19th Century Research Group Online Talk: Dr Anna Jamieson (Birkbeck) will be Presenting on ‘Practical Hints: The Art of the Asylum Visitor Book in the Early Nineteenth-Century’

Dr Anna Jamieson (Birkbeck), ‘Practical Hints: The Art of the Asylum Visitor Book in the early nineteenth-century’

Wednesday 23rd November, 4pm (talk beginning 4.15pm), MS Teams. Register via Eventbrite to access the Teams meeting link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lincoln-c19-talk-dr-anna-jamieson-on-the-art-of-the-asylum-visitor-book-tickets-468288221677

You are warmly invited to join us for the second online meeting of 2022-23 of the Nineteenth Century Research Group at the University of Lincoln, as we continue our mini-season of talks on the nineteenth-century asylum. This event is open to all.

Abstract: By the early decades of the nineteenth century, asylums and hospitals had become mainstays of England’s philanthropic tourist circuit. Providing visitors with the opportunity to interact with human suffering, they were uniquely placed to encourage and facilitate the display of humanity and refinement deemed socially appropriate during this period. At the end of the asylum tour, many visitors had the opportunity to publicly record their responses in a communal visitor book – where they would write their name, place of residence, and typically a few lines discussing what they had seen. Characterising the asylum visitor book as a material site where themes of philanthropy and performance meet, this paper explores the issues at stake in the act of committing one’s thoughts to paper within this space. On the one hand, it argues that this ritual enabled the performance of one’s philanthropy, demonstrating the tourist’s fluency in topics surrounding the smooth running of the institution. On the other, I argue that writing in the asylum visitor book allowed a reflective moment of emotional recovery – an ameliorating endpoint to the psychological strain of a visit to the asylum itself.

Bio: Anna Jamieson is an interdisciplinary art historian specialising in visual and material cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Anna is currently working on a book exploring asylum tourism between 1770-1845. Her research interests include women and patient agency; illness, fashion and consumerism; dark tourism and enfreakment; material culture and the history of emotions.

The next event in this series will be an in-person event on campus, on Wednesday 7th December, from 4pm: we’ll be celebrating the publication of Owen Clayton’s new book Roving Bill Aspinwall: Dispatches from a Hobo in Post-Civil War America. Further details will follow soon!

Story submitted by Laura Gill
lgill@lincoln.ac.uk