Victorian Psychiatry

Or, beyond The Female Malady: some suggestions for reading in this flourishing historiographical area. The authors whose monographs and edited volumes are listed below have also produced useful articles. To find further details, search the Wellcome Library online catalogue.
And if you're looking for the records of Victorian mental institutions, try searching the Wellcome/National Archives Hospital Records Database. The public search engine will only search on name or town, but putting lunatic or asylum into the hospital name search box should produce what you are looking for. However, be warned, the survival of records of private lunatic asylums is very sparse indeed. There is an extremely useful website on the County Asylums, 1810-1948 including many images. Also of interest:

Index of English and Welsh Lunatic Asylums and Mental Hospitals

Jonathan Andrews, They're in the Trade... They Cannot Interfere-They Say: Scottish Lunacy Commissioners and Lunacy Reform in Nineteenth-century Scotland (1998)

Jonathan Andrews, Asa Briggs, Roy Porter, Penny Tucker, and Keir Waddington, The History of Bethlem (1997)

Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby (eds), Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish Psychiatry (2004)

Jonathan Andrews and Iain Smith (eds), "Let there be light again" : a history of Gartnavel Royal Hospital from its beginnings to the present day. Essays written to mark the 150th anniversary in 1993 of Gartnavel Royal Hospital's existence on its present site (1993)

Peter Bartlett, The poor law of lunacy : the administration of pauper lunatics in mid-nineteenth century England (1999)

Peter Bartlett and David Wright, Outside the walls of the asylum: on "care and community" in modern Britain and Ireland (1999)

Steven Cherry, Mental Health Care in Modern England: The Norfolk Lunatic Asylum/St Andrew's Hospital, 1810-1998 (2003)

Pamela Dale and Joseph Melling (eds), Mental illness and learning disability since 1850 : finding a place for mental disorder in the United Kingdom (2005)

Anne Digby, Madness, morality, and medicine: a study of the York Retreat, 1796-1914 (1985)

Waltraud Ernst, Mad tales from the Raj: the European insane in British India, 1800-1858 (1991)

Bill Forsythe and Joseph Melling (eds), Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800-1914 (1999)

Mark Jackson, The borderland of imbecility: medicine, society, and the fabrication of the feeble mind in late Victorian and Edwardian England (2000)

Charlotte Mackenzie, Psychiatry for the Rich: a history of Ticehurst Private Asylum, 1792-1917 (1992)

Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe, The politics of madness : the state, insanity and society in England, 1845-1914 (2006)

Pamela Michael, Care and treatment of the mentally ill in North Wales, 1800-2000: In God's Keeping (2003)

Peter Nolan, A History of Mental Health Nursing (1996)