Amateur Lunatics
Investigative Journalism, Asylum Reform, and the Undercover Authorship of Lewis Wingfield
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12411848 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephen Donovan (0000-0002-4335-9975, Uppsala University, corresponding author), Matthew Rubery (0000-0002-1545-8896, Queen Mary University of London) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 721-755 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Victorian Literature and Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1060-1503 • E-ISSN: 1470-1553 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1060150321000152 |
| OpenAlex | W4312385286 |
| Language | EN |
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
Amateur · Archaeology · Context (archaeology · Covert · Irish · Journalism · Linguistics · Media studies · Political science · Relation (database · Sociology · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History · Law · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
|---|