"Comforts in Her Calamity": Shopping and Consumption in the Late Eighteenth-Century Private Madhouse

This article analyses archival material documenting the spending habits of Dorothea Fellowes during her incarceration at an English private madhouse between 1791 and 1817. Exploring Dorothea's financial, material, and emotional world, it situates her experience within debates on eighteenth-century psychiatry, consumerism, material culture and the history of emotions. It identifies a range of consumer choices available for madhouse patients and their families, reframing the madhouse as a permeable space within which one's former habits might continue. Ultimately, it argues that Dorothea gained a sense of identity, even agency, through the buying, wearing, and collecting of items from her unusual home.