EQUIPOS DE EMERGENCIAS. FUNCIONES

Historians have shown that men who were considered to fall short of manly ideals (those who were criminal, unindustrious, and who refused to provide for their families) were separated from the rest of society in fiction, medical literature and press reports.⁸¹An examination of Broadmoor cases indicates the extent to which ideas regarding normal male behaviour were articulated and encouraged by a diverse group of men within the asylum; an institution within which demarcations between normal and deviant male

79 Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 307.

80 Rules for the Guidance of the Officers of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1863), p. 7.

81 Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality, p. 47; Claudia Nelson, Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), p. 55.

31 conduct were made by medical officers in their patient reports, and also by the patients themselves. An examination of patients’ letters suggests that they had their own ideas regarding appropriate male behaviour and that their opinions were similar to those promoted by the middle classes, with an emphasis on industry, financially providing for children, and heterosexuality. This thesis thus suggests that ideas about appropriate male behaviour were not only discussed, encouraged and modelled by alienists, lawyers, judges, authors of fiction and social commentators, but they were negotiated and

internalised by ordinary middle and working-class men. Such a finding will be of interest to historians of masculinity because it answers the calls of Michael Roper, John Tosh, Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard to examine masculinity not only as a cultural and social construction, but as a subjective identity.⁸²

Some gender historians have ‘given their work a psychological inflection, emphasizing selfhood and the subjective experience of being male.’⁸³ It is difficult to examine subjectivities and personal experiences prior to the First World War because of a lack of surviving evidence, such as memoirs, letters and diaries.⁸⁴ In addition, twentieth-century historians have the advantage of being able to turn to oral history.⁸⁵ Some work has been done on the nineteenth century. Ying S. Lee studied masculine subjectivities

82 Michael Roper and John Tosh, ‘Introduction: Historians and the Politics of Masculinity’, in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since 1800, ed. by Michael Roper and John Tosh (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 1-24 (p. 17); Michael Roper, ‘Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History’, History Workshop Journal, 59 (2005), 57-72 (p. 57); John Tosh, ‘What Should Historians Do With Masculinity?: Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Manliness and

Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain (Pearson Education Ltd., 2005), pp. 29-60; Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard, ‘What Have Historians Done With Masculinity? Reflections on Five Centuries of British History, Circa 1500-1950’, Journal of British Studies, 44:2 (April 2005), 274-280 (p. 275).

83 Harvey and Shepard, ‘What Have Historians Done With Masculinity?’, p. 275.

84 For male subjective identities in the twentieth century, Martin Francis, The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Michael Roper, ‘Maternal Relations:

Moral Manliness and Emotional Survival in Letters Home During the First World War’, in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, ed. by Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 295-316.

85 Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2007).

32 through an examination of working-class autobiographies and fiction,⁸⁶ and new research on masculinity and domesticity has begun to consider men’s domestic identities and experiences, particularly in regard to fatherhood which, as Joanne Bailey writes in her study of Georgian fathers, ‘is a fruitful site for masculine subjectivity.’⁸⁷ Through an examination of autobiographies, letters, diaries, press reports and popular culture, Bailey shows that fathers associated care and provision with their paternal role.⁸⁸ Some literary scholars have examined Victorian fathers. Valerie Sanders examined the records of eminent middle-class men including Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens and Charles Kingsley, to reconstruct what it meant to be a father from the point of view of men themselves, and in doing so offered an alternative perspective of fathers to that previously presented; i.e. through the eyes of their (often traumatised) children.⁸⁹ Sanders found that in their correspondence these men ‘express[ed] their feelings about fatherhood in a way that was unguarded or outspoken: regretting superfluous births, worrying about the slow progress of [...] son or mourning the death of a favourite child.’⁹⁰ Paul White examined how, following the death of one of his children, Charles Darwin ‘used his professional research as a specifically affective language to address matters of grief and loss with other fathers.’⁹¹ Given the scarcity of sources, examining ordinary men’s feelings, particularly working-class men, about their children and their paternal role is a

86 Ying S. Lee, Masculinity and the English Working-Class: Studies in Victorian Autobiography and Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 2007).

87 Joanne Bailey, ‘Masculinity and Fatherhood in England c.1760-1830’, in What is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics From Antiquity to the Contemporary World, ed. by John H. Arnold and Sean Brady (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 167-186 (p. 169).

88 Ibid., p. 171.

89 Valerie Sanders, The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and ‘“What Do You Want to Know About Next?” Charles Kingsley’s Model of Educational Fatherhood’ in Gender and Fatherhood, ed. by Broughton and Rogers, pp. 55-67. For the joy Kinglsey associated with the birth of his son, Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk: a Life of Charles Kingsley (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974), p. 98.

90 Sanders, Tragi-Comedy, p. 3.

91 Marie Strange, ‘Introduction’, in British Family Life, 1780-1914, ed. by Claudia Nelson and Julie-Marie Strange, 5 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto Ltd., 2012), VII, pp. i-xii (p. xii); Paul White,

‘Darwin Wept: Science and the Sentimental Subject’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 16:2 (2011), 195-213.

33 difficult task. Research undertaken by Megan Doolittle and Julie-Marie Strange has begun to reveal class subjective identities. Through an examination of working-class autobiographies and family disputes in the mid-nineteenth century courtroom, Doolittle showed that a working-class man’s identity was closely related to his paternal role.⁹² Doolittle continued to examine autobiographies in an effort to understand welfare from the point of view of working-class fathers, and highlights the shame and anger felt by men who failed to keep their families from the workhouse.⁹³ In her studies of grief and attachment, Strange has shown that some working-class men formed strong emotional bonds with their children.⁹⁴

Because of the paucity of evidence regarding working-class identities it is important to locate sources, however unusual, that might enable further exploration.

Doolittle and Strange both show that an examination of material culture (grandfather clocks and men’s chairs) grants access to examples of affectionate working-class

fatherhood.⁹⁵ An examination of Broadmoor cases also grants access to valuable sources including courtroom testimony and, more unusually, letters to and from patients in the asylum. An examination of these sources, the letters in particular, not only provides access to the voices of the mad, as previously discussed, but also to the voices of men, many of whom would not have ordinarily had the opportunity or inclination to record

92 Megan Doolittle, ‘Missing Fathers: Assembling a History of Fatherhood in Mid Nineteenth-Century England’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Essex, 1996).

93 Megan Doolittle, ‘Fatherhood and Family Shame: Masculinity, Welfare and the Workhouse in Late Nineteenth-Century England’, in The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain Since 1800, ed. by Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin and Abigail Wills (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 84-108.

94 Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty, p. 233; ‘Fatherhood, Providing and Attachment in Late Victorian and Edwardian Working Class Families’, The Historical Journal, 55:4 (2012), 1007-1027.

95 Megan Doolittle, ‘Time, Space and Memories: The Father’s Chair and Grandfather Clocks in Victorian Working-Class Domestic Lives’, Home Cultures, 8:3 (2011), 245-264; Julie-Marie Strange, ‘Fatherhood, Furniture, and the Interpersonal Dynamics of the Working-Class Homes’, Urban History, 40:2 (2013), 271-286.

34 their feelings on the home or fatherhood, but who did so in their letters from the asylum.⁹⁶ It is thus possible, using the Broadmoor records, to complement Sanders’s study and reconstruct fatherhood from the point of ordinary middle – and, more crucially, working-class men, something done in Chapters Four and Six of this thesis and discussed in greater detail below. The examination of men’s subjective identities and experiences as fathers is in its early stages, and thus the research undertaken for this thesis will help historians in their efforts to construct a chronology of masculine subjectivities, as called for by Tosh et al.⁹⁷