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This thesis explores the institutional care of Irish women, aged fifty years or more, from 1845 to the introduction of the Old Age Pension in 1908. Moving beyond the experiences of the adolescent and young women, which have been explored by historians in recent years, this study introduces the aged grandmother, elderly widow and old spinster to the historical record. This exploration serves to deepen not only our understanding of the life course in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also what it truly meant to be a woman in the past. Archival sources were used to compile thirty distinct databases, containing 12,925 entries. These represent 7,112 elderly women who resided in Irish workhouses, charitable homes, lunatic asylums, prisons and infirmaries as some point between 1845 and 1908. This ambitious study focuses primarily on gender differences, comparing and contrasting the institutional experiences of older women and men. However, it also addresses issues of class, religion and family. The impact of late life poverty is explored, alongside experiences of those from middle-class families, assessing the standard of care for older women of diverse social status. It considers the role of religion in gaining access to institutions established by religious orders, highlighting the treatment of women who adhered to different faiths. Lastly, by exploring the movement of women through these institutions, this thesis provides an insight into the changing demographic of Ireland, showing how family structure was altered by the Great Famine of 1845-53. In doing so, it reveals the extent to which family members adopted the responsibility of caring for their older relatives. In addressing these key themes, this thesis serves to further our understanding of family dynamics and relationships, societal attitudes and responses towards old age and the importance of poor relief and welfare for aged women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland.

In the early 19th century, a novel approach to the treatment of the insane, known as moral treatment or management, arrived in the United States of America. With its focus on appealing to the emotional and intellectual capacities of patient, moral treatment diverged from a longstanding tradition of treating insanity as a medical condition. Its practice was further distinguished by its emphasis on removing the lunatic from their home and community and into a specialised institution: the lunatic asylum. Life at these establishments was scheduled and scripted. Patients woke, ate, slept, and took their medicines according to a regular schedule, and followed a targeted spiritual, occupational, and recreational regimen intended to instil the self-discipline and foster the self-esteem believed necessary to restore their rationality. A broad and multidisciplinary body of scholarship has grown up around moral treatment and the institutions that practised it. Yet, while many studies recognise the prominent role that buildings, furnishings, and other aspects of the material world played in effecting this reform, few researchers have engaged with these landscapes primarily through the physical objects - the materia medica and materia moral - themselves. This thesis examines how the rhetoric of moral treatment translated into the lived, material experiences associated with asylum-based treatment regimens at two case institutions: The Western Washington Hospital for the Insane near Steilacoom, Washington (1871), and the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, Virginia (1773). Applying the methodologies and approaches used in historical archaeology, this thesis organises the encounters that shaped life at these institutions around the patient body. Despite its focus on the mind, moral treatment operated in, on, and around the body. Most of these treatment activities involved in treatment left a clear mark on the archaeological record. From the foods and medicines that patients ingested, to the clothes and jewellery they wore, to the structures and interior spaces that they inhabited, the material world was essential to both maintaining order in the institution and restoring order to patients' disordered minds. While the adherents to moral treatment championed the development and construction of the ideal institution, their ideals and principles did not translate perfectly into the material world of these institutions. By juxtaposing archaeological and archival data, this thesis demonstrates that daily life in these institutions was shaped by more than the rhetoric of moral treatment alone. Rather, the practical requirements of managing of a large institution, patients' individual ways of living and being, and the decisions of those authorities who were responsible for determining and delivering care through institutional channels coalesced, leaving a distinct mark on the archaeological record.

This project seeks to illuminate the relatively neglected subject of male madness in Victorian literature and culture, noting that at least half of the national asylum population in this period were men. Interdisciplinary sources include fiction, popular periodicals, psychiatric journals and casebooks from lunatic asylums in the London area. The thesis explores representations of various crises, examining the blurred line between healthy emotion and insanity through the lens of shifting models of masculinity and gentlemanliness. Chapter One investigates the impact of financial crises, speculation and 'railway mania', focusing primarily on nervous breakdown and suicide in Dickens's Little Dorrit, Trollope's The Way We Live Now, and Hanwell Asylum records. It argues that the stock market became irretrievably tied to mental health in this period, constituting a major factor in what has been termed a 'crisis of masculinity.' Chapter Two traces the evolution of 'monomania', developments in psychiatric diagnostics, and cases of jealous obsession or 'erotomania' in young married men. It argues that Trollope's He Knew He Was Right foregrounds the more explicit portrayal of domestic abuse and sexual violence found in Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga some years later. Chapter Three explores representations of men following the deaths of their wives or children, for whom grief becomes pathologised as a mental disorder. It argues that Dickens's Dombey and Son and Trollope's The Duke's Children contribute to the psychiatric discourse on melancholia, advocating a healthier approach to processing grief based on communication, community and action, rather than isolation and stasis. Finally, Chapter Four considers the dialectic between individual and collective mental pathology, investigating mid-nineteenth-century perspectives on earlier political mobs. Contextualised by cultural anxieties about regicide, criminal responsibility, and Bethlem and Broadmoor cases, it explores the complexities of representations of idiocy, trauma and psychopathic political violence in Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities.