The volume contains: 1. A Letter to the Rt. Honourable Earl Fitzwilliam...respecting the Investigation which has lately taken place into the Abuses at the York Lunatic Asylum by Godfrey Higgins Esq (Doncaster, 1814) [this has extensive appendices] 2. Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Rules and Management of the York Lunatic Asylum [with appendix] (1814) The importance of this volume of tracts on the York Lunatic Asylum controversies is that it has been very extensively annotated by Godfrey Higgins himself and contains extra information not found elsewhere in the published tracts. A Letter to… Earl Fitzwilliam has been bound into the volume so that each printed page is interleaved with a blank page onto which Higgins has added comments, an extensive gloss on, and manuscript additions to, the printed text, and examples of further occurrences and abuses at the Asylum and further descriptions of his own actions during the dispute. At the beginning of the volume, newspaper cuttings about the dispute have been pasted in, and these also contain Higgins’ annotations. There are also, at the beginning of the volume, a few manuscript pencil notes about the dimensions of patients’ accommodation and about other asylums, including Bethlem, St Lukes and Guys.
