A Victorian-era journalist snuck into an infamous asylum, and what she exposed shocked New York

In autumn 1887, a 23-year-old woman checked into a temporary boarding house for working women in New York City.

She immediately alarmed the other residents: she didn’t sleep for days, and insisted that she didn’t remember who she was. But for all that it looked as if she might be in need of psychiatric support, the woman wasn’t experiencing any mental ill health. She was, in fact, a journalist. And she was trying to get herself admitted to a psychiatric unit for a story.

Elizabeth Jane Cochran, better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was working for the New York World newspaper, reporting on the conditions inside the infamous Woman’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in NYC’s East River.

The resulting article and book would shock America, and lead to reform. But it also helped to boost Bly’s reputation usher in a new style of sensationalist investigative reporting that would come to be known as ‘stunt journalism’.

She became a “proper bona fide celebrity, in a way that almost no journalists of the 19th century were,” explains Dr Bob Nicholson, a historian of Victorian media and popular culture at Edge Hill University, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast about how the story unfolded.

How Nellie Bly tricked psychiatric doctors

Soon after starting to alarm her fellow boarding house residents, Bly was examined by the police, a judge and doctors at a hospital.

“She had the challenge of trying to convince people that she was mad, but not to also terribly mistreat her. [Eventually] the judge sent her to a hospital in New York to be examined. And from there, they were absolutely convinced she's mad. Every doctor was 100 per cent certain,” Nicholson says.

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“They then send her to Blackwell's Island, which is a small island in the river between Manhattan and Queens.”

Her employer, the New York World, promised to retrieve her in ten days – meaning that “for those ten days, she was entirely at the mercy of the people of the asylum,” Nicholson says.

Bly dropped the ‘mad’ act once she arrived at the asylum, but the staff just assumed that her normal behaviours were symptoms of insanity.

“She can't tell them, ‘I am a journalist and I'm doing all this for a story,’ because that sounds like the maddest thing you could possibly say,” Nicholson points out.

With her performance now behind her, it became clear to Bly that she had come upon a big story.

“It’s absolutely ridden with abuse, with terrible treatment of patients,” Nicholson says.

“Nurses and attendants that looked after them day-to-day were particularly abusive. They would beat and choke patients, they would refuse them food, they would tease them and goad them. They wouldn't give them enough clothes to keep warm.”

Bly also “described in vivid detail the terrible food she would have to eat, the times that she would be plunged into an ice-cold bath and scrubbed by one of the other patients, and then placed into just a wet nightgown to sleep in an ice-cold cell,” he says.

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While rumours had been circulating about the terrible conditions on Blackwell’s Island, no one had corroborated them until Bly was able to actually see – and experience – them for herself.

“The little details in there really hammer home the horror of it. It's an incredibly powerful expose that she writes when she gets out,” Nicholson says.

Reform to New York City’s mental health treatment

The story was published in two parts, with the first ending in a cliffhanger as Bly boards the boat to the asylum, and then later as a book titled Ten Days in a Mad-house. It piqued people’s curiosity, and they were astonished by what she had managed to do.

There was also a “journalistic frenzy” around the story, Nicholson says, because lots of papers had unwittingly reported on Bly’s admission to the asylum at the start. The New York Times had called her a “mysterious waif,” and other papers wrote about the unknown attractive girl who had appeared with no knowledge of who she was.

“She had fooled the journalists, and they'd written all these reports about her. So, one of the first reactions from the other papers who've been duped is embarrassment,” Nicholson says. “They desperately then try to get in first, before her next instalment comes out a week later.”

As well as causing a sensation, the buzz around the story led to real change in the way the facility was run.

“The conditions in the asylum that she uncovers are so shocking and horrifying to people, that it is enough to put pressure on the government to invest more money in the asylums to make sure that they are reformed,” Nicholson says.

The reforms included a new requirement for female physicians and ‘properly trained attendants’ to be present at patient assessments, new sanitation regulations, and the firing of abusive staff members.

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Nellie Bly was a pioneer of a new style of journalism

Bly’s journalism created change in real people’s lives – but Nicholson thinks that it wasn’t just the coverage that allowed this change to happen. It was her unique approach to the story that gave it so much power.

“Ultimately what makes that story so compelling is not just what she finds, it's her narrative. We really become fascinated with her and with her journey. And the jeopardy of going undercover becomes just as important as anything else,” he says.

Other papers soon followed suit and a new trend in journalism arose. Ten Days in a Mad-house became an early example of investigative journalism with a performative element, designed to attract more attention.

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“The vast majority of journalists in the 19th century would have been completely anonymous,” Nicholson says. Bly’s story “broke the mould of what a conventional journalist would do”.

But it wasn’t just the experiential element of her reporting. Bly also broke the mould as a female journalist. She wasn’t the first or only woman working as a journalist at the time, but others were mostly confined to covering subject matter like weddings, fashion, and society.

Bly showed that women were capable of much more, and inspired other young women to become stunt journalists in the 1880s, Nicholson says.

“She threw herself into absolutely everything, whether it was learning to fence or to be a chorus girl, being admitted to a ‘madhouse’, or reporting on a war. In the end, she ticks off almost every aspect of journalism. All the things that people told her a woman couldn't do, she did.”

Bob Nicholson was speaking to Kev Lochun on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.