Asylum

A stranger has come To share my room in the house not right in the head, A girl mad as birds – Dylan Thomas, ‘Love in the Asylum’With the advent of ‘care in the community’ for the mentally afflicted, the self-contained villages for the apparently insane have now been consigned to the history books. These once bustling Victorian institutions were commonly known in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the ‘county asylum’ or the ‘pauper lunatic asylum’, and were an accepted and essential