While this text follows the recent historiographical shift to decentre the asylum from the history of mental health care, it is impossible to ignore asylums as they loomed large in both patient experience and the cultural understanding of madness for men and women. The rise of the asylum in the second half of the nineteenth century is astounding. At mid-century there were twelve thousand patients living in asylums as a result of the 1845 Lunatic Asylum and Pauper Lunatics Act, rising to a hundred thousand by 1900.³ Most registered lunatics ended up spending at least some time in an asylum. The asylum was the medical and governmental response to the ‘problem’ of lunacy, and thus it plays an essential role in the culture of men's madness. Many opinions of the asylum are a microcosm of views of lunacy in general. This chapter does not attempt to be a comprehensive account, but rather explores issues that were particularly salient to men's gendered experiences.

Over the past decades, historians have unpacked Victorians’ overly optimistic view of their asylums: from micro-histories of individual asylums to sweeping surveys of the changing nature of madhouses and the ideologies shaping institutionalization. In a recent review of asylum literature, Robert Houston offers a comprehensive, nuanced account of the asylum from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁴ Such overviews highlight the variety of approaches over time and by different disciplines, and the complicated negotiation between doctors, patients, and families over care. Other scholars have aptly described the medical rationalization of treatment and the shifting architecture and internal management of asylums.⁵ The pauper asylum has been thoroughly explained both as part of larger government programmes and as part of institutional histories. Institutions that dealt with idiocy are the focus of their own thriving scholarly sub-field.⁶ Recent historical studies highlight the importance of gender and class in shaping all aspects of institutional life.⁷ Gender is now an intrinsic part of many asylum studies, even when not the main focus.⁸

Research for this chapter is grounded in a variety of institutional, government, and medical sources. Annual Lunacy Commissioner reports were the official record of the asylum system, and often sparked public debate and comment. Experiences of asylum life are drawn from a number of hospitals and asylums to give a sense of the diversity of patient experiences; however, the richest asylum archival source is from Manor House, a private asylum based in Chiswick with no constraints of funding or size.⁹ Manor House was, by its nature, exclusive and unique. Records of Bethlem and Glasgow Royal hospitals include men of a much wider range of economic backgrounds and provide relatively robust archives. Records from Broadmoor, the criminal lunatic asylum, add men from across the economic spectrum who were deemed dangerous to others. The archives of the pauper asylum have not been included but have been admirably studied elsewhere.¹⁰ To connect the social history of the asylum to broader social and cultural representations, newspaper accounts, memoirs, and medical texts offer a window into the public discourse on asylum life.

The asylum is a microcosm of many larger questions about madness posed throughout the book. This chapter begins with brief overview of the rationale and philosophy of the asylum system. As work by Melling and Forsythe demonstrates, the asylum is part of the society that created it, ‘a corridor between civil society and the state along which different groups met to negotiate’.¹¹ Men's particular place in that asylum system was significant, and in a highly gender-segregated system they were recognized as a distinct group in the asylum. Laws and policies surrounding confinement varied by nation, by class, and by type of mental distress. Men were taken out of their homes and workspaces, sometimes against their will, and placed in an enforced site of passive convalescence.

This chapter will briefly explore the institutional and legal frameworks of asylums, and men's standing within asylums across the nation. The focus of the chapter will be the particular challenges men faced in the asylum, and the particular negative associations of the asylum. While doctors and reformers attempted to destigmatize the asylum, these actions were undercut by larger social messaging. The next section focuses on how the experience of institutionalization challenged men's gendered identity on a personal level, and often destabilized family power dynamics. No matter the social background of the men involved, ...