Passing the Hours: Measuring, Recording, and Experiencing Time Through Periodical Publishing in Victorian Asylums

Abstract: Following Margaret Beetham’s suggestion to apply Julia Kristeva’s theory of time to periodical studies, this paper draws on a transatlantic archive to explore the interaction of different temporalities in asylum periodicals. I argue that, despite asylums’ efforts to realign patients with linear (“masculine”) time, institutional time and insanity were often experienced as circular and indefinite, and these “feminine” qualities contributed to patients’ disempowerment and discontent. Asylum periodicals served as instruments of both recalibration and resistance, through which patients sought to continue participating in linear time and history and to escape from the margins of time.