Daniel Francis investigates the practice of visiting asylums and penitentiaries as entertainment in nineteenth-century Canada.

On her way home to Belleville from a visit to Niagara Falls in the summer of 1853, the writer Susanna Moodie paused on the outskirts of Toronto to make a tour of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum. As she dismounted from her carriage in front of the high-domed central wing of the recently opened building, she spied several male patients who were out stretching their legs. They looked at her, she wrote in her memoir, Life in the Clearings, “with an eager air of childish curiosity.” Once she had entered the asylum, it was Moodie’s turn to gawk.

At first her impressions were positive; she observed “no appearance of wretchedness or misery in the ward; nothing that associated with it the