The flimsy line between historical fact and fiction – between accurate summary of the contents of an archive and the construction of a gripping tale – is at the centre of the historian's craft. The choice of focus and angle, spotlight and commentary, make the difference between overwhelming detail and pattern, repetition and forward movement. Historians' choices, as they lead their audience through a sequence of ‘facts’, are weighty matters: the most mundane of detail, such as the price of a cake of soap in 1897, becomes significant in a story about – for example – gender, laundry and household budgets.

This chapter addresses the narrative truths and fictions of colonial asylum histories, and the significant challenges posed by their archival traces. It is partly an exploration of the complexity and ethics of writing about the everyday lives of the insane; it also explores the discursive structures that continue to shape scholarship in this area, and the effects these have on interpretations of the archive.

Patricia Allderidge sketches the shape of the problem in an article about historians' willingness to perpetuate a certain kind of spectacular history in relation to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, without ever consulting primary sources. She notes: