Skip to main content

The Lock Asylum (Audio Drama)

Can we imagine what life was like for the thousands of young women who lived as prostitutes, servants and migrants in eighteenth-century London?
Can we imagine what life was like for the thousands of young women who lived as prostitutes, servants and migrants in eighteenth-century London?
Monday 8 November 2021 | 31 minutes 7 seconds
Download File | 71.24MB

In 1787, the Lock Hospital Asylum opened its doors to a small group of women who had been treated for syphilis, to house them and spiritually reform them. The clerk who admitted them kept a notebook in which he recorded their stories of their lives before treatment. These short, handwritten accounts offer us a narrow window into hundreds of women’s experiences, as they recalled the abuse, seduction, prostitution, poverty and broken relationships they had faced.

These unique records – lost in the archive for two centuries - now form the basis for an audio drama by writers Cara Jennings and Sophie Trott in partnership with Morley Radio (Morley College London) and LSE Professor Patrick Wallis who uncovered the source and has led the project to research it.