Historians of nineteenth-century women and material culture have explored the myriad ways that material practices informed female strategies of identity, agency and creativity. This paper relates these ideas to experiences had in the nineteenth-century asylum. Focusing on the experiences of women, it examines the diary and material legacy of one asylum patient in particular: Elizabeth Hitchcock, a staymaker confined at Lancaster asylum in the 1840s.

Through Hitchcock’s diary, this presentation interrogates the ways in which asylum patients engaged in meaning making through material artifacts. The paper examines Hitchcock’s rich material practice, exploring how these material processes spoke to creativity, craft and care. Arguing that agency had an important part to play in the creative practice of incarcerated individuals, the paper considers the therapeutic potential of the material world of the asylum.