John Clews

My research considers the practice of treating fee-paying patients in publicly funded and operated county and borough lunatic asylums in late Victorian and Edwardian England. At the crux of my research lies the question of how class divisions were manifested and developed within public asylums throughout the period. I will also seek to understand institutional and familial motivations for using the pauper asylum to house this group of patients. I hope to analyse institutional practices in three regions in an effort to understand if this practice was a uniform phenomenon or shaped by regional forces.