The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland provided a grant to PhD student Theo Christodoulis at the University of Dundee to undertake a research trip to consult archives for his research.

News that the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland had awarded me this grant arrived a few months before I organised a research trip back to my native Scotland (at the time of the award, I was living and working remotely from Italy) over 3 of the 4 weeks of August, to aid my doctoral studies with the University of Dundee.  The trip was intended for intensive archival research, focused on identifying and collating specific case notes, relating to those segments of Dundee’s female migrant population who spent time in the city’s asylums and poorhouses. This was a necessary trip, since archival excavating of this scale is and would have been virtually impossible if carried out remotely, online. While archival records are abundantly available on the web, the sheer size of the case notes, petitions of admission and admission registers my study relies upon did not allow for the use of photocopies and/or online payments for the services such a task would produce. This study, approached both quantitively and qualitatively, relies on hundreds of cases, examined individually. This would require on-campus presence, for at least a week.

The grant I was awarded allowed me to pay for accommodation in Dundee, close to the archives, for a whole week. It also helped me fund the trip itself, and the trip to and from Dundee once I had re-located to my family home in Edinburgh. Without the grant, given my status as a self-funded student with limited resources, a trip like this would have been impossible.

My research investigates the female migrant mill workers housed at the asylums and poorhouses in Dundee and its environs from 1850 to 1900, assessing and analysing recorded manifestations of anomic symptoms, and evidence of anomic experience, using data principally from the Dundee Royal Lunatic Asylum, Montrose Asylum, the Dundee East poorhouse, and the Liff and Benvie poorhouse. I am exploring how contemporary diagnoses found within asylum and poorhouse records can be associated with the socio-economic and settlement conditions surrounding the nineteenth-century migrant.

During the first week of the trip, where I was situated in Dundee, I spent the mornings at the University of Dundee Archives, where the Dundee Royal Lunatic Asylum and Montrose Asylum records are kept. I was able to gather at least 30 individual cases from these asylums combined, specifically relating to women with an Irish, Catholic background or Highland background, who were formerly employed in Dundee’s textiles industry. I was also able to gather photographic evidence not only of the unparalleled scale of female migrant employment in Dundee, but also of the strict division of labour (fundamental for my study of anomie, alienation, and mental illness in the city) evidenced in the ‘uniforms of the mills and factories’, the absence or presence of hats, barefootedness, age etc. This week also allowed for the collation of hundreds of letters, written by both hospital physicians and mill owners, that aided the study enormously in terms of indicating anomic evidence and experience both on the factory floor and the asylums, through the words of those who ran or operated them.

The case notes of an inmate at the Dundee Royal Lunatic Asylum

The second week was based in Edinburgh. I was able to make use of the national archives and library there, but the money from the grant also allowed for three separate trips up to Dundee, where I was able to conduct further primary research at the Dundee City Archives and Local History Centre, at the Dundee’s central library. This is where most records from the city’s poorhouses are kept, and so I was able to collate an abundance of data from female admissions registers and other records, that aided my examination of the experiences of these women in the institutions. The admissions registers provided an excellent idea of the primary causes of institutionalisation, such as abandonment by a spouse, insanity, tuberculosis (providing an excellent link to factory labour) and the death of a loved one– shedding light on the disproportionate rates of infanticide in Dundee, as a result of poverty and overcrowding in the city’s migrant-heavy areas.

For the two months following my return to Italy, I was able to engage in detailed analyses of the data gathered. Thanks to the grant, I have found enough solid material for the writing of two separate chapters, both of which I have completed and sent in to be examined by the University of Dundee’s upgrade panel. Thanks to this work, my thesis is one step closer to completion.