The fashionable and well-known physician George Cheyne (16711743) regarded the corrosive and viscid

humour associated with splenetic disorders as being caused by 'the English climate, the richness and
heaviness of our food, the quality of the soil, the wealth and abundance of the inhabitants, the inactivity and
sedentary occupations of the better Sort and the Humour of living in great, populous and unhealthy towns'.
However, he attached prime importance to diet and in his Essay on Health and Long Life (1724) he
advocated a milk and seed diet. Nevertheless, madness continued to be associated with inner excellence and
social quality. Cheyne himself suffered from depression and claimed that 'those of the liveliest and quickest
natural Parts ... whose genius is most keen and penetrating', were most prone to such disorders. First, the
spleen, unlike lowness of spirits, was an indicator of high social rank. Secondly, it also implied a degree of
intelligence, imagination, and sensitivity in the sufferer. As a youth, David Hume was in correspondence
with Cheyne. After describing his symptoms, Hume was flattered and reassured to learn that his was no
ordinary complaint, but 'a disease of the learned'. Thus, even a rank order in illnesses was acknowledged.
Eighteenth-century writers on the spleen were also concerned with the relationship between imagination
and the spleen and, in particular, with the possible dangers of too much imagination. The fear of
imagination developed from and is related to the fear of passion. Thomas Wright was able to voice these
fears most clearly and forcefully (The Passions of the Minde in Generall, 1620). He described the evil
effects of unrestrained passions as: 'blindness of understanding, persuasion of will, alteration of humours;
and by them maladies and diseases and troublesomeness and disquietness of the soul.' The paradoxical
demands of reason and imagination and the precariousness of their relationships were recognized well in
advance of Freud's discussion of the dilemmas of civilized man. Foremost among the 18th-century
distrusters of imagination was Samuel Johnson, who waged a lifelong battle against melancholy. Idleness
and solitude were both to be avoided on the grounds that they provided a fertile breeding ground for the
imagination. Solitude 'is dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue. ... Remember ... that the
solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious and probably mad: the mind stagnates for want
of employment, grows morbid and is extinguished like a candle in foul air.' Idleness was condemned not
because of its later associations with poverty, but because it promotes inner stagnation and decay.
Early 19th-century writing on insanity was dominated by the work of the moral managers. Their ideas
developed from faculty psychology, according to which man possessed three souls: the rational, the
sensitive, and the vegetative. The rational soul is concerned with understanding and the will; the sensitive
soul is concerned with the imagination, memory, and perception; and the vegetative soul is concerned with
growth, nutrition, and reproduction. Health depends upon the right relationship between the rational and the
sensitive soul, namely one of dominance and control. The moral managers held that insanity was a 'lesion
of understanding' and that the will could be trained to cope with the possibility of madness. John Locke had
first put forward the view that madness was a self-contained defect of reason and thus left open the
possibility that other parts of the self could be enlisted to combat this weakness. In An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding, Locke wrote that:
madmen do not appear to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some ideas very
wrongly they mistake them for truths ... as though incoherent ideas have been cemented together so
powerfully as to remain united. But there are degrees of madness as of folly; the disorderly jumbling ideas
together in some more, in some, less. In short, herein seems to lie the difference between idiots and
madmen. That madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason
right from them. But idiots make very few or no propositions, but argue and reason scarce at all.
Now that the seat of madness had been isolated, optimism and cure became possible. In fact, much of the
writing on insanity in the first half of the 19th century was concerned with delineating the strategic role
played by the will. One such book which crystallizes the early 19th-century outlook is called Man's Power
over Himself to Prevent or Control Insanity, published anonymously in 1843. The author assigns the
following role to the will:
The affection of the brain which causes delusions is not madness, but the want of power or will to examine
them, is. Nothing then but an extent of disease which destroys at once all possibility of reasoning, by
annihilating, or entirely changing the structure of the organ, can make a man necessarily mad. In all other
cases, the being sane or otherwise, not withstanding considerable disease of brain, depends on the
individual himself. He who has given a proper direction to the intellectual force and thus obtained an early
command over the bodily organ by habituating it to processes of calm reasoning, remains sane amid all the
vagaries of sense.

Within asylums treatment consisted of the cultivation of character and the rediscovery and strengthening of
will power.
During this period there was one important change of emphasis in the accounts of madness. James Cowles
Prichard, ethnologist and physician, first introduced the term 'moral insanity' in 1833, and defined it as
follows: 'This form of mental disease ... consists of a morbid perversion of the feelings, affections, habits,
without any hallucination or erroneous conviction impressed upon the understanding; it sometimes coexists
with an apparently unimpaired state of the intellectual faculties.' Thus the will was no longer the
impenetrable stronghold against insanity, and madness had shifted from defective reasoning to the
emotions. Given that the will in man was seen to be like a pilot in a ship, this reappraisal constituted a far
more serious threat to man's supremacy over madness. Incidentally, the term 'moral insanity' is often, but
erroneously, claimed to be the forebear of the modern 'psychopathic personality', whose cause still remains
a matter for debate.
The theme of moral decline which lunacy represented was developed in a more systematic way and on a
larger scale in the last third of the 19th century. Henry Maudsley published Responsibility in Mental
Disease in 1873. Misleadingly titled, it was in fact a claim for non-responsibility in mental disease
(although not in any indulgent sense) and was largely an argument against the claims of the moral
managers. Maudsley was not concerned with cure so much as with identifying and segregating the morally
degenerate. Man's life is governed by genetic laws, and thought and volition are determined by them as
much as are all other aspects of human life. Maudsley called this genetic determinism 'the tyranny of
organisation'. He writes:
Individuals are born with such a flaw or warp of nature that all the care in the world will not prevent them
from being vicious or criminal, or becoming insane. ... No one can escape the tyranny of his organisation;
no one can elude the destiny that is innate in him, and which unconsciously and irresistibly shapes his ends,
even when he thinks he is determining them with consummate foresight and skill.
Whatever the complex intellectual and social changes that contributed towards this position (see asylums: a
historical survey), it is a startling reversal of earlier accounts. Maudsley brings the dialogue with the
irrational to a bleak and abrupt close. His concept of the 'tyranny of organization' seems to have been taken
to its logical conclusion by Johannes Lange in his book Crime and Destiny (1930). Later studies of twins
involved in crime have given as much emphasis to environmental as to hereditary factors as causes of
felony.
(Published 1987)
Insanity and Spiritual Songs in the Soul of a Saint
The second reason I am drawn to William Cowper is that I want to know the man behind the hymn, "God
Moves In a Mysterious Way." Over the years it has become very precious to me and to many in our church.
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never failing skill,
He treasures up his bright designs
And works his sovereign will.
Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.
Judge not the lord by feeble sense,
But trust him for his grace;
behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.

His purpose will ripen fast,

Unfolding every hour;
the bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flower.
Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan his work in vain:
God is his own interpreter,
And he will make it plain.
This hymn hangs over our mantle at home. It expresses the foundation of my theology and my life so well
that I long to know the man who wrote it.
Finally, I want to know why this man struggled with depression and despair almost all his life. I want to try
to come to terms with insanity and spiritual songs in the same heart of one whom I think was a saint.
A Sketch of his Life
Let's begin with a sketch of his life. Who was he and when did he live?
He was born in 1731 and died in 1800. That makes him a contemporary of John Wesley and George
Whitefield, the leaders of the Evangelical Revival in England. He embraced Whitefield's Calvinistic
theology rather than Wesley's Arminianism. It was a warm, evangelical brand of Calvinism, shaped (in
Cowper's case) largely by one of the healthiest men in the 18th century, the "old African blasphemer" John
Newton, whom we will see more of in a moment.
Cowper said he could remember how as a child he would see the people at four o'clock in the morning
coming to hear Whitefield preach in the open air. "Moorfields (was) as full of the lanterns of the
worshippers before daylight as the Haymarket was full of flambeaux on opera nights" (see note 1).
He was 27 years old when Jonathan Edwards died in America. He lived through the American and French
revolutions. His poetry was known by Benjamin Franklin who gave Cowper's first volume a good review
(see note 2). But he was not a man of affairs or travel. He was a recluse who spent virtually all his adult life
in the rural English country side near Olney and Weston.
From the standpoint of adventure or politics or public engagement his life was utterly uneventful. The kind
of life no child would ever choose to read about. But for those of us who are older we have come to see that
the events of the soul are probably the most important events in life. And the battles in this man's soul were
of epic proportions.
So let's sketch his seemingly uneventful life with a view to seeing the battles of the soul.
From 1749 he was apprenticed to a solicitor with a view to practicing lawat least this was his father's
view. He never really applied himself, and had no heart for the public life of a lawyer or a politician. For
ten years he did not take his legal career seriously, but lived a life of leisure with token involvement in his
supposed career.
In 1752 he sank into his first paralyzing depressionthe first of four major battles with mental breakdown
so severe as to set him to string out of windows for weeks at a time. Struggle with despair came to be the
theme of his life. He was 21 years old and not yet a believer. He wrote about the attack of 1752 like this:
(I was struck) with such a dejection of spirits, as none but they who have felt the same, can have the least
conception of. Day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horror, and rising up in despair. I presently
lost all relish for those studies, to which before I had been closely attached; the classics had no longer any
charms for me; I had need of something more salutary than amusement, but I had not one to direct me
where to find it.
He came through this depression with the help of the poems of George Herbert (who lived 150 years
earlier). These contained enough beauty and enough hope that Cowper found strength to take several
months away from London by the sea in Southampton. What happened there was both merciful and sad. He
wrote in his Memoir:
The morning was calm and clear; the sun shone bright upon the sea; and the country on the borders of it
was the most beautiful I had ever seen...Here it was, that on a sudden, as if another sun had been kindled
that instant in the heavens, on purpose to dispel sorrow and vexation of spirit, I felt the weight of all my
weariness taken off; my heart became light and joyful in a moment; I could have wept with transport had I
been alone.
That was the mercy. The sadness of it was that he confessed later that instead of giving God the credit for
this mercy he formed the habit merely of battling his depression, if at all, by seeking changes of scenery. It
was the merciful hand of God in nature. But he did not see him, or give him glory. Not yet.

Between 1749 and 1756 Cowper was falling in love with his cousin Theodora whose home he would
regularly visit on the weekends. She became the Delia of his love poems. They were engaged, but for some
mysterious reason her father, Ashley Cowper, forbade the marriage. His apparent reason was the
inappropriateness of consanguinity. She was William's cousin. But it seems strange that the relation was
allowed to develop for seven years as well as the engagement only to shatter on a brick wall at the last
minute. Probably her father knew things about William that convinced him he would not have been a good
husband for his daughter. This is probably true.
But it didn't turn out the way he hoped. Though they never saw each other again after 1756, Theodora
outlived him but never married. She followed the poetic career of William from a distance and sent him
money anonymously when he was in need, even a regular stipend at one point.
We know of 19 poems that he wrote to her under the name Delia. One of them, written some years after
their parting, shows the abiding pain:
But now, sole partner in my Delia's heart,
Yet doomed far off in exile to complain,
Eternal absence cannot ease my smart,
And hope subsists but to prolong my pain.
What we find is that William Cowper's life seems to be one long accumulation of pain.
In 1759 when he was 28 years old he was appointed, through the influence of his father, Commissioner of
Bankrupts in London. Four years later he was about to be made Clerk of Journals in Parliament. What
would have been a great career advancement to most men struck fear in William Cowperso much so that
he had a total mental breakdown, tried three different ways to commit suicide, and was put into an asylum.
His father had arranged for the position. But his enemies in parliament decided to require a public
interrogation for his son as a prerequisite. Cowper wrote about the dreadful attack of 1763:
All the horrors of my fears and perplexities now returned. A thunderbolt would have been as welcome to
me as this intelligence (=interrogation) ... Those whose spirits are formed like mine, to whom a public
exhibition of themselves, on any occasion, is mortal poison, may have some idea of the horror of my
situation; others can have none (see note 3).
For more than half a year his feelings were those "of a man when he arrives at the place of execution."
At that point something dreadful returned to his memory that causes us to wonder about what kind of father
William Cowper had. The 32 year old Clerk suddenly recalled a "treatise on self-murder" that he read when
he was 11 years old.
I well recollect when I was about eleven years of age, my father desired me to read a vindication of selfmurder, and give him my sentiments upon the question: I did so, and argued against it. My father heard my
reasons, and was silent, neither approving nor disapproving; from whence I inferred that he sided with the
author against me (see note 4).
In the week before his examination (October 1763) he bought laudanum to use as a poison. He pondered
escaping to France to enter a monastery. He had illusions of seeing himself slandered in the newspaper
anonymously. He was losing his hold on reality almost entirely.
The day before the Parliamentary examination he set out to drown himself and took a cab to Tower Wharf.
But at Custom House Quay he found the water too low and "a porter seated upon some goods" as if "a
message to prevent" him (see note 5).
When he got home that evening he tried to take the laudanum but found his fingers "closely contracted" and
"entirely useless." The next morning he tried three times to hang himself with a garter. The third time he
became unconscious, but the garter broke. The laundress found him in bed and called his uncle who
canceled the examination immediately. And that was the end of Cowper's brush with public lifebut not
the end of his brush with death.
Conviction of sin took place, especially of that just committed; the meanness of it, as well as its atrocity,
were exhibited to me in colours so inconceivably strong that I despised myself, with a contempt not to be
imagined or expressed ... This sense of it secured me from the repetition of a crime which I could not now
reflect on without abhorrence ... A sense of God's wrath, and a deep despair of escaping it, instantly
succeeded (see note 6).
Now everything he read condemned him. Sleep would not come, and, when it did, it brought him terrifying
dreams. When he awoke he "reeled and staggered like a drunken man."

So in December 1763, he was committed to St. Albans Insane Asylum where the 58 year old Dr. Nathaniel
Cotton tended the patients. He was somewhat of a poet, but most of all, by God's wonderful design, an
evangelical believer and lover of God and the gospel.
He loved Cowper and held out hope to him repeatedly in spite of his insistence that he was damned and
beyond hope. Six months into his stay Cowper found a Bible lying (not by accident) on a bench in the
garden.
Having found a Bible on the bench in the garden, I opened upon the 11th of St. John, where Lazarus is
raised from the dead; and saw so much benevolence, mercy, goodness, and sympathy with miserable men,
in our Saviour's conduct, that I almost shed tears upon the relation; little thinking that it was an exact type
of the mercy which Jesus was on the point of extending towards myself. I sighed, and said, "Oh, that I had
not rejected so good a Redeemer, that I had not forfeited all his favours." Thus was my heart softened,
though not yet enlightened (see note 7).
Increasingly he felt he was not utterly doomed. There came another revelation and he turned again to the
Bible and the first verse he saw was Romans 3:25: "Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through
faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the
forbearance of God."
Immediately I received the strength to believe it, and the full beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone
upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the atonement He had made, my pardon sealed in His blood, and all the
fullness and completeness of His justification. In a moment I believed, and received the gospel ... Whatever
my friend Madan had said to me, long before, revived in all its clearness, with demonstration of the spirit
and power. Unless the Almighty arm had been under me, I think I should have died with gratitude and joy.
My eyes filled with tears, and my voice choked with transport; I could only look up to heaven in silent fear,
overwhelmed with love and wonder (see note 8).
He had come to love the place of Dr. Cotton so much that he stayed on another 12 months after his
conversion. One might wish the story were one of emotional triumph after his conversion. But it will not
turn out that way. Far from it.
In June 1765, Cowper left St. Albans and moved in with the Unwin family in Huntington. Mary Unwin was
only 8 years older than Cowper, but she was to become to him like a mother for almost 30 years. In 1767
Mr. Morley Unwin, Mary's husband, died in a tragic fall from his horse. This set the stage for the most
important relationships in Cowper's life. Not only did he and Mary Unwin live together for the rest of her
life, but at the death of her husband, John Newton entered the picture and became the most important
influence in Cowper's life.
note 10).
Newton saw Cowper's bent to melancholy and reclusiveness and drew him into the ministry of visitation as
much as he could. They would take long walks together between homes and talk of God and his purposes
for the church. Then in 1769 Newton got the idea of collaborating with Cowper on a book of hymns to be
sung by their church. He thought it would be good for Cowper's poetic bent to be engaged.
In the end Newton wrote about 208 hymns and Cowper wrote 68. The hymnal was published in 1779.
Besides "Amazing Grace," Newton wrote "How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds" and "Glorious Things of
Thee Are Spoken" and "Come, My Soul Thy Suit Prepare." Cowper wrote "God Moves in a Mysterious
Way" and "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood" and "O for a Closer Walk with God In 1780 Newton
leaves Olney for a new pastorate in Lombard Street, London where he served for the next 27 years. It is a
great tribute to him that he did not abandon his friendship with Cowper, though this would have been
emotionally easy to do no doubt. Instead there is an earnest exchange of letters for twenty years. Cowper
poured out his soul to Newton as to no one else.
Perhaps it was good for Newton to go away, because when he left, Cowper poured himself into his major
poetic projects between 1780 and 1786. You have probably never heard of any of these. His most famous
and lengthy was called The Task, a one hundred page poem in blank verse. Even though he saw himself in
his blackest moods as reprobate and hopeless, he never stopped believing in the truth of the Evangelical
Revival. All his poems are meant to teach as well as to entertain.
He wrote about himself:
... I, who scribble rhyme
To catch the triflers of the time,
And tell them truths divine and clear
Which, couched in prose, they would not hear. (see note 13)

His first volume of poems was published in 1782 when he was 51. Three years later came The Task which
established his fame. The great usefulness of these poems is that they "helped to spread (the Revival's)
ideas among the educated of all classes ... because of his formal alliance with the (Evangelical) movement
and the practical effects of his work, (Cowper) remains its (poet) laureate" (see note 14).
Perhaps his productivity staved off the threatened breakdown of 1783, the next ten-year interval. But the
reprieve did not last. In 1786 Cowper entered his fourth deep depression and again tried unsuccessfully to
commit suicide. He and Mary move from Olney to Weston that year and the long decline of both of them
begins. He cares for her as for a dying Mother from 1790 to 1796, filling what moments he can with work
on his translations of Homer and other Greek and French works. He writes his last original poem in 1799,
called The Castaway, and then dies apparently in utter despair in 1800.
William Cowper's melancholy is disturbing. We need to come to terms with it in the framework of God's
sovereign power and grace to save and sanctify his people. What are we to make of this man's life long
battle with depression, and indeed his apparent surrender to despair and hopelessness in his own life?
One thing to notice is that there is some inconsistency in the way he reports his misery and hopelessness.
For example, in a letter to John Newton on January (!) 13, 1784 he wrote,
arth brilliantly satirizes the often useless and destructive character of Britain's ruling classes.
This original engraving was both designed and engraved by William Hogarth and published by William
Heath in 1822.
Hogarth: The Rakes Progress Scene 8
The final scene is set in Bethlehem Royal Hospital (Bedlam), an institution for the poor and insane. He is
lying in the foreground almost stripped of clothes and thus his social pretensions. Sarah weeps by his side
knowing that Tom is beyond her help. Like prisons and other hospitals, Bedlam was open to paying
visitors. Within this scene an aristocratic lady and her maid are standing towards the left, amused and
disgusted by the antics of the unfortunate people around them. The irony is that, while Tom had set out to
mimic the aristocratic lifestyle, he finishes by being one of its entertainments.
In the concluding scene Tom has descended into madness and is now in Bethlem Hospital or Bedlam as it
was known.
He is surrounded by other inLoaded as my life is with despair, I have no such comfort as would result from
a supposed probability of better things to come, were it once ended ... You will tell me that this cold gloom
will be succeeded by a cheerful spring, and endeavour to encourage me to hope for a spiritual change
resembling itbut it will be lost labour. Nature revives again; but a soul once slain lives no more ... My
friends, I now expect that I shall see yet again. They think it necessary to the existence of divine truth, that
he who once had possession of it should never finally lose it. I admit the solidity of this reasoning in every
case but my own. And why not in my own? ... I forestall the answer:God's ways are mysterious, and He
giveth no account of His matters:an answer that would serve my purpose as well as theirs that use it.
There is a mystery in my destruction, and in time it shall be explained. (see note 15)
Notice that he affirms the truth of the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints and does not even quarrel
with the reality of his own conversion at St. Albans. What he disputes is that the general truth applies to
him. He is the lone exception in the universe. He is reprobate though once he was elect. Ask not why. God
gives no account. This is his bleakest way of talking.
But notice something else. In that same year he was writing The Task. In it he recounts what Christ meant
to him in a way that makes it very hard to believe there are not times now when this is still real for him:
I was stricken deer, that left the herd
Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt
My panting side was charg'd, when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
There was I found by one who had himself
Been hurt by th' archers. In his side he bore,
And in his hands and feet, the cruel scars.
With gentle force soliciting the darts,
He drew them forth, and heal'd, and bade me live.
Since then, with few associates, in remote
And silent woods I wonder, far from those
My former partners of the peopled scene;
With few associates, and not wishing more.

What would he mean in 1784, twelve years after the "fatal dream" that Jesus had drawn the arrows out and
healed him and bade him live? Were there not moments when he truly felt this and affirmed it against the
constitutional gloom of his own mind?
Even in the 1790's there were expressions of hope. From time to time he gave evidence, for example, that
he was permitted by God "once more to approach Him in prayer." His earliest biographer and friend said
that in the days of the last decade God had once more opened a passage for him but that "spiritual hounds"
haunted him at night (see note 16).
A Rake's Progress by William Hogarth, Plate 8: "A Rake's Progress" ends in the famous madhouse,
Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam). Chained, half-naked, and in great anguish is our final view of Tom
Rakewell. Faithful to the end, Sarah Young attempts to give him whatever comfort she can. One keeper
attends to Tom's chains while another molests Sarah.
This particular image is among Hogarth's greatest and most damning indictments of society. Its cast of
tormented characters points to the many causes of madness. Behind Tom and Sarah, science has claimed
two victims. One studies the stars through a useless role or tube of paper, while another scribbles geometric
calculations on the wall. Religion, too, has led to madness. In the cell to the left, a tormented, half-animal,
soul worships his cross. To the extreme right a delusional man believes he is the Pope. Beside him a
musician madly plays his violin with a stick. On the steps a love lost man has carved the initials of his
obsession ('Charming Betty Careless', who was a famous prostitute of the day) on the banister. Rounding
out this horrific scene is a mad tailor and, in cell 55, a naked delusional King.
Most disturbing, however, are the two, pretty aristocratic ladies who have come to view the suffering of the
insane as a form of entertainment. Throughout this entire, masterful set, Hogarth has shown us the dangers
of a morally bankrupt society.
Almost thirty years (1763) after completing A Rake's Progress, Hogarth returned to this final plate and
made one significant addition. On the wall he etched an image of a halfpenny portraying Britannia with her
hair wildly flying behind her. Within the lower margin he also wrote, "Retouch'd by the Author, 1763." In
the last year of his life, Hogarth clearly felt that Britain and its ruling classes had not improved.
A Rake's Progress was first published by William Hogarth in 1735. Created several years after A Harlot's
Progress, it chronicles many of the same vices and follies. But whereas Moll, the heroine of the earlier set,
is a victim of society, the young, aristocratic 'hero', of A Rake's Progress, Tom Rakewell, is a victim of
himself. In this series, Hogarth brilliantly satirizes the often useless and destructive character of Britain's
ruling classes.
This original engraving was both designed and engraved by William Hogarth and published by William
Heath in 1822.
A Rake's Progress by William Hogarth, Plate 8: "A Rake's Progress" ends in the famous madhouse,
Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam). Chained, half-naked, and in great anguish is our final view of Tom
Rakewell. Faithful to the end, Sarah Young attempts to give him whatever comfort she can. One keeper
attends to Tom's chains while another molests Sarah.
This particular image is among Hogarth's greatest and most damning indictments of society. Its cast of
tormented characters points to the many causes of madness. Behind Tom and Sarah, science has claimed
two victims. One studies the stars through a useless role or tube of paper, while another scribbles geometric
calculations on the wall. Religion, too, has led to madness. In the cell to the left, a tormented, half-animal,
soul worships his cross. To the extreme right a delusional man believes he is the Pope. Beside him a
musician madly plays his violin with a stick. On the steps a love lost man has carved the initials of his
obsession ('Charming Betty Careless', who was a famous prostitute of the day) on the banister. Rounding
out this horrific scene is a mad tailor and, in cell 55, a naked delusional King.
Most disturbing, however, are the two, pretty aristocratic ladies who have come to view the suffering of the
insane as a form of entertainment. Throughout this entire, masterful set, Hogarth has shown us the dangers
of a morally bankrupt society.
Almost thirty years (1763) after completing A Rake's Progress, Hogarth returned to this final plate and
made one significant addition. On the wall he etched an image of a halfpenny portraying Britannia with her
hair wildly flying behind her. Within the lower margin he also wrote, "Retouch'd by the Author, 1763." In
the last year of his life, Hogarth clearly felt that Britain and its ruling classes had not improved.
A Rake's Progress was first published by William Hogarth in 1735. Created several years after A Harlot's
Progress, it chronicles many of the same vices and follies. But whereas Moll, the heroine of the earlier set,
is a victim of society, the young, aristocratic 'hero', of A Rake's Progress, Tom Rakewell, is a victim of
himself. In this series, Hogmates who are suffering various delusions. These include a tailor, a musician, an

astronomer and an archbishop. In the door to one of the cells is a man who thinks he is a king - he is naked
and carries a straw crown and sceptre.
Like the real Bedlam, Hogarth's Madhouse is open to the public. Two fashionable ladies have come to
observe the poor suffering lunatics as one of the sights of the town.
The ever-faithful Sarah Young sits, weeping, by Tom's side. In the last of a series of paintings depicting the
story of the dissolute young man Tom Rakewell, the English artist William Hogarth (1697 1764), had
given us a rare glimpse of the interior of Bethlem Hospital in the eighteenth century. The paintings were
exhibited in 1735 to encourage potential subscribers to pay for a series of engravings, and it is largely
through these engravings that the story became known to the public.
The engravings depict Bethlem in caricature but of course Londoners and visitors had another, more direct
source of information about conditions inside the hospital until 1770 they could visit the hospital in
person without restriction. At holiday times, especially, Bethlem attracted quite large crowds. It was even
listed as an attraction in tourist guides of the time. There is no suggestion that the Hospital ever objected to
the way in which Hogarth had depicted it indeed, he was elected onto its Court of Governors in 1752.
This last scene takes place in one of the long corridors or galleries, which ran the length of the building
and functioned as ward space. Patients were housed and treated in separate areas of the hospital according
to gender and diagnosis. Metal grilles helped maintain the separation. Though some patients were
secluded, the majority had relatively free movement through the gallery as can be seen here.
Tom Rakewell lies in the foreground in a pose reminiscent of the statues by Caius Gabriel Cibber which
surmounted the entrance to the Moorfields building. He already appears to be manacled. His fellow
patients exhibit signs of different disorders. The man standing on the stairs represents religious delusion;
the seated man below him, disappointment in love. In a cell on the other side of the gallery, a man wearing
the crown (but otherwise naked) suffers from delusions of grandeur.
Surveying the scene, and using their fans to hide their blushes, are two lady visitors.
Exterior of Bethlehem, New Hospital, Hogarths picture of interior, the other hospitals exterior and
interior, 19th century interior of Bedlam. (p. 75 of Lecture Plan)
BEDLAM REVISITED: A HISTORY OF BETHLEM
HOSPITAL c1634-177O
By Jonathan Andrews
In delineating the scandalous environment of Bethiem the public visiting of its patients has standardly
been portrayed by historians as the greatest scandal of all. It has now become almost a
historical platitude to exemplify the brutalising of the insane in the classical period by describing
how Bethlem's patients were exhibtted, teased, ridiculed, provoked, abused, and otherwise
subjected to the 'impertinent curiosity of sightseers at a mere penny [or tuppence] a time' .
As zoo and freakshow, Bethlem has served 'as emblematic of an overriding cosmology of madness,
whereby 'the madman in confinement was treated no better than a beast', or 'monster'2.
Accordingly, the curtailing of visiting there in 1770 has been seen as signalling the humanising
of the madman, his elevation from animal to patient, a profound disjunction from former attitudes,
the product of a new 'Age of Sensibility', a kind of psychiatric peresiroika.
The Exhortatory Show And The Visitor Of Quality
Who, then, were these 'swarms' of visitors and what were their motives ? The orthodox,
ideal visitor, as far as the Governors were concerned was the 'person of quality', who came
to the hospital with the intention 'of doing them [ie.'the poore Lunatiques'] good & releiving
them'43 . I.e. he was defined in accordance with elite notions of morality and charity, and
with Bethlem's function as a charity. As defined by Steele in The Speclator (1712), 'a Man of
Condition or Quality' was 'one who according to the Wealth he is Master of, shews hirnselfjust,
beneficent, and charitable' 44 . The term was not generally employed, however, without a heavy
bias towards the wealthy, better educated and higher bred members of society. Such visitors were
openly courted by the Governors and conceived of as supporters of charity. Indeed, there is no
doubt from literary and journalistic accounts of visiting Bethlem that the educated and wealthy
comprised a considerable proportion of visitors to the hospital throughout the period. During
much of the seventeenth century, the customary donation required at the hospital door may
have been a greater deterrent than historians have recognised to plebiean visitors, as Ann Cook

has argued concerning the minimum penny admission fee for pre-Protectorate playgoers45 With the
hospital's rebuilding at Moorfields, the connections between charity
and the public spectacle of insanity were rendered even more explicit. The blue that had long. been worn by
the apprentices of Bridewell and the blue-coat boys of the charity schools, and had
long represented sombre charity and humility (as well as subservience), was now extended to the
inmates and staff of Bethlem. Not only was it adopted as the garb of charity patients (i.e. those
clothed and maintained at the sole charge of the hospital), and for the Porter's and basketmen's
coats of office; but it was also added to the new poor' boxes carved out of wood in the form
of two life-size figures, representing male and female patients/beggars (see Fig. 2c) 52 . Thus,
visitors would be even more directly accosted at their entrance or exit by a vivid and calculated
appeal for charity. From 1709, the inscription over the poors' boxes was posted additionally
on the outer and inner doors of the hospital (although rather to prevent embezzlement than to
elicit charity) 53 . The stark and shocking image of the insane conveyed by Cibber's statues (see
Fig 2d) of raving and melancholy madness displayed over the main gateway to new Bethiem has
received a great deal of attention from historians keen to illustrate the prevalence of brutal and
freakish conceptions of the mad in this period. The contrast of the poors' box representations
of patients with the Cibber figures has rarely, however, been commented on by historians, yet
quite clearly reflects the coexistence of a rather more generous and practical notion of the plight
of the insane and the function of visiting.
The best illustration of this dual role of visitors as overseers and benefactors, was when,
in the 1690s, the Governors established the Wardrobe Fund. This was directly provoked, ifller
alia, by the spectacle of (and the Governors embarrassment at) naked patients exposed before the public
eye, which had 'moved some Charitable persons to give Gifts and Legacies' for the
same purpose55.
The Didactic Spectacle: Visiting The Insane As A Moral Lesson
Besides the hortatory, fund-raising function of exhibiting the insane, the mad were displayed
as a didactic spectacle, and it was 'a desire for instruction' which was supposed to 'carry the
majority of spectators'or rather, the 'enlightened' visitorto Bethlem 63 . Beyond their role
as 'Objects of Charity', Bedlamites served as object lessons, living exemplams of the wages of vice
and indulgence, barely removed from their traditional signification as 'the damned'. This was
not a conscious advertisement on the part of the governing board, of course, but an adventitious
development, a circumstance, rather than an explanation, of the practice of visiting. One finds
it formulated most consummately as an ideology for the educated visitor, in the account of a
visit to Betlilem in The World (1753). For the anonymous correspondent, here, there is no
better lesson [to] be taught us in any part of the globe than in this school of misery. Here we
may see the mighty reasoners of the earth, below even the insects that crawl upon it; and from
so humbling a sight we may learn to moderate our pride, and to keep those passions within
bounds, which if too much indulged, would drive reason from her seat, and level us with the
wretches of this unhappy mansion'64
It was the utter degradation of the mad, their atavism, their inversion of the natural order,
which acted so forcibly on the minds of such visitors. Madness was the beast within that, at
close proximity, operated as both leveller and admonition. It brought man face to face with his
own bestiality and in so doing warned him to keep his baser instincts in check.
While this didactic of visiting did not attain its apogee until the eighteenth century, the
notion of madness as a moral lesson, and of the mad as teachers, was, of course, not new. It
Greek and Christian traditions from S,ocrates to Erasmus 65 . The 'good mania' of Christendom
and of Heflenic philosophy is, however, less pertinent here than the punitive madness of
providential theology. Historians have rarely connected the old, but resilient idea of madness as
divine judgment with the didactic spectacle of visiting the insane in the classical period. As God (by
degrees) stepped back from the worldly arena during the seventeenth century, the relationship between
madness/illness and immorality became increasingly direct, and the moral exemplum afforded by the
mad/ill was made increasingly explicit66.

Bethlem was founded in 1247 as a sanctuary, and became an asylum for the insane in the 1370s. It moved
from Bishopsgate to Moorfields in 1676, and to Lambeth in 1815, where it remained until 1930. THE
REBUILDING OF 'BETHLEM'
Following the great fire of 1666, a programme was launched to rebuild London hospitals, displaying the
city's wealth and prestige. Surprisingly, the first hospital to be rebuilt was the poor relation of the five
London hospitals - the much discredited Royal Bethlehem or 'Bethlem', London's 'asylum for the mad'.
Though the old building was undamaged by the fire, the Governors had concluded by 1674 that it was 'too
weak and ruinous' and too small to meet demand.
By 1676, a new building had been constructed in Moorfields, designed by the eminent scientist and
architect Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Light and airy, with landscaped gardens sweeping away from the
front entrance, it could house 120 people and was intended to inspire awe and admiration. One Londoner
wrote: "So brave, so neat, so sweet it does appear / makes one half-mad to be a lodger there".
But as so often in Bethlem's history, it was not the building that caused distress to its residents - it was the
people who ran it. By 1750, the acquisitive Monroe family of 'mad doctors' was in charge. With paying
visits from the curious public, restraints and purges, it was once again in public disrepute.
NEW MILITARY AND OTHER HOSPITALS
The rebuilding of Bethlem had inspired others. Charles II was keen to emulate Louis XIV's great Htel des
Invalides military hospital in Paris, and in 1682 work began on Christopher Wren's Chelsea Hospital,
London for disabled and aged soldiers.
By 1691 this building was complete. It was followed in 1694 by the Royal Hospital at Greenwich, London
for disabled and aged navy veterans, also designed by Wren. A century of naval hospital building followed Haslar, Hampshire (1762), Plymouth, Devon (1762), Deal, Kent (1795) and Great Yarmouth, Norfolk
(1811).
Meanwhile in 1721, Guy's Hospital in London opened its doors, built for the incurably sick and chronic
lunatics.
Ned Ward
Thus we prattled away our time till we came in sight of a noble pile of building, which diverted us from our
former discourse, and gave my friend the occasion of asking me my thoughts on this magnificent edifice. I
told him, I conceived it to be the Lord Mayor's Palace, for I could not imagine so stately a structure could
be designed for any quality inferior. He smiled at my innocent conjecture, and informed me this was
Bedlam, an hospital for mad folks.
"In truth," said I, "I think they were mad that built so costly a College for such a crack-brain society,"
adding, it was a pity so fine a building should not be possessed by such as had a sense of their happiness. It
was a mad age when this was raised, and no doubt the chief of the City were in a great danger of losing
their senses, so contrived it the more noble for their own reception, or they would never have flung away so
much money to so foolish a purpose.
Accordingly we were admitted through an iron gate, within which sat a brawny Cerberus of an indigo
colour, leaning upon a money-box. We turned in through another iron barricade, where we heard such a
rattling of chains, drumming of doors, ranting, holloaing, singing and rattling, that I could think of nothing
but Don Quevado's vision, where the damned broke loose, and put Hell in an uproar.
The first whimsy-headed wretch of this lunatic family that we observed, was a merry fellow in a straw cap,
who was saying to himself that he had an army of eagles at his command. Then clapping his hand upon his
head he swore by his crown of moonshine that he would battle all the stars in the skies but he would have
some claret. In this interim came a gentleman with a red face to stare at him. "No wonder," said his Aerial
Majesty, "that claret is so scarce, look there's a rogue carries more in his nose than I, that am Prince of the
Air, have had in my belly for a twelvemonth."
"If you are the Prince of the Air," said I, "why don't you command the Man in the Moon to give you some?"
To which he replied, "The Man in the Moon's a sorry rascal; I sent to him for a dozen bottles but t'other day,
and he swore by his bush, his cellar had been dry this six months. But I'll be even with the rogue. I expect a
cloud laden with claret to be sent me by the Sun every day, and if a spoonful of lees would save him from
choking, the old drunkard should not have a drop."
lees would save him from choking, the old drunkard should not have a drop."

10

The London Spy, Ned Ward 1709

A Visit to Bedlam
[We had been told of a patient] who is said to have crowed all day long like a cock [The Hospitals staff]
know nothing about him [but recommended we see another patient instead,] the most foolish and
ludicrous of all...because he imagined that he was a Captain and wore a wooden sword at his side and had
severall cock's feathers stuck into his hat. He wanted to command the others and did all kinds of
tomfoolery; we threw a shilling or two down to him, with which he appeared highly delighted
[We saw milder patients who were] not mad but only deprived of their wits or simple the females [we
saw were]utterly repulsive.
W.H. Quarrell and Margaret Mare (eds) London in 1710
THE MOVEMENT AGAINST 'VAIN MAGNIFICENCE'
As a reaction against the merchant-wealth extravagance of these buildings, a lively charitable movement
started up. Its intention was to pursue the social aims of supporting the sick and disabled poor rather than to
create grand buildings. In 1712, the charitable Bethel Hospital for Lunatics was built in Committee Street
(later Bethel Street), Norwich.
St Lukes, a charitable asylum for pauper lunatics with a magnificent classical frontage, was built near
Bethlem in Old Street, London and became its rival. Run by the eccentric physician William Battie (17031776), it advocated (but did not always achieve) a system of non-restraint, activity, fresh air and good food
and it rejected the Bethlem-type regime.
VOLUNTARY ASYLUMS
Other voluntary hospitals sprang up. Small scale asylums housing around 100 people were built in
Manchester (1766), Newcastle (1767), York (1777) and Liverpool (1792).
Voluntary did not always mean good, however, and York became notorious for corruption and abuse. In
1796, the Quaker community led by William Tuke (1732-1822) decided to establish their own asylum, the
York Retreat in Bootham. 'Medical' treatment was replaced by 'moral' means - kindness, reason and
humanity in a family atmosphere with no restraint. The Retreat became famous around the world.
In England, the foundations were in place for the era of the asylum and the institution.
While the crowds flocked to see the new Bethlem, the building strained under a weight of symbolic
meaning (Ingram, 2005). For example, its visual impact was both intensified and undermined by the twin
images of madness sculptured by Caius Gabriel Cibber, which from around 1676 adorned the main portico
to the institution. Known as raving and melancholy madness, the statues gave symbolic confirmation
that Bethlem was a portal to Bedlam, a world of craziness. It is in this sense of imposing crazy carica tures
on the historically real Bethlem that Bedlam serves as both a mask and a mirror of madness (Porter, 1987).
The large number of visitors strolling out to Moorfields to take in Bethlems magnificent facade led its
governors to seize on a market opportunity, allowing the paying public entry to the hospital to view the
inmates. Until at least 1770, viewing the inmates in Bethlem was a popular tourist attraction alongside the
lions in the Tower and the attractions of Bartholomew Fair (Porter, 1997). However, the actual numbers of
18th-century visitors entering Bethlem are moot; Macdonalds (1981) suggestion of 96,000 visitors to the
hospital has been rejected by Bethlems principal historians (Allderidge, 1985; Andrews et al., 1997) for its
dubious projections based on the quantity of money recorded in the poor box takings.
REASONS FOR THE ESTABLISHING AND FURTHER ENCOURAGEMENT G F S^. LUKE'S
HOSPITAL FOR LUNATICKS. TOGETHER WITH THE RULES AND ORDERS For the
GOVERNMENT thereof. M.DCC.LXXX.
^ a ' ^ H E Ufefulnefs and Neceffity of Hofpltals In
general being at prefent fo well iinderllood in
this Kingdom, it will be needlefs to offer any
Confiderations on thofe Heads. But it may not
be improper to lay before the Publick, the particular Reafons and Inducements for the fetting on Foot a new Delign
of this Sort, for the Relief of poor Lunaticks.

11

I, Experience had long fhewn, that the Hofpltal

of Bethlem was incapable of receiving and providing for
the Relief of all the unhappy Objeds of this Sorty
who made Application for it 5 this Truth can be attefted by every Governor of that Houfe^ and by tvciy
Perfon to whofe Lot it has flillen, to follcit the Ad
miffion of a Patient into it.
2. That the Expence and Difficulty attending the
AdmliTion of a Patient into the Hofpital of Bethlem,
had difcouraged many Applications for the Benefit of
that Chanty, particularly on behalf of the more neceffitous Objedls, and of fuch who refided in the remote Parts of the Kingdom.
3. That by this unavoidable Exclufion, or Delay in
the Admiffion of Objeds of this Sort, many ufeful
Members have been loft to Society, either by the Diforder gaining Strength beyond the Reach of Phyiick,
or by the Patients falling into the Hands of Perlons
utterly unt'killed in the Treatment of the Diforder, or
who have found their Advantage in negleding every
Method neceffary to obtain a Cure.
4. That many Families, (in no mean Circumftances)
through the heavy Expence attending the Support
of one Obje<ft of this Sort, have themfelves become
Objedts of charitable Relief, and thereby doubled the
Load and Lofs to the Publick.
5. That the moft fatal Acts of Violence on themfelves. Attendants and Relations, have been often confequent on the fmalleft Delay in placing the Afflided
with
In 1814, mental health reform campaigners including the campaigning journalist William Hone, and the
politically well-connected philanthropist Edward Wakefield, visited Bethlem and discovered among its
inmates some who were chained to their cell wall (Wilson, 2005). These inmates included James Norris, a
former American marine who had been pinioned in the following unique manner:
A stout iron ring was riveted round his neck, from which a short chain passed through a ring made to slide
upwards and downwards on an upright massive iron bar, more than six feet high, inserted into the wall.
Round his body a strong iron bar about two inches wide was riveted; on each side of the bar was a circular
projection; which being fashioned to and enclosing each of his arms, pinioned them close to his sides.
(quoted in Porter, 2002: 107)
Norris had spent around 12 years of his detention in Bethlem pinioned in this custom-built harness. What
made it all the more shocking was that Norris could apparently converse rationally with his visitors. On a
further visit to Bethlem, Norris visitors included an artist who sketched Norris in his iron structure. Shortly
afterwards, the image of Norris in chains was transformed into an engraving and became news.
The image of Norris in chains formed part of a portfolio of evidence for the House of Commons SubCommittee on Madhouses Enquiry of 1815 (Andrews et al., 1997). The focus was almost entirely on
Bethlem, whose officials, including its physician Dr Thomas Monro and the apothecary John Haslam,
defended the manner of Norris restraint, arguing weakly that it was for his own benefit and that they were
about to release him just as the mental health campaigners knocked on their door (Wilson, 2005). For his
part, Norris was released from his torment in 1812 only to die weeks later of tuberculosis exacerbated by
his years spent in a static position.

12

When Bethlem moved to its third premises at St Georges Fields, Southwark in 1815, the ghost of James
Norris also relocated. The image of Norris in chains was revived in newspaper stories and mental health
campaign pamphlets over the next two decades, whenever the politics of mental health reform were
reported (Wilson, 2005). The difficulty for Bethlem was that the idea of Bedlam could always serve as the
bogey image of psychiatric progress (Allderidge, 1985). While the image of Norris in chains added to 19thcentury gothic motifs of Bedlam as a madhouse of horrors (Porter, 1997), we shall now see how a
Bedlamite figure from the early modern era changed form and meaning in the popular musical culture of
the 19th century and later.
[Rivetted alive in iron, & for many years confined, in that state, by chains 12 inches long to an upright
massive bar in a cell in Bethlem.
The sad tale of James Norris (mistakenly called William by the press) captured the attention of the public in
1814 when he was discovered in Bethlem Royal Hospital, mechanically restrained and in poor health,
having been confined in isolation for more than ten years. Norris, a seaman from America, was originally
incarcerated in Bedlam for an unnamed lunacy and was, after a number of violent incidents, restrained in
this extraordinary device designed specifically for him. No less than six members of parliament visited
Norris during 1814, each maintaining that he was rational, quiet, and capable of coherent and topical
conversation.
As a result of the publication of this image and the interest it generated in asylum reform, Norris was
released from his restraints in 1814, yet remained confined in Bethlem. However, the conditions he had
endured for more than ten years had so weakened his constitution that he died within a few weeks of his
release, of either pneumonia or tuberculosis. The case of James Norris, and the public interest it created,
was instrumental in the creation of the Mad House Act of 1828, which sought to license and regulate
asylums for the insane, and to improve the treatment of the insane.
Three men were responsible for exposing the plight of William Norris, and eventually gaining his release:
Edward Wakefield (1774-1854), member of parliament, reformer, and philanthropist, William Hone (17801842), political writer and publisher, and James Bevans, architect. These men were concerned by writer and
publisher, and James Bevans, architect. These men were concerned by the condition and ill-treatment of
patients in lunatic asylums and thus formed a committee with the aim of visiting asylums around the
country and making reports on what they found. The illustration of Norris and its subsequent publication
was part of an orchestrated drive by these three men to bring the issue of asylum reform to the public. The
number of times the image was copied by different artists pays tribute to the vision of the committee. This
particular etching by G. Cruikshank, was published in 1815 by William Hone, sketched from life by G.
Arnald in 1814.]
Extract from Minutes of Bridewell and
Bethlem Governors
25 Feb. 1709
The Governors ordered that...
a larger Inscripccion be putt over the poors Box to desire all persons to see the money they give putt into
the poors Box.
And that Springs be made to the poors boxes or some other care be taken to prevent the money being pickt
out
And That [a] large Inscripccion be likewise putt over the outward and inward doores of the said hospital of
Bethlem desireing all persons to see the money they give putt into the poors box.
Extract from Minutes of Bridewell and Bethlem Governors
21 Nov. 1770
Having taken into Consideration the present Method of Admitting Persons into the Hospital to Visit and
View the Patients, and observing that great Irregularities are daily Committed the Patients disturbed and

13

often Robbed of their Provisions and Cloaths by the Admission of improper Persons into the Hospital the
Governors ordered that
for the future the Gates of the Hospital should be kept constantly Shut And that no person or persons
whatsoever, Except a Governor, or in Company with a Governor and the Officers and Servants of the
Hospital be Permitted to enter the same, unless he she or they produce to the Porter of said Hospital a
Ticket Signed same, unless he she or they produce to the Porter of said Hospital a Ticket Signed by one of
the Governors thereof the said Tickets to be provided by and delivered out under the Direction of the
Treasurer & Committee of said Hospital.
And that one of the Basketmen and Gallery Maids should attend all such Persons who should come to View
the Hospital And upon the Departure of such Persons who should be Admitted no Officer or Servant of or
belonging to said Hospital should presume to ask, demand, or receive any Benefaction or Gratuity on
behalf of the Hospital or themselves; but whatever such Persons are inclined to give that they be desired to
put the same into the Poors Box with their own Hands And the Key for the future be kept by the Treasurer
for the Time being, the said Box to be opened the last Saturday in every Month as usual in the presence of
the Weekly Committee.
And that such Persons who should become Securities for any Patient Admitted into said Hospital should
upon the Admission of such Patient have a Ticket delivered them which upon being produced to the said
Porter should Intitle two of the said Patients Friends at a Time to see them Gratis,
And that in Case an(y) Steward or Porter of the said Hospital shall disobey and Act in Contradiction of the
Rules and Regulations mentioned in the said Memorial that he & they shall be thereupon immediately
dismissed and discharged from their respective Offices.
1763 SELECT COMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON MADHOUSES
2.3.2 THE 1774 Madhouse Bill
The Bills that became the 1774 Act were formulated in the context of court cases, such as those considered
by the 1763 Select Committee on Madhouses concerning detention of the allegedly sane. The two
established remedies for such infringements of the British liberties were an application to the higher courts
for a writ of habeas corpus, or a request to a JP to intervene. The confined person was in no position to
make such an appeal (*) and those who confined someone did not advertise their actions or allow the
confined to communicate with those who might assist (at Turlington's patients were prevented from sending
letters). The applicant, therefore, was usually someone who suspected another had been confined. Also a
number of precautionary measures regarding the issue of certificates and licenses.
(*) Unless, like Alexander Cruden in 1738, he escaped and applied to the public authorities to prevent his
recapture. Cruden applied to the Lord Mayor.
same, unless he she or they produce to the Porter of said Hospital a Ticket Signed by one of the Governors
thereof the said Tickets to be provided by and delivered out under the Direction of the Treasurer &
Committee of said Hospital.
And that one of the Basketmen and Gallery Maids should attend all such Persons who should come to View
the Hospital And upon the Departure of such Persons who should be Admitted no Officer or Servant of or
belonging to said Hospital should presume to ask, demand, or receive any Benefaction or Gratuity on
behalf of the Hospital or themselves; but whatever such Persons are inclined to give that they be desired to
put the same into the Poors Box with their own Hands And the Key for the future be kept by the Treasurer
for the Time being, the said Box to be opened the last Saturday in every Month as usual in the presence of
the Weekly Committee.
And that such Persons who should become Securities for any Patient Admitted into said Hospital should
upon the Admission of such Patient have a Ticket delivered them which upon being produced to the said
Porter should Intitle two of the said Patients Friends at a Time to see them Gratis,
And that in Case an(y) Steward or Porter of the said Hospital shall disobey and Act in Contradiction of the
Rules and Regulations mentioned in the said Memorial that he & they shall be thereupon immediately
dismissed and discharged from their respective Offices.
1763 SELECT COMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON MADHOUSES
2.3.2 THE 1774 Madhouse Bill
The Bills that became the 1774 Act were formulated in the context of court cases, such as those considered
by the 1763 Select Committee on Madhouses concerning detention of the allegedly sane. The two
established remedies for such infringements of the British liberties were an application to the higher courts
for a writ of habeas corpus, or a request to a JP to intervene. The confined person was in no position to
make such an appeal (*) and those who confined someone did not advertise their actions or allow the

14

confined to communicate with those who might assist (at Turlington's patients were prevented from sending
letters). The applicant, therefore, was usually someone who suspected another had been confined. Also a
number of precautionary measures regarding the issue of certificates and licenses.
(*) Unless, like Alexander Cruden in 1738, he escaped and applied to the public authorities to prevent his
recapture. Cruden applied to the Lord Mayor.
Sometime if the mid 1750s a Mrs Gold suspected her son in law had confined his wife in Miles's Hoxton
Madhouse. She asked a local JP for assistance, he drew a confession from the husband and then
accompanied Mrs Gold to Miles's where the release of her daughter was secured (1763 SCHC)
The 1774 Madhouses Act established a
commission of the Royal College of Physicians
to license and visit private madhouses in the London area. (see law)
Each September, from 1774 to 1827, Royal College of Physicians appointed five of its Fellows
commissioners for the year. They met in October to grant licences. They could not refuse or revoke a
licence. (see law)
At least once in the year they visited each madhouse, making a minute of its condition. Any keeper refusing
admission forfeited his licence. (see law)
A Secretary to the Commissioners was to be sent a notice of the admission of every lunatic who was not a
pauper to any licensed house in England and Wales. He kept registers of these in which he also entered
commissioners' visiting minutes and those sent to him by the clerks of the county visitors (County Clerks).
(see law)
28.7.1800 The 1800 Criminal Lunatics Act aimed at the safe custody of criminal lunatics, especially any
who threatened the king. The consequent long term detention of lunatics in county gaols triggered the 1808
County Asylums Act. [[Fear of lunatics, heightened by the publicity about Hadfield and the Act, may be
reflected in the life of Mary Lamb] See Counter-Revolutionary Panic and the Treatment of the Insane: 1800
by Valerie Argent
Unfit to plead, and acquittal on the grounds of insanity
There were two main ways in which insanity in an accused person was taken into account by the courts
under the common law.
A person who was insane at the time of his trial could be found "unfit to plead":John Frith, for instance, threw a stone at the coach of George 3rd in 1790 and was brought to trial before
Lord Chief Justice Kenyon on the charge of Treason.
Despite the fact that Frith strongly protested his sanity and fitness to stand trial, the court set the Jury to try
his sanity. The jury heard medical evidence that he was insane and that "there was an order concerning
him". They found him unfit to plead and remanded him. ( State Trials 1790 col.307) It is not known if Frith
was plead and remanded him. ( State Trials 1790 col.307) It is not known if Frith was ever brought to trial.
(see Walker, N. + MCabe, S. 1973, p.250)
(Margaret Nicholson, who tried to stab George 3rd with a blunt table knife in 1786 was not ever brought to
trial. The Privy Council committed her to Bethlem Hospital after examination by Drs. John and Thomas
Munro. (see Hunter, R.A. and Macalpine, I. 1963 p.569 and 1969 pp. 310-13).
Alternatively, if a person was tried, they could be proved to have been insane at the time of the offence and
found not guilty on that ground.
In neither case do the courts appear to have had any problem about ordering the confinement of the
accused.
1.

Political cartoons and pamphlets

Chapter 2.
Madness and Masculinity in the Caricatures of the Regency Crisis, 178889
Jamie Agland, Monash University
When George III descended into madness towards the end of 1788, the ministry of William Pitt the
Younger faced the prospect of dismissal should the Prince of Wales, who favoured the Foxite Whigs,
become Regent. The Regency Crisis encouraged an outpouring of writings and images, of which its

15

caricature prints are especially fascinating. The caricaturists managed and exploited the tensions,
uncertainties and opportunities generated by the kings madness in a uniquely visceral fashion. Already
highly proficient in the manipulation of political figures, the caricaturists contrasted and intermeshed
various ways of being mad with existing political masculinities to both augment and defuse political
vices, follies and (to a much lesser extent) virtues. The imagery of mania and raving madness has tended
to dominate inquiries into the relationship between madness and politics in the late eighteenth-century, but
representations of melancholy and despair were also highly significant, and these played an important role
during the Regency Crisis.
The king was treated respectfully in the caricatures of the Regency Crisis. Christopher Reid, in his
study of the rhetoric surrounding the kings illness, observes that while the analogy between madness and
political and cultural disorder appeared to have materialised as a political fact, the possibilities of
representation were severely constrained by considerations of delicacy and protocol. The kings
condition was spoken of hesitantly, through coded reference and studied circumlocution in the parliament
and in the press.11 Reid notes that King Lear had become virtually a forbidden text, and that the Prince of
Wales physician, Dr Richard Warren, was chastised for his use of the term insanity. 12 The caricatures
produced during the crisis reflect these sensitivities.
This respect for the king is largely explained by the growing popularity of George III in the 1780s. This
was partly dependent on his observance of domestic virtues. It was perhaps equally dependent on the
growing unpopularity of the notoriously disobedient and dissolute Prince of Wales. The Princes reputation
for gambling, drinking and extravagant spending contrasted sharply with his parents modest and homely
image. The Princes secret marriage to his Catholic mistress Maria Fitzherbert in 1785 (the 1701 Act of
Settlement excluded those who had married a Roman Catholic from succeeding to the throne), and his
amicable relationship with the Foxite Whig opposition, had further soured his relationship with the king
and his public image.13
Representations of the king and references to the kings illness in the caricature prints of 178889 strive
to reinforce both the humanity and the sanctity of the kings body, and to amplify the immorality and
instability of his political enemies. Isaac Cruikshanks Frith the Madman Hurling Treason at the King
(Figure 2.1)was published on 31January 1790, almost a full year after the announcement of the kings
recovery. This image parodies an incident, which was reported on 21 January, in which a disturbed man
named John Frith threw a stone at the royal coach. Drawing a parallel with the reporting of the Margaret
Nicholson affair, Carretta suggests that the king again demonstrated understanding and mercy in his
response to this incident.20 Although this print postdates the Regency Crisis, it spectacularly evokes the
representational dynamics of the winter of 178889, and highlights the ongoing impact of the crisis on the
satirical identities of the key political actors
In Cruikshanks print, George III is seated in the royal coach, which is surrounded by Yeoman of the
Guard and mounted Life Guards. Dignified and almost angelic, he is not at all concerned or flustered by the
surrounding activity. Edmund Burke is cast as the stone-throwing John Frith. He is being restrained by a
vigorous looking protector of the king and by a young man who resembles the Prince of Wales. Burke is
accompanied by Fox, who is dressed as a woman, and Prince of Wales. Burke is accompanied by Fox, who
is dressed as a woman, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who is dressed as a sailor. The three opposition
figures are unshaven, dishevelled and ragged, and they stand in stark contrast to the noble king, and the
sturdy guards who attend to his safety. Fox holds a paper titled Dying Speech and Sheridan a paper titled
[Ki]ngs last speech. Above Foxs head is inscribed the words: Creul [sic] Fortune thus our hopes
Destroy, and Sheridan laments: Damd unlucky, suggesting the unprincipled and cruel opportunism of
their political position against the vulnerable king during the crisis of 178889. Their disorderly dress,
dejected countenances, and complete lack of manly deportment, denote shame and failure. This is
exemplified by the despondent, effeminised Fox.21 Foxs transgression of natural gender roles may also
signify a propensity for falseness and deception through masquerade. 22 Jane Kromm notes the prominence
in the 1780s of female figures whose agency, unnaturalness, and immodesty bear the paticular imprint of
maniacal excess, but in this instance Foxs female clothing and tearfulness suggest a weakness for
feminine passions that undercuts his efficacy as a public man.23 The incongruity inherent in Cruikshanks
picturing of Fox amplifies his political impotency, while simultaneously pointing to some of the vices and
weaknesses underlying his predicament. Cruikshank uses the imagery of the royal procession as a metaphor
for the state of the nation, a strategy that distinguishes two other prints of the Regency Crisis, The Grand
Procession to St. Pauls on St. Georges Day (1789) and Going in state to the House of Peers (1789). All

16

three of these prints employ grotesques, mostly plebeians, as signifiers of folly and disorder. Distinguished
by their torn clothing, their exaggerated noses and chins, their gangling limbs, and their disorderly
comportment, these grotesques threaten to exercise an undue influence on the conduct of the state coach. In
these prints, political virtue is set between the opportunism of parliamentarians, on the one hand, which is
seen to foster degradation, and plebeian politics, on the other, which marks the realisation of that
degradation. The demotic physiognomies, posture and dress of the Foxite Whigs in Frith the Madman
connotes the unnaturalness of their politics, and the decline of their political sensibilities and fortunes. 24
The king seems impervious to the disruption. His profile, which is reminiscent of representations of
George III on medals and coins, suggests solidity and reliability, and his composure denotes a benign and
unflinching devotion to duty. The kings pose, furthermore, underlines the potentially disastrous
consequences, for national health and prosperity, of Burkes assault.26 Atop the coach, however, there health
and prosperity, of Burkes assault.26 Atop the coach, however, there crouches a devilish imp, playing a
fiddle, which suggests the existence of an undesirable influence on the king, most probably William Pitt.
Perhaps Cruikshank is implying that the king is unapproachable, unreachable, and oblivious to the concerns
of the lower orders. Whether the kings pose indicates fortitude and clarity of mind, or insensibility and
vulnerability to exploitation, Cruikshank nevertheless surrounds the king with a supportive, robust
presence. The endangered king serves as a rallying-point, as a locus of cohesion and solidarity. His
centrality to political virtue is not undermined by his weaknesses, as these weaknesses invite unity of
purpose and vigilance in the interest of steady progress.27
The casting of Burke as John Frith, of course, taints the Foxite Whigs with the political symbolism of
physically violent forms of madness. His aggressiveness signifies an absence of good sense, control and
solidarity. This is demonstrated by Fox and Sheridan, who turn away from their disturbed colleague, and by
the Prince, who attempts to contain him. Burkes characteristically intense rhetorical style left him
vulnerable to accusations of mental instability. In February 1789, for example, he infamously declared that
George III had been hurled by Providence from his throne.28 Cruikshank exploits the heatedness of
Burkes oratory to suggest the irony and hypocrisy of his attitude towards the stricken king. Burkes
treatment of the king in Frith the Madman also connotes a general lack of compassion and sensibility, a
charge that was repeated by Mary Wollstonecraft in the same year that this print was published.29 The
picturing of a physically threatening form of madness in this print amplifies the ineffectuality and
instability suggested by the Whigs depressed and ragged state.
Several Regency Crisis prints employ the striking imagery of the asylum interior. In these prints the
political players are often subjected to restraint, in the form of shackles and straightjackets. These figures
are tainted with dangerous and threatening forms of madness, which connote the complete and irreversible
degeneration of their political minds. In The Hospital for Lunatics (Figure 2.5), for example, we are
presented with three cells of Incurables. The first contains William Pitt, who sits on a chamber pot
wearing a crown of straw. He is naked below the waist. Above Pitts head is written went mad supposing
himself next heir to a Crown.36 Richmond, the Master of the Ordnance, occupies the second cell. He wears
a chamber pot on his head and a simple night shirt, and he is surrounded by a ring of toy cannons. The third
cell contains a woman who, we are told, was Driven mad by a Political itching. She resembles the
Duchess of Gordon, a Tory health and prosperity, of Burkes assault.26 Atop the coach, however, there
crouches a devilish imp, playing a fiddle, which suggests the existence of an undesirable influence on the
king, most probably William Pitt. Perhaps Cruikshank is implying that the king is unapproachable,
unreachable, and oblivious to the concerns of the lower orders. Whether the kings pose indicates fortitude
and clarity of mind, or insensibility and vulnerability to exploitation, Cruikshank nevertheless surrounds the
king with a supportive, robust presence. The endangered king serves as a rallying-point, as a locus of
cohesion and solidarity. His centrality to political virtue is not undermined by his weaknesses, as these
weaknesses invite unity of purpose and vigilance in the interest of steady progress. 27
The casting of Burke as John Frith, of course, taints the Foxite Whigs with the political symbolism of
physically violent forms of madness. His aggressiveness signifies an absence of good sense, control and
solidarity. This is demonstrated by Fox and Sheridan, who turn away from their disturbed colleague, and by
the Prince, who attempts to contain him. Burkes characteristically intense rhetorical style left him
vulnerable to accusations of mental instability. In February 1789, for example, he infamously declared that
George III had been hurled by Providence from his throne.28 Cruikshank exploits the heatedness of
Burkes oratory to suggest the irony and hypocrisy of his attitude towards the stricken king. Burkes
treatment of the king in Frith the Madman also connotes a general lack of compassion and sensibility, a
charge that was repeated by Mary Wollstonecraft in the same year that this print was published.29 The

17

picturing of a physically threatening form of madness in this print amplifies the ineffectuality and
instability suggested by the Whigs depressed and ragged state.
Several Regency Crisis prints employ the striking imagery of the asylum interior. In these prints the
political players are often subjected to restraint, in the form of shackles and straightjackets. These figures
are tainted with dangerous and threatening forms of madness, which connote the complete and irreversible
degeneration of their political minds. In The Hospital for Lunatics (Figure 2.5), for example, we are
presented with three cells of Incurables. The first contains William Pitt, who sits on a chamber pot
wearing a crown of straw. He is naked below the waist. Above Pitts head is written went mad supposing
himself next heir to a Crown.36 Richmond, the Master of the Ordnance, occupies the second cell. He wears
a chamber pot on his head and a simple night shirt, and he is surrounded by a ring of toy cannons. The third
cell contains a woman who, we are told, was Driven mad by a Political itching. She resembles the
Duchess of Gordon, a Tory Driven mad by a Political itching. She resembles the Duchess of Gordon, a
Tory figure.37 A doctor approaches saying I see no signs of convalescence. The attendant behind him
responds: No damme. they must be all in a state of Coercion. The political illegitimacy and ineffectuality
of these figures is established through their appropriation of the visual and verbal indicators of incurable
madness. The suggestion of sexual debauchery was a stock weapon of political satirists, but in this instance
it is used to reinforce the link between political vices and madness. The connection between overweening
political ambition and sexual desire is suggested by the Duchesses Political itching. For many eighteenthcentury writers a corrupt and effeminate polity was linked to the political influence of women, who might
use their emotional and sexual leverage over powerful men to weaken the body politic.38 In this case the
Duchess has contracted venereal disease (itching) through her political-sexual misconduct, and this in
turn has reduced her to madness and misery. The Duchesses condition, furthermore, underscores the
deluded thinking and emasculation of her fellow inmates.
James Gillrays Cooling the Brain or The Little Major, shaving the Shaver (Figure 2.6), contains a
particularly confronting and downright portrait of raving madness. In this print we see Burke on the strawcovered floor of a madhouse, his right wrist and left ankle chained to the floor. He is bare-chested except
for a rosary and crucifix, and his head is being shaved to enable it to cool, a familiar remedy for the
intemperately mad. Burkes muscularity is striking, and his fists are clenched with rage. These chains, then,
restrain an obvious physical menace, and the process of Cooling the Brain is clearly overdue. His
sympathy for Catholics, as signified by the rosary and the crucifix, underscores his political recklessness
and illegitimacy.39 Christopher Reid details the ways in which Edmund Burke worked imaginatively on the
medical evidence he had gathered on maladies of the mind to suggest that Pitt and his ministers were
grotesquely inverting political rationality and correct constitutional practice during the Regency Crisis. 40
But ironically, the complexity and violence of Burkes oratory left him vulnerable to charges of irrationality
and even outright madness. A notice commenting on Burkes behaviour, a parody of Willis reports on
George III, was actually posted at Whitehall during the Regency debates: calmer this morning but tending
towards unquietness.41 Gillrays portrait of Burke as a stereotypical Georgian lunatic, then, underscores his
hypocrisy and intemperance, and thereby his political judgement and efficacy, in a vivid and arresting
manner. Inconstancy of temper, wrote Benjamin Fawcett, is deplorable as it is almost incurable. It
puts the whole mind out of order, and taints every object of every sense.42
The metaphor of the madhouse connotes a loss of political reason, potency and influence. The restraint
to which these figures are subjected heightens the comedic potential of such scenes, as the anxiety
associated with violent displays of madness is contained. Rowlandson and Gillray had at their disposal a
wide and overlapping variety of late eighteenth-century discourses on madness, many of which, such as
Incoherent Insanity, were rich in political overtones. For Thomas Arnold, writing in the 1780s, this state
of mind was characterised by an incoherency of ideas, occasioned by an Excessive, Perverted, or
Defective activity of the imagination and memory, accompanied by images existing in the mind, which do
not exist externally.43 The kings illness permitted the political connotations contained in eighteenthcentury treatises on delusion, incoherency, and raving madness to resonate, and encouraged the caricaturists
to enlist them in the process of unmasking and indelibly marking the factional players.
The Regency Crisis spurred the development of raving madness as a political metaphor in caricature
prints, and the French Revolution encouraged its continued use and development. As Jane Kromm argues,
an emphasis on images of mania in political culture is justified on the basis that the political participation
of the era was imbued with maniacal tendencies, whether these inhered in the noisy activities of majority or
opposition, or in the assaultive responses their verbal and visual rhetoric provoked. And, more importantly,
mania deserves special attention due to the conflation of the dynamics of mania and the forces of

18

revolutionary change in the artistic production of the 1790s.46 The gendered dimensions of this change in
the general application of maniacal traits from male parliamentarians to female radicals, is especially
noteworthy. The vanguard of revolutionary politics in the caricatures of the 1790s are frequently insane
female personifications and female revolutionaries, especially those whose militarism did much to revive
the warrior ethics and the iconography of ira and furor. The observations of French commentators about
the indecent and demented character of revolutionary women, Kromm suggests, could only reinforce the
truth claims of foreign political caricatures in which the revolution and its philosophy appeared as furious
madwomen.47 In her characterisation of this development, however, Kromm tends to downplay the
significance of Regency Crisis caricatures, which apply maniacal traits to male politicians with remarkable
frequency and ferociousness. maniacal traits to male politicians with remarkable frequency and
ferociousness. As a result, she also downplays the continuity and resonance, into the 1790s and beyond, of
the raving parliamentarian in caricature. Moreover, while Kromms emphasis on mania is both justified and
important, it neglects the contribution of subtler varieties of madness, and especially melancholy madness,
to the political images of the 1780s and the 1790s. Kromm notes the mixed or sequential, rather than
entirely distinguishable shapes given to mania and melancholy in the works of William Hogarth, but she
doesnt explore the coexistence of mania and melancholy in the prints of the 1780s and the 1790s.48 Little
attention, then, has been paid to the ways in which the prints of this period make use of the various
Shapes of madness. In some, explains Alexander Bicknell, madness produces Ravings, Distraction, and
all the Symptoms of ungovernable Fury. In others it assumes a gentler form, and terminates in Melancholy,
Despondence, and Despair.49 Images of Melancholy, Despondence, and Despair were extensively used
during the Regency Crisis. These images made a significant contribution to the political masculinities of
Fox and his allies, as they were central to the attempts of the caricaturists to reflect Pitts gradual betterment
of the Foxite Whigs.
Portrait of a Nabob: Graphic Satire, Portraiture,
and the Anglo-Indian in the Late Eighteenth Century
Christina Smylitopoulos, Postdoctoral Research Associate,
Department of Exhibitions and Publications, Yale Center for British Art
The nabob was a significant subject in eighteenth-century
British visual culture. An employee of the East India Company,
the nabob was perceived to have returned to Great Britain
equipped with ill-gotten affluence, a ravenous appetite for extravagance,
and aspirations to rise into elite spheres of power
and influence.2 When featured in graphic satirea form of
artistic print production which in this period in England applied
ridicule, irony, sarcasm, and humour for the correction
of vice and improper conduct and the chastisement of immorality
and folly3the figure of the nabob expressed domestic
anxieties regarding a foreign, ad hoc empire in India.
Contemporary accounts suggest that with the spoils of Asia,
the nabob had overstepped the prescribed socio-economic limit
of his humble beginnings.4 In his freedom from his homelands
ethical constraints, the nabob had committed intemperance
in eating Curries and Peelaws and drinking India Madeira
and arrack, the catch-all term for spirituous liquors of native
manufacture in Eastern settings.5 He was guilty of an extravagant
violation of decency, law, and/or morality through outrageous
conduct, and he transgressed the limits of moderation
by acquiring resources by art, fraud, cruelty, and imposition.6
Furthermore, when the figure of the nabob emerged in the
1760s, the British had already established a tradition of associating
India with effortless fertility, casting it as a source of gainwithout toil and a place where men of action
became idle and developed imperial boredom.7 India itself had therefore been
portrayed through a rhetoric of excess, and by means of the
nabob, its corruptive forces were imagined to be travelling to

19

the West to infect the metropole. The creation of the nabob as a

figure of satire was consequently an act of distancing the rhetorical
terra firma of the metropole from the Asiatic adventurers8
realm of excess.
To consider the impact that
graphic satire seems to have had on portraiture enriches our
understanding both of the function of India-inspired graphic
satire and of portraitures receptiveness to influence. Graphic
satires of the nabob had such an influence in British visual culture
that as a body they could transform the meaning even of an
authoritative portrait by Van Dyck. Portrait of a Nabob: Graphic Satire, Portraiture,
and the Anglo-Indian in the Late Eighteenth Century
Christina Smylitopoulos, Postdoctoral Research Associate,
Department of Exhibitions and Publications, Yale Center for British Art
The nabob was a significant subject in eighteenth-century
British visual culture. An employee of the East India Company,
the nabob was perceived to have returned to Great Britain
equipped with ill-gotten affluence, a ravenous appetite for extravagance,
and aspirations to rise into elite spheres of power
and influence.2 When featured in graphic satirea form of
artistic print production which in this period in England applied
ridicule, irony, sarcasm, and humour for the correction
of vice and improper conduct and the chastisement of immorality
and folly3the figure of the nabob expressed domestic
anxieties regarding a foreign, ad hoc empire in India.
Contemporary accounts suggest that with the spoils of Asia,
the nabob had overstepped the prescribed socio-economic limit
of his humble beginnings.4 In his freedom from his homelands
ethical constraints, the nabob had committed intemperance
in eating Curries and Peelaws and drinking India Madeira
and arrack, the catch-all term for spirituous liquors of native
manufacture in Eastern settings.5 He was guilty of an extravagant
violation of decency, law, and/or morality through outrageous
conduct, and he transgressed the limits of moderation
by acquiring resources by art, fraud, cruelty, and imposition.6
Furthermore, when the figure of the nabob emerged in the
1760s, the British had already established a tradition of associating
India with effortless fertility, casting it as a source of gainwithout toil and a place where men of action
became idle and developed imperial boredom.7 India itself had therefore been
portrayed through a rhetoric of excess, and by means of the
nabob, its corruptive forces were imagined to be travelling to
the West to infect the metropole. The creation of the nabob as a
figure of satire was consequently an act of distancing the rhetorical
terra firma of the metropole from the Asiatic adventurers8
realm of excess.
To consider the impact that
graphic satire seems to have had on portraiture enriches our
understanding both of the function of India-inspired graphic
satire and of portraitures receptiveness to influence. Graphic
satires of the nabob had such an influence in British visual culture
that as a body they could transform the meaning even of an
authoritative portrait by Van Dyck.
The significance of the nabob, both as an embodiment of corruption
and as a subject of graphic satire, is that he had the ability
to inhabit multiple and contradictory spaces. For example,

20

though he was British, venturing to India made him AngloIndian. Returning home somehow meant he was invading Britain:
a 1785 article in The Times described the many new-imported
Nabobs, who have a vast deal of money among them.22
In this sense, the nabob was both a domestic product and a foreign
import infiltrating what was touted as a moral, domestic
market, and he reinforced eighteenth-century anxiety about the
threat of excess from the over-importation of foreign wares.23
The nabobs liminalityanthropologist Victor Turner uses the
term to describe the condition betwixt and between established
states of politico-jural structure24suggests a permeability of
the conceptual borders defining him. This premise benefits considerably
from the theoretical foundations laid by scholars who
recognize significant porosity at the boundaries of identity, particularly
at those margins delineated by empire.25 In essence, in
a metropole in the process of fashioning a national identity, the
nabob embodied imperial anxiety.26 The nabob could therefore
be described as both a product of, and a reaction to, uncertainty
in an emerging debate regarding national distinctiveness.
Anglo-Indians, according to Jitender Gill, were colonials who
come to/from India; this back-and-forth quality of the nabob
also implies marginality.27 As the anthropologist Mary Douglas
explains, danger lies in the transitional states inhabited by
marginal beings and the individual who passes from one state
to another is not merely a danger to himself, but a menace to
the blameless inhabitants of the interior.28 The perception of
the nabobs transitional status helps to illuminate why he was so
reviled in eighteenth-century Britain.
According to
art historian Herman Goetz, the bizarrerie of Persian fancy
dress found a welcome home among European absolutists in
Baroque Europe as they became interested in Eastern despots,
resulting in the custom of sitting for a portrait costumed as
an Oriental nobleman.51 In the eighteenth century the Turkish
Style was also often seen in the portraiture of British and
American women, a fashion that continued well into the nineteenth
century, when turban-like headdresses were universally
adopted and frequently adorned with pearls, lace, or ostrich
feathers.52 Lady Mary Wortley Montagus repeated use of the
turban in her portraits not only referenced her life in Constantinople
as wife to the British Ambassador to Turkey, but also
signified her intellectual engagement with the East.53 Turbanlike
headdresses continued to appear throughout Regency portraiture,
exemplified by Sir Thomas Lawrences portrait of Mrs.
Jens Wolff, a friend and possible lover of the artist.54
Even so, there is evidence at this time that sartorial homages
to India by Company men in London were beginning to be
reflected upon comically.
The various descriptions of Eastern dress in magazines and
novels are examples of the laying out of the excesses of Eastern
rulers for British audiences. In an excerpt from Zulima: An
Oriental Tale (1764), for instance, the author creates a literary
representation of a figure whose dress was purple enriched with
gold, and the jewels in his turban glittered like the rays of the
sun. Yet in the midst of his riches Hamed was temperate; fifty
women only had he in his Harem.57 Turbans, in particular,

21

were being associated with foolishness. The following passage

from A Description of the Curious Boat, Lately Brought from
India, and Presented to Their Majesties by Gov. Vansittart
(1768) describes one officers exotic job on the boat:
Such an officer as is here mentioned, is at this day actually
employed in most of the row-gallies in the East Indies,
particularly gallies of stateas is the vessel we are now
describinghis province is to make the rowers cheerful. He
is dressed in a fantastic habit with feathers in his turban and
bells on his arms and legs, assuming a character not unlike
our Merry Andrew, and is known by the name of the fool
of the boat.58
Hastings, the first Governor-General of
Bengal (177385), is the figure most frequently lampooned as
a nabob through the satirical device of dressing him in exaggerated
Indian costume. Even so, there is evidence at this time that sartorial homages
to India by Company men in London were beginning to be
reflected upon comically.
The various descriptions of Eastern dress in magazines and
novels are examples of the laying out of the excesses of Eastern
rulers for British audiences. In an excerpt from Zulima: An
Oriental Tale (1764), for instance, the author creates a literary
representation of a figure whose dress was purple enriched with
gold, and the jewels in his turban glittered like the rays of the
sun. Yet in the midst of his riches Hamed was temperate; fifty
women only had he in his Harem.57 Turbans, in particular,
were being associated with foolishness. The following passage
from A Description of the Curious Boat, Lately Brought from
India, and Presented to Their Majesties by Gov. Vansittart
(1768) describes one officers exotic job on the boat:
Such an officer as is here mentioned, is at this day actually
employed in most of the row-gallies in the East Indies,
particularly gallies of stateas is the vessel we are now
describinghis province is to make the rowers cheerful. He
is dressed in a fantastic habit with feathers in his turban and
bells on his arms and legs, assuming a character not unlike
our Merry Andrew, and is known by the name of the fool
of the boat.58
Hastings, the first Governor-General of
Bengal (177385), is the figure most frequently lampooned as
a nabob through the satirical device of dressing him in exaggerated
Indian costume.
Andrew Scull observes, in agreement with many others, that At the
margin, what constitutes madness strikes me as fluctuating and
ambiguous, indeed theoretically indeterminate, making its boundaries
the subject of endless dispute and anxiety.18 One meaningful boundary,
nevertheless, for most eighteenth-century Londoners and in representation
for most eighteenth-century readers was Bethlem. Here
was where the world of normality, of sane seeing, ended and crazy frivolity
took over. Here was where madness went to hide its face and to
emerge with another, Madness in Mascarade, an act that readers were
becoming well-trained in understanding. Here, above anywhere,
illness became disease, sick, or supposedly sick, people transformed
Into acceptable forms of madness.

22

The English Malady:Enabling and Disabling Fictions

Edited by
Glen Colburn
INTRODUCTION*
GLEN COLBURN
In 1733, the famous nerve doctor George Cheyne published his book on a
nervous disorder believed to be so prevalent among the English that he titled
the treatise The English Malady. In literary circles, writers called it spleen,
vapors, or hyp. In medical circles, it was called hysteria when it afflicted a
woman, hypochondria when a man, or it was vaguely referred to as a nervous
disorder.1 The variety of names hints at the mysteriousness of the disease, so
it is not surprising that physicians throughout the period complained about
the protean nature of the English Malady. In 1682, the prominent
physician Thomas Sydenham described it as so strangely various, that it
resembles almost all the Diseases poor Mortals are inclinable to.2 Some
seventy years later, Sir Richard Manningham lamented that in trying to
diagnose the disease, "both the Patient and the Physician are very liable to
be deceived."3 One might therefore apply to the English Malady what
Susan Sontag wrote about cancer thirty years ago: "diseases thought to be
multi-determined (that is, mysterious) . . . have the widest possibilities as
metaphors for what is felt to be socially, or morally, wrong."4 Given
uncertainty about its causes and symptoms, as well as the belief that it had
reached epidemic proportions, theorizing about the English Malady in the
eighteenth centurywhether medical or literaryalmost inevitably turned
toward discussions of the social and moral ills this mysterious disease was
felt to represent, and medical diagnoses frequently implied social and
moral prescriptions for English women and men.
Though Foucault has claimed that in the Enlightenment, an analytical,
disjunctive epistemology replaced the mystical, homological thinking of
the late Middle Ages, one might argue instead that a new kind of mystical
homology arose in the eighteenth century: the body social came to replace
the body politic. The concern was with society more than government, or
with society as the basis of government, a concern embodied in political
history by Lockes substituting the consent of the governedthat is, of
societyfor jure divino, the consent of God, as the warrant of
government. The shift to a secular paradigm for questions of political
authority becomes clear when, in the middle of the eighteenth century,
Rousseau theorizes government as a social contract. The dominance of a
secular paradigm for questions of moral authority becomes equally clear in
the literary productions of the period, as when Pope has Clarissa advise
Belinda to accept a domestic role not because religion demands it, but
because this is the only way well [her] power to use.
Cheynes The English Malady illustrates dramatically the way in which
ambivalence makes the analysts narrative itself become hysterical.15
Cheyne acknowledges that contemporary economic and social changes
foster disorder (medical and otherwise), but he also describes these
changes in positive terms:
Now since this present Age has made Efforts to go beyond former Times, in
all the Arts of Ingenuity, Invention, Study, Learning, and all the contemplative
and sedentary Professions, (I speak only here of our own Nation, our own
Times, and of the better Sort, whose chief Employments and Studies these
are) the Organs of these Faculties being thereby worn and spoil'd, must affect
and deaden the whole System, and lay a Foundation for the Diseases of
Lowness and Weakness. (37-38)
Even more striking is Cheynes belief that the condition responsible for
the English Malady is also necessary to refinement, taste, and virtuous

23

sentiments: it is a Misfortune indeed, to be born with weak Nerves, but if

right usd and managd, . . . it may be the Occasions of greater Felicity.
Weak nerves create a greater appreciation of the innocent Enjoyments of
life, particularly intellectual Pleasures (14-15). The body of the text
becomes hysterical to the degree that it is nervous, loquacious, selfcontradictory,
sometimes incoherent; it is fitting, then, that the text should end with The Authors Case, in which
Cheyne describes his own
struggles with the malady.16
G. S. Rousseau points out in his centrally important study of early-modern
writing about hysteria, "Melancholy, madness, hysteria, hypochondria, dementia,
spleen, vapors, nerves: by 1720 or 1730 all were jumbled and confused with one
another as they had never been before" ("A Strange Pathology, 153). In bringing
together the present collection of essays and writing an introduction for it, I have
imitated this discursive conflation--without, it is hoped, reproducing the
confusionby using the terms English Malady, hysteria, hypochondria, vapors,
and the spleen interchangeably.
In Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century, Karen Harveys argument about the
cultural role of erotica in the period provides a useful analogy for thinking about
the role of the English Malady. Harvey summarizes historians conflicting versions
of the century as a time of control and restraint or a time of freedom and
licence (1), then argues that erotica reconciled the opposing tendencies of the
period because its use of metaphor and allusion, as well as its frequent deferral of
the sexual act, combined license with restraint; whereas pornographys graphic
depiction of genitalia and coition nakedly appealed to readers prurient desires,
erotica maintained at least the veneer of genteel self-restraint. Similarly, one might
argue that the English Malady offered its diagnosticians, medical and otherwise, a
conceptual site for examining the vexed relationship between liberation and
restraint, progress and order.
Wikipedia
De Sade lived a scandalous libertine existence and repeatedly procured young prostitutes as well as
employees of both sexes in his castle in Lacoste. He was also accused of blasphemy, a serious offense at
that time. His behavior included an affair with his wife's sister, Anne-Prospre, who had come to live at the
castle.
Beginning in 1763, de Sade lived mainly in or near Paris. Several prostitutes there complained about
mistreatment by him and he was put under surveillance by the police, who made detailed reports of his
activities. After several short imprisonments, which included a brief incarceration in the Chteau de
Saumur (then a prison), he was exiled to his chteau at Lacoste in 1768.[8]
The first major scandal occurred on Easter Sunday in 1768, in which de Sade procured the sexual services
of a woman, Rose Keller;[9] whether she was a prostitute or not is widely disputed. He was accused of
taking her to his chateau at Arcueil, imprisoning her there and sexually and physically abusing her. She
escaped by climbing out of a second-floor window and running away. At this time, la Prsidente, de Sade's
mother-in-law, obtained a lettre de cachet (a royal order of arrest and imprisonment, without stated cause or
access to the courts) from the king, excluding de Sade from the jurisdiction of the courts. The lettre de
cachet would later prove disastrous for the marquis.
In 1772, an episode in Marseille involved the non-lethal poisoning of prostitutes with the supposed
aphrodisiac Spanish fly and sodomy with Latour, his manservant . That year, the two men were sentenced
to death in absentia for sodomy and said poisoning. They fled to Italy, and de Sade took his wife's sister
with him. De Sade and Latour were caught and imprisoned at the Fortress of Miolans in late 1772, but
escaped four months later.
De Sade later hid at Lacoste, where he rejoined his wife, who became an accomplice in his subsequent
endeavors. He kept a group of young employees at Lacoste, most of whom complained about sexual
mistreatment and quickly left his service. De Sade was forced to flee to Italy once again. It was during this
time he wrote Voyage d'Italie, which, along with his earlier travel writings, has never been translated into
English. In 1776, he returned to Lacoste, again hired several servant girls, most of whom fled. In 1777, the
father of one of those employees went to Lacoste to claim his daughter, and attempted to shoot the Marquis
at point-blank range, but the gun misfired.

24

Later that year, de Sade was tricked into going to Paris to visit his supposedly ill mother, who in fact had
recently died. He was arrested there and imprisoned in the Chteau de Vincennes. He successfully appealed
his death sentence in 1778, but remained imprisoned under the lettre de cachet. He escaped but was soon
recaptured. He resumed writing and met fellow prisoner Comte de Mirabeau, who also wrote erotic works.
Despite this common interest, the two came to dislike each other intensely.[10]
In 1784, Vincennes was closed and de Sade was transferred to the Bastille. On 2 July 1789, he reportedly
shouted out from his cell to the crowd outside, "They are killing the prisoners here!", causing something of
a riot. Two days later, he was transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton near Paris. The storming of the
Bastille, a major event of the French Revolution, would occur a few days later on 14 July.
He had been working on his magnum opus Les 120 Journes de Sodome. To his despair, he believed that
the manuscript was lost during his transfer; but he continued to write.
In 1790, he was released from Charenton after the new Constituent Assembly abolished the instrument of
lettre de cachet. His wife obtained a divorce soon after.
De Sade lived a scandalous libertine existence and repeatedly procured young prostitutes as well as
employees of both sexes in his castle in Lacoste. He was also accused of blasphemy, a serious offense at
that time. His behavior included an affair with his wife's sister, Anne-Prospre, who had come to live at the
castle.
Beginning in 1763, de Sade lived mainly in or near Paris. Several prostitutes there complained about
mistreatment by him and he was put under surveillance by the police, who made detailed reports of his
activities. After several short imprisonments, which included a brief incarceration in the Chteau de
Saumur (then a prison), he was exiled to his chteau at Lacoste in 1768.[8]
The first major scandal occurred on Easter Sunday in 1768, in which de Sade procured the sexual services
of a woman, Rose Keller;[9] whether she was a prostitute or not is widely disputed. He was accused of
taking her to his chateau at Arcueil, imprisoning her there and sexually and physically abusing her. She
escaped by climbing out of a second-floor window and running away. At this time, la Prsidente, de Sade's
mother-in-law, obtained a lettre de cachet (a royal order of arrest and imprisonment, without stated cause or
access to the courts) from the king, excluding de Sade from the jurisdiction of the courts. The lettre de
cachet would later prove disastrous for the marquis.
In 1772, an episode in Marseille involved the non-lethal poisoning of prostitutes with the supposed
aphrodisiac Spanish fly and sodomy with Latour, his manservant . That year, the two men were sentenced
to death in absentia for sodomy and said poisoning. They fled to Italy, and de Sade took his wife's sister
with him. De Sade and Latour were caught and imprisoned at the Fortress of Miolans in late 1772, but
escaped four months later.
De Sade later hid at Lacoste, where he rejoined his wife, who became an accomplice in his subsequent
endeavors. He kept a group of young employees at Lacoste, most of whom complained about sexual
mistreatment and quickly left his service. De Sade was forced to flee to Italy once again. It was during this
time he wrote Voyage d'Italie, which, along with his earlier travel writings, has never been translated into
English. In 1776, he returned to Lacoste, again hired several He had been working on his magnum opus
Les 120 Journes de Sodome. To his despair, he believed that the manuscript was lost during his transfer;
but he continued to write.
In 1790, he was released from Charenton after the new Constituent Assembly abolished the instrument of
lettre de cachet. His wife obtained a divorce soon after.
De Sade lived a scandalous libertine existence and repeatedly procured young prostitutes as well as
employees of both sexes in his castle in Lacoste. He was also accused of blasphemy, a serious offense at
that time. His behavior included an affair with his wife's sister, Anne-Prospre, who had come to live at the
castle.
Beginning in 1763, de Sade lived mainly in or near Paris. Several prostitutes there complained about
mistreatment by him and he was put under surveillance by the police, who made detailed reports of his
activities. After several short imprisonments, which included a brief incarceration in the Chteau de
Saumur (then a prison), he was exiled to his chteau at Lacoste in 1768.[8]
The first major scandal occurred on Easter Sunday in 1768, in which de Sade procured the sexual services
of a woman, Rose Keller;[9] whether she was a prostitute or not is widely disputed. He was accused of
taking her to his chateau at Arcueil, imprisoning her there and sexually and physically abusing her. She
escaped by climbing out of a second-floor window and running away. At this time, la Prsidente, de Sade's
mother-in-law, obtained a lettre de cachet (a royal order of arrest and imprisonment, without stated cause or

25

access to the courts) from the king, excluding de Sade from the jurisdiction of the courts. The lettre de
cachet would later prove disastrous for the marquis.
In 1772, an episode in Marseille involved the non-lethal poisoning of prostitutes with the supposed
aphrodisiac Spanish fly and sodomy with Latour, his manservant . That year, the two men were sentenced
to death in absentia for sodomy and said poisoning. They fled to Italy, and de Sade took his wife's sister
with him. De Sade and Latour were caught and imprisoned at the Fortress of Miolans in late 1772, but
escaped four months later.
De Sade later hid at Lacoste, where he rejoined his wife, who became an accomplice in his subsequent
endeavors. He kept a group of young employees at Lacoste, most of whom complained about sexual
mistreatment and quickly left his service. De Sade was forced to flee to Italy once again. It was during this
time he wrote Voyage d'Italie, which, along with his earlier travel writings, has never been translated into
English. In 1776, he returned to Lacoste, again hired several
Lesley Hall
The pains of love and the agonies of unrequited desire have formed a constant theme in art from antiquity
to the latest pop song. However, in most cases these pains and agonies are emotional or metaphorical, not
literal bodily pain. But for some people, pain and love, or at least sexual pleasure, are intricately
intertwined - and have been for many centuries.
been translated into English. In 1776, he returned to Lacoste, again hired several servant girls, most of
whom fled. In 1777, the father of one of those employees went to Lacoste to claim his daughter, and
attempted to shoot the Marquis at point-blank range, but the gun misfired.
Later that year, de Sade was tricked into going to Paris to visit his supposedly ill mother, who in fact had
recently died. He was arrested there and imprisoned in the Chteau de Vincennes. He successfully appealed
his death sentence in 1778, but remained imprisoned under the lettre de cachet. He escaped but was soon
recaptured. He resumed writing and met fellow prisoner Comte de Mirabeau, who also wrote erotic works.
Despite this common interest, the two came to dislike each other intensely.[10]
In 1784, Vincennes was closed and de Sade was transferred to the Bastille. On 2 July 1789, he reportedly
shouted out from his cell to the crowd outside, "They are killing the prisoners here!", causing something of
a riot. Two days later, he was transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton near Paris. The storming of the
Bastille, a major event of the French Revolution, would occur a few days later on 14 July.
He had been working on his magnum opus Les 120 Journes de Sodome. To his despair, he believed that
the manuscript was lost during his transfer; but he continued to write.
In 1790, he was released from Charenton after the new Constituent Assembly abolished the instrument of
lettre de cachet. His wife obtained a divorce soon after.
In The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography (1979), Angela Carter provides a feminist
reading of de Sade, seeing him as a "moral pornographer" who creates spaces for women. Similarly, Susan
Sontag defended both Sade and Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil (Story of the Eye) in her essay "The
Pornographic Imagination" (1967) on the basis their works were transgressive texts, and argued that neither
should be censored. By contrast, Andrea Dworkin saw de Sade as the exemplary woman-hating
pornographer, supporting her theory that pornography inevitably leads to violence against women. One
chapter of her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1979) is devoted to an analysis of de Sade.
Susie Bright claims that Dworkin's first novel Ice and Fire, which is rife with violence and abuse, can be
seen as a modern retelling of de Sade's Juliette.[18]
Pain and the Erotic
Sadomasochistic practices have a long, if largely hidden, history. There appear to be depictions of some
kinds of sadomasochistic practice in the art and poetry of antiquity, but as with everything else about
classical sexuality, controversies rage over the exact meanings. Given the power relations in Greece and
Rome, can the consent of all participants be assumed? The picture is further complicated by the innate
violence and cruelty of these societies, exemplified by events such as gladiatorial games.
More explicit reference was made in the famous Sanskrit text Kamasutra, composed somewhere in the
north of India, probably late in the third century AD. Its recommendations for the use of scratching, biting
and slapping presented these as ritualized concomitants of eroticism rather than the overflow of aggressive
passion. However, again questions of consent arise from male-centred assumptions that the woman's cries,
whimpers and protests were merely an equally ritualized response of pleasure. By contrast, Van Gulik
claimed in The Sexual Life of Ancient China (1961, republished 2003) that episodes of sexual sadism and

26

masochism in China were very rare in either handbooks of sex, or erotic and pornographic literature, in
spite of (or because of) the general pervasiveness of cruelty, by modern Western standards.
The potential for erotic arousal among participants or viewers of Western European medieval religious
ceremonies involving flagellation remains a matter for speculation, although Gibson, in The English Vice
(1978), draws attention to an early fifteenth-century Catalan painting, 'Flagellation of Christ', in which the
floggers certainly appear to be deriving sexual pleasure from their work. Renaissance humanist Pico della
Mirandola described the passive flagellatory desires of a friend, which he found both puzzling and
amusing. Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and poetry include motifs of sexualized violence, for example
Cleopatra's allusions to the lover's pinch, which hurts and is desired.
In the Restoration period, Snarl in Shadwell's The Virtuoso (1676) made, perhaps for the first time, the
connection between pedogogical punishment in English schools and addiction to 'le vice anglais' in later
life. Otway, in Venice Preserved (1682), depicted a masochistic Venetian senator engaging in what might
today be termed 'puppy-play' or 'kennel-training' with his mistress.
The birch over the bed in Hogarth's series of 'The Harlot's Progress' alludes to flagellation as an erotic
speciality for hire, further attested to by inventories of paraphernalia confiscated in raids on London
brothels. 'Fladge' as a subgenre in pornography emerged before the end of the eighteenth century and
proliferated during the Victorian era.
Erotic response to being flagellated was thus reasonably well documented from the Renaissance period, but
there was less evidence for the erotic reaction of the actual flagellator. Havelock Ellis, in Love and Pain
(1913), one of the first major studies of the subject, gave the earliest reported example he could find of
sadistic pleasure in the sight of active whipping as 1672 (though Gibson, as mentioned, found an earlier
visual allusion). Ellis pointed out that whipping as a punishment was common in European societies for
many centuries, and beating of wives, children and servants an accepted practice: therefore devotees did not
need to go far to seek it out and observe it for their own pleasure. By contrast, the desire of powerful
members of society for apparently humiliating punishment was highly puzzling.
Theorizing painful pleasures
Although flagellation is often considered to be 'le vice anglais' par excellence, the first medico-scientific
treatise on the subject probably came from Germany. De Flagrorum Usu in Re Veneria & Lumborum
Renumque Officio (On the Use of Rods in Venereal Matters and in the Office of the Loins and Reins), by
the German doctor Johann Heinrich Meibom, known as Meibomus, was first published in Leiden in 1629.
It attempted to explain, in the light of contemporary understanding of anatomy and physiology, why
chastisement might be arousing.
A more psychological explanation was given in the personal testimony of the Swiss Enlightenment
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his frank, though posthumously published, Confessions (1782).
Rousseau recounted the lasting effects of youthful experiences of corporal punishment at the hands of his
schoolmaster's sister. Themes of sadism and masochism famously pervaded the schoolmaster's sister.
Themes of sadism and masochism famously pervaded the works of the eventually eponymous Marquis de
Sade (17401814), alongside other forms of sexual transgression, and their philosophical underpinnings
were expounded upon at great length. These themes also figured in the fiction of the late nineteenth-century
Austrian writer, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (18361895), author of Venus in Furs (1870), who gave his
name to the passive endurance of pain
Peter Brooks infamous filming of Peter Weiss MARAT/SADE is one of the screens great depictions of
unfettered insanity, as well as a historical drama with definite contemporary relevance. About a play
performed by maniacs under the direction of the notorious Marquis de Sade, its confrontational,
provocative and stunningly filmed--in short, a classic.
The Package
The Royal Shakespeare Company first performed Peter Weiss 1963 play THE PERSECUTION AND
ASSASSINATION OF JEAN-PAUL MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM
OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE--invariably shortened to
MARAT/SADE--under the direction of Peter Brook on Broadway in 1965. The production, set in the early
19th Century during Sades final years spent in the Charenton asylum, was a Tony Award winning success.
This film version, directed by Brook and starring the Royal Shakespeare Company, was released in 1967.
Critics were initially unresponsive to the film, claiming Brook ruined his distinctive circus-like staging
with close-ups and cutaways. Still, the film was staggeringly influential. It provided a conceptual blueprint
for subsequent plays and movies about Sade, which like this one are largely set during Sades final years

27

(see MARQUIS, SADE and QUILLS). None, however, have come close to equaling the propulsive
intellectual power of MARAT/SADE.
The Story
In France of 1808 an audience of cultured Parisians have gathered (as French folk actually did back
then) to view a play put on by the inmates of the Charenton asylum. The director is one of those inmates,
the oft-banned writer Marquis de Sade (who actually served as the asylums entertainment director). The
subject is the famed journalist Jean-Paul Marat, a central figure of the Reign of Terror that followed the
French revolution, and his 1793 murder by Charlotte Corday. The killing took place in Marats bathtub,
where he was confined due to a debilitating skin condition.
Sades play is situated around Marat in his bath, with performers periodically emerging from and
disappearing into underground chambers situated in a circle around the tub. The play, intended as a simple
depiction of Marats execution, quickly degenerates into a chaotic and unwieldy affair.
Marats political oratories are periodically interrupted by Sade, who has his own take on the ideals of the
French revolution. He feels individuals should look out for themselves, in defiance of Marats staunch
collectivism. (Those opposing viewpoints were obviously quite relevant during the sixties, the time of
MARAT/SADES inception, and remain so today.)
Further interruptions issue from the ultraconservative head of the asylum, who constantly threatens to
halt the performance. Theres also the problem of the crazy performers various afflictions: the woman who
plays Corday is narcoleptic and constantly falling asleep on her feet, while a supporting player cant keep
from manhandling the women. Eventually madness overwhelms the performers, and the stage is engulfed
in complete chaos.
The Direction
There exists no other movie quite like this one. As in his films LORD OF THE FLIES and KING
LEAR, with MARAT-SADE Peter Brook has nearly created an anti-movie. Slickness and craftsmanship
are completely absent in Brooks free-form juxtaposition of wide shots and extreme close-ups, filmed
through shifty handheld camerawork. Most controversial are the impressionistic moments, such as the
nightmare sequence depicted via out-of-focus silhouettes, that break the otherwise staunchly naturalistic
veneer. Im not bothered by such scenes, as they contribute immeasurably to the overall atmosphere of
barely contained hysteria.
That hysteria boils over completely in the final scenes, an awe-inspiring cavalcade of mayhem. I
understand it was mind-blowing to be present during the original Broadway performance of those final
moments. Obviously nothing in this film can come close to matching that experience, but the brilliance and
conviction of Brooks staging is as fine as can be imagined.
There are moments of impudence (the general copulation music number), sheer weirdness (Sade
flogged by a womans hair) and bone-chilling eeriness (the aforementioned nightmare sequence), and even
some memorable tunes (15 Glorious Years in particular). The performances of the Royal Shakespeare
Company, playing crazy people impersonating actors, are simply brilliant, with standouts being a debuting
Glenda Jackson as the narcoleptic playing Corday andskin condition.
Sades play is situated around Marat in his bath, with performers periodically emerging from and
disappearing into underground chambers situated in a circle around the tub. The play, intended as a simple
depiction of Marats execution, quickly degenerates into a chaotic and unwieldy affair.
Marats political oratories are periodically interrupted by Sade, who has his own take on the ideals of the
French revolution. He feels individuals should look out for themselves, in defiance of Marats staunch
collectivism. (Those opposing viewpoints were obviously quite relevant during the sixties, the time of
MARAT/SADES inception, and remain so today.)
Further interruptions issue from the ultraconservative head of the asylum, who constantly threatens to
halt the performance. Theres also the problem of the crazy performers various afflictions: the woman who
plays Corday is narcoleptic and constantly falling asleep on her feet, while a supporting player cant keep
from manhandling the women. Eventually madness overwhelms the performers, and the stage is engulfed
in complete chaos.
The Direction
There exists no other movie quite like this one. As in his films LORD OF THE FLIES and KING
LEAR, with MARAT-SADE Peter Brook has nearly created an anti-movie. Slickness and craftsmanship
are completely absent in Brooks free-form juxtaposition of wide shots and extreme close-ups, filmed
through shifty handheld camerawork. Most controversial are the impressionistic moments, such as the
nightmare sequence depicted via out-of-focus silhouettes, that break the otherwise staunchly naturalistic

28

veneer. Im not bothered by such scenes, as they contribute immeasurably to the overall atmosphere of
barely contained hysteria.
That hysteria boils over completely in the final scenes, an awe-inspiring cavalcade of mayhem. I
understand it was mind-blowing to be present during the original Broadway performance of those final
moments. Obviously nothing in this film can come close to matching that experience, but the brilliance and
conviction of Brooks staging is as fine as can be imagined.
There are moments of impudence (the general copulation music number), sheer weirdness (Sade
flogged by a womans hair) and bone-chilling eeriness (the aforementioned nightmare sequence), and even
some memorable tunes (15 Glorious Years in particular). The performances of the Royal Shakespeare
Company, playing crazy people impersonating actors, are simply brilliant, with standouts being a debuting
Glenda Jackson as the narcoleptic playing Corday andstandouts being a debuting Glenda Jackson as the
narcoleptic playing Corday and an even more grandiose than usual Patrick Magee as the Marquis de Sade.
There exist quite a few movies about the Divine Marquis, but MARAT/SADE is without question the one
to see.
Vital Statistics
MARAT/SADE (THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF JEAN-PAUL MARAT AS
PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION
OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE)
The Royal Shakespeare Company/Metro Goldwyn Meyer
Director: Peter Brook
Producer: Michael Birkett
Screenplay: Adrian Mitchell
(Based on the play by Peter Weiss)
Cinematography: David
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (popularly known as Fanny Hill) is an erotic novel by John Cleland first
published in England in 1748. Written while the author was in debtors' prison in London,[1][2] it is
considered "the first original English prose pornography, and the first pornography to use the form of the
novel."[3] One of the most prosecuted and banned books in history,[4] it has become a synonym for
obscenity.[5]
The novel was published in two instalments, on November 21, 1748 and February 1749, respectively, by
"G. Fenton", actually Fenton Griffiths and his brother Ralph.[6] Initially, there was no governmental reaction
to the novel, and it was only in November 1749, a year after the first instalment was published, that Cleland
and Ralph Griffiths were arrested and charged with "corrupting the King's subjects." In court, Cleland
renounced the novel and it was officially withdrawn. However, as the book became popular, pirate editions
appeared. It was once suspected that the sodomy scene near the end that Fanny witnesses in disgust was an
interpolation made for these pirated editions, but as Peter Sabor states in the introduction to the Oxford
edition of Memoirs (1985), that scene is present in the first edition (p. xxiii).
In the 19th century, copies of the book were sold "underground." The book eventually made its way to the
United States, where in 1821 it was banned for obscenity. It was not until 1963, after the failure of the
British obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 that Mayflower Books, run by Gareth Powell,
The trial took place in February 1964. The defence argued that Fanny Hill was a historical source book and
that it was a joyful celebration of normal non-perverted sexbawdy rather than pornographic. The
prosecution countered by stressing one atypical scene involving flagellation, and won. Mayflower decided
not to appeal. However the case had highlighted the growing disconnect between the obscenity laws and
the social realities of late 1960s Britain, and was instrumental in shifting views to the point where in 1970
an unexpurgated version of Fanny Hill was once again published in Britain.
The novel was published in two instalments, on November 21, 1748 and February 1749, respectively, by
"G. Fenton", actually Fenton Griffiths and his brother Ralph.[6] Initially, there was no governmental reaction
to the novel, and it was only in November 1749, a year after the first instalment was published, that Cleland
and Ralph Griffiths were arrested and charged with "corrupting the King's subjects." In court, Cleland
renounced the novel and it was officially withdrawn. However, as the book became popular, pirate editions
appeared. It was once suspected that the sodomy scene near the end that Fanny witnesses in disgust was an
interpolation made for these pirated editions, but as Peter Sabor states in the introduction to the Oxford
edition of Memoirs (1985), that scene is present in the first edition (p. xxiii).

29

Smart is s willing to be called a fool of God for the sake of Christ. (B 51) He aligns himself with his
Saviour in suffering the same hostile interpretation of his challenge to conventional decorums. For I am
under the same accusations with my Saviour for they said he is beside himself. (B 151)
Rejoice in God, O ye tongues, give glory to the Lord, and the Lamb,
Nations, and languages, and every Creature, in which is the breath of Life.
Let man and beast appear before him, and magnify his name together.
For by the grace of God I am the reviver of adoration amongst English- men.
For I am the Lords news-writer, the scribe evangelist.
For I am not without authority in my jeopardy, which I derive inevitably from the glory of the Name of the
Lord.
For my existimation is good even amongst the slanderers and my memory shall arise for a sweet savour
unto the Lord.
For I preach the very GOSPEL of CHRIST without comment and with this weapon shall I slay envy.
For Newton nevertheless is more of error than of the truth, but I am of the Word of God.
For I bless God in the libraries of the learned and for all the booksellers in the world.
For I pray the Lord Jesus that cured the lunatick to be merciful to all my brethren and sisters in these
houses.
For they work me with their harping-irons which is a barbarous instrument, because I am more unguarded
than others.
For I have a greater compass of mirth and melancholy than another.
God be merciful to all dumb creatures in respect of pain.
For THUNDER is the voice of God direct in verse and musick.
For lightning is a glance of the glory of God.
For the brimstone that is found at the times of thunder and lightning is worked up by the Adversary.
For God has given us a language of monosyllable's to prevent our clipping.
For a toad enjoys a finer prospect than another creature to compensate his lack.
Tho toad I am the object of man's hate.
Yet better am I than a reprobate. (who has the worst of prospects).
For there are stones whose constituent particles are little toads.
For the spiritual music is as follows.
Per there is the thunder-stop, which is the voice of God direct.
For the rest of the stops are by their rhymes.
For the trumpet rhymes are sound bound, soar more and the like.
For the harp rhymes are ring string and the like.
For the shawm rhymes are lawn fawn moon boon and the like.
For the cymbal rhymes are bell well toll soul and the like.
For the flute rhymes are tooth youth suit mute and the like.
For the dulcimer rhymes are grace place beat heat and the like.
For the clarinet rhimes are clean seen and the like.
For the Bassoon rhymes are pass, class and the like. God to be gracious to Baumgarden.
For all the creatures mentioned by Pliny are somewhere or other extant to the glory of God.

30

For languages work into one another by their bearings.

For the power of some animal is predominant in every language.
For the power and spirit of a CAT is in the Greek.
For it is the business of a man gifted in the word to prophecy good.
For it will be better for England and all the world in a season, as I prophecy this day.
For I prophecy that they will obey the motions of the spirit descended upon them as at this day.
For they have seen the glory of God already come down upon the trees.
For I prophecy that it will descend upon their heads also.
For I prophecy that the praise of God will be in every man's mouth in the Public Streets.
For I prophecy that there will be public worship in the cross ways and fields.
For I prophecy that there will be more mercy for criminals.
For I prophecy that there will be less mischief concerning women
for I prophecy that they will be cooped up and kept under due controul.
For I prophecy that the clergy in particular will set a better example
For I prophecy that they will not dare to imprison a brother or sister for debt.
But is there so great Merit and Dexterity in being a mad Doctor? The common Prescriptions of a
Bethlemitical Doctor are a Purge and a Vomit, and a Vomit and a Purge over again, and sometimes a
Bleeding, which is no great mystery
Alexander Cruden, The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured, 1739.[92]
... you find yourself in a long and wide gallery, on either side of which are a large number of little cells
where lunatics of every description are shut up, and you can get a sight of these poor creatures, little
windows being let into the doors. Many inoffensive madmen walk in the big gallery. On the second floor is
a corridor and cells like those on the first floor, and this is the part reserved for dangerous maniacs, most of
them being chained and terrible to behold. On holidays numerous persons of both sexes, but belonging
generally to the lower classes, visit this hospital and amuse themselves watching these unfortunate
wretches, who often give them cause for laughter. On leaving this melancholy abode, you are expected by
the porter to give him a penny but if you happen to have no change and give him a silver coin, he will keep
the whole sum and return you nothing

Inveterate letter-writer Csar de Saussure's account of Bethlem during his 1725 tour of London's sights. [153]
The late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries are typically seen as decisive in the emergence of new
attitudes towards the management and treatment of the insane.[192] Increasingly, the emphasis shifted from
the external control of the mad through physical restraint and coercion to their moral management whereby
self-discipline would be inculcated through a system of reward and punishment. [193] For proponents of
lunacy reform, the Quaker-run York Retreat, founded in 1796, functioned as an exemplar of this new
approach that would seek to re-socialise and re-educate the mad.[193] Bethlem, embroiled in scandal from
1814 over its inmate conditions, would come to symbolise its antithesis.[194]
Through newspaper reports initially and then evidence given to the 1815 Parliamentary Committee on
Madhouses, the state of inmate care in Bethlem was chiefly publicised by Edward Wakefield, a Quaker
land agent and leading advocate of lunacy reform.[n 19] He visited Bethlem several times during the late
spring and early summer of 1814.[n 20] His inspections were of the old hospital at the Moorfields site, which
was then in a state of disrepair; much of it was uninhabitable and the patient population had been
significantly reduced.[199] Contrary to the tenets of moral treatment, Wakefield found that the patients in the
Contrary to the tenets of moral treatment, Wakefield found that the patients in the galleries were not
classified in any logical manner as both highly disturbed and quiescent patients were mixed together
indiscriminately.[200] Later, when reporting on the chained and effectively naked state of many patients,
Wakefield sought to describe their conditions in such a way as to maximise the horror of the scene while
decrying the apparently bestial treatment of Bethlem's inmates[n 21] and the thuggish nature of the asylum
keepers.[n 22] Wakefield's account focused on one patient in particular, James Norris, an American marine

31

reported to be 55 years of age who had been detained in Bethlem since 1 February 1800. Housed in the
incurable wing of the hospital, Norris had been continuously restrained for about a decade in a harness
apparatus which severely restricted his movement.[n 23][203] Wakefield stated that:
... a stout iron ring was riveted about his neck, from which a short chain passed to a ring made to slide
upwards and downwards on an upright massive iron bar, more than six feet high, inserted into the wall.
Round his body a strong iron bar about two inches wide was riveted; on each side of the bar was a circular
projection, which being fashioned to and enclosing each of his arms, pinioned them close to his sides. This
waist bar was secured by two similar iron bars which, passing over his shoulders, were riveted to the waist
both before and behind. The iron ring about his neck was connected to the bars on his shoulders by a
double link. From each of these bars another short chain passed to the ring on the upright bar ... He had
remained thus encaged and chained more than twelve years. [204]
Wakefield's revelations, combined with earlier reports about patient maltreatment at the York Asylum, [n 24]
helped to prompt a renewed campaign for national lunacy reform and the establishment of a 1815 House of
Commons Select Committee on Madhouses which examined the conditions under which the insane were
confined in county asylums, private madhouses, charitable asylums and in the lunatic wards of Poor-Law
workhouses.[205]
In June 1816 Thomas Monro, Principal Physician resigned as a result of scandal when he was accused of
wanting in humanity towards his patients.[206]
St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics was founded in London in 1751 for the treatment of incurable pauper
lunatics by a group of philanthropic apothecaries and others. It was the second public institution in
London created to look after mentally ill people, after the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlem
(Bedlam), founded in 1246). History
1246). History
The first chief physician was Dr William Battie who was renowned as an eccentric humorist. He believed
the patients of this hospital shall not be exposed to publick view. Medical treatment consisted of cold
plunge baths to shake lunatics out of their insanity. A system of non-restraint was professed, however
manacles and other restraints were sometimes used.[3]
The hospital was originally housed in a converted foundry in Windmill Street, Upper Moorfields, close to
Bedlam. It was designed by George Dance the Elder in 1750-1 and after his death, his son George Dance
the Younger succeeded him as surveyor to the hospital. It was originally built for 25 patients, but was
enlarged and by 1771 was overcrowded. A decision was made to build a larger hospital on a new site. The
design was put out to competition which was a novelty at the time. None of the competition entries was
successful however and Dance was asked to design the new building.[4]
In 1786 it moved to Dance's purpose-built premises on Old Street, between Bath St and what is now the
City Road roundabout. The building had a magnificent frontage of clamp brick, 500 feet (150 m) long,[4]
which had a central entrance, with the male wards to the left and female wards to the right. [3] The building
contained single cells for 300 patients, each with small windows set high in the wall, no heating, and loose
straw on wooden bedsteads.[3]
By 1865 it had a population of 150 to 160 patients, taken from the middle classes, its original purpose of
supporting paupers having been abandoned.[5] The proportion of cures at St. Luke's was 67 to 70 per cent
compared to that of only 15 per cent at pauper lunatic asylums .[1]
Behind the main building were two gardens for the exercise of the less disturbed inmates, one for men and
another for women. More dangerous residents were kept inside, or in their cells. The treatment regime
consisted of cold plunge baths, and a focus on the gastrointestinal system with the administration of antispasmodics, emetics (to induce vomiting) and purgatives.[3]
The patients were transferred to other institutions or their homes in 1916, and the buildings were acquired
by the Bank of England to become the St Luke's Printing Works, used for printing bank notes until the early
1950s.[5][6] The building was demolished in 1963.[3]
In 1922 it was suggested that a psychiatric unit should be instituted by the St Luke's charity in cooperation with
a general hospital. This led to the funding by the charity of both an out-patient clinic and a psychiatric in-patient
ward at the
charity of both an out-patient clinic and a psychiatric in-patient ward at the Middlesex Hospital and then to
a new St Luke's, the third, opening at Woodside Avenue, Muswell Hill, in 1930. This was variously known
as Woodside Nerve Hospital, St Luke's Woodside Hospital for Functional Nervous Disorders and from
1948 as St Luke's Woodside.[5]

32

In 2011 the NHS Trust responsible for St Luke's Woodside, Camden and Islington Foundation Trust,
successively closed all wards, leaving open only an occupational therapy unit and effecting closure by
stealth with the consultation process required on formal closure proposals. The site is for sale through
Knight Frank Estate Agents [7]
Notable patients

The poet Christopher Smart (17221771) was confined in St Luke's from 1757 to 1763.

Jonathan Martin, brother of John Martin (17891854), the English Romantic painter. Confined
1829 until his death in 1838 for setting fire to York Minster.
Due to their historical location outside City of London jurisdiction, St Luke's and Clerkenwell had long been
regarded as a little 'beyond the Pale,' on the outer edge of civilised society, associated with religious
nonconformists, political radicals and other subversives. From the late 18th century it was also linked to
insanity. 1786 saw the opening of St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, only the second mental hospital in the
country (after the notorious Bethlam, better known as Bedlam). This magnificent and forbidding building to
the east of St Luke's Church, opposite what is now Old Street Roundabout housed violent and 'incurable'
patients. Although inmates slept in unheated cells and were subjected to cold water plunges to shock them out
of their madness, the hospital had a reputation for its supposedly enlightened approach towards mental illness.
Due to their historical location outside City of London jurisdiction, St Luke's and Clerkenwell had long been
regarded as a little 'beyond the Pale,' on the outer edge of civilised society, associated with religious
nonconformists, political radicals and other subversives. From the late 18th century it was also linked to
insanity. 1786 saw the opening of St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, only the second mental hospital in the
country (after the notorious Bethlam, better known as Bedlam). This magnificent and forbidding building to
the east of St Luke's Church, opposite what is now Old Street Roundabout housed violent and 'incurable'
patients. Although inmates slept in unheated cells and were subjected to cold water plunges to shock them out
of their madness, the hospital had a reputation for its supposedly enlightened approach towards mental illness.

The battle of the lunatic asylums in eighteenth-century York

Tuesday 11 June 2013, 6.30PM
Speaker: Dr Ann-Marie Akehurst, Department of History of Art
Lifelong Learning Lectures
The York Lunatic Asylum opened in 1777, but by 1788 it was at the centre of a public controversy, and in
1790 a patient died there without the requested solace of her fellow Quakers. This narrative forms part of
the founding myth of the York Retreat, an independent lunatic asylum established by the Society of Friends
in 1792. The relationship between the two asylums was therefore, from the outset, capable of bearing an
oppositional character but all was not quite as it seemed
This talk reveals the secret political origins of the foundation of the York Asylum, and its presentation as a
metaphor of corruption as an act of partisan revenge. And while the Retreat emerged directly out of Quaker
philosophy and a renaissance in institutional foundation, it was only with the publication of Samuel Tukes
innovative Description of the Retreat, two hundred years ago this year, that its celebrated success made the
contrast with the Asylum more striking. In 1814, early-morning visitors to the York Asylum discovered
thirteen old women in tiny cells, inches deep in excremental filth. The very particular problems there were
exposed in Parliament, and the relationship between these two York institutions acted as a catalyst for
national reform of both asylum design and the treatment offered within their walls.
It may be observed here that John Wesley prescribed at this period for
madness, as well as for irreligion.[112] One of his remedies was that
the patient should be exclusively fed on apples for a month--a regimen
which recalls the starving treatment of epilepsy prescribed, at a
recent date, by Dr. Jackson, of Boston. Wesley's prescriptions for
"lunacy" and "raving madness" are given with almost as much confidence
of success as those we have cited from the Saxon leech-book.
"For Lunacy:
1. Give decoction of agrimony four times a day.
patients. Although inmates slept in unheated cells and were subjected to cold water plunges to shock them
out of their madness, the hospital had a reputation for its supposedly enlightened approach towards mental

33

illness.

The battle of the lunatic asylums in eighteenth-century York

Tuesday 11 June 2013, 6.30PM
Speaker: Dr Ann-Marie Akehurst, Department of History of Art
Lifelong Learning Lectures
The York Lunatic Asylum opened in 1777, but by 1788 it was at the centre of a public controversy, and in
1790 a patient died there without the requested solace of her fellow Quakers. This narrative forms part of
the founding myth of the York Retreat, an independent lunatic asylum established by the Society of Friends
in 1792. The relationship between the two asylums was therefore, from the outset, capable of bearing an
oppositional character but all was not quite as it seemed
This talk reveals the secret political origins of the foundation of the York Asylum, and its presentation as a
metaphor of corruption as an act of partisan revenge. And while the Retreat emerged directly out of Quaker
philosophy and a renaissance in institutional foundation, it was only with the publication of Samuel Tukes
innovative Description of the Retreat, two hundred years ago this year, that its celebrated success made the
contrast with the Asylum more striking. In 1814, early-morning visitors to the York Asylum discovered
thirteen old women in tiny cells, inches deep in excremental filth. The very particular problems there were
exposed in Parliament, and the relationship between these two York institutions acted as a catalyst for
national reform of both asylum design and the treatment offered within their walls.
It may be observed here that John Wesley prescribed at this period for
madness, as well as for irreligion.[112] One of his remedies was that
the patient should be exclusively fed on apples for a month--a regimen
which recalls the starving treatment of epilepsy prescribed, at a
recent date, by Dr. Jackson, of Boston. Wesley's prescriptions for
"lunacy" and "raving madness" are given with almost as much confidence
of success as those we have cited from the Saxon leech-book.
"For Lunacy:
1. Give decoction of agrimony four times a day.
patients. Although inmates slept in unheated cells and were subjected to cold water plunges to shock them
out of their madness, the hospital had a reputation for its supposedly enlightened approach towards mental
illness.
The battle of the lunatic asylums in eighteenth-century York
Tuesday 11 June 2013, 6.30PM
Speaker: Dr Ann-Marie Akehurst, Department of History of Art
Lifelong Learning Lectures
The York Lunatic Asylum opened in 1777, but by 1788 it was at the centre of a public controversy, and in
1790 a patient died there without the requested solace of her fellow Quakers. This narrative forms part of
the founding myth of the York Retreat, an independent lunatic asylum established by the Society of Friends
in 1792. The relationship between the two asylums was therefore, from the outset, capable of bearing an
oppositional character but all was not quite as it seemed
This talk reveals the secret political origins of the foundation of the York Asylum, and its presentation as a
metaphor of corruption as an act of partisan revenge. And while the Retreat emerged directly out of Quaker
philosophy and a renaissance in institutional foundation, it was only with the publication of Samuel Tukes
innovative Description of the Retreat, two hundred years ago this year, that its celebrated success made the
contrast with the Asylum more striking. In 1814, early-morning visitors to the York Asylum discovered
thirteen old women in tiny cells, inches deep in excremental filth. The very particular problems there were
exposed in Parliament, and the relationship between these two York institutions acted as a catalyst for
national reform of both asylum design and the treatment offered within their walls.
It may be observed here that John Wesley prescribed at this period for
madness, as well as for irreligion.[112] One of his remedies was that
the patient should be exclusively fed on apples for a month--a regimen
which recalls the starving treatment of epilepsy prescribed, at a
recent date, by Dr. Jackson, of Boston. Wesley's prescriptions for

34

"lunacy" and "raving madness" are given with almost as much confidence
of success as those we have cited from the Saxon leech-book.
"For Lunacy:
1. Give decoction of agrimony four times a day.
2. Or, rub the head several times a day with vinegar in which
ground ivy leaves have been infused.
3. Or, take daily an ounce of distilled vinegar.
4. Or, boil juice of ground ivy with sweet oil and white wine
into an ointment. Shave the head anointed therewith, and
chafe it in, warm, every other day for three weeks; bruise
also the leaves and bind them on the head, and give three
spoonfuls of the juice warm every morning.
This generally cures melancholy. The juice alone taken twice
a day will cure.
5. Or, electrify. Tried.
For Raving Madness:
1. It is a sure rule that all madmen are cowards, and may be
conquered by binding only, without beating (Dr. Mead). He
also observes that blistering the head does more harm than
good. Keep the head close shaved, and frequently wash it with
vinegar.
2. Apply to the head clothes dipt in cold water.
3. Or, set the patient with his head under a great waterfall,
as long as his strength will bear; or pour water on his head
out of a tea-kettle.
4. Or, let him eat nothing but apples for a month.
5. Or, nothing but bread and milk. Tried."
In all hypochondriacal cases, and in obstinate madness, Wesley
recommended the following, wherein we see a return to the almost
inevitable hellebore: "Pour twelve ounces of rectified spirits of wine
on four ounces of roots of black hellebore, and let it stand in a warm
place twenty-four hours. Pour it off and take from thirty to forty drops
in any liquid, fasting."
Lastly, for all nervous disorders, he recurs to what was his favourite
remedy, and says, "But I am firmly persuaded that there is no remedy in
nature for nervous disorders of every kind, comparable to the proper
and constant use of the electrical machine."
Electrical machine designed by John Wesley for the treatmentofmelancholia in the 18th century
Cintio d'Amato, "Bloodletting Scene" (1671)
Thomas Rowlandsons Gall
Caricature by Thomas Rowlandson, 1808

35

Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) leading a discussion on phrenology with five colleagues, among his
extensive collection of skulls and model heads. The three shelves of model heads behind Gall are labelled:
"Lawers, thieves & murderers", "Poets, dramatists, actors", "Philosophers, statesmen & historians. Franz
Joseph Galls rightfully recognised as a great anatomist , pioneering the concepts of localized functions in
the brain. He developed the cranioscopy, a method to try the personality, mental faculties on the basis of
the external shape of the skull. Cranioscopy from cranium : skull and scopos : vision was called later to
phrenology from phren : mind and logos : study by his pupil Johann Christoph Spurzheim (1776-1832). In
1791, the first Galls publication were two chapters appeared in Philosophisch-medicinische
Unlersucliungen-uber Natur u. Kunsi im kranken u. gesunden Zustande des Menschen. In 1810, he
published his main work In 1810, he published his Anatomie et physiologie du systeme nerveux en general,
et du cerveau en particulier, avec des observations sur la possibilite de reconnaitre plusieurs dispositions
intellectuelles et morales de l'homme et des animaux, par la configuration de leur tetes, the first two
volumes of which were written with Spurzheim. Image by Wellcome Library n 11368
James Gillrays true faces
Doublres of Characters or striking resemblances in Physiognomy. Caricature by James Gillray (17561815), published by John Wright (active in 1798) on 1st
In all hypochondriacal cases, and in obstinate madness, Wesley
recommended the following, wherein we see a return to the almost
inevitable hellebore: "Pour twelve ounces of rectified spirits of wine
on four ounces of roots of black hellebore, and let it stand in a warm
place twenty-four hours. Pour it off and take from thirty to forty drops
in any liquid, fasting."
Lastly, for all nervous disorders, he recurs to what was his favourite
remedy, and says, "But I am firmly persuaded that there is no remedy in
nature for nervous disorders of every kind, comparable to the proper
and constant use of the electrical machine."
Electrical machine designed by John Wesley for the treatmentofmelancholia in the 18th century
Cintio d'Amato, "Bloodletting Scene" (1671)
Thomas Rowlandsons Gall
Caricature by Thomas Rowlandson, 1808
Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) leading a discussion on phrenology with five colleagues, among his
extensive collection of skulls and model heads. The three shelves of model heads behind Gall are labelled:
"Lawers, thieves & murderers", "Poets, dramatists, actors", "Philosophers, statesmen & historians. Franz
Joseph Galls rightfully recognised as a great anatomist , pioneering the concepts of localized functions in
the brain. He developed the cranioscopy, a method to try the personality, mental faculties on the basis of
the external shape of the skull. Cranioscopy from cranium : skull and scopos : vision was called later to
phrenology from phren : mind and logos : study by his pupil Johann Christoph Spurzheim (1776-1832). In
1791, the first Galls publication were two chapters appeared in Philosophisch-medicinische
Unlersucliungen-uber Natur u. Kunsi im kranken u. gesunden Zustande des Menschen. In 1810, he
published his main work In 1810, he published his Anatomie et physiologie du systeme nerveux en general,
et du cerveau en particulier, avec des observations sur la possibilite de reconnaitre plusieurs dispositions
intellectuelles et morales de l'homme et des animaux, par la configuration de leur tetes, the first two
volumes of which were written with Spurzheim. Image by Wellcome Library n 11368
James Gillrays true faces
Doublres of Characters or striking resemblances in Physiognomy. Caricature by James Gillray (17561815), published by John Wright (active in 1798) on 1st November, 1798.
This explicit print played on the recent success of Lavaters Essay. By manipulating the principle that heart
and face were essentially connected, Gillray ironically unveiled the true faces of the opposition party by
pairing their public face with its corrupted countertype. So, for example, we see The Patron of Liberty
turned into The Arch-Fiend or a Character of High Birth as Silenus debauching.
Bust portraits of seven leaders of the Opposition, each with his almost identical double, arranged in two
rows, with numbers referring to notes below the title. The first pair are Fox, directed slightly to the left, and

36

Satan, a snake round his neck, his agonized scowl a slight exaggeration of Foxs expression; behind them
are flames. They are I. The Patron of Liberty, Doublre, the Arch-Fiend. Next is Sheridan, with bloated
face, and staring intently with an expression of sly greed; his double clasps a money-bag: II. A Friend to
his Country, Doubr Judas selling his Master. The Duke of Norfolk, looking to the right, scarcely
caricatured, but older than in contemporary prints. His double, older still, crowned with vines, holds a
brimming glass to his lips, which drip with wine: III. Character of High Birth, Doubr Silenus debauching.
(Below) Tierney, directed to the right, but looking sideways to the left: IV. A Finishd Patriot, Doubr The
lowest Spirit of Hell. Burdett, in profile to the right, with his characteristic shock of forward-falling hair,
trace of whisker, and high neck-cloth, has a raffish-looking double with similar but unkempt hair: V.
Arbiter Elegantiarum, Doubr Sixteen-string Jack [a noted highwayman]. Lord Derby, caricatured, in profil
perdu, very like his simian double, who wears a bonnet-rouge terminating in the bell of a fools cap: VI.
Strong Sense, Doubr A Baboon. The Duke of Bedford, not caricatured, and wearing a top-hat, has a double
wearing a jockey cap and striped coat: VII. A Pillar of the State, Doubr A Newmarket Jockey. After the
title: If you would know Mens Hearts, look in their Faces Lavater. 1 November 1798 Hand-coloured
etching and stipple
Physiognomy by the study of facial features and the shape and size of the skull
Artificial Leech
The artificial leech was created roughly near the end of the eighteenth century as a way to diminish the use
of real leeches in medical practices. The artificial leech was way to diminish the use of real leeches in
medical practices. The artificial leech was a prominent tool in blood letting and proved to be a more sterile,
an efficient method of bloodletting; however, its gruesome appearance and methods were viewed as being
slighty frightentning. The artificial leech was made out of an aluminum tube with small blade on one end
and a pump on the other. The leech was then applied to the patient where the blades began bleeding the
patient. The pump could be pulled which helped keep blood flowing and which effectively captured the
blood.
Clysters (Enemas)
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a clyster, or enema, is when "a medicine injected into the
rectum, to empty or cleanse the bowels, to afford nutrition" (Oxford English Dictionary). In other words,
stool is manually forced out of the body. This treatment was just one more way to purge the ailment out of
the body and mind along with vomiting and bloodletting. Dr. John Woodward, an 18th century British
physician, was well known for prescribing this treatment to his patients along with the other methods of
purging the body. According to a vivid description by Dr. Woodward, the enema of one hysteric patient
"was made of wind and matter, foetid, green, froathy, and sour" (Woodward 64).
Cold bathing
During the 18th century, cold bathing and cold water was thought to be of use in curing many ailments.
One of the most prominent uses of cold bathing is for fever reduction. A differing modern practice requires
a tepid bath because a drastic difference in temperature between the body and the bath could cause shock.
Other uses of cold bathing are the cessation of convulsions, insanity, plagues, typhoid fever, and
drunkenness.
Jugum
The jugum was an instrument used to treat "spermatorrhoea" in the 18th century. Men who were "feeling
anxious, tired, and irritable" were diagnosed with this condition; the cause was attributed to masturbation.
[1] In 1758, doctor Samuel Auguste Tissot published his theory on masturbation stating it was more
devastating than smallpox since the act robbed the body of sperm, the "carrier of vital energies."[1] By the
late 1700s, the jugum was created to prevent male genitalia from releasing sperm. The release of sperm was
considered to be a serious detriment to physical and mental health. Eighteenth-century medical
practitioners felt that too much masturbation could cause weakness, loss of vision, and loss of hearing.
More importantly, it was also understood to cause insanity, epilepsy, and way to diminish the use of real
leeches in medical practices. The artificial leech was a prominent tool in blood letting and proved to be a
more sterile, an efficient method of bloodletting; however, its gruesome appearance and methods were
viewed as being slighty frightentning. The artificial leech was made out of an aluminum tube with small
blade on one end and a pump on the other. The leech was then applied to the patient where the blades began
bleeding the patient. The pump could be pulled which helped keep blood flowing and which effectively
captured the blood.

37

Clysters (Enemas)
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a clyster, or enema, is when "a medicine injected into the
rectum, to empty or cleanse the bowels, to afford nutrition" (Oxford English Dictionary). In other words,
stool is manually forced out of the body. This treatment was just one more way to purge the ailment out of
the body and mind along with vomiting and bloodletting. Dr. John Woodward, an 18th century British
physician, was well known for prescribing this treatment to his patients along with the other methods of
purging the body. According to a vivid description by Dr. Woodward, the enema of one hysteric patient
"was made of wind and matter, foetid, green, froathy, and sour" (Woodward 64).
Cold bathing
During the 18th century, cold bathing and cold water was thought to be of use in curing many ailments.
One of the most prominent uses of cold bathing is for fever reduction. A differing modern practice requires
a tepid bath because a drastic difference in temperature between the body and the bath could cause shock.
Other uses of cold bathing are the cessation of convulsions, insanity, plagues, typhoid fever, and
drunkenness.
Jugum
The jugum was an instrument used to treat "spermatorrhoea" in the 18th century. Men who were "feeling
anxious, tired, and irritable" were diagnosed with this condition; the cause was attributed to masturbation.
[1] In 1758, doctor Samuel Auguste Tissot published his theory on masturbation stating it was more
devastating than smallpox since the act robbed the body of sperm, the "carrier of vital energies."[1] By the
late 1700s, the jugum was created to prevent male genitalia from releasing sperm. The release of sperm was
considered to be a serious detriment to physical and mental health. Eighteenth-century medical
practitioners felt that too much masturbation could cause weakness, loss of vision, and loss of hearing.
More importantly, it was also understood to cause insanity, epilepsy, and hearing. More importantly, it was
also understood to cause insanity, epilepsy, and even mental retardation. The jugum, therefore, was not only
a device used to treat a perceived physical ailment, but also one used to prevent and treat mental
disorders
Wesleys machine for electrotherapy
John Wesley (1704-1791) was an eighteenth century English clergyman who helped to pioneer the use of
electric shock for the treatment of illness. In 1760 he published The Desideratum: Or, Electricity made
Plain and Useful by a Lover of Mankind and of Common Sense1 based on his use of electricity in free
medical clinics, which he had established for the poor in Bristol and London a decade earlier.
That electrotherapy caught-on and was embraced by many physicians later in the eighteenth century cannot
be denied. A few of these developments were noted in the introduction to this essay. Among other
developments was the first installation of a room for electrification in the asylum at Leicester in 1788. A
fascinating account of an electric cure of an epidemic of hysteric reactions in a cotton mill at Lancashire
was reported in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1787. A physician with a portable electric machine shocked
some female workers who had gone into convulsions in imitation of a colleague who had a mouse put
down her blouse in a playful ruse. The "fits were stopped but it took a week for work to return to normal.
Whether any of these developments were due to Wesley's influence is debatable, as Rogal noted in his
thesis that Wesley was a relative unknown in professional circles.
Probably the first physician to write a book on the use of electricity in general medicine was Christian
Kratzenstein in 1745. By 1783, Nicholas Phillipe Ledru and his son Charles established a "medico-electric
clinic in France and made house calls using a portable machine similar to that of Wesley's. Electricity was
being used in Italy and Germany by 1786 when Galvani published his researches which were to lead to
continuous current applications. Perhaps the most interesting indications of medicine's acceptance of this
form of treatment were six pages of endorsements for Mr. J. L. Pulvermacher's "electric chains in the back
of the 1781 edition of Wesley's Desideratum that included over ten "gentlemen of the faculty, four of whom
were listed as physicians to the queen! For physicians to be willing to have their names in print with
Wesley's indicated electrotherapy had finally "arrived! Even Benjamin Franklin had begun offering
treatment by this time. Although these developments were, no doubt, due to more than Wesley's initiative,
Turrell's evaluation of his efforts would evoke almost universal agreement. He stated, "Clearly, we find (in
Wesley) a man of conspicuous ability, of indomitable energy, of reckless and fearless impetuosity, of
science and fixed convictions, and of outstanding `Benevolence to Human Kind.'50

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