Race had a key role in the construction of madness and literary value and thus in periodical production in asylums, especially in the United States. Contributing to a periodical enabled educated white patients not only to express their creativity, enlightenment, and agency, but to reclaim their citizenship, at least figuratively. The launch of the Meteor in 1872 by a former plantation owner and patient at the Alabama Insane Hospital, Joseph Alexander Goree, was an act of rebellion against the irony of losing his own liberty and rights once he was certified as insane. The periodical was part of a larger campaign of literary activity through which he demonstrated his erudition, high taste, and reason. Recasting himself as an ally and collaborator to the superintendent, Goree found empowerment in maintaining the high literary quality of his publication and keeping madness out of it. Yet, the Meteor was far from a homogeneous polished account of the asylum: during its irregular run, it embodied different viewpoints as well as Goree’s declining enthusiasm and growing discontent, as he realised that his project of self-empowerment would fail to earn him his freedom and rights.

This chapter engages with the issue of voice and freedom of expression by interrogating the function of the patient-editor. It explores the stories of the known editors and printers of the unpublished Moon (1882) of the New York City Lunatic Asylum and the first two series of the Gartnavel Gazette (1853–54; 1855), produced and internally circulated in the Glasgow Royal Asylum. The archives associated with these publications offer a glimpse into the relationships that periodical publishing involved. They show that asylum periodicals emerged out of conflict, negotiation, and collaboration – perhaps not unlike other similar publications at the time. This case study reveals that forces other than institutional supervision were at work. The editors’ class-based aesthetics and individual preferences in selecting material for publication, as well as conflicts among patients impacted asylum periodicals. The study of this newspaper also offers evidence that, far from polished records of asylum life, asylum periodicals embodied tensions. Patients’ grievances did find a place in their pages, even if complaints and attacks were softened with humour and irony.

Asylums’ adoption of printing and periodical publishing from the late 1830s was related to two major developments on both sides of the Atlantic: the growing accessibility of print and printing presses and the spread of the moral treatment of insanity. As the periodical press permeated daily life, and printing equipment became cheaper and easier to use, the introduction of presses into asylums was a practical move. The presses served multiple purposes: recreational, therapeutic, as well as administrative. This chapter identifies various factors that contributed to the introduction of printing in asylums and addresses concerns about the exploitation of patients’ labour hidden behind the theory of moral therapeutics. It also reflects on the symbolic meaning of the press, its association with civilizational progress, and the influence of such ideas on the early adoption of periodical publishing in America and Scotland. While presses were almost never bought solely for patients’ benefits, they offered novel opportunities for inmates to exercise initiative and agency as partners in the development of early psychiatry, as well as civilization.

The introduction provides a general description of asylum periodicals and a brief introduction to the publishing and medical contexts within which they emerged. Then it discusses the place of asylum periodicals in the ongoing disputes over the social function of psychiatry and mental institutions. I challenge the suspicion with which historians and literary scholars have approached asylum periodicals due to their dual function of serving both patients and institutions. While scholars have perceived asylum periodicals as defined by censorship and, consequently, inauthenticity and unknowability, I argue that asylum periodicals’ positioning does not compromise their value as historical records but requires different approaches to their study, borrowed from book history and literary and periodical studies. A recognition of asylum periodicals and their producers as agents in wider literary networks enables further consideration of these publications and an acknowledgement of their potential to facilitate the generation of new insight about asylums, their inhabitants, and nineteenth-century print culture.

Peter Ronaldson was an inmate of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum in the 1840s and contributed to the first issue of its Morningside Mirror. Soon after the publication of the periodical, Ronaldson escaped. Tracing Ronaldson’s story in the available records, the conclusion reflects on the difficulty of constructing coherent narratives out of partially preserved complex and fluid institutional experiences. It nevertheless argues that asylum periodicals are invaluable resources for understanding life in nineteenth-century institutions, suggests directions for further research using the publications, and highlights their relevance to mental health and Mad activism.

Asylum periodicals participated in complex exchanges of medical and general print that took place in the nineteenth century. Therapeutic publishing spread in different institutions through networks of physicians, who were keen to stay abreast of the newest developments in their discipline. Asylum periodicals themselves contributed to medical communication, once they were in circulation. When launching and supporting periodical publication, however, physicians were not purely driven by self-interest and the interests of their institutions. As asylum periodicals joined the wider networks of print, they enabled patients’ continuous engagement with literary culture and public life. This function was not secondary to most of the publishing projects, but it was an effect sought by physicians for the benefit of those in their care and to support the provision of healthy recreation, which was an important aspect of the moral treatment. The inception, development, and survival of asylum periodicals depended on the exchanges they facilitated – exchanges that were themselves enabled and often encouraged by physicians.

Recognising the processes of social marginalisation to which they were subjected, some patients found rhetorical power in their disadvantaged position. They used asylum periodicals to challenge the distinction between sanity and insanity, evoke sympathy and better understanding, and foster a sense of solidarity among fellow inmates across institutions. These sentiments found their clearest expression in Excelsior (1857–1878), the publication of the James Murray Royal Asylum in Perth, Scotland. Though edited by the physician superintendent, William Lauder Lindsay, this periodical was especially militant in its attack on the misrepresentation of mental illness and keen to cultivate a sense of an existing tradition of lunatic literature and a cross-institutional imagined community of patients. This chapter assesses the successes and failures of this mission. Despite tensions and antagonism behind the scenes, it argues that Excelsior was a space where the clashing voices of different actors could be reconciled and united around the common goal of representing the asylum and its inhabitants before the outside world.

This chapter turns to the forces of unity that drove patients’ publishing projects, focusing on the role of asylum periodicals in construing and maintaining real and imagined communities within and beyond the asylum. Producing and consuming periodicals brought together various actors with distinct skill sets, enabling, to a degree, transgression of the institutional boundaries that otherwise kept different groups of patients separated. This transgression fed into the representation of the asylum community as a family on the pages of asylum periodicals, reenforcing the institutionally imposed family model, according to which patients were ascribed the role of children under the care and protection of a father-like superintendent and a motherly matron. However, asylum periodicals show not only the manifestation of this framework’s application but patients’ active engagement with these symbols. Finally, the chapter explores former inmates’ continuous involvement in asylum periodicals, suggesting that some patients formed lasting and meaningful connections during their stay in mental institutions and relied on the asylum for support during their reintegration into society.