2 - Undercover Authors

Summary

Chapter 2 considers the implications of Greenwood’s innovation for contemporary perceptions of psychiatric institutions. The roles of undercover pioneer and literary author converge here in a single individual: the Anglo-Irish aristocrat Lewis Strange Wingfield, who impersonated an asylum warder for the purposes of literary research. Wingfield aimed to expose the endemic abuse of vulnerable individuals – but in the form of a novel. Covert observation, he believed, would furnish him with material for a new kind of fiction whose authenticity would supersede the factual scrupulousness of a ‘newspaper novelist’ like Charles Reade and even the first-hand testimonies of former inmates. As his novel Gehenna (1882) makes clear, Wingfield’s extraordinary experiment in undercover authorship attests to the creative opportunities opened up by undercover journalism as well as to the overshadowing of British trailblazers by American investigators such as Nellie Bly.