Madness: A Brief History (7 page)

Renaissance artists were credited with receiving visions in dreams and daydreams; gloom and woe fired the poet’s fancy; and, especially on the stage, there skulked the melancholy malcontent, clad all in black, disaffected, disdainful, dangerous, yet brilliantly discerning and diamond sharp. For Hamlet in the churchyard or Jaques in the forest of Arden in
As You Like It
, something bittersweet was to be savoured in a contemplative sorrow: Jaques enjoyed sucking ‘melancholy out of a stone’. The same idea underlay Thomas Gray’s
Elegy

Written in a Country Churchyard
in the eighteenth century. Given man’s mortality, the wheel of fortune, and the scurviness of the times, what other response could there be to life’s changes and chances but a detached sadness?—such was the drift of Robert Burton’s obsessive
Anatomy of Melancholy
(1621 ):

When I go musing all alone,

Thinking of divers things fore-known,

When I build Castles in the air,

Void of sorrow and void of fear,

Pleasing my self with phantasms sweet,

Methinks the time runs very fleet.

All my joys to this are folly,

Naught so sweet as Melancholy.

For Burton, to live in this sordid, base world, surrounded by despots, tyrants, misers, thieves, slanderers, adulterers, and whole broods of knaves and fools was a melancholy matter. Hence his pen name ‘Democritus Junior’, after the Greek philosopher who became a solitary because he found mankind alternately so risible and so pitiable. Life was a black comedy.

Amongst the paradoxes beloved of the Humanists was the thought that, in a mad world, the only realist was the ‘fool’ or simpleton. In
The Praise of Folly
(1511), Erasmus’s eponymous heroine, so full of herself, prated
wisdom unthinkingly, while the Fool in
King Lear
and Feste in
Twelfth Night
outwitted logic in nonsense ditties which gave voice to darker truths denied to sober speech. In sixteenth-century France Michel de Montaigne, who posed the sceptical question, ‘what do I know?’, thought the whole world run mad, or at least hinted that all humans, since the Fall, lived at risk of Reason’s shipwreck or the poison of the passions.

Aboard this ship of fools or topsy-turvy world, scholars were crazy and (in Gray’s phrase) it was folly to be wise for, as the Acts of the Apostles warned, ‘much learning doth make thee mad’. Cervantes explains in
Don Quixote
how his hidalgo hero embarked upon his career of tilting at windmills:

this gentleman, in the times when he had nothing to do—as was the case for most of the year—gave himself up to the reading of books of knight errantry; which he loved and enjoyed so much that he almost entirely forgot his hunting, and even the care of his estate.

Evidently he should have heeded Burton’s advice: be not solitary, be not idle.

Madness thus donned many disguises and acted out a bewildering multiplicity of parts in early modern times: moral and medical, negative and positive, religious and secular. After all, man was an ‘amphibian’, part angel,
part beast, and hence a divided self—and in any case was fallen: no wonder his pretensions were mocked by madness.

The conundrums and contradictions in this riddling doubling of
homo sapiens
with the mad fool—‘semel
insanivimus omnes
^?
, Burton declared: we’re all mad—are embodied in the double face of Bethlem Hospital, both a bricks-and-mortar institution on the edge of London and an image (‘Bedlam’). Since that ‘College’ was open to visitors, the sane and the mad were there brought tantalizingly face-to-face: who could tell the difference? For its many critics, the fact that Bethlem allowed itself to be included among the ‘shows of London’, like the menagerie in the Tower, was central to its scandal: putting the Other on display in a human zoo or freak show courted shameless voyeurism, as is suggested in a host of Bedlam cartoons, especially the final scene of Hogarth’s
The Rake’s Progress,
where two visiting ladies of fashion (or are they high-class courtesans?) linger before the cell of the mad monarch: who is really crazy?

10
The Hospital of Bethlem (Bedlam) at Moorfields. This is the second building of the Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam), built in 1675-6 at Moorfields, just north of the City of London. It was designed by the natural philosopher, Robert Hooke. Its showy and palatial exterior was the subject of much satirical comment.

Officially at least, Bethlem’s insane were meant to be edifying spectacles, object lessons to the public at large of the wages of passion, vice, and sin. In 1753, a magazine held that there was 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.’ Without self-control, who might not plunge into the depths of derangement? Indeed, as critics loved to note, it could be hard to tell visitors and patients apart, and the mad inmates might even be held up as more free and fortunate (and hence sensible) than those outside. Recounting a supposed visit, the journalist Ned Ward pictured one of the Bedlamites

holding forth with much vehemence against Kingly government. I told him he deserv’d to be hang’d for talking of treason. ‘Now’, says he, ‘you’re a fool, for we madmen have as much privilege of speaking our minds ... you may talk what you will, and nobody will call you in question for it. Truth is persecuted everywhere abroad, and flies thither for sanctuary, where she sits as safe as a knave in a church, or a whore in a nunnery. I can use here as I please and that’s more than you dare to’.

The archetypal Bedlam situation was milked in
The Rake’s Progress
sequence. In the early scenes, Hogarth’s hero Tom Rakewell drinks, gambles, whores, and marries his way through two fortunes. Finally, demented and dumped in Bethlem, he lies naked, a brutalized wreck, surrounded by his fellow crazies: a mad lover 
(‘love sickness’ had long featured in the roster of insanity) , a mad bishop, a mad king (a pretender?), sitting with make-believe orb and sceptre on his close-stool of a throne, a popish religious enthusiast, a mad tailor, and a crazy astronomer, gazing up to the rafters through a rolled-up paper ‘telescope’.

11
At the centre of the print from Hogarth’s
Rake’s Progress
series is Tom Rakewell, who, having gambled away his fortune, has knocked over his chair and fallen to his knees, wigless and frantic, with the dog barking at him. Madness will follow, symbolized by the fire breaking out in the wainscoting; after 1735.

Is this what the Bedlamites looked like?
That
is clearly not Hogarth’s point: the parable he was telling was about the
British.
Indeed, on the far wall, a mad artist (Hogarth himself?) sketches a coin of the realm, with ‘Britannia 1763’ inscribed around its rim. Hogarth thus pretends to engrave Bethlem while actually depicting Britain. He is not mocking the mad to spare the sane, he is holding up the mirror to the viewer: it is we who are mad—or, in the words of the moralizing Baptist Thomas Tryon, ‘the World is but a great
Bedlam,
where those that are
more mad,
lock up those that are
less
'.

Jokes about mad monarchs came home to roost remarkably rapidly: George III’s delirious descent in 1788 provided a golden opportunity for satirists and cartoonists like James Gillray to highlight the craziness of power. The politician Edmund Burke was so obsessive as to be thought well nigh certifiable—‘the most eloquent madman I know’, joked Edward Gibbon. His fellow Whig politician Charles James Fox likewise: his unkempt looks, impetuous political switches, and 
passionate enthusiasm for the French Revolution led cartoonists to represent him as quite out of his wits. One engraving pictures him blanketed in Bedlam. Wearing a crown of straw and clutching an impromptu sceptre, he exhibits weird delusions of grandeur: ‘Do you not behold friend Sam I have obtained the height of all my wishes?’ he buttonholes a visitor.

12
Plate VIII from Hogarth’s
Rake’s Progress
series, 1735. Now insane, Tom Rakewell sits on the floor of the gallery at Bethlem Hospital, London, grasping at his head in the classic pose of the maniac. His faithful admirer, Sarah Young, cries at the spectacle whilst two attendants attach chains to his legs; they are surrounded by other lunatics.

Disinheriting folly

In time, the medicalization of insanity, the move to lock mad people up, and the sensibilities of the age of reason undermined and rendered obsolete the old figure of the ‘witty fool’ with his riddling truths and carnival-esque freedoms. The writing is clearly on the wall in the following vignette written by the Newtonian physician Nicholas Robinson in the 1720s:

It is not long ago since a very learned and ingenious Gentleman, so far started from his Reason, as to believe, that his Body was metamorphos’d into a Hobby-Horse, and nothing would serve his Turn, but that his Friend, who came to see him, must mount his Back and ride. I must confess, that all the philosophy I was Master of, could not dispossess him of this Conceit; ’till by application of generous Medicines, I restor’d the disconcerted nerves to their regular Motions, and, by that Means, gave him a Sight of his Error.

Hobby-horses are obviously out, and the implied sexual licence inadmissible. For the likes of Robinson, folly is no longer revealing, meaningful, or amusing, it simply needs a strong purge.

The playful ambiguities of Erasmian irony and double-talk—Folly as teacher—were no longer tenable as science turned insanity into pathology and the rise of the asylum set the mad poet or artist at growing risk of being put under lock and key, for society’s good, or even his own. James Carkesse was a clerk at the Navy Office under the diarist Samuel Pepys. A casualty of office politics, he grew disturbed and was locked up first in a private madhouse and later in Bethlem under its physician Dr Allen. There he wrote a collection of verse, published in 1679 under the title
Lucida Intervalla.
This drew upon the old conceits of mad poetry—following the Erasmian tradition of ‘praisers of folly’, the privilege of the badge of lunacy is used to lash a crazy world; and yet paradoxically and self-defeatingly, Carkesse’s verse also sought to deny the author’s own identity as a mad poet. This ambivalence appears in contradictory titles: one poem is headed ‘Poets are Mad’, another, ‘Poets no Lunatick’—and in the ‘lucid intervals’ blazoned in the title.

Physicians are the ones who are crazy, proclaimed Carkesse, but Bedlamites are sane, or at least would be but for the treatment they suffer:

Says He, who more wit than the Doctor had,

Oppression will make a wise man Mad;

—the reference is to Solomon in the Old Testament. Carkesse protested his sanity: what was mistaken for lunacy in him, was actually poetic inspiration: