Bedlam (41 page)

• On an experiment that indicates the normal are not detectably sane.

Gregory Bateson, ed.
Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis 1830-1832.
New York 1974. A modern edition of John Perceval,
A Narrative of the Treatment Received by a Gentleman, During a State of Mental Derangement.
2 vols. London 1838, 1840.

• A memorable account of a nineteenth-century incarceration for insanity, by the son of the murdered British Prime Minister.

Anon.
The Mysteries of the Madhouse.
London 1847.

• Tales of madness and suffering from inside Bethlem, by an unknown observer.

www.greghollingshead.com

Author’s website. Go to
Bedlam,
Essays, Interviews, and Talks.

www.theairloom.org

The artist Rod Dickinson’s model of the air loom.

collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

Pictures of Bethlem at Moorfields. Go to Search the Collections, Society, Community and Social Welfare, Health and Disease.

www.bethlemheritage.org.uk/archbethlem. html

Archives of Bethlem Royal Hospital.

www.medicalmuseums.org/museums/ bethlem.htm

Website of the Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum.

An Excerpt from
The Roaring Girl
(1995):

One day I opened my door and it was Harris. He hadn’t knocked. I was on my way out for a chocolate bar. I needed chocolate. Once when I was a kid I picked up the phone to call my father and my father was right there. I hadn’t dialled.

“Henry?” my father said.

It was like that. After twenty-five years I wasn’t expecting Harris, but after twenty-five years the shock exploded any question of expectation.

When I first saw him again, Harris was still moving towards my door. The hair on his head was no longer ash-blond, it was the colour of ashes, and it poked out the expansion gap in the back of his cap, as I saw when he folded me in his arms.

“Dry those tears,” Harris said.

I invited him in.

Harris took the stairs two at a time. I remounted more slowly. In those days I was still living over the
TV
Repair. An old
TV
will be filled with roaches like a wood horse with Greeks. With Harris back I kicked myself for dragging my feet in the accommodation department.

“Where did life go?” I asked him in the kitchen.

“Life’s not gone yet,” Harris replied. He held up two mickeys of Sauza Gold, one from each pocket of his windbreaker, which was raw silk in green and chartreuse. His jeans protruded with limes.

—from “A Night at the Palace”

An Excerpt from
The Healer
(1998):

Timothy Wakelin, age thirty-two, pale features handsome or weak, it was hard to tell, fine dark hair thinning, widower food stains down the front of his blue cotton turtleneck, sat, dismayed and receiving looks, along a rear wall in the single chair at a table for two in the Grant Gemboree, a bus-stop café in the mining town of Grant. It was lunchtime on a hot weekday in late June. Outside, through layers of smoke, blue and enfolded, pickup trucks slowly passed. Inside, the place was jammed. Everybody knew everybody else, and everybody except the stranger had a cigarette going. A din of talk, shouts, horseplay. Clattering cutlery and banging dishes. The name tag of the waitress—not Wakelin’s own waitress but the one who had taken away the other chair from his table—said Ardis, and he was
watching her closely because he knew that this was the name of the healer’s mother, and it did not strike him as a common name, unless it was common around here. Ardis was a tall woman, five-eight (Wakelin guessed) in flat heels. In adolescence she must have enjoyed the attractiveness of a cherub or an animal cub. Wakelin saw cheeks once rosy with new powers, but those powers, with the booze and the cigarettes, in middle age were swollen with disappointment, the cheeks pouchy, the bleached hair pinned up like straw, eyes dark-ringed and guarded.

She did not look like the mother of a saint.

This novel owes a great deal to the brilliant work of the late Roy Porter, without whose encouragement it would not have been written.

The best accounts of James Tilly Matthews are by Roy Porter and Mike Jay. My own primary source has been Roy Porter’s edition of John Haslam’s
Illustrations of Madness
(1810; London and New York 1988). Mike Jay has kindly let me see proofs of his nonfiction study of Matthews,
The Air Loom Gang
(London 2003). Among other twentieth-century sources, the richest have been Jonathan Andrews
et al., The History of Bethlem
(London 1997) on Bethlem Hospital; Erving Goffman,
Asylums
(New York 1961) on psychiatric institutions; Roy Porter,
Mind-Forg’d Manacles
(Cambridge 1987) on eighteenth-century madness; and Andrew Scull
et al., Masters of Bedlam
(Princeton 1996) on John Haslam.

As well as his
Illustrations of Madness,
works by Haslam I have used, now and then for his own words and phrases, include his
Observations on Insanity
(London 1798),
Observations on Madness and Melancholy
(London 1809),
Observations of the Physician and Apothecary of Bethlem Hospital
(London 1816),
Considerations on the Moral Management of Insane Persons
(London 1817),
A Letter to the Governors of Bethlem Hospital
(London 1818),
Sound Mind
(London 1819), and
On the Nature of Thought
(London 1835). I have also drawn, again at times verbatim, from Britain’s Parliamentary Papers (1815),
Report (4) from the Committee on Madhouses in England,
House of Commons; Anon.,
Sketches in Bedlam
(London 1824); John Perceval,
A Narrative of the Treatment Received by a Gentleman, During a State of Mental Derangement,
2 vols. (London 1838, 1840); Anon.,
The Mysteries of the Madhouse
(London 1847); and M.G. Lewis,
Journal of a West India Proprietor, 1815-1817
(London 1929).

The artist Rod Dickinson has constructed an Air Loom based on Matthews’ engravings. It may be seen at www.theairloom.org.

For their generous assistance, I thank the staffs of the Wellcome Institute Library, Bethlem Royal Hospital Archive, British Library, Archives des Affaires Étrangères, and Public Record Office. Jonathan Andrews has been extraordinarily helpful with details pertaining to Bethlem and its staff and residents. Any omissions, errors, and conflations and broadenings of historical figures are my doing, not his. For their warmth and hospitality on my several research trips to London, I owe more than a Bethlem Archive souvenir coffee mug to my friends Doug and Judy Vickers. For her clerical support, I thank Marcie Whitecotton-Carroll. For advice on, and contributions to, the work in progress, I am grateful to Jonathan Andrews, Siobhan Blessing, Pamela Erlichman, John Glenday, Mike Jay, Terry Karten, Nicole Langlois, Anne McDermid, Mark Morris, Rosa Spricer, Bruce Stovel, and my wise and tireless editor and champion, Phyllis Bruce.