictorial Autobiography, which from this point on focuses almost entirely on his creations, occluding his life almost entirely. Though he was now an employee, working for three shillings a week, doctors continued to record the progress of his ‘case’, and to regard Pullen as existing under their authority. These official institutional records are the most detailed counterpart to the Autobiography in providing the facts about Pullen's life. However, as he became better known, Pullen increasingly became an attraction, and source of journalistic material, in himself: long-form articles were published on him by Annesley Kenealy in 1898, and Arthur Birnage in 1900. These writers eschewed the medical diagnosis ‘savant’ in favour of more fanciful formulations. To Kenealy, writing for the Harmsworth Magazine, he was ‘A Mad Genius’, while Birnage's article in Pearson's Magazine describes him as ‘the Genius of Earlswood Asylum’; satellite phrases, including ‘the idiot shipbuilder’ and the ‘mad inventor’ were routinely advanced by local journalists reporting on Earlswood. 43 These epithets, pointedly removed from the official language of the asylum, seem designed to resonate with the post-Romantic categorization of the artist-visionary, as a ‘melancholic outsider […] isolated and suffering in his genius’, and they incidentally prefigure Dubuffet's emphasis on social alienation as ‘the pole where all mental creations of the highest order’ arise. 44 Indeed, in describing him working ‘[i]n lonely and Frankenstein spirit’, Kenealy directly invoked a key text in this artistic history. 45 However, though these writers attempt to avoid the explicit medical diagnosis, a combination of isolation and brilliance is already implied by the ‘savant’ label as used by Pullen's doctors. As Dubuffet's description suggests, this idea would later become characteristic of ‘outsider art’; whereas the artist-visionary is imagined to be so creative as to border on mental incapacity, the ‘outsider artist’ attains to visionary status by virtue of their societal position ‘outside’ the mainstream. 46 Yet, as I have noted, a notable feature of the formal ‘outsider art’ discourse from the twentieth century onwards is that it largely excludes ‘savants’ from this reading: Roger Cardinal described ‘autistic artists’, in contrast to the ‘artist-visionary’, as working in a ‘quieter, less bombastic idiom arising in conditions of psychological and emotional withdrawal’. 47 It is striking that this distinction does not seem to have occurred to Pullen's nineteenth-century commentators, who used catch-all terms like ‘mad’, which encourage a direct comparison with the ‘romantic visionary’ trope, with little regard for the specific facts of their subject's case. Such terms were clearly a convenient shorthand signalling Pullen's ‘outsider’ status, his primary claim to artist-visionary label. However, as I will elaborate in the next section of this essay, both terms and trope were clearly useful to those of his contemporaries who used it. While Pullen himself saw his works as a source of creative pride, his contemporaries viewed them as illustrations of the power of ‘training’ in treatment. Thus, just as his condition seems to have exemplified ‘idiocy’ as a diagnosis, Pullen's boats were co-opted early on as an advertisement for effective treatment. A ‘fine model of a full-rigged ship’ completed before his fifteenth birthday was displayed alongside other ‘articles of art and manufacture’ from Essex Hall at a fundraising meeting in March 1856. 48 Five years later, when reporting on the achievements of Earlswood Asylum and its ‘order, discipline and cleanliness’, the London Evening Standard noted of Pullen's ‘beautiful model of a frigate’ that its author was ‘a remarkable instance of what may be effected by the kind treatment of the forlorn idiot’. 49 Pullen was also a regular exhibitor at Earlswood's annual fundraising fêtes, where his Great Eastern was often advertised in advance as a featured attraction. 50 Most publicly of all, in April 1867, Langdon Down sent a group of works by Pullen, including one of his fantasy boats, to the Exposition Universelle in Paris. 51 Underlining their illustrative, rather than aesthetic, importance, they were categorized under the artist's residence, rather than his name, the catalogue entry simply giving ‘The National Asylum for Idiots, Earlswood, Red Hill, Surrey’, and listing ‘Drawings, boots and shoes, tailoring, needlework, models, basket-work, &c’. 52 The category ‘Models’ included work by other Earlswood residents, and Pullen's model of some Earlswood buildings, a man-of-war, and his fantastical State Barge (plate 3). 53 They were seen here as part of the Exposition's overarching aim (as Arthur Chandler put it) to ‘classify and organize every branch of human activity, and to invest that activity with moral purpose’. 54 The publicity potential of Pullen's imaginative work probably partly explains the comparative freedom he was allowed to pursue his own projects within the official parameters of his role as carpenter. Indeed, their approval of such work was proven in 1869 when doctors installed a glass case for his ships in Earlswood's entrance hall. 55 Yet it is equally clear that Pullen did not always accommodate himself neatly to his doctors' ambitions, and they record his activities with a combination of fascination and frustration. In May 1869 he was denied a holiday from the Asylum and reportedly ‘snatched various tools & other articles in his workshop’ in a fit of pique, with the result that he ‘caught his leg in a rope, & falling fractured the tibia’. 56 He was ‘sullen’ in September 1878, and ‘seem[ed] to be carving ivory for his own profit instead of working for the Asylum’, a reference to his series of small ivory brooches and tiepins, two examples of which are still in the collection of the Langdon Down Museum. 57 According to one Redhill resident, Pullen would regularly work through a circuit of the pubs near the Hospital, selling these carvings to locals for anything between 2 s 6d and 3 s 6d, thereby easily matching his weekly asylum salary. 58 His doctors record his apparent refusal to prioritize asylum work repeatedly in the 1870s and 1880s: he was ‘very self-willed, & us[ing] much of his time to his own interests’ in October 1881, and in July 1885 the doctor wrote that he ‘does what he likes & goes where he likes: does not do much work for the Institution’. 59 He was ‘very hard to keep under control as he has always been allowed full liberty to do as he pleases’ in October 1887, but this was a full decade after his doctor had first noted, in 1877, that he ‘[h]a[d] too much his own way, & if not let have it now he would be very difficult to manage’. 60 One of the special privileges Pullen was accorded was the ‘workshop fitted up for his especial use’ that was visited, and commented upon with approval, by the Surrey Mirror in 1895. 61 It was clearly older than this, since the case notes for 1884 report that the Great Eastern had been ‘on show in his room during the fête just over’, indicating that it was already part of the public route at open days. 62 Pullen's own record of it, in the Pictorial Autobiography, suggests it had been established in some form at least as early as 1877. His depiction can be compared with a photograph of the space reproduced in Kenealy's article of 1898 (plate 4). Both images show the walls covered with Pullen's drawings, many in self-made wooden frames; framed photographs of Earlswood events are also visible in the 1898 image. The personal, indeed autobiographical, nature of the display, echoing the crowded visual effect of the Pictorial Autobiography itself, also dominated by Pullen's productions, justifies Kenealy's characterization of it as ‘a museum of wonders reflecting the artistic spirit of the occupant’. 63 Describing Pullen himself as ‘exceedingly happy and contented with his lot’, Arthur Birnage emphasized its practical advantages, considering that ‘[m]any a carpenter would envy the workshop at Earlswood which is specially set apart [for him]’. 64 Absent from the Autobiography, but described by both Birnage and Kenealy, was a contraption designed to promote optimal light, described by Birnage as a special bench (‘another instance of his ingenuity’) suspended in mid-air ‘so that he could get the best light obtainable’; a photograph of Pullen working on the bench was reproduced with the article. 65 Kenealy was more specific, referring to a ‘glass reflector’ as well as an ‘aerial platform’ to which Pullen could ascend ‘by means of a ladder’. 66 However, while the studio must have originated with the asylum authorities, Pullen also guarded it from them, using a ‘contrivance, some distance from the door, which visitors are bound to touch, and which gives the signal that someone is approaching’. 67 The psychiatrist Alfred Tredgold referred to this as a ‘guillotine’, while Dr H. F. Stephens wrote in Pullen's case notes that he had many ‘intricate but thoroughly ineffectual “man-traps”’. 68 From at least the 1890s, Pullen's studio was also protected by his ‘Giant’, a gigantic puppet he could climb inside, and from which position he was able to operate the jaws, tongue, eyebrows and head and create a ‘huge roar’ from the interior (plate 5). 69 A kind of surrogate self, when in use the ‘Giant’ effectively scaled Pullen's body and voice up to over twelve feet tall, just as his Great Eastern had scaled down Brunel's ‘giant’ of 1857. This intimate relationship to its maker, as something closer to a tool or a prop than an artwork, may be one reason for its absence from the Pictorial Autobiography, which Pullen seems to have viewed as a more formal way of presenting himself and his history. The period of its production may be another: the ‘Giant’ is not mentioned until an article in the Surrey Mirror for 1895, although a prototype version appears in a photograph from c. 1865 now at the Surrey History Centre, which shows a group of Earlswood patients in front of a haystack. 70 This photograph is visible in the 1898 image of Pullen's studio, framed, and hanging on the left-hand wall. Despite the ‘Giant's’ close identification with Pullen himself, a D