Morning light spills through tall arched windows, glinting off polished floors and neatly folded uniforms.

On the surface, the Victorian Asylum looks like progress.

There are orderly gardens, calm wards and doctors preaching moral treatment and cure.

A haven of science and compassion, they said.

But behind those locked doors where visitors seldom tread,

the air is thick with fear and silence.

Patients labour in laundries and fields under the guise of therapy.

Some are restrained, secluded or simply forgotten. What begins as reform too often slides

into repression. In a world that claimed to heal the mind,

how much suffering was hidden behind the facade of care,

and what really happened inside the Victorian asylum?

Music Hello and welcome to After Dark, I'm Anthony.

And I'm Addie.

Now, as you know, one of the dark symbols of the Victorian age is, of course, the asylum.

And we are going to discover today why it captured their collective imagination and fitted into their idea of what a reformed society, a Victorian

reformed society should look like. We want to be careful about how we discuss this history,

of course, and we caveat this episode by saying we will be using the language in the context

from the period. That rightly is no longer used to describe mental illness. But with that,

let's delve into the Victorian world that created its iteration of the asylum. Maddie, what can you tell us about

Victorian England at this time? Okay, so the Victorian asylum, I think, is something that we all

have a sense of, particularly from Hollywood, particularly from novels written at the time and novels written afterwards,

a stay in the Victorian era.

...