The Manager’s Children: Family Space and a Private Life in the Nineteenth-Century Asylum

Purpose-built lunatic asylums were constructed across the British Isles for the reception of the pauper insane from the first decades of the nineteenth century. These large institutions were run by a Manager and a Matron, generally a husband and wife, who were resident in the asylum, in many cases alongside their children. The families of the Manager and Matron would have joined patients, keepers, nurses, service staff, and clerks in the asylum buildings, forming part of the individual character of the institution. Their day-to-day experience of the buildings was separate from both the interior workings of the institution, and the exterior world. This chapter will examine the familial spaces of the asylum, the rooms and areas dedicated to the family of the Manager, and speculate on the distribution of space within these households as small institutions in themselves. Building on plan-based archaeological approaches to now-demolished (or redeveloped) asylum buildings, the spatial and material concerns of growing up in an asylum in the nineteenth century will be mapped. This space-based approach to an irregular yet highly-stratified domestic dwelling will be of use to archaeologists approaching the study of childhood in non-traditional domestic settings.