Book Review: Bedlam (2004)
Apr. 30th, 2008 04:16 pmBook #18 of the year is Bedlam, by Greg Hollingshead (2004). This was a prominent Canadian release, winning several national and provincial awards. It was one of the more interesting books I've read this year, set in the familiar (from the recently read O'Brian novels) period of late 1700s and early 1800s England. More specifically, London, and even more specifically, Bethlem Royal Hospital - aka "Bedlam", the world's first and longest-running psychiatric hospital.
The book is set at a time when insanity was becoming an important national and scientific interest. Doctors were actively looking for a way to cure madness. The idea that kindness, compassion, and a clean environment might help recovery were gaining ground. Still, the practical reality of dealing with the violently insane, and lack of social or scientific tools to do so, meant that many idealist reformers found themselves turning into wrung-out caretakers, relying on chains and straw beds to keep order.
The book is a fictionalized account of the incarceration of James Tilly Matthews. Matthews was an English tea merchant and would-be republican (in the old revolutionary sense) whose delusions were exhaustively recorded in a book by John Haslam, the apothecary of Bethlem and the de facto manager of the hospital. His book has one of the best titles ever, and it's available on the Internet:
Illustrations of Madness: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity, And a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinions: Developing the Nature of An Assailment, And the Manner of Working Events; with a Description of Tortures Experienced by Bomb-Bursting, Lobster-Cracking and Lengthening the Brain. Embellished with a Curious Plate by James Haslam (1810).
I told you it had an awesome title...
Matthews believed that gangs of French spies, or possibly demons, were camped in basements around England with devices called "Air Looms". These devices could exert a magnetic influence at a distance upon their targets, and allow the operators to inhabit the bodies of their victims and tools. Matthews was generally considered harmless and quite intelligent, and even sane aside from his Air Loom delusions, but his wife was never able to win his release from Bethlem. The laws at the time required lunatics to be released after a year if they had family, even if they showed no sign of improvement. Only clearly violent lunatics were kept, and even they might be decanted into the street if the hospital didn't want to deal with them.
Matthews was in an unusual position because there may have been a foundation to some of his delusions. He had worked with some very big names in British government as part of a secret plan to make peace with France. He met with very senior members of the Revolutionary government in France, but gradually lost their trust as he (apparently) become more and more eccentric. Eventually he was imprisoned in the Bastille as a lunatic. He was released in the late 1700s and returned to England, but almost immediately imprisoned in Bethlem.
Though there is little written proof, the suggestion is that he was kept there at the direction of members of the privy council, who perhaps feared that he might spills the beans about their secret overtures to the French. And, of course, this was the age when Mesmer's "animal magnetism" was still widely accepted as good science. It is possible (though unlikely, perhaps) that "Air Loom" technology actually existed, though not as a working device, perhaps as a secret British project. Governments have invested in crazier schemes in more enlightened times.
It is a good book, solidly written, with excellent and realistic characterizations. Haslam, for example, is portrayed as a generally good man with a number of conflicting motives and emotions that are hard to unify - just like a real person. The book is set in the decade when the Old Bethlem Hospital (built in 1675) is a crumbling ruin, undermined by illegal warehouses dug in the cellars by the East India Company. A new hospital is planned on enlightened, modern principles, but in the meantime the old facility is left to crumble, along with its inhabitants. The book provides details that humanize even the brutal keepers. For example, during this period, asylum keeps and attendants were required to live in the asylum, and many simply worked until they died. They were on duty 24 hours a day, and rarely left the walls of Bethlem. They were provided with free beer, which was their only amusement, aside from the inmates, and so they were often alcoholic wrecks. Many ended up in Bethlem as inmates themselves.
I was going to move on to The Alienist, on the recommendation of![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
melskunk, but the intense weirdness of Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, followed by the depressing grimness of Bedlam, has put me in the mood for some crunchy SF or Wodehousian light comedy!
The book is set at a time when insanity was becoming an important national and scientific interest. Doctors were actively looking for a way to cure madness. The idea that kindness, compassion, and a clean environment might help recovery were gaining ground. Still, the practical reality of dealing with the violently insane, and lack of social or scientific tools to do so, meant that many idealist reformers found themselves turning into wrung-out caretakers, relying on chains and straw beds to keep order.
The book is a fictionalized account of the incarceration of James Tilly Matthews. Matthews was an English tea merchant and would-be republican (in the old revolutionary sense) whose delusions were exhaustively recorded in a book by John Haslam, the apothecary of Bethlem and the de facto manager of the hospital. His book has one of the best titles ever, and it's available on the Internet:
Illustrations of Madness: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity, And a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinions: Developing the Nature of An Assailment, And the Manner of Working Events; with a Description of Tortures Experienced by Bomb-Bursting, Lobster-Cracking and Lengthening the Brain. Embellished with a Curious Plate by James Haslam (1810).
I told you it had an awesome title...
Matthews believed that gangs of French spies, or possibly demons, were camped in basements around England with devices called "Air Looms". These devices could exert a magnetic influence at a distance upon their targets, and allow the operators to inhabit the bodies of their victims and tools. Matthews was generally considered harmless and quite intelligent, and even sane aside from his Air Loom delusions, but his wife was never able to win his release from Bethlem. The laws at the time required lunatics to be released after a year if they had family, even if they showed no sign of improvement. Only clearly violent lunatics were kept, and even they might be decanted into the street if the hospital didn't want to deal with them.
Matthews was in an unusual position because there may have been a foundation to some of his delusions. He had worked with some very big names in British government as part of a secret plan to make peace with France. He met with very senior members of the Revolutionary government in France, but gradually lost their trust as he (apparently) become more and more eccentric. Eventually he was imprisoned in the Bastille as a lunatic. He was released in the late 1700s and returned to England, but almost immediately imprisoned in Bethlem.
Though there is little written proof, the suggestion is that he was kept there at the direction of members of the privy council, who perhaps feared that he might spills the beans about their secret overtures to the French. And, of course, this was the age when Mesmer's "animal magnetism" was still widely accepted as good science. It is possible (though unlikely, perhaps) that "Air Loom" technology actually existed, though not as a working device, perhaps as a secret British project. Governments have invested in crazier schemes in more enlightened times.
It is a good book, solidly written, with excellent and realistic characterizations. Haslam, for example, is portrayed as a generally good man with a number of conflicting motives and emotions that are hard to unify - just like a real person. The book is set in the decade when the Old Bethlem Hospital (built in 1675) is a crumbling ruin, undermined by illegal warehouses dug in the cellars by the East India Company. A new hospital is planned on enlightened, modern principles, but in the meantime the old facility is left to crumble, along with its inhabitants. The book provides details that humanize even the brutal keepers. For example, during this period, asylum keeps and attendants were required to live in the asylum, and many simply worked until they died. They were on duty 24 hours a day, and rarely left the walls of Bethlem. They were provided with free beer, which was their only amusement, aside from the inmates, and so they were often alcoholic wrecks. Many ended up in Bethlem as inmates themselves.
I was going to move on to The Alienist, on the recommendation of
melskunk, but the intense weirdness of Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, followed by the depressing grimness of Bedlam, has put me in the mood for some crunchy SF or Wodehousian light comedy!
