Introduction

Nineteenth-century Surrey encompassed both crowded urban settlements in south London and a sprawling rural population. As the county's, population increased, so too did the numbers of lunatics requiring care and control. The first Surrey County Asylum, Springfield, opened at Wandsworth in 1841 with 299 patients and was soon filled beyond capacity. This necessitated the creation of Brookwood, a second asylum at Woking, which was opened on 17 June 1867 by the Metropolitan Asylums Board (MAB), the new authority created to care for the infectious and insane poor of Greater London. In contrast, the nearby Holloway Sanatorium was established by private bequest for the exclusive benefit of the middle-class insane. It relied on the fees of the better-off patients to subsidize those less affluent but who were deemed as ‘deserving’ of assistance. Philanthropic support to create and support hospitals increased as the nineteenth century progressed. Holloway was completed in 1884, being described as ‘the most grandiloquent of all nineteenth-century donations’ both in the size and scale of the building and in its lavish interior.

This chapter compares and contrasts the two very different psychiatric institutions, considering the admissions and management structure, and daily routines. As suggested earlier, asylums have been associated with increased professionalization, unfair and lengthy confinement and social control. Pauper institutions in particular, were often defined as warehouses for societal misfits whose problems were medicalized.