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Amateur Lunatics: Investigative Journalism, Asylum Reform, and the Undercover Authorship of Lewis Wingfield

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2022

Stephen Donovan Open the ORCID record for Stephen Donovan [Opens in a new window]  and
Matthew Rubery Open the ORCID record for Matthew Rubery [Opens in a new window]
Stephen Donovan
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Uppsala, Sweden
Matthew Rubery
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom
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Abstract

This essay examines the literary career of Anglo-Irish peer Lewis Strange Wingfield (1842-1891) in relation to the rise of investigative journalism and Victorian debates over the treatment of mental illness. Situating his work in the context of the first covert investigations into asylums in Britain and the United States, it focuses on Wingfield's use of disguise to infiltrate a private London asylum for the purpose of researching his novel Gehenna; or, Havens of Unrest (1882). Wingfield's pioneering experiment in undercover authorship, we argue, sheds new light on investigative journalism's impact on both the form and thematics of the nineteenth-century realist novel.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , Winter 2022 , pp. 721 - 755
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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