Asylums for the Middle and Upper Classes

Abstract

In 1876, Herman C. Merivale was brought as a patient to Ticehurst, an establishment often considered the crème de la crème of privately-run asylums. On arrival he remembered that: ‘In my weakened perceptions I at first thought that the mansion was an hotel.’¹ This was an understandable mistake, even allowing for the writer’s troubled mental condition. Large private asylums were sometimes built on a grand scale with suites of elaborate day rooms akin to country houses and hotels.² Ticehurst opened in 1792, and was expanded and embellished in the decades that followed. By 1867, the institution boasted a Chinese gallery, billiard room, museum and conservatory, as well as a handsome chapel.³ In the 1870s an aviary and theatre were introduced, and the 1890s saw the arrival of a French chef and a ballroom.⁴ Like the superintendents of public asylums, the doctors at Ticehurst hoped that cure could partly be reached by reintroducing patients to domestic regimes. But this was a very different kind of domesticity, built on an idea of social prestige, the polite and formal world of the great country house as well as the new, more anonymous hotels for the wealthy. The well-off would have expected these amenities, but splendour was also meant to distract patients, as well as underlining their status and consoling their relatives. The material world was expected to create a distinctive kind of sociability and behaviour.