Materialities of Care: Agency and the Asylum in nineteenth-century England
Historians of nineteenth-century women and material culture have explored the myriad ways that material practices informed female strategies of identity, agency and creativity. This paper relates these ideas to experiences had in the nineteenth-century asylum. Focusing on the experiences of women, it examines the diary and material legacy of one asylum patient in particular: Elizabeth Hitchcock, a staymaker confined at Lancaster asylum in the 1840s.