The secrets of institutions
Published 19 Jan 2012 14:00
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Staff and patients enjoy music on the terrace. Picture courtesy of Surrey History Centre
AN EXHIBITION is peering behind the doors of Victorian and Edwardian institutions and reveal what life was like for asylum inpatients, schoolboys and the poor.
A two-year study carried out by Jane Hamlett at Royal Holloway College's history department has explored what the organisation and decoration of buildings around Surrey can tell us about the people who lived in them.
One of the buildings is the elaborate Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water, a mental hospital built during the Victorian era. Along with documents on the Charterhouse School in Godalming and a common lodging house in Staines, the findings of the study will be on display at the Surrey History Centre in Woking this month.
Dr Hamlett said: "We carried out the research to try to find out more about the lives of those people who lived in institutions and one way of doing that is to look at room plans and decorations and what residents can have; these can all tell you about how much power these people had."
The sanatorium, now luxury flats, was conceived by philanthropist Thomas Holloway - who also designed Egham's Royal Holloway College in the same style.
Dr Hamlett and her team observed it was largely an asylum for the wealthy. She added: "I've been really surprised how facilities of the 19th century really did care about the inpatients. You would imagine the institutions to be dark and gothic but when we looked they were closer to what authorities are trying to do today."
The study also looked into the lives of patients to catch a glimpse of what their lives were like. One was Miss P, a high-class governess admitted to the sanatorium in 1865 suffering from mania.
Dr Hamlett added: "Miss P didn't get on well with the doctors and didn't like having to share a space with other people. But we did find out she was very attached to the cats on the ward and she would bring morsels of food from dinner for them. We could see from this that someone who is very much a reluctant patient can somehow make herself feel at home."
The exhibition, Living Away From Home: Life In Some Of Surrey's Victorian and Edwardian Residential Institutions, is at the Surrey History Centre in Goldsworth Road, Woking, until Saturday, January 28.
This article appeared in Villager 19 Jan 12
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