Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth-Century Writing: Representing the Insane

Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth Century Writing Representing the Insane Allan Ingram with Michelle Fau...

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Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth Century Writing Representing the Insane

Allan Ingram with

Michelle Faubert

Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth Century Writing

By the same author PATTERNS OF MADNESS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY (ed.) VOICES OF MADNESS (ed.) THE MADHOUSE OF LANGUAGE THE LANGUAGE OF DH LAWRENCE JOSEPH CONRAD: SELECTED LITERARY CRITICISM AND ‘THE SHADOW-LINE’ (ed.) INTRICATE LAUGHTER IN THE SATIRE OF SWIFT AND POPE BOSWELL’S CREATIVE GLOOM

Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth Century Writing Representing the Insane Allan Ingram with

Michelle Faubert

© Allan Ingram 2005 Chapter 6 © Michelle Faubert, 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–4595–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ingram, Allan Cultural constructions of madness in eighteenth century writing : representing the insane / by Allan Ingram with Michelle Faubert. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-4039-4595-0 (hardback) 1. English literature–18th century–History and criticism. 2. Literature and mental illness–Great Britain–History–18th century. 3. Mental illness in literature. 4. Mentally ill in literature. I. Faubert, Michelle. II. Title. PR448.M45144 2005 820.9′3561–dc22

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To Ruth and Steve

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Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

x

1 Speaking It Like a Horse: Gulliver’s Travels and the Contexts of Insanity

1

2 Reconstructing the Classical Model: Pope’s Homer and Its Influence

25

3 ‘Th’ unbalanc’d Mind’: Poetry, Satire and the Assimilation of Madness

53

4 ‘The Madness of a Multitude’: Insanity, People and Prose

78

5 Acting the Part of a Madman: Insanity and the Stage

106

6 A Gendered Affliction: Women, Writing, Madness

136

7 ‘The Image of Our Mind’: Seeing and Being Seen

170

8 Madness Itself: the Real Story

202

Bibliography

231

Index

240

Note: Chapter 6 is by Michelle Faubert.

vii

List of Illustrations Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Fig. 3a

Fig. 3b

Fig. 4a Fig. 4b

Fig. 5a Fig. 5b Fig. 6 Fig. 7 Fig. 8

Fig. 9 Fig. 10 Fig. 11

Richard Newton, A Visit to Bedlam (1794). By permission of the Wellcome Library, London Bethlem Hospital, Moorfields, after 1733 (c.1735). By permission of Bethlem Art and History Collections Trust Caius Gabriel Cibber, Melancholy Madness (c.1676). By permission of Bethlem Art and History Collections Trust Caius Gabriel Cibber, Raving Madness (c.1676). By permission of Bethlem Art and History Collections Trust William Hogarth, The Rake’s Progress 8 (1735). © Copyright The British Museum William Hogarth, The Rake’s Progress 8 (1763). By permission of The Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester Thomas Rowlandson, Doctor Willis at Home (c.1788) Thomas Rowlandson, Doctor Willis Abroad (c.1788) Thomas Rowlandson, The Hypochondriac (1788). © Copyright The British Museum George Woodward, John Bull Troubled with the Blue Devils (1799). © Copyright The British Museum Benjamin Wilson, engraved by James McArdell, Mr Garrick in the Character of King Lear (1761). © Copyright The British Museum Henry Fuseli, engraved by R. Earlom, King Lear (1789, engraved 1803) Henry Fuseli, Mad Kate (1806–7). Photograph by Ursula Edelmann, Frankfurt. By permission James Gillray, Pray Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Blind Man (c.1812). Reproduction by permission of Phaidon Press; last known ownership the Collection of Mr L. G. Duke, London

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178 183 183 186 188

190 194 195

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List of Illustrations ix

Every effort has been made to trace and contact third party or original rights holders. If any have inadvertently been overlooked, the author/publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

Acknowledgements Our warmest thanks to those friends and colleagues who have so generously given their time and trouble in the preparation of this book, either through invited comment or through offering opportunities to present in public what is now given in print. Specifically, we should like to express our appreciation to Alan Bewell, Conrad DeBold, Heather Kelly, Clark Lawlor, Pat Maher, Pierre Morère, Hermann Real, Richard Terry and, above all, to Hélène Dachez for her painstaking and positive reading of the manuscript. Any things of darkness that remain we acknowledge our own. Chapter 1 is partly based on an essay published in Gulliver’s Travels: Jonathan Swift, ed. Pierre Morère, Paris: Ellipses, 2001, and partly on a paper presented at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster in 2002. Allan Ingram Michelle Faubert

x

1 Speaking It Like a Horse: Gulliver’s Travels and the Contexts of Insanity

The history of insanity is full of dizzying paradoxes. Here, for example, is the nineteenth-century madhouse proprietor Thomas Bakewell, writing in 1815: ‘I never sit at table’, he observes, ‘without a number of Lunatics on each side of me; I treat them exactly as I should do if they were not afflicted with that disease, and, in return, they almost uniformly behave as if nothing was the matter with them…’.1 Were it not for those two words, ‘almost uniformly’, there would be nothing at all to justify that key capitalised term ‘Lunatics’. He treats them normally: they behave normally. Where is the lunacy? The very reason for their presence in the madhouse, even their identities as proprietor and patrons, begin to dissolve as they engage in this mutual conspiracy to deny the existence of what their confinement, and Bakewell’s own description, would seem to confirm. An elaborate charade, apparently, is being acted out, in which both parties pretend not to know that they, on the one hand, are insane, and that he, on the other, is where he is precisely in order to attempt their cure. In what sense can they be cured if there is ‘nothing the matter with them’? In what sense are they ‘Lunatics’? Yet there they all are in Bakewell’s exemplary madhouse in Staffordshire. Bakewell, in his spare time, wrote and published books of poetry – The Moorland Bard; or, Poetical Recollections of a Weaver, in the Moorlands of Staffordshire – which included several on topics of his trade as madhouse keeper: ‘Drunkenness not distinguishable from Madness’; ‘Lines after a Dispute respecting Insanity’.2 The very notion of insanity is in constant danger of collapse, under the weight of its own ironies. Even the houses themselves, the crucially unavoidable locations for the confinement of lunacy, stand as contradictions, architecture capable of being at insane odds with language. Alexander Cruden, confined as a lunatic for the fourth time in his life,3 in 1

2 Cultural Constructions of Madness in 18th Century Writing

1753 at Inskip’s house in Chelsea, asked John Thompson, his whimsical keeper (and formerly a butcher in Leeds), ‘how many madhouses there were in Chelsea? he answered, none; for, said he, Nothing ails the houses’.4 The exemplary madhouse owner dines with his inmates ‘as if nothing was the matter with them’. The whimsical keeper engages in linguistic play with his charge like some Shakespearean fool, wearing motley in his words if not in his brain. Where is the lunacy? ‘Perhaps some day’, wrote Foucault in a late paper, ‘we will no longer really know what madness was. Its face will have closed upon itself, no longer allowing us to decipher the traces it may have left behind.’5 But in that case, where is sanity? What special kind of sanity has it taken to ‘really know what madness was’, either in Foucault’s or our own lifetimes, or in those centuries over which his work on mind and minds focused? The sanity of a Bakewell or a Thompson? Of a Cruden? Or of a butcher, or an architect? Writers and artists have always had a fascination for the close proximity of madness and sanity, indeed for the capacity of madness to ape the sane, and for the sane to appear at times as if mad: ‘Drunkenness not distinguishable from Madness’. If numerous eighteenth-century depictions of madhouse scenes, by William Hogarth, by Thomas Rowlandson, by Richard Newton, turn upon the shift in perspective that allows viewer to become viewed, viewed viewer, a comparable switch between sane writing and mad reading occurs across a myriad of literary forms as the period moves from Swiftian aggression to Wordsworthian sensitivities. When James Carkesse, who had been confined in 1678, entitled his subsequent collection of poetry Lucida Intervalla, he was exploiting a cultural trompe l’œil whereby madness masquerading as true seeing is not only acceptable but admirable and amusing. Carkesse, whose full title was Lucida Intervalla: Containing divers Miscellaneous Poems, Written at Finsbury and Bethlem By The Doctors Patient Extraordinary, played the insanity game for all it was worth. He is an actor, albeit one who chooses to play mad: From Finnes-burrough, to Bedlam I am come, To be a Sober man, not Act mad Tom; My name is James, not Nokes, and yet an Actor; But now, Mad Devil, seeks another Factor.6 As such, he leaves the doctor who is charged with his confinement and cure trailing hopelessly behind him: For he, both Fool and Physitian, At all no difference made,

Speaking It Like a Horse 3

Betwixt a Senseless condition, And Madness in Mascarade.7 Carkesse, in fact, outstrips science and is able to lay claim to a far higher source of knowledge, one that makes a traditional association between madness, poetry and divine inspiration, against which mere human science will always be an also-ran: Doctor, this Pusling Riddle pray explain; Others your Physick cures, but I complain It works with me the clean contrary way, And makes me Poet, who are Mad they say. The truth on’t is, my Brains well fixt condition Apollo better knows, than his Physitian: ‘Tis Quacks disease, not mine, my Poetry By the blind Moon-Calf, took for Lunacy.8 Indeed, Carkesse boldly claims the highest of all sources for his blessed condition, one before which the world can only blink in amazement and confusion: When Zeal for God inspires the Breast, Says the Blind world, the Man’s possest; And flattering their own cold desire, Call Lunacy, the Heavenly Fire: But though their Eyes are by the Flame So dasled, they mistake the Name; Know, that ‘twas born with Christ at first In Bethlehem, and at Bedlam Nurst. Who is ill and who is well? Who sees clearly and who sees awry? What is the relation between being mad and being sane? When Bakewell is passed the salt, is the transaction a sign of sanity? When the doctor reads the poem, whose brain is being addled? Was Carkesse, in fact, really insane? To be mad ‘in Mascarade’ is not necessarily to be sane. Carkesse, after all, did apparently attempt to destroy meeting houses of dissenters. He did, apparently, believe he had a divine mission to do so. He did perceive a conspiracy to discredit and ruin him with Samuel Pepys, his superior at the Navy Office, at its centre. He was confined for over six months as a lunatic, first at Thomas Allen’s house in Finsbury and then at Bethlem. While in Bethlem he had, or thought he had, a series of visits from some of the


dignitaries of his time: the Duke of Grafton, the Duke of Monmouth, Lady Jane Levison Gower and Mrs Catherine Newport, who each gave him sixpence, Sir Gabriel Silvius, and a Mrs Moniment from Charing Cross. To each of these he writes a poem. But none of these things, either, is proof of insanity. Being in a madhouse is not in itself proof of suffering delusions, nor, in the late seventeenth century, was a divine mission necessarily certain to have one confined. We should be fatally wrong to conclude that Carkesse was indeed really mad, as foolishly wrong-headed as the hapless Dr Thomas Allen, at sea with the wealth of contradictory evidence. We should have fallen into the insanity trap. Not only would we be rashly diagnosing from the distance of over three centuries. We should also be guilty of wrong reading – the conviction that our apparently sane reading of this apparently mad writing is a reliable way to a knowable truth. What is true is that Carkesse, mad or sane in himself, was in his writing drawing upon an established range of literary stereotypes for insanity – the jester, the divinely inspired poet, the licensed satirist, the holy fool, and even the prankster for the Lord. Clement Hawes has spoken, in a slightly different context, of ‘a well-developed … rhetoric of madness’ in this period, as opposed to the ‘real madness’ found by psycho-historians.9 Writing ‘real madness’, or, in Foucault’s disputed phrase, ‘madness itself’,10 even for the ‘real’ madman, would seem to be an impossibility. As Helen Small usefully puts it, ‘When we look at madness in literature we are looking at something that is already representation.’11 Madness ‘itself’ is inevitably an inarticulate spokesman for itself, for as soon as the mad writer enters literary language then madness becomes transformed into ‘madness’, a reality, of sorts, into a representation and with it all those social and cultural norms and transgressions which are the burden and glory of working within a tradition. ‘Disease’, observes Sander Gilman, ‘is the social construct that always provides the frame for an understanding of “illness”.’12 While acknowledging that the sentence would be equally logical with the terms (like so much else in this infinitely self-reflective issue) reversed, Gilman’s point is an important one, especially for those of us too prone to lose sight of the real sufferings of the past in the relish of present wordplay. There is ‘illness’ and people die from it. Some of it is mental. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association lists sixteen basic categories of mental disorder.13 The fact that in 1968 it only listed nine does not prove that the list is a fiction, merely that our grasp of mental features is as slippery


still as it ever was. But there is still illness. To quote Gilman again, ‘illness’ (or whatever we choose to call it) refers to ‘physical and mental states that are understood in Western culture as pathological and “dangerous” because of their life-threatening, stability-threatening or chronic nature’, while ‘disease’ (if that is the term we settle on) ‘always relates to the social construction of “illness”’.14 The history of ‘illness’, therefore, is one thing, a matter of physical causes and cures, crises and recoveries, perpetually capable of increasing refinement alongside increasingly precise, or at least minute, knowledge about the body and its malfunctions. The history of ‘disease’ is quite another. Here we are dealing with the shifting and reconforming patterns of cultural understanding, relative, socially framed and dismantled, influenced and inflected by a huge range of factors, both discernible and mentally microscopic. Here is where ‘madness itself’ is in hiding, covering its own tracks under representations of representations. To look at ‘representation of illness’ from the past, says Gilman, is to see ‘the stage on which the cultural fantasies of every member of society – physician and lay alike – could be played out’.15 In order to read such representations, we have to be prepared to engage not only with the truths of the mad, but with the half-truths and the untruths of the sane. In his early publication Observations on Insanity (an expanded version, Observations on Madness and Melancholy, appeared in 1809, eleven years after the original), John Haslam, apothecary for many years at Bethlem Hospital, detailed brief case histories of twenty-nine of the inmates who had come under his care since his appointment to the post in 1795. Their ages range between twenty-five and ‘to all appearance about eighty’.16 Eighteen are men, eleven women. They include the melancholy, the manic, the suicidal, the deluded, the visionary, the paranoid, the would-be monarchs, the deprived monarchs, the bereaved and the troublesome. Some can be readily engaged with, even after over two hundred years: the man ‘in a very anxious and miserable state’ whose insanity came on shortly after the death of his son’ (p. 72); the woman ‘in extreme grief, in consequence of the loss of her only daughter’ (p. 42); the woman whose attack (her second) followed ‘upon the birth of a child’ (p. 52); a man confined following ‘laborious attention to business, and great apprehensions of the want of success’ (p. 60). Others, while difficult to close with, nevertheless make for identifiable figures: the woman confined for ‘Religious enthusiasm’ who ‘alternately sang and cried the greatest part of the night’ (p. 47); a man ‘naturally violent’ and ‘easily provoked’ who ‘would often appear to be holding conversations’ which


‘always terminated in a violent quarrel between the imaginary being and himself’ (pp. 67–8); the woman whose ‘greatest delight appeared to be getting into some corner to sleep’ and who otherwise would commit ‘some petty mischief, such as slyly breaking a window; dirtying the rooms of the other patients, or purloining their provisions’ (pp. 69–70). But still others are from a remote region, as inaccessible after the fact as for Haslam there and then: the man of forty-two who sometimes ‘conceived himself the king of Denmark, at other times the king of France’ and who ‘was persuaded he had some faint recollection of coming over to this country with William the Conqueror’ (p. 65); the woman who supposed that ‘the overseers of her parish’ were ‘deeply enamoured of her, and that they were to decide their claims by a battle’ (p. 75); a man who ‘conceived himself very nearly related to Anacreon, and possessed of the peculiar vein of that poet’ (p. 93); and the woman, probably eighty, an incurable patient since 1782, with no history Haslam could discover. She sat, says Haslam, ‘in a particular part of the common-room, from which she never stirred’. She ‘appeared feeble and childish’. On 19 October 1796, she died, ‘apparently worn out’ (p. 58). They all die, usually within a few months, and only one as the result of a self-inflicted injury. This, in fact, is why they are included in Haslam’s book. It is precisely because they are dead that he has been able to perform post-mortem examinations on them all, opening each skull and describing its contents, searching for abnormalities, finding none. The truth of the insane may lie that way, but Haslam, there and then, had insufficient expertise to read it. Writing as a would-be scientist at a time when this science was only half-formed, if that, he can only describe: ‘The scull was thick and porous. There was a large quantity of water between the different membranes. The membrana arachnoidea was particularly opake … the consistence of the brain was natural’ (p. 82). But his descriptions, containing facts and appearances, plausible explanations as well as puzzled inconclusiveness, are the closest we can perhaps come to ‘madness itself’, to the ground where, in 1798, ‘illness’ meets ‘disease’, medical observation occupying the same space as social understanding. Any truths that Haslam’s patients have to convey must be read through the eyes and instruments of the apothecary. Any pre-conceptions, theories, interpretations, conclusions the apothecary may come with must be confronted with the vivid spectacle of his patients, singing and crying, spouting Anacreon, or silently waiting to die. That ground where they meet is Moorfields, and the space is the interior of Bethlem Hospital.17


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. Bethlem was cheap to visit – free for inmates – and freely available as a literary and artistic metaphor. Any study of the representation of the insane in the period must recognise this simple fact: the age found the idea of insanity compelling, the reality of insanity terrifying, and both responses cohere in the dominance of Bethlem as signifying both, equally and simultaneously, to the public imagination. One early exploiter of the image of Bethlem, and an instructive one, is Ned Ward. Ward’s London Spy, which he began in November 1698, dealt in those areas of public and popular life where ‘the triumphs’ were ‘most visible, and the rabble most rude’.19 The phrase ‘most visible’, in fact, is a key one in Ward’s seeing, or spying, career. The urge to see takes him through all the famous and infamous locations of London at the close of the seventeenth century, and what he sees is laid down with speed and relish in all its most aggressively visual detail. His writing moves through a series of surfaces, encountered, savoured, and left behind, tracelessly. Representation in The London Spy is no more and no less than what is seen. Even the dialogue, of which there is plenty, and closely heard, is the aural equivalent of seeing: surface sound, a snapshot of a spoken moment, passing without echoes. Ward moves on, the true exploiter. Bedlam is an early site for a visit, in the third of the eighteen itineraries that constitute the Spy. Innocently (or ‘innocently’, for nothing in Ward’s writing is straightforwardly innocent) conceiving the ‘magnificent edifice’ to be ‘my Lord Mayor’s Palace, for I could not imagine so stately a structure could be designed for any quality inferior’, the spy is enlightened by his experienced friend: ‘this was Bedlam, an hospital for mad folks’.20 Passing through the ‘iron gate’ and an ‘iron barricade’, they instantly ‘heard such a rattling of chains, drumming of doors, ranting, hollering, singing and rattling, that


I could think of nothing but Don Quevedo’s Visions, where the damned broke loose and put Hell in an uproar’.21 There then follows the parade of the damned: lunatic no-hopers composed of surface and sound, madness masquerading as show in an apparently inexhaustible store of deluded variety: The first whimsy-headed wretch of this lunatic family that we observed, was a merry fellow in a straw cap, who was talking 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 but he would have some claret. In this interim came a gentleman, to stare at him, with a red face. ‘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 this twelvemonth.22 A second, ‘who was peeping through his wicket, eating bread and cheese’, repeatedly praises his victuals until, counterfeiting a sneeze, he ‘shot such a mouthful of bread and cheese amongst us that every spectator had some share of his kindness’. This is followed by ‘a plentiful bowl of piss which he cast very successfully amongst them, crying, in a laugh, “I never give victuals but I give drink, and you’re welcome gentlemen.”’23 Yet another is discovered in a room ‘which smelt as strong of chamber-lye, as a bottle of sal-ammoniac’. Here ‘a fellow was got as hard at work as if he’d been treading mortar’. This man is ‘trampling down conscience under my feet, lest he should rise up and fly in my face’. ‘Have a care he does not fright thee,’ he continues, ‘for he looks like the Devil and is as fierce as a lion, but that I keep him muzzled. Therefore get thee gone, or I will set him upon thee.’24 One, finally, is ‘holding forth with as much vehemence against Kingly government as a brother of the Commonwealth doctrine rails against plurality of livings’. ‘We madmen’, he tells the spy, have as much privilege of speaking our minds, within these walls, as an ignorant dictator when he spews out his nonsense to a whole parish. … Truth is persecuted everywhere abroad, and flies hither for sanctuary, where she sits as safe as a knave in a church, or a whore in a nunnery. I can use her as I please and that’s more than you dare do.25 The catalogue continues in the women’s wing: one ‘straddling with her back against the wall’ crying to her husband’s apprentice to come and


‘serve’ her;26 another talking ‘very merrily’ to the crowd who asked by a ‘foolish girl’ how old she was replies ‘I am old enough to have hair where you have none’, which made ‘the young creature betake herself to her heels, to avoid the mockery of her companions’;27 another, a ‘meagre, old grey-headed wretch, who looked as wild as an angry cat’, and cried ‘The wind is _____ blow, devil, blow. The wind is _____ blow, devil, blow.’28 Ward’s free-wheeling rambling and his free-wheeling style have many advantages. Conclusions are unnecessary when there is always somewhere else to go, another spectacle to divert. Specimens of madness can be used to provide a promiscuous variety of effects, some merely curious, some politically or religiously satiric, and some directed more precisely at the act of viewing and being viewed. But they all pass, as surely as the subjects of Haslam’s case histories all die. That is why they are there. The scalpel and the pen are different implements, but both require a lack of engagement with the object in order to work effectively. They pass and are forgotten, to be succeeded by other representations from other parts of London, ripe for a visit from the spy. To move from Ward to Swift is to leap over several species in the scale of sophistication, though initially his early experiments with madness do bear a superficial resemblance to Ward’s. The close associations between insanity and its forms and the life and work of Swift have been discussed, in a variety of contexts, over the last 250 years. Swift not only wrote uninhibitedly about lunatics and lunacy, but also established an ineradicable personal tie with such throwaway remarks as ‘I shall be like that tree, I shall die at the top.’ The remark, of course, is an attributed one, on the authority of the poet Edward Young,29 himself part of the large group of contemporary biographers and remembrancers who developed and enlarged the reputation of a writer already in danger of looming larger than his own life. Samuel Johnson, in his ‘Life of Swift’, eloquently confirms the insanity of Swift’s last years. His mind, says Johnson, was left ‘vacant to the vexations of the hour, till at last his anger was heightened into madness’, a madness, he adds, ‘compounded of rage and fatuity’.30 It is Johnson, too, who includes details, based on reports circulated immediately after Swift’s death by such as Charles Yorke and Thomas Birch,31 of the habits of his last days: ‘His meat was brought to him cut into mouthfuls; but he would never touch it while the servant staid, and at last, after it had stood perhaps an hour, would eat it walking.’ In Thackeray’s assessment of Swift, published in 1851 in English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, this is distorted into the infamous picture of the lonely


madman, devouring his meat raw, raging and pacing in the dark, and it inevitably contributes to Thackeray’s judgement on the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels: ‘It is Yahoo language: a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against mankind – tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, raging, obscene.’32 In twentieth-century discussions of Gulliver’s Travels insanity became a central issue in terms of the slant with which different schools of interpretation believed that the text demanded to be read, not the insanity of Swift, however, but of Gulliver. Quite simply, if Gulliver ended the account of his travels sane, then his condemnation of mankind was being endorsed by Swift himself. If Gulliver was mad, then there was the distance that Swift, with typical satiric trickery, was putting between his own views and those of his apparent mouthpiece. Neither of these positions needs to be rehearsed here, but the debate concerning Gulliver’s sanity continues to take many forms, particularly as researches over the last twenty years into the eighteenth-century experience of insanity have gained wider dissemination. A recent example, arguing for Gulliver’s madness, is found in Christopher Fox’s essay, published in 1993, ‘Of logic and lycanthropy: Gulliver and the faculties of the mind’.33 For Fox, Swift is locating Gulliver’s thinking processes in the context of eighteenthcentury ideas on logic and medicine, and in so doing is offering his readers the material to conclude ‘that Gulliver’s neighbours were right’ when and if they decided that the lonely man out in the stable talking to the horses was indeed mad. Not only is Gulliver shown as confusing imagination and memory: he is also, in Fox’s view, suffering from ‘wolf madness’, or ‘lycanthropy’ in its eighteenth-century sense of ‘a deception concerning the nature of one’s species’. Gulliver does not believe he is a wolf, but he does, by the end of his travels, wish that he were a horse. Fox’s claim is sustainable, but no more and no less than the case that might be made for a range of similar contemporary conditions identified by a series of eighteenth-century medical commentators. Gulliver could as readily be suffering from any one of the delusions that were familiar to Swift, or indeed from several of them at once. To pin Gulliver down to any single madness, though, would, inevitably, be to take the fatal step of regarding him as a psychologically realised character, which he is conspicuously not. It would also be to chain him down to a single explicable meaning, to fall, as conclusively as with Carkesse, once more into the insanity trap.


Swift’s representations of insanity in the contemporary world are invariably brutal, graphic and one-dimensional, and nowhere more so than in the ‘Digression Concerning the Original, the Use and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth’ in A Tale of a Tub. Here is the stark truth, that ‘our undistinguishing Age’ chooses to subject its imputed lunatics to ‘Phlebotomy, and Whips, and Chains, and dark Chambers, and Straw’.34 Here, Ward-like, in the visit to Bedlam, is the inmate ‘tearing his Straw in piece-meal, Swearing and Blaspheming, biting his Grate, foaming at the Mouth, and emptying his Pispot in the Spectator’s Faces’, and another who is ‘a surley, gloomy, nasty, slovenly Mortal, raking in his own Dung, and dabling in his Urine’: ‘The Student of this Apartment is very sparing of his Words, but somewhat over-liberal of his Breath; He holds his Hand out ready to receive your Penny, and immediately upon Receipt, withdraws to his former Occupations.’ Here are the conditions of madness in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century London, as perpetuated in its notorious hospital for the insane and in Spy-like representations of it. Here is the reader, too, being involuntarily put in the position of the visitor there, peering into the cells, curious about the spectacle that is madness and in a position to be able to pay his penny to have his curiosity satisfied. The same reality is represented in other near contemporary texts. The world of James Carkesse’s madhouse and that of Tale of a Tub are the same. Carkesse is imprisoned behind bars, chained in darkness in a ‘place’ where ‘Rats and Mice do swarm’ (p. 25),35 sleeps on straw, is kept naked, force fed medicinal purges and vomits, and has his blood let both by lancing of his veins and by physical violence: ‘I order’d his Keeper, at Large’, Carkesse has his physician declare in the poem ‘The Poetical History of Finnesbury Mad-house’, On occasion to ply him with Blows, That what Jugular did not discharge, The mad Blood might come out at his Nose. (p. 26)36 Similarly, George Trosse, taken to a private madhouse in Glastonbury in 1656, spent his time manacled, attempting ‘to break the Bones of my Arms’ by ‘striking them against the Iron’ (p. 14), while Alexander Cruden, confined at Wright’s madhouse in Bethnal Green in 1738, was every night chained to his bed and at other times, when not strait-jacketed, was kept in handcuffs. The very orthodox representations of the experience of insanity in Swift’s major works, chronologically spanned by


such accounts as these, clearly bore a close affinity with contemporary reality over a considerable period. Such treatment was sanctioned by the mainstream of medical opinion. To read, for example, the physician Nicholas Robinson, whose A New System of the Spleen, Vapours and Hypochondriack Melancholy was published in 1729, three years after the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels, is at times almost the equivalent of looking at the kind of satiric representation of the dispositions of insanity that one finds in Swift. Robinson’s madmen are nothing if not graphically stereotypical. The melancholy madman ‘wears his Soul in his Countenance, which is mark’d with all the Characters of Woe, Gloom and Desperation’, he ‘trembles to behold the Face of the Sun, from an Apprehension, that it insults his Misery’, and his mind is perplexed ‘with Phantoms of Furies just ready to devour him’ (p. 78). The raging madman, on the other hand, ‘appears with a fierce, grim, and rough Aspect, his Reason is disturb’d, his Judgment confus’d, and the Exercise of his Intellectuals is lost and bewilder’d in a bottomless Gulph of most absurd Cogitations’ (p. 80). Such people: will break the strongest Bars of Iron with a single Impulse, throw off their Bonds, Chains, and Shackles, to the Wonder and Surprize of all that see them; nor are they scarce ever tired, tho’ they exercise their Bodies whole Days and Nights, and are almost continually without Sleep. (p. 80) Moreover, adds Robinson, crucially, in view of the treatment he recommends, ‘They will endure the severest usage, with a steady and equal Mind; nor shall you perceive them at all scarce affected with the Extremes of Cold, Fasting, and Stripes, that are enough to sink the Spirits of the most intrepid Mortals.’ (p. 80) This sanctions, among other remedies, ‘the most violent Vomits, the strongest purging Medicines, and large Bleeding’ which ‘are to be often repeated’ (p. 76), a view echoed amongst orthodox medical opinion throughout this period, from the famous and influential physician Thomas Willis, who in 1667 advocated ‘punishments, and hard usage, in a strait room’ (p. 18), through to John Monro, physician to Bethlem Hospital, who declared in 1758 that: I never saw or heard of the bad effect of vomits, in my practice; nor can I suppose any mischief to happen, but from their being injudiciously administered; or when they are given too strong, or the person who orders them is too much afraid of the lancet. (p. 121)


In 1815, when the Parliamentary Committee on Madhouses in England made its first report, it remained standard practice in Bethlem for inmates to spend their time chained, either in their cells or in the gallery, often naked, or covered ‘by a blanket-gown only’ (p. 247), sleeping on straw, and ‘in no way distinguished from each other as to disease’ (p. 248). The closest that Gulliver’s Travels brings us to the traditional visit to Bedlam that Swift exploited in A Tale of a Tub is Gulliver’s ‘viewing’ of ‘the grand Academy’ at Lagado (p. 178).37 While clearly a satire on London’s Royal Society, not least in terms of the projects being pursued, the structure and details of Gulliver’s experience parallel the conventional literary account of a cell-by-cell, lunatic-by-lunatic, progress around London’s hospital for the insane: The first Man I saw was of meagre Aspect, with sooty Hands and Face, his Hair and Beard long, ragged and singed in several Places. His Clothes, Shirt and Skin were all of the same Colour. … I made him a small Present, for my Lord had furnished me with Money on purpose, because he knew their Practice of begging from all who go to see them. (p. 178) I went into another Chamber, but was ready to hasten back, being almost overcome with a horrible Stink. … The Projector of this Cell was the most ancient Student of the Academy. His Face and Beard were of a pale Yellow; his Hands and Clothes dawbed over with Filth. When I was presented to him, he gave me a very close Embrace, (a Compliment I could well have excused.) (pp. 178–9) If Bethlem in 1815 failed to distinguish disease from disease, the Academy at Lagado not only distinguishes, it classifies, room from room, experiment from experiment, obsession from obsession. This is madness isolated, identified and pinned down to single meaning: Gulliver and reader move between delusions, resisting the seduction of each in turn, passing on secure in seeing each insanity safely contained within the mental space appropriate for it. Gulliver might escape with his faculties intact from the Academy, but in fact he himself suffers during the course of his travels from many of the restraints and indignities that were features of the eighteenth-century treatment of the insane, though not, at least not at


first, because he is regarded as a madman. His first experience of forcible restraint is upon waking near the Lilliputian coast: I attempted to rise, but was not able to stir: For as I happened to lie on my Back, I found my Arms and Legs were strongly fastened on each Side to the Ground: and my Hair, which was long and thick, tied down in the same Manner. I likewise felt several slender Ligatures across my Body, from my Armpits to my Thighs. I could only look upwards; the Sun began to grow hot, and the Light offended mine Eyes. I heard a confused Noise about me, but in the Posture I lay, could see nothing except the Sky. (p. 5) For the Lilliputians, Gulliver is if anything more dangerous than a madman: he is an unknown phenomenon and as such must be pinned down as quickly and effectively as possible. But for Gulliver, at this stage unaware of the nature of the place on which he has stumbled, the description of constraint conveys surprise, and discomfort, and by the end of the quoted passage a degree of helpless confusion such as might normally precede panic. If, during the following few pages, Gulliver, in a manner of speaking, enters into negotiation with these people, at least insofar as a show of force on his part and a brief military engagement on theirs represents a kind of negotiation, its outcome is only, by the end of the chapter, a more explicit confinement for Gulliver, with an actual chain and an actual cell from which he is, like his Bedlamite contemporaries, to become an object of display. Gulliver describes the ‘ancient Temple’ in which he is to ‘lodge’: The great Gate fronting to the North was about four Foot high, and almost two Foot wide, through which I could easily creep. On each side of the Gate was a small Window not above six Inches from the Ground: Into that on the Left Side, the King’s Smiths conveyed fourscore and eleven Chains, like those that hang to a Lady’s Watch in Europe, and almost as large, which were locked to my Left Leg with six and thirty Padlocks. (p. 12) Fourscore and eleven chains, with thirty-six padlocks, represent a formidable level of restraint, until we are reminded of their size. Even so, they still testify to a remarkable degree of potential terror on the part of the restrainers. Here, however, Gulliver abides, a spectacle not only for the Emperor and ‘many principal Lords of his Court’ but for ‘above


an hundred thousand Inhabitants’ from out of the town (p. 12). Once his strings are cut, Gulliver is able to rise up: with as melancholly a Disposition as ever I had in my Life. … The Chains that held my left Leg were about two Yards long, and gave me not only the Liberty of walking backwards and forwards in a Semicircle; but being fixed within four Inches of the Gate, allowed me to creep in, and lie at my full Length in the Temple. (p. 13) Wild beast, criminal, madman: all, at some point during his travels, are appropriate models for Gulliver’s condition. As criminal, certainly, in Lilliput he eventually has a severe sentence pronounced on him, only evaded by his escape to Blefuscu. As animal, too, his identity is mistaken in both Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnmland, and, as Fox argued, he comes at last to suffer from species confusion. But it is the series of humiliations experienced over the course of his visits that makes the lunatic, in the eighteenth-century perspective of lunacy and its treatment, the most compelling image, as if Swift, pre-empting the madness debate that has developed around his text, deliberately has Gulliver go through a recognisable range of receptions normally reserved for the mad. He is an object of display, of course, throughout his time in Brobdingnag, though explicitly so when in the possession of the farmer, and equally explicitly, though with quite different emphasis, when in company with the misnamed ‘Maids of Honour’ who, taking ownership and display to one logical conclusion, claim ‘the Pleasure of seeing and touching me’ and therefore ‘often strip me naked from Top to Toe, and lay me at full Length in their Bosoms’ (p. 111). Yet again, differently slanted, he is an object of curiosity for a series of ‘Houyhnhnms who came to visit my Master, out of a Design of seeing and talking with me’ (p. 238). More threateningly, he is on at least one occasion force fed, when the Brobdingnagian monkey carries him up to the palace roof, ‘cramming into my Mouth some Victuals he had squeezed out of the Bag on one side of his Chaps, and patting me when I would not eat; whereat many of the Rabble below could not forbear laughing’ (p. 115). One consequence of this is that Gulliver, like many madmen under a physician’s care, ‘fell a vomiting, which gave me great Relief’ (p. 116). He shares other contemporary therapies practised upon the insane. He is ducked, in common with numbers of patients from the late seventeenth century onwards whose practitioners espoused shock treatment for their lunatics, though in Gulliver’s case it is in a bowl of cream


where he is dropped by the envious ‘Queen’s Dwarf’ (p. 99). He is, however, like the physician Patrick Blair’s patients in the first decades of the century, ‘put to Bed’ (p. 100) immediately after the experience. He is made to sneeze (the application of an errhine, in contemporary medical practice), when a Lilliputian guard ‘put the sharp End of his Half-Pike a good way up into my left Nostril, which tickled my Nose like a Straw’ (p. 11). He is bathed, examined, dressed, undressed, swung around in a box and fed upon a range of unfamiliar diets, most obviously on the milk and grain diet of Houyhnhnmland, famously championed, along with raw vegetables, by the society physician George Cheyne during the 1720s and 1730s. Finally, along, apparently, with a host of madmen, as represented in Swift and elsewhere, and along, too, with at least one projector in Lagado’s Academy, Gulliver has an obsession with defecation, with faeces and urine, whether in the performance of it, as at the beginnings of his Lilliput and Brobdingnag accounts, in the reception of it, as at his first experience with Yahoos, in the public-spirited utilising of it, as in the case of the palace fire in Lilliput, or simply by voluntarily jumping into it, in Brobdingnag: There was a Cow-dung in the Path, and I must needs try my Activity by attempting to leap over it. I took a Run, but unfortunately jumped short, and found my self just in the Middle up to my Knees. I waded through with some Difficulty, and one of the Footmen wiped me as clean as he could with his Handkerchief; for I was filthily bemired, and my Nurse confined me to my Box until we returned home. (p. 117) Gulliver, who is so anxious ‘to justify my Character in Point of Cleanliness to the World’ (p. 15), and who hides ‘between two Leaves of Sorrel’ when first in Brobdingnag in order to discharge ‘the Necessities of Nature’ (p. 84), has to be wiped clean and confined to his box after this encounter, having originally been allowed out for exercise and ‘to take the Air’ (p. 117). Like any contemporary madman, he at least provides an occasion for laughter, for ‘the Footmen spread it about the Court; so that all the Mirth, for some Days, was at my Expence’ (p. 117). Such incidents do not make Gulliver a lunatic. Striking, memorable, outrageous or offensive as they may be, they are clearly not evidence of a mentality deteriorating towards a state of insanity. Rather, they are evidence of Swift’s intention to subject his gullible Everyman to a full


range of contemporary experiences, including those normally more closely associated with the position and preoccupations of individuals commonly regarded and represented as insane. Gulliver is made to experience human life at every extreme, and while the structure of the Travels embodies successive extremes of size and, finally, of species, laterally other extremes are explored. Confinement, display, humiliation and obsession take their place alongside less spectacular characteristics of Gulliver’s story, such as curiosity, facility in learning languages, and love of his country, characteristics which bear a less obvious relation to insanity. On the occasions when Gulliver’s soundness of mind is explicitly questioned within the text, it is not for behaving like a conventional lunatic. On the contrary, it is when he is engaged in his returns to normal society, coming back from the extremes. It is the scraps of narration that his various rescuers catch, preparations, perhaps, for the narrative that we read, that put into successive sea captains’ minds the suspicion that Gulliver is not mentally sound. The captain of the ‘English Merchant-man, returning from Japan by the North and South Seas’ is ‘Mr. John Biddel of Deptford, a very civil Man, and an excellent Sailor’ (p. 67). Gulliver has just left Blefuscu, with ‘six Cows and two Bulls alive, with as many Yews and Rams’, which he is carrying in his ‘Coat-Pockets’ (pp. 66–7): The Gentleman treated me with Kindness, and desired I would let him know what Place I came from last, and whither I was bound; which I did in a few Words; but he thought I was raving, and that the Dangers I underwent had disturbed my Head. (p. 67) It is the narrative act, rather than urinating on people’s homes or being force fed by a monkey, that reveals a defective mentality, at least to a dispassionate listener. Captain Biddel is shown the ‘black Cattle and Sheep out of my Pocket, which, after great Astonishment, clearly convinced him of my Veracity’ (p. 67), and indeed the captain is made a present of ‘a Cow and a Sheep big with Young’ (p. 68), failing thereby to resist the seductiveness of a narration such as Gulliver is later to resist in successive cells of the Academy at Lagado. Following his departure from Brobdingnag it is Captain ‘Thomas Wilcocks, an honest worthy Shropshire Man’ (p. 139), who becomes equally suspicious of Gulliver’s sanity and who straight away, ‘hearing me utter these Absurdities, concluded I was raving’ (p. 139). After sleeping and dining, Gulliver again discusses his travels, ‘Whereupon he began again to


think that my Brain was disturbed, of which he gave me a Hint, and advised me to go to Bed in a Cabin he had provided’ (p. 141). Again Gulliver’s account satisfies, or seduces, the captain, for, says Gulliver, ‘as Truth always forceth its Way into rational Minds; so, this honest worthy Gentleman, who had some Tincture of Learning, and very good Sense, was immediately convinced of my Candor and Veracity’ (p. 141). Wilcocks accepts the present of ‘a Footman’s Tooth’ and encourages Gulliver to publish his account (p. 142). Madness is a danger to self and others; it is to be restrained, pinned down, obliged to occupy a single space, single meaning. Madness, on the other hand, is seductive, denies itself, would convince of its own normality, draws its auditors in to share its vision, beliefs, experience. Madness has a voice, capable of uttering what sounds like truth and, as we know from Gulliver’s accounts, might indeed be truth. This too finds a correspondence in contemporary medicine. Alongside the Robinson mainstream of eighteenth-century medical orthodoxy on the treatment of insanity, a second, less restrictive, line of thought and practice developed, based on the belief that the insane mind had a view of itself and was as it was in consequence of something understandable. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, such Nonconformist divines as Richard Baxter and Timothy Rogers wrote extensively about mental illness, or ‘trouble of mind’ (p. 36), recommending, for example, in the words of Rogers that the ‘Relations and Friends of Melancholly People’ should ‘be so kind to your Friends under this Disease, as to believe what they say’ (p. 39). A sequence of physicians throughout the succeeding period, without being themselves seduced into insanity, nevertheless took seriously what their patients told them: John Woodward and Peter Shaw in the early decades, William Battie in the 1750s and 1760s, and Andrew Harper in the 1780s, who went so far as to declare that ‘every rational or even whimsical notion’ (p. 176) should be indulged in the insane, and argued forcefully against their traditional confinement: The custom of immediately consigning the unfortunate victims of Insanity to the cells of Bedlam, or the dreary mansions of some private confinement, is certainly big with ignorance and absurdity. This practice, ‘tis true, may answer the purpose of private interest, and domestic conveniency, but at the same time it destroys all the obligations of humanity, robs the sufferer of every advantage, and deprives him of all the favourable circumstances which might tend to his recovery. (p. 175)


Madness not only is capable of cure, but of being understood and therefore managed, a view reflected in Sir Charles Grandison, where Richardson has Clementina’s parents change their initial espousal of aggressive treatment for their daughter to a more lenient regime, with a consequent improvement in her condition. The crucial fact about Gulliver’s Travels is that we cannot tell conclusively by the end whether Gulliver is mad. Unlike his neighbours, we come to the lonely man out in the stable with the whole reading of his account behind us. While we are no doubt jolted by the closing perspective as we return to our own rationality from the seductiveness of his story, nevertheless there is still the story, which sounds like truth. There really were, after all, the cows and sheep, and the footman’s tooth. Maybe there were the talking horses, even though Gulliver failed to bring any home with him. But what he does bring home with him, as conspicuously as a pocket full of livestock, but more damagingly, are the psychological scars of his period in Houyhnhnmland. These are likely to be if anything more long-lived than the Lilliputian beasts, more generative in terms of textual offspring, and, if we read with the attentiveness of a Rogers, a Woodward or a Harper, more convincingly indicative of a truthful psychological narrative. The effects of his Houyhnhnmland experience are immediately obvious to the Portuguese crewmen who discover him and who, in true spectator fashion, ‘fell a laughing at my strange Tone in speaking, which resembled the Neighing of a Horse’ (p. 294). Their talking is equally bizarre to Gulliver: ‘I thought’, he writes, ‘I never heard or saw any thing so unnatural; for it appeared to me as monstrous as if a Dog or a Cow should speak in England, or a Yahoo in Houynhnmland’ (p. 294). Gulliver, having fallen ‘on my Knees to preserve my Liberty’, is taken tied with cords to the captain, ‘Pedro de Mendez’ (p. 295), one of the very few wholly admirable characters in Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver, in return for his courteous and humane treatment, remains ‘silent and sullen’, ready to ‘faint at the very Smell of him and his Men’ (p. 295). He is ‘put to Bed in a very clean Cabbin’, but steals out and attempts ‘to leap into the Sea, and swim for my Life, rather than continue among Yahoos’, in consequence of which he is chained, like a traditional lunatic, ‘to my Cabbin’ (p. 295). On this occasion, the ‘very short Relation of my Voyage’ that Gulliver consents to give is ‘looked upon as if it were a Dream or a Vision’ (p. 295), and only after a series of questions does Mendez begin ‘to have a better Opinion of my Veracity’ (p. 296). There are no confirming items of evidence, only a few skins, an outlandish story, and a lunatic.


In Brobdingnag, by the orders of the king, Gulliver is examined by ‘three great Scholars’ of the kingdom, who study his shape, discourse over his nature and logically rule out any form of life familiar to them. One argues, that I might be an Embrio, or abortive Birth. But this Opinion was rejected by the other two, who observed my Limbs to be perfect and finished; and that I had lived several Years, as it was plainly discovered from my Beard; the Stumps whereof they plainly discovered through a Magnifying-Glass. (p. 95) Gulliver is not being scrutinised here for his sanity, either by the scholars or by the reader. On the contrary, his own narrative if anything renders ridiculous the speculations of the examiners. The perspective, nevertheless, works both ways. As they ponder his beard through a magnifying glass, Gulliver and we ponder them, large enlarged Brobdingnagian eye peering down, seeing with difficulty an enlarged minute bristle of hair. They are little wiser, we are little wiser. Yet a species of intelligent scientific scrutiny has taken place, Gulliver by the scholars, the scholars by Gulliver. The truth is a very simple one, but the grasping of it is inhibited by problems of scale. By the end of Gulliver’s Travels the scrutiny needed is less straightforward, and a magnifying glass an insufficiently subtle implement for conducting it. Perspective, however, continues to work both ways. Captain Mendez is clearly correct in his suspicions of Gulliver’s travels. He has only this odd man and his odd scraps of an account to go on. He is not a physician, still less a mad-doctor. Gulliver, equally, is correct: he bears the scars, and Captain Mendez is a Yahoo. Both perspectives carry conviction. It depends on what one’s attitude towards insanity is. Do we read as a Robinson, or do we read as a Harper? Swift provides the material for both: Gulliver the orthodox madman in a series of orthodox mad representations, and Gulliver the understandable consequence of a psychological case history. Gulliver and the Portuguese sailors are speaking the same language, but he speaks it like a horse. Two final facts. Gulliver is a physician, or at least medically trained, and Swift founded a hospital for the insane. Gulliver’s training was as apprentice ‘to Mr. James Bates, an eminent Surgeon in London’ for four years, followed by ‘two Years and seven Months’ studying ‘Physick’ at Leyden (p. 3). He is not seen practising his trade, though he goes on voyages over several years as ship’s surgeon. What we are told of these


voyages, though, is not how many seamen he treated and for what, but that ‘My Hours of Leisure I spent in reading the best Authors … and when I was ashore in observing the Manners and Dispositions of the People’ (p. 4). On his medical work the account is silent, appropriately so for a text in which he is to emerge as patient rather than as practitioner, as the observed as much as the observer, and finally as judged more than judging. Swift’s famous legacy, however, far more explicitly suggests a judgement, not least on contemporary medical practice with regard to the insane. While exploiting in so many of his works a public familiarity with the traditional, one-dimensional figure of the madman, Swift clearly took the view that the insane were inadequately provided for, both in London, where in 1714 he was elected as one of the governors of Bethlem Hospital, and in Dublin, which is where his foundation, St Patrick’s Hospital, was to be built four years after his death. Known popularly as Swift’s Hospital, it still functions as a psychiatric hospital. Henry Gray Bennett described it in 1815: It contains nearly 200 persons, 51 of whom are boarders and pay for their treatment. … The whole clean and in good order; the galleries long, having cross windows; cells in the side, and a large window in the end, commanding a cheerful view. … The cells were 10 feet 8 inches long, 8 feet broad, and 12 feet high; the bedsteads wooden; the bedding found by the boarders. … All the others were paupers, and were maintained at the expense of the charity, and to these were found mattress, sheets, etc., which were clean and good.38 Here is the final context of insanity for Gulliver’s Travels, its author’s other major contribution to the experience of madness: a legacy bringing good order, cleanness, space, light, and the scope for looking out on ‘a cheerful view’. The contrast with the lonely man spending his life out in the stable could not be more stark. Eighteenth-century perspectives on insanity, even within the field of representation, are many and various. The chapters that follow are not intended to be inclusive, and the attentive reader will certainly find many gaps, even oversights, among the range of writers and artists that we discuss. We do attempt, however, to look at the major literary forms of the period, including satiric and moral poetry, periodical prose, fiction, drama, especially versions of Shakespearian tragedy, and personal memoir. We also find space for attention to some major visual representations, and for the implications of issues concerning gender in thinking and writing about the insane. We begin, however,


with Pope’s Homer, at the bedrock of eighteenth-century neo-classical culture and also fundamental to one dominant mode in the literary construction of madness.

Notes 1. Thomas Bakewell, A letter, addressed to the chairman of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, appointed to enquire into the state of mad-houses, Stafford, Chester, 1815, cited in Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535–1860, eds Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, London: Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 709. 2. See Hunter and Macalpine, Three Hundred Years, p. 710. 3. See Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, p. 114, for the discovery that Cruden was actually confined in Bethlem between December 1743 and March 1744. 4. Alexander Cruden, The Adventures of Alexander the Corrector, London: for the Author, 1754, p. 11. 5. Michel Foucault, ‘Madness, the Absence of Work’, tr. Peter Stastny and Deniz Sengel, Critical Inquiry (Winter 1995), p. 290. 6. James Carkesse, ‘To His Royal Highness’ in Lucida Intervalla, ed. Michael V. DePorte, Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1979, p. 5. 7. James Carkesse, ‘The Poetical History of Finnesbury Mad-house’ in Carkesse, p. 10. 8. James Carkesse, ‘The Riddle’ in Carkesse, p. 32. 9. Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 14. The ‘psycho-historian’ referred to is Alfred Cohen, ‘Prophecy and madness: women visionaries during the Puritan Revolution’, The Journal of Psychohistory, 11: 3 (1984), p. 413. 10. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, tr. Richard Howard, London: Tavistock, 1967. The dispute involves, among others, Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 34. 11. Helen Small, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, p. 19. 12. Sander L. Gilman, Health and Illness: Images of Difference, London: Reaktion Books, 1995, p. 12. 13. See Tina Stern, ‘The Language of Illness: Three First-Person Accounts of Depression’, in Crossing Borders: Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. XXXVI, No. 2, autumn 2003, ed. Allan Ingram, Atlanta: Georgia State University. 14. Gilman, Health and Illness, pp. 11–12. 15. Gilman, Health and Illness, p. 31. 16. John Haslam, Observations on Insanity, with Practical Remarks on the Disease and an Account of the Morbid Appearances on Dissection, London: F. and C. Rivington, 1798, p. 57.

Speaking It Like a Horse 23 17. In common with most writers on eighteenth-century London’s most famous hospital, I use the term ‘Bethlem’ when referring to the hospital itself, and ‘Bedlam’ for the popular and cultural construction of it. See the opening of Chapter 7 for further discussion. 18. Andrew Scull, Social Order/Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 8. 19. Ned Ward, The London Spy, ed. Paul Hyland, East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1993, p. 222. 20. Ward, p. 54. 21. Ward, p. 55. 22. Ward, p. 55. 23. Ward, p. 55. 24. Ward, p. 56. 25. Ward, p. 56. 26. Ward, p. 57. 27. Ward, p. 57. 28. Ward, p. 57. 29. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), quoted in Ricardo Quintana, Swift: An Introduction, London: Oxford University Press, 1955 (1962 edn), p. 3. 30. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, London: Oxford University Press, 2 vols, 1906 (1967 edn), II, 209. Following quotation also p. 209. 31. See the discussion in Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and The Age, 3 vols, London: Methuen, 1983, III, 919. 32. William Makepeace Thackeray, English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1851), quoted in Denis Donoghue (ed.), Jonathan Swift: A Critical Anthology, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1971, p. 117. 33. Christopher Fox, ‘Of logic and lycanthropy: Gulliver and the faculties of the mind’ in Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter (ed.), Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 101. Subsequent quotations p. 112 and pp. 110–11. Examples of other recent work on the eighteenth-century experience of insanity are R.A. Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000; Allan Ingram, The Madhouse of Language: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century, London: Routledge, 1991 and Roy Porter, MindForg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency, London: Athlone Press, 1987. 34. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1704), ed. John Hayward, Swift: Gulliver’s Travels and Selected Writings in Prose and Verse, London: Nonesuch Press, 1968, p. 331. Subsequent quotations p. 338 and p. 339. 35. Quotations from the following writers are taken from Allan Ingram (ed.), Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998: James Carkesse, Lucida Intervalla (1679); George Trosse, The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse (1714); Nicholas Robinson, A New System of the Spleen, Vapours and Hypochondriack Melancholy (1729); Thomas Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain and the Description and Use of the Nerves (1667, tr. 1681); John Monro, Remarks on Dr Battie’s Treatise on Madness (1758); ‘Report From the Committee on Madhouses in England’ (1815); Timothy Rogers, A Discourse Concerning Trouble of Mind and the

24 Cultural Constructions of Madness in 18th Century Writing Disease of Melancholly (1691); Andrew Harper, A Treatise on the Real Cause and Cure of Insanity (1789). Page numbers in the text refer to this edition. 36. See Alexander Cruden, The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured (1739) in Allan Ingram (ed.), Voices of Madness: Four Pamphlets 1683–1796, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997. 37. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ed. Paul Turner, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford World’s Classics, 1998. Quotations hereafter are given in the text. 38. Quoted in Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, p. 157.

2 Reconstructing the Classical Model: Pope’s Homer and Its Influence

Pope’s Homer, and especially his Iliad, was the foundation stone of his poetic reputation and, as is well known, of both his personal financial security and of the degree of independence he was thereafter able to assert in his dealings with the publishing trade over the terms and even of the textual appearance of future publications. It marked a turningpoint, in fact, in relations between writers and their society’s customary agents of transmission. Equally, as the complete, authoritative and above all English translation of the father of all poetry, it was almost at once a cultural platform, second only to Shakespeare, for the Augustan age and for the foreseeable future. Pope’s towering achievement set an unchallengeable standard: it was the classical world made safe for England. Just how safe, and at what cost, and with what contortions, are of course questions resisted by the confidence enshrined in Pope’s text. Nevertheless, as writers such as Maynard Mack and Claude Rawson have begun to ask, just what are the implications of those features of his original that Pope chooses to suppress, and how does that suppression take place? In this chapter, the focus will be on Achilles, most heroic of the heroes, central to the Homeric enterprise, and acutely problematic to a translator for another age and time. In understanding Pope’s solutions, we are not only brought face to face with a significant perspective on the representation of insanity, but, perversely, with a sense of how far high neo-classical culture was obliged to found itself on the misrepresentation of a past civilization. The subject of the Iliad, both Homer’s and Pope’s, is the wrath of Achilles, ‘the most short and single Subject that ever was chosen by any Poet’, as Pope puts it at the beginning of his 1715 ‘Preface’.1 There, unsurprisingly, the similarity between them ends. Pope’s Homer represents the result of a very different enterprise from Homer’s: in Maynard 25


Mack’s useful phrase, Pope’s method was ‘to recreate Homer by transforming him’.2 The effects of that transformation are nowhere seen more clearly than in his treatment of the wrath of Achilles. Achilles in fact is absent from the Iliad almost more than he is present. In particular, after the crucial falling-out with Agamemnon in Book I, he remains discontented in his encampment, and thereby out of the narrative, until visited by Odysseus (Ulysses, as Pope prefers to call him), Ajax and Phoenix early in Book IX, when their attempted retraction and wooing back on behalf of Agamemnon is ‘rejected with Roughness by Achilles’.3 The last that we see of Achilles prior to his long withdrawal is late in Book I, when he is described sitting, brooding, alone amongst his ships. Pope’s recreation of the lines is: But raging still amidst his Navy sate The stern Achilles, stedfast in his Hate; Nor mix’d in Combate, nor in Council join’d, But wasting Cares lay heavy on his Mind: In his black Thoughts Revenge and Slaughter roll, And Scenes of Blood rise dreadful in his Soul. (I, 634–9) If this is Pope’s farewell to the silent hero for the next seven books, a moment of foreboding pause in the rush of events that have constituted the crisis described in Book I and in the tumult of emotions and hatreds that have distinguished the conducting of the war against Troy, it is also a moment of disturbing and disturbed culmination of the bitter disagreement with Agamemnon. Achilles’ turbulent state of mind has been developed over the course of Book I both in terms of his reactions to other personalities and of his own rhetoric, so that his silence and stillness now are consequential upon prior speech and action. The courage of Achilles, says Pope in his ‘Preface’, as he distinguishes between the ‘surprizing’ variety of Homer’s characters, ‘is furious and intractable’.4 Agamemnon’s unwarrantable demand for Achilles to surrender to him Briseïs, the ‘due Reward of many a well-fought Field’ (I, 158), is, however, the trigger to a fury and intractability that derives, in Pope’s recreation of it, not from courage but from the depths of a temperamental instability that, in action at least, has not been far removed from heroism. Agamemnon’s outrageous order, and in particular his expression of it – But then prepare, Imperious Prince! prepare, Fierce as thou art, to yield thy captive Fair:

Reconstructing the Classical Model 27

Ev’n in thy Tent I’ll seize the blooming Prize, Thy lov’d Briseïs with the radiant Eyes. Hence shalt thou prove my Might, and curse the Hour, Thou stood’st a Rival of Imperial Pow’r; And hence to all our Host it shall be known, That Kings are subject to the Gods alone. (I, 243–50) – provokes an equally outrageous response, more foreboding in its unspoken inwardness, and pre-emptive therefore of Achilles’ retirement from the narrative to his encampment, than the potentially heroic action it shadows. Elsewhere, in other company, Achilles’ response, seen through in all its simplicity, would indeed have been heroic. Here and now it would be lunatic: Achilles heard, with Grief and Rage opprest, His Heart swell’d high, and labour’d in his Breast. Distracting Thoughts by turns his Bosom rul’d, Now fir’d by Wrath, and now by Reason cool’d: That prompts his Hand to draw the deadly Sword, Force thro’ the Greeks, and pierce their haughty Lord; This whispers soft his Vengeance to controul, And calm the rising Tempest of his Soul. (I, 251–8) Achilles, still but on the point of action, riven by inner activity, silent but torn by opposing inner voices, transfixed at a moment of supreme immediacy but at the mercy of contradictory visions of what might be – the more developed scenario of his violent progress to accomplish the curiously understated ‘piercing’ of Agamemnon, or the equally curious, because somehow sinister, ‘whispering’ of ‘Reason’ – is himself, at this point, an emblem not only of battle, conquest and surrender, but of Pope’s whole epic enterprise. Heroism is in combat with reason, individuality with community, and blood with civilization. On this occasion, the immediate effect of Achilles’ wrath is suspended on the instruction of Minerva ‘in her guardian Care’ (I, 269), who requires the hero to ‘Command thy Passions, and the Gods obey’ (I, 286). For Achilles, if obedience to the Gods means not attempting the murder of Agamemnon, it nevertheless involves his anger erupting in the most abusive speech of the poem so far – ‘O Monster, mix’d of Insolence and Fear, Thou Dog in Forehead, but


in Heart a Deer!’ (I, 297–8) – and in his declaration of withdrawal from the Greek confederation: By this I swear, when bleeding Greece again Shall call Achilles, she shall call in vain. When flush’d with Slaughter, Hector comes, to spread The purpled Shore with Mountains of the Dead, Then shalt thou mourn th’Affront thy Madness gave, Forc’d to deplore, when impotent to save: Then rage in Bitterness of Soul, to know This Act has made the bravest Greek thy Foe. (I, 317–24) Achilles’ ‘Act’, which is a speech, is a declaration of inaction, as well as a prediction of other consequences of other acts, not least Hector’s, upon the Greeks without Achilles. But, just as his abuse of Agamemnon stands in for the suspended intention to kill him – an intention that nevertheless finds expression as a threat in Achilles’ parting words: ‘For know, thy Blood, when next thou dar’st invade, Shall stream in Vengeance on my reeking Blade’ (I, 398–9) – and its unrestrained violence is representative of ‘the Rage’ of ‘his boiling Breast’ (I, 295), so here Achilles’ language is again a mirror of his inner anguish. As ‘the bravest Greek’ Troy is his arena, its story the showcase for his glory; indeed, knowing already that he is fated to die there, his final glory. He deserved better. Hector, the enemy, will now take the glory rightfully his because the Trojans will triumph. Achilles’ is the ‘impotence’ as much as the raging. He is withdrawing to visible inactivity as an alternative to the action of killing his commander, but also to unseen ‘Bitterness of Soul’, foe now to his own kind, and at war now within himself. If Agamemnon’s act can legitimately be described as ‘Madness’ (as Pope does, though Homer does not), the consequences for Achilles are equally suggestive of insanity. Achilles’ inactive activity, then, as described at lines 634–9, represents a critical culmination of a dangerous, tense and divisive encounter for the Greeks. Pope’s version of it is equally critical in terms of its indicativeness of his overall attitude to the hero of the Iliad, an attitude that emerges particularly clearly if his recreation of these lines is compared to other available translations. Frank Stack has observed, of the contemporary context of Pope’s Imitations of Horace, that: there was no simple or agreed view of Horace in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Dryden’s ‘interpretation’ of


Horace was different from André Dacier’s which was different from Isaac Casaubon’s which was different from the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s.5 This is equally the case with Homer, high though the standings of the Iliad and the Odyssey were. Not least, the ‘interpretation’ of the Homeric hero, not only Achilles but also Odysseus, tested Homer’s translators markedly. Pope’s Achilles, more than most, represents the outcome of a carefully considered process of construction whereby the hero stands at the point of most intense, and uneasy, negotiation between the received Homeric text and what the early eighteenth century wanted Homer to be. The temperamental instabilities of Pope’s Achilles are the inevitable accompaniment to Pope’s attempted solution for the incongruities between Homeric heroism and neo-classical culture. A standard modern prose translation of what became Pope’s lines 634–9, that by E. V. Rieu from 1950, reads: Now all this time Achilles the great runner, the royal son of Peleus, had been sitting by his fast ships, nursing his anger. He not only kept away from the fighting but attended no meetings of the Assembly, where a man can win renown. He stayed where he was, eating his heart out and longing for the sound and fury of battle.6 The Greek original for this last line, as William Cooke Taylor put it in his edition of George Chapman’s translation, is simple: ‘He ardently desired shout and war.’7 Chapman himself renders the passage, to which Taylor’s note is appended: But Peleus’ son, swift-footed Achilles, at his swift ships sate, Burning in wrath, nor ever came to councils of estate That make men honour’d, never trod the fierce embattled field, But kept close, and his lov’d heart pin’d, what fight and cries could yield Thirsting at all parts to the host. Not only has Pope very conspicuously dispensed with Achilles’ conventional titles, ‘Peleus’ son’, the ‘swift-footed’, confining himself merely in the second line of his translation to the apposite ‘stern’. His lines also markedly play down the proportion of the text given over to the alternative spaces of action, the battlefield and the


council, limiting it to the single line, ‘Nor mix’d in Combate, nor in Council join’d’. The actions that are to do with speaking, and the reputation to be gained that way, are absent altogether, as Achilles occupies himself in silence and inner turmoil. Conversely, other versions deal far more sparingly with Achilles’ emotions, his ‘Burning’, his pining, ‘Thirsting’, or, as in John Ozell’s contemporary English translation, preceding Pope’s first volume by only three years, of Anne Dacier’s French Homer: Mean time, the God-like Son of Peleus, fretting, shut himself up retir’d within his Ship, nor ever went to those Assemblies, where Men acquire such Glory by their Counsels, nor join’d his Aid in Battle; but sat, unactive, yielding himself to be consum’d by Sorrow, and sighing after loud Alarms and Combats.8 But ‘fretting’, ‘yielding’ and ‘sighing’ represent a far weaker state of mind than the Achilles of Pope, ‘raging’ and, ambiguously, ‘still’, seated, ‘stedfast’, while ‘rolling’ visions of ‘Revenge and Slaughter’ in his ‘black Thoughts’. Above all, Achilles’ yearning for battle in all other versions, and in the original, is in fact absent from Pope’s, or at least deflected inwardly so that ‘Thirsting at all parts to the host’ and ‘sighing after loud Alarms and Combats’, consistent with a conventionally classical portrait of a hero denying his true heroic space through anger but still recognising his need for that space, has become ‘And Scenes of Blood rise dreadful in his Soul’. What elsewhere was an inner recognition of an outer arena, in Pope is transformed to an ominous helplessness under forces out of control, and possibly unrecognised. The ambiguity of the line becomes more apparent in comparison to one further translation, to which Pope was inevitably sensitive, by Dryden, published in 1700, where the sense of the original is unambiguously altered: Mean time the Goddess-born, in secret pin’d; Nor visited the Camp, nor in the Council join’d, But keeping close, his gnawing Heart he fed With hopes of Vengeance on the Tyrant’s Head: And wish’d for bloody Wars and mortal Wounds, And of the Greeks oppress’d in Fight, to hear the dying Sounds.9 Like Pope, Dryden minimises the conventional epithets and the activity of the council in favour of the violence of Achilles’ inner anguish.


Equally his hero is a man controlled rather than controlling. But what is starkly different is the transformation of the yearning for battle, no longer a hero’s need for heroic activity but his active desire to hear the sounds of the slaughter of his former friends. Achilles at this point, in Dryden, is the hero inverted, the hero almost, like Coriolanus, gone over to the enemy. The brutal simplicity of Dryden’s interpretation clarifies the subtlety of Pope’s. Achilles, for Pope, is indeed yearning for vengeance against Agamemnon, and has already predicted the need the Greeks will come to have for his services, but he is not overtly longing to hear his friends dying. If, however, ‘Scenes of Blood’ are rising ‘dreadful in his Soul’, that awful possibility has to remain one unacknowledged instinct. Pope’s transformation of the yearning for battle is in fact an internalising of its activities and imagery, not a straightforward switch from Greek to quasi-Trojan, hero to villain. Pope’s Achilles, in a way that no other version has attempted, is a figure brought to complexity by the meeting within him of forces both stateable and unstateable, recognised and unrecognised, his own and not his own. The heroic mould cannot hold under the pressures of mental and temperamental insecurity. Achilles’ collapse into derangement is, in Pope’s recreation, the subject of the Iliad. Pope’s reconstruction of the wrath of Achilles and of its consequences is the stuff of the text of his translation, developed in speech and action over the twenty-four books of the poem. At the same time, though, a more explicit shaping of his readers’ understanding of that action, of the motivations to be distinguished both within the hero and within his original creator, and ultimately of the assessment towards which he was trying to guide those readers of the whole classical enterprise, is developed within the running commentary that is constituted by Pope’s footnotes (in the case of the Iliad, entirely by Pope, though as Mack points out, often using materials supplied to him by others10). The events of the visit to Achilles by Ajax, Ulysses and Phoenix in Book IX, which is also the next appearance of Achilles in the poem, provide an illuminating example, not least because as readers we have spent the previous seven books in company with those Greeks who have repeatedly fought and lost to the now superior Trojans, and not with the one Greek who has, by absenting himself, cut himself off both from that community of fellow suffering and from the engagement of the reading attention. The book opens with Agamemnon proposing to acknowledge their defeat and to return home, but instead agreeing to humble himself


by seeking a reconciliation with Achilles. Ajax and Ulysses bring both handsome speeches and offers of lavish gifts and restitution to Achilles. He replies to Ulysses: Then thus the Goddess-born. Ulysses, hear A faithful Speech, that knows nor Art, nor Fear; What in my secret Soul is understood, My Tongue shall utter, and my Deeds make good. Let Greece then know, my Purpose I retain, Nor with new Treaties vex my Peace in vain. Who dares think one thing, and another tell, My Heart detests him as the Gates of Hell. (IX, 406–13) ‘Nothing’, says Pope’s note, is more remarkable than the Conduct of Homer in this Speech of Achilles. He begins with some degree of Coolness, as in respect to the Embassadors whose Persons he esteem’d, yet even there his Temper just shews itself in the Insinuation that Ulysses had dealt artfully with him, which in two Periods rises into an open Detestation of all Artifice. He then falls into a sullen Declaration of his Resolves, and a more sedate Representation of his past Services; but warms as he goes on, and every Minute he but names his Wrongs, flies out into Extravagance. His Rage awaken’d by that Injury, is like a Fire blown by a Wind, that sinks and rises by fits, but keeps continually burning, and blazes but the more for those Intermissions.11 John Haslam, the Bethlem apothecary, wrote in Observations on Insanity: Unthinking people are frequently led to conclude, that, if during a conversation of a few minutes, a person under confinement shall betray nothing absurd or incorrect, he is well. … [I]nsane people will often, for a short time, conduct themselves, both in conversation and behaviour, with such propriety, that they appear to have the just exercise and direction of their faculties; but let the examiner protract the discourse, until the favourite subject shall have got afloat in the madman’s brain, and he will be convinced of the hastiness of his decision. To those unaccustomed to insane people, a few coherent sentences, or rational answers would indicate a lucid interval, because


they discover no madness; but he who is in possession of the peculiar turn of the patient’s thoughts, might lead him to disclose them, or by a continuance of the conversation they would spontaneously break forth. (pp. 28–9) More colourfully, in his later work, Medical Jurisprudence, published in 1817, having been dismissed from his Bethlem post in consequence of the 1815 report of the Parliamentary Committee on Madhouses in England and now appearing regularly as a professional expert witness in criminal trials where insanity was at issue, he reworked his observation: It often happens that persons may converse for some time with a lunatic, and find him apparently composed and rational; he will discuss the floating topics of the day as another man, – accord with the most enlightened general principles of morals, and correctly estimate the light and shade of human conduct. If the observer should here retire he might be convinced of his sanity: but let him protract the discourse, let him touch the fatal string which throws his mind into discord: let him draw the hair-trigger which inflames the combustible materials of his disease, and he will be surprised at the explosion. … Whatever may be the subject of the discourse, and however rationally he may appear to treat it, the experienced practitioner will expect, and he will not often be disappointed, to find that by some unaccountable association, even ordinary topics are linked with his darling delusion, – the map of his mind will point out that the smallest rivulet flows into the great stream of his derangement.12 Pope’s Achilles needs no ‘experienced practitioner’ to touch the ‘fatal spring’ of his obsession: ‘sedate’ observance of the duties of hospitality and of formal discourse, as Pope commented, ‘blazes’ into the relived recollection of his injuries, triggered, during the long speech that, effectively, breaks his seven books of silence, by the veering currents of his own rhetoric. He will, he declares, leave for Thessaly the next day: Pthia to her Achilles shall restore The Wealth he left for this detested Shore: Thither the Spoils of this long War shall pass, The ruddy Gold, the Steel, and shining Brass; My beauteous Captives thither I’ll convey, And all that rests of my unravish’d Prey. One only valu’d Gift your Tyrant gave,


And that resum’d; the fair Lyrnessian Slave. Then tell him; loud, that all the Greeks may hear, And learn to scorn the Wretch they basely fear. (For arm’d in Impudence, Mankind he braves, And meditates new Cheats on all his Slaves: Tho’ shameless as he is, to face these Eyes Is what he dares not; if he dares he dies) Tell him, all Terms, all Commerce I decline, Nor share his Council, nor his Battel join; For once deceiv’d, was his; but twice, were mine. (IX, 475–91) The measure of the earlier lines of this passage, with the apparent balance of the triple spoils, ‘Gold’, ‘Steel’, ‘Brass’, the apparent satisfaction in this declining order of worth, in his ‘beauteous Captives’, rapidly disintegrates into halting unpredictability as Achilles rehearses, verbally now as silently and inwardly over the last seven books, the cause of his anger. The lack of control is at its height in the long, semi-parenthetical intervention between ‘Then tell him’ and the repeated ‘Tell him’, as Achilles’ fury spills over in all directions, chasing a multitude of inner motivations and resentments through inconclusive phrases, accusations, threats, before the attempt to restore some order with a summary of what is actually to be told to Agamemnon. Even here, Achilles is led to extend a perfectly adequate final couplet – ‘Tell him, all Terms, all Commerce I decline, Nor share his Council, nor his Battel join’ – into an unnecessary triplet, normally a means of enforcing order, emphasis and conclusiveness, but here, broken and sardonic, indicative once again of a mind running out of control. Pope’s note to line 481, ‘One only valu’d Gift your Tyrant gave’, restates succinctly what his own lines have constructed, and what Haslam was to repeat a century later: The Injury which Agamemnon offer’d to Achilles is still uppermost in his Thoughts, he has but just dismiss’d it, and now returns to it again. These Repetitions are far from being Faults in Achilles’s Wrath, whose Anger is perpetually breaking out upon the same Injury.13 With an ironic touch, Pope has Achilles declare of Agamemnon, three lines later, ‘Kings of such a Kind Stand but as Slaves before a noble Mind’ (IX, 494–5). The encounter, couched as it is in surface courtesy, a meeting between equals conducted through language and formal observance,


reaches a climax with Achilles’ last answer, this time to the speech of Ajax, an answer as energetic, as unstable, as any in this book of the poem, and dramatically suggestive of the action for which Achilles’ silent inaction is so damaging a substitute: Oh Soul of Battels, and thy People’s Guide! (To Ajax thus the first of Greeks reply’d) Well hast thou spoke; but at the Tyrant’s Name, My Rage rekindles, and my Soul’s on flame: ‘Tis just Resentment, and becomes the brave; Disgrac’d, dishonour’d, like the vilest Slave! Return then Heroes! and our Answer bear, The glorious Combat is no more my Care; Not till amidst yon’ sinking Navy slain, The Blood of Greeks shall dye the sable Main; Not till the Flames, by Hector’s Fury thrown, Consume your Vessels, and approach my own; Just there, th’impetuous Homicide shall stand, There cease his Battel, and there feel our Hand. (IX, 757–70) Equally, Pope’s note states in prose the effect he has produced through poetry, and at last makes explicit the connection in his own construction of this character between obsessive wrath, and behind that the Homeric heroic code, and eighteenth-century views on madness: We have here the true Picture of an angry Man, and nothing can be better imagin’d to heighten Achilles’s Wrath; he owns that Reason would induce him to a Reconciliation, but his Anger is too great to listen to Reason. He speaks with respect to them, but upon mentioning Agamemnon, he flies into Rage: Anger is in nothing more like Madness, than that Madmen will talk sensibly enough upon any indifferent Matter; but upon the mention of the Subject that caused their Disorder, they fly out into their usual Extravagance.14 As if alert to the content of this note, though in fact only having heard the report delivered by Ulysses of Achilles’ response, Pope has Diomedes conclude the book by advising his compatriots: Why shou’d we Gifts to proud Achilles send, Or strive with Pray’rs his haughty Soul to bend? His Country’s Woes he glories to deride,


And Pray’rs will burst that swelling Heart with Pride. Be the fierce Impulse of his Rage obey’d; Our Battels let him, or desert, or aid; Then let him arm when Jove or he think fit; That, to his Madness, or to Heav’n commit. (IX, 816–23) ‘Madness’ here is Pope’s: Rieu translates the final two lines, ‘He’ll fight again, when his own conscience speaks and the spirit moves him.’15 In Chapman they are rendered: ‘But let us suffer him to stay, or go, at his desire, Fight when his stomach serves him best, or when Jove shall inspire.’16 And, in direct contradiction of Achilles’ earlier claim to ‘a noble Mind’, Pope’s own last word in annotation to the book is to hold up for praise the character and temperament of Diomedes: This Speech is admirably adapted to the Character of Diomed, every word is animated with a martial Courage, and worthy to be deliver’d by a gallant Soldier. He advis’d fighting in the beginning of the Book, and continues still in that Opinion; and he is no more concern’d at the Speech of Achilles now, than he was at that of Agamemnon before.17 Pope’s notes to Achilles, specific and focused though they are, are also of a piece with his fraught reinterpretation of Homer as such, and of Homeric heroism in particular. Claude Rawson refers to Pope’s censures appearing ‘with a gingerly anguished apprehensiveness in his notes to the Iliad’, at one with other ‘critiques of the heroic ethos which sought to protect the hallowed masterpieces of Homer and Virgil from the opprobrium of military cruelty and thuggish codes of honour’.18 The anguish, in fact, begins earlier than the footnotes, in the ‘Essay on the Life, Writings, and Learning of Homer’ that Pope commissioned from his friend Thomas Parnell to occupy second place, after his own ‘Preface’, in the first volume of the Iliad, and, though differently constituted, in the ‘Preface’ itself. For Parnell, as for Pope, the ‘Morality’ of Homer stood in need of apology, and its justification was to be found in his times, in the ‘Morality of Greece’ which ‘could not be perfect while there was a natural Weakness in its Government’. By this Parnell meant its ‘Division into so many States’, whereby the frequency of ‘Quarrels’ led inevitably to a code supportive of ‘Bodily Strength’ and ‘headlong Courage’. This was the temper of Homer’s age: For this reason (not a want of Morality in him) we see a boasting Temper and unmanag’d Roughness in the Spirit of his Heroes,


which ran out in Pride, Anger, or Cruelty. … Homer writ for Men, and therefore he writ of them; if the World had been better, he would have shown it so; as the Matter now stands, we see his People with the turn of his Age, insatiably thirsting after Glory and Plunder; for which however he has found them a lawful Cause, and taken care to retard their Success by the intemperance of those very appetites.19 The poet, for Parnell, writes for and of his times, but nevertheless is also above his times insofar as his ‘care’ is expended in the interests of a discernibly superior morality, a ‘lawful Cause’ and the operations of a higher sense of just or unjust ‘Success’. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Parnell has to dismiss as ‘trifling’, as ‘unfit for the Materials of History’ and as ‘arising merely from Chance, or the Humours of Men’ the ‘Report we meet with from Heraclides, That “Homer was fin’d at Athens for a Madman”’.20 Pope himself, however, in the ‘Preface’ to the Iliad, comes closer to accepting a degree of disorder in Homer’s creativity: ‘Our Author’s Work is a wild Paradise, where if we cannot see all the Beauties so distinctly as in an order’d Garden, it is only because the Number of them is infinitely greater.’ Indeed, Homer’s ‘amazing Invention’ means that ‘no Man of a true Poetical Spirit is Master of himself while he reads him’: ‘the Reader is hurry’d out of himself by the Force of the Poet’s Imagination’.21 Pope’s apology differs in emphasis from Parnell’s in stressing Homer as manifestly a poet above Homer as perceptibly a moralist, ‘Force of Imagination’ above lawfulness and ‘care’. Pope’s poetic enthusiasm, though, inevitably has dangerous implications, as becomes apparent when he proceeds to compare Homer with Virgil, a comparison between ‘Invention’ and ‘Judgment’, the ‘Genius’ and the ‘Artist’. It is genius that ‘hurries and transports us with a commanding Impetuosity’ and Homer who ‘boundless and irresistible as Achilles, bears all before him, and shines more and more as the Tumult increases’. Homer, indeed, ‘seems like his own Jupiter in his Terrors, shaking Olympus, scattering the Lightnings, and firing the Heavens’. Achilles, however, is Homeric heroism, and Homeric heroism is problematic. Pope breaks away from his enthusiasm. Both poets, he acknowledges, have imperfections attendant upon their virtues: ‘as Magnanimity may run up to Profusion or Extravagance, so may a great Invention to Redundancy or Wildness’. We arrive at the apology: ‘If we look upon Homer in this View, we shall perceive the chief Objections against him to proceed from so noble a Cause as the Excess of this


Faculty.’ Such objections, for Pope, might include ‘some of his Marvellous Fictions’, ‘his Similes’, and then the nub of the problem: If there are others which seem rather to charge him with a Defect or Narrowness of Genius, than an Excess of it; those seeming Defects will be found upon Examination to proceed wholly from the Nature of the Times he liv’d in. Such are his grosser Representations of the Gods, and the vicious and imperfect Manners of his Heroes, which will be treated of in the following Essay. Pope is leaving the detail of this discussion to Parnell, and a note directs the reader to ‘the Articles of Theology and Morality, in the third Part of the Essay’. However, he does make clear the limitations to his own ‘Partiality’ (in contrast to that quoted from ‘Madam Dacier’) for ‘Antiquity’: Who can be so prejudiced in their Favour as to magnify the Felicity of those Ages, when a Spirit of Revenge and Cruelty, join’d with the practice of Rapine and Robbery, reign’d thro’ the World, when no Mercy was shown but for the sake of Lucre, when the greatest Princes were put to the Sword, and their Wives and Daughters made Slaves and Concubines?22 Maynard Mack speaks of Pope as having ‘tried … to make the translation itself faithful to Homer’s accounts of ancient Greek life’, but that ‘to a considerable extent the whole English Augustan age passes into his Homer and looks back from it, strengths and weaknesses magnified’.23 Fidelity to a revered original is in conflict with respect for, adherence to, and confinement within, the sensibilities of one’s own civilization. To the extent that Achilles is a consciously undertaken construction by Pope, that construction represents his alertness to the perceivable imperfections within his original, not imperfections of performance but of principle. To the extent that Pope has reconstructed Achilles as a man turned to insanity, a model of ‘Raging’ or ‘Furious Madness’ fit to stand alongside Cibber’s 1676 statues outside Bethlem Hospital in London, his own task in the recreation of the whole of the rest of the Iliad is made substantially more straightforward. The most testing stretch of the poem, in terms of its transformation into an English Augustan document, deals with the return of Achilles from inaction to action following the death of his friend Patroclus at the hands of Hector, though enabled by the intervention of Apollo, at the end of Book XVI: ‘Patroclus, neglecting the Orders of Achilles, pursues


the Foe to the Walls of Troy; where Apollo repulses and disarms him, Euphorbus wounds him, and Hector kills him, which concludes the Book.24 What is quite clear at this point is that for Pope, as for Homer, Achilles now has a legitimate reason for his fury and a valid arena in which to enact it – indeed, a critical distinction is made early in Book XIX when the sea-nymph Thetis, his mother, presenting him with the new armour made for him by Vulcan, instructs him: But go, Achilles, (as Affairs require) Before the Grecian Peers renounce thine Ire: Then uncontroll’d in boundless War engage, And Heav’n with Strength supply the mighty Rage! (XIX, 35–8) The course of that fury, however, and the brutal consequences of it, and particularly the state of mind of Achilles as it heightens to its crisis before its final, almost tranquil, abatement in Book XXIV, are fortified, coloured and distorted by the unresolved emotions that have disabled and preoccupied him throughout the first half of the poem. If Book XXIV sees the legitimate conclusion to proper heroic battle rage, it also, with great delicacy and with a minimum of divine intervention, brings about the resolution of Achilles’ insanity. The ‘Exploits of Achilles’, as Pope calls them in a footnote,25 begin early in Book XX. From the outset they are motivated by both a specific and a general purpose, each of which is utilised by Pope in terms of developing the insanity of the hero. The specific is the quest for Hector, in vengeance and retribution for the death of Patroclus: While thus the Gods in various League engage, Achilles glow’d with more than mortal Rage: Hector he sought; in search of Hector turn’d His Eyes around, for Hector only burn’d; And burst like Light’ning thro’ the Ranks, and vow’d To glut the God of Battles with his Blood. (XX, 103–8) This relentlessness drives Achilles through the casual cruelty of lesser slaughters that constitutes the general intention of wreaking a promiscuous revenge on all and any Trojan, the unleashing of a wrath held unnaturally back since the events of Book I: Not so Pelides; furious to engage, He rush’d impetuous. Such the Lion’s Rage,


Who viewing first his Foes with scornful Eyes, Tho’ all in Arms the peopled City rise, Stalks careless on, with unregarding Pride; Till at the length, by some brave Youth defy’d, To his bold Spear the Savage turns alone, He murmurs Fury with a hollow Groan; He grins, he foams, he rolls his Eyes around; Lash’d by his Tail his heaving sides resound; He calls up all his Rage; he grinds his Teeth, Resolv’d on Vengeance, or resolv’d on Death. (XX, 198–209) Even at this early stage in the ‘Exploits’ Pope has contrived significant distinctions in his version of these lines: where Chapman, for example, has merely ‘coy disdain’ (and Rieu ‘goes his way and treats them with contempt’)26 Pope has the more ostentatious, more self-conscious ‘Stalks careless on, with unregarding Pride’, a pride that is designed to culminate in the animal relish of the moment where Achilles at last ‘grins’ and ‘calls up all his Rage’. These expressions have no strict equivalent in Chapman whose ‘his stern Lasheth his strength up’ (Rieu’s ‘flanks with his tail to work himself into a fighting fury’)27 has been divided by Pope into two distinct aspects of Achilles’ behaviour: the merely animal lashing of the tail, and the calculatedly human feature of delaying while anticipating the full power of known emotions. Equally, what in Pope is the knowing, half-human ‘grins’ in Chapman is the wholly animal ‘yawning head’ (and in Rieu simply ‘a snarl’). If Chapman is rendering Homer’s lion simile for the weight of its full animal savagery, Pope, in keeping with his overall construction of the mad man-monster that his hero has become, is ensuring that Achilles the man is seen within it, more than animal in the anticipation of his own animal fury, less than human in the relish of giving in at last to his emotional instincts. The culmination within this book of the slaughter by Achilles comes in a moment of pause in the last lines, a standing aside by the poet prior to the headlong resumption in Book XXI. Here Pope differs less from his predecessors except in the degree of emotion insisted upon and in the actual construction of the moment of suspended action. Achilles is seen driving his chariot across the heaps of his slain. Chapman has: mix’d and overborne, Beneath Achilles’ one-hoof’d horse, shields, spears, and men, lay trod, His axle-trees and chariot wheels, all spatter’d with the blood


Hurl’d from the steeds’ hooves and the strakes. Thus, to be magnified, His most inaccessible hands in human blood he dyed.28 Pope, at greater length, spells out the detail of the destruction before highlighting the figure of Achilles himself, not only eager for glory but momentarily inactive amid the action, silent, as when ‘raging’ among his ships in Book I, but in the process now of enacting some at least of the ‘Scenes of Blood’ for which his own ‘Soul’ was then the only arena: So the fierce Coursers, as the Chariot rolls, Tread down whole Ranks, and crush out Hero’s Souls. Dash’d from their Hoofs while o’er the Dead they fly, Black bloody Drops the smoaking Chariot die: The spiky Wheels thro’ Heaps of Carnage tore; And thick the groaning Axles dropp’d with Gore. High o’er the Scene of Death Achilles stood, All grim with Dust, all horrible in Blood: Yet still insatiate, still with Rage on flame: Such is the Lust of never-dying Fame! (XX, 581–90) Pope, insistent to the end, concludes in his own voice as commentator with a note that reads in stark contrast to his ‘Exploits of Achilles’ note earlier in the book. There Homer was said to be enlarging upon the ‘Exploits’ ‘that he may leave a noble Idea of Valour upon the Mind of the Reader’.29 If this is unusually forceful in its apparent endorsement of the Homeric heroic code, its certainty, masking perhaps his more characteristic ‘anguished apprehensiveness’, is almost explicitly undermined by Pope’s own interpretation enforced ‘upon the Mind of the Reader’ as the last words of the book: I cannot close the Notes upon this Book, without observing the dreadful Idea of Achilles, which the Poet leaves upon the Mind of the Reader. He drives his Chariot over Shields and mangled Heaps of Slain: The Wheels, the Axle-tree, and the Horses are stain’d with Blood, the Hero’s Eyes burn with Fury, and his Hands are red with Slaughter. A Painter might form from this Passage the Picture of Mars in the Fulness of his Terrors, as well as Phidias is said to have drawn from another, that of Jupiter in all his Majesty.30 Pope, however, has dealt in representation as much as Phidias or any other painter, and the horror he expresses at the portrayal of Achilles is


as much at the Augustan exaggeratedly insane Achilles as at the Homeric heroic model. The high-point of Achilles’ blood-lust, and therefore of Pope’s potentially ‘anguished apprehensiveness’, comes however in the next book, for which the hero seen paused ‘High o’er the Scene of Death’ is only a preliminary, a reminder of the yearning for the action in which he is now to be glutted. Book XXI of The Iliad depicts the progress of a killing-machine that is so devastatingly and relentlessly efficient that nature itself, in the form of the river Scamander, rises up in a revulsion that, in Pope at least, borders upon the hallucinatory. The impact here, however, is not so much in the differences between Pope’s and other versions as in the complete sense this episode makes after Pope’s strategic construction of Achilles as a man out of his mind. The book opens with the hero’s pursuit of part of the Trojans towards the river, where he continues his slaughter, filling the waters with corpses until the river god himself dramatically intervenes. Here, Achilles has killed Asteropeus: then from the Bank his Jav’lin tore, And left the breathless Warrior in his Gore. The floating Tydes the bloody Carcass lave, And beat against it, Wave succeeding Wave; Till roll’d between the Banks, it lies the Food Of curling Eels, and Fishes of the Flood. All scatter’d round the Stream (their Mightiest slain) Th’ amaz’d Pæonians scour along the Plain: … But from the Bottom of his Gulphs profound, Scamander spoke; the Shores return’d the Sound. O first of Mortals! (for the Gods are thine) In Valour matchless, and in Force divine! If Jove have giv’n thee every Trojan Head, ‘Tis not on me thy Rage should heap the Dead. See! my choak’d Streams no more their Course can keep, Nor roll their wonted Tribute to the Deep. Turn then, Impetuous! from our injur’d Flood; Content, thy Slaughters could amaze a God. (XXI, 217–38) Achilles’ abrupt dismissal of this appeal brings about the rising of the river against him, a sequence that allows Pope to invest his character


with all the dizzying distractedness of being caught up in the incredible actually taking place around him: Then rising in his Rage above the Shores, From all his Deep the bellowing River roars, Huge Heaps of Slain disgorges on the Coast, And round the Banks the ghastly Dead are tost. While all before, the Billows rang’d on high (A wat’ry Bulwark) screen the Bands who fly. Now bursting on his Head with thund’ring Sound, The falling Deluge whelms the Hero round: His loaded Shield bends to the rushing Tide; His Feet, upborn, scarce the strong Flood divide, Slidd’ring, and stagg’ring. (XXI, 257–67) The rising of Scamander, the irresistible force more powerful than Achilles himself, is both a moral condemnation of and a natural counterpart to that wrath that is itself an unnatural perversion of mental and emotional energies. The fury of the river, disgorging its contents, turning against Achilles, pursuing him across the plain, is an act of moral revulsion as well as of a vengeance that exceeds the hero’s own, and an act, too, that while overtopping his insane motivation also intensifies it, carrying him with all the unstoppable ferocity of his own inner reality: Still flies Achilles, but before his eyes Still swift Scamander rolls where’er he flies: Not all his Speed escapes the rapid Floods; The first of Men, but not a Match for Gods. Oft’ as he turn’d the Torrent to oppose, And bravely try if all the Powers were Foes; So oft’ the Surge, in wat’ry Mountains spread, Beats on his Back, or bursts upon his Head. Yet dauntless still the adverse Flood he braves, And still indignant bounds above the Waves. Tir’d by the Tides, his Knees relax with Toil; Wash’d from beneath him, slides the slimy Soil. (XXI, 299–310) As banks and footholds give way, retreating to a chaos of water, earth and air, as mind itself slides and staggers, held together only by the


instinct to keep slaughtering, Achilles finally comes face to face with the natural embodiment of himself, his code, his mentality. The river god pronounces his final threat: He said: and on the Chief descends amain, Increas’d with Gore, and swelling with the Slain. Then murm’ring from his Beds, he boils, he raves, And a Foam whitens on the purple Waves. At ev’ry Step, before Achilles stood The crimson Surge, and delug’d him with Blood. (XXI, 378–83) If Achilles is no ‘Match for Gods’, nor is he a match for himself. The ‘crimson Surge’ that is himself confronts him at ‘ev’ry Step’, hemming him in, pouring over him the logic of his own reality. Trapped within the reflective nature of his own insanity there is no longer a way back: Achilles, wherever he looks, sees only himself. It is Juno, here, who calls upon Vulcan, fire, to restore order to chaos by drying and evaporating water: only divine intervention has the capacity to redeem the hero from himself. Yet the theme of the double continues to pervade the poem, as it has since Patroclus first wore the armour of Achilles in Book XVI in order to delude the Trojans. The battlefields of Troy, in fact, see many doubles, most of them the consequence of a god taking on a specific mortal appearance in order to achieve a particular end. So, Apollo assumes the shape of Agenor at the end of Book XXI in order to draw off Achilles while the real Agenor makes his escape shrouded ‘in a Veil of Clouds’ (XXI, 706), and while Troy is enabled to close its gates against the hero. Equally, in Book XXII, Athene, at a crucial point in the final battle between Achilles and Hector, becomes Deiphobus, brother of Hector, long enough to delude Hector into fatally thinking himself supported. Early in the poem, Jupiter sends a deceitful dream to Agamemnon at the opening of Book II, in the form of Nestor, which urges him to attack the city straight away despite the withdrawal of Achilles; Minerva passes among the Trojan ranks in the form of the spearsman Laodocus in Book IV in order to persuade Pandarus to shoot at Menelaus, thus breaking the temporary truce that has been agreed between the sides; and Neptune takes on the shape of Calchas at the beginning of Book XIII in order to inspire the Greeks. Deception and delusion are integral to action in a universe where the divine and the mortal pursue different agendas within a common arena. The doubleness of Achilles, however, is not only central to the action of the poem and its culmination but also to the crisis and resolution in his


own derangement. Significantly, in view of his suspicion of the duplicity of Ulysses, whom he has accused of artfulness (IV, 407), Achilles quickly agrees to Patroclus’ request to deceive the Trojans into believing that he has returned to the battle by borrowing his armour. The suggestion, in fact, had come earlier in the poem, from Nestor, during his conversation in his tent with Patroclus in Book XI, a long, artful, digression by the old man (though Pope’s long note at line 800 criticises the speech as ‘too long’ and ‘absurd’ while also acknowledging those who praise it as designedly protracted31), apparently reminiscing about military exploits long gone, but actually moving steadily towards the critical point: If some dire Oracle his Breast alarm, If ought from Heav’n with-hold his saving Arm; Some Beam of Comfort yet on Greece may shine, If thou but lead the Myrmidonian Line; Clad in Achilles’ Arms, if thou appear, Proud Troy may tremble and desist from War. (XI, 926–31) By the time these lines are repeated to Achilles by Patroclus in Book XVI, they have undergone suggestive modification: If some dire Oracle thy Breast alarm, If ought from Jove, or Thetis, stop thy Arm, Some Beam of Comfort yet on Greece may shine, If I but lead the Myrmidonian Line: Clad in thy dreadful Arms if I appear, Proud Troy shall tremble, and desert the War: Without thy Person Greece shall win the Day, And thy mere Image chase her Foes away. (XVI, 54–61) The resonances of the ‘Image’ of Achilles, as Maynard Mack points out, are Pope’s own development ‘out of no more than a hint in the original’.32 The ‘Achilles’ that is about to emerge is not merely the pretend Achilles of Homer’s Iliad but an unreal one, one existing in imagination, what Mack calls the ‘ersatz’ Achilles.33 The ersatz Achilles both is and is not; it partakes both of the presence and of the absence of the real Achilles; and it participates in and outdoes the delusiveness of the fields of Troy. Moreover, it exists both as separate from and as dependent upon the existence and identity of the man himself. The description of Patroclus ‘becoming’ Achilles is curiously brief, a feature explained by Pope as Homer’s reserving a more leisurely


description ‘for the new Armour which Thetis shall bring that Hero’.34 What is noticeable about the ten lines that are given (a further six are devoted to Achilles’ javelin and its lineage, which is not to be taken by Patroclus) is the initial emphasis on Patroclus’ own body, implying its suitability to receive such glorious attire, but then the swift overshadowing of that body by the accoutrements and even the named identity of Achilles: He cas’d his Limbs in Brass, and first around, His manly Legs, with silver Buckles bound The clasping Greaves; then to his Breast applies The flamy Cuirass, of a thousand Dyes; Emblaz’d with Studs of Gold, his Faulchion shone, In the rich Belt, as in a starry Zone. Achilles’ Shield his ample Shoulders spread, Achilles’ Helmet nodded o’er his Head. Adorn’d in all his terrible Array, He flash’d around intolerable Day. (XVI, 162–71) The armour is real, the chariot and horses are real, the Myrmidons are real, only the Achilles is fake, a delusion substituting for the real Achilles, now in a position of actual withdrawal but tacit participation or, given that his heart is with Patroclus, of formal withdrawal but actual participation, albeit as an image. ‘Think, your Achilles sees you fight: Be brave’ (XVI, 328) urges Patroclus Achilles to Achilles’ troops, which he might do, from afar, or might, through their willing suspension of disbelief, themselves taking, therefore, the fake Achilles as the real one, as indeed the battlefield in general does: The War stood still, and all around them gaz’d, When great Achilles’ shining Armour blaz’d: Troy saw, and thought the dread Achilles nigh, At once they see, they tremble, and they fly. (XVI, 334–7) The ‘mere Image’ does indeed chase their foes away, and the bulk of Book XVI from here on is given to narrating the exploits of the ersatz Achilles. Achilles himself, even as a viewing presence, is absent once again, forgotten by the narrative except insofar as he is effectively present through his personation by Patroclus, present in image, present in ‘body’, absent in self.


The ersatz Achilles, of course, is killed, by a combination of Apollo, Euphorbus and Hector. Or rather, Patroclus is killed, his moment of death described in a manner that, unusually, stresses the loneliness of a single identity once stripped of its arms, its body, its context, and its deceptions: He faints; the Soul unwilling wings her way, (The beauteous Body left a Load of Clay) Flits to the lone, uncomfortable Coast; A naked, wand’ring, melancholy Ghost! (XVI, 1032–5) The real Patroclus dies, but the ersatz Achilles lives on. Hector, in common with the rest of the Trojans, flew from the ersatz Achilles, but in Book XVII it is Hector who takes and then wears the armour worn by Patroclus, thus putting on with it the role of the ersatz Achilles. The description of Hector putting on the armour of Achilles is perfunctory in comparison even to that of Patroclus: There his own Mail unbrac’d, the Field bestrow’d: His Train to Troy convey’d the massy Load. Now blazing in th’immortal Arms he stands, The Work and Present of celestial Hands. (XVII, 217–20) However, what follows amounts virtually to a divine sanctification of this act, here from Jupiter: Then with his sable Brow he gave the Nod, That seals his Word; the Sanction of the God. The stubborn Arms (by Jove’s Command dispos’d) Conform’d spontaneous, and around him clos’d; Fill’d with the God, enlarg’d his Members grew, Thro’ all his Veins a sudden Vigour flew, The Blood in brisker Tides began to roll, And Mars himself came rushing on his Soul. Exhorting loud thro’ all the Field he strode, And look’d, and mov’d, Achilles, or a God. (XVII, 245–54) Hector has ‘become’ Achilles to an extent that Patroclus did not, a feature that carries huge implications, not least for the still absent real Achilles, whose ersatz self is now fighting for the other side, an eventuality ambiguously foreshadowed back in Book I of the poem. What was


there a matter of ‘black Thoughts’ and ‘Scenes of Blood’ rising ‘dreadful in his Soul’ (I, 638–9) has now been given embodiment in the fake form that he himself has sanctioned. That sanctioned fake self, however, is no longer his to control, to ‘see’. It has taken on its own life and its own will, and with divine approval. Achilles’ relentless pursuit of Hector through Books XX and XXI, therefore, must also be seen as a pursuit of himself, a self that he always had the potential to become, and one as dangerous to his identity as the ‘crimson Surge’ from which Juno rescues him. Hector certainly becomes the focus for the wrath of Achilles in these final books of the poem, after the killing of Patroclus, but that focus is one that takes its pull from the Achilles of the very first book, beside himself with anger. Moreover, it takes its capacity for intensifying his fury from its tantalising enactment of another Achilles, indeed an Achilles that has already killed the approved other Achilles, and therefore Achilles’ ‘Image’, but that still remains, in the nightmare reality of the fields of Troy, yet another other Achilles, another ‘Image’ dependent upon while agonisingly separate from, the real Achilles, whatever that now means. When Achilles finally faces Hector in Book XX, ‘The Man, that slew Achilles, in his Friend!’ (XX, 494), he is facing a self that has devastatingly good claims to ‘be’ ‘Achilles’, or, like the false Agenors, Nestors and Calchases, ‘a God’. At the height of the battle between them, in Book XXII, Achilles is described as scrutinising Hector’s armour, his own armour, for a weak link, his own weak link: In his right Hand he waves the Weapon round, Eyes the whole Man, and meditates the Wound; But the rich Mail Patroclus lately wore, Securely cas’d the Warrior’s Body o’er. One place at length he spies, to let in Fate, Where ‘twixt the Neck and Throat the jointed Plate Gave entrance: Thro’ that penetrable Part Furious he drove the well-directed Dart: Nor pierced the Windpipe yet, nor took the Pow’r Of Speech, Unhappy! from the dying Hour. Prone on the Field the bleeding Warrior lies … (XXII, 403–13) Achilles drives through the neck that, in his own armour, is effectively his own: the death wound is given with the deliberate finality not only of a wrath in the process of finding its proper recipient but of a necessary suicide. The calculated precision whereby the ersatz ersatz Achilles


is dispatched is also the mechanism whereby Achilles reclaims his own image, reclaims it and reintegrates it. If Hector’s death, stripped of fake identity, is described in almost exact echo of that of Patroclus, similarly stripped – He ceas’d. The Fates supprest his lab’ring Breath, And his Eyes stiffen’d at the Hand of Death; To the dark Realm the Spirit wings its Way, (The manly Body left a Load of Clay) And plaintive glides along the dreary Coast, A naked, wandring, melancholy Ghost! (XXII, 453–8) – Achilles’ triumphant speech is a calling in of himself, a restitution of mental integrity and a closing of the gap between self and other self, between the presence and the absence that with regard to Achilles have been so conspicuous a feature of the narrative, so damaging a feature of the mentality: At last is Hector stretch’d upon the Plain, Who fear’d no Vengeance for Patroclus slain: Then Prince! you should have fear’d, what now you feel; Achilles absent, was Achilles still. (XXII, 415–18) The anger of Achilles, of course, continues, with the stripping of the body, the dragging of it behind Achilles’ chariot around the walls of Troy and the insistence that it lie unburied and dishonoured. Pope’s footnotes continue his ‘anguished apprehensiveness’ both at the behaviour of the hero after his passion should properly be spent and at the possible stain on the reputation of the author whom he is rendering as a classic for his age: This Inhumanity of Achilles in dragging the dead Body of Hector, has been severely (and I think indeed not without some Justice) censur’d by several both Ancients and Moderns. Plato in his third Book de Republica, speaks of it with Detestation: But methinks it is a great Injustice to Homer to reflect upon the Morals of the Author himself, for things which he only paints as the Manners of a vicious Hero.35 For Pope, however, the supreme advantage of Achilles’ continuing wrath is the opportunity thereby afforded for humane reconciliation


when Achilles, genuinely affected by the visit of Priam himself in Book XXIV to plead for his son’s return, ends his anger for good and agrees to restore the body in a scene remarkable for its display of admirable human emotion: These Words soft Pity in the Chief inspire, Touch’d with the dear Remembrance of his Sire. Then with his Hand (as prostrate still he lay) The Old Man’s Cheek he gently turn’d away. Now each by turns indulg’d the Gush of Woe; And now the mingled Tides together flow: This low on Earth, that gently bending o’er, A Father one, and one a Son, deplore: But great Achilles diff’rent Passions rend, And now his Sire he mourns, and now his Friend. Th’infectious Softness thro’ the Heroes ran; One universal, solemn Show’r began; They bore as Heroes, but they felt as Man. (XXIV, 634–46) Pope’s grateful footnotes, too, are now fulsome in their praise of a man whose long withheld humanity now emerges in a manner both touching and dignified enough to render him an appropriate representative of his sublime creator. So, of the immediately following speech of Achilles, he comments: There is not a more beautiful Passage in the whole Ilias than this before us: Homer to shew that Achilles was not a mere Soldier, here draws him as a Person of excellent Sense and sound reason:… And it was a piece of great Judgment thus to describe him; for the Reader would have retain’d but a very indifferent Opinion of the Hero of a Poem, that had no Qualification but mere Strength: It also shews the Art of the Poet thus to defer this part of his Character till the very Conclusion of the Poem: By these means he fixes an Idea of his Greatness upon our Minds, and makes his Hero go off the Stage with Applause.36 Achilles is thus fitted to enter the Augustan age, an exemplary hero for a Christian nation, rather than a primitive thug. But this is not, of course, the actual significance of Pope’s Achilles, nor the actual achievement of Pope’s Homer, though the sanitisation of a classic was certainly a dominant influence in the wide and lasting


impact of its publication. Pope, as Johnson observed in his ‘Life of Pope’, ‘wrote for his own age’:37 Time and place will always enforce regard. In estimating this translation, consideration must be had of the nature of our language, the form of our metre, and, above all, of the change which two thousand years have made in the modes of life and the habits of thought. What he gave to that age, says Johnson, was a model of poetic diction: He cultivated our language with so much diligence and art, that he has left in his Homer a treasure of poetical elegances to posterity. His version may be said to have tuned the English tongue; for since its appearance no writer, however deficient in other powers, has wanted melody. Such a series of lines so elaborately corrected, and so sweetly modulated, took possession of the publick ear; the vulgar was enamoured of the poem, and the learned wondered at the translation.38 A ‘treasure of poetical elegances’, which is precisely what Coleridge was later to condemn in denouncing ‘his translation of Homer … as the main source of our pseudo-poetic diction’,39 was indeed a triumphant achievement when what was actually being ‘recreated’ was a text about which the translator clearly had such mixed feelings, feelings which concentrated in the detail of his presentation of the poem’s hero. If Carolyn Williams is right in claiming that ‘Pope’s treatment of Achilles is an attempt at rehabilitation – not only of Achilles but of Homer’,40 it is a rehabilitation that has very marked strains and very identifiable outcomes. In giving his age poetical elegance, he also gave a model of heroic identity under intolerable pressure, one that thereby became a pattern of madness reclassified from its heroic context. It was a pattern that was to influence the representation of insanity within the ‘modes of life and habits of thought’ of his own age, and not least by way of Pope’s own influence on himself in his mature satires.

Notes 1. Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, ‘Preface’, ed. Maynard Mack, The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vols VII–VIII, London: Methuen, 1967, VII, 5. 2. Pope, Poems, VII, xcvi.

52 Cultural Constructions of Madness in 18th Century Writing 3. Pope, Poems, VII, 430. 4. Pope, Poems, VII, 7. 5. Frank Stack, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p.xiv. 6. Homer, The Iliad, tr. E.V. Rieu, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1950, p. 36. 7. Cited in George Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, ed. Richard Hooper, London: John Russell Smith, 1888, I, 19, n. 8. Pope, Poems, X, 533. 9. John Dryden, Fables Ancient and Modern, 1700, ed. James Kinsley, The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, London: Oxford University Press, 1962, p. 676. 10. Pope, Poems, VII, xviii. 11. Pope, Poems, VII, 452, n. 12. John Haslam, Medical Jurisprudence, London: C. Hunter, 1817, pp. 18–19. 13. Pope, Poems, VII, 456, n. 14. Pope, Poems, VII, 472, n. 15. The Iliad, tr. E.V. Rieu, p. 180. 16. George Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, I, 208. 17. Pope, Poems, VII, 474, n. 18. Claude Rawson, ‘Heroic Notes: Epic Idiom, Revision and the Mock-Footnote from the Rape of the Lock to the Dunciad’, in Alexander Pope: World and Word, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill, Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1998, p. 88. 19. Pope, Poems, VII, 72. 20. Pope, Poems, VII, 41. 21. Pope, Poems, VII, 3–4. 22. Pope, Poems, VII, 12–14. 23. Pope, Poems, VII, l. 24. Pope, Poems, VIII, 233. 25. Pope, Poems, VIII, 401. 26. Chapman, II, 177; Rieu, p. 370. 27. Chapman, II, 178; Rieu, p. 370. 28. Chapman, II, 187. 29. Pope, Poems, VIII, 401. 30. Pope, Poems, VIII, 419. 31. Pope, Poems, VIII, 71–2. 32. Pope, Poems, VII, cxxxix. 33. Pope, Poems, VII, cxxxix. 34. Pope, Poems, VIII, 244. 35. Pope, Poems, VIII, 476. 36. Pope, Poems, VIII, 564. 37. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ‘Life of Pope’, ed. Arthur Waugh, London: Oxford University Press, 2 vols, 1952, II, 320. 38. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, II, 319. 39. S. T. Coleridge, Biographica Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2 vols, 1907, I, 26; cited in Steven Shankman, Pope’s ‘Iliad’: Homer in the Age of Passion, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 56. 40. Carolyn D. Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of EighteenthCentury Classical Learning, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 104.

3 ‘Th’ Unbalanc’d Mind’: Poetry, Satire and the Assimilation of Madness

In reconstructing Homer’s Achilles, Pope not only wrote his own way out of a tricky moral dilemma, one that had the capacity to unsteady an entire neo-classical culture. He also created a model in which the mental insecurity of the hero became a meeting-place for the tensions of his time and place, or, more accurately, of his constructor’s apprehensions about time and place. If, as G.S. Rousseau puts it, ‘we recognize that malady – among the various thermometers, so to speak, by which cultures measure themselves and are measured – is among the most accurate’,1 then Pope’s insane hero is indeed a measure of heroic culture, but in particular of the perception of that culture from the time and place of a very different one. Equally, recovered and reconciled, the hero comfortably approaches the values and norms of a culture that needs to find something beyond thuggery in heroism. To that extent, too, mad Achilles in all his forms is an accurate indicator of the anguish, or ease, of his recreator. The final volumes of the Iliad were published in May 1720. It was followed, of course, in 1725 and 1726, by the Odyssey. But Pope’s Odyssey, while not Pope’s in the sense that his Iliad was, was also no successor to his earlier recreation. In terms of lessons learnt, problems solved, and sleights of hand perfected, the true successor was The Dunciad, published eight years after the Iliad, in May 1728. Indeed, as ‘Scriblerus’ asserts in the prefatory ‘Of The Poem’, tragic epic and comic epic have the same originator in Homer himself, with comedy actually preceding tragedy, though now sadly lost: ‘And thus it doth appear, that the first Dunciad was the first Epic poem, written by Homer himself, and anterior even to the Iliad or Odyssey.’ 2 Pope’s undertaking is nothing less than to recreate an 53


absence, a missing original that has claim to be the foundation of the comic, that gave ‘to Comedy its first Idæa’ (V, 48): Now forasmuch as our Poet had translated those two famous works of Homer which are yet left; he did conceive it in some sort his duty to imitate that also which was lost: And was therefore induced to bestow on it the same Form which Homer’s is reported to have had, namely that of Epic poem, with a title also framed after the antient Greek manner, to wit, that of Dunciad. (V, 49) If The Dunciad’s function is to give form to a lost pattern, its chief personage, as in The Iliad, will act as the focal point for the trials and tensions, glory and grandeur, to be recreated from the ghost of the original. So, ‘as Homer, singing only the Wrath of Achilles, yet includes in his poem the whole history of the Trojan war, in like manner our author hath drawn into [a] single action the whole history of Dulness and her children’ (V, 51). As a model of heroic identity under intolerable pressure, then, Tibbald is decisively of Achilles’ lineage. He is ‘the Person’ to be ‘fix’d upon to support’ the action, the ‘phantom in the poet’s mind’ whose name is found ‘to be Tibbald, and he becomes of course the Hero of the poem’ (V, 51) – the lost hero of a lost epic, recreated for his own time. Clearly, though, the tone of this hero’s representation, both through verse and, in 1729, with The Dunciad Variorum, through notes, is not that of anguish or apprehensiveness but of irony, the comic epic mode. Tibbald, in conception, function and situation shadows his great original, as the events, phrasing and jokes of The Dunciad shadow the range of epic poetry, not, however, as an imitation of Achilles but as his antithesis, partaking of his greatness, his single-mindedness, and above all of his madness, yet partaking of them in another mode. If ‘Achilles absent, was Achilles still’ (XXII, 418), it is Tibbald, a ‘last, great Prophet of Tautology’, like Shadwell before him,3 who gives significant form to that absence. His introduction into the poem itself echoes Achilles early in the Iliad. He is found alone, wrestling with the turbulence of his own thoughts, and he is witnessed by Dulness herself: She ey’d the Bard, where supperless he sate, And pin’d, unconscious of his rising fate; Studious he sate, with all his books around, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound! Plung’d for his sense, but found no bottom there; Then writ, and flounder’d on, in mere despair. (A: I, 110–14)

‘Th’ Unbalanc’d Mind’ 55

Tibbald, like Achilles, is helpless in the sway of greater, unknowable forces, from below or within. Each mental turn takes him further inwards, where Achilles’ ‘wasting Cares’, ‘black Thoughts’ and the ‘Scenes of Blood’ that rise ‘dreadful in his Soul’ (I, 637–9) find their counterparts in the inner emptiness of his thoughts, his sinking and plunging towards nothingness, and the despair of the writing act. Where Achilles’ isolation is a beginning, though, and his madness a personal and federal tragedy, worked out over the long and bloody books that follow, Tibbald’s is the ironic reverse. The studied ambiguity of Pope’s Achilles, hating, silent, self-devouring, locked into the long descent to obsession and madness, is rendered in The Dunciad as a prelude to triumph, to the impending confirmation of all those values that contradict ‘sense’ and to Tibbald’s centrality to that empire. Where Achilles’ isolation genuinely cut him off from all ties of loyalty and sanity, Tibbald’s in fact proves his true kinship with the world of mental disorder. Madness in The Dunciad is not a consequence of long agony, nor is it a means of authorial escape from moral dilemma: it is here, now, readily bestowed and instantly welcomed, a necessary badge for those who are truly of their time and place. Tibbald’s ‘despair’, far from indicating a mind at the end of its capacity to sustain coherent identity, in fact is what fits him for his enthronement as hero and dunce. As the tragic epic hero loses himself, his comic antithesis finds his truth, his dulness, his destiny, and his home. At the heart of Tibbald’s confirmation is his meeting with his own likeness. If his function within The Dunciad is to act as hero of a recreated lost comic epic, and as such as the antithesis of the hero Pope made of an actual tragic epic, that function involves giving coherence to a series of resemblances. Dulness herself sees ‘in Tibbald’s monsterbreeding breast’ her own ‘image full exprest’ (A: I, 106, 105). The pattern of acknowledged likeness is crucial to the establishment of her empire. Mutual recognition – ‘All who true dunces in her cause appear’d, And all who knew those dunces to reward’ (A: II, 21–2) – is all. While the plains of Troy were unsettled by the likenesses set in place by self-interested gods, and while multiplying ersatz heroes mirrored and complicated the crisis within Achilles’ heroic identity, in the serene chaos that is the world of The Dunciad, mirror recognition allies the dull with the dull, unreason with unreason, uncreation with uncreation. It is the act in which insanity finds and glories in itself. If ‘all the Mighty Mad in Dennis rage’ (A: I, 104) it is nevertheless in the figure, indeed in the vision, of Elkanah Settle that Tibbald, as after him in The


Dunciad, in Four Books Cibber, finds his father in dulness, the lost literary progenitor through whom the ‘rage’ is most sacredly devolved. Already, in Book I, Tibbald himself, at the heart of his despair, acknowledges the lately dead Settle (he had in fact died in 1724) as the greatest of his line: But see great Settle to the dust descend, And all thy cause and empire at an end! Cou’d Troy be sav’d by any single hand, His gray-goose-weapon must have made her stand. But what can I? (A: I, 185–9) The shadowing of Virgil’s Aeneid in these lines, as Tibbald echoes the ghost of Hector in Book II – ‘If by a mortal hand my father’s throne Could be defended, ‘t was by mine alone’ is Dryden’s version4 – already blurs the distinction between father and son, saviour and saved, living and dead, and prefigures the vision of Settle himself in Book III. Wond’ring he gazed: When lo! a Sage appears, By his broad shoulders known, and length of ears…. Bland and familiar as in life, begun Thus the great Father to the greater Son. (A: III, 27–8, 33–4) The foremost classical model here is Aeneid Book VI, with Tibbald/Aeneas meeting Settle/Anchises. More significantly, it is an encounter in which like is destined to bless like and dulness to confirm dulness. ‘“Oh born to see what none can see awake!”’ begins Settle: Behold the wonders of th’ Oblivious Lake. Thou, yet unborn, hast touched this sacred shore; The hand of Bavius drench’d thee o’er and o’er. But blind to former, as to future Fate, What mortal knows his pre-existent state? (A: III, 35–40) It is this blindness that Settle’s visit is to correct. Tibbald, like Achilles, is to be confronted with a sequence of likenesses, of other selves, a long act of recognition that will culminate in the vision of truth that ends the poem and brings to the hero a lasting awareness of self and fate. For Achilles, this involves a final resumption of unduplicated identity and the capacity for reconciliation. For Tibbald, it is a realisation of multiplicity, and of the nature of his creative gift, sought for in vain


despair at his introduction to the poem. ‘“Ascend this hill,”’ commands Settle, ‘“whose cloudy point commands Her boundless Empire over seas and lands”’ (A: III, 59–60). From there, North, South, East and West, as much as past, present and future, are displayed as contributing to the consummation that is Tibbald’s enthronement. Like Achilles, Tibbald, wherever he looks, sees only himself: Joy fills his soul, joy innocent of thought: “What pow’r,” he cried, “what pow’r these wonders wrought?” “Son! what thou seek’st is in thee. Look, and find Each monster meets his likeness in thy mind.” (A: III, 245–8) The lasting establishment of the empire of Dulness will depend, therefore, on the creativity of the discovered hero and on his own recognition of his natural gifts, an empire, like the field of Troy, that in significant respects seems to defy the laws of nature: Thence a new world, to Nature’s laws unknown, Breaks out refulgent, with a heav’n its own: Another Cynthia her new journey runs, And other planets circle other suns: The forests dance, the rivers upward rise, Whales sport in woods, and dolphins in the skies, And last, to give the whole creation grace, Lo! one vast Egg produces human race. (A: III, 237–44) ‘Recognition by mirror’, says Foucault, was capable of becoming an essential process within the eighteenth-century, and particularly within the nineteenth-century, asylum, a process whereby madness is brought to see itself and to ‘be seen by itself’. He quotes: “Three insane persons, each of whom believed himself to be a king, and each of whom took the title Louis XVI, quarreled one day over the prerogatives of royalty, and defended them somewhat too energetically. The keeper approached one of them, and drawing him aside, asked: ‘Why do you argue with these men who are evidently mad? Doesn’t everyone know that you should be recognised as Louis XVI?’ Flattered by this homage, the madman immediately withdrew, glancing at the others with a disdainful hauteur. The same trick worked with the second patient. And thus in an instant there no longer remained any trace of an argument.”5


This, says Foucault, is the first phase of recognition, ‘that of exaltation. Madness is made to observe itself, but in others: it appears in them as a baseless pretense….’ It is ‘recognised in the object’ but ‘masked, on the contrary, in the subject’. Then the second phase: in order to be identified within the self, the king is asked why, as a king, he remains confined with madmen. This is the phase of abasement: ‘presumptuously identified with the object of his delirium, the madman recognizes himself as in a mirror in this madness whose absurd pretensions he has denounced… He is now pitilessly observed by himself.’6 Pitilessly, Achilles must slaughter himself, the ersatz ersatz Achilles, re-acquiring his own image, restoring a lost sanity, gathering up multiplicity to a single coherent meaning. Tibbald, the lost comic hero, never reaches abasement. On the contrary, he remains on a perpetual tide of exaltation, swept towards the moral chaos of the end of the poem, assured of his kingly supremacy amongst the monstrous community of the dull. Reflection in The Dunciad brings only reaffirmation of the self, a rejoicing in multiplicity and Foucault’s imprisonment in ‘an infinitely self-referring observation’.7 Comic epic, giving form to a lost pattern, and Tibbald, embodying that form, are ‘anterior’ to tragic epic, but anteriority, as developed by Pope, involves not the ultimate triumph and celebration of civilization but rather the exaltation of insanity. That exaltation is decisively foregrounded in 1743. Significantly, Pope opens his new Dunciad with a reflection on the authenticity of the hero of the old: By virtue of the Authority in Us vested by the Act for subjecting Poets to the power of a Licenser, we have revised this piece; where finding the style and appellation of KING to have been given to a certain Pretender, Pseudo-Poet, or Phantom, of the name of Tibbald; and apprehending the same may be deemed in some sort a Reflection on Majesty, or at least as insult on that Legal Authority which has bestowed on another person the Crown of Poesy: We have ordered the said Pretender, Pseudo-Poet, or Phantom, utterly to vanish, and evaporate out of this work: And do declare the said Throne of Poesy from henceforth to be abdicated and vacant, unless duly and lawfully supplied by the LAUREATE himself. And it is hereby enacted, that no other person do presume to fill the same. (V, 252) The stand-in hero to the lost epic has proved to be an imposter, an ersatz poet as artificial as any pretend Achilles on the field of Troy.


Pinning down the hero, in consequence, becomes as vital an enterprise for the accomplishing of The Dunciad as it was for the abasement and restoration of Achilles. Moreover, the finding of the true lost hero gives ironic resonance to the renewed and reworked sequence of recognitions that proceed from Book I onwards, a sequence that, with a new hero and a new location, renders the recognitions of the original Dunciad as a series of false starts culminating in a fake triumph. The renewal is conspicuously signalled as early as the twenty-ninth line of Book I where, after the preliminary paragraphs dealing, much as the original Dunciad had done, with the lineage of Dulness and with the tribute to Swift, Pope famously and triumphantly changes the location for the epic from Rag-Fair to Bedlam: Close to those walls where Folly holds her throne, And laughs to think Monroe would take her down, Where o’er the gates, by his fam’d father’s hand Great Cibber’s brazen, brainless brothers stand; …(B: I, 29–32) Into this newly-minted, newly-maddened setting steps the new herowriter, ‘like a bridegroom’,8 in Sterne’s words on another occasion, perfectly matched for the impending sequence and for the poem’s final consummation. Marching through familiar territory – the initial despair, the pyre of works, the recognition by the goddess, the games, the visitation from Settle – the treatment nevertheless reinvests familiarity with novelty as each item and each encounter is touched by its engagement with a rightful hero and with true insanity. Features as formerly disposed shift slightly in their new attribution. Settle’s ‘graygoose-weapon’ that might have saved Troy, but failed (A: I, 187–8), reveals the imposition of its pretended wielder. ‘Could Troy be sav’d by any single hand,’ proclaims Cibber, ‘This grey-goose weapon must have made her stand.’ (B: I, 196–7) Ownership is rightfully asserted. Tibbald’s helpless ‘But what can I?’ (A: I, 189) thence becomes Cibber’s ‘What can I now?’ (B: I, 198) as the confidence of a hero over-writes the hesitation of an imposter. The new hero sweeps all before him. Dulness’ speech concluding Book I expands from just over nine lines in 1728 to almost twentyeight in 1743 as she anticipates and celebrates ‘the promis’d land’ of Cibber’s ‘reign’ (B: I, 292). Now that Eusden (not, as in 1728, Settle) is recently dead, Cibber, and not Tibbald, will claim his legitimate kingdom as laureate. The consequence, which was not a consequence foreseen in 1728, will explicitly extend the power of Dulness from the


merely cultural to the political, the legal, the military and to the royal court. In a passage which anticipates the more famous end, in the new Book IV, to the entire poem, she supposes, as she did not in 1728, the triumph of her empire: “O! when shall rise a Monarch all our own, And I, a Nursing-mother, rock the throne, ‘Twixt Prince and People close the Curtain draw, Shade him from Light, and cover him from Law; Fatten the Courtier, starve the learned band, And suckle Armies, and dry-nurse the land: ‘Till Senates nod to Lullabies divine, And all be sleep, as at an Ode of thine.” (B: II, 311–18) Significantly, it is ‘the Chapel-royal throat’ which begins the succeeding chorus of ‘“God save king Cibber!”’ (B: 1, 319–20) while in 1728 the ‘Grubstreet alleys’ began the cry ‘“God save King Tibbald”’ (A: I, 256). King Cibber is to have more far-reaching impact than was expected, even by Dulness herself, from King Tibbald. He, after all, was an imposter, and the recognitions he received therefore were false ones. Equally, Rag-Fair could never, with hindsight, have produced a hero to assimilate the heights of influence now anticipated. The true inheritor could only ever have come from Bedlam. Nicholas Robinson, the London physician cited earlier, specialised in treating mental disturbance, and was also a governor of Bethlem Hospital. A New System of the Spleen, Vapours and Hypochondriack Melancholy was published in 1729, after the composition and publication of the original Dunciad. His portrait, though, of the typical maniac of his day, or of one suffering from ‘what we call Lunacy or the raging Madness’,9 is not only indicative of the popular and medical perceptions of the furious madman – one of Cibber’s two ‘brazen, brainless brothers’ – but a measure of how far Pope played upon such perceptions for his account of the ‘high heroic Games’ (B: II, 18) called by Dulness to celebrate the proclamation of Cibber as king. ‘This Madness’, writes Robinson (and I quote more fully the passage already alluded to in Chapter 1), taking care to preserve a proper distance between himself and his readership on one side, and the spectacle of the maniac on the other: presents the Reader with a most dreadful Scene of Horror and Distraction; the Patient appears with a fierce, grim and rough


Aspect, his Reason is disturb’d, his Judgment confus’d, and the Exercise of his Intellectuals is lost and bewilder’d in a bottomless Gulph of the most absurd Cogitations. If this applies only in very general terms to Pope’s gaming dunces, it is when Robinson turns to describing the physical symptoms of mania that the energies released become more conspicuously parallel. Sometimes the Fits of Lunacy arise beyond all the Bounds of Nature, and the Patients acquire a preter-natural Strength, greatly above the Power of the strongest Man to oppose: They will break the strongest Bars of Iron with a single Impulse, throw off their Bonds, Chains, and Shackles, to the Wonder and Surprize of all that see them; nor are they scarce ever tired, tho’ they exercise their Bodies whole Days and Nights, and are almost continually without Sleep. They will endure the severest Usage, with a steady and equal Mind; nor shall you perceive them at all scarce affected with the Extremes of Cold, Fasting, and Stripes, that are enough to sink the Spirits of the most intrepid Mortals. Others, again, acquire a Swiftness of Foot, greatly superior to the swiftest Man. I myself knew a young Woman, that in the Height of her Lunacy, broke from her Keepers, and run so fast, for near two Miles, that neither Man nor Horse could overtake her, got into a River, and was drowned, before any could come to her Relief. When once the Disease is suffer’d to arise to this Height, they are bold, impudent, and of a most revengeful Disposition; apt to quarrel, and think, and speak, and dream, if perchance they slumber or sleep, of nothing but Battles, Combats, and their Manhood; they are furious and impatient in Discourse; stiff, irrefragable, and prodigious in their Actions; and, if provok’d, most violent, outrageous, and ready to kill themselves, and all others, that come in their Way.10 Here, in medical diagnosis, are the symptoms and tendencies that in satire find themselves organised by Dulness into competitive lunacies: Curll’s and Lintot’s swiftness of foot, in pursuit of the ersatz poet; Curll’s and Osborne’s assertions of ‘manly confidence’ and of ‘vigour and superior size’ (B: II, 169–70) in the urination contest; the insane disregard of personal safety and hygiene shown by Oldmixon, Smedley, Concanen, Arnall, by the ‘plunging Prelate, and his pond’rous Grace’ (B: II, 323) in leaping into the Fleet – Concanen,


apparently, never to surface, and the victorious Smedley only after a lengthy period lost. Overall, the antagonistic readiness of all the dunces to engage their talents for noise, dirt, squalor and pointless expenditure of effort in mock heroic competition becomes especially focused as the activities of madmen when the celebration being enacted is one that emanates, as it does in 1743, from Bedlam. In Book XXIII of the Iliad, Achilles, sane now, proclaims the funeral games in honour of Patroclus. He judges the contests himself, awards the victories and presents prizes from his own spoils and possessions. Pope, in the ‘Argument’ to Book II of The Dunciad, draws the parallel with the games instituted ‘by Æneas in Virgil’. King Cibber’s games, on the contrary, are declared not by the hero, prince of the insane, ‘but for greater honour by the Goddess in person (in like manner as the games in Pythia, Isthmia, &c. were anciently said to be ordained by the Gods, and as Thetis herself appearing, according to Homer, Odyss. 24. proposed the prizes in honour of her son Achilles.)’ 11 Cibber himself, after his initial installation on the ‘gorgeous seat’ (B: II, 1), plays no further part in the events. Achilles’ games in the Iliad are the chariot race, boxing, wrestling, the foot race, armed combat, the discus, archery and the javelin (Aeneas’ are rowing, foot race, single combat and archery), as suggestive as anything in The Dunciad of Robinson’s symptoms of manic lunacy, or of the first of Cibber’s ‘brainless brothers’. Indeed, the activities instigated by Achilles appear to bring out far more explicitly than those for Cibber the boldness, impudence and quarrelsomeness of the Greek heroes. Pope’s Dunciad games, however, assimilate a wider range of borrowings and parodies from the fields of Troy than simply the funeral games for Patroclus. If urinating and braying are only very casual approximations for armed combat and archery, other features present more subtle, as well as more specific, endorsements of events before Troy, and not least in terms of the unsettling of rational perspective. While battle and bloodshed are sanitised into competitive dirt-dabbling, and while the inactive hero, watching from his solitary encampment, is transformed into the elevated spectatorship of the newly-crowned Cibber, it is in fact the capacity to see, and to see straight, that is being subverted by the Bedlamite powers of Dulness. Tibbald gave form to an absence, though that form, revealed as fake, rendered Tibbald as yet another absence, his place to be filled by the genuine hero, Cibber. Duplication of absences is as central to the games as the multiplication of false heroes was to the ‘slidd’ring’ mentality of Achilles in the Iliad. So, Curll and Lintot are duped by


the ‘Poet’s form’ created by Dulness, the ‘image of well-body’d air’ (B: II, 35, 42): And empty words she gave, and sounding strain, But senseless, lifeless! idol void and vain! Never was dash’d out, at one lucky hit, A fool, so just a copy of a wit; So like, that critics said, and courtiers swore, A Wit it was, and call’d the phantom More. (B: II, 45–50) ‘All gaze with ardour’ (B: II, 51) at the embodiment of emptiness, capped with the fortuitous name of James Moore Smythe. The dizzy race produces a dizzied victor: And now the victor stretch’d his eager hand Where the tall Nothing stood, or seem’d to stand; A shapeless shade, it melted from his sight, Like forms in clouds, or visions of the night. To seize his papers, Curll, was next thy care: His papers light, fly diverse, tost in air; Songs, sonnets, epigrams the winds uplift, And whisk ‘em back to Evans, Young, and Swift. Th’embroidered suit at least he deem’d his prey; That suit an unpay’d taylor snatch’d away. No rag, no scrap, of all the beau, or wit, That once so flutter’d, and that once so writ. (B: II, 109–20) Absence returns to absence. Nothing comes of nothing. The falsities of Troy have been finessed into the plagiarisms and impositions of Grub Street. Once exposed, the purloinings return to their rightful owners, while the foistings disappear into air. Seeing straight, as Achilles found, and as Curll finds now, is rendered complicated when artful embodiments stand in for the genuine article, or even for other stand-ins. That Achilles was party to the initial stand-in, when Patroclus borrowed his armour, helped him no more with the multiplicity of perception experienced at Troy than Curll’s own engendering of false texts and his reception of stolen goods enables him to see through the contrivances of Dulness.


Fittingly, because so much of The Dunciad, and so much of its second book, is generated by the principle of re-enactment, Dulness immediately plagiarises from herself: Heav’n rings with laughter: Of the laughter vain, Dulness, good Queen, repeats the jest again. Three wicked imps, of her own Grubstreet choir, She deck’d like Congreve, Addison, and Prior; Mears, Warner, Wilkins run: delusive thought! Breval, Bond, Besaleel, the varlets caught. Curll stretches after Gay, but Gay is gone, He grasps an empty Joseph for a John: So Proteus, hunted in a nobler shape, Became, when seiz’d, a puppy, or an ape. (B: II, 121–30) Pope’s, Warburton’s and succeeding notes to these lines multiply the impositions, including as they do competing versions of who might, and who might not, be genuine. Joseph Gay, certainly, was an invention of Curll’s, contrived for the sole purpose of passing off counterfeit texts.12 Curll, here, is perpetrator turned victim, manipulator turned fool. Yet Dulness, neatly, restores his credibility as a fraud by advising: ‘Son! thy grief lay down, And turn this whole illusion on the town’ (B: II, 131–2). The already duplicated jest will multiply perpetually when transcribed and retranscribed, changing form and person so that ‘Cook shall be Prior, and Concanen, Swift’ (B: II, 138). An inablility to discern the ‘well-body’d air’ from the genuine poet is the key to Dulness’s kingdom: ‘So shall each hostile name become our own, And we too boast our Garth and Addison’ (B: II, 139–40). Curll is not the hero of the poem, though he represents a continuity between the two major Dunciads. His dizzied state is part of the acknowledgement that is Cibber’s triumph. But that dizzying is crucial. Not seeing straight is what is being celebrated here, with the accumulating energy that can only come from its Bedlam home. As the 1743 Dunciad moves towards its almost repeated 1728 finale, the almost known events almost recur, but not quite. That which was thought to be familiar is recounted in slightly different lines, employing a sequence of different names amongst the recalled dunces of an earlier era. Dulness has progressed, in spite of the pretender’s rule. Her followers are legion. As Settle, familiar still by ‘his broad shoulders’ and ‘length of ears’ (B: III, 36), reappears to welcome his son and image, and introduces the inheritor to the compass points of his kingdom, the


train of identities displayed and the monsters whose likenesses are now met in Cibber’s mind (B: III, 251) are reinforced by newly recognised recruits for Bedlam. The falsely based rapture of 1728, shared by the fake hero, is redoubled in Settle’s almost repeated 1743 vision: This, this is he, foretold by ancient rhymes: Th’ Augustus born to bring Saturnian times. Signs following signs lead on the mighty year! See! the dull stars roll round and re-appear. See, see, our own true Phoebus wears the bays! Our Midas sits Lord Chancellor of Plays! (B: II, 319–24) The cumulative force of the 1743 poem depends upon a familiarity with the 1728 text, sufficient to register difference with identity, and to acknowledge the distinctions to be drawn between fake and genuine, pretend and real dulness, ersatz and authentic madness. Settle’s triumphal cry, ‘This, this is he’ (B: II, 319) is a different ‘he’ from the ‘He’ of ‘This, this is He’ (A: II, 317). If this renders worthless Settle’s ability to distinguish true dulness, in doing so it also confirms his own status as a dunce, moreso in his repeated 1743 rapture than in the original, mistaken, scene. Dizzy emotions and mentalities awry are accentuated by re-recognitions and rerun celebrations. Settle’s lines, and the then hero’s cry in response, ‘Enough! enough!’ (A: III, 357) ended the 1728 text: enough, in 1728, was indeed enough. In 1743, with the rightful monarch enthroned, the same cry from Cibber is instead the signal for more: the new fourth book, presenting new tributes and new claims for dulness far beyond what Tibbald enjoyed. This, the longest book of all, confirming the establishment beyond question of the era of Dulness, displaying a wholly fresh sequence of performance and achievement over and above the heroics of Book II, also clarifies finally the nature of the relation between dulness and madness, a clarification less necessary in 1728, when the hero was found by Rag-Fair. Following the opening invocation to ‘dread Chaos, and eternal Night!’ (IV, 2), ‘Invoked’, as Pope’s note explains, ‘as the Restoration of their Empire is the Action of the Poem’,13 the poet proceeds to set the scene for the action of this book: Now flam’d the Dog-star’s unpropitious ray, Smote ev’ry Brain, and wither’d ev’ry Bay: Sick was the Sun, the Owl forsook his bow’r, The moon-struck Prophet felt the madding hour:


Then rose the Seed of Chaos, and of Night, To blot out Order, and extinguish Light, Of dull and venal a new World to mold, And bring Saturnian days of Lead and Gold. (IV, 9–16) It is a moment of darkness, the darkness of the mind and the darkness of civilization. While these lines virtually summarise the whole action of this fourth book of the poem, including the closing vision of a world buried under ‘Universal Darkness’ (IV, 656), they focus particularly on the meeting of the cosmic and the mental, the powers of predisposition and the forces of intellect. So Warburton’s 1743 note elaborates: The Poet introduceth this, (as all great events are supposed by sage Historians to be preceded) by an Eclipse of the Sun; but with a peculiar propriety, as the Sun is the Emblem of that intellectual light which dies before the face of Dulness. Very apposite likewise is it to make this Eclipse, which is occasioned by the Moon’s predominancy, the very time when Dulness and Madness are in Conjunction; whose relation and influence on each other the poet hath shewn in many places.14 This has been the business and the achievement of the 1743 Dunciad: it has pinpointed and magnified and set running the moment of ‘Conjunction’ between ‘Dulness and Madness’, conducting thereby a satiric biopsy of the human mind, individual and collective, gone mad under specific baleful influences. If this madness has been a construction, as influenced in its making by Pope as a recreator of Homer as by any observations of the contemporary mad, it has nevertheless succeeded in representing the insane in terms of a cultural incapacity for straight seeing. Pope’s poetry, of course, is itself indisputably sane. The heroic couplet, of all poetic forms, is tailor-made for seeing straight. No other form so conclusively enacts wholeness, affording the capacity for meaning to complete itself and for sound to synchronise within a framework of grammatical exactness. To this extent, the endeavour to express the intricacies and excesses of mental instability represents a would-be content perpetually destined to be at odds with its form. Minds gone awry are obliged to enter the couplet almost in spite of itself, as Pope constructs a form fit for the ‘Cracks and Zig-zags of the Head’ (B: I, 124). Yet in a work – indeed in two works – where the


capacity for seeing double is so fundamental an invitation, the tautologies inherent in dulness are able to find a ready resonance in the mirror recognition of the couplet form. In fact Pope’s achievement, formally, is the subversion of the limitations of his own exactness in the interests of all that constitutes its antithesis: the chaotic, the repetitive, the mechanical and the obsessive. To return to the ‘Invocation’ of Book IV: Yet, yet a moment, one dim Ray of Light Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night! Of darkness visible so much be lent, As half to shew, half veil the deep Intent. (IV, 1–4) The Pope/Warburton note helpfully observes: ‘This is a great propriety, for a dull Poet can never express himself otherwise than by halves, or imperfectly.’15 Pope’s couplets deal in wholeness, in straightness of seeing whatever the subject. Doubleness, however, is not the same as wholeness. Cibber’s ‘brazen, brainless brothers’ (B: I, 32) might be twins in madness, might indeed, as ‘furious’ and ‘melancholy’ madness, represent the wholeness of contemporary insanity, but they are still mad: they are two halves and halves they remain. Two species of insanity might be expressed in terms of kinship and similarity but they can never come together to constitute rational perspective. No more can the monsters who meet their likeness in Cibber’s mind expect from that meeting anything more than a multiplication of monstrosity: “Son; what thou seek’st is in thee! Look, and find Each Monster meets his likeness in thy mind.” (B: III, 251–2) The seeing that is recorded in these lines, the seeking, looking, finding and meeting, is seeing that is destined to remain awry, ‘imprisoned in an infinitely self-referring observation’, but a seeing that is nevertheless rendered straight in the reading by wholeness of poetic form. Pope’s poetry allows space for duplication while itself refusing to duplicate. Its construction of madness is a construction of infinitely self-referring mirrors, held in place by rhyme and reason. The King of the Dull, wherever he looks, sees nothing but himself, his kind, his brothers, obliged to do so by the infinitely reflective couplets in which he, and all the monstrosities of Dulness, are condemned to remain.


It is the ‘gloomy Clerk’ in Book IV of The Dunciad, representing, as Pope’s ‘Argument’ puts it, ‘the Minute Philosophers and Freethinkers’,16 who advises to Make God Man’s Image, Man the final Cause, Find Virtue local, all Relation scorn, See all in Self, and but for self be born. (IV, 478–80) Between the two Dunciads, Pope wrote all of his major satires with the exception of Rape of the Lock. The self-referentiality reflected in these lines, and in the constructed insanity of particularly the 1743 Dunciad, is a conspicuous feature of these mature satires and, in fact, of Pope’s developing view of man as a moral, or morally lacking, creature. In the sequence of poems written between about 1730, a year before the Epistle to Burlington was published, and 1738, with the Epilogue to the Satires, he is exploring and, in some cases resolving, issues that, as Maynard Mack puts it, involve both ‘the repositioning of human expectations required by new cosmogonies’, which is the business of the first epistle of the Essay on Man, and the transition between ‘the cosmic scene’ and ‘the psychological and ethical’, involving ‘careful notation of the attributes of human nature’.17 If Pope’s final position, as stated at the end of the third epistle of the Essay, is one that bends to the side of optimism – Man, like the gen’rous vine, supported lives; The strength he gains is from th’embrace he gives. On their own Axis as the Planets run, Yet make at once their circle round the Sun: So two consistent motions act the Soul; And one regards Itself, and one the Whole. Thus God and Nature link’d the gen’ral frame, And bade Self-love and Social be the same. (III, 311–18)18 – nevertheless his ‘notation’ of the attributes of ‘Self-love’ in the varieties of its manifestations engages precisely those features of mental morbidity that culminate in the 1743 Dunciad. This, above all, is the business of satire. The concept of the ‘master Passion’, when introduced in the second epistle of the Essay on Man (II, 131), is not presented as ripe for satiric exploitation. The analogy with disease, though, that follows in its


wake, albeit harboured within an emphatically natural process, strikes the note that pertains to the morbid. As Man, perhaps, the moment of his breath, Receives the lurking principle of death; The young disease, that must subdue at length, Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength: So, cast and mingled with his very frame, The Mind’s disease, its ruling Passion came; Each vital humour which shall feed the whole, Soon flows to this, in body and in soul. Whatever warms the heart, or fills the head, As the mind opens, and its functions spread, Imagination plies her dang’rous art, And pours it all upon the peccant part. (II, 133–44) If what John Haslam was later to call the ‘darling delusion’ is only a very distant echo here, nevertheless examples of characteristically obsessive behaviour soon multiply, even in a non-satiric work like the Essay, as the disease of thoughtless self-interest propels its chosen to their inevitable destinies: A mightier Pow’r the strong direction sends, And sev’ral Men impels to sev’ral ends. Like varying winds, by other passions tost, This drives them constant to a certain coast. Let pow’r or knowledge, gold or glory, please, Or (oft more strong than all) the love of ease; Thro’ life ‘tis followed, ev’n at life’s expence; The merchant’s toil, the sage’s indolence, The monk’s humility, the hero’s pride, All, all alike, find Reason on their side. (II, 165–74) The presentation here is benign, indeed this is ‘Nature’s road’ (II, 161), and we are enjoined to ‘treat this passion more as friend than foe’ (II, 164). Yet by the fourth epistle, ‘Of the Nature and State of Man, with respect to Happiness’, while still organised within a frame of optimism, the slant with which Pope’s specimens are displayed has acquired a decisively satiric cast: Look next on Greatness; say where Greatness lies? “Where, but among the Heroes and the Wise?”


Heroes are much the same, the point’s agreed From Macedonia’s madman to the Swede; The whole strange purpose of their lives, to find Or make, an enemy of mankind! Not one looks backward, onward still he goes, Yet ne’er looks forward further than his nose. (IV, 217–24) The ‘certain coast’ of the second epistle has by now become ominously overshadowed by the likelihood of disaster, no matter what the nature of one’s aspirations: Bring then these blessings to a strict account, Make fair deductions, see to what they mount. How much of other each is sure to cost; How each for other oft is wholly lost; How inconsistent greater goods with these; How sometimes life is risq’d, and always ease: Think, and if still the things thy envy call, Say, would’st thou be the Man to whom they fall? To sigh for ribbands if thou art so silly, Mark how they grace Lord Umbra, or Sir Billy: Is yellow dirt the passion of thy life? Look but on Gripus, or on Gripus’ wife: If Parts allure thee, think how Bacon shin’d, The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind: Or ravish’d with the whistling of a Name, See Cromwell, damn’d to everlasting fame! If all, united, thy ambition call, From ancient story learn to scorn them all. There, in the rich, the honour’d, fam’d and great, See the false scale of Happiness complete. (IV, 269–88) Man’s whole enterprise, in fact, has emerged as tantamount to a career into insanity, so much so that, in lines which provide an alternative summary of the Essay, almost its unofficial conclusion, as distinct from the ‘gen’rous vine’ passage, the ultimate perspective would see us not as ‘link’d’ within a ‘gen’ral frame’ by ‘God and Nature’, but rather as the mockery of the universe: Oh sons of earth! attempt ye still to rise, By mountains pil’d on mountains to the skies?


Heav’n still with laughter the vain toil surveys, And buries madmen in the heaps they raise. (IV, 73–6) The full impact of this view, however, with man cast insanely adrift in a sea of futile aspiration, is developed in the philosophical satires and imitations on which Pope was working over the same period as the Essay on Man. While the physician George Cheyne wrote and, in 1733, published his key work, The English Malady, influentially blaming luxury and lifestyle for the diseases, mental as well as physical, from which the nation persisted in suffering, and while Alexander Cruden, in 1739, compiled The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured, his record of outrage at having been, in his view, wrongfully confined in Wright’s private madhouse in Bethnal Green, Pope composed and published his own analysis of English social and mental disease, drawing on a string of near contemporary exemplars as far-reaching as any shown to Tibbald or Cibber by Settle or Eusden. Mentality might be difficult to penetrate, as he concedes in what became the first Moral Essay, the Epistle to Cobham: Our depths who fathoms, or our shallows finds, Quick whirls, and shifting eddies, of our minds? Life’s stream for Observation will not stay, It hurries all too fast to mark their way. (ll. 29–32)19 Nevertheless, we can reliably trace a man’s obsession, what he consistently identifies as his ‘Self’, by consideration of those very ‘heaps they raise’, in life, and even in death. As early as Rape of the Lock, Pope was playing with reflections, with degrees and kinds of duplication, not merely in terms of mirrors, such as those in which Belinda finds perpetually flattering versions of herself, but also insofar as actions and possessions are if anything a more reliable guide to the ‘Self’ that has raised, or owned, them. In this instance it is the Baron who erects an ‘Altar’ to ‘Love’, constructed from ‘twelve vast French Romances, neatly gilt’, and from ‘three Garters, half a Pair of Gloves; And all the Trophies of his former Loves’.20 The offering of items acknowledged as precious is itself a reflection, more accurate than any actual mirror, of the Baron’s inadequate fetishistic past, and of the ‘Self’ whose most cherished identity is found in these things. Like Cibber’s ‘brothers’, two counterparts throw up the distorted nature of each, just as Belinda and her reflection join together in an act of confirmation that preserves that self and that society as perversely normal. Doubleness makes more emphatic the morally and mentally awry: it does not straighten it.


In the Moral Essays, building amiss, and owning amiss, as much as living amiss, provide the mental index for minds gone wrong. Timon’s Villa, in the Epistle to Burlington, most conspicuously proclaims the deficiencies of its possessor. If nature here is contrived in as perverted a form as anywhere in The Dunciad – The suff’ring eye inverted Nature sees, Trees cut to Statues, Statues thick as Trees, With here a Fountain, never to be play’d, And there a Summer-house, that knows no shade (ll. 119–22) – it is in fact in its relentless doubleness that Timon’s construction reflects the unsynchronised bent of his state of mind. Where nothing appropriately matches, nothing will make straight sense. Exact and mechanical duplication may be achieved, when ‘Grove nods at grove, each Alley has a brother, And half the platform just reflects the other’ (ll. 117–18), and such constructed symmetry then confirms the dull uniformity of the generating mind. More disastrously, the attempted matching of size and self is the most fundamental expression of misconceived equivalence: Greatness, with Timon, dwells in such a draught As brings all Brobdignag before your thought. To compass this, his building is a Town, His pond an Ocean, his parterre a Down: Who but must laugh, the Master when he sees, A puny insect, shiv’ring at a breeze! (ll. 103–8) Timon’s ‘Self’, intended to find its consummation in the scale of his building, finds instead the unambiguous statement of its mental and moral littleness – ‘Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!’ (l. 109); finds its crippling limitation, its reflection only of the narrow space of himself: ‘On ev’ry side you look, behold the Wall!’ (ll. 113–14) If Timon’s ‘brainless brother’ is an ‘Alley’, similar constrictions impair widely differing mentalities within the Moral Essays. Old Cotta, in the Epistle to Bathurst, unlike Timon, finds ‘Self’ in not building, not spending, not entertaining, and identity, therefore, is expressed not in construction but in its absence: No rafter’d roofs with dance and tabor sound, No noontide-bell invites the country round;


Tenants with sighs the smoakless tow’rs survey, And turn th’unwilling steeds another way: Benighted wanderers, the forest o’er, Curse the sav’d candle, and unop’ning door. (ll. 191–6) Cotta’s son, or ‘brother’, corrects his father’s living amiss by himself living amiss: ‘Not so his Son, he mark’d this oversight, And then mistook reverse of wrong for right’ (ll. 119–120). The spendthrift, and ultimately bankrupt, son duplicates one extreme by falling into another, one mental discrepancy by its opposite. It is left to Pope to draw the moral, and to look to Bathurst himself to supply the true corrective: ‘Oh teach us, BATHURST! yet unspoil’d by wealth! That secret rare, between th’extremes to move Of mad Good-nature, and of mean Self-love’ (ll. 226–8). But no further away than The Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace (though five years later in composition) Pope also expresses the niceness of sanity itself when scrutinised through a moral telescope: Thus good, or bad, to one extreme betray Th’ unbalanc’d Mind, and snatch the Man away; For Vertue’s self may too much Zeal be had; The worst of Madmen is a Saint run mad.21 The scope for mental impairment is enormous: mental wholeness, in the Moral Essays, is a matter of fine balance, not between extremes, nor between vying sets of duplication, but of self-possession in the face of other possible selves, selves constructed, reflected and distorted. The ultimate location for living amiss in these poems is the deathbed, that occasion for self-surrender when clinging relentlessly to ‘Self’ is all but irresistible. ‘Self-love’ is never more insistent than when departing from self. The Epistle to Cobham concludes with a sequence of examples of dying amiss, individuals who, unlike Achilles, prove unable to conquer false selves in order to live straight with the true. To die amiss is, for Pope, the ultimate insanity, the act that confirms God in ‘Man’s Image’. So, a lifetime of preoccupation with appearance is reflected in death-bed vanity: ‘Odious! in woollen! ‘twould a Saint provoke, (Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke) No, let a charming Chintz, and Brussels lace Wrap my cold limbs, and shade my lifeless face:


One would not, sure, be frightful when one’s dead – And – Betty – give this Cheek a little Red.’ (ll. 242–7) This, as Pope’s note tells us, might be how ‘a very celebrated Actress’, Anne Oldfield, died, but it is also, twenty years on, how a Belinda dies, a lifetime of confusing ersatz with real culminating in going for the ersatz. The lecher, the glutton and the fawner are equally displayed, living to the last the temperamental distortions that have rendered amiss the course of their lives. It is in the pecuniary and the acquisitive, however, in those to whom material possession is everything, that the absurdity of standing by the world, things in the world and self in the world, is seen at its most ridiculous: The frugal Crone, whom paying priests attend, Still tries to save the hallow’d taper’s end, Collects her breath, as ebbing life retires, For one puff more, and in that puff expires. (ll. 238–41) Failing even in this final effort, she unwittingly puts out one light while aspiring to save on the cost of the other. And the miser: ‘I give and I devise, (old Euclio said, And sigh’d) My lands and tenements to Ned.’ Your money, Sir? ‘My money, Sir, what all? Why, – if I must – (then wept) I give it Paul.’ The Manor, Sir? – ‘The Manor! Hold, he cry’d, ‘Not that, – I cannot part with that’ – and dy’d. (ll. 256–61) When self-duplication is found in property, then the ‘Self’ that is found in wait on the death-bed will not differ substantially from the self that lived. It will be constructed on lands, tenements, money and manors and as such will present an allurement towards the familiarity of the world and all that has grown amiss during one’s engagement with it. Stephen Miller has drawn attention to Pope’s own wish ‘to have an edifying deathbed scene’: A few days before he died, he said to a friend: “Here am I, like Socrates, distributing my morality [he was sending advance copies of a deathbed edition of his Ethical Epistles to some of his friends] among my friends, just as I am dying.” At his bed-side when he was dying were two friends who represented two strains in Pope’s


religious thinking: Henry St. John Bolingbroke, a deist … and Warburton, the Anglican divine. 22 Pope here touches all the right notes: the comparison to the worthy classical role model, the arrangement of the suitably symbolic companions, and above all the distributing of the ‘Self’ that has been laid up with promise of benefit to mankind, of moral insight, and with the hope of securing a degree of blessed personal futurity. Pope is meeting, on his deathbed, that genuine and sane self that is content to leave the world behind after a lifetime of seeing, and writing, straight. This, we have to conclude, is how a sane man would aspire to die. That selfsame ‘morality’ he is distributing is filled with examples of the contrary, of selves who, unlike the ‘gen’rous vine’, give no ‘embrace’ but to that self which, in consequence, is nurtured into unnatural shape by a lifetime of obsession. To face death, for such, is to meet a self that has been waiting for a lifetime, developing, deforming, growing diseased with the distortions of spiritual, physical and mental abuse: In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half-hung, The floors of plaister and the walls of dung, On once a flock-bed, but repair’d with straw, With tape-ty’d curtains, never meant to draw, The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, Great Villiers lies – alas! how chang’d from him, That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim! Gallant and gay, in Cliveden’s proud alcove, The bow’r of wanton Shrewsbury and love; Or just as gay, at Council, in a ring Of mimick’d Statesmen, and their merry King. No Wit to flatter, left of all his store! No Fool to laugh at, which he valu’d more. There, Victor of his health, of fortune, friends, And fame; this lord of useless thousands end. (ll. 299–314) As the Epistle to Bathurst draws to its conclusion, Pope’s famous lines on the death of Buckingham in 1687 cap (albeit unjustly) the sequence of celebrated doublenesses whose monstrosity culminates in an unfitting deathbed. Villiers, devoted to pleasure and vice, has himself overcome the benefits of his own health, fortune, friends and fame by long dedication to living crooked. Dryden’s ‘Blest Madman’23 of 1681


stands over fifty years later as mad indeed, lured to his end by the phantom of himself, a likeness in his mind that is pursued at the cost of everything he is and has. Pope’s Ethical Epistles, like his Iliad, construct a diagnosis of a time and place through the deployment of moral and mental exemplars, some explicitly, like Achilles, portrayed as insane, and others who participate in the currency of insanity. If it is in The Dunciad that Pope’s use of madness comes closest to a contemporary Bedlam-born image of it, it is in these satires and essays of the 1730s that ideas about insanity and about its practical poetic potential, as generated in The Dunciad but originating in his transformation of Homer and the heroic, are sharpened into a sophisticated satiric method whereby the ‘depths’ and ‘shallows’ of the human mind can be read and morally organised. His poetic assimilation of madness undoubtedly involves misrepresentation: clearly Timon, the Cottas, Euclio and Villiers are not mad in the sense that George Trosse, Christopher Smart, John Perceval or John Clare were mad, or even in the sense that Ophelia and Lear are mad. But they are necessarily mad insofar as they are to be lodged within a structure where straight thinking is the one and only truth. For that, ‘Th’ unbalanc’d mind’ is sacrificed on the altar of balanced reading.

Notes 1. G.S. Rousseau, ‘War and Peace: Some Representations of Nostalgia and Adventure in the Eighteenth Century’, in Guerres et paix: la Grande-Bretagne au XVIII siècle, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé, Paris: Presses de la Sourbonne Nouvelle, 1998, I, 124. Rousseau credits the metaphor to Terry Castle. 2. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland, The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol V, London: Methuen, 1943 (1963 edn), The Dunciad Variorum (A), V, 48. 3. John Dryden, Mac Flecknoe, ed. James Kinsley, The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, London: Oxford University Press, 1962, p. 239. 4. John Dryden, p. 45. 5. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, 1961, tr. Richard Howard, London: Tavistock, 1967 (1997 edn), pp. 262–3, citing René Sémelaigne, Aliénistes et philanthropes, Paris, 1912, Appendix, p. 502. 6. Foucault, pp. 263–4. 7. Foucault, p. 265. 8. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, ed. Graham Petrie, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967, p. 95. 9. Nicholas Robinson, A New System of the Spleen, Vapours and Hypochondriack Melancholy, London: A. Bettesworth, 1729, p. 241. 10. Robinson, pp. 242–3.

‘Th’ Unbalanc’d Mind’ 77 11. Sutherland, V, 295. 12. For a compelling account of forgery during the period, criminal as well as literary, see Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. 13. Pope, Poems, V, 339. 14. Pope, Poems, V, 340. 15. Pope, Poems, V, 339. 16. Pope, Poems, V, 338. 17. Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985, pp. 530–1. 18. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack, The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol III-i, London: Methuen, 1950. 19. Alexander Pope, Epistles to Several Persons: Moral Essays, ed. F.W. Bateson, The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol III-ii, London: Methuen, 1951. 20. Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol II, London: Methuen, 1940, II, 37–40. 21. Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace, ed. John Butt, The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol IV, London: Methuen, 1939, ll. 24–7. 22. Stephen Miller, Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought, London: Associated University Presses, 2001, p. 33. 23. John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, ed. James Kinsley, The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, London: Oxford University Press, 1962, p. 204 (l.553).

4 ‘The Madness of a Multitude’: Insanity, People and Prose

‘Cowper came to me’, wrote William Blake in around 1819, nearly twenty years after the earlier poet’s death, and said “O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? I will never rest till I am so. O that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all – over us all – mad as a refuge from unbelief – from Bacon, Newton and Locke.”1 Roy Porter comments that this is ‘savagely ironic’: Cowper ‘did not luxuriate in his bouts of insanity. For him it was overwhelming terror.’ Blake’s account represents ‘the last destiny the anguished Cowper would have wished’. 2 Representing the insane, however, is not the same as doing them justice. Blake looks to Cowper not in order to render verifiable facts but as an imaginative precursor, one who figures his own poetic and cosmic elevation of the idea of insanity in the face of a world sold out to reason and science. The fact that Cowper is made to speak for and from ‘us all’, be that us all poets, or us all madmen, is as untrue to Cowper as it is true to Blake. Madness is what is made of it. For Blake, annotating Observations on … Insanity by Johann Caspar Spurzheim, who had recently lectured in England on phrenology, it was important to assert the imaginative power of what went on inside the head, as opposed to interpreting such signs as were available on its outside. Insanity was that remote, self-sufficient region to which science had no access. Poets in particular were potentially the saviours of the people’s mental health, provided that they, at least, had access to their own madness. 78

‘The Madness of a Multitude’ 79

Blake’s elevation of Cowper is also a redefining of his age, an age, for Blake, of relentless sanity, created by empiricism and logically extended into the whole realm of human knowledge. When rationalism is perceived as the only orthodoxy, then to be ‘truly insane’ is not only the sole refuge: it is the only sane way out. Who we are and where we are dictates what we see as insane, and indeed how far and in what ways we choose to value that insanity. Being ‘truly insane’ will engage notions of different, and possibly contradictory, kinds of truth, as surely as Foucault’s implied suggestion that we do ‘really know’ what madness is must engage contradictory modes of knowing. One of those truths will be that true insanity is the only sanity, particularly in the context of an age gone mad for reason. One of those modes will involve knowing as the sane know, and one as the insane know. Two sides of knowing, somehow, are anticipated as providing the integrity of a truth. Blake’s exaltation of his own insanity is given not only endorsement but integrity in being hailed by the semi-sane Cowper, aspiring to be truly mad, and in the wake of that exaltation flows the negation of both their ages, of all ages living under the inheritence of ‘Bacon, Newton and Locke’, the lives and times of the merely sane. Looking back for truths about madness is not always so extreme, and so aggressively celebratory, but other seekers after insanity can be equally relentless in their misconstruing of an earlier icon. Joseph Warton reached for the easy acquisition that Swift had become when addressing the subject in an essay for John Hawkesworth’s periodical, The Adventurer, in November 1753, just over eight years after the dean was safely dead. In doing so he not only renders an understanding of what Swift’s writing might have been doing, but about what he felt, in 1753, his readers wanted to understand by it, and why they subscribed to a solid but unthreatening journal like The Adventurer. Warton, like Blake, has a vision, though in his case it is prompted by reading Montesquieu on insanity, not Spurzheim, and in his case too, probably unlike Blake, he is lying. ‘I imagined’, writes Warton: that Bedlam had been ordered to be rebuilt upon a more extensive plan by act of parliament; and that Dean Swift, calling at my lodgings, offered to accompany me to see the new-erected edifice, which, he observed, was not half capacious enough before to contain the various species of madness that are to be found in this kingdom.3 The paper then becomes a version of the traditional tour of Bedlam, conducted by the vision of the man who had redeemed that tired


mode from the exploitation of a Ward and made it the stuff of serious satiric reflection. As they walk through the galleries, Swift gives to Warton ‘the following account of the several inhabitants’: He on the right hand is a philosopher, who has lost his reason in a fruitless attempt to discover the cause of electricity. He on the left is a celebrated jockey of noble birth, whose favourite mare, that had enjoyed three triumphs in former seasons, was distanced a few days ago at Newmarket. Yonder meagre man has bewildered his understanding by closely studying the doctrine of chances, in order to qualify himself for a professorship which will be shortly established and amply endowed at an eminent chocolate-house, where lectures on this important subject are constantly to be read. An unfortunate accident turned the head of the next unfortunate prisoner. She had for a long time passed for fifteen years younger than she was, and her lively behaviour and airy dress concurred to help forward the imposition; till one evening, being animated with an extraordinary flow of spirits, she danced out seven of her artificial teeth, which were immediately picked up, and delivered to her with great ceremony by her partner.4 There is a disappointed merchant, a disappointed heiress, a betrayed wife, a classical commentator who ‘has lost his wits inquiring whether or no the ancients wore perukes’; there is an unsuccessful lottery speculator whose plans for a beautiful wife, a magnificent coach and a ‘villa on the banks of the Thames’ are replaced by ‘these melancholy lodgings’, and a successful lottery speculator ‘who, obtaining a very large and unexpected sum, could not stand the shock of such sudden good fortune, but grew mad with excess of joy’; there is a youth who killed a man in a foreign brothel whom he later discovered to be his own brother, and, more plausibly, a lady whose husband communicated to her an infamous distemper, which her natural modesty forbade her to discover in time; and the violent medicines which were afterward administered to her by an unskilful surgeon, threw her into a delirious fever, from which she could never be recovered.5 None of these figures, of course, with the exception of the last, would be a genuine occupant of John Haslam’s gallery of Observations on


Insanity nearly half a century later. They inhabit a literary, not a real, madhouse and their function is to illustrate not the state of the insane, or even the thin proximity of madness to sanity, but the follies and delusions of contemporary society. Warton and Swift make an odd pairing, odder by far than Blake and Cowper. Warton was not, at least for his poetry, an admirer of Swift who lacked, he thought, a ‘creative and glowing imagination’.6 As an off-the-peg satirist, though, with his established recognition values of savagery and indignation, as well as a dangerous figure with the shadow of insanity on him, Swift was a ready choice for the dream guide to a new Bedlam. Swift himself had speculated, when proposing the endowment of his own asylum: What a mixed multitude of ballad-writers, ode-makers, translators, farce-compounders, opera-mongers, biographers, pamphleteers, and journalists, would appear crowding to the hospital.7 A crucial difference, though, between Swift’s glance at the future, compared to Warton’s through the adopted figure of Swift, is that not only is none of Swift’s clients engaged in activities with any obvious risk of insanity, but that several of the activities are ones at which Swift himself had worked. The humour in Swift’s vision is partly in that touch of self-reflection, and partly in the wider implication that to engage in the word-trade is to open oneself to losing one’s wits. Warton, on the contrary, is engaging in nothing more reflective than social observation of the most lightweight kind. The fact that philosophers and speculators would indeed be found in Bethlem as he wrote, as would both guilty and innocent parties suffering from syphilitic derangements, does not give his vision validity. The mad for Warton remain mad for light entertainment, mad as products of social frivolity, with the awesome figure of Swift yoked on as easily as a Montesquieu, a Virgil or a Tom Thumb. It is, in the end, neither here nor there. ‘Real’ madness, by 1753 and in Warton’s hands, has become no more than a mode. Disease, to return to Gilman’s distinction, in Warton’s new Bedlam, has always been disease, the social construction of being mad, and has never had any relation to illness at all. The transparency of the device, the inapt and inept yoking in of the dean, is underlined by the very end of the paper. Having exhausted his


list of social deviancy, Warton abruptly, and inappropriately, concludes his essay: Here the Dean paused; and looking upon me with great earnestness, and grasping my hand closely, spoke with an emphasis that awakened me; – ‘Think me not so insensible a monster, as to deride the lamentable lot of the wretches we have now surveyed. If we laugh at the follies, let us at the same time pity the manifold miseries of man.’8 Jonathan Swift, reticent and enigmatic during his lifetime, has selected of all people Joseph Warton to receive his posthumous apologia. So that is what Gulliver’s Travels was all about. Spirits make strange choices. Warton, as far as is known, never met Swift, was never looked upon by him either with earnestness or indifference, certainly never had his hand grasped closely by him, any more than Blake had met Cowper. Blake did work, however, over several years engraving plates for his friend William Hayley’s Life of Cowper, and his miniature of the poet, painted from the portrait by George Romney, apparently horrified Cowper’s cousin Lady Hesketh, who called it a ‘fatal resemblance’ which she found ‘dreadful! shocking!’ ‘Blake had caught’, observes Michael Davis, ‘Romney’s hint of her cousin’s madness.’9 But if Blake made more of Cowper’s madness than the family could tolerate, Warton tries to make explicit what in Swift himself is at best deeply implicit, indeed that which the dean seemed to have worked particularly hard over many years to bury as deeply as language could bear. Swift in The Adventurer is Swift made human, cordial, earnest, hygienic, and above all sane. Yet Warton was not at all untypical in his appropriation of a predecessor in the field of madness, even though as an amateur his efforts show us how the piece was cobbled together rather more readily than the effortless superiority of a Blake in commandeering for his own uses the suffering Cowper. Madness, after all, is public property. No other illness has so conspicuous a public face or issues so enticingly an open invitation to take up the debate. ‘I am mad – feel free to comment. I am your disease: make what you will of me.’ Here, indeed, is one feature, and a crucial one, of the periodical essay’s enduring popularity as a form throughout the eighteenth century. Few journals over the long course of that period offered their readers anything that came close to straining their mental grasp. That was not their point. Their style was almost uniformly reader-friendly. Even when James Boswell


chose to write a series of anonymous essays as ‘The Hypochondriack’ for the London Magazine, of which he was then part owner, between 1777 and 1783, he rarely stretched either his style or his content to engage issues of real moment to those ‘fellow sufferers from Hypochondria’ he expects to address – indeed, in his first number he explicitly claims to have ‘attained to tranquillity and cheerfulness in the general tenor of my existence’, even if in subsequent papers he does acknowledge an increasing number of lapses.10 But it is The Tatler and The Spectator, first and foremost, and as influentially for subsequent prose writing as Pope was in regulating the form and framing of poetry for the decades to come, that are instrumental in making madness a tool of a wider spectrum of expectation and debate. With The Tatler between 1709 and 1710 and The Spectator from 1711 to 1712 and for seven months in 1714, madness becomes an item of public ownership, available as a model and a mode, and even as a figure of speech, with regard to issues as varied as religion and morals on the one hand and fashion or social conduct on the other. The Tatler sets the tone, for example in No. 40, the paper for Tuesday, 12 July 1709, in the course of a discussion concerning idiots, fools and madmen: This Affair led the Company here into an Examination of these Points; and none coming here but Wits, what was asserted by a young Lawyer, that a Lunatick is in the Care of the Chancery, but a Fool in that of the Crown, was received with general Indignation. ‘Why that? says old Renault. Why that? Why must a Fool be a Courtier more than a Madman? This is the Iniquity of this dull Age: I remember the Time when it went on the mad side; all your TopWits were Scourers, Rakes, Roarers, and Demolishers of Windows. I knew a mad Lord who was drunk five Years together, and was the Envy of that Age, who is faintly imitated by the dull Pretenders to Vice and Madness in this. Had he lived to this Day, there had not been a Fool in Fashion in the whole Kingdom.’11 This leads Mr Bickerstaff to conclude this section of his paper with a private observation: Mr. Locke has somewhere made a Distinction between a Madman and a Fool: A Fool is he that from right Principle makes a wrong Conclusion; but a Madman is one who draws a just Inference from false Principles. Thus the Fool who cut off the Fellow’s Head that lay


asleep, and hid it, and then waited to see what he would say when he awak’d, and miss’d his Head piece, was in the right in the first Thought, that a Man would be surprized to find such an Alteration in Things since he fell asleep; but he was a little mistaken to imagine he could awake at all after his Head was cut off. A Madman fancies himself a Prince; but upon his Mistake, he acts suitably to that Character; and though he is out in supposing he has Principalities, while he drinks Gruel, and lies in Straw, yet you shall see him keep the Port of a distressed Monarch in all his Words and Actions.12 Between the company and Bickerstaff, a breadth of application to the concept of madness has been drawn, embracing drunkenness and disorderliness of the most destructive, and self-destructive, kind, as admired by Renault; wittiness, at least of a certain species – that of being a ‘Top-Wit’; courtliness, where both fools and madmen are apparently to be classed as appropriate courtiers; fashionable conduct; nostalgia for a previous age as against the dullness of current ‘Pretenders to Vice’; and, still comical in style and illustration, a seemingly casual reference (‘Mr. Locke has somewhere made a Distinction’) to the work of England’s most distinguished contemporary philosopher (Locke had in fact been dead only five years when this essay was published). Finally, Bickerstaff characteristically (and it is characteristic of the deployment of madness in the periodical essay as such, as well as in Bickerstaff’s particular hands) turns Locke’s distinction against his previous company and, we assume, against the views there expressed and the values there explicitly and implicitly espoused: These two Persons are equally taken into Custody: But what must be done to Half this good Company, who every Hour of their Life are knowingly and wittingly both Fools and Madmen, and yet have Capacities both of forming Principles, and drawing Conclusions, with the full Use of Reason?13 Madness is moving into its predominant eighteenth-century popular seat: not so much the man mad with drink, though him, as well, and not the aspirant to fashion or courtliness in either dress or behaviour, though that person too, and not even the deluded wretch who believes he is a king while living in straw, though certainly him. But above all this, ‘over us all’, in Blake’s Cowper’s words to Blake, madness is every individual of us who possessing reason chooses against it. Our vices,


pleasures, idiosyncrasies and selfishnesses all inform against us. We all have the capacity to be mad every day of our lives. This is the territory the periodical essay, under the unavoidable influence of Steele and Addison, mapped out for itself. The minor and major peccadillos of our social behaviour are all potential sources of madness, and the likes of Isaac Bickerstaff and Mr Spectator exist to hold them up to ridicule, enlarging as they do so the bounds of insanity beyond the madhouse and the cell of straw to every court, counting-house and domestic hearth in the land, along with the linguistic modes fitted for its discussion. If Steele and Addison popularised the notion of sociability, and with it the importance of social values, conversational ease and a little learning, they also demonstrated the adaptibility of madness within public discourse, applicable to whatever folly or ill came next under the satiric microscope. ‘There is a Sect of antient Philosophers,’ begins the Tatler paper for Thursday 26 January 1709/1710, No. 125, who, I think, have left more Volumes behind them, and those better written, than any other of the Fraternities in Philosophy. It was a Maxim of this Sect, That all those who do not live up to the Principles of Reason and Virtue, are Madmen. Every one who governs himself by these Rules, is allowed the Title of Wise, and reputed to be in his Senses: And every one in Proportion, as he deviates from them, is pronounced frantick and distracted.14 Within the latitude this allows, Bickerstaff comes closer to home: We are therefore to look upon every Man’s Brain to be touched, however he may appear in the general Conduct of his Life, if he has an unjustifiable Singularity in any Part of his Conversation or Behaviour: Or if he swerves from right Reason, however common his Kind of Madness may be, we shall not excuse him for its being epidemical, it being our present Design to clap up all such as have the Marks of Madness upon them, who are now permitted to go about the Streets for no other Reason, but because they do no Mischief in their Fits.15 He goes on to envisage an extension to Bedlam for all the new clients it might therefore expect, setting out the criteria for admission, and in subsequent papers further examples of the inmates of the New Bedlam are described, covering a variety of modes of contemporary


folly, and singularities of the most commonly found kind. Madness is everywhere: we must be on our guard. The good work is continued in The Spectator with even greater popularity and influence. Through paper after paper, Addison, Steele and their contributors draw their readers towards a median of conduct, thought and expression, explicitly castigating extremes and self-made outcasts with the reproach of eccentricity, absurdity or madness, fit only for ridicule or confinement. There is the valetudinarian in No. 25, who read himself into ‘this ill Habit of Body, or rather of Mind’ and, having ‘studied my self into a Complication of Distempers’ has at last gained some relief through conducting his existence by a system of weights and measures designed to ensure regularity in diet, sleep and even perspiration, ‘inasmuch that I may be said, for these three last Years, to have lived in a Pair of Scales’.16 The love of flattery is described, in No. 238, as a ‘Disease of the Mind’: For as where the Juices of the Body are prepared to receive a malignant Influence, there the Disease rages with most Violence; so, in this Distemper of the Mind, where there is ever a Propensity and Inclination to suck in the Poison, it cannot be but that the whole Order of reasonable Action must be overturned.17 Even, in No. 46, Mr Spectator’s own ‘Minutes’ for a future paper, being accidentally dropped and discovered ‘at Lloyd’s Coffee-house’ and read aloud to the company by the boy, are found to be so bizarre – ‘Sir ROGER DE COVERLEY’S Country-Seat – Yes, for I hate long Speeches – Query, if a good Christian may be a Conjurer – Childermas-day, Saltseller, House-Dog, Screech-Owl, Cricket’ – that ‘some of them concluded it was written by a Madman.’18 Singularity must at all costs be regarded as highly suspect, a message that receives particular emphasis in No. 576, the paper for Wednesday 4 August 1714. In this paper, in fact, Addison is at pains to distinguish between kinds of singularity. He begins by recalling a ‘young Man of very lively Parts’ who had such an aversion to appearing unfashionable that he observed to the letter a course of life that would have won the admiration of Isaac Bickerstaff’s ‘Renault’, including staying up until two every morning, joining ‘half a Dozen Clubs before he was One and twenty’ and indulging in acts of fashionable drunken vandalism such as breaking windows ‘and other the like Monuments of Wit and Gallantry’, in consequence of which, ‘having fully established his Reputation of being a very agreeable Rake, he died of old Age at Five and twenty’.19


This leads into a discussion of singularity, which is not always, says Addison, to be avoided. On the contrary it can be either ‘laudable’ or ‘vicious’. If singularity involves, ‘in Contradiction to a Multitude’, adhering ‘to the Dictates of Conscience, Morality, and Honour’, then it becomes a matter of ‘Duty’ above ‘Custom’: ‘Singularity in Concerns of this Kind is to be looked upon as heroick Bravery,’ continues Addison, unconcerned, at least in this paper, with the possible contradictions within the concept of heroism that Pope, and elsewhere, in Tale of a Tub, Swift, were respectively encountering and enjoying, ‘in which a Man leaves the Species only as he soars above it’. Singularity is to be considered vicious, however, ‘when it makes Men act contrary to Reason, or when it puts them upon distinguishing themselves by Trifles’, by which he means ‘things of no Importance, as in Dress, Behaviour, Conversation, and all the little Intercourses of Life’. These are the affairs that Mr Spectator has undertaken to look into; these, and the public responses to them, are his home ground. Here there is a certain Deference due to Custom; and notwithstanding there may be a Colour of Reason to deviate from the Multitude in some Particulars, a Man ought to sacrifice his private Inclinations and Opinions to the Practice of the Publick.20 With this in mind, and in counterpart to the cautionary tale which began the paper, Addison concludes by telling of ‘a Gentleman in the North of England, who was a remarkable Instance of this foolish Singularity’ insofar as he had determined ‘to act in the most indifferent Parts of Life according to the most abstracted Notions of Reason and good Sense, without any Regard to Fashion or Example’. This involved eating and drinking only when hungry or thirsty, with therefore no regular mealtimes; observing in conversation only those politenesses he actually felt; wearing a turban rather than a periwig, ‘concluding very justly, that a bandage of clean Linnen about his Head was much more wholesome, as well as cleanly, than the Caul of a Wig, which is soiled with frequent Perspirations’; wearing only loose clothing in order not to ‘check the Circulation of the Blood’; and declaiming for half an hour from his chamber window each morning for the Benefit of his Lungs; to which End he generally took them out of Homer; the Greek Tongue, especially in that Author, being more deep and sonorous, and more conducive to Expectoration, than any other.


In consequence of this harmlessly colourful behaviour, having ‘departed so much from the rest of his Countrymen, and indeed from his whole Species’, his ‘Friends’ would have ‘clapped him into Bedlam, and have begged his Estate’. The judge, however, ‘being informed that he did no Harm, contented himself with issuing out a Commission of Lunacy against him, and putting his Estate into the Hands of proper Guardians’.21 Madness for The Spectator, as for The Tatler, is in the home and the streets and the clubs, in how we eat and dress and how we address our fellows – particularly in how we address our fellows, because it is those same fellows, when all is said and done, who will turn evidence against us and swear before a judge that we should be ‘clapped … into Bedlam’ and lose our estate. Addison may draw the moral, as he does in his concluding paragraph, with quoting ‘Monsieur Fontonelle’s Dialogues of the Dead’: The Ambitious and the Covetous (says he) are Madmen to all Intents and Purposes, as much as those who are shut up in dark Rooms; but they have the good Luck to have Numbers on their Side; whereas the Frenzy of one who is given up for a Lunatick, is a Frenzy hors d’oeuvre. Such a moral, however, does not quite follow from the essay, which is much more straightforward than the point of Fontonelle’s remark. For Fontonelle, we are all potentially morally mad, simply by following our least generous instincts, but precisely because we are all this way we pass as normal. Addison’s real moral is actually broader, simpler, more down-to-earth, and therefore much more disturbing. A ‘Frenzy hors d’oeuvre’ is, ‘in other Words, something which is singular in its Kind, and does not fall in with the Madness of a Multitude.’22 What has happened, then, over the course of these periodicals, is that madness has lost touch with illness and become, as Warton was to find it, all disease. There is nothing ailing these people, clapped up or deprived of legal identity, except what a sufficient number of their fellows think is ailing them. Addison and Steele, in representing insanity as a shorthand for social disapproval, or misinterpretation, or risibility, have released to the multitude the understanding of a multitude. Madness for much of the eighteenth century, as in the pages of The Spectator, found itself in the free market: when being mad is subject only to the eye of the spectator, definition is a matter of infinite free play, a concept with no more, and no less, meaning than a sufficient multitude wishes it to mean, yet with the full backing of the law behind it, and beyond the law the welcoming arms of the asylum.


Madness is suddenly democratic, subject only to a majority verdict. As Roy Porter quotes of the playwright Nathaniel Lee, confined in Bedlam in the 1680s, ‘They said I was mad; and I said they were mad; damn them, they outvoted me.’23 Pope, most daringly, in looking back to a long gone era from the perspective of wholly different literary, cultural and heroic norms, took full command of that right to define anew what constituted insanity, and did so thereafter through a series of constructions that dealt with social issues through the filter of what it might mean to be mad. Blake annexing Cowper, Warton Swift, are less daring, closer to home, more recognisable, but these are still, no less than with Pope, matters of individual definition with the potential to be accepted as meeting the requirements for madness with a multitude. When we turn to the novel, and particularly the comic novel, as it developed over the eighteenth century, we find scope not only for perceived madness in word and deed, but also the opportunity for privileging those individual and group perspectives through which the madness debate might proceed. Such, amongst the most intelligent examples, as well as the most inventive, is the case with Tom Jones. With The Iliad and the Moral Essays, and, exceptionally so, with Gulliver’s Travels, we have been dealing with madness as a highly selfconscious literary construct, made the way it is in the furtherance of ends other than, or additional to, meeting and making popular conceptions of what it was to be mad. With the novel, we are at last witnessing madness made in the image of what might pass for mad in the context of what, to all intents and purposes, might pass for real life. In Book Twelve of Tom Jones, Chapter 6, in a nondescript kitchen of ‘an Inn, or indeed an Alehouse’,24 in a remote village somewhere in the region of Upton, where Tom and Partridge, in pursuit of Sophia, are now lost, a company of assorted oddballs of the kind which are normally to be found in Fielding gathers over a late glass. After the trials of the day, which have included, most lately, a puppet show which has been criticised by Jones, and with the hero now safely in bed and asleep, and with other various mishaps and fallings-out forgiven and forgotten, ‘a Face of perfect Peace and Tranquillity’, says Fielding, reigned in the Kitchin; where sat assembled round the Fire, the Landlord and Landlady of the House, the Master of the Puppetshow, the Attorney’s Clerk, the Exciseman, and the ingenious Mr. Partridge; in which Company past the agreeable Conversation which will be found in the next Chapter. (II, 643)


The subject they turn to, of course, is the madness of Tom Jones. It is, in fact, a subject introduced by Partridge himself, who has some cause for his suspicion, which, as we are told, was ‘an Apprehension which he had begun to conceive the Day before, and for which, as we hinted at that very Time, the Behaviour of Jones seemed to have furnished a sufficient Foundation’ (II, 644). The most recent incident was indeed immediately following their departure from the inn at Upton where Jones had missed, by a hair’s breadth, Sophia, encountered, equally by a hair’s breadth, Squire Western, and blamed the whole disaster on the loose tongue of Partridge, gossiping late in the kitchen. They pause at a cross-roads, where Partridge advises returning home, upon which Jones flies into a passion of anger and despair: ‘Alas!’ cries Jones, ‘I have no Home to return to; — but if my Friend, my Father would receive me, could I bear the Country from which Sophia is flown — Cruel Sophia! No. Let me blame myself — No, let me blame thee. D—nation seize thee, Fool, Blockhead! thou hast undone me, and I will tear thy Soul from thy Body.’ — At which words he laid violent Hands on the Collar of poor Partridge, and shook him more heartily than an Ague Fit, or his own Fears had ever done before. (II, 626) The broken language and the swift changes in mood, indeed, unsurprisingly lead to an actual violence, as momentarily fierce as the anger of an Achilles, followed as swiftly, and erratically, by another change of mood: Partridge fell trembling on his Knees, and begged for Mercy, vowing he had meant no Harm — when Jones, after staring wildly on him for a Moment, quitted his Hold; and discharged a Rage on himself, that had it fallen on the other, would certainly have put an End to his Being, which indeed the very Apprehension of it had almost effected. (II, 626–7) At this point Fielding, endorsing for once the perspective of Partridge over that of Jones, describes, or rather explicitly refrains from describing, ‘all the mad Pranks which Jones played on this Occasion’, and brings the incident to a halt with Tom, like any madman who has in fact done ‘no Mischief’ in his fit, being brought safely back to normal: Suffice it then simply to say, that Jones, after having played the Part of a Madman for many Minutes, came, by Degrees, to himself;


which no sooner happened, than turning to Partridge, he very earnestly begged his Pardon for the Attack he had made on him in the Violence of his Passion: but concluded, by desiring him never to mention his Return again; for he was resolved never to see that Country any more. (II, 627) Jones recognises his own ‘hair-trigger’ even if Partridge has not; equally Partridge, understandably, will now agree to anything. Who, in a multitude, would not do so? And Fielding leaves the scene joining Partridge, as they journey on, in his private speculations: Our Travellers now marched a full Mile, without speaking a Syllable to each other, tho’ Jones, indeed, muttered many Things to himself; as to Partridge, he was profoundly silent: For he was not, perhaps, perfectly recovered from his former Fright; besides, he had Apprehensions of provoking his Friend to a second Fit of Wrath; especially as he now began to entertain a Conceit, which may not, perhaps, create any great Wonder in the Reader. In short, he began now to suspect that Jones was absolutely out of his Senses. (II, 627–8) One of Fielding’s specialities as a comic narrator is to address two readers, or rather to imply two simultaneous levels of reading, one at which we attend to what the words are saying, and one at which we know what Fielding would have us understand. Here, what we clearly understand is that Jones is not mad, and will never be allowed in the text that bears his name to become mad, even though we have just witnessed, along with Partridge, a kind of behaviour that could well pass for mad in normal circumstances, and that certainly within a novel should be read as a capacity for mad intervals. The fact that Jones is even now walking along muttering to himself would clearly give any indifferent passer-by passing doubts about his state of mind. And indeed Fielding’s narrative at the level of what the words are saying would seem to endorse Partridge’s misgivings. He has been shaken ‘more heartily than an Ague Fit’, seen Tom on his knees to him, witnessed the self-beratement and the ‘mad Pranks’ and heard at first hand the accompanying language, in fits and in starts and in the full flow of despair. He is rightly apprehensive, rightly keeping his own counsel; rightly, ‘perhaps’, in accordance with the narrator on this one. With these twin readings in mind we arrive at the discussion in the ‘Inn, or indeed an Alehouse’ where, in his absence, Tom is reconstructed


by the company in the form and particulars of a madman, a reconstruction that we, and the narrator, can safely endorse for comic purposes, knowing too that this is not where Fielding would have us conclude madness lies. Partridge begins by ‘freely’ communicating the ‘Apprehension which he had begun to conceive the Day before … that his Master was out of his Wits, with which Opinion he very bluntly acquainted the good Company round the Fire’ (II, 644). He finds swift agreement, though with each speaker a different perspective brings different reasons, based on personal observation and personal interests: With this Sentiment the Puppet-show Man immediately coincided. ‘I own,’ said he, ‘the Gentleman surprized me very much, when he talked so absurdly about Puppet-shows. It is indeed hardly to be conceived that any Man in his Senses should be so much mistaken; what you say now, accounts very well for all his monstrous Notions. Poor Gentleman, I am heartily concerned for him; indeed he hath a Strange wildness about his Eyes, which I took Notice of before, tho’ I did not mention it.’ (II, 644–5) The landlord is of the same mind: ‘And certainly,’ added he, ‘it must be so: for no one but a Madman would have thought of leaving so good a House, to ramble about the Country at that Time of Night’ (II, 645). From the reconstruction of behaviour and tell-tale signs the company moves to the discussion of appropriate action: The Exciseman pulling his Pipe from his Mouth, said, ‘He thought the Gentleman looked and talked a little wildly,’ and then turning to Partridge, ‘If he be a Madman,’ says he, ‘he should not be suffered to travel thus about the Country, for possibly he may do some Mischief. It is Pity he was not secured and sent home to his Relations.’ (II, 645) As Partridge heartily agrees, and mob rule, or at least strength of numbers, seems about to break out (‘Pogh!’ says the Exciseman. ‘I believe I am as good a Man as he. Besides here are five of us’ (II, 645)) it is the landlady who asserts a contrary interpretation, equally based on personal interests and, from her perspective, and ‘perhaps’ from the narrator’s, equally a plausible one: The young Gentleman is as pretty a young Gentleman as ever I saw in my life, and I believe he is no more mad than any of us. What


do you tell of his having a wild Look with his Eyes? They are the prettiest Eyes I ever saw, and he hath the prettiest Look with them; and a very modest civil young Man he is. I am sure I have bepitied him heartily ever since. The Gentleman there in the Corner told us he was crost in Love. Certainly it is enough to make any Man, especially such a sweet young Gentleman as he is, to look a little otherwise than he did before. (II, 645–6) When the attorney’s clerk ‘likewise declared he would have no Concern in the Business, without the Advice of Council’ (II, 646), the danger is averted. Tom slumbers on, absent still, and the conversation shifts to actions of false imprisonment, the difficulty of finding ‘sufficient Evidence of Madness to a Jury’ and, more remotely from the case upstairs, reminsiscence by the exciseman of ‘a Trial of Madness, where twenty Witnesses swore that the Person was as mad as a March Hare; and twenty others, that he was as much in his Senses as any Man in England’ (II, 646). Personal observation cannot always be trusted, no more can personal testimony: if we cannot believe our own eyes, especially in cases of madness, how much less can we believe our ears. ‘And indeed’, continues the exciseman, ‘it was the Opinion of most People, that it was only a Trick of his Relations to rob the poor Man of his Right’ (II, 646). And indeed, in the present case, what Fielding has us read and what he has us understand are not quite one and the same. What Fielding has shown us here is the construction of a construction. To look at madness in literature, recalling once again Helen Small’s phrase, is to look at something ‘that is already representation’. The discussion in Tom Jones is a representation of the collective mind moving towards, and then away from, a verdict of insanity, based on their own received images of madness: characters in fiction join in erecting an image of the madman which for a moment has enough common features, signs of madness that they can individually endorse albeit with individually slanted significance, to be in danger of being taken as the ‘real’ thing, until a dissenting interpretation highjacks the conversation and leaves it harmlessly floundering in legalities and precedent. The construction has failed. The narrative winks and moves on. Tom Jones absent is Tom Jones still. There are numerous occasions in the course of Tom Jones when characters, either through fury, or despair, or even elation, are represented as if, or as potentially, out of their wits, beside themselves, or downsight insane. Tom himself, for example, is described early on in his battle fit in a style that is both explicitly Homeric, and explicitly


refraining from being so. This is at the battle of the churchyard in Book IV, when Molly Seagrim, taunted by Goody Brown and the mob for her new finery, has been engaging with assorted members of the multitude – Jemmy Tweedle, ‘old Echepole, the Sow-gelder’, Kate of the Mill, ‘Betty Pippin, with young Roger her Lover’, Tom Freckle, Miss Crow, John Giddish, Nan Slouch, Esther Codling, Will Spray, Tom Bennett, ‘the three Misses Potter, whose Father keeps the Sign of the Red Lion’ (I, 180–1) and others – and now, so far victorious, is found in single combat with Goody. Tom’s rage is briefer by far than that of Achilles, but begins almost as outrageously with the horsewhipping of a woman, and proceeds to a wholesale undiscriminating onslaught: ‘Who, who?’ cries Tom; but without waiting for an Answer, having discovered the Features of his Molly through all the Discomposure in which they now were, he hastily alighted, turned his Horse loose, and leaping over the Wall, ran to her. She now, first bursting into Tears, told him how barbarously she had been treated. Upon which, forgetting the Sex of Goody Brown, or perhaps not knowing it, in his Rage; for, in reality, she had no feminine Appearance, but a Petticoat, which he might not observe, he gave her a Lash or two with his Horsewhip; and then flying at the Mob, who were all accused by Molly, he dealt his Blows so profusely on all Sides, that unless I would again invoke the Muse, (which the good-natured Reader may think a little too hard upon her, as she hath lately been violently sweated) it would be impossible for me to recount the Horsewhipping of that Day. (I, 183) It is an ugly scene, displaying heroism of the most base kind, with wrath providing the excuse for setting aside normal reservations regarding gender and weaponry. Even the Muse has been, apparently, subjected to abusive exploitation by the male narrator. But there is no ‘anguished apprehensiveness’ from Fielding, no recreation of a thuggish way of life for a politer, more ‘good-natured’, readership. This after all is what, in Tom Jones, passes for the here and now: this is not a bygone hero but a present one, with ‘the prettiest Eyes I ever saw’. We are to approve. Molly’s condition, ‘which must give both me and my Reader Pain, was it to be described here’, provides ample endorsement for Tom, who ‘raved like a Madman, beat his Breast, tore his Hair, stamped on the Ground, and vowed the utmost Vengeance on all who had been concerned’ (I, 183–4). Fielding has unapologetically brought the action to a close with an


apt comparison: ‘Having scoured the whole Coast of the Enemy, as well as any of Homer’s Heroes ever did’, or rather with two apt comparisons: ‘or as Don Quixotte’; or indeed with three: ‘or any Knight Errant in the World could have done’ (I, 183). The reading is clear as it is comic: classical hero, Don or knight errant, Tom’s heroic mould will not and should not crumble. Madness in the Achilles mould, as recreated by Pope, if it comes into Tom Jones comes by a more indirect route. Tom in action is invariably Tom endorsed, if not always entirely by the words of the narrator then by the underlying understanding that prevails between himself and his reader. And in fact if madness there is, we are obliged to look beyond Tom himself to find it. We saw in Pope’s major satires between the two Dunciads the key significance of the moment of death in terms of the reworking of the mad self: living Achilles ends sane, while Narcissa, Euclio and ‘great Villiers’, by dying amiss give the truth to a life so awry as to constitute ‘real’ insanity. All but one of the deaths in Tom Jones – Bridget Allworthy, Dr Blifil, Mrs Partridge, Square the philosopher – are permitted to take place respectfully off the page. Indeed, while the doctor and Mrs Partridge are allowed to die because Fielding has no further use for them, Bridget and Square, in dying, move a little towards the ranks of the blessed by writing a true account of an awry existence. One death only, that of Captain Blifil at the end of Book II, takes place on page, and in doing so can be read as quite clearly participating in the obsessive moral insanity that Pope, over the course of the previous decade, had inscribed as a satiric pattern. Captain Blifil, who like his brother and Mrs Partridge has now served his purpose, dies in full view of the reader, in full contempt of the narrator, and what is more we are encouraged to laugh at him. The captain, in common with many of Pope’s imprudent exemplars, has planned on the grand scale while awaiting the death of Mr Allworthy and his own succession to the property on behalf of his infant son. ‘Nothing’, says Fielding, as we unwittingly approach his end: was wanting to enable him to enter upon the immediate Execution of this Plan, but the Death of Mr. Allworthy; in calculating which he had employed much of his own Algebra; besides purchasing every Book extant that treats of the Value of Lives, Reversions, &c. From all which, he satisfied himself, that as he had every Day a Chance of this happening, so had he more than an even Chance of its happening within a few Years. (I, 109)


The captain’s logic is faultless but, like Locke’s madman, he reasons right on wrong premisses, or rather on insecure foundations, from which Fielding extracts the maximum mileage: But while the Captain was one Day busied in deep Contemplations of this Kind, one of the most unlucky, as well as unseasonable Accidents, happened to him. The utmost Malice of Fortune could, indeed, have contrived nothing so cruel, so mal-a-propos, so absolutely destructive to all his Schemes. In short, not to keep the Reader in long Suspence, just at the very instant when his Heart was exulting in Meditations on the Happiness which would accrue to him by Mr. Allworthy’s death, he himself – died of an Apoplexy. (I, 109) Blifil takes less time to die, almost, than the narrator does to describe it. Moreover, Fielding extends the account, adding contextual detail like some comic hitman, ensuring that the death is death indeed. ‘This unfortunately befel the Captain as he was taking his Evening Walk by himself, so that no Body was present to lend him any Assistance, if indeed any Assistance could have preserved him’ (I, 109). Endorsing the horsewhipping of a woman is dubious, but being brought to agree to laugh at the spectacle of a dying man should be a human outrage. Yet it is not so, any more than at the miser or at the crone, unenlightening her own darkness. On the contrary, few epsiodes in the novel bring more pleasure than this witty justice where a self-adopted and religiously pursued moral insanity, setting quite askew the integrity of a lived existence and persisted in right up until what, unsuspectingly, has proved to be the last moment, is brought to meet an end, a final self, that is both humorous and apt. Fielding even closes the classical loop as he leaves the captain at the end of the chapter: He took, therefore, Measure of that Proportion of Soil, which was now become adequate to all his future Purposes, and he lay dead on the Ground, a great (though not a living) example of the truth of that observation of Horace: Tu secanda marmora Locas sub ipsum funus: et sepulchri Immemor, struis domos. Which Sentiment, I shall thus give to the English Reader: ‘You provide the noblest Materials for Building, when a Pick-ax and a


Spade are only necessary; and build Houses of five hundred by a hundred Feet, forgetting that of six by two.’ (I, 109) Captain Blifil’s insanity has been in the line that finds God in ‘Man’s Image’, and its termination one that, while not bringing the captain himself the ‘Happiness’ he anticipated, certainly bestows a generous share of happiness, through laughter, among Fielding’s readers. But it is also an occasion when the reader-narrator bond is for once shaken. The imputed madness of Tom, suspected by Partridge and discussed at large by the company, is a matter of conjecture, where every man and woman’s opinion is given equal validity: madness in conjecture is a matter of who sees what and when. This is the madness of a multitude, with scant foundation, usually, and less truth. The reading act alights upon each view, and moves on, superior, in the know. But the madness of Captain Blifil is of an altogether different cast: it is a fixed moral fact, not changeable through public opinion, not observable as singularity in behaviour is, and not answerable to any commission of lunacy. It is a madness from the inside and we must not be allowed free rein to misread it. Fielding holds out on us. Only as the captain, unexpectedly, and increasingly unexpectedly as Fielding couches the phraseology of the death, meets his end does the absolute justice of that end clarify and make moral the deranged self that is concluding before our eyes. We are being obliged, through laughter, to read straight as surely as by any couplet from Pope, and the reading that ensues acts thereafter as one moral rock amongst the multitudinous uncertainties that Tom has yet to encounter. Blifil’s death, thus early in the novel, is a shock, but a salutary and a welcome one. In reading it, we read too the possibility that a higher justice, indeed a higher sanity, might exist within this conspicuously constructed ‘reality’ that is Tom Jones. By a final irony, however, the self that the captain meets there at his death is itself constructed into a moral message, one available for other kinds of readings by travellers of a more casual kind than either Tom or Fielding’s own readers: Here lies In Expectation of a joyful Rising, The Body of Captain JOHN BLIFIL. LONDON had the Honour of his Birth, OXFORD


of his Education. His Parts were an Honour to his Profession and to his Country: His Life to his Religion and human Nature. He was a dutiful Son, a tender Husband, an affectionate Father, a most kind Brother, a sincere Friend, a devout Christian, and a good Man. His inconsolable Widow hath erected this Stone, The Monument of His Virtues, and of her Affection. (I, 114–15) Little of which is true, and the stone was in fact erected by Mr Allworthy, misreading the dead as effectively as he habitually misreads the living, and inadvertently achieving through the moral fixity of an epitaph an accurate image of a life dedicated to deceit. Madness as a rootless signifier: madness recognised as the mirror of a self. These are the twin paths of eighteenth-century insanity, as constructed within its cultural icons, and as located within the ‘real’ England of its prose fiction. If madness on one track allows free space for whatever one or more of a multitude wishes to make of it, a Blake or a Warton or the company in the kitchen, it also, in parallel, and increasingly as the novel joins and endorses the age of sentiment, reconstructs and returns an image of all we have been and are. Madness is what we make of it: but what we make of madness is our madness too. As representation moves from the grotesque creature looking back at us from the Wardian cell, through the lunatic seaman with whom we have shared so much, to the Belindas and Barons and amoral exemplars who have set too much by this world, and at last to the suffering Pamelas, Clarissas, Clementinas, Shandys and Yoricks, to Caleb Williams, to heroines from Burney and Wollstonecraft and to Mackenzie’s men of feeling, the reflection in the glass becomes increasingly unmisreadable. Mental disturbance throughout the later eighteenth-century novel is the madness that makes us one, not the


madness that divides. It is ‘Swift’ pitying ‘the manifold miseries of man’ and making them his own. It is engagement with all we are, albeit perhaps dressed up as all we are most not. It is the face in the mirror, the epitaph on the monument labelled ourselves. Smollett, here as in other ways, can be seen in tandem with Fielding. Roderick Random, published in 1748, precedes Tom Jones by just one year and its documenting of insanity is exactly contemporary, exactly on the cusp of not me and me. The alien thing that is madness is witnessed in the process of becoming the self that has seen and defined it, not yet located as narrator and reader, for that is a subsequent step, but as a thing to be identified as constituting a twin component within the text as surely as the brainless brothers. A key scene is Chapter XXVII, which sees the relentless Captain Oakum, having received sailing orders, come on board the HMS Thunder, accompanied by a new surgeon, a Mr Mackshane. Together they proceed to go through the sick-list – ‘Blood and oons! sixty-one sick people on board of my ship! Harkee, you sir, I’ll have no sick people on board of my ship, by God’25 – and impose upon each and every one rigorous punishment and an immediate return to duty, thereby reducing the number, as successive seamen collapse under the whip, fall from the rigging, or die at their posts, ‘to less than a dozen’.26 They reach the final case, a maniac ‘lashed to his hammock by the direction of the doctor’s mate’ who, unlike his fellow sick, ‘begged hard to be released; affirming he had been so maltreated only for a grudge Mr. Morgan bore him, and that he was as much in his senses as any man aboard’. Truth is what you want to hear: the captain gives him credit: The captain, hearing this, darted a severe look at the Welshman, and ordered the man to be brought up immediately: upon which Morgan protested with great fervency, that the person in question was as mad as a March hare; and begged, for the love of Got, they would at least keep his arms pinioned during his examination, to prevent him from doing mischief.27 Thus confined, madness in the dock is required to account for itself to a judge and jury strongly inclined in its favour, in spite of witnesses to the contrary. The mock trial, with ruthless self-interest sitting in judgement over mindful insanity, proceeds: This request the commander granted for his own sake, and the patient was produced, who insisted upon his being in his right wits


with such calmness and strength of argument, that everybody present was inclined to believe him, except Morgan, who affirmed there was no trusting to appearances; for he himself had been so much imposed upon by his behaviour two days before, that he had actually unbound him with his own hands, and had well-nigh been murdered for his pains. This was confirmed by the evidence of one of the waiters, who declared he had pulled this patient from the doctor’s mate, whom he had gotten down and almost strangled. To this the man answered, that the witness was a creature of Morgan’s, and was suborned to give his testimony against him by the malice of the mate. …28 Madness is in possession of rationality, articulacy, self-assurance: where, then, is the madness? The captain is in possession of a single obsession, of narrow prejudice, of crass inhumaneness: where, then, is the sanity? The judge is biased, the jury bought: Captain Oakum, without any further hesitation, ordered the fellow to be unfettered; at the same time threatening to make Morgan exchange situations with him for his spite. But the Briton no sooner heard the decision in favour of the madman, than he got up the mizen shrouds, crying to Thomson and me to get out of his reach, for we would see him play the devil with a vengeance. We did not think fit to disregard his caution, and accordingly got up on the poop, whence we beheld the maniac, as soon as he was released, fly at the captain like a fury, crying, “I’ll let you know, you scoundrel, that I am commander of this vessel,” and pommel him without mercy. The surgeon, who went to the assistance of his patron, shared the same fate; and it was with the utmost difficulty that he was mastered at last, after having done great execution among those who opposed him.29 Madness, when the gloves come off, not only assaults you with everything it has claimed not to be. It perpetrates the final indignity and claims to be you, would take your identity, assume your face, authority, self. In this respect, and in this instance, madness is in the right. Captain Oakum may not require physical restraints as the maniac does, but in every other way, at least as much as Captain Blifil, he is a threat to life and reason in all its forms. He has already ‘done great execution’ among his crew as a result of his slanted seeing, his resolute misreadings, his twisted logic, and, what is worse, he actually is ‘commander of


this vessel’. When he is attacked by the maniac, Captain Oakum is being assaulted by all that he himself has been and is, an enforced recognition of self and insanity differing from Captain Blifil’s and Euclio’s only in that this captain survives the assault, to profit, like Achilles, or not, like Belinda, by the experience. Madness might be at home with Captain Oakum, but it does not yet reside with the reader, nor with the narrator. Here is the cusp between not me and me. Fielding and Smollett as narrators, and still more so Random as a first-person teller of his own adventures, are in protected space, telling from above, or beyond, or after, the events that might in other hands pose a threat to their own identities. Such had been the case in Gulliver’s Travels, with all identities, including the reader’s, held ultimately up to question, and such becomes the case in Caleb Williams and, later still, in Frankenstein and in Confessions of a Justified Sinner. For Fielding and Smollett, however, the teller is as sane as Pope the poet and Ward the spy, and with him the reader, held out on perhaps, surprised and delighted perhaps, but secure in assumed rightness of wits. For telling that truly melds the insanity that is seen with the self that is seeing we turn to Sterne. If any writer of the eighteenth century can be described as writing with mirrors it is Sterne and in this he is the true inheritor of the Popean fascination with surfaces. What in Pope, though, is a matter of matching and unmatching pairs that reveal moral and mental misalignments, becomes in Sterne the process of duplicating and even triplicating identities through a highly polished alertness to the reflective properties of language. Jokes, in Sterne, beget jokes, allusions beget allusions, and words, phrases and names give rise to chains of images that form and reform into eliding concentrations of time, place and perception. One such is the encounter with Maria of Moulines, or rather the encounters, where Maria is the same, but the narrator is not. Except of course that the narrator is, for they are all Sterne, meeting her once, extra-textually, as himself, once as Tristram in Tristram Shandy, and finally as Parson Yorick in A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. The real Sterne met the real Maria, or someone very like her, while actually travelling through France in 1765. The first fictional recreation came in the ninth and final volume of Tristram Shandy, published in 1767. The encounter is brief, precious, and incomplete. Maria has lost her wits from thwarted love. She is the love and pity of all the villages around us; said the postillion – it is but three years ago, that the sun did not shine upon so fair, so


quick-witted and amiable a maid; and better fate did Maria deserve, than to have her Banns forbid by the intrigues of the curate of the parish who published them – 30 But she is young, beautiful and, as she sits with her goat and plays mournful airs on her pipe, a heart-rendingly melancholy spectacle. We had got up by this time almost to the bank where Maria was sitting: she was in a thin white jacket with her hair, all but two tresses, drawn up into a silk net, with a few olive leaves twisted a little fantastically on one side – she was beautiful; and if ever I felt the full force of an honest heart-ache; it was the moment I saw her –31 Maria/Ophelia might mark, as Helen Small has observed, a step in the ‘commercialization of the spectacle of feminine derangement’, inspiring ‘more than thirty paintings by the start of Victoria’s reign’, one of which, an engraving by Angelica Kauffman, ‘circulated all over Europe in print form, and was transferred to numerous fashion articles, including a watch-case, a tea-waiter, and a Wedgwood cameo’. 32 But the episode as it features in Tristram Shandy is closed not with tears but with a comic abruptness that is also a characteristic holding out on the reader: a potential promise that remains unspoken and unsatisfied: Adieu, Maria! – adieu, poor hapless damsel! – some time, but not now, I may hear thy sorrows from thy own lips – but I was deceived; for that moment she took her pipe and told me such a tale of woe with it, that I rose up and with broken and irregular steps walked softly to my chaise. – What an excellent inn at Moulins!33 Madness itself is omitted: how, then, can we ‘really know what madness was’? Maria’s ‘sorrows’ as communicated from ‘her own lips’ might have been in the text, we might have had the ‘tale of woe’ as understood, appropriately enough, by Tristram, but instead we have the pipe, and silence. Tristram’s own reactions are more significant. The inn was a good one. The narrative moves on, albeit with the ‘broken and irregular steps’ that this novel has made its own.


One year later, in Sentimental Journey, Sterne revisits the scene no longer as Tristram but as Parson Yorick, dead in Volume I of Tristram Shandy, but alive and well at the end of it, and clearly in possession of all his faculties, as they were by then defined, while travelling through France. Three meetings with madness, one Maria, three Sternes; or one Sterne, three Marias, two of them representations. The Sterne who is now Yorick explicitly visits having been ‘affected not a little in the reading’ of the account by ‘my friend, Mr Shandy’, the last Sterne to have passed that way. His meeting both endorses the image and supplies, in a way, the gap: She was dressed in white, and much as my friend described her, except that her hair hung loose, which before was twisted within a silk net.—She had super-added likewise to her jacket, a pale green ribband which fell across her shoulder to the waist; at the end of which hung her pipe.—Her goat had been as faithless as her lover; and she had got a little dog in lieu of him, which she had kept tied by a string to her girdle; as I looked at her dog, she drew him towards her with the string.—‘Thou shalt not leave me, Sylvio,’ said she. I looked in Maria’s eyes, and saw she was thinking more of her father than of her lover or her little goat; for as she uttered them the tears trickled down her cheeks.34 Yorick, alone amongst the narrators of the insane and the visitors to Bedlam, has looked into the eyes of insanity and understood. What has he understood? Something that was there, or something that came with the seeing? He engages, sympathises, as he is predisposed to do, but with what? Tears speak louder than words, but less articulately: I sat down close by her; and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell with my own handkerchief — I then steeped it in my own — and then in hers — and then in mine — and then I wiped hers again — and as I did it, I felt such indescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion.35 The identification is complete. Not only does Sterne/Shandy/Yorick see into the hidden heart of madness, he joins it, weeps with it, becomes, as far as tears are concerned, indistinguishable from it and, now that his ‘emotions’ are ‘indescribable’, even participates in its silence. They are one. The face in the mirror is clear at last: when Sterne looks at Maria, he sees himself, or at least Tristram, or Yorick.


The reader, too, to the extent that sentiment is in vogue, sees the same – sees enough of the same, at least, to create a market for ‘more than thirty paintings by the start of Victoria’s reign’. But does the gentle reader read in Maria all that goes to make reading gentle and all that is to be valued, therefore, above the cold world of sanity as genuinely human? Do we, uniquely, have here writing and reading that really does do the insane justice? Is insanity, truly known in and for itself, being prized as, after all, the only true mode of sanity? When Yorick and Maria share tears and a handerchief, and when, in conclusion, they link arms and walk together into Moulines – ‘And where are you going, Maria? said I. — She said to Moulines. — Let us go, said I, together. — Maria put her arm within mine, and lengthening the string, to let the dog follow, in that order we entered Moulines.’36 – are we witnessing two sides of knowing, sane insanity and the insanely sane joining impossibly and miraculously in the integrity of a truth? Or is a seeing through sentiment as cruelly awry as seeing through savagery, or through satire, or from the viewpoint of imaginative poetic exaltation? We have here, perhaps, a different kind of misrepresentation of the insane, something equally madness as defined by a multitude, but a multitude in ones, ending, though, with the same old confirmation of a half-truth. Maria and Yorick walk in together, each supporting the other’s delusion.

Notes 1. William Blake, ‘Notes on Spurzheim’s “Observations on the Deranged Manifestations of the Mind, or Insanity”’, 1819, in Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, London: Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 772. 2. Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, p. 99. 3. Joseph Warton, Adventurer 109 (1753), in The British Essayists, ed. Robert Lynam, vols XIV–XVI, London, J. F. Dove, 1827, XV, 182. 4. Warton, XV, 183. 5. Warton, XV, 183–5. 6. Joseph Warton, Essay on Pope (1756), p. v, cited in Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols, vol 2, Dr Swift, London: Methuen, 1967 (1983 edn), p. 25. 7. Cited in Max Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974, p. 63; see also my discussion of this passage in The Madhouse of Language: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century, London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 14–15. 8. Warton, XV, 185. 9. Cited in Michael Davis, William Blake: A New Kind of Man, London: Paul Elek, 1977, p. 94. 10. James Boswell, Boswell’s Column, 1777–1783, ed. Margery Bailey, London: William Kimber, 1951, pp. 388, 25. For discussion of one significant occasion


11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

when Boswell’s writing breaks ranks see my Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century, p. 123. The essay is reprinted pp. 126–8. Richard Steele, The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq (The Tatler), London: H. Lintot et al., 1749 edn., 4 vols, 1.239–40. Steele, Tatler, 1.241. Steele, Tatler, 1.241. Steele, Tatler, 3.46. Steele, Tatler, 3.47. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. C. Gregory Smith, London: Dent Dutton, 1945, 4 vols, 1.75–6. Addison and Steele, Spectator, 2.206. Addison and Steele, Spectator, 1.139–40. Addison and Steele, Spectator, 4.310–11. Addison and Steele, Spectator, 4.311. Addison and Steele, Spectator, 4.311–12. Addison and Steele, Spectator, 4.312. Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, p. 2, citing Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, p. 75. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749), ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers, The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, 2 volumes, II, 637. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), ed. H.W. Hodges, London: Everyman, 1967, p. 160. Smollett, Roderick Random, p. 162. Smollett, Roderick Random, p. 162. Smollett, Roderick Random, p. 163. Smollett, Roderick Random, p. 163. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67), ed. Graham Petrie, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967, p. 600. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, p. 601. Helen Small, Love’s Madness, p. 13. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, pp. 601–2. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), ed. Graham Petrie, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967, p. 138. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, p. 138. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, p. 140.

5 Acting the Part of a Madman: Insanity and the Stage

In the sixth book of Tom Jones, Squire Western, being suddenly made aware of the true relationship between Tom and his daughter Sophia, and realising that he has himself just sent Tom for a private interview with her, sets off ‘like one Thunder-struck’ and with ‘a round Volley of Oaths and Imprecations’ for the apartment where they will be. Fielding describes Tom and Sophia’s state of impending shock. It is as when ‘two Doves, or two Wood-pigeons, or as when Strephon and Phillis’ are rudely interrupted by ‘hoarse Thunder’ bursting ‘through the shattered Clouds’: Or as when two Gentlemen, Strangers to the wondrous Wit of the Place, are cracking a Bottle together at some Inn or Tavern at Salisbury, if the great Dowdy who acts the Part of a Madman, as well as some of his Setters-on do that of a Fool, should rattle his Chains, and dreadfully hum forth the grumbling Catch along the Gallery; the frighted Strangers stand aghast, scared at the horrid Sound, they seek some Place of Shelter from the approaching Danger, and if the wellbarred Windows did admit their Exit, would venture their Necks to escape the threatning Fury now coming upon them. (I, 300–1) Martin Battestin provides the crucial information to support this piece of west country in-jokery. Daniel Pearce was ‘the great Dowdy’. A Corporation mace-bearer in Salisbury during his day job, he took on the role of escaped lunatic in his spare time, preying on unsuspecting visitors to the city inns. Battestin quotes the obituary to Pearce, who died in 1762, from Lloyd’s Evening Post, and British Chronicle for 18–20 January, 1762: The Demerit of this man, known by the name of Dowdy, consisted in assuming the tatter’d garment, decorations of straw, rattling 106

Acting the Part of a Madman 107

chains, visage stained with blood, and deportment of the most desperate lunatic; in which he was assisted by a frightful tone of voice and articulation (which he could modulate, for the pastime of those who put him on this barbarous sport, to increase or decrease, at pleasure, the terror of its object): he had a peculiar genius for this part, so as to fill the boldest with real fear, and hunt them to and fro, thro’ windows, up chimneys, and even over the tops of houses, to escape the fury of a supposed raving, mischievous Bedlamite, intent on their destruction.1 Sheridan Baker adds, from The Salisbury Journal obituary, 18 January, 1762, that Pearce also ‘used to frighten strangers at The Three Lions inn (afterwards “The Three Golden Lions”), in Salisbury, by walking the galleries as a ghost’.2 To cap the evening’s entertainment, continues the Lloyd’s Evening Post obituary, taking up the madman act, Pearce would then reappear as himself and dupe the stranger into accepting his assistance in attempting to apprehend the lunatic: Mr. Pearce (except in the exercise of this piece of false humour) was a pacifick and civil man; and, it is said, has sometimes, after he had thrown off his disguise, and the person attacked has been made sensible of the cruel joke put upon him, officiously tendered his service, and gone about with him in pretended search after the madman, in order to correct his insolence, or bring him to justice.3 Salisbury, clearly, lost a living legend when ‘the great Dowdy’ made his last exit. Impersonating the madman successfully depended, in Pearce’s clearly effective performance, on the deployment of key signs and manners. Sander Gilman has described how early visual representations of the madman included his stock accoutrements – the branch, the crown of leaves or flowers, the disarrayed clothing.4 With Dowdy it is the assumption of tatters and straw, chains and blood-stains, rattling and shouting, and the ‘dreadful hum’ of a ‘grumbling Catch’ that unmistakably identifies him as lunatic. At the same time he requires both a willing audience, in the know and sufficiently ready to participate in giving credence to this real unreal madman, and an unwilling one, sufficiently schooled in spotting the signs to be deluded into taking the unreal as real, and, presumably, sufficiently fleet of foot to make the chase worth while. Appearance, sound, insolence and apparently uncontrollable bodily energy combine to make Pearce’s playing truly ‘mad’.


Nevertheless, Pearce, now safely laid to rest, could be described as ‘a pacifick and civil man’, ‘pacifick’ enough, one assumes, to bear his mace on ceremonial occasions without succumbing to the temptation to run amok through the streets of Salisbury, and ‘civil’ enough to impose plausibly upon his terrified victims and dupe them into the performance of a second act. The issue here, of course, is how far the desire and ability to impersonate insanity is compatible with actually being sane. Without suggesting that David Garrick, for example, by common consent the most stunningly effective King Lear on the eighteenth-century stage, had to have a strong streak of the insane about him in order to ‘be’ so convincingly insane, it does become a valid question where an actual Pearce, albeit as a non-actual Dowdy, makes a quite voluntary choice to ‘become’ the madman in his leisure hours simply for sport. Was Dowdy mad for wishing to seem mad, or was he sane for knowing how best to seem insane? The same questions arose in various forms when eighteenth-century commentators thought about such stage characters as Hamlet and Edgar. Dowdy is dead and gone, and probably would have left us little wiser. Edgar and Hamlet are different matters. A good deal of ‘mad’ drama and dramatic performances dating from the eighteenth century do follow the Dowdy formula in some or most respects, given that the language spoken will usually have been of a more sophisticated, or at least scripted, kind than moanings and the humming of a ‘grumbling Catch’. I have written elsewhere about Nicholas Rowe’s The Tragedy of Jane Shore, first produced in 1714, where Alicia in her madness is represented ‘in disorder’ speaking wildly – ‘And see the nodding ruin falls to crush me! ‘Tis fallen, ‘tis here! I feel it in my brain!’ – while Jane herself, ‘her hair hanging loose on her shoulders, and barefooted’ comments in dismay, ‘Alas! she raves; her brain, I fear, is turned.’ 5 Rowe’s was a widely admired and frequently performed play, right through the century, as was Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved from 1682, again for its protrayal of female insanity. Here it is Belvidera, driven mad by the suicide on the scaffold of her lover Jaffeir, who enters ‘distracted’ for the final scene, to the sound of soft music and ‘led by two of her women’. Her appearance is matched by her language, repetitive, obsessive and peripheral to the catastrophe: Come come come come come, nay, come to bed! Prithee my love. The winds! hark how they whistle! And the rain beats: oh, how the weather shrinks me!


You are angry now, who cares? pish, no indeed. Choose then, I say you shall not go, you shall not; Whip your ill nature; get you gone then!6 Otway’s predilection for repetition, and for echoing Shakespeare in some of his bolder effects, was mocked by Fielding nearly fifty years later in his burlesque, The Tragedy of Tragedies; or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, where Fielding’s line ‘Oh, Tom Thumb! Tom Thumb! wherefore art thou Tom Thumb?’7 has its presence in this cornucopia of overblown tragic diction justified by Fielding’s note citing Otway’s ‘Oh! Marius, Marius: wherefore art thou Marius?’ from the play of the same name. In similar vein, Belvidera laments in mad desperation the disappearance of Jaffeir’s ghost, along with that of his co-conspirator Pierre: Vanished! Here they went down; oh, I’ll dig, dig the den up. You shan’t delude me thus. Ho, Jaffeir, Jaffeir, Peep up and give me but a look. I have him! I’ve got him, father: oh, how I’ll snuggle him! My love! my dear! my blessing! help me, help me! They’ve hold on me, and drag me to the bottom. Nay – now they pull so hard – farewell – [She dies.8 She dies, a great, though not a living, example of sudden death by language. But other writers also attracted attention, though not necessarily so lasting, for their portrayal of different species of stage insanity. One that particularly intrigued Steele, writing in The Spectator, was Nathaniel Lee. Addison in a much earlier paper, No. 39, for Saturday 14 April 1711, had written of how well Lee was ‘turned for Tragedy’, but that he suffered from a lack of moderation. At his best there is ‘a Simplicity in the Words, that outshines the utmost Pride of Expression’ and his writing can be ‘inexpressibly beautiful’ through being ‘natural’, ‘soft’ and yet ‘passionate’. His thoughts, however, are ‘frequently lost in such a Cloud of Words, that it is hard to see the Beauty of them: There is an infinite Fire in his Works, but so involved in Smoak, that it does not appear in half its Lustre.’ Lee, instead of ‘favouring the Impetuosity of his Genius’, would have been a better tragic writer if ‘he had restrained it, and kept it within its proper Bounds’.9 Given that keeping within bounds was ultimately what The Spectator was all about,


we should not be surprised at this judgement, but while his description of Lee, who had been dead since 1692, hovers, in terms and in sentiment, around the fact of Lee’s madness and confinement a few years after his most famous play, The Rival Queens or The Death of Alexander the Great, it is left to Steele, in paper No. 438, for Wednesday 23 July 1712, to make the connection explicit. He has been discussing the unforgivable indulgence of giving way to excess passion, and turns to Lee as providing an example of this in The Rival Queens: ‘If you would see Passion in its Purity, without Mixture of Reason, behold it represented in a mad Hero, drawn by a mad Poet.’ He goes on to quote from Act III, scene i: Nat. Lee makes his Alexander say thus: Away, begon, and give a Whirlwind Room, Or I will blow you up like Dust! Avaunt; Madness but meanly represents my Toil. Eternal Discord! Fury! Revenge! Disdain and Indignation! Tear my swoln Breast, make way for Fire and Tempest. My Brain is burst, Debate and Reason quench’d; The Storm is up, and my hot bleeding Heart Splits with the Rack, while Passions, like the Wind, Rise up to Heav’n, and put out all the Stars.10 The linguistic characteristics here are similar to those given to Alicia, to Belvidera, and to a variety of other deranged stage characters, with overstatement and the weather colluding in lines of irregular length and broken rhythms to produce the equivalent of a mentality confused and out of control. What is unusual about Steele’s remarks, though, is that somehow such language is believed to have come naturally to Lee. Being ‘a mad Poet’, he implies, Lee was automatically in tune with the ‘mad Hero’. Personated insanity is unfeigned when the poet is himself known to have been insane. The ‘Reason’ that would in saner writers have shaped the fashioning of mad talk for its representation on the stage is missing here: what we have is unadulterated madness in all ‘its Purity’, ‘madness itself’ that a Foucault might have killed to find. It is an extraordinary assumption, and one that appears to confuse the state of being mad (if indeed Lee was mad when he wrote the third act of The Rival Queens) with the ability to represent madness effectively. Dowdy was not mad, officially, but Lee was. Does that make Dowdy’s performance sane, or Lee’s writing insane? Or both? Steele, it


has to be said, has already unwittingly undermined even this claim about Lee by misattributing the speech, which, as Gregory Smith pointed out many years ago, is spoken not by Alexander, ‘a mad Hero’, but by Roxana, a very cross heroine who was Alexander’s first wife. Lee might indeed have been mad when he wrote these lines, but he was not a mad woman. Lee, Otway and Rowe were in their turn popular and influential and provided roles of substance in which actors and, in particular, actresses might make their name. Indeed, Otway is said to have written the role of Belvidera specifically for Elizabeth Barry, for whom he had a lasting and unreturned passion. But by far the most prominent exponent of tragic madness for the English stage throughout the period was, of course, Shakespeare, and particularly the Shakespeare of King Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth. In all three plays are models, both male and female, that aroused compassion, poetic appreciation, a sense of moral outrage or of moral justice, and allowed full rein to the dramatic possibilities of being mad. ‘There is nothing more beautiful than Lear’s first Starts of Madness,’ wrote Charles Gildon in his Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare, published in 1710 as part of his edition of the plays, ‘when Edgar comes out in the Habit of a Madman – Didst thou give all to thy Daughters? And art thou come to this?’11 ‘The madness of LEAR, the wild confusion of MACBETH preparing the murder of DUNCAN, and the singular distress of TIMON upon his fall, are copied only from nature’, claimed Edward Burnaby Greene in his Critical Essays, published in 1770. ‘SHAKESPEARE’S pen is the magician’s wand commanding the soul of his reader’.12 And William Richardson, in his Essays on Shakespeare’s Dramatic Characters, published in 1783, declared that the ‘strongest feature in the mind of Hamlet, as exhibited in the tragedy, is an exquisite sense of moral conduct’. The ‘melancholy’, on the other hand, ‘which throws so much gloom upon him in the course of the play appears to his former friends and acquaintance altogether unusual and unaccountable’.13 Equally, a succession of talents flourished in the acclaim afforded for their performances in these classic roles portraying mad men and women, including Thomas Betterton as Hamlet – ‘I cannot leave Hamlet without taking notice of the Advantage with which we have seen this Master-piece of Shakespeare distinguish itself upon the Stage by Mr. Betterton’s fine Performance of that Part’, as Nicholas Rowe himself wrote in 170914 – Susanna Cibber as Lady Macbeth, James Barry as King Lear, Henry Mossop as Macbeth, Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth, who performed the revolutionary act of putting down the candle in order to wash her hands during her sleep-walking, thereby


inserting a small gesture of normality during a favourite scene of derangement and in doing so changing the course of performance history,15 and David Garrick in almost everything, but pre-eminently in Lear during the first part of his career, and Hamlet during the latter. The Shakespeare that was seen, however, was not of course the Shakespeare that we see now, or even always the Shakespeare that was read. Major eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare, such as Lewis Theobald’s, Pope’s, Johnson’s and, in 1790, Edmond Malone’s, were precisely that, editions with a concern for textual accuracy compatible with making sense of the verse. What was acted could be very different, and in those differences lies an understanding not only of what eighteenth-century audiences wanted to see on the stage, but what they expected to be asked to make of madness. King Lear, in fact, is the most conspicuous example, with Nahum Tate’s version, first performed at the Duke’s Theatre in London in 1681, holding the stage virtually unchallenged throughout the century, though with occasional attempts at partial restorations, until William McReady’s production at Covent Garden in 1838 finally brought much of Shakespeare back together. Tate, as is well-known, not only shortened the play and rewrote large sections of it, but reworked the plot to produce a love relationship between Cordelia and Edgar, one that was declared by Edgar at the very beginning of the play, cut the Fool completely, and arranged for a happy ending where Lear – saved along with Cordelia from execution by the timely arrival of Edgar – is restored to complete sanity and to his throne, and Edgar is married to Cordelia, with whom he is to rule the kingdom as joint rulers upon Lear’s voluntary abdication. Lear himself is portrayed as far more sinned against than sinning, while Goneril and Regan, together with Edmund, are necessarily cast as even more blackly responsible for the tragic events (such as they now are) than in the Shakespearian original. As Christopher Spencer puts it, ‘The action leads up to the moral that “Truth and Vertue shall at last succeed” in spite of “Storms of Fortune,” a statement that applies to the Lovers, but that has little to do with Lear.’16 When Edgar at the conclusion of Tate’s Act V, in a rare moment of coincidence with the original, ends the play that has become King Lear, his words do indeed indicate a profound dilemma that seventeenth and, especially, eighteenth-century audiences found themselves in with regard to Shakespeare and particularly in respect of what were recognised as his greatest tragedies. With Gloster led in to be reconciled to his ‘pious Son’, with Cordelia declaring herself ‘o’er-paid For all my sufferings past’, and with Lear himself preparing to retire with Kent ‘to some cool Cell’ where they will ‘gently pass our short reserves of


Time In calm Reflections on our Fortunes past’, it is Edgar, now husband and co-monarch, who steps forward to pronounce the moral. Our drooping Country now erects her Head, Peace spreads her balmy Wings, and plenty Blooms. Divine Cordelia, all the Gods can witness How much thy Love to Empire I prefer! Thy bright Example shall convince the World (Whatever Storms of Fortune are decreed) That Truth and Vertue shall at last succeed. [Exeunt Omnes.17 The dilemma was, quite simply, what was the moral tragedy. Some plays were unproblematic. Macbeth, for example, presented a clear case of moral decline followed, after a suitably bloody period, by appropriate application of justice. The madness of Lady Macbeth was particularly happy in this respect. Her madness, asserts the anonymous ‘T. W.’, writing in the British Magazine in 1767, being occasioned by her stings of conscience, is perfectly in nature and has in it something shocking, which greatly increases the horror raised by the sanguinary catastrophe of the piece. The circumstance of her constantly rubbing her hand in order to wipe out the stain made by Duncan’s murder, is admirably imagined; and her exclamation, ‘Who would have thought that there was so much blood in the old man’s body!’ is a most natural representation of the state of mind racked with the consciousness of having committed murder.18 Macbeth, even in misquotation, combines morality with beauty and simplicity so effectively, the mental torments of its principal characters are so terrible yet so just, that few contemporary writers could envisage its equal in terms of what tragedy ought properly to be. William Guthrie, writing in 1747 in his Essay upon English Tragedy, even speculates what writers of his own time might make of the perfection of Macbeth – indeed, what they might make of the simple beauty of Otway: Were a modern poet to express that simple yet fine sentiment of Otway, ‘O I could love thee, ev’n in madness love thee!’ how would he disdain the baldness of expression! how would he dissect and define, first, the lady’s worthiness to the object of love,


then love itself; and ten to one but he would even step into Bedlam, that he might entertain us with a more lively picture of madness and its symptoms! Were he to express the horrors of the Lady Macbeth how would he smile, supposing he had never read the play, if he were told it could be done beyond what ever poet executed or imagination conceived, only by rubbing the back of her hand and repeating a deal of wild stuff in her sleep! With him all must be great, all must be philosophy, all must be poetry.19 In fact, so simple and clear was Macbeth that it alone amongst the great Shakespearian tragedies was able to sustain an additional mad scene. The version by William Davenant, first printed in 1668 and probably acted from around 1663, which held the stage for at least the first half of the eighteenth century, has, among other changes, a scene, Act IV, scene iv, in which Lady Macbeth appears haunted to distraction by the ghost of Duncan. ‘His fatal Ghost is now my shadow’, she reveals to her husband, ‘and pursues me Where e’re I go.’ She adds the note of mental awareness: ‘I stand so high that I am giddy grown. A mist does cover me, as Clouds the tops Of Hills. Let us go down apace.’20 Sometimes Shakespeare was just so good that he needed only a touch more madness and he would be there. Hamlet and Lear, however, were more problematic, not only too long but seriously muddied by apparently unjust story lines and inadequately rewarded characters. The unjust might die horribly, but so did the just, or what audiences seemed to want to have interpreted as the just, and that was simply not moral enough, certainly not for art. Hamlet himself was one stumbling block, not least in his madness, which could only satisfactorily be explained as entirely feigned in the pursuit of a higher end. This had the benefit of justifying his otherwise unacceptable treatment of Ophelia. Her madness, meanwhile, was wholly unsatisfactory, being both indecently expressed and unjustly suffered. George Stubbes makes the dilemma explicit in Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, published in 1736, in that his valiant justifications of the play as possessing the requisites of tragedy inevitably articulate what Stubbes and his contemporaries found inconvenient about it. There is ‘not one Scene’, he argues, ‘but what some way or other conduces towards the Denoüment of the Whole’, and even ‘Laertes going to France, and Ophelia’s Madness, however trivial they may seem (and however much soever I dislike the Method of that last mentioned) are Incidents absolutely necessary towards the concluding of all, as will appear to any one upon due Consideration.’


‘This all holds good’, he continues, ‘notwithstanding, that it is my Opinion, that several of the Scenes might have been altered by our Author for the better.’ Hamlet remains, however, a truly moral tragedy, or nearly so, if Addison is allowed to come to the aid of ‘our Poet’ in this instance: In short, Vice is punished in this excellent Piece, and thereby the Moral Use of it is unquestionable. And if Hamlet’s Virtue is not rewarded as we could wish, Mr. Addison’s Maxim ought to satisfy us, which is this, ‘That no Man is so thoroughly Virtuous as to claim a Reward in Tragedy, or to have Reason to repine at the Dispensations of Providence; and it is besides more Instructive to the Audience, because it abates the Insolence of Human Nature, and teaches us not to judge of Men’s Merit by their Successes.’ And he proceeds further, and says, ‘that though a virtuous Man may prove unfortunate, yet a vicious Man cannot be happy in a well wrought Tragedy.’ ‘This last Rule is well observed here’,21 concludes Stubbes, evidently in some relief. Now for Titus Andronicus. The line to be kept, between what is natural and what is moral, between what partakes sufficiently of the real and what will qualify as art, is a fine one indeed. Not every great writer of the past had been able to tread it all the time, yet the greatest models were great by virtue of treading that line so delicately. James Beattie is precise, writing in On Poetry and Music, as They Affect the Mind, published in 1776. Poetry, he writes, is an imitation of human action; and therefore poetical characters, though elevated, should still partake of the passions and frailties of humanity. If it were not for the vices of some principal personages the Iliad would not be either so interesting or so moral: – the most moving and most eventful parts of the Æneid are those that describe the effects of unlawful passion; – the most instructive tragedy in the world, I mean Macbeth, is founded in crimes of dreadful enormity.22 Homer, as we have seen, was presented to the eighteenth century reborn, his greatness unstained by thuggery, his translator’s anguish resolved through the strategic representation of a heroic madness finally restored to reconciliation and sanity. Shakespeare, except where he was unquestionably perfect, was in need of a similar recreation, a similar sanitizing for a more cultivated age. But where the solution to


Pope’s dilemma with Homer and The Iliad was found in carefully immersing his hero in more and more madness, the redemption of Hamlet and, especially, of King Lear, was to rescue the plays through the deployment of less and less. ‘Lear’s real, and Edgar’s pretended Madness’, wrote Tate in the dedication to his History of King Lear: have so much of extravagant Nature (I know not how else to express it) as cou’d never have started but from our Shakespear’s Creating Fancy. The Images and Language are so odd and surprizing, and yet so agreeable and proper, that whilst we grant that none but Shakespear cou’d have form’d such Conceptions, yet we are satisfied that they were the only Things in the World that ought to be said on those Occasions.23 The first meeting between Lear and Edgar in his role as Poor Tom was indeed much praised, and was retained by Tate in much the same form as the original. It remained a prized scene throughout the succeeding century, an encounter between real and feigned madness – or rather, given that we are discussing performance here, between feigned real and feigned feigned, a meeting point, therefore, between acting the self and acting a performance of the self. The ‘beautiful distinction he has made between real and affected madness’, writes Francis Gentleman in 1770, in his The Dramatic Censor, ‘cannot be sufficiently admired’. Among ‘many other matchless beauties which occur in this scene’ is the opportunity taken by Shakespeare to construct feigned mad and really mad dramatic language: In all Edgar’s flights we may plainly perceive a laboured diffusion of ideas, a methodical strain of images, and a studied wildness, adverting to no particular leading subject. In the execution of this our author has been amazingly successful, beyond imagination luxuriant. From Lear we have not a syllable but directs either to the original cause of his frenzy, or collaterally alludes to it.24 Moreover, it is exactly that linguistic fidelity to what eighteenthcentury commentators liked to take as ‘the original cause’ of Lear’s frenzy that provides a crucial plank in the moral interpretation of the play so strategically enabled by Tate’s adaptation. For King Lear to be a properly moral tragedy Lear himself cannot be portrayed as a domestic tyrant already mad with self-regard. A benevolent but mistaken old man, his ‘frenzy’ will derive not from within but from the treatment


he receives, outrageously, by his ungrateful daughters. ‘Tell me, Fellow, didst thou give all to thy Daughters?’ asks Tate’s Lear in his first address to Edgar, changing only peripherally Shakespeare’s ‘Didst thou give all to thy daughters? And art thou come to this?’25 And a few lines later, ‘Have his daughters brought him to this pass? Cou’dst thou save Nothing? didst thou give ‘em All?’ and on through much of Shakespeare’s subsequent scene, still harping on his daughters, though with the significant omission of Lear’s sudden and violent uttering of a curse on Edgar’s supposed daughters: ‘Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air Hang fated o’er men’s faults light on thy daughters.’26 This Lear, certainly in his madness, is spotless, and widely praised for being so. ‘Now when the Poet has once work’d up the Minds of his Audience to a full Compassion of the King’s Misfortunes,’ writes a preDunciad Lewis Theobald in the Censor, No. 10, for 2 May, 1715, ‘to give a finishing Stroke to that Passion he makes his Sorrows to have turn’d his Brain.’ Moreover, and specifically, ‘It may be worth observing that there is one peculiar Beauty in this Play, which is that throughout the whole the same Incidents which force us to pity Lear are Incentives to our Hatred against his Daughters.’ The madness itself, meanwhile, has been ‘wrought’ by Shakespeare ‘with such Spirit and so true a Knowledge of Nature that he has never yet nor ever will be equall’d in it by any succeeding Poet’.27 Equally, Arthur Murphy, in the Gray’s-Inn Journal in 1754, is robust in his interpretation of Lear’s madness: His sudden apostrophe to his daughters must draw tears from every eye: O Regan! Goneril! Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all. The break has a fine effect. O! that way madness lies – let me shun that – No more of that – As yet the perturbation of his mind does not seem fixed to a point. He begins to moralize, but still with a view to his own afflictions. Edgar enters disguised like a madman, and this seems to give the finishing stroke. Lear’s first question is, ‘have his daughters brought him to this pass? couldst thou save nothing? didst thou give them all?’ Here we have the first touch of fixed madness in the play. Will


the resignation of his sceptre or the mere loss of regal power be any longer urged as the cause of Lear’s distraction?28 Some, like Samuel Foote, did continue to urge precisely that,29 but as minority voices. Lear as author of his own distraction was not to be tolerated, still less as principal architect of his own undoing. Were he culpable, he could not survive, and unlike Macbeth, or Lady Macbeth, Lear was more sinned against than sinning, more driven mad than mad through guilt. Moreover, for Lear to be an agent in his own suffering would begin to exonerate the daughters. Tragedy would become muddied and disastrously less moral. Tate’s History of King Lear is, as Thomas Cooke declared in 1731, the model tragedy, ‘because almost every Character in that Play is an Instance of Virtue being rewarded and Vice punished’.30 King Lear, more than any other tragedy, represented Shakespeare in need of rescue from himself. Francis Gentleman is quite clear on the matter when comparing Tate’s Lear and the version produced by George Colman in 1768 with Shakespeare’s original: The person who enters upon dramatic alteration, without being a slave to his original, should nearly as possible confine himself to pruning luxuriances, correcting irregularity, rationalizing bombast, and elucidating obscurity; cautious of adding, unless where unavoidable gaps are made and connection consequently wanting. It is most allowable that SHAKESPEARE’S King Lear very much wanted such assistance as we have mentioned.31 Gentleman echoes what Tate himself had written in his dedication, which was addressed to ‘My Esteemed FRIEND Thomas Boteler, Esq’: ‘I found the whole to answer your Account of it, a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht; yet so dazling in their Disorder, that I soon perceiv’d I had seiz’d a Treasure.’ The string he found to Shakespeare’s unsorted ‘Jewels’, the ‘assistance’ that Gentleman diagnosed as so glaringly wanting, was the love relationship ‘betwixt Edgar and Cordelia, that never chang’d word with each other in the Original’. Where there was silence there is to be love, a love that explains, happily, so much left unexplained by Shakespeare: This renders Cordelia’s Indifference and her Father’s Passion in the first Scene probable. It likewise gives Countenance to Edgar’s Disguise, making that a generous Design that was before a poor Shift to save his Life. The


Distress of the Story is evidently heightned by it; and it particularly gave Occasion of a New Scene or Two, of more Success (perhaps) than Merit. Cordelia and Edgar now move centre stage, not only in carrying the plot forward but in terms of motivation, while remaining constant in their purity – improved in purity, in Edgar’s case, who has exchanged a shabby regard for his own skin for the selfless exposure to dangers and a clear-sighted constancy. With everything to gain, including the lastminute rescue, the play can progress to the moral of its last lines, fittingly spoken, as above, by Edgar, and with the sure prospect of survival, for, as Tate reasons, ‘This Method necessarily threw me on making the Tale conclude in a Success to the innocent distrest Persons: Otherwise I must have incumbred the Stage with dead Bodies, which Conduct makes many Tragedies conclude with unseasonable Jests.’32 This, then, is the context for providing King Lear with less and less madness. Madness, apparently, was all very well in its place, all very well over a few drinks in the The Three Lions, or a decent interval after the bloody murder of your monarch, or even out on the heath where no one much goes, but not in a court, or on the throne, or while carrying the mace. Lear is allowed his moment in the rain, but only on condition that he regains his senses before he comes in. Even while mad, he is not to have free Shakespearian rein, not to be too rude about his daughters, and not to talk to strange Fools. Tate’s madness is madness severely sanitised, made presentable as a ‘Jewel’ fit for the English stage. The first remarks to ‘mad’ Edgar are crucial in making madness moral, but then so is the setting for those remarks – an Edgar who is ‘Poor Tom’ for a reason, a Fool whose absence liberates the play from much of its distortive-reflective multiplicity, as well as its capacity for double entendre. The mad scenes in Shakespeare’s King Lear are at the very core of its encounter with moral and mental and elemental chaos. It is William Richardson, late in the eighteenth century, who observes of madness in Lear (and he is writing of Shakespeare’s, obviously, not Tate’s): It is sometimes observed that there are three kinds of madness displayed in this performance: that of Lear, that of Edgar; and that of the Fool. The observation is inaccurate. The madness of Edgar is entirely pretended; and that of the Fool has also more affectation than reality. Accordingly, we find Lear for ever dwelling upon one idea, and reconciling every thing to one appearance. The storms and tempests were not his daughters. The gleams of reason that shoot


athwart the darkness of his disorder render the gloom more horrid. Edgar affects to dwell upon one idea; he is haunted by fiends; but he is not uniform. The feeling he discovers, and compassion for the distresses of Lear, breaking out in spite of his counterfeit, render his speeches very often pathetic. The Fool, who has more honesty than understanding, and more understanding than he pretends, becomes an interesting character by his attachment to his unfortunate master.33 Edgar’s madness, certainly, is ‘pretended’, just as much as the madness of ‘the great Dowdy’, but the questions that such a pretence arouses make it equally ambiguous in both cases whether the pretence is entire. A predisposition to act mad is implicit in both performances, not least because both performances are insufficiently explained, and are certainly not entered upon in pursuit of ‘a generous Design’. Equally, the Fool above all characters is the very epitome of ambiguity, nameless, ageless, linguistically opaque, awry in his straight thinking, a performer par excellence and real beyond a doubt, a professional and a fool, and one who disappears without trace. What is more, Lear himself has a layer of interest added and developed ‘by his attachment to’ this unfortunate character. There might not, as Richardson argues, be ‘three kinds of madness’ witnessed in performance in King Lear, but the capacity for madness is nevertheless triplicated in these scenes, and along with it the potential that insanity on display possesses for unloosing questions that are only latent in sane behaviour and rational language. In Shakespeare’s Lear, the mad king in company with madness, albeit professional madness, encounters madness, albeit feigned madness. Together they converse, exchanging the linguistic symptoms of their conditions, interpreting each other through the spectacles of their own disorders. Together, in the chamber that houses Act III, scene vi, they arraign Lear’s daughters, each bringing to the trial the forensic talents at their disposal – song, epigram, incoherence and abuse. The mad sit in judgement on the wicked, but the wicked are absent. The mad, however, have not only confronted, though obliquely, the putative agents of Lear’s derangement but, more critically, and far more obliquely, they have confronted each other and in doing so have met with the counterparts of their own insane, or ‘insane’, realities, or ‘realities’. It is a crisis in every way, the height of a shared distemper that ends with the disappearance of one, the Fool, the evaporation of a second, ‘Poor Tom’, and, after a further species of madness in which he


runs innocently garlanded in the lunatic’s traditional crown of nature and, compounding delusion with plausibility, fancies himself a king again, the restoration of the third to something resembling sanity. Lear, like Achilles, is at least rendered sane enough to die, though in Achilles’ case it is for the moment a death only in anticipation. In Tate’s Lear, the encounter is orientated otherwise. With no Fool and with the trial scene deleted, there is scope only for a straightforward meeting, one to one, between madness real and madness feigned, between Edgar’s ‘studied wildness’, as Francis Gentleman put it, and Lear’s morally directed monomania. Lear sees in Edgar a reflection of himself: ‘didst thou give all to thy Daughters?’ Edgar sees in Lear a cause for compassion: ‘My tears begin to take his part so much They marr my Counterfeiting’,34 which Tate imports verbatim from the trial scene in Shakespeare. Truncated and unpeopled, and with Edgar poised for the next scene in which he is to drive off ‘with his Quarter-staff’ the ruffians attempting to lay impudent hands upon Cordelia (‘What Cry was That? – ha, Women seiz’d by Ruffians? Is this a Place and Time for Villany? Avaunt ye Blood-hounds’35), Tate’s deployment of madness might achieve its moral purpose within the structure of his tragedy but it falls so far short of Shakespeare’s mutually entangling perspectives as to be virtually on a par with Ward’s tour of Bedlam, with which it is almost contemporary. In Tate, as in The Dunciad, madness meets its own apparent other self, greets it, celebrates apparent identity, and then goes about its business, Edgar to rescue maidens, Lear to his ‘Coronet of Flowers’, his ‘Wreaths and Garlands’36 and thence to the restorative powers of sleep in Act IV, scene v and the unlikely, in these dramatic circumstances, recovery of his wits, life and throne. Madness, far from being rendered complex by the seemingly chaotic coming together of discourses, is simplified to a mirror encounter in which the self sees only what it takes as the self. Lear does not go forward to crisis, yet is implausibly, in artistic terms, credited with restored sanity. Edgar goes forward only to heroics and, as Joseph Conrad put it several centuries later, ‘Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.’37 David Garrick, widely acclaimed as the supreme Lear of the century – ‘Mr Garrick in Lear is like the sun, which eclipses every other planet’, wrote an anonymous reviewer in 176238 – restored to Shakespeare a good proportion of Shakespeare in his production of 1756, with much of the first three acts put back in place. But, as Brian Vickers describes, Garrick still followed ‘the major changes of Tate: the Fool is omitted, Edgar and Cordelia have their love-affair, and the play ends with Lear,


Edgar and Cordelia alive and happily reunited’.39 Garrick as adaptor might strive for the authentic Shakespeare, but tragedy had still to be conspicuously moral and commercially acceptable to audience expectations. Garrick as actor also strove for authentic madness, reputedly visiting Bethlem itself in his preparations for the part. Theophilus Cibber, who was no neutral observer, took the opportunity to scorn him for doing so, had he in fact done so: I have been informed (I know not how true it may be, tho’ the Story is not unlikely), that when Mr Garrick first undertook the Part of King Lear he went to Bedlam to learn to act a Madman. It had not been a very improper School, perhaps, had he been to have play’d some of the low ridiculous mad Characters in The Pilgrim. But as we do not hear of any mad King being locked up there I do not readily conceive how his Visit to those elder Brothers of the Sky could answer his Purpose. One might imagine his Judgment (if he has any) might have suggested to him a considerable Difference in the Behaviour of a real King, by great Distress drove to distraction, and the Fantasque of a poor mad Taylor who, in a Kind of frolick Delirium, imagines himself a King. Tho’ the Mockery of King Cabbage might cause a Smile with our Pity, yet sure the deplorable Situation of the real Monarch would rather rive the Heart than excite Risibility. Cibber declares himself ‘at a Loss to guess what End this visit to the Palace in Moor-Fields could answer’, and continues, in echo of William Guthrie’s censure of ‘a modern poet’ writing Otway: ‘Tis probable the most striking Objects he could fix his Eye on, and the most worthy his Attention, are plac’d over the Gate to that Entrance. I imagine no one would think Shakespeare would have paid such a Visit, to have learn’t from the Medley Jargon of those unhappy Maniacs Matter to have furnished out his Scenes of Lear’s Madness.40 Cibber’s point, of course, is valid, if biased. In acting ‘real’ madness, the performer will more attend to his audience’s expectation of mad speech and behaviour than to any single specimen of the real thing. Those expectations, though, while culturally formed, and perhaps the most conspicuous manifestation of a society’s understanding of mental ‘disease’, as opposed to ‘illness’, are nevertheless adjacent, at least, to those actual examples of derangement in their midst that could so


easily be visited for an appropriate fee. Samuel Foote, like Cibber a rival actor and dramatist, was another who criticised Garrick’s portrayal of the madness of Lear: And when mad Tom is consulted as a learned Theban Lear should not, if he would be directed by me, pull his Rags, play with his Straws, or betray the least Mark of his knowing the real Man. But with great Solemnity, a contracted Brow, one Hand on Edgar’s Shoulder, his Finger on his Breast, or some Action that should denote Superiority, seem to consult him on a knotty Point: but no Sign of Equality, no Familiarity, no sitting down Cheek by Jowl; this might be a proper Representation of a mad Taylor, but by no means corresponds with my Idea of King Lear.41 He was answered, from the viewpoint of authenticity, by the anonymous author of A Letter of Compliment to the Ingenious Author of a Treatise on the Passions: This pretty Critick, I am apt to think, has never yet seen Bedlam … the Words and Actions of a Madman have seldom any kind of Connection whatsoever. It is a common Thing to observe these unhappy People, while they are learnedly entertaining you with Discourses of the highest Importance and Weight; at the same Instant employ’d in Actions of the most frivolous Nature.42 The debate about acting style, it seems, centres on whether it is worth taking the trouble to ‘step into Bedlam’. Garrick might not physically have stepped into the asylum, but in other ways he did indeed enter the mind and thought patterns of the madman in his attempts to portray convincingly Shakespeare’s mad characters. In doing so, he transformed acting. According to Arthur Murphy, whose Life of David Garrick, Esq. was published in 1801, twenty-two years after the actor’s death, Garrick did own to the influence of personal experience on his handling of the mad scenes in Lear, or at least to the observation of those close to him. ‘He was used to tell’, relates Murphy, ‘how he acquired the hints that guided him when he began to study this great and difficult part.’ One particularly affecting example was a male friend, a father: He was acquainted with a worthy man, who lived in Leman-street, Goodman’s Fields; this friend had an only daughter, about two


years old. He stood at his dining-room window, fondling the child and dangling it in his arms, when it was his misfortune to drop the infant into a flagged area, and killed it on the spot. He remained at the window screaming in agonies of grief. The neighbours flocked to the house, took up the child, and delivered it dead to the unhappy father, who wept bitterly, and filled the street with lamentations. He lost his senses, and from that moment never recovered his understanding. As he had sufficient fortune his friends chose to let him remain in his house, under two keepers appointed by Dr. Monro. The scene, continues Murphy, was frequently re-enacted by the man himself at his own window, which Garrick sometimes witnessed: Garrick frequently went to see his distracted friend, who passed the remainder of his life in going to the window and there playing in fancy with his child. After some dalliance he dropped it, and, bursting into a flood of tears, filled the house with shrieks of grief and bitter anguish. He then sat down, in a pensive mood, his eyes fixed on one object, at times looking slowly round him as if to implore compassion. The link between real madness witnessed and fake real madness performed is made explicit, not only by Murphy but, as Murphy relates it, by Garrick himself: Garrick was often present at this scene of misery, and was ever after used to say that it gave him the first idea of King Lear’s madness. This writer has often seen him rise in company to give a representation of this unfortunate father. He leaned on the back of a chair, seeming with parental fondness to play with a child, and, after expressing the most heart-felt delight, he suddenly dropped the infant, and instantly broke out in a most violent agony of grief, so tender, so affecting and pathetic that every eye in company was moistened with a gush of tears. ‘There it was,’ said Garrick, ‘that I learned to imitate madness; I copied nature, and to that owed my success in King Lear.’43 Copying nature: this is precisely what Shakespeare himself was credited with doing, sometimes, indeed, to his detriment, and Garrick, as we have seen, also had his detractors. Dr Johnson is reported as observing in company that ‘Garrick, Madam, was no declaimer’, meaning that ‘there


was not one of his own scene-shifters who could not have spoken To be, or not to be, better than he did’.44 What Johnson inadvertently testifies to, however, is Garrick’s rejection of the older (and, in fact, later) reliance on the declamatory mode of acting in favour of a more natural style, such as might be displayed in drawing rooms, and even in streets, inns and madhouses. Moreover, in performing to Murphy and company, Garrick was not giving a convincing and moving rendering of an appalling event, but of that event as it preoccupied the mind of his friend. The event that Garrick was able to capture was the repeatedly relived event, re-entered in all its horror and guilt, and in which his friend passed his existence, not the original moment when that friend moved from joyous sanity to incurable distraction. Murphy indicates just how such engagement with a state of mind entered Garrick’s stage acting: It was in Lear’s madness that Garrick’s genius was remarkably distinguished. He had no sudden starts, no violent gesticulation; his movements were slow and feeble; misery was depicted in his countenance; he moved his head in the most deliberate manner; his eyes were fixed, or, if they turned to any one near him he made a pause, and fixed his look on the person after much delay; his features at the same time telling what he was going to say before he uttered a word. During the whole time he presented a sight of woe and misery, and a total alienation of mind from every idea but that of his unkind daughters.45 Other writers, too, bear witness to what actually went on during a performance by Garrick, and particularly during his celebrated representation of mad King Lear. Thomas Wilkes, for example, writing in his 1759 publication A General View of the Stage, describes how ‘The alteration of his countenance from sensibility to madness, the foolish laugh, and indeed his whole performance of the mad part must impress every body capable of the smallest tenderness’, filling in the details of facial expression, sound and bearing in Garrick, quite apart from his delivery of the lines. ‘I never see him’, continues Wilkes, testifying to the continuing use, made famous by Garrick, of the expressive qualities of hands and eyes in the capturing and astonishing of audience attention, coming down from one corner of the Stage with his old grey hair standing, his hands expanded, and his whole frame actuated by a


dreadful solemnity but I am astounded and share in all his distresses. Nay, as Shakespeare in some different place, with elegance, observes upon another subject, one might interpret from the dumbness of his gesture. Methink I share in his calamities, I feel the dark drifting rain and the sharp tempest, with his Blow winds – ‘till you have burst your cheeks. It is here that the power of his eye, corresponding with an attitude peculiar to his own judgment and proper to the situation, is of force sufficient to thrill through the veins and pierce the hardest bosom.46 An anonymous reviewer in Murphy’s Universal Museum, while concentrating on the effects upon the listener rather than giving detail of intonation, nevertheless offers evidence of Garrick’s powers of voice and delivery: The variety of his emotions were wonderfully expressed in his speaking face: never stroke was greater than the conclusion of that scene, You think I’ll weep! This heart shall break into a thousand pieces, Before I’ll weep – O Gods, I shall go mad! There was something so moving and terrible in his speaking ‘Oh Gods! I shall go mad’, that without hearing him no idea can be formed of it. When he is shut out in the storm his soul is all agony, torment, and despair, the transitions of his passions are amazing. No, I will no more: in such a night To shut me out – Pour on, I will endure – In such a night as this: O Regan, Goneril! Your kind old father, whose frank heart gave all: O that way madness lies: let me shun it. No more of that. Finely spoke! How amazingly great he is in the mad scene, when he enters with a coronet of straw: he affects the audience by the natural manner in which he performs it.


In short, concludes the reviewer, while ‘Mrs Cibber in Cordelia was very great, as was Mr Harvard in Edgar; … Mr Garrick in Lear is like the sun, which eclipses every other planet’.47 There were, of course, those to whom his style was unacceptable. William Shirley, himself a playwright, deplored both his bearing and delivery, putting the latter down, implausibly, to his lack of ‘powers’ which, he says, often fail him in the flow of elocution, insomuch that he is forced to make restings in utterance where no stops are to be found in his authors. To a consciousness of this deficiency may be owing his rarely attempting of sublime characters; and which, when he does attempt, it may be observed that he never succeeds in them. He is neither graceful in his treading of the stage or his bodily deportment; he uses abundance of false action, such as moulding the habit of his stomach, catching at and grasping the side of his robe; is mean in his approaches of love, and often aukwardly embarrassed with his hat. He frequently clap-traps in false pauses, stammerings, hesitations and repetitions; and uses pantomime tricks in affected agitations, tremblings and convulsions; he over-agonizes dying, and many ways debases his own excellencies to extort applause from the injudicious by methods that are offensive to the true judges of his art.48 John Hill, writing eight years earlier in 1750, had made similar points, criticising in particular Garrick’s lack of dignity on the stage and his inability, therefore, to portray Lear as a mad king. He ‘robs us of the king in Lear’, says Hill: Even in the mad scenes we know from another player’s manner of conducting them that the majesty of the monarch may be kept up amidst the wildest sallies of the frantic lunatic; but surely the best friends of Mr Garrick will not dispute with us that in this whole part of the play he looks as like a mad anything else, as a mad king. Shakespeare has every where kept up Lear’s remembrance of his regal state, even in his utmost ravings; he introduces him with the ornaments of royalty about him, tho’ made of weeds and straw, and makes him remember that he is every inch a king. But ‘tis Shakespeare only, not the actor in the case that does it: even when this player says, When I do stare, see how the subject quakes… .


The judicious observer, tho’ pleased with the just emphasis laid on the words, tho’ charmed with the spirit with which they are spoken, yet cannot but observe that they are not deliver’d with a kingly majesty. They seem rather the flights of a man whose madness made him fancy himself a monarch, than of one who ever really was so.49 Being a successful ‘mad any thing else’ wearing the accoutrements of majesty, and treated as a king by those other characters present – here, Edgar and the blind Gloster – might well be regarded as an effective dramatic portrayal of madness, particularly from one who had made a point of studying the ways of madness in anywhere but a courtly context. If Garrick played authenticity, it was that very fact that could upset where it could also bring admiration. Shirley’s objections are expressions of irritation with a more natural mode of delivery from one who was ‘no declaimer’. Hill’s concluding remark might equally be testimony to the accuracy of Garrick’s portrayal as an actor of something deeply disturbing at the heart of madness, the fluidity between what is and what is believed to be. Arthur Murphy, writing in the London Chronicle in 1758, long before undertaking his Life of David Garrick, makes an intriguing observation, indicative of Garrick’s ability to occupy ambiguity, his mastery of the rhythms of motion in order to render himself apart, in an in-between world that is not quite real and not quite unreal: ‘I cannot help observing in this place that there is hardly one performer upon either theatre that knows how to stand still, except Mr Garrick.’50 Garrick, playing mad or playing sane, was in a space of his own. Garrick was not only immensely popular but, by most accounts, was singularly effective in engaging the emotions of his audiences, whether it be by voice, gesture, eye, or the co-ordination of all these in a more natural mode of acting. James Boswell went to see him as Lear on Thursday 12 May, 1763: I went to Drury Lane and saw Mr Garrick play King Lear. So very high is his reputation, even after playing so long, that the pit was full in ten minutes after four, although the play did not begin till half an hour after six. I kept myself at a distance from all acquaintances, and got into a proper frame. Mr Garrick gave me the most perfect satisfaction. I was fully moved, and I shed abundance of tears.51 Acting, of course, is the epitome of feigning, of the fake, the ersatz: it is all effects, wholly dependent on audience impression, achieved through technique, manipulation and theatrical sleight of hand. No other cultural


form, before the development of film, is so utterly the slave to illusion and to its willing acceptance. Yet through this fluid and impermanent mode there has emerged a means of rendering insanity, in the hands of the most celebrated actor of his day, that brought it home to the hearts and minds of an audience in a way that recreated epic, moral satire and comic novel could not. Other forms, and no doubt other actors, played their part in the accumulated injustice to the insane that characterised, certainly in the eighteenth century, art forms and artistic expression, but, judging by many of those who saw him, Garrick brought something different to his portrayal of mad characters: authenticity. Andrew Harper, a military surgeon who published A Treatise on the Real Cause and Cure of Insanity in 1789, a year before his death, saw the role of the medical man in cases of insanity as rather an attender and enabler than a prescriber or enforcer. He deplored confinement and intrusion, believing that the mad mind, carefully watched over and followed through the stages of its derangement, would at last heal itself. He speculates: If it were possible to give full scope to the extravagant humours and excentric vagaries of incipient Insanity, I can conceive it very probable that the mind would pursue the fantastic delusion, through the path of distracted ideas, till the powers of mental action being spent, and the corporal system materially changed, the tumultuary motions would consequently cease, and the calm serenity of established reason resume its natural influence.52 To read John Shebbeare, subsequently an acquaintance of Boswell, describing in 1755, in his Letters on the English Nation, Garrick as King Lear is to begin to appreciate the possibility of emulating Harper’s ideal physician through the medium of drama, and in particular through the sensitive portrayal of insanity moving convincingly through the stages of its derangement: As the madness advances in the character of Lear it increases in the action and expression of the player. You scarce see where he first begins, and yet find he is mad before Kent says I fear’d ‘twould come to this; his wits are gone. It steals so gradually and imperceptibly, the difference grows like a colour which runs on from the lightest to the darkest tint, without


perceiving the shades but by comparing them at different parts of the whole. When he enters mad in the fourth act, with mock ensigns of majesty on him, thro’ this whole scene that which the poet has marked so strongly the player has also preserved: that satyric turn which accompanies madness arising from wrongs is inimitably conceived by the poet and sustained by the player; that vague and fugitive manner of pronouncing, mixt with sarcastic touches of expression, is truly exhibited. And as in the poet’s writings so in the player’s behaviour, the king is never one moment forgotten: it is royalty in lunacy. The recovery, finally, is as fully engaged with as the decline, with, like Boswell, the ultimate accolade of a weeping spectator: When a mind exhausted by its former wildness recovers, nothing is so weak and vacillating: the unornamented simplicity of Lear’s words, therefore, has more sublimity and pathos than all the powers of figure and metaphor could impart to them. And as it was imagined by Shakespeare it is spoken by Mr Garrick: my tears have ever testified this approbation.53 For Shebbeare and for Boswell, at least, all the illusions have come together to produce an unquestionably real theatrical experience. Fielding takes this reality one step further and into comedy in Tom Jones when Partridge, whom we saw earlier convincing himself, erroneously, of the derangement of Tom, is taken by Tom, Mrs Miller and her daughter to see Garrick as Hamlet. The point of the episode is precisely Partridge’s confusing of real and make-believe, particularly with the appearance of the Ghost to Hamlet, when Partridge gave that Credit to Mr. Garrick … and fell into so violent a Trembling, that his Knees knocked against each other. Jones asked him what was the Matter, and whether he was afraid of the Warrior upon the Stage? ‘O la! Sir,’ said he, ‘I perceive now it is what you told me. I am not afraid of any Thing; for I know it is but a Play: And if it was really a Ghost, it could do one no Harm at such a Distance, and in so much Company; and yet if I was frightened, I am not the only Person.’ ‘Why, who,’ cries Jones, ‘dost thou take to be such a Coward here besides thyself?’ ‘Nay, you may call me Coward if you will; but if that little Man there upon the Stage is not frightened, I never saw any Man frightened in my Life.’ (II, 853–4)


Partridge then follows the action and the dialogue step by step through his own commentary as Hamlet/Garrick engages with the figure from beyond the grave: ‘Ay, ay; go along with you! Ay, to be sure! Who’s Fool then? Will you? Lud have Mercy upon such Fool-Hardiness! – Whatever happens, it is good enough for you. – Follow you? I’d follow the Devil as soon. Nay, perhaps it is the Devil – for they say he can put on what Likeness he pleases. – Oh! here he is again. – No farther! No, you have gone far enough already; farther than I’d have gone for all the King’s Dominions.’ (II, 854) As a final twist, and a final compliment to his friend Garrick, Fielding has Partridge asked by Tom ‘which of the Players he had liked best’, and Partridge giving the prize unquestionably to Claudius. To the objection, from Mrs Miller, that ‘Hamlet is acted by the best Player who ever was on the Stage’, Partridge is ‘contemptuous’: ‘why’, he responds, I could act as well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a Ghost, I should have looked in the very same Manner, and done just as he did. And then, to be sure, in that Scene, as you called it, between him and his Mother, where you told me he acted so fine, why, Lord help me, any Man, that had such a Mother, would have done exactly the same. I know you are only joking with me; but, indeed, Madam, though I was never at a Play in London, yet I have seen acting before in the Country; and the King for my Money; he speaks all his Words distinctly, half as loud again as the other. – Any Body may see he is an Actor.’ (II, 856–7) Tom Jones was published in 1749. Shebbeare wrote about Garrick in 1755 and Boswell saw his Lear for the first time in 1763. By the end of the century, theatrical illusion so engaged with as to be mistakable for reality by a spectator had come full circle and entered the asylum as a recognised therapy for insanity. Pre-eminently, Joseph Mason Cox, the respected proprietor of Fishponds asylum near Bristol, recommends the treatment of delusion through a species of dramatic performance that is based on taking the delusion seriously with the intention of dispelling it, sometimes by stage effects alone, but also with the agency of human performers. ‘It


certainly is allowable’, he writes in his Practical Observations on Insanity, first published in 1806, to try the effect of certain deceptions, contrived to make strong impressions on the senses, by means of unexpected, unusual, striking, or apparently supernatural agents; such as after waking the party from sleep, either suddenly or by a gradual process, by imitated thunder or soft music, according to the peculiarity of the case, combating the erroneous deranged notion, either by some pointed sentence, or signs executed in phosphorus upon the wall of the bedchamber, or by some tale, assertion, or reasoning by one in the character of an angel, prophet, or devil.54 Other devices include conducting superficial surgery to remove imaginary impediments to eating, such as a bone, a frog or a toad, which then appears in the receptacle as if from the patient’s person; the handing about of secret documents in a patient’s presence; testing for poison a shirt of a man who believed his house-keeper was intending to kill him by this means, with the subsequent mock arrest of the house-keeper; and presenting a religious melancholic who conceived himself to be the Holy Ghost with a second gentleman, also insisting he was the Holy Ghost: ‘There is but one, and I am he; how can there be two?’ in consequence of which the patient replied ‘No; and that he himself was not the Holy Ghost, as there could not be two.’55 The madman, in this definition of therapy, is not confronted with his own madness and obliged to recognize it as insane, but is rather confirmed in it as a reality, and obliged to give it over as a no longer necessary, or no longer viable, mode of conduct: the frog has departed, the poisoner is under guard, the position of Holy Ghost is already occupied. Madness reinforced might in The Dunciad or in the moral essays represent the threat of moral disintegration, but it has a respected place in the theatre of performance therapy, its delusions no longer delusions, its symptoms not signs of being ill. Acting mad had come home. William Cowper, towards the end of his life, and still living with the conviction of his unavoidable damnation, was the subject of an elaborate attempted hoax by friends and well-wishers, specifically William Hayley and John Johnson, involving a range of eminent public figures including William Wilberforce, Beilby Porteus, the Bishop of London, and the Chief Justice Lord Kenyon. The intention was that a dream supposed to be Hayley’s, and reported in advance to Cowper, would include not only the assurance from God, through the medium


of Cowper’s own late mother, that her son would be among the elect, but also news of letters shortly to arrive from dignitaries thanking him for his poetic services to Christianity. The dream was duly reported and some of the letters duly arrived. The man who had purportedly appeared to Blake, pleading for madness, to be ‘insane always … as a refuge from unbelief’, was about to have his own special madness both endorsed and simultaneously dispelled by a stage-managed engagement with delusion on the part of some of the most solid, least Dowdy-like, holders of public office, willingly collaborating to effect if not a cure then at least a respite from ‘distracted ideas’ and enjoyment of something resembling ‘the calm serenity of established reason’. To no avail. Some of the conspirators declined the invitation to act, or at least to write, albeit in the interests of achieving sanity. Cowper, anyway, while he clearly believed many implausible things, was unlikely to accept something as transparently fake as the written evidence of God’s predictions.56 He suffered on, waiting to play his part, acting the madman that he actually was, in the inspired theatre of William Blake’s imagination.

Notes 1. Fielding, Tom Jones, I, 301 n.1. Quotations hereafter are given in the text. 2. Fielding, Tom Jones (1749), ed. Sheridan Baker, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995, p. 196 n. 2. 3. Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. Battestin and Bowers, I, 301 n. 1. 4. Sander Gilman, Seeing the Insane, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, passim. 5. Nicholas Rowe, Jane Shore (1714), ed. John Hampden, London: Dent Dutton, 1928 (1968 edn), V.i; see also Allan Ingram, The Madhouse of Language: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century, London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 86–7. Charles Churchill’s lines from The Rosciad in which he pays tribute to the effectiveness of the actress Susannah Cibber in the role of Alicia are also cited on p. 87. 6. Thomas Otway, Venice Preserved (1682), ed. Edmund Gosse, London: Dent Dutton, 1932 (1966 edn), V.ii. 7. Henry Fielding, The Targedy of Tragedies (1731), II.iii. 8. Otway, Venice Preserved, V.ii. 9. Addison and Steele, Spectator, 1.119. 10. Addison and Steele, Spectator, 3.355. 11. Charles Gildon, Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare (1710) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 2: 1693–1733, ed. Brian Vickers, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974, p. 259. 12. Edward Burnaby Greene, Critical Essays (1770) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 5: 1765–1774, ed. Brian Vickers, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, pp. 416–17.

134 Cultural Constructions of Madness in 18th Century Writing 13. William Richardson, Essays on Shakespeare’s Dramatic Characters (1783) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 6: 1774–1801, ed. Brian Vickers, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, p. 365. 14. Nicholas Rowe, Some Account of the Life, &c of William Shakespeare (1709) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 2, p. 201. 15. See Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 6, pp. 62–3. 16. Five Restoration Adaptions of Shakespeare, ed. Christopher Spencer, Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1965, p. 23. 17. Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear (1681), V.vi. 125, 144–5, 148–50 and 155–61, in Five Restoration Adaptions of Shakespeare, pp. 272–3. 18. ‘T. W.’, from The British Magazine, viii (1767) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 5, p. 289. 19. William Guthrie, An Essay upon English Tragedy (1747), in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 3: 1733–1752, ed. Brian Vickers, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, p. 200. 20. William Davenant, Macbeth, a Tragedy. With all the Alterations, Amendments, Additions, and New Songs (1668; 1674 edn), IV. iv. 27–8, in Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, p. 92. 21. George Stubbes, Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet (1736), in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 3, p. 67. 22. James Beattie, Essays. On Poetry and Music, as They Affect the Mind (1776), in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 6, pp. 151–2. 23. Tate, The History of King Lear, in Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, p. 203. 24. Francis Gentleman, The Dramatic Censor (1770) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 5, p. 401. 25. Tate, The History of King Lear, III.iii.42, in Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, p. 235; Shakespeare, King Lear, III.iv.48–9, ed. Kenneth Muir, London: Methuen, 1952 (1964 edn), p. 116. 26. Tate, The History of King Lear, III.iii.52–3, in Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, p. 236; Shakespeare, King Lear, III.iv.67–8, ed. Muir, p. 118. 27. Lewis Theobald, Censor (1715) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 2, p. 306. 28. Arthur Murphy, Gray’s-Inn Journal (1754) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 4: 1753–1765, ed. Brian Vickers, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976, p. 98. 29. See Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 4, p. 94 n. 1 and Volume 3, p. 211ff. 30. Thomas Cooke, Considerations on the Stage (1731) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 2, p. 465. 31. Francis Gentleman, The Dramatic Censor (1770) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 5, p. 398. 32. Tate, The History of King Lear, in Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, pp. 203–4. 33. William Richardson, Essays on Shakespeare’s Dramatic Characters (1783) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 6, pp. 359–60. 34. Tate, The History of King Lear, III.iii.114–15, in Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, p. 237; Shakespeare, King Lear, III.vi.60–1, ed. Muir, p. 134.

Acting the Part of a Madman 135 35. Tate, The History of King Lear, III.iv.17–19, in Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, p. 239. 36. Tate, The History of King Lear, IV.iv.70 (s.d.), in Five Restoration Adaptations of Shkespeare, p. 253. 37. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, London: Harper, 1904 (1975 edn, London: Pan Books), p. 60. Nostromo has the epigraph: ‘So foul a sky clears not without a storm.’ 38. Anon., Universal Museum (1762) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage: Volume 4, p. 468. 39. Brian Vickers (ed.), Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 4, pp. 20–1. 40. Theophilus Cibber, Two Essays on Theatrical Subjects (1756; 1759 edn) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 4, pp. 259–60. 41. Samuel Foote, A Treatise on the Passions, So far as they regard the Stage (1747) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 3, p. 214. 42. ‘J. T.’, A Letter of Compliment to the Ingenious Author of a Treatise on the Passions (n.d.), cited in Cecil Price, Theatre in the Age of Garrick, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973, p. 22. 43. Arthur Murphy, The Life of David Garrick, Esq. (1801) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 6, pp. 633–4. 44. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791), ed. R. W. Chapman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970 (1998 edn), p. 1252. 45. Arthur Murphy, Life of Garrick (1801) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 6, p. 633. 46. Thomas Wilkes, A General View of the Stage (1759) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 4, pp. 365–6. 47. Anon., Universal Museum (1762) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 4, p. 466, 468. 48. William Shirley, Herald, or Patriot-Proclaimer (1758) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 4, pp. 323–4. 49. John Hill, The Actor: A Treatise on the Art of Playing (1750) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 3, p. 372. 50. Arthur Murphy, London Chronicle (1758) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 4, p. 345. 51. James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. F. A. Pottle, London: Heinemann, 1950 (1966 edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books), p. 280. 52. Andrew Harper, A Treatise on the Real Cause and Cure of Insanity (1789), in Allan Ingram (ed.), Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century, p. 176. 53. John Shebbeare, Letters on the English Nation (1755) in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume 4, pp. 196, 197. 54. Joseph Mason Cox, Practical Observations on Insanity, London: Baldwin and Underwood, 1806 (1813 edn), p. 88. This passage is quoted and discussed by Roy Porter in Mind-Forg’d Manacles, p. 217. 55. Cox, Practical Observations on Insanity, pp. 25, 26, 28. 56. For details, see Maurice J. Quinlan, William Cowper: A Critical Life, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1953, pp. 223–6.

6 A Gendered Affliction: Women, Writing, Madness

In the eighteenth century, the realm of madness was a locus of intensity in terms of the perception of women. Characteristics that were attributed to women multiplied in degree when madness was on the horizon. If women were viewed as passive and sexualized, mad women were viewed thus to a much greater degree, for, in and of itself, madness was perceived as having the same features. As such, we may regard eighteenth-century madness as a gendered affliction: what characterized women also characterized madmen. This topic I will outline shortly with reference to the treatment of the mad in madhouses. First, however, I will delineate the connection between madness and women as it is established by one of the most famous – and, indeed, most influential – female writers of the century, Mary Wollstonecraft. In her political works, such as A Vindication of the Rights of Men from 1790, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman from 1792, and in her novels, such as The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, published in 1798, Wollstonecraft illustrates that eighteenth-century women were encouraged to adopt the same characteristics as those that were widely recognized as typifying madmen.1 By reading these different modes of Wollstonecraft’s literary output in conjunction, it becomes apparent that Wollstonecraft presents popularly conceived womanhood as an afflicted gender. I will then show how other writers, male and female, represent female madness for reasons quite different from Wollstonecraft’s. Finally, I will show how a mentally afflicted woman wrote about herself, and how this self-representation challenges the traditional representation of female madness. Near the end of William Godwin’s novel from 1794, when Caleb Williams breaks out of prison, he exclaims, ‘“Ah, this is indeed to be a man!”’.2 Godwin’s wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, might have added 136

A Gendered Affliction 137

that, in the context of the eighteenth-century perception of women, as defined through sensibility, the word ‘man’ in this quotation must be taken to refer not to humankind, but specifically to males. In short, to be free is to be a man, and to be confined is to be a woman, she maintained. Eighteenth-century woman was passive and defined by her sexuality, as all mad people were. This is the madness of eighteenth-century femininity as Wollstonecraft defines it in her attempt to illustrate the dehumanizing nature of women’s social situation. It is important to detail the way in which Wollstonecraft, often termed the mother of feminism, envisions female passivity and its causes in her time, and shows how this passivity is identifiable with madness. Wollstonecraft’s identification of sensibility as a distinctly female realm serves as the basis for her conclusions about the connection between women and madness, and these conclusions comment upon the fashion for bad nerves in women that sensibility encouraged. In his article, ‘Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility’, G. S. Rousseau draws a connection between sentiment, or sensibility, and nerve theory. He claims that literary sentiment, the eighteenth-century literary fashion that lauded the display of feelings like pity and sympathy, found its origins in nerve theory. According to Rousseau, a main focus of the study of ‘nerves, and their subsidiaries – fibres and animal spirits’, was their link to the brain, which, through this research, was newly posited as the seat of love and the soul. In turn, love and the soul are two of the main concerns of sentimental fiction.3 Indeed, the literature of sensibility adhered to the concept of the all-encompassing power of the emotions, an aspect of sentiment that Wollstonecraft grew to abhor. Finally, it was a particular trait of female delicacy to be joined to a predisposition to bad nerves, a fact that is born out by the many images of fainting and swooning ladies in eighteenth-century fiction. Helen Small recognizes ‘the eighteenth century’s primary emphasis on women as the typical sufferers from debility of nerves’,4 a view that is echoed and expanded upon by Peter Melville Logan, who confirms that ‘the nervous narrative … [was] automatically considered feminine, even when … [it was] associated with males’.5 The realm of sensibility was one of emotions, of love, and was inseparable from the feminine realm. Wollstonecraft came to acknowledge how damaging these associations were for women, but not before she had helped to concretize them through her own writing. On one hand, Wollstonecraft’s motivation in writing her early sentimental novel of 1788, Mary, A Fiction, is clear: she fulfilled her society’s view that women – or, more specifically, delicate ladies, the best kind of


women – have a tendency to indulge in sensibility; by writing Mary, then, she posited herself as just such a perfected lady. Her semi-autobiographical first novel Mary is, undeniably, sentimental, complete with a heroine, delicate of body and melancholy of mind. Here, sensibility is hailed as ‘the foundation of all our happiness’.6 Mary, the protagonist, writes this phrase in her ‘rhapsody on sensibility’, a subject that she calls this quickness, this delicacy of feeling … which expands the soul, gives an enthusiastic greatness, mixed with tenderness, when we view the magnificent objects of nature; or hear of a good action… . Softened by tenderness; the soul is disposed to be virtuous. Is any sensual gratification to be compared to that of feeling the eyes moistened after having comforted the unfortunate?7 One is inclined to ask whether or not the author is being ironic in this passage, especially in consideration of Wollstonecraft’s later attitude toward sensibility. But nowhere in the novel does she indicate her facetiousness. Thus, Wollstonecraft’s indulgence in sensibility by writing Mary is somewhat surprising. Our surprise is compounded when we consider that Mary was written after Education of Daughters, in which she roundly criticizes one of the major manifestations of sensibility in eighteenth-century society. In this work from 1786, Wollstonecraft scoffs, ‘many ladies are delicately miserable, and imagine that they are lamenting the loss of a lover, when they are full of self-applause, and reflections on their own superior refinement. Painful feelings are prolonged beyond their natural course, to gratify our desire of appearing heroines, and we deceive ourselves as well as others’.8 The author clearly criticizes sentimental fiction for its real-life implications when she suggests that delicate women believe themselves to be ‘heroines’, the fetching main characters of a popular novel. Notably, she points out the element of acting, of pretending to be sentimental, as one of the most disturbing qualities of the adherents to the culture of sensibility. Yet, in other writings, Wollstonecraft indicates that the finger of blame must also point at herself. She did, after all, indulge in the culture of sensibility by writing Mary. At one point in her letters, she seems to mock herself as she melodramatically plays the part of the swooning lady: she calls herself, with the help of Thomas Gray, a ‘lilly drooping – Is it not a sad pity that so sweet a flower should waste its sweetness on the Desart air’.9 Nor is this self-mockery misplaced. In other letters, she partakes in the very performance of sensibility that she so roundly condemns in Education of Daughters. This time with a


focus on her delicately nervous state, Wollstonecraft writes to her sister, Everina, ‘so my eyes roll in the wild way you have seen them. A deadly paleness overspreads my countenance – and yet so weak am I a sudden thought or any recollect emotion of tenderness will’ disturb her.10 Wollstonecraft strenuously insists that her correspondents form a distinct and accurate picture of her in their minds, and even tries to replicate dramatically her fluttering condition by her style of writing: ‘Even now I am suffering; a nervous head-ache torments me, and I am ready to throw down my pen – almost unable to direct it – my thoughts are frozen – I cannot thaw them – or force them to flow glibly from my pen – I shall write nothing but tautology – well – well – ‘.11 Indeed, the half-formed sentences and many dashes in this passage cause it to be read in a staccato and scattered manner that surely echoes the mental distress Wollstonecraft describes here. Moreover, she solidly links herself with the eighteenth century’s great literary – and, significantly, epistolary – representation of disturbed female sensibility through her style of writing, for Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe uses such a halting writing style in her mental distress after Robert Lovelace rapes her. In one passage of the novel from 1747–8, even the import of the heroine’s letter anticipates that of Wollstonecraft: Clarissa writes, ‘But how I ramble! I sat down to say a great deal – my heart was full – I did not know what to say first – and thought, and grief, and confusion, and (Oh my poor head!) I cannot tell what – And thought, and grief, and confusion came crowding so thick upon me … so I can write nothing at all’.12 The ‘nothing’ that these letter-writers believe they convey is, rather, something quite recognizable: through their writing they establish themselves as paragons of sensibility. In the same vein, a comment Wollstonecraft wrote in a letter soon after she arrived in Dublin to work as a governess may be understood to describe the aim of much of her correspondence: ‘you may perceive how unwel [sic] I am by my confused style’.13 She seems to revel in her role as a nervous and delicate lady, the object of everyone’s attention and pity. But Wollstonecraft was to leave off toying with sensibility, by both writing and acting it out, when she began to write her major works. In them, it is clear that the author views sensibility as a type of insanity. Writing about the evils of sentiment in her Rights of Men and French Revolution, Wollstonecraft clearly intends to suppress the influence of the phenomenon on a wide cultural level. As Janet Todd notes, at times in the former work, Wollstonecraft seems to be more intent on attacking ‘sentimental writing and habit of mind’ than the argument of Burke, whose Reflections on the French Revolution inspired Wollstonecraft’s reply,


the first of its kind (both works were published in 1790).14 In her famous work, the author describes sensibility as a culture-wide form of insanity. Indeed, Wollstonecraft writes, ‘Sensibility is the manie of the day.’15 Through this comparison, the author indicates the feeble basis of sensibility and takes the first step in developing a link between madness and sentiment, which she would continue to develop later in earnest, as I will illustrate in my discussion of The Wrongs of Woman. For the purposes of Rights of Men, though, Wollstonecraft was content to use her negative framing of sentiment in her attempt to destroy the authority of Burke’s voice in Reflections. Wollstonecraft effects this purpose in the opening paragraph of Rights of Men by figuring Burke as a trembling sentimental author who has wandered into an arena in which he is not prepared to fight: ‘I contend for the rights of men and the liberty of reason. You see I do not condescend to cull my words to avoid the invidious phrase, nor shall I be prevented from giving a manly definition of it’; nor will she wait, she swears, ‘till time has wiped away the compassionate tears which you have elaborately laboured to excite’.16 Thus, when Wollstonecraft pits herself against Burke, she pits herself against sentiment, and in doing so, she adopts a ‘manly’ tongue. As Vivien Jones puts it, Wollstonecraft attacks Burke’s ‘feminized “sentimental jargon”’.17 Wollstonecraft also denounces Burke for honing his audience’s taste for pitiful, passive objects, like the sentimental objects of pity. Robert Kaufman states the matter succinctly: She suggests that Burke in consequence has developed a notion of theater in which part of the audience’s delight … stems from the phenomenon of people being viewed in the first instance as thespians, as actors presenting and objectifying themselves for the audience’s (or the subject’s) possession or consumption.18 In short, Wollstonecraft resents Burke’s cultivation of an audience’s – the subject’s – taste for a grossly passive object. This resentment is of a piece with her condemnation of Burke’s sentiment, for, as Wollstonecraft makes clear in the following passage, the literature of sensibility, which is represented by French novels in the passage,19 cultivates the same despicable dynamic of the powerful subject over an abject other. Wollstonecraft asks: Where is the dignity, the infallibility of sensibility, in the fair ladies whom … the captive negroes curse in all the agony of bodily pain,


for the unheard of tortures they invent? it is probable that some of them, after the sight of a flagellation, compose their ruffled spirits and exercise their tender feelings by the perusal of the last imported [i.e. French] novel.20 Although ‘unmanly’ men like Burke (for Wollstonecraft applies this epithet to him often in this work) are sentimental, the sphere is a female one. Women propagate it and are the main objects of its focus. Like the slaves in the above passage, women suffer from their identification as the prime sentimental objects of pity, and, more particularly, objects whose intimate and emotional lives are laid on display for the entertainment of others. As Wollstonecraft herself shows us in her letters, though, these sentimental ladies are not unwilling entertainers, but cunning actresses who polish their roles as lovelorn spectacles. To be sure, Wollstonecraft does not merely and objectively condemn sentiment in The Rights of Men, The Rights of Woman, French Revolution, and The Wrongs of Woman. She is constrained, rather, to confessing her role in the cultivation of sentiment at the same time that she inveighs against it, for she is one of the guiltiest of women who cultivates a social taste for sentiment by having written a sentimental novel. The author illustrates her self-condemning programme most clearly in the very title of The Wrongs of Woman, which, as Anne K. Mellor points out, ‘registers an important ambiguity, signaling the novel’s concern both with the wrongs done to women and the wrongs done by women’. Mellor adds that Wollstonecraft tries to show in The Wrongs of Woman the subtle ‘wrongs that women do to themselves, unconsciously but voluntarily. The greatest of these, in her view, is an indulgence in sensibility.’21 Long before Wollstonecraft wrote The Wrongs of Woman, her last, and unfinished, work, the author had begun to attack sensibility as cruel to women. For example, Wollstonecraft asserts in The Rights of Woman that women’s ‘senses are inflamed, and their understanding neglected, consequently they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility, and are blown about my every momentary gust of feeling’.22 Women are ‘preyed’ upon, trapped by the sensibility that their culture deems suitable to them and that they hone in themselves. With her last novel, Wollstonecraft shows sensibility to be no less than a prison. The madhouse setting of The Wrongs of Woman must be understood as, at least in part, a manifestation of sentiment in order to allow the double entendre of the title its full impact. The unfair imprisonment of


the protagonist, Maria, in a madhouse marks the madhouse as a representation of male power over women, for it was Maria’s husband, Venables, who had her confined there. Such are the wrongs done to woman. Virginia Sapiro maintains that this imprisonment works not just on the personal level, between husband and wife, but on a wide cultural level when she states with reference to Wollstonecraft’s novel, ‘The gothic convention of the insane asylum/prison [represents] … the figurative and more inescapable prisons of marriage and property law’.23 Meanwhile, Eva Figes hints at the alternate reading of Wollstonecraft’s ambiguous title by asserting that the prison in The Wrongs of Woman is ‘a dark and dreadful place of the mind’, explaining that ‘Women are the victims of men, but as a result they have also become prisoners of their own minds’.24 Thus, Figes intimates the other significance of the novel’s title and setting. Amongst other things, the madhouse is a manifestation of the ‘wrongs’ done to women by women. Indeed, by indulging themselves in sentiment and encouraging other women to do the same, they become the weak ‘prey’ of sentiment.25 Wollstonecraft illustrates that the madhouse is a representation of the confinement that sentiment imposes upon women by showing in no uncertain terms that Maria fell in love with George Venables – her husband- and gaoler-to-be – because of her sentimental character. Her interest in him was first inspired by her desire to ‘see new characters … such as fancy had pourtrayed’; also, her first thoughts about his superiority to other men were not informed so much by fact, but by what she ‘imagine[d]’ about him.26 In this privileging of the imaginary, the fanciful, over a perception of reality as guided by reason, Wollstonecraft unquestionably indicates the aspect of the sentimental character that she roundly condemns in Education of Daughters.27 Moreover, it was as a result of a scene distinctively sentimental in character that Maria fell in love with Venables. Maria describes how she was caught up in a benevolent scheme worthy of Henry Mackenzie’s Harley, the man of feeling, himself. She was amassing financial and other support for the unfortunate sister of her maid, an employment that sent her into ‘rapture[s]’ of pleasure. But nothing was so pleasurable to her as the moment when Venables secretly ‘slid a guinea into … [her] hand’ for the cause: Maria notes: ‘What a revolution took place, not only in my train of thoughts, but feelings! I trembled with emotion – now, indeed, I was in love. Such delicacy, too, to enhance his benevolence! I felt in my pocket every


five minutes, only to feel the guinea; and its magic touch invested my hero with more than mortal beauty. My fancy had found a basis to erect its model of perfection on.’28 The references to sentimental literature are unmistakable: the benevolent scheme, the quiver of emotion, Venables as a ‘hero’, and the involvement of her ‘fancy’. All of these details serve to show that the madhouse in which Maria later finds herself is the confinement of sentiment, for the sentimental ‘hero’, Venables, is responsible for Maria’s incarceration there. But the question remains: why does Wollstonecraft choose a madhouse, specifically, as a place of confinement for Maria? If she meant only to indicate that women were confined by male-dominated society’s laws and views of women, then surely a simple criminal prison would have served her purpose. And Wollstonecraft is well aware of this imagistic option, as is evident from a declaration Maria makes, which refers to the famous French prison that became the focus of so much cataclysmic action during the French Revolution: Maria states, ‘Marriage had bastilled me for life’.29 Her specific choice of a madhouse as the place of confinement constitutes, on one level, her use of historical evidence in order to demonstrate man’s unfair treatment of women. As Todd asserts, in Wollstonecraft’s use of the madhouse setting, she points to a ‘real social disgrace, the easy incarceration of victims by greedy relatives’, a claim that Todd substantiates by mentioning the famous case of a vicar who was locked up for years by his wife and her lover, as well as that of Mary Daintree, who was incarcerated in a madhouse for fifteen weeks by her nephew and his wife, who, in turn, hoped to inherit Daintree’s property.30 Mellor confirms that this ‘social disgrace’ existed in Wollstonecraft’s day, but limits her discussion of it to a more gender-specific realm; she reports, ‘The use of the private madhouse by fathers and husbands to incarcerate rebellious or disobedient daughters and wives was widespread in the eighteenth century, as documented in a 1763 British parliamentary committee’s report on the medically unjustified confinement of women in such institutions’.31 Indeed, in terms of the wrongs done to women, it is likely that Wollstonecraft points specifically to historical evidence of man’s mistreatment of woman in her choice of the madhouse setting. But in terms of the wrongs that woman has taken part in inflicting on herself, the madhouse setting manifests a point that Wollstonecraft makes throughout the novel about woman’s self-imposed bond, sentiment, to wit, that it is a form of insanity.


If sentiment is a form of insanity, then the sentimental belong in a madhouse. Such is Wollstonecraft’s message, in part, by placing Maria in a madhouse. Small argues that the author challenges the sentimental affinity for the icon of the love-mad woman by placing the supposedly sane Maria in a madhouse, which shows the folly of this conventional figure, but I contend that Wollstonecraft takes her criticism of sentiment yet a step further.32 In the opening pages of The Wrongs of Woman, the author clearly identifies sentiment, and its attendant motions, as a kind of insanity. The narrator states of Maria, ‘Indulged sorrow, she perceived, must blunt or sharpen the faculties to the two most opposite extremes; producing stupidity, the moping melancholy of indolence; or the restless activity of a disturbed imagination.’33 And, to be sure, Wollstonecraft had long before maintained that all three stages – ‘indulged sorrow’, ‘moping melancholy’, and ‘disturbed imagination’ – were characteristic of lovers of sentiment. Again, in the Education of Daughters, Wollstonecraft reproves women in whom ‘Painful feelings are prolonged beyond their natural course’, those ‘ladies [who] are delicately miserable’, who ‘imagine’ things that are not true.34 Maria sees that these are the dangers of indulging in sentiment, and yet she has difficulty resisting its attraction. Even in her first vicarious contact with Darnford, her fellow inmate, Maria’s sentimental nature gains ascendancy over her will and forms her feelings for him. While borrowing some of Darnford’s books, Maria reads his marginalia with great alacrity: ‘in one of the modern pamphlets, there was a fragment left’, with political comments that agree with hers; in reading his marginalia, ‘fancy, treacherous fancy, began to sketch a character’ of him, and Maria grows disposed to love him before she has even met him. Just as she did with Venables, then, Maria ties herself to Darnford – ‘as her husband she now received him’ – even though she scarcely knows him. He is, for her, like a hero from a sentimental novel, ‘pledg[ing] … himself as her protector’. Unsurprisingly, though, the relationship does not last. Indeed, the fragmentary endings for the novel that Wollstonecraft left at her death, which must serve as a conclusion, all indicate Maria’s separation from Darnford, and several reveal his duplicitous and cruel nature. In a paragraph that ostensibly explains why Maria is attempting to ‘eradicate some of the romantic notions, which had taken root in her mind’, the narrator implies that Maria’s second fall is the result of her sentimental nature, her ‘imagination [, which was] painfully alive’, and her ‘sickly sensibility’.35 Doubtlessly as a result of this final blow of being rejected by Darnford, a situation into which Maria is led by her sentimental nature, Maria


attempts suicide in all of the potential, but ultimately abortive, endings of the novel. And, significantly, by Georgian times suicide was regarded legally, if not also culturally, as a sure sign of madness. Roy Porter reports that coroners and juries almost always found those who had committed suicide to have been insane at the time.36 The conclusion, fragmented though it may be, is nevertheless clear: the madness of sentiment breeds true madness. As I have noted, Wollstonecraft identifies female sensibility with a tendency to be controlled by one’s emotions, and to be ‘blown about by every momentary gust of feeling’ in Rights of Woman, the nonfictional counterpart of The Wrongs of Woman. Elsewhere in the work, Wollstonecraft uses this image again, that of a woman with ‘uncultivated understanding’, who is prey to ‘the wild emotions that agitate a reed over which every passing breeze has power’. Through these descriptions, Wollstonecraft shows that women of her time were generally expected to have ‘little understanding’, which made them nervous, which was tied to female sensibility, which is a kind of madness. She writes, ‘frankly acknowledging the inferiority of women, according to the present appearance of things, I shall only insist that men have increased that inferiority till women are almost sunk below the standard of rational creatures’, and, later still, she confirms that women have no reason.37 And the absence of reason was – to Wollstonecraft, as it was to many people of her day – the very definition of madness.38 Indeed, she echoes a popular view of the mad when she writes in The Wrongs of Woman of the governing ‘restless passions’ of the madman, which triumph over distinctly human reason.39 On the other hand, Wollstonecraft’s characterization of sensibility as a kind of madness appears in its most revolutionary light in consideration of this distinction between madness and reason. R. F. Brissenden has shown that some of the most influential English philosophers of the eighteenth century, such as David Hume and the Earl of Shaftesbury, argued for the link between reason and sensibility. Brissenden states that, to these philosophers, ‘the spontaneous moral responses of the individual … possess some special and general authority, that one’s better feelings are necessarily reasonable. This is what “sentiment” ultimately comes to mean – a reasonable feeling’.40 To Wollstonecraft, however, sentiment was much more closely tied to the realm of unreason. The Wrongs of Woman is widely recognized as Wollstonecraft’s attempt to fictionalize the arguments in The Rights of Woman. However, one may nonetheless contend that a close comparison of the two works is rather too presumptuous. The similarities, though,


between the strange ending of Rights of Woman and the daring setting of The Wrongs of Woman constitute Wollstonecraft’s challenge to her readers to venture the comparison. In the final section of Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft declares that woman must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that chains such a weak being to her duty. – If the latter, it will be expedient to open a fresh-trade with Russia for whips; a present which a father should always make to his son-in-law on his wedding day, that a husband may keep his whole family in order by the same means; and without any violation of justice … because he is the only being [in the marriage] who has reason.41 In short, woman’s lack of reason and, therefore, her similarity to madmen would earn her treatment with whips and chains, which were, by the late eighteenth century, still recognized as the cruel trappings of a madhouse. In short, through the connections between Rights of Woman and The Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft shows that, until women develop their reason, it will be deemed almost just that they will be denied respect, basic human rights, and the integral place in society that reasonable, fully human beings deserve. Because of the opposition of feminine sensibility to reason, women are, Wollstonecraft shows, not notable for their delicacy, but identical with madmen and similarly positioned to be treated with whips and chains. For instance, they are sensual in the same way that madmen are, according to Wollstonecraft’s perception of madness. In The Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft defines madmen as the victims of ‘the wild luxuriancy of noxious passions’.42 In this view, the author underscores a popular perception about the sexualized nature of madmen that I will outline shortly. But more importantly for the present line of argument, Wollstonecraft shows that women’s sensuality and sensibility are linked, for they are born of the selfsame circumstance, namely improper education. In Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft states that ‘in the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirements of some corporeal accomplishment’, adding that ‘genteel women are … slaves to their bodies’. The author subsequently outlines another outcome of poor education: ‘Another instance of feminine weakness of character, often produced by a confined education, is a romantic twist of the mind, which has been very properly termed sentimental’. Indeed, if knowledge is power, as Foucault has famously asserted,


then, implies Wollstonecraft, women have none. Thanks to their poor education, they are merely sensual objects. Later in the same work, Wollstonecraft outlines precisely how women are positioned when they are defined only through their sensual existences. Viewed thus, women ‘are, literally speaking, standing dishes to which every glutton may have access’.43 In short, she is a physical object designated for the consumption of others. She is made passive, she is objectified, she is preyed upon. She is as helpless and imprisoned as a madman. As John Mullan puts it, ‘the heroine [of the novel of sentiment] has to be shown to be acted upon, shown as the palpitating object of scrutiny, the property of a spectacle’. 44 Through these terms, Wollstonecraft illustrates how femininity, as it is defined through sensibility, is maddened. Yet, as I have already indicated, the equation of madness and femininity also worked the other way. No matter the gender of the afflicted subject, madness was, to a certain extent, feminizing, for its victim was made passive. Cibber’s raving brothers at the gates of Bethlem clearly spend more time on the weight machines than on their beds of straw (see Fig. 3a, b, p. 174). The same goes for the principle character of The Rake’s Progress. The fame of both of these images of madness is testament to their accuracy, if not in relation to reality, then in relation to contemporary perceptions of the insane. These representations of madness, with their unlikely physiques, indicate that the body of the mad patient was a source of fascination to the public. In consideration of their admirably muscular forms, they seem to suggest that the mad patient was viewed as the epitome of masculinity. However, the distinctly male muscularity of these famous representations of eighteenth-century madness is where their masculinity ends. In terms of the politics of perception, these figures have much more in common with women in the eighteenth century, particularly as Wollstonecraft presents the latter group. She asserts that to sexualize a person is to make that person utterly passive; according to this logic, the eighteenth-century madman lost his masculine aggression. The characteristics of his gender changed. If the madman was still a man, he was a totally different kind of man, for the traditional eighteenth-century man was not passive, and the topic of his sexuality was not open for discussion, but was an intensely personal matter. By contrast, the madman’s defencelessness and sexuality were both on display through his nudity, while his eroticized body, his muscular build, reflects one aspect of contemporary perceptions of the insane.


In popular representations, eighteenth-century madmen were usually naked. Michael Donnelly notes that these pictures made allusions to one another and thereby reinforced the stereotypical image of the madman in his ‘near-naked condition’.45 Yet, despite their limited frame of reference, these images of madness did reflect reality accurately, for madmen really were kept almost naked.46 On one hand, it is clear that the near-naked condition of the typical eighteenth-century madman reflected his keepers’ perception of him as a kind of beast, who had no need for clothes in his inhuman resistance to cold. But his nudity would necessarily have suggested his defencelessness and complete lack of privacy as well. Indeed, if women were, as Wollstonecraft claims, ‘standing dishes to which every glutton may have access’, the madman was yet another delicacy for any greedy gourmand willing to pay Bethlem’s price of admission to indulge himself in the spectacle of the madman’s shame.47 Mad writing from the turn of the nineteenth century bears witness to his plight. In his Description of the Retreat, published in 1813, asylum-keeper Samuel Tuke includes one patient’s versification of the words of another madman: A miracle, my friends, come view, A man, admit his own words true, Who lives without a soul; Nor liver, lungs, nor heart has he, Yet, sometimes, can as cheerful be As if he had the whole. His head (take his own words along) Now hard as iron, yet ere long Is soft as any jelly; All burnt his sinews, and his lungs; Of his complaints, not fifty tongues Could find enough to tell ye. Yet he who paints his likeness here, Has just as much himself to fear, He’s wrong from top to toe; Ah friends! pray help us, if you can, And make us each again a man, That we from hence may go.48 Here, the madman manifests in words his feeling of being entirely on display for all. He verbally displays his internal organs and dissects his


body in a linguistic replication of his existence in the madhouse. Notably, the mad scribe presents these words not as an interior monologue, but as a public plea. This broad audience lends verisimilitude to the poem, for it was in relation to the observing sane, the ‘friends’ of this poem, that the madman’s self was laid open thus. Other contemporary examples of mad writing indicate that the inmates of madhouses viewed their relationships with keepers and doctors in a similar way. Although he does not directly name the figure to whom he refers in his description of the ‘Helleborean Savage’, it seems certain that William Belcher alludes to the authorities of the madhouse in the last part of his pamphlet of 1796, which is largely devoted to his Address to Humanity. Here, in his Sketch of a True Smiling Hyena, Belcher describes a brutal and devouring creature, ‘non-descript of a mixed species’, with ‘Form obtuse’ and ‘teeth and prowess on the decline’. He asserts that this dangerous creature ‘doth ravish the rich when he getteth him into his den’, in a sure reference to the occasional practice, and widespread eighteenth-century fear, of the greedy relatives of the rich working with the keepers of madhouses to incarcerate the wealthy so that their money may revert to the perpetrators of their confinement. But the ‘smiling Hyena’ does not only attack the rich, for Belcher asserts that ‘the Author was severely bitten’ by it, too.49 By broadening his defensive focus, Belcher seems to say that all madmen are privy to a kind of dissection, and, literally speaking, he was right. The dissection of madmen’s brains for anatomy lessons in English and Scottish medical schools was widespread at the time. John Haslam, cited earlier in this book, describes in detail the practice of postmortem examination in his Observations on Insanity, in which ‘The dissection concluding each [patient] history is, for Haslam, the real focus’.50 Indeed, through Haslam’s cold, clinical accounts of the patients’ behaviour and the appearance of their brains after death, the reader senses that the significance of these madmen for Haslam was in their deaths and their receptivity to the examiner’s knife. Similarly, through Belcher’s imaginative and various description, the madhouse inmate’s position as a defenseless object of consumption becomes clear. Given the popular representation of madmen as passive beings and, in some instances, their representations of themselves as such, it is not surprising that mad women were all the more likely to be viewed in the same way. The figure of the mad woman in eighteenth-century literature abounds, and although she adopted many faces by the end of the century – ‘the suicidal Ophelia, the sentimental Crazy Jane, and the Violent Lucia’ – the view of her was common: she was a passive


being, ‘sentimental’ and ‘suicidal’, and usually driven to those states by disappointment in love.51 Indeed, as I will argue in more detail later, even the ‘violent Lucia’ figure is, essentially, the same passive figure as the others mentioned. As Showalter notes, ‘The victimized mad woman became almost a cult figure for the Romantics’, and the matter was much the same in the previous century.52 Writing about the eighteenth century, Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull assert: Women were regularly portrayed in both contemporary literary and artistic representations … as distressed, melancholic, and suicidal, romanticization of feminine emotions and frailty tending to vie with more censorious accounts of women perverted and destroyed by their passions and weak intellects. However, precisely where the social construction of illness begins and genuine illness behaviour ends in the representations of this period is difficult to say.53 Whether or not these representations reflect reality accurately, the ubiquitousness of this figure suggests that she epitomizes some perceptual truth, some fascination of her time. The Ophelia figure was a kind of feminine ideal: totally passive, sexualized, and utterly defined by her romantic relationships. For its vividness of description, one of the most memorable appearances of this figure appears in Laurence Sterne’s narrative, A Sentimental Journey, discussed in a previous chapter. Sterne encourages his reader to focus on the great beauty and, in particular, the warm bosom of the mad Maria, who was spurned by her lover years before we meet her. After their mutual weeping, Maria, the gentle and attractive mad woman offers to wash Yorick’s drenched handkerchief in a stream and ‘dry it in … [her] bosom’, to which he feelingly inquires, ‘And is your heart still so warm, Maria?’54 Soon thereafter the reader is assured that this bosom is a lovely one not despite, but because of, her madness: ‘Maria … [was] of the first order of fine forms: affliction had touched her looks with something that was scarce earthly’.55 The sexual attractiveness and the insanity of this helpless, blighted figure are linked. But perhaps the most recognized eighteenth-century representation of female madness is ‘Crazy Kate’. Indeed, many critics have cited William Cowper’s ‘Crazy Kate’ from Book One of The Task, published in 1785, as a typical representation of female madness in the period. The popularity of this figure had, no doubt, something to do with the fame of Cowper’s poem, but Fuseli’s painting of Mad Kate from 1807


surely contributed to her wide recognition as well (see Fig. 10, p. 195). In keeping with Cowper’s description of Kate, Fuseli represents her in a dreary wilderness, her manic eyes staring, uncomprehending, her long hair echoing the movement of the waves behind her and suggesting an inherent link between the inner chaos of her madness and the untamed environment that surrounds her. This is the figure of the love-crazed mad woman, the poor damsel unsettled by her disappointment in love. Cowper describes her thus: A serving-maid was she, and fell in love With one who left her, went to sea, and died… . She heard the doleful tidings of his death And never smiled again. And now she roams The dreary waste.56 As is often the case, the mad woman’s entire existence is represented as being defined by romantic matters. Problems in the realm of love are enough to unhinge her entirely, in a way that is far less common in representations of male lunatics during the period. Kate is defined by her relationships with men. While the stock images of the madman reflected many reasons for their mental breakdown – such as religious fanaticism, isolation and pride – mad women were, by and large, represented as having descended to their states because of romantic problems. It is true that women appear in amorous situations in many depictions of them in eighteenth-century literature. What is noteworthy about representations of mad women, though, is that the romantic situation is not presented as a mere slice of a woman’s life, but as the defining aspect of her whole existence, a concern that has the power to change her into a very particular kind of being, a mad being, who must live in a unique way, perhaps in a madhouse or in ‘The dreary waste’, and who must relate to society in a new way or perhaps not at all in the existential isolation of her madness. In these terms, Cowper’s representation of ‘Crazy Kate’ is typical. Yet, our awareness of Cowper’s own mental problems may give us pause, partly because we may expect a unique and more insightful description of madness from him, and partly because we may be surprised to find that he, too, offers up the body of the mad woman for the reader’s consumption. The poet continues: … A tattered apron hides, Worn as a cloak, and hardly hides, a gown More tattered still; and both but ill conceal


A bosom heaved with never-ceasing sighs. She begs an idle pin of all she meets, And hoards them in her sleeve; but needful food, Though pressed with hunger oft, or comelier clothes, Though pinched often with cold, asks never. – Kate is crazed!57 In this passage, Cowper powerfully exhibits the sexualized nature of the typical figure of the mad woman, and his description may tell much about why this figure was the source of such fascination. She is thin, but she still has a bosom to speak of and this is just barely covered by her threadbare clothes. Gauzy layer lies lightly over gauzy layer upon a heaving bosom, like an eighteenth-century strip-tease. Indeed, this scene is a strip-tease, but with one important distinguishing characteristic: in her mental debility, Kate is utterly powerless, and has not chosen to display herself thus. She is an utterly passive object of the poet’s pen and the reader’s scrutiny. Simply by defining women in terms of their intimate relationships, a society commits a kind of psychic assault upon them: what should be the most personal of matters, her sex life, becomes the most public of denominators. Nowhere is this delimitation of women’s experience more foregrounded than in the realm of madness, where her luck in love, or lack thereof, is written on her body, in her ripped clothes, or in her tangled hair. We meet such a pathetic figure early in Henry Mackenzie’s 1771 novel, The Man of Feeling, as we attend Harley, the sentimental protagonist of the novel, to a madhouse. This mad woman has, predictably, gone mad due to amorous misfortune. As the keeper puts it, her lover was deemed by her father too poor to marry her and, after this refusal, the young man sailed to his feverish death in the West Indies. Sadly, ‘The death of her lover had no effect on her inhuman parent; he was only the more earnest for her marriage with the man he had provided for her; and what between her despair at the death of the one, and her aversion to the other, the poor young lady was reduced to the condition you see her in’. That state is worth commenting upon at greater length. Mackenzie first presents her as a paradigm of pitiable objects: Separate from the rest stood one, whose appearance had something of superior dignity. Her face, though pale and wasted, was less squalid than those of the others, and showed a dejection of that decent kind, which moves our pity unmixed with horror: upon her, therefore, the eyes of all were immediately turned.


We find her engrossed in a ‘little garnet-ring she wore on her finger’, apparently given her by her beloved Billy, and singing of his pastoral grave. She addresses Harley: “sometimes I sing; when I am saddest, I sing: – You shall hear me, hush! ‘Light be the earth on Billy’s breast’, ‘And green the sod that wraps his grave!’” After this statement she takes leave of us in so courteous a manner that we are shocked to remember that hers are the words of madness: ‘“Farewel! I must leave you now.” – She would have withdrawn her hand; Harley held it to his lips. – “I dare not stay any longer; my head throbs sadly: farewel!”’.58 In addition to the cause of her madness and pitiable nature, her singing and especially the content of her song position Mackenzie’s mad woman as a latter-day Ophelia, almost a reincarnation of that paragon of female madness, so closely aligned are the two characters. The parallels abound. To begin with, the first words describing Ophelia’s madness at the start of Act IV, scene v of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet indicate the proper reaction to her: a ‘Gentleman’ tries to convince the Queen to speak with the poor unfortunate by informing her, ‘She is importunate, indeed distract. Her mood will needs be pitied.’ Both mad women are introduced with an injunction to the fictional characters, and to the audience, to ‘pity’ them for an ailment caused by a cruel amorous fate. Moreover, in Ophelia’s conversation with the King and Queen, she demonstrates the depth of her distraction with a song for the Queen that is a sure antecedent to the song of Mackenzie’s mad woman: He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone; At his head a grass-green turf, At his heels a stone. Both ladies sing of the same verdant setting of dead men’s graves, although Ophelia seems to refer to her dead father, Polonius, in her song. It is perhaps in Ophelia’s famous leave-taking that the two characters are most closely aligned. Reconsider Ophelia’s famous last words alongside those of Mackenzie’s mad woman: ‘Good night, ladies; good


night, sweet ladies, good night, good night’.59 These mad ladies’ words are imbued with a sad sweetness and gentility that cannot but touch their hearers, who must meditate on the sorry mental state of the speakers. Yet Mackenzie’s use of the Ophelia figure, born in the early seventeenth century, is only one of many that appear in eighteenth-century literature. In her novel, The History of Ophelia, published in 1760, Sarah Fielding gives the name ‘Ophelia’ to her protagonist, who, in her countrified naivete, unquestioningly and even willingly remains and eventually falls in love with the wealthy suitor who has forcefully abducted her. Fielding’s choice of name reiterates the idea that, during the period, the Ophelia figure epitomized female passivity and a character more acted upon than acting. This figure even appears in the medical literature of the eighteenth century.60 When she is not evoked by name, her presence is conjured up in this literature by repeated diagnoses and descriptions that seem to focus more on this myth of the mad woman than the subject herself, and these are, tellingly, attended by signs of the writer’s pity. About John Monro’s case book of 1766, Andrews and Scull contend that the doctor showed an unusual degree of sympathy for his subjects when he wrote of such patients: ‘The breaking off of courtships and marital contracts was cited especially often among the women he [John Monro] treated… . Monro set down particularly long histories of such unsuccessful engagements and love affairs, implying that he, along with their families, may have shared a special empathy with these unfortunate women’.61 To what can we attribute the ubiquitousness of the Ophelia figure? Evidently, she was so popular in both kinds of writing because she had some particular power to satisfy readers. She confirmed and contributed to an eighteenth-century impression about femininity and female madness. Women – at any rate, the best of them, the most delicate, the women of sensibility – were thought to be utterly passive, pitiable, gentle. The popularity of the Ophelia figure suggests the view that, in their passivity and utter malleability, women were so dependent upon their relationships with men that with the destruction of their bonds with the opposite sex would surely come the destruction of their mental health and of their very beings. Even Romantic writers, who insisted that they represented the world honestly and avoided the enticements of sentiment, made use of the popular image of the woman driven mad by love. William Wordsworth composed two poems about women driven insane by romantic misfortune in 1798. In ‘The Thorn’, the reader meets Martha Ray, who


Gave with a maiden’s true goodwill Her company to Stephen Hill, … And they had fixed the wedding-day, The morning that must wed them both, But Stephen to another maid Had sworn another oath, And with this other maid to church Unthinking Stephen went – Poor Martha! On that woeful day A cruel, cruel fire, they say, Into her bones was sent: It dried her body like a cinder And almost turned her brain to tinder.62 Not for long does the reader imagine that poor Martha is only halfmad. In the next stanza, the narrator informs us of the full extent of her misfortune and her affliction: ‘’Tis said a child was in her womb,/ As now to any eye was plain –/ She was with child and she was mad’.63 This image also appears in ‘The Mad Mother’. Perhaps unexpectedly, this mother has also been thrust into madness by hardship in love. I suggest that this explanation for her madness is rather less predictable because the title of the poem and its main focus would seem to indicate that Wordsworth might fully explore in ‘The Mad Mother’ what he hints at in ‘The Thorn’, namely the phenomenon of post-partum depression, or puerperal insanity, as it was later called. This theme was brought to the fore by the mid-nineteenth century: in 1859, George Eliot depicted the infanticide, Hetty Sorrel, in Adam Bede. However, Wordsworth’s exploration of female madness and post-partum depression in ‘The Mad Mother’ goes no further than his hints about infanticide in ‘The Thorn’. In ‘The Mad Mother’, Wordsworth’s focus and his proffered explanation for the mother’s condition is, typically, amorous ill-luck. In her address to her baby, the mad mother explains herself thus: Thy father cares not for my breast; ‘Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest, ‘Tis all thine own! And if its hue Be changed, that was so fair to view, ‘Tis fair enough for thee, my dove!64


Again the mad woman is defined by her intimate relationships, and, perhaps more to the point, the reader is encouraged to assess her in terms of her sexual attractiveness. These literary representations of mad women reflect how they were actually treated in the madhouse. As late as the turn of the nineteenth century, when changes to the care of the insane were beginning to take place, various accounts of the treatment of mad women indicate that while their minds preyed on themselves, those who were charged with the care of their bodies (for before the birth of moral management, the duties of the asylum were primarily custodial and secondarily curative) launched a more brutal attack. In the First Report Minutes of Evidence taken before the Select Committee of the House of Commons from 1815, it becomes apparent that mad women were treated with no more delicacy than madmen were. Edward Wakefield reports a meeting he held with just such an unfortunate soul: ‘this female, who held a coherent conversation with us … was of course fully sensible of the mental and bodily condition of those wretched beings, who, equally without clothing, were closely chained to the same wall with herself’.65 Shamefully on display, the mad woman’s feminine modesty is crushed into oblivion. In this way, she is as sexualized an object as are her naked male counterparts. But she must also endure an additional assault. According to Andrew Scull, female patients were liable to be raped.66 Not only through visual means, then, but also in physical terms, her keepers communicate to the mad woman that no part of herself is her own. What should be the most private part of her being, hers alone to share or not share, her sexual self, is not hers. The message that mad women were utterly defenceless was loud and clear to a female Quaker at York as she died at the hands of her keepers. Thankfully, though, this time the message was too loud for even those outside of the asylum to ignore, for the incident inspired a humane response coordinated by the Tukes in the form of The Retreat.67 This asylum was one of the first of many practical changes made to the care of the insane around the turn of the nineteenth century. We have seen how female madness was reflected through the eyes of male writers, in addition to how Wollstonecraft explores the topic of female madness in order to make a political point about her society’s lauding of passivity in women. But many other female writers in the eighteenth century represented mad women, and for less political purposes. For many such authors, the figure of the female lunatic, mentally destroyed by amorous misfortune, was simply fashionable. Mary Alcock’s humourous poem, ‘A Receipt for Writing a Novel’, from


1799, makes this point abundantly clear: she advises female authors ‘to swell the book’ with … a fond maid Run mad, by some false loon betrayed – These stories supply the female pen, Which writes them o’er and o’er again, And readers likewise may be found To circulate them round and round.68 Such instances of female madness appeared not only in novels, but also in poetry. One of the most memorable poems on female madness was written by Mary Robinson in 1800, and is entitled ‘Poor Marguerite’. The first lines introduce us to the unfortunate figure: Swift, o’er the wild and dreary waste A nut-brown girl was seen to haste; Wide-waving was her nut-brown hair, And sun-scorched was her bosom bare. Robinson goes on to ask, in chorus-like repeating lines, why Marguerite has been driven to this sad state. She offers, by the end of the poem, the predicted reason, specifically, misfortune in love. Robinson posits ‘Poor Marguerite’ as a pitiable figure throughout the poem, but most colourfully in the following lines: from the lone and silent Cot The watchful Cur assailed her not, Though at the beggar he would fly, And fright the Traveller passing by: But she, so kind and gentle seemed, Such sorrow in her dark eyes beamed, That savage fierceness could not greet With less than love, – Poor Marguerite!69 So passive and pathetic is this mad and lovelorn woman that ferocious dogs cannot help but ‘love’ her. Notably, by drawing attention to Marguerite’s nudity and charging her romantic relationships with the power to totally alter Marguerite’s existence, this female poet presents the figure of the mad woman in as sexualized a way as do the male poets, Cowper and Wordsworth.


Wollstonecraft might claim that Robinson’s sexualized focus is an unfair delimitation of female experience and that it is the equivalent of an intrusion on her private life that makes her a mere ‘standing dish’. This interpretation is underlined by Robinson’s emphasis on Marguerite’s passivity. But, as the early feminist author would also note, women are often just as guilty for carving out women’s lamentable position in society. Truly, many female writers of the time present mad women in much the same light as do male writers. In their pathetic passivity, these feminine creations of female madness do not appear to be ‘the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety or rage’ and ‘asocial surrogates for docile slaves’, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have described the mad woman in nineteenth-century literature.70 Rather, these passive figures of female madness reiterate the weak position in which women found themselves. Even female writers who, themselves, reportedly experienced madness were wont to present mad women in this passive light. The listed cause of Fanny Holcroft’s death was ‘mania’,71 which, if true, would seem to promise that the poet would present a less mythologized, more realistic and modulated approach to female madness in her poetry. However, the first lines of ‘Annabella’, published in 1797, present a figure that was well-known to audiences by the end of the century. Here, we find the title’s namesake: Lamenting o’er her orphan child, Young Annabella stood: Her tresses loose, her action wild, Her eyes a briny flood. And the last lines of the poem imply a familiar diagnosis for her mental imbalance: Thus raved the beauteous weeping fair, While frenzy seized her brain: She dropped, the victim of Despair, Beside her Henry slain.72 Is this repeated figuration of the female lunatic as the victim of an illfated love-affair an indication of authorial laziness, a sign that too many authors would rather build on the success of tried-and-true formulas than explore new territory? One must allow this explanation as a possibility, but it should be allowed that atypical mad women also appear in eighteenth-century literature.


Unusually, in a poem from 1734, Mary Barber presents a female lunatic who has been driven to her lamentable state by frustration and financial cares, rather than by amorous concerns. The long title of the poem in question describes the situation well: ‘On Seeing an Officer’s Widow distracted, who had been driven to Despair by a long and fruitless Solicitation for the Arrears of her Pension’. Yet, Barber’s innovations do not end with her suggestion of possible causes for female insanity. Indeed, in this poem she presents the very state of madness in a unique light. In the first two lines of the poem, the speaker asks the officer’s widow, so long tormented by the worries imposed upon her by the British state, ‘O WRETCH! hath madness cured thy dire despair?/ Yes – All thy sorrows now are light as air’. Barber presents madness as a welcome escape from a terrible situation. She still posits the mad woman as pathetic, but she does so through a unique approach to the transformative powers of insanity. Here, insanity has the power to make the afflicted parties forget themselves, which may be embraced by those whose lives are torments worth forgetting. Nevertheless, Barber does not present madness as a joyous cure for distress, effective though it may be. The second stanza confirms that this poem, like many others about female madness, is one of lament. Barber shows that she can tug at the reader’s heartstrings with the best when she writes: Now, wild as winds, you from your offspring fly, Or fright them from you with distracted eye; Rove through the streets; or sing, devoid of care, With tattered garments and dishevelled hair; By hooting boys to higher frenzy fired, At length you sink, by cruel treatment tired, Sink into sleep, an emblem of the dead, A stone thy pillow, the cold earth thy bed.73 Even in this passage, in which Barber uses some of the conventions for describing female madness by focusing on her character’s tattered clothes and tangled hair, the poet asserts the singularity of her vision by hinting at the mad woman’s potential for violence. To be sure, the officer’s widow frightens her own children and has been ‘to higher frenzy fired’. Finally, we must ask, how did mad women present themselves and their affliction? This question is a vexed one, for we meet immediately with the problem of how to define madness in an actual person, rather than simply looking at the theme of madness and representations of it in literary figures that are labelled as mad by their authors. Accordingly,


in my above discussion of Fanny Holcroft, I present her reported mania as a possibility only: ‘if’ she was, indeed, manic, then we can draw certain conclusions from her depiction of female madness. Such trepidation is necessary, for the definitions of madness are famously protean, rendering uncertain any diagnosis of a historical figure. Thus, although Anne Finch’s ‘The Spleen’, from 1713, is one of the first texts to suggest itself with regard to the topic of mad women writing about mad women, as it is widely regarded to have been inspired by Finch’s own experience with the ailment of the poem’s title, we must question how changing attitudes about what constitutes madness affect our reading of the poem. The great popularity of ‘The Spleen’ in the eighteenth century put Finch, the Countess of Winchilsea, on the literary map, which was an extraordinary circumstance at the time for a ‘scribbling lady’. Through this poem, Finch’s recurrent bouts of ‘the spleen’ – or what was also called ‘the vapours’, ‘melancholy’, bad ‘nerves’, or, to us, depression – became well-known to the reading public, which might seem to suggest that Finch was known for her mental debility and that the poem would have been regarded as a mad woman’s depiction of madness. However, we must remember how the neuroses of the upper classes were viewed in the eighteenth century. Cheyne clearly distinguishes the spleen, or bad nerves, from madness in his seminal work, The English Malady. In fact, laying claim to the vapours became a mark of one’s mental superiority,74 and this association Finch herself points out in her poem: The Fool, to imitate the Wits, Complains of thy [the spleen’s] pretended Fits, And Dulness, born with him, wou’d lay Upon thy accidental Sway Because, sometimes, thou dost presume Into the ablest Heads to come: That, often, men of Thoughts refin’d, Impatient of unequal Sence, Such slow Returns, where they so much dispense, Retiring from the Croud, are to thy Shades inclin’d.75 In aristocratic circles, the spleen was the mark of mental excellence, not mental debility (and, generally, today we are no more inclined to identify depression with insanity). Despite its popularity and its seemingly appropriate subject matter, it is arguable that Finch’s celebrated poem does not really offer us insight into how mad women represented their madness in writing.


However, in one publication from the turn of the eighteenth century, a mad woman saves us from the responsibility of diagnosing her as mad by presenting herself as such in a written account of her experiences. Hence, she is simultaneously a self-described mad author, a mad speaker, and the source for a literary representation of madness. In A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian, Mrs. Hannah Allen, published in 1683, the ‘Choice Christian’ herself allows us a glimpse into the other side of women’s mad experience. She describes the experience from the inside and it is an ordeal making for aggression rather than passivity.76 The first pages of Allen’s pamphlet make the reader personally aware that this mad voice is not a submissive one, for, unexpectedly, it speaks directly to the reader and bids her to listen closely and learn from the words that follow. ‘Christian Reader’, Allen writes, ‘Peruse such Instances as these, and this of a Nowglorified Soul presented to thee, with fear and trembling. How knowest thou but it may not be thine own Case?’ Allen implies that her writing is of the highest importance: it may be the key to the eternal salvation of the reader’s soul. In this way she commands the reader’s attention. She also forces us to view ‘such Instances’, that is, of her madness as she presents it to us in writing, not with sympathy, but with horror. In the eighteenth century, most depictions of female madness were meant to elicit pity from the reader, but Allen, prior to that time, describes our expected reaction to the text in quite a different light: ‘Learn then to hate Sin, all Sin bitterly and implacably, to avoid it universally and continually’, lest God ‘let down but the smallest drop of his Wrath into thy Conscience’.77 Our lesson will be derived from the revulsion we must feel upon reading about her madness. In accordance with her unusual purpose of using the topic of female madness in order to inspire horror in the reader, Allen characterizes the phenomenon in an unusual way. She presents herself as utterly despicable, belligerent to an unbearable degree. She is not the pathetic mad woman that Mary Robinson describes; she is no ‘Poor Marguerite’, who is so meek and unexceptionable that snarling curs regard her calmly and even lovingly. Allen was, to use her own words ‘a Terrour to my self and all my Friends’. She is the extreme precursor to Barber’s frenzied widow. Allen is unequivocal in her description of her own loathsome nature: Yes, said I, My Sins are so great, that if all the Sins of all the Devils and Damned in Hell, and all the Reprobates on Earth were comprehended in one man; mine are greater; There is no word comes so near the comprehension of the dreadfulness of my Condition; as that, I am the Monster of Creation: in this word I much delighted.


By underlining her evil nature, such passages serve not only to emphasize to the reader how threatening she was in her mad state; the tone also marks it as distinctive. These words, spoken from the depths of female madness, are frightening in their aggression. The mad woman who spoke them almost seems to glory in her malevolence. If femininity, and especially female madness, was usually represented as passive, sexualized, endearing, then Allen eschews all of the conventions of representation that we might expect of her in this pamphlet. This mad woman is no victimized Ophelia. She is a fury. According to Allen, she was hardly to be considered a woman in her lunacy. She implies as much when she relays a speech she made to her cousin during her madness: ‘And [I] once thought my self not only a Woman but a Christian, and tho’ I was such a dreadful wretch as now it appears.’78 In other words, she was, to her mad self and her later redeemed and writing self, not a Christian at the time of which she writes, although she was before that time. Similarly, she was not a woman. Through her self-representation, this mad woman intimates something quite different about what it is to be her, or to be like her, than do most other portraitists of female madness around her time. In terms of the attributes that were considered to be desirable in a female in the eighteenth century – such as the passivity that made the traditionally represented mad woman a paragon of femininity, and, according to Wollstonecraft, the woman of sensibility exemplary of madness – Allen’s version of female madness appears to be defeminising, as it causes a woman to be extraordinarily aggressive, brutish, and desexualized. She is, Allen asserts, not a woman. The atypicality of Allen’s figuration of female madness cannot be understated. Even the figure of the ‘violent Lucia’, conceived of first by Sir Walter Scott as Lucy Ashton in The Bride of Lammermoor in 1819 and endowed with a soprano’s voice by Gaetano Donizetti in the opera Lucia di Lammermoor in 1835, must be understood as, essentially, a figure of female passivity in consideration of the reasons for her insanity and in comparison with Allen’s vision of female madness. If she controlled her own fate, Lucia would marry Sir Edgardo, but her lying brother, Lord Enrico, guides her destiny and he is more concerned about how she can be used to further his political ambitions. Enrico tells her, falsely, that Edgardo has been unfaithful to her and convinces her that the welfare of their family depends on her marrying his political ally, Lord Arturo. Being the pawn of scheming males that she is, Lucia agrees to the marriage, but only outwardly: her mind revolts against this betrayal of her heart’s wishes, and, in her madness, she kills Lord Arturo. After this


dramatic expression of passivity pushed too far, Lucia dies of grief. Notably, ‘violent Lucia’ does not glory in her malevolence. Her violence is, rather, like a reflex, a sudden and fleeting reaction to the male characters’ endless usage of her and to her amorous misfortune. The same can be said of Martha Ray in Wordsworth’s ‘The Thorn’: if she is as violent as her community suspects her of being in calling her an infanticide, then she appears to have been driven to this murderous state by her lover’s inhumane treatment of her.79 By contrast, Allen’s extended and seemingly unprovoked madness is imbued with a sense of agency, for the tone of her mad words suggests her enjoyment of her aggressiveness. Most fictional representations of female madness show it to be an expression of female passivity, even at its most violent. Perhaps Allen’s portrayal of the phenomenon is distinguishable from these representations because it reflects her personal and actual experience of madness, and not only the perceptual truth of how the eighteenth century envisioned female madness as expressive of a feminine ideal. This hypothesis is borne out by records of court cases involving mad women in the period. Some of these women were not, as the fictional representations and even John Monro’s records almost invariably indicated, the pitiable products of disastrous love affairs. They were, it seems, simply violent at times. For example, Jean Blair did not tell a woeful tale of luckless love when she was on trial for murdering her employer. She did mention in her confession that she ‘“had the custom of women upon her to a very great degree … that day”’, but this detail was never presented in court because, as R. A. Houston notes, ‘Jean was so obviously deranged that any menstrual side-effects were minor by comparison.’80 Similarly, Agnes Crockat’s case could not inspire pity through the usual sentimental means, but we may sympathize with her, given our contemporary knowledge about post-partum depression. Indeed, we are inclined to pity the woman who was condemned to ‘death and dissection’ in July 1756 for strangling her baby, as the records hint that she may have been affected by what would in the early nineteenth century be called ‘puerperal insanity’; she was, the report indicates ‘weak after the birth’ of her child.81 In our eyes, Crockat may be pitiable in her violent madness, but she is not so in the same way as a Lucia is, or, for that matter, an Ophelia. The kinds of violence exhibited by these mad women – savage, extended, and unprovoked by amorous misfortune – did not appear often in the written representations of female madness in the eighteenth century, as if certain types of madness simply did not register


with the perceivers of madness. Some court cases from the period suggest that such selective perception may have characterized the realm beyond the written representation of female madness as well. For example, witnesses reported Crockat to have been ‘strange in her speech and behaviour’ on the day of the murder, but they disregarded these facts.82 This oversight becomes weighted with significance in consideration of the major role that speech usually played in determining the presence of madness at the time. Andrews and Scull assert that ‘Speech was predictably regarded as an especially firm indicator of mental state… . It was often and fundamentally on the basis of patients’ spoken (or reported) language that the physician arrived at and evolved his diagnosis’.83 In a similar case, Houston points out that, when Agnes Johnstone was indicted for slitting the throat of her ninemonth old grand-niece in February 1674, ‘The jury seem[s] [sic] to have agreed with the prosecuting advocate that Agnes committed the deed out of malice, and that she was not deranged when she murdered the child’, even though the court documents remark that ‘she confesses she was sometimes possessed with a spirit which did draw her neck together and … that before she committed the said murder the spirit had tempted her several times to put down her self.’84 Strangely, the fact that Johnstone was visited by a ‘spirit’ that encouraged her to commit murderous acts did not strike the court as a sign of her madness, perhaps because its members understood female madness to have different characteristics than the ones Johnstone betrayed. What conclusion can we draw from the apparent disparity between representations of female madness and more direct evidence of female madness, evidence that is based less on the writer’s interpretation of what constitutes female madness? I argue that, in the eighteenth century, the link between the concept of madness and ideals of femininity – such as those outlined in the realm of sentiment – were so strong that definitions of female madness rarely strayed from definitions of femininity. Yet, I recognize that more than gender issues may be at work here. For example, it may be countered that perhaps the most essential difference between Allen’s interpretation and later medical ones is one of perspective, the former being personal and the latter being objective. Perhaps the insane are inclined to see their mental affliction in religious terms to satisfy an emotional need to impose a familiar order and meaning onto their mystifying experience. However, one must also consider that Allen’s Christian interpretation of her madness as moral evil is typical of her time, which was a century before what is commonly called ‘the birth of psychiatry’,


when a distinct facet of the medical community adopted insanity as its area of expertise and religious interpretations of madness were thrown over in favour of scientific and eventually psychological, or ‘moral’, interpretations. Indeed, the most likely explanation for the vast difference between the views of female madness I have outlined lies in chronology, but I suggest that what shaped and motivated the change was neither religion nor medical practice, but literary fashion. So convinced are we still that literature should be a ‘mirror of nature’, to echo the famous formulation of fictional realism in the nineteenth century, that we are inclined to view literature as a reflection of the world around it, rather than as a shaper of its culture. But the evidence surrounding female madness in the eighteenth century indicates that what the New Historicists claim is indeed true: literature both reflects the culture that produces it and affects, produces, that culture. Writers as diverse as Fanny Holcroft and William Wordsworth indicate that the possibilities for figures of female madness were limited to repetitions of the same sentimental theme, while even jurors and mad-doctors, such as John Monro, appear prepared only to recognize this sentimental manifestation of female madness, one that was pitiful, passive, amorous, and sensual. In short, because literary sensibility had not defined female madness as aggressive, the idea of ‘aggressive madwoman’ was unrecognizable, paradoxical for literati, medical practitioners, and jurors alike. But why, we must ask, was literary sensibility’s definition of female madness so influential? Was the influence traceable to the similarity between the features of madness and sentimental femininity? Moreover, was this link merely coincidental? Earlier in this chapter I suggested that madmen took on feminine qualities in their passivity and sensuality, but perhaps it is more accurate to say, with Wollstonecraft, that sensibility defined women in the image of unreason. As for the questions of influence and coincidence, it may be argued that the representation of womanhood as utterly powerless, almost inhuman in its divorce from the realm of reason, gained influence because it seemed to reflect the truth by reiterating some long-held views of femininity, and because it upheld a hierarchy that was challenged in the last half of the eighteenth century by such women’s groups as the Bluestockings. The link between the sentimental ideal of femininity and madness was not happenstance, but it was forged on such a wide cultural scale that no single party can be held responsible for it. Ultimately, this maddened, sentimental femininity is the locus of the ‘wrongs’ done to and by women.


Notes 1. Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings, ed. Janet Todd, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), ed. Ashley Tauchert. 2nd rev. ed, London: J. M. Dent, 1995, and Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman (1787, 1798), ed. Gary Kelly, London: Oxford University Press, 1976. 2. William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794), ed. David M. McCracken, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 210. 3. G. S. Rousseau, ‘Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility’, Blue Guitar 2: 1976, p. 135. 4. Helen Small, Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity 1800–1865, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, p. viii. 5. Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose, London: University of California Press, 1997, p. xiii. 6. Wollstonecraft, Political, p. 54. 7. Wollstonecraft, Political, pp. 53–4. 8. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, London: William Pickering, 1989, Volume 4, p. 29. 9. Mary Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979, p. 145. 10. Wollstonecraft, Letters, pp. 148, 151; Wollstonecraft’s emphasis. 11. Wollstonecraft, Letters, p. 171. 12. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1747–48), ed. Angus Ross, New York: Viking, 1985, p. 890. 13. Wollstonecraft, Letters, p. 120. 14. Wollstonecraft, Political, pp. ix, vii. 15. Wollstonecraft, Political, pp. 29, 6. 16. Wollstonecraft, Political, p. 5. 17. Vivien Jones, ‘Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams’, in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832, eds Stephen Copley and John Whale, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 181. 18. Robert Kaufman, ‘The Madness of George III, By Mary Wollstonecraft’, Studies in Romanticism 37.1: 1998, p. 22. 19. The fact that Wollstonecraft thought of French novels as the epitome of sentimental literature becomes clearer in her French Revolution, in which she devotes several pages to outlining the history of the development of sentiment in French literature. It is germane to my discussion here to note that Wollstonecraft identifies the debauched and effeminate court of Louis XIV as the birthplace of French sentimental literature (see Wollstonecraft, Political, p. 310). 20. Wollstonecraft, Political, p. 47. 21. Anne K. Mellor, ‘Introduction’, Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798), by Mary Wollstonecraft, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994, pp. xi, xii. 22. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, p. 69.

A Gendered Affliction 167 23. Virginia Sapiro, ‘Wollstonecraft, Feminism, and Democracy: “Being Bastilled”’, in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Maria J. Falco, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, p. 40. 24. Eva Figes, Sex and Subterfuge: Women Novelists to 1850, London: Macmillan, 1982, p. 74. 25. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, p. 69. 26. Wollstonecraft, Wrongs, p. 129. 27. Wollstonecraft, Works, p. 29. 28. Wollstonecraft, Wrongs, pp. 134, 135. 29. Wollstonecraft, Wrongs, pp. 154–5. 30. Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000, p. 427. 31. Mellor, ‘Introduction’, p. x. 32. Small, Medicine, p. 29. 33. Wollstonecraft, Wrongs, p. 79. 34. Wollstonecraft, Works, p. 29. 35. Wollstonecraft, Wrongs, pp. 85, 188, 188, 193. 36. Roy Porter, Mind Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency. London: Athlone Press, 1987, p. 95. Wollstonecraft herself differed in opinion as to the possible mental states of those who commit suicide. She wrote to Gilbert Imlay, regarding her own suicide attempt, that it was ‘one of the calmest acts of reason’ (Letters, p. 317). However, her very assertion of her sanity during this act indicates Wollstonecraft’s understanding that her audience would readily assume one to be insane during a suicide attempt. 37. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, pp. 69, 33, 39–40, 62. 38. Most famously, Philippe Pinel, who is immortalized in the history of psychiatry for freeing the patients at the Bicêtre and Salpêtriére in 1793, calls madness ‘“the loss of reason”’ in the 1806 translation, Treatise on Insanity (cited in Roy Porter, ed., The Faber Book of Madness, London: Faber & Faber, 1991, p. 12). 39. Wollstonecraft, Wrongs, p. 84. 40. R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade, London: Macmillan, 1974, p. 54. 41. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, pp. 220, 223. 42. Wollstonecraft, Wrongs, p. 84. 43. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, pp. 21, 49, 210, 156–7. 44. John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, p. 68. 45. Michael Donnelly, Managing the Mind: A Study of Medical Psychology in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain, London: Tavistock, 1983, p. 107. 46. Porter, Manacles, p. 43. 47. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, pp. 156–7. 48. Cited in Allan Ingram, ed., Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998, p. 241. 49. Cited in Allan Ingram, ed., Voices of Madness: Four Pamphlets, 1683–1796, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1997, p. 135. 50. Ingram, Patterns, p. 193.

168 Cultural Constructions of Madness in 18th Century Writing 51. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980, New York: Pantheon, 1985, p. 10. 52. Showalter, p. 10. 53. Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade: The Management of Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, p. 71. 54. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal, ed. Melvyn New and W. G. Day, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 153. 55. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, p. 154. Somewhat surprisingly, in the next section of the book, Yorick expresses an opinion that echoes that of Wollstonecraft when she indicates, as I argue above, that the madness of sensibility breeds true madness. In a lengthy apostrophe to ‘Dear Sensibility’, Yorick laments, ‘thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw’, in a sure reference to the living conditions of asylum inmates (p. 155). 56. William Cowper, The Task, and Selected Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook, London: Longman, 1994, ll. 537–8, 545–47. 57. Cowper, Task, ll. 549–56. 58. Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771), ed. Brian Vickers, London: Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 23, 26, 25, 26, 27. 59. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Cyrus Hoy, New York: W. W. Norton, 1992, ll. 2–3, 29–32, 69–70. 60. Andrew M. Cooper, ‘Blake and Madness: The World Turned Inside Out’, English Literary History 57: 1990, p. 606. 61. Andrews and Scull, Customers, p. 53. 62. William Wordsworth, ‘The Thorn’, William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, ll. 117–18, 122–32. 63. Wordsworth, ‘The Thorn’, ll. 137–39. 64. William Wordsworth, ‘The Mad Mother’, ed. Gill, ll. 61–5. 65. Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535–1860, London: Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 698. 66. Andrew Scull, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England, London: Allen Lane, 1979, p. 75. 67. Eckbert Faas, Retreat into the Mind: Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 38. 68. Mary Alcock, ‘A Receipt for Writing a Novel’, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, ll. 64, 67–72. 69. Mary Robinson, ‘Poor Marguerite’, Romantic Women Poets, 1788–1848, ed. Andrew Ashfield, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998, ll. 49–56. 70. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, p. 78. 71. Andrew Ashfield, ‘Fanny Holcroft’, Romantic Women Poets, p. 88. 72. Fanny Holcroft, ‘Annabella’, Romantic Women Poets, ll. 36–40. 73. Mary Barber, ‘On Seeing an Officer’s Widow distracted, who had been driven to Despair by a long and fruitless Solicitation for the Arrears of her Pension’, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, ll. 11–18.

A Gendered Affliction 169 74. George Cheyne, M. D., The English Malady: or, a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers &c., London: G. Strahan and J. Leake, 1733, pp. 260, 261. 75. Anne Finch, ‘The Spleen’, The Poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Myra Reynolds, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1903, ll. 64–73. 76. Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian, Mrs. Hannah Allen (1683), in Voices of Madness: Four Pamphlets, 1683–1796, ed. Allan Ingram, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1997. 77. Allen, p. 4. 78. Allen, pp. 13, 15. 79. Yet, Alan Bewell has cogently argued that Martha’s community suspects her of having ‘entered into a compact with the devil and murdered her child at the sabbat’, an interpretation of the poem that would put Martha into malevolent company with Hannah Allen (Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in Experimental Poetry, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 165). For the purposes of the present argument about female madness, though, I emphasize the most direct explanation for Martha’s mad behaviour that is offered in the poem, which is that the father of her child left her. 80. R. A. Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, p. 87. 81. Houston, pp. 86–7. Hilary Marland confirms that ‘“puerperal insanity” was propelled into the medical arena’ ‘in the 1820s and 1830s’ in ‘At home with puerperal mania: the domestic treatments of the insanity of childbirth in the nineteenth century’, in Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in the Community 1750–2000, ed. Peter Bartlett and David Wright, London: Athlone Press, 1999, p. 45. 82. Hunter and Macalpine, Three Hundred Years, p. 558. 83. Andrews and Scull, Customers, p. 58. 84. Houston, pp. 85–86.

7 ‘The Image of Our Mind’: Seeing and Being Seen

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 my 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-brained society,’ adding, it was pity so fine a building should not be possessed by such as had a sense of their happiness. ‘Sure,’ said I, ‘it was a mad age when this was raised, and the Chief of the City were in 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.’ ‘You must consider,’ says my friend, ‘this stands upon the same foundation as the Monument, and the fortunes of a great many poor wretches lie buried in this ostentatious piece of vanity; and this, like the other, is but a monument of the City’s shame and dishonour, instead of its glory. Come let us take a walk in, and view its inside.1 Thus, in 1699, the London Spy approaches to his first experience of Bethlem Hospital, and in doing so registers both the visual impact of insanity in the City and the fine line that could be drawn between those inside and those without, those contained and those responsible for the containing, and ultimately between the viewers and the viewed. It is the story of Bethlem, or rather not of Bethlem, the place, but of Bedlam, the image of that place in the cultural mind of the 170

‘The Image of Our Mind’ 171

period, of those who had been confined there, of those who had visited, and, much more widely, of those who read, saw or heard its representation and its resolute consolidation within the idioms of common speech. Throughout the eighteenth century, moreover, those who reflected, like Ward, on the insane in their most ostentatious setting would inevitably find themselves reflecting, too, on the extent to which madness sent back to the spectator an image, albeit an oblique one, of the mind that viewed: ‘Something’, as Pope put it in An Essay on Criticism, in relation to ‘True Wit’, ‘whose Truth convinc’d at Sight we find, That gives us back the Image of our Mind.’2 But, as Pope knew only too well, and as he explored in his subsequent career into the intricacies of mental disorderliness, minds were capable of taking on many forms and of reflecting themselves in modes and measures that were a long way from his standard of ‘True Wit’. Wit of any kind as commonly understood, for example, is at a considerable remove from the mentalities of those visitors depicted in Richard Newton’s 1794 drawing, A Visit to Bedlam (Fig. 1). The mindless gawping on each side of the bars is broken only by the obscene gesture and evil grin

Fig. 1

Richard Newton: A Visit to Bedlam (1794)


from the inmate on the left, and the shocked reaction from the two visitors who have, presumably, come in order to be shocked, though not quite in this way. As Fiona Haslam comments: ‘From which side of the bars is the reader viewing the inmates? The physiognomies of the man and his wife, who has been accused of cuckolding her spouse, show steroetypical features of those depicted as “mad”, with open mouths, raised eyebrows and staring eyes, making awkward gestures.’ As for the other two visitors, ‘they fare no better. Only the strange headgear in the form of crown and chamberpot betoken the madness on the other side of the bars, with the handle of the chamberpot drawn to suggest the new moon, a portent of lunacy.’3 What is more, we who view the visitors, through a square the size of a grille, viewing the inmates through their grilles, are thereby implicated not only in the depicted act of voyeuristic intrusion (and by 1794 Bethlem, following a series of increasingly tightened restrictions, had prohibited all but family and friends of patients and visitors authorised by the physician) but in a second intrusion of our own making. Is the wish to look upon madness itself mad? Is this, then, the ‘Image of our Mind’, Theobald-like, or Cibber-like, watching the mad watching the mad, and celebrating, through our laughter, in the spectacle? Bethlem the foundation dated from the thirteenth century, when Simon Fitzmary established in Bishopsgate, just north of the City, the priory that became first a hospital and subsequently a house for the treatment of the insane. Bethlem the visual edifice that signified for Londoners and London artists the presence of the insane dated from 1676 when the hospital moved a little further east to Moorfields, in the interests of expansion: more madness, more space. It was conceived in magnificence and designed to impress. Its model was the Tuileries Palace in Paris, begun in 1564 for Catherine de Medicis, alongside the much older Louvre, by Philibert de l’Orme who had studied both the architecture of Antiquity and of the Italian Renaissance in Rome. Newly designed gardens along the bank of the Seine had been laid out as recently as 1664 under Andre Le Notre. The regal splendour of the Tuileries, its distinctive combination of long narrow buildings and high roofs, domed or turreted, presenting thereby an extraordinary breadth of façade – what Nikolaus Pevsner calls ‘sweeping axial planning’4 – was captured by Bethlem’s Robert Hooke, the chemist, physicist, mathematician and, finally, architect, in a building that was approaching 550 feet in length, along Moorgate, with its front looking north across the expanse of Moorfields. When Whitehall went up in flames in early 1698, and with Kensington and St James’s palaces, in


the words of John Evelyn, ‘noble, tho not very great’,5 and with the redesigning of Buckingham House not undertaken until 1825, Bethlem, seen from outside, was one of London’s most impressive buildings. By the time wings for incurable patients had been added at each end in 1733 (Fig. 2), the hospital occupied a substantial stretch between Moorgate and Bishopsgate, backing onto London Wall. Madness, palatially lodged, stood cheek by jowl with the City, a ‘monument’ of its ‘glory’, at least on the outside. The visual impact of the building was both intensified and undermined by the ominous life-size stone statues above the hospital gate, ‘Melancholy Madness’ to the left, ‘Raving Madness’ to the right (though the names are a mid-eighteenth-century popular addition), a sure sign that the order, symmetry, elegance and decorum of this particular architectural symbol of insanity was as untrue to the experience of ‘madness’ as ‘it really was’ as almost any other visual representation from the period (Fig. 3a, b). Carved by Colley Cibber’s father, by Theophilus Cibber’s grandfather, Caius Gabriel, who died in 1700, they were commissioned and completed around 1676 for the new Bethlem.

Fig. 2

Bethlem Hospital, Moorfields, after 1733 (c.1735)


Fig. 3a

Caius Gabriel Cibber, Melancholy Madness (c.1676)

Fig. 3b

Caius Gabriel Cibber, Raving Madness (c.1676)


Here were the forms of madness for anyone to approach, see and pass between, the twin poles of contemporary lunacy, the one chained anguish, rolling in his fury, the other inertly self-contained, arms and knees held in, and the inwardly gazing eyes of despair. Models of the mind, they were also, partly in practice and wholly in imagination, the depiction of conditions within. When James Carkesse describes himself, in ‘The Poetical History of Finnesbury Mad-house’, as wearing ‘Chains of Iron’, as kept ‘in the Hole’, as treated with vomits and purges, as having his blood forcibly let and as sleeping on straw ‘Where Rats and Mice do swarm’,6 he was speaking nothing less than the truth, albeit in the awry form of his own telling. Cibber’s statues confirmed and consolidated that truth with a force of imagination that influenced countless literary and visual representations of the insane down the course of the next century, from Pope’s famous lines in The Dunciad, through the inmates described in Smollett’s Sir Launcelot Greaves and those displayed in the last plate of Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, to the rattling chains in the performance of ‘the great Dowdy’, and finally, at what was probably the darkest period of Bethlem’s existence, to the madness as it ‘really’ was, or really was treated, as witnessed by Edward Wakefield in 1814. Wakefield visited Bethlem on 2 May and found, as he reported to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Madhouses in England a year later, that in this case fiction was also very much fact: In the men’s wing in the side room, six patients were chained close to the wall, five handcuffed, and one locked to the wall by the right arm as well as by the right leg; he was very noisy; all were naked, except as to the blanket gown or a small rug on the shoulders, and without shoes; one complained much of the coldness of his feet; one of us felt them, they were very cold. The patients in this room, except the noisy one, and the poor lad with cold feet, who was lucid when we saw him, were dreadful idiots; their nakedness and their mode of confinement, gave this room the complete appearance of a dog-kennel.7 Bethlem within undermined the palatial ideal of its exterior as surely and as thoroughly as Pope’s treatment of Homer, and particularly of the ideals of Homeric heroism, shook the bases of neo-classical culture, shook, in Pope’s case, in order to reconstruct on a surer, more morally acceptable ground but shook, in Bethlem’s, with nothing but the truth to fall back on. Here really was the home of insanity. Representation, for once, could be verified by passing between Bethlem’s statues,


between raving and melancholy, and entering the real fabrication that was Bedlam, a state of mind and of art overlaid upon and coinciding with a set of buildings, galleries, cells, grilles, warders, inmates and the conditions that bound them into a pattern of medical, moral and cultural understanding, like ‘disease’ upon an ‘illness’. Behind the long facade the building contained galleries on two floors, equally long, men to the east, women to the west, with individual cells opening from the galleries.8 Space in the new Bethlem was relatively generous, with cells measuring 12 feet by 8 feet and the galleries themselves 13 feet high.9 Segregation was mainly by sex until the opening of the two newly constructed wings for incurables in 1733, men at the farthest east, women out to the west. Some, however, were segregated as a danger to others or to themselves. César de Saussure, writing of the period after 1714, describes finding himself in a long and wide gallery, on either side of which are a large number of little cells where lunatics of every decription 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.10 Order and proportion on the outside, cell by cell disposition on the inside, delusion by delusion, maniac by melancholiac, the frenzied, the ecstatic and the morbid side by side in the reality of living. Visitors, admitted any day except Sunday, but more especially in the summer months and with a particular surge every Easter,11 were able to run the range of contemporary derangement, see for themselves the ‘shame’ and the ‘glory’ of their City’s thinking for the insanity in its midst. The more thoughtful, or the more jocular, among them might reflect upon the relation between ‘the Chief of the City’ and the ‘crack-brained society’ they found themselves in, and even on how far the minds on display were mirrored in the minds enjoying the display, indeed, with Richard Newton’s drawing in mind, on which was in fact which. As Ward expresses it at the end of his visit: ‘Having pretty well tired ourselves with the frantic humours and rambling ejaculations of the mad folks, we took a turn to make some few remarks upon the looseness of the spectators …’ concluding that ‘’Tis an almshouse for madmen, a showing-room for whores, a sure market for lechers, and a dry walk for loiterers.’12


Hogarth, above all artists, seized upon the visual potential of Bedlam. In the final plate of The Rakes’s Progress (Fig. 4a, b), which originally dates from 1735, but with revisions in 1763, by which time Hogarth had himself been elected as a Governor of Bethlem Hospital, he engraved the century’s most abiding image of insanity in confinement, a multi-layered fashioning of expectation and of fact deployed so that it reads like the truth. On a narrative level, of course, it is indeed true, insofar as the downfall of a rake was a recognized theme in novels and prints of the period and, as we have seen with Pope’s later work, a profligate son compensating through his own lack of straight thinking for a miserly father’s opposite mode of living amiss was also an established satirical subject. Tom Rakewell’s giddy career towards Bedlam is in accord with the simultaneously moral and exploitative intentions of these forms. We enjoy the decadence, enjoy condemning it, and enjoy all the more, therefore, the self-induced justice of the dénouement. A visit to Bethlem would certainly be morally worthwhile were we to

Fig. 4a

William Hogarth, The Rake’s Progress 8 (1735)


Fig. 4b

William Hogarth, The Rake’s Progress 8 (1763)

see only such inmates as deserved to be there and whose stories were as straightforwardly instructive as Tom’s. Equally, Hogarth’s Bedlam is factually true. There are the high galleries, the long narrow cells, the barred grilles, and even the iron gates that from 1729 were in place to separate the curables from the incurables in their new wings. We, presumably, are on the incurable side (male, and therefore to the east, along towards St Botolph’s Church and Bishopsgate Street): moral return from such a fall as the rake’s is narratively impossible. Inmates, as de Saussure observed, are allowed free access to the gallery, where visitors mingle, shocked and titillated by what they see. What they see here is a naked king, crowned with straw, urinating against the wall. They take refuge behind a fan. In the 1763 revision the lady with the fan more delicately averts her gaze with a slight turn of the head. Are these Ward’s whores, busy in their ‘showing-room’, or are they his foolish hairless girls, ready to take to their heels for fear of mockery? Fact in Hogarth quickly melds into


interpretation. Verifiable detail, equally, merges with artistic inheritance. Rakewell himself, as naked now as he has been elaborately overdressed through the preceeding plates, head conspicuously shaven without the adornment of either his own hair, from the first plate, or his expensive wig, sits holding his head, his gaze directed away from the throng about him towards the bare floor, seeing only his own despair. He is Cibber’s dreadful, pre-emptive model, melancholy madness in all its unadorned essentials. Behind him, through the open door of cell 54, his ‘brainless Brother’, translated into religious mania, raves on his pallet of straw, naked, facially animated, eyes as afire with rapture as Cibber’s furious twin was with anguish. He has mistaken, suggest Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, ‘the light from his cell window for a revelation’.13 Other types of madness, well-known in the texts and visualisations of the period and therefore unsurprisingly present in such a representation, people the gallery, ‘crack-brained’ each according to his own light, each locked into the truth of his own slant and, equally, each ignorant of the varied slants going on around them: the failed musician, scraping at a fiddle with his score on his head; the religious fanatic with Papal crown and staff; an ageing Hamlet, mad for love – possibly for love of ‘Charming Betty Careless’, the prostitute whose name is carved beside him on the stairs – ‘his doublet all unbrac’d’ and ‘his stockings foul’d, Ungarter’d and downgyved’14 towards his ankles; three figures obsessed with measurement, one the very type of the mad tailor, running his tape between his outstretched fingers, a second, an astonomer, squinting through a rolledup sheet of paper, and a third, squeezed behind an open cell door, engrossed in calculations to find the longitude on the wall of the gallery; and there are the naked, urinating monarch and the rapt anchorite. Of all these secondary figures, only the dog (a King Charles spaniel, perhaps), barking at the moon-faced lover, shows any sign of interactive recognition. Crack-brained worlds co-exist, side by side, even overlap, sharing the same floor, the same airy height, but they do not co-ordinate. Certainly none participates in another’s delusions, any more than the projectors do at Lagado. When it comes to madness, each mad space is a closed system. The star-gazer gazes on at nothing, oblivious of the tailor, measuring thin air beside him and the crazy longitudinal calculations going on at his back. Our seeing, of course, the breadth of seeing in which we are invited to participate by Hogarth, is one that, in the know and in the confidence of the satirist, demands connectedness where from within the frame there is nothing but self. Between the extremes of insane


self-centredness, as much as between the twin artistic poles of moral intention and satiric under-cutting, to read a Hogarth print is, in terms of understanding a thing straight, not far removed from reading a Pope satire or moral essay or even a Fielding novel. The insane types might come from The Dunciad but the reading demands are more akin to what Pope requires from his Ethical Epistles. Yet even sane reading is not allowed to stay still. Proper understanding cannot rest on its laurels and Hogarth, keeping satire on its toes, took the opportunity in 1763 to retouch specific satiric details in order to strike slightly different, or slightly resharpened, notes from those of 1735. One principal change is to the wall behind the main group. Peter Wagner suggests that with Britain, by 1763, in the grip of ‘the hunt for the “longitude prize”’ (instituted by Act of Parliament and since 1714 worth £20,000, sufficient to tempt the most dedicated as well as the most crackbrained of calculators and chronometrists to risk a future in Bedlam),15 this whole section of the plate has been focused more precisely on this particular source of highly contemporary lunacy. Indeed, the prize was to be won by John Harrison only two years later. Even so, most of the details cited – moon, ship, mortar discharging a bomb, comet – were also present in the first version, as was the scrawled word ‘Longitude’. What is conspicuously different is the central addition, in what had been a vacant space, of a large coin, a halfpenny, tail-side forwards, with the figure of Britannia on her chariot, hair dishevelled and flowing behind her in what is clearly a state of derangement. The coin is dated 1763. Wagner is surely correct in reading this as Britain officially endorsing the madness that has accelerated over the years as the longitude prize fever mounts, and beyond that of the seal that has approved the madness of life in contemporary Britain. What is also the case, however, is that this late addition effectively closes down interpretation on what had previously been a more uncertain ground between the factual and the conjectural. Where from 1735 the longitude calculations had been one part in a crazy jigsaw, a single delusion among many, mad Britannia not only elevates that branch of delusion as of particular national application but, in presiding, frantically, over the whole scene from her wall-bound elevation, pronounces categorically what had already been implicit but multitudinously varied: this is a mad country. The other major change, though a less obtrusive one, is to the central group itself. Here, from the moral point of view, is the culmination of Tom Rakewell’s decline and of the narrative point of it all. Chained now by the ankle, a dressing below his naked right breast,


which Fiona Haslam suggests could represent a failed suicide attempt, but which Andrews and Scull attribute to the fact that he has been recently bled,16 and visually wholly at home in his new surroundings, he is tended by the faithful and tearful Sarah and, completing the Pietà, an anonymous but overarching figure, attentive both to the oblivious Tom and to nearly oblivious Sarah, but rather more to Sarah. In 1735 this figure is a physician, his coat unbuttoned and a white shirt underneath, reflecting the white of his wig. His left hand rests on Tom’s naked shoulder while the last two fingers of his right hover, outstretched, fractionally above Sarah’s exposed brow as she weeps over lost Tom, mopping her tears with her handkerchief. His gaze is firmly on Sarah. Is this touching display a straight contrast with the lunacy and self-interest all around them? Tom, mad now, has at least the consolation of faithful Sarah weeping and of the faithful physician. Is this physician, perhaps, Bethlem’s actual physician at the time, Dr James Monro, first of the dynasty that was to hold the post in unbroken succession down to 1853 in spite of two investigating commissions in the nineteenth century and two consequent dismissals for varying degrees of incompetence? Certainly Hogarth knew Monro, who had been physician since 1728, and also his son John, who succeeded him at Bethlem in 1752. The angle of head makes it difficult to compare the broad face of this physician with the equally broad face, long nose and piercing eyes of James Monro.17 As such, Hogarth might be conveying a subtle tribute to Monro, the hand of healing and reconciliation at work after the trials that have gone before. Or, in that Monro had something of a reputation as an adulterer, he might not.18 The ambiguity, at least, in 1735 is appropriate. Tom’s tale, like all explicitly moral narratives, risks becoming banal. It is redeemed from being so by the uncompromising undercutting of Hogarth’s satiric contextualising and by the restless impermanence of his closures. Down, mad or dead as his protagonists might eventually find themselves, his dead refuse to go without taking a welter of contemporary allusion with them, all of it open to continuing interpretation. The force of the change made in 1763 to the Pietà at the close of The Rake’s Progress is to shut the door on such ambiguity. The physician is no longer a physician but, simply by darkening his shirt and wig and by the addition of the long clerical collar, has been transformed into a clergyman. Interpretation is no more. The possible tribute to the now late James Monro, or to medicine in general, or the possible extra-medical interest in Sarah, fade into a more genuine scene of healing, not at the hands of science but of God. In the context of Tom’s fall, and of the faithful


Sarah, salvation is a promise with real force. In the context of mad Britannia, we must look to another world for rest and reconciliation. In the context of Bedlam, Christ is at hand, even here. In the context of the Pietà, the frisson of danger of engaging such an image in such a place for such a protagonist in 1735 is replaced by an unambiguous religious conclusion: Christ is in us all. In the context of Hogarth’s life, he was to die two years later. Displaying madness in all its variety, all its ambiguity in relation to contemporary life, and in all its factuality within an architecturally realised space, is not the same thing, of course, as coming close to the mad mind in its own capacity for variety, ambiguity and ownership of space. Seeing madness in Hogarth is seeing madness as it is seen, but not necessarily as it is experienced. In this sense, Hogarth’s plate is at the exact point of perception where Bethlem becomes Bedlam, something real turns into something seen and, because seen in a variety of modes with their appropriate accumulations of tradition, into something understandable and acceptable as truth. The issues of what it is to be mad, however, of when madness is madness, and of what the relation is between madness and sanity, are in fact more explicitly encountered in two less well-known and less influential works by Thomas Rowlandson, Doctor Willis at Home and its twin Doctor Willis Abroad, both of which date from around 1788, though late 1788 or early 1789 are most probable (Fig. 5a, b). The scene is a dining table where Francis Willis, like Thomas Bakewell later, is presiding over the assembled inmates of his house, the private madhouse, presumably, in Lincolnshire where Willis, a former clergyman and now a mad-doctor of unorthodox methods, had his practice. Willis, as is well known, had come to celebrity through his unexpected call to attend, and possibly to cure, George III after his deterioration during his first period of madness in the autumn of 1788. Willis was sent for in early December. In April 1789, following the king’s recovery, medals were struck and distributed as part of the national celebrations: ‘Doctor Willis’ was inscribed on the face, with the doctor’s portrait, and on the reverse, ‘Britons Rejoice Your King’s Restored 1789’.19 As Ronald Paulson has written, a characteristic Rowlandson subject is that moment when everything has just gone out of control: the coach has just, but only just, toppled over and has not yet hit the ground; the crowds of people rolling down Greenwich Hill have just begun to turn into an unstoppable landslide; the theatre is collapsing, but the first bodies and slabs of masonry have only just landed in the pit.20 The force of the collapse in the Doctor Willis prints is that it is extended


Fig. 5a

Thomas Rowlandson, Doctor Willis at Home (c.1788)

Fig. 5b

Thomas Rowlandson, Doctor Willis Abroad (c.1788)


over two frames, but not in a straightforward chronological manner. Narrative between two scenes has many drawbacks when compared to the Hogarthian eight of The Rake’s Progress: banality of outcome or triteness of contrast are attendant dangers. The impact of these two prints, though, is achieved partly because of their misleading titles. They are not about quite what they say they are about. Indeed Willis himself is absent from the second altogether, which is certainly not therefore about his being abroad but about the consequences at home of his not being there. It is precisely his absence that is the subject of the picture, just as his presence, we realise, was the subject of the first, not the fact of that presence being at home. Willis’s methods as a maddoctor, the imposition of an iron control through the strength of his own personality and, if need be, the strength of a few burly retainers, were in important respects part of the moral management movement that gained in force over chains and straw in the latter part of the century. The responsibility for self-regulation was one to be assumed by the patient, but managed, or imposed, through the agency of the physician and his regimen. The effect of this method is vividly seen in the first print, where the spilt glass is the only evidence of actual collapse, but the whip, strait-jackets, five attendants and the ferocious glare of Willis himself are reminders of just how the therapy works, with varying degrees of success, on the eight inmates of the house who are present, or almost present. Willis’s absence, and the apparent absence of attendants, from the second print give even more vivid evidence of how it both works and fails to work. Doctor Willis absent, unlike Achilles and Tom Jones, is certainly not Doctor Willis still. Here four male patients at the same table have been joined by three female, all in stages of undress. The table, curiously, is clothed, the only sign of restraint now being exercised. This time wine is spilling more plentifully, knives are drawn – indeed a fork and a spoon are drawn – fights are breaking out, vomiting is taking place, chairs are toppling. The room itself is sketched in with less clarity now that Doctor Willis is from home, but the facial expressions of the inmates are distinct and animated, as are the varied energies they bring to the picture, resulting in movement taking place simultaneously across several conflicting planes. Did Thomas Bakewell, we wonder, have this problem up there in Staffordshire whenever he stepped outside? Or did treating them ‘exactly as I should do if they were not afflicted’ not include leaving them alone at the table? Doctor Willis Abroad, however – and this is one superiority that the two-part narrative has over the eight – has the effect of sending us back


to the first. Contrasts, after all, are not only differences but also reflections that mirror the unlike in relation to the like. It is in rereading the first that Rowlandson’s work obliges an engagement with the experience of madness. What the first print emphasises on second and subsequent viewings is the sheer effort of restraint, not as conspicuously exerted by the doctor and attendants, which was clearly evident on first viewing, but by the patients themselves. Some, clearly, have failed in self-restraint, overwhelmed by the responsibility. Three are in strait-jackets, and one, presumably, will shortly be joining them. The four still seated at table exhibit varying degrees of stress, from the man with his fists in the air, next, no doubt, for flailing on the floor, to the noble endeavour of the inmate to Doctor Willis’s right, face grasped between his hands as if to hold himself expressionless – no Hogarthian turning of the head where turning could be so disastrously misinterpreted – but the cost of this stolidity clearly visible beneath the table where his left leg swings restlessly, perilously close to the doctor’s own. Here, in the dwindling number of patients at table, in their expressions and in the breaking down of their individual will power, are genuine issues of what it is to be experiencing madness in a context where sanity is demanded. Social norms are set up in the form of the dinner table: individual effort, and the mental grasp that exacts, are tested, measured and, inevitably, found wanting. All is not ‘order and containment’, as Paulson claims,21 in Doctor Willis at Home. All is order in the process of becoming disorder, as minds crack under the intolerable strain, the pressures of that strain made all too evident by the utter confusion of Doctor Willis Abroad. Only restraint removed can fully reveal the success, and cost, of its imposition in the first place. Rowlandson, then, at least in these two prints, albeit directed in satire, and no doubt as half-truthful as most satire is obliged to be, does contrive to engage with minds that are mad, or struggling not to be thought mad, in a way that Hogarth, at least in The Rake’s Progress, does not do. Other works by Rowlandson, and indeed by other artists, also deal with madness as it appears in relation to madness from within, though more straightforwardly than in the Doctor Willis prints, where appearance is at the heart of the therapy, the heart of being or not being mad, as much as at the heart of the visual form. The Hypochondriac (Fig. 6), from 1788, is content with being two-dimensional after the mirror contrasts of Doctor Willis, though its effect is also to allow, albeit at a less sophisticated level, access to a mind under stress. We are no longer in Bethlem the place, though Bedlam the state of mind is still in the process of becoming present. We are not even,


Fig. 6

Thomas Rowlandson, The Hypochondriac (1788)

we may assume, in a private madhouse. The space portrayed here is the patient’s residence where, like Garrick’s friend, he is able to engage in his lunacy amid all the comforts of his own home. Madness in these prints does not depend on location to define it: it has come out of the madhouse and into the parlours and personal chambers of the English middle classes. The effect of The Hypochondriac is in its portrayal of two visions of reality, two truths as they are being seen by the participants in what is an attempted medical consultation. Only the viewer, well within the traditional frame of visual satire, shares with the satirist the complete perspective that places both visions as one-sided. The hypochondriac gentleman of the title sits in his nightshirt, inert, staring, like the lover in Rake’s Progress, into what looks to the maid and physician like vacancy. His vision, however, realised vividly for the viewer, is far from inert and dominates the entire left side of the picture, peopling the empty wall, as it appears to doctor and maid, with compellingly animated means of suicide. The energy that there is in the print is energy towards death, towards the ultimate inertia, but it is energy nevertheless. Hypochondria, as Boswell and many others of his contemporaries


knew, is a closed world, but it is by no means solitary or uncreative. On the contrary, it teems with the products of what Boswell in The Hypochondriack calls ‘his gloomy imagination’ which is ‘so powerful that he cannot disentangle himself from its influence, and he is in effect persuaded that its hideous representations of life are true’.22 The physician John Woodward – another unorthodox figure, who had been mocked in his time by Swift and Pope – treated such a man in what was probably the second decade of the century (the case is undated). This gentleman’s melancholy, ‘continually increasing’, says Woodward, was come finally to a Pitch very high and uncommon; and he was under that Terror, Consternation, and Uneasiness, that it is not possible to express. He seemed ever to himself as in an Hell upon Earth, to use an Expression of his own. Even his most lucid and comfortable Moments were so dismal and miserable, that he thought Death more desireable. His Thoughts were become now likewise more extravagant, and his Mind unruly; insomuch that he expected nothing but sudden Distraction; a thing the most horrible to him that could happen. So that, partly to avoid that, and partly to ease himself of that insupportable Burthen of Melancholy, he continually resolved to lay violent Hands upon himself; and several Times attempted it.23 So, Rowlandson’s hypochondriac sees offers of rope, poison, dagger, execution by beheading, impalement by death’s own dart, and finally the hearse that will bear him away – apparently at high speed. Physician and maid, meanwhile, see nothing of this, only a man motionless and self-absorbed. Physician rests his cane under his nose in the traditional stance of perplexed professionalism, reflective but clueless. His eyes focus on the carpet, or on the table of previously prescribed and clearly ineffective medicines, or possibly on the bosom of the maid, thrust generously forward for his approval. There is no engagement. The patient has nothing in common with those sent to tend him: they have no access to the reality of his thoughts. As the accompanying verses baldly put it, ‘not in torture such a wretch to keep One pitying bolus lays him sound asleep’.24 In some cases, mercy-killing is apparently the only solution. If the viewer’s engagement with a deranged mind, albeit one that could be on its way out, has been facilitated by The Hypochondriac it is clearly at a very preliminary level, particularly compared with the


Doctor Willis prints, and by means that depend very much on the deployment of stock images, both of patient and of doctor. One more example, that goes further towards a single frame of reading in its presentation, or rather utilisation, of a mad mind, is George Woodward’s John Bull Troubled with the Blue Devils (Fig. 7), one of a host of political appropriations of insanity that appeared over the last decades of the century. Woodward’s is from 1799, but others, by such artists as Newton, Rowlandson and Gillray, are dotted through the 1780s and 1790s. If The Hypochondriac seeks to mock two different worlds and their incompatibility, Woodward’s print unapologetically annexes the images of melancholy for a purely political agenda and thereby installs them within the single dimension that is charged with the force of one time and one place. John Bull would perhaps not be as instantly recognisable as Hogarth’s distracted Britannia were it not for his name, helpfully mentioned in the title, but his diminution from the normal heavy hearty Englishman, given currency earlier in the century by John Arbuthnot, to this sick and sallow figure huddled by his fire, face

Fig. 7

George Woodward, John Bull Troubled with the Blue Devils (1799)


carved in misery like a crescent moon, makes a striking statement against the policies of the Pitt administration. Boswell wrote in his journal of the melancholy imagination’s capacity to produce images that are smoke-damaged: ‘My mind is a furnace. It melts and refines objects when there is a strong clear heat; but sometimes my furnace is smoky, and then the objects are blackened.’25 Boswell’s mental furnace for Woodward’s melancholic Bull has transmuted into the more homely heat of his own fireside, but its production of smoky objects is clearly fully functional: the devils in different forms pour from his hearth, all of them taxing to his life and comforts – income tax, house tax, hair powder tax, taxes on salt, tea, wine and windows, and other, smaller devils that have not yet grown into fully developed taxes – as well as to his mental equilibrium. We are forbidden, of course, by the explicitly political framing of the drawing even to consider the nature of the consciousness that is seeing these devils. It is not that kind of representation. Woodward’s work is the exploitation of a set of images directed towards one specific end. The mad mind here is simply a vehicle, one rather blunt, though possibly effective, extreme at the far end of the cultural uses of insanity. Madness is not the issue: the issue is the sane reading of signs in a display where the merest vestiges of insanity ‘as it really was’ remain, for the better imparting of a quite different meaning in a quite different agenda. If John Bull Troubled with the Blue Devils is the junction where madness finally gets off, leaving sane understanding to journey on without it, other artists of the period, with other interests and other agendas, made it their business to re-invest in what they saw as ‘real’ insanity and to reengage the emotions and passions that, they felt, could only come from a meeting with mad minds, albeit minds that were already reworked through the medium of literary and dramatic language. If stage madness was as much of an appropriation as political Woodward, nevertheless, as seen in the fifth chapter, the theatrical enactment of insane states, and particularly through the characters of Shakespeare, provided for many a sensitive and convincing exposure to minds gone awry. Many painters, particularly in the latter part of the century, took to scenes from Shakespeare as subjects to be treated, often on a grand scale, usually in oils, as befitting the grandeur of the cultural master, and often identifying his more extreme situations as the ones most suited for artistic representation. Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West, Benjamin Wilson, James Northcote, George Romney and Robert Smirke from the 1760s onwards all painted Shakespearean scenes, many based on actual productions and featuring known actors, particularly such


stars as David Garrick. Benjamin Wilson, for example, painted Mr Garrick in the Character of King Lear as early as 1761, showing Lear on the heath at his first encounter with Poor Tom (Fig. 8). The scene is clearly a representation of Tate’s Lear (or probably of Garrick’s own version of Tate’s Lear), for the Fool is absent. Tom is wild and brooding, but carries the traditional forked stick of the madman and is dressed in the loose gown of the Bedlamite. His wind-swept hair reflects the scudding clouds overhead and the sideways bent branches of the trees, one of which has been felled by the lightning that can still be seen in the turbulent background. The focus of the scene, however, is Lear himself, supported by a sad-eyed Kent. Garrick, while regally dressed, has hair almost as wild as Tom’s and eyes as staring. He holds his right hand, fingers outstretched in the characteristic Garrick gesture, towards the angry heavens. Wilson has clearly intended to capture him at the turning of the mind, the felled tree foreshadowing the authority and mentality that are collapsing under stress, while Tom is the exemplar of the madness that awaits. The whole presentation engages landscape, atmospheric conditions, facial and bodily expression, as well as dress, in a coherent portrayal not

Fig. 8 Benjamin Wilson, engraved by James McArdell, Mr Garrick in the Character of King Lear (1761)


only of imminent madness but of madness utterly in tune with its surroundings, as in tune, presumably, as it is with the sympathies of the spectator. Lear at the mercy of the elements in Garrick’s, and Wilson’s, portrayal is as grand, awful and sublime as anything in Childe Harold, Mazeppa or Rob Roy. What is more, this is madness represented for itself: for its dramatic impact, certainly, but without a political or even, at the level at which The Rake’s Progress works, a moral agenda. Madness is elevated, madness is spectacular, but madness is not highjacked except insofar as it is being used for the arousal of larger than life feelings in the spectator. Many of these paintings, on display from 1789, were for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, the brainchild of Alderman John Boydell, which attracted a series of leading artists and a good deal of public interest, but less financial profit, until its sale in 1803. Even then Boydell published, two years later, a set of a hundred plates from the gallery, equally featuring some of the best-known painters whom he had commissioned for the gallery. These included Johann Zoffany’s painting of Garrick as Macbeth, Romney’s of Ariel, Richard III by Reynolds, Macbeth by Reynolds, Coriolanus by Gavin Hamilton, John Hoppner’s Cymbeline and Northcote’s Arthur and Hubert from King John. Perhaps the most dedicated Shakespearian artist, though, and one of the most prolific contributors to Boydell’s exhibitions, was Henry Fuseli, and for obvious reasons. Fuseli, who moved to London from his native Zurich in 1764, had long been attracted to Shakespeare and to the kind of art he represented – moral in the widest sense, large in scale, unrelenting in its stress on human passions at the limits. He returned repeatedly to the plays for the subjects of his canvases. As Peter Tomory observes, of Fuseli’s arrival in England: The most significant experience for Fuseli must have been to see Shakespeare played. It can be assumed that he knew the texts of many of the plays by heart, indeed he had translated Macbeth in Zurich. But to see so many familiar scenes enacted as dramatic situations would have revealed the possibilities of Shakespeare as a pictorial source.26 The banker Thomas Coutts recollected in 1809 that ‘Fuseli had Shakespeare’s work so completely in His memory as to be able to recollect any passage alluded to.’27 Fuseli himself wrote in admiration and awe of Shakespeare. ‘The exhibition of character in the conflict of passions with the rights, the rules, the prejudices of society’, he declared


in a lecture he gave as Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy in 1805, ‘is the legitimate sphere of dramatic invention. It inspires, it agitates us by reflected self-love, with pity, terror, hope and fear… . Such is the invention of Sophocles and Shakespeare, and uniformly that of Raphael’.28 Or, more briefly in one of the Aphorisms he was compiling between 1788 and 1818: ‘Shakespeare is to Sophocles what the incessant flashes of a tempestuous night are to daylight. Things came to Raphael and Shakespeare; Michelangelo and Milton came to things.’29 Just what it was to Fuseli to paint Shakespeare comes in his response to Macbeth, a play he did paint on several occasions, including his famous depictions of Garrick as Macbeth with Hannah Pritchard as Lady Macbeth. This, from the same lecture of 1805, directs attention from what, for Fuseli, are superficial side-effects in both text and performance (and in his view in the ambitious canvas Macbeth and the Witches by Sir Joshua Reynolds, which he is clearly describing here30) to what is at the heart of the play’s emotions and, therefore, ought properly to be the dominant impression of a pictorial rendering. ‘It is not’, he asserted, by the accumulation of infernal or magic machinery, distinctly seen, by the introduction of Hecate and a chorus of female demons and witches, by surrounding him with successive apparitions at once, and a range of shadows moving above or before him, that Macbeth can be made an object of terror, – to render him so you must place him on a ridge, his down-dashed eye absorbed by the murky abyss; surround the horrid vision with darkness, exclude its limits, and shear its light to glimpses.31 Here are Shakespeare’s ‘incessant flashes of a tempestuous night’ rendered not only visually coherent but also psychologically, both to the ‘horrid vision’ that increasingly takes over the protagonist and, in her separate way, his wife and to the ‘object of terror’ that Macbeth thereby becomes to audience and spectator. As a painter, too, and as a commentator on the painting of texts and performances, Fuseli entered into the morality and madness debate about King Lear – entered, at least, insofar as he scorned the dominant line, espoused as we have seen by Lewis Theobald and Arthur Murphy and enshrined in Tate’s The History of King Lear, that the direct and culpable cause of Lear’s madness was the behaviour of his two daughters. Fuseli, writing here in 1767 in his anonymous pamphlet Remarks on the Writings and Conduct of J.J. Rousseau, following his meeting with


Rousseau in Paris the preceding year, assaults Tate’s play (Tate, of course, is the first ‘gentle feeler’ cited, and Johnson the second) and its supporters with undisguised contempt: When Shakespeare, to lesson mankind, afflicts innocence and virtue, nor, in the latitude of the ravings, crimes, follies he exposes, can find any reward this side of the grave for them; when, to warn fathers against the dotage of predilection, the fury of prejudice and the destructive consequences of flattery, he destroys the family of Lear, and wraps Cordelia in the storm, one gentle feeler changes her dagger to a husband, and adulterates the simplicity of filial piety with love, and another could not for all the world read the play a second time, till he turned commentator. When the same poet, to stamp on power the mark of private virtue, and to consecrate wedlock, thunders law and nature to ambition, tears the womb of incest, and dashes all its horrors into light, they mince passion to a tear for pretty, harmless, blasted Ophelia, and arraign the great instructor of mankind at the bar of Drury Lane. But could you expect worse from those who, with the gravity of a Welsh goat, discuss whether Lear’s madness was owing to his abdication of power or the ingratitude of his daughters?32 Perhaps this is something Coutts had in mind when remembering in 1809 the Fuseli he had known forty years earlier (and it is with reference to his recollective memory for Shakespearean texts): ‘with all His talent He still had a sort of distortion in His mind, something similar to what is seen more or less in all His pictures’.33 Distortion of the prevailing view, and indeed of the taste of the times, it might have been, but Fuseli’s 1789 painting of King Lear (Fig. 9), as Peter Tomory points out, shows ‘the precise moment of Lear’s rejection of Cordelia’.34 In doing so, Fuseli highlights both the moral and dramatic significance of the act, but also its critical importance as the initial seeding of Lear’s consequent insanity. Unlike Wilson’s portrayal of Garrick as Lear in the storm, Fuseli has the action in this scene confined within Lear’s throne room, but the drama of the moment and the terrifying nature of the passions on display are no less telling. No Poor Tom is present to duplicate the madness, and no Fool to triplicate it (though Fuseli paints Shakespeare, and not Tate or Garrick): this scene precedes either of them. Instead all the energies and all the subsequent despair are gathered in the pose and expression of Lear himself, the awful pointing finger, the index to his whole body, and the shocked and shockingly glaring eyes, telling of


Fig. 9

Henry Fuseli, engraved by R. Earlom, King Lear (1789, engraved 1803)

unreasonable hopes dashed, anger indulged, and madness impending. They are Garrick’s hand and eyes, but it is not Garrick’s body, for this Lear is tall and muscular, nor Garrick’s face. Here, rather, is an idealised Lear, robust, fully haired and bearded, authoritative, dominating the frame with his wrathful self-conceit, implored with by (as in Wilson) sad-eyed Kent, and apparently reckless of the suffering he is in the process of causing, the bright-eyed animosities he cannot see in the expressions of Goneril and Regan over to the right, or the ripple of horror in the faces of the attendants. It is a portrayal of a dotage unchecked and about to descend, as rapidly as the burst of fury that has just broken, into all the insanity of spoilt second childhood and unwanted self-responsibility. The spears, held by invisible agents, bristle expectantly. There is no turning back. Mad self-destiny will have its way. It is said that one of Garrick’s innovations as an actor was to introduce reactions: the stage was no longer to be a showcase for a single talent, or for the histrionic skills of whoever happened to be speaking, while the rest of the cast chatted with their friends. With Garrick, actors acted and they reacted. The stage became a coherent place. If, as Tomory suggests, actors from Betterton in the 1660s onwards had studied ‘paintings by the Old Masters to gain insights into posture and gesture’,35 there is no better


illustration of the potential of the stage for giving sustained readings, rather than individual showpieces and effects, than Fuseli’s Shakespearean canvases with their moments of horror, of criminal realisation, of telling encounters and of corners voluntarily and wilfully turned into madness and ‘night’. Yet Shakespeare’s was not the only representation of insanity, present or to come, that interested Fuseli and nor, like Rowlandson in his way, was he content to confine the deranged mind to the Old Masters of English or classical drama. Madness was also in the homes and in the streets and in particular in the asylums of the world around. Fuseli told his friend Joseph Farington, apparently, that ‘according to a medical friend the largest number of inmates at Bedlam were women in love and the second largest were hackney or stage coachmen, for the reason that the continual shaking they got affected the pineal gland’.36 He did not choose to make a specialism of painting mad coachmen, but he did paint Mad Kate (Fig. 10).

Fig. 10

Henry Fuseli, Mad Kate (1806–7)


Mad Kate, from 1806 to 1807, is probably Fuseli’s best-known work after The Nightmare. Both are classic statements in genres that are absolutely of their time, one the Romantic Gothic, where myth and psychology meet, the other a triumph of charged female alienation. Both were subsequently imitated and parodied, yet both, equally, have some claim to representing the last word, or last stroke, within their respective fields. Mad Kate is not unique in Fuseli’s work – Tomory points to a number of precursor figures, including marginal groups of forlorn young females, wasting inertly while the main focus goes on elsewhere, in such paintings as The Vision of the Lazar House of 1791–3.37 Nor, of course, was the Mad Kate figure uniquely of its time, even though the direct impetus for the subject was the tale from Cowper’s poem, discussed in the previous chapter. Sterne’s Maria was one close relation and, as we have seen, she too appeared in many visual representations and continued to do so. As Helen Small has shown, though, it is ‘pretty, harmless, blasted Ophelia’ who became both the theatrical and the visual prototype for the love-mad female. ‘Ophelia set a standard for later madwomen’, successfully combining (quoting Elaine Showalter’s words) ‘“dual messages about feminity and insanity”: at once a wistful innocent and a sexually explicit woman’.38 Fuseli’s protrayal might or might not owe something to his rather patronising memories of the younger Mary Wollstonecraft during their period of intimacy in the early 1790s, including her well-known tendencies to dress down. But the features of Mad Kate were already wellestablished in the semiology of female insanity: the simple disarranged clothing, the working-class bonnet, hair long, untied, swept about promiscuously by the whirling of the wind. Equally, the seashore setting was already established, not only for pictorial Kates but even for representations of the textually landlocked Maria.39 Maids out of their wits sat better by the seaside, where the abandoned turbulence of their passions could be reflected not in the deceptive purity of their faces but in the accompanying restlessness of the ocean and its constant imparting of movement and ambiguity to sunshine and storm. In all of these respects Fuseli’s painting is of, rather than above, what was already a convention and, as convention, already in danger of debasing in the repeated representation what had already been appropriated from those actual women, like the Sarah Fletcher whose story is reconstructed by Helen Small,40 abandoned by actual lovers, or actual husbands, and who did, unlike Cowper’s Crazy Kate, actually suffer hunger and who did feel the cold. Henry Alexander testified before the 1815 Committee on Madhouses on his visit to the small Lunatic Asylum in


‘Leskeard’, Cornwall, where there were just two female inmates. They were kept in buildings that were ‘very damp and very low’. ‘Both of them were chained down to the damp stone-floor, and one of them had only a little dirty straw, which appeared to have been there for many weeks.’ He is asked: ‘With respect to this woman whom you found chained to the floor, you probably were led into conversation with her; did she tell you the wants she felt there?’ Not at all, she appeared incapable, the mind appeared gone very much; she was about thirty years of age; and it appeared, I think, that about seven years before she was a very respectable maidservant, who lived in various reputable families there, and was about to be married to a young man who left Leskeard and went to reside at Plymouth Dock, and not hearing from him, she went over, and found he was about to be married the next day to another person, and it had such an effect upon her mind that she has been deranged ever since… . Did she appear in a bad state of health, independent of the loss of reason? – She was extremely dejected and very much emaciated, but I attributed it to not having sufficient nutriment. We examined the provision, which was very poor. She was not allowed water to wash herself? – No.41 The narrative, told on her behalf, might be a construction, but the physical reality is there for all to see and smell. No one before Goya showed much inclination to appropriate that. What is different about Fuseli’s Mad Kate, and still uniquely shocking to the spectator, is still nothing to do with any recognition of hunger or cold. It is the look. This Kate, unlike Cowper’s, unlike Sterne’s Maria and her portrayals, is not comfortable to see. Her eyes, certainly, are wide, staring and crazed, but what they stare at the spectator in is neither wistful innocence nor sexual explicitness. They stare in terrified accusation. No eyes of the period ask so penetratingly of the observer what he does there. They ask, moreover, in a language that is itself alien, engaged and interrupted in the pursuance of its own unreachable discourse. Rather than ‘gone very much’ this is a mind gone elsewhere, but still capable of a direct assault on the prying tendencies of those of us left behind. There is neither welcome nor recognition in the eyes that not only meet the viewer’s but demand them. A tradition is redefined in the penetration of her glance: the love-mad maid, as open for exploitation by the man who comes to see as much as by the


man who has gone, looks back. The long line of visitors, of spies, voyeurs, oglers, satirists, sentimentalists, reformers and impersonators is abruptly brought to a halt. It is the most demanding mirror of all. What do you want? Eyes have no part in Gillray’s last drawing – or rather, in having no part they have every part. Gillray, who had played as large a role as any caricaturist, satirist or visual commentator in the political and mental ill-being of his time, annexing as he did so a full range of passing and enduring medical initiatives, including inoculation, bleeding and ‘Metallic Tractors’, suffered from declining eyesight all his life. He also suffered from rheumatism. During 1809 and 1810 he repeatedly failed to meet deadlines for his contracted work and at the end of the summer of 1810 his mental hold had become so fragile, with occasional bouts of raving and more persistent depression, that he was considered insane. By 1811, when he was in his mid fifties, and with failing eyesight, he was having difficulty holding a line. Draper Hill describes his attempt at a portrait which is dated 1 July 1811: On some parts of this unsettling drawing an inkless point has gouged viciously into the paper. Elsewhere the line wanders over the form in erratic jags and swirls, here and there resolving into tiny grotesque heads. The caricaturist’s pen seems to have pulsated electrically across the surface, leaving in its wake a meaningless trail of short broken lines.42 Shortly afterwards he attempted, according to The Examiner for 21 July 1811, ‘to throw himself out of the window of the attic story’ of ‘Mrs Humphrey’s, the caricature shop in St James’s Street’ where he lived. Only the window bars, in which he became trapped, prevented him.43 He finally died on 1 June 1815, at the age of fifty-eight. The drawing in question is an extraordinary self-portrait, Pray Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Blind Man (Illus. 11). Executed during Gillray’s final years, it has all the characteristics described by Hill, with irregular, illheld lines, in places degenerating into a mesh of cobweb which almost obscures the begging sign around the neck, and contrasting with the firm contours of the hat, stick and face of the beggar. The hair is long and unkempt. He has three visible teeth. Forms and faces of different sizes, some visualised, others the merest shadows, litter not only the margins but invade the form of the beggar himself. In contrast to Mad Kate, this work makes a specifically articulated request: ‘Pray Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Blind Man’. It is a request based in human emotion,


the capacity to engage with another’s neediness and suffering. Mad Kate assaults with her eyes, but the true eloquence of Gillray’s drawing is in the lack of eyes and in our knowledge of the artists’s physical and mental state when it was composed. If the eyes that are absent are the key to its clouded obscurity, its sprawling, fading run-away lines, and its openfaced vulnerability, they are also the trigger to our engagement with the state of mind, the artistic ‘Melancholy Madness’, that undertook it. Here is a face unseen but remembered, never actually witnessed in its fully blind state but imagined, the closed eyes with their prominently shuttered lids, the wispy figures a reminder of the creative impulse persisting within a world of darkness. And if it speaks to us of the artist’s own

Fig. 11

James Gillray, Pray Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Blind Man (c.1812)


blindness, created through the recollection of sight, it is also a portrayal, in a moment that strives for visual clarity, of a mind reappearing through uncertainty, invasion and stark unrelenting oblivion. It is an image drawn from the far reaches of a mind without sight. Uniquely, in a period when insanity and the insane were put to uses far beyond the business or benefit of mad men and women ‘as they really were’, it ‘gives us back’ an image of a mind on the very edges of disintegration.

Notes 1. Ned Ward, The London Spy, pp. 54–5. 2. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, ll. 297–300, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, London: Methuen, 1963, p. 153. 3. Fiona Haslam, From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in EighteenthCentury Britain, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996, pp. 166–7. I am indebted to Dr Haslam’s book for drawing my attention to several of the illustrations discussed in this chapter. 4. Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1943 (1963 edn), p. 311. 5. John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. William Bray, London: Dent Dutton, 1966, cited in John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, London: Harper Collins, 1997, p. 10. 6. James Carkesse, ‘The Poetical History of Finnesbury Mad-house’, in Carkesse, pp. 12–15. 7. First Report. Minutes of Evidence Taken before The Select Committee appointed to consider of Provision being made for the better Regulation of Madhouses, in England, House of Commons, 1815, p. 11. Reprinted in Ingram, Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century, p. 248. 8. See Patricia Allderidge, The Bethlem Hospital Historical Museum: Catalogue, The Board and Governors of The Bethlem Royal Hosiptal and The Maudsley Hospital, 1976, pp. 5, 8. 9. See Haslam, From Hogarth to Rowlandson, p. 155. 10. César de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reign of George I and George II, tr. and ed. Madame Van Muyden, London: John Murray, 1902, pp. 92–3, cited in Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, p. 126. 11. See Patricia Allderidge, ‘Bedlam: fact or fantasy?’, in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, Volume II: Institutions and Society, ed. W.F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd, London: Tavistock, 1985, p. 23. 12. New Ward, The London Spy, pp. 57–8. 13. Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000, p. 22. 14. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, II.i.78–80, ed. Harold Jenkins, London: Methuen, 1982, p. 234. 15. Peter Wagner, ‘Representation of Time in Hogarth’s Paintings and Engravings’, in Hogarth: Representing Nature’s Machines, eds David Bindman,


16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Frédéric Ogée and Peter Wagner, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, p. 104. Haslam, From Hogarth to Rowlandson, p. 153; Andrews and Scull, Undertaker of the Mind, p. 22. Andrews and Scull reproduce a 1747 painting of Monro by John Michael Williams in Undertaker of the Mind, p. 6. See for example Alexander Cruden, The Adventures of Alexander the Corrector, London: Richard Baldwin, for the Author, 1754, p. 23. As a former patient of both James and John Monro, we should, of course, be taking the word of a confined madman in accepting Cruden’s allegation. See Hunter and Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, p. 512. Ronald Paulson, Rowlandson: A New Interpretation, London: Studio Vista, 1972, p. 29. Paulson, p. 29. James Boswell, Boswell’s Column, 1777–1783, ed. Margery Bailey, London: William Kimber, 1951, p. 209. John Woodward, Select Cases, and Consultations, in Physick, London: L. David and C. Reymers, 1757, pp. 242–3. Quoted in Haslam, From Hogarth to Rowlandson, p. 165. James Boswell, Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774–1776, ed. Charles Ryskamp and F.A. Pottle, London: Heinemann, 1963, p. 252. Peter Tomory, The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli, London: Thames and Hudson, 1972, p. 15. Henry Fuseli, The Mind of Henry Fuseli: Selections from his Writings, ed. Eudo C. Mason, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951, p. 69. Fuseli, p. 251. Fuseli, p. 345. This is reproduced in Tomory, p. 226. Fuseli, p. 218. Fuseli, pp. 170–1. Fuseli, p. 69. Tomory, p. 227. Tomory, p. 70. Tomory, p. 110. Tomory, p. 172. The Vision of the Lazar House is reproduced as Plate 101. Small, p. 8, quoting Showalter, p. 11. See, for example, Richard Reinagle’s The Fair Maria, engraved in 1797, reproduced in Tomory as Plate 193. Small, pp. 1–5. First Report. Minutes of Evidence, pp. 65–6. Reprinted in Ingram, Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 251–2. Draper Hill, Mr. Gillray the Caricaturist, London: Phaidon, 1965, p. 145. Cited by Hill, p. 146.

8 Madness Itself: the Real Story

The search for ‘madness itself’, for ‘really’ knowing what madness is, or was, or will be, for the ‘truly insane’, in language, in appearance, in art, in behaviour, or for what I refer to earlier as ‘the wholeness of contemporary insanity’, is long, teasing and irresistible, as peopled by look-alikes as the fields of Troy, as strewn with casualties, as lined by mirrors as any dressing-room or picture gallery, and as encumbered by ham performances as any eighteenth-century stage or inn. Carrying conviction, Garrick-like, or arresting or moving the viewer, like Fuseli or Gillray, takes us some way, but only as far as the conventions of an artistic mode allow, albeit conventions that in Garrick’s case were being rewritten through the medium of his career. Disbelief may be willingly suspended, but we are still faced with what is at bottom a performance, either of lines on a page that get up and speak or of crafting with colour, shape and movement. If these are ‘madness itself’, then they are so only because we recognise the deceptions of these forms and agree to take them as truth. Can we, therefore, only ‘really’ know what madness was through the medium of an art? Is the ‘representation’ that is already a ‘representation’ in fact all that there is, the only way in which this particular ‘illness’, which we join in calling ‘madness’, can be shared and essentially known? Is an understanding of ‘disease’ the best we can do? Is it, perhaps, and shockingly, better than that and, in spite of the previously explored reservations about ‘representing’ the insane only to do them less than justice, to annexe their territory, highjack their suffering, is it to come closer to what insanity is all about than to ‘be’, or have been, insane? If we would know the truly insane, then we must attend to the sane, to the artists and writers and actors, not to the patients. Representation is not only the closest we shall come to ‘the real story’ but actually more ‘true’ than the real thing. 202

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That is a sobering conclusion, but one that carries conviction, particularly when we look at accounts of being, or having been, mad. I have written extensively, in The Madhouse of Language, about the extreme difficulty of encountering mad, as opposed to ‘mad’, writing about madness. Most accounts we can come across of what it was like actually to be mad still present us with formidable problems, quite apart from just why it was that the individual concerned was able to conclude that they had indeed been mad. Hannah Allen, for example, already discussed in chapter six, certainly went through a very harrowing and psychologically tortuous period of several years, and some of what she writes in her sane account of it – her delight at that time in her imagined monstrosity, as well as the occasional formal slippages in the journal from which she has been quoting – does indeed read today like writing ‘from the depths of female madness’. But these are instances in a text which, as we have seen, knows confidently what it is doing and where it is going. Hannah Allen’s ‘madness’, quite simply, now that she is in a position to see it, was a test from God on the path to making of her a ‘Choice Christian’ and the document which now narrates her madness also contains it and renders it no longer mad. The experience, we have to conclude, though now safe to live with is also thereby less authentic to what Allen actually went through and what the quoted journal occasionally allows us to glimpse. Moreover, the narrative has also been able to find a safe home within the overall conventions of a recognised form, the spiritual autobiography, where the whole tendency is towards one inevitable outcome and the whole point of suffering is to test and make clear the true path to personal restoration and divine redemption. Very much the same is the case with George Trosse’s The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse, which was Publish’d according to his Order, as the title page tells us, in 1714, a year after his death. An exemplary life, replete with mental and physical suffering and confinement in a madhouse, and concluding with Nonconformist ministry, is set out not in order to come to psychological terms with that suffering, still less to allow us to experience the full horror and incomprehension of it, but to serve as a model of the way to the Lord. It all has meaning, these texts assure us. But what was it really like, we ask in vain. Non-religious accounts – or at least accounts not written explicitly to relate a path to salvation – are equally problematic. Both Alexander Cruden and Samuel Bruckshaw were religious men, Cruden pre-eminently and extravagantly so. But none of their self-published pamphlets is to do with bringing the author to salvation. Cruden’s The


Adventures of Alexander the Corrector, certainly, involves his apparent belief that the events narrated, of his unjust confinement in Inskip’s madhouse in Chelsea, are evidence that God intends him to become a great man, but this is, as it were, a happy by-product of the outrage that has been perpetrated upon him. It is the sense of injustice that drives these works, fortified by a claim for financial damages against one or more named individuals. There never was, according to the authors, madness of any kind. The sufferings were those of falsely accosted innocence. We reading may read, now, for evidence of what could be taken as mad in Cruden and Bruckshaw’s portions of the eighteenth century, for linguistic evidence of how sanity wrongly accused goes about attempting to prove itself not insane,1 and even for signs of actual madness within a narrative quite explicitly addressed to the denial of such signs, but we find no account of ‘madness itself’ as experienced by the mad mind. In some accounts, ones in which a madness is actually acknowledged, albeit a madness later explained by attribution to God’s will and plan, it is the intelligence and articulacy of the writer that, paradoxically, get in the way of ‘madness itself’. One particularly interesting, and moving, example is William Cowper, who has already featured in these pages within a variety of modes and with whom I deal at some length elsewhere.2 Cowper, in the Memoir of the Early Life of William Cowper, Esq., which was published posthumously in 1816 but probably written in 1765, immediately after the two years of suffering and confinement he describes, finds, like Allen and Trosse, the narrative source of his mental torment in the recognition of God’s ultimately benign agency. There are suicide attempts, there are the promptings of the devil, there is the complete mental breakdown, the confinement, the appalling dreams, the conviction of sin and certainty of damnation, all feelingly narrated, more feelingly, in fact, for the almost detached manner in which Cowper deals with his own experience, as if it were not, somehow, even his own. There is, too, the gradual recovery, the gaining of ‘true’ understanding as he regains his understanding, and the serenity and promise of the end: ‘I said, “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord; he has chastened me sore, but not given me over unto death. O give thanks unto the Lord, for his mercy endureth for ever.”’3 But Cowper, unlike Allen and Trosse, is primarily an artist, a patterner of words, a configurater of ideas, albeit deeply held and suffered ones. His after-knowledge, as he believes it at the time of writing, and not at the time of experiencing, directs the construction not only of the overall meaning to be attached to the

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events, as it does with Trosse and Allen, but of their susceptibility to presentation, to issues of reflectivity, irony and beauty, to a far greater extent than can be achieved, or even perceived as possible, by his two fellow Puritan predecessors. One example will suffice (at the risk of rehearsing too much already in print). George Trosse, at the height of his madness, attempts to bite his tongue off in order to spit it in the face of God. This he interprets, as narrator, as having been prevented by God (‘the Lord graciously prevented so dreadful an Evil, and would not suffer me to force up my Under-Jaw with so much Strength as to bite it quite off’4) in order to preserve that tongue to do God’s work. Here is pattern, and one directly related to the declared intention of the account. Cowper, equally, describes committing an early affront to God by burning the prayers he had composed while on a spiritually recuperative visit to Southampton. In Cowper, however, the offence to the Lord becomes an assault, too, on language itself, a voluntary confinement within silence and exile that pervades and permeates the detail of his suffering quite apart from any intention that God might ultimately have regarding Cowper’s subsequent role as poet and hymnwriter. Patterning is irresistible for its own sake, quite apart from any contribution it might make (and of course it does so) to the avowed meaning of the story. Cowper the writer is too artistically intelligent to let the madness speak for ‘itself’. We learn as much about Cowper’s capacity for writing from his memoir as we do about his immersion in his madness. This chapter is concerned with giving voice to madness. We have witnessed, through the course of earlier chapters, a succession of sane writers and artists representing the insane in modes that corresponded with the requirements of their own sane agendas at the time of writing, relying on an audience whose recognition of the conventions of the mad would ensure that what was being depicted as ‘mad’ would at bottom be read as sane. Some of those engaged in the representation trade, more reflective perhaps than others, or with less pressing agendas to pursue, contrived that in seeing ‘madness’ on the page or in the frame an audience should also see something of itself, either by way of joke, or by way of moral justification for the intrusion. In most modes of reading madness, we could say, the reader or spectator is invited to participate in the construction of insanity in his or her own image. The likeness, for one reason or another, must bear a resemblance to ourselves, even if by repulsion from what we agree as finding shocking, or by laughter at what we join in finding a source of fun. Our discussion of Allen, Trosse, Cruden and Cowper has so far


suggested that mad, or imputedly mad, writers have found little option but to join the mainstream. The madness in their narratives is, after all, ‘madness’, as much constructed from the conventional signs as that of a Swift, a Ward, a Tate or a Hogarth and as reliant as theirs on audience sign recognition for the reading of their own ‘madness’ within the sane agenda upon which they are now engaged. Neither the sane, it would therefore seem, nor the mad, or indeed the ‘mad’, are capable of writing ‘madness itself’. One rather special category, that seems to bring us a little closer to madness ‘as it really was’, is those writers, either acknowledged or imputed as at one time insane, who, rather than resisting or explaining away their madness, actively embrace it for presentational purposes, thereby prompting the question: is someone who so readily puts on the mantle of madness capable of being sane? I am not concerned here – or indeed at all in this book – with writing performed while ostensibly mad, for example Smart’s Jubilate Agno.5 It is not that such writing is itself unproblematic. But there is a significant difference between, as in Smart’s case, poetry undertaken while innocently insane, while in a state of mind that seems at the time perfectly normal, albeit later recognised as not normal at all, and writing that consciously sets out to recreate what will pass as convincingly mad, either because it is indeed ‘madness itself’ or, more likely, because a significant number of readers will be prepared to take it as such. While we might agree in allowing Smart, and possibly William Blake, to remain thus ‘innocently insane’, we encounter different issues with those writers, for example James Carkesse and William Belcher, who persist in occupying the madness-sanity border. Both Carkesse and Belcher have already been mentioned. Of the two it is Carkesse, in the opening chapter, whose poetry and poetic stance quite explicitly act the madman. Form and, to a large extent, content, are chosen, he declares, in order to impersonate, to ‘be’ what society has apparently already decided that he is by locking him away in the first place. The reckless playing with rhyme and language together with the scorn expressed for conventional understanding make Carkesse’s poetry almost a textbook case of what his readers might expect mad poetry to be like, thus straight away making it also ‘mad’ poetry of the kind that became so popular at the turn of the seventeenth into the eighteenth centuries as so-called Bedlam verses. His writing is a long way, for example, from the direct simplicity of that quoted by Tuke – ‘Ah friends! pray help us if you can, And make us each again a man, That we from hence may go’ – as discussed in chapter six. Carkesse, it would seem is, as Roy Porter puts it, ‘hard to evaluate’,6 but only

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insofar as deciding which side of the line to place him. He is either wholly mad or wholly pretending. The Lucida Intervalla of his title are precisely what he is not experiencing. Belcher, however, is a slightly different case of ‘madness itself’ because in Belcher there is ambiguity more than there is conviction one way or the other. As we have seen, Belcher, as much as Hogarth, writes of the real madhouse, real conditions During my irremediable confinement, I was driven to the verge of desperation and real lunacy, through want of sleep, occasioned (I speak as if on oath) chiefly by the thinness of the partitions of the apartments, whereby I was disturbed by night with snoring and coughing, and by day with ranting and raving; so I know not what I would not have given for an hour’s peace, and am now astonished that I survived all.7 – and the real prospect of medical and quasi-medical individuals making large sums by the exploitation and commodification of the supposedly insane. But what distinguishes Belcher, alone among the company in this book, is that he expresses, at the time of writing, genuine doubt about his own sanity. He might declare against his wrongful confinement as loudly as Cruden or Bruckshaw, and assert that all this happened to him ‘when as perfectly in my senses as I trust I am at present’8 but there is still the uncertainty: ‘as I trust I am at present’. Belcher has, after all, been driven to the verge of ‘real lunacy’. How can he be sure he has not crossed over, and if crossed, how can he know he ever returned? Is the ‘Victim to the Trade of Lunacy’,9 as he subscribes himself, actually a victim because he has lost his mind to it? This ambiguity is a major governing factor in the writing of the Address To Humanity and it also renders Belcher’s work something close to what we might term the expression of ‘madness itself’. Structurally it is odd. It comprises a brief ‘Advertisement’, signed ‘W.B.’, in which Belcher declares his intention in publishing this work. It is that his ‘injuries’ and their cause should be taken note of by ‘men in power’ and thereby, it is implied, result in tighter restriction being imposed on the mad trade. This is concluded with allusion and thanks to Sir John Scott, currently Attorney-General and subsequently Lord Chancellor, but notorious as Earl of Eldon after the events at Peterloo in 1819. It is followed by the body of the pamphlet, ‘A Letter to Dr. Thomas Monro’, then physician to Bethlem and the man who had finally secured, in 1795, Belcher’s release from the Hackney madhouse where he had been


confined for eighteen years. It is here that Belcher sets out his treatment as an imputed lunatic, his charges against the trade, and gives the clearest idea of what it was like, for him, experiencing ‘the most insupportable situation possible to a man of feeling, that of imputed, accompanied with the disabilities of real, insanity’.10 As he proceeds, however, attempting to convey the horrors of the years of ‘legal death’11 in a manner compatible with a piece of writing addressed to an eminent physician, and including personal reference to the Attorney-General, to the distinguished defence barrister Thomas Erskine and to the then Lord Chancellor, Alexander Wedderburn, the strains of his experience tell within what he has to say. How, Monro had asked, in ‘wonder’ upon his release, was he able, while confined, ‘to settle my mind to the composition of a series of literary works in such circumstances’?12 The same wonder persists with regard to the ‘Letter’ itself. Here is a man released after eighteen years, years in which he has ‘lain whole winter nights bound’ in a strait waistcoat, ‘cold from want of bed-clothes’,13 and has been fettered, crammed with physic by a bullock’s horn, and knocked down, and at length declared a lunatic by a Jury that never saw me; and, what would make a man tear his flesh from his bones, all through affected kindness.14 What is more, he has experienced a version of the insanity trap, one that is specially reserved for imputed lunatics: Another dreadful aggravation is, that every degree of resentment against the authors of their ruin, is considered as a presumption of remaining insanity in the sufferer, who has hardly any chance of restoration without their consent, though he adduces thousands of proofs that the whole was a scene of iniquity thus countenanced and encouraged.15 Tearing the flesh, protesting over much about one’s sanity, providing proofs against what any sane observer may see is true: how does the imputed lunatic demonstrate himself sane? Belcher, in fact, doubts this too. He has been there. He knows and is even prepared to try to tell: Having thus closely attended to the operations of my mind when urged to the brink of insanity, as to form an idea of its reality, the

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best account I can give of it is, that in real derangement the mind is rather out of the body than the body out of the mind, according to the expression, “out of one’s mind.” I shall not, however, say all, lest I should be deemed a fanatic, after having in a manner learned to live in mental fire. …16 Not only has Belcher come sufficiently close to attempt a description of the ‘reality’ of being insane, but he knows more than he says, possibly more than is capable of being said – and the pamphlet gives many instances of those things which are ‘far beyond words to express’, are ‘incalculable and inexpressible’ or ‘unspeakable’.17 Hence the ambiguity of Belcher’s position as a released imputed lunatic, and hence the structural oddity of his Address, as if the experience that has just concluded has never and will never conclude. Indeed, the increasingly unsynchronised tone virtually asserts that Belcher will never recover. He takes the chance, in a ‘Postscript’ to the ‘Letter’ to advertise his forthcoming work, the ‘Galaxy, containing near 300 quarto pages of sacred and miscellaneous poetry and prose’ as ‘warm from the brain of a Lunatic’,18 and in the following section of the pamphlet, ‘The Trade of Lunacy; or, an approved receipt, To make a Lunatic, and seize his Estate’, Belcher’s list of steps to be taken is precisely what he narrates as having happened to himself: totally confound his understanding by the strangeness of his treatment, and lay him in an apartment of which the partitions are so thin that he be kept awake by coughing, snoring, and raving; and then allege as a proof of madness, that he sleeps ill; but do not destroy him quite, unless bribed high, but give him opium to enable him to endure further tortures and at the same time render him delirious. And should his stomach reject the plenty of physic with which you must be sure to ply him, the use of a bullock’s horn will be very proper.19 As Alexander Cruden asserted, nearly sixty years earlier in The LondonCitizen Exceedingly Injured, ‘if Persons be not mad when sent to the Madhouse, Wright’s People will make them mad if they can’.20 Belcher, certainly, seems ready also to exploit his role as possible lunatic, quite relishing, in a rather perverse way, the freedom it gives him to be outraged, outrageous, measured, manic, witty and abusive by turn, but what his pamphlet amounts to is the articulation, in several modes, structural as well as stylistic, of ‘the brink of insanity’. If the Address To


Humanity does indeed address the dilemma of the sane madman, the struggle for coherence in his writing is also a struggle for incoherence: being sane and being mad alternate and vie. Either way, he seems to be as ‘real’ a ‘Victim to the Trade of Lunacy’ as we are likely to encounter outside a madhouse. A prominent heir to Belcher, who takes the tradition significantly further (if indeed giving voice to ‘madness itself’ can be conceived of as falling into a tradition), is John Perceval, though with Perceval, who published the two volumes of his Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman, During a State of Mental Derangement in 1838 and 1840, we have moved away from even the longest span of the ‘long’ eighteenth century and are within the Victorian era. But Perceval is inheritor of the eighteenth-century articulation of madness because he, at last, sees and, with admirable directness, says things about what, to him, has been the truth of the experience. He is articulate, candid, rejects the trial from God explanation, at least insofar as it might justify every turn and nuance of the experience, as accepted by so many of his predecessors, and resists, equally, the temptation to play up the part of the madman. If his narrative contains disruptions and confusion, it is because he remembers it like that, not because he is writing ‘mad’.21 If there is a semi-comic side to what he then believed, it is because that was how it was, not because he is playing for laughs. His motives for writing are all there in the extended title of the work: it is A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman, During a State of Mental Derangement; Designed to Explain the Causes and the Nature of Insanity, and to Expose the Injudicious Conduct Pursued Towards Many Unfortunate Sufferers Under That Calamity. In terms of the first and the third intentions, he is well within the line that stretches back through Cruden, Bruckshaw and Belcher. In terms of the second, and particularly in his wish to explain the ‘Nature’ of insanity, he is very much in virgin territory. One of the most telling revelations in Perceval’s account is a simple sentence from relatively early in his experience, one that comes when he describes his stay and treatment (which he deplores, and deplored at the time) at Fox’s private madhouse near Bristol. He says: ‘I was not now aware that I was lunatic, nor did I admit this idea until the end of the year.’22 It is the key to the ‘innocence’ of his account. He is informed by spirit voices – many of them personating the voices of relations or friends – who tell him things, explain things, even instruct him, sometimes in opposition to one another, the order in which to eat his breakfast. He is able, too, to recognise, as George Trosse did in

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the Glastonbury madhouse back in the 1650s, the hidden identities of those around him: The next morning after my entrance into the lunatics’ common room, I observed three men, apparently servants or attendants of the gentlemen there. One was Herminet Herbert, whom in a black coat I was to address as Zachary Gibbs, and who I was afterwards told, on seeing him in a blue coat, was Samuel Hobbs; but under all these appearances he was one and the same Jesus. I used to call him Herminet Herbert, the simple and Jesus Christ.23 And there is a directness, too, in his telling of how his earlier understanding came to seem to him from the perspective of his own – partial – recovery: I may safely say, that for nine entire months, if not for the whole of the period of my confinement in Dr. F – ’s charge, I never spoke, hardly acted, and hardly thought, but by inspiration or guidance, and yet I suppose that never was there any one who so completely contradicted the will of the Almighty, or the desires of those around him, and I could not help laughing now at the delusions which made me constantly choose that conduct which was most disagreeable and terrifying to my doctor and his keepers, as in reality the most agreeable to them … .24 God, indeed, was a factor in what he has been through, but that does not stop what happened at the time from being what it now so conspicuously appears to be: pure delusion, or ‘madness itself’. As Roy Porter says, paraphrasing Perceval, ‘the nature of lunacy involves a complex interweaving of the imbecile and the perverse with the rational and the willing’.25 It is precisely the mixing of qualities, perspectives and complexities both within the narrative and in Perceval’s awareness of what he is doing in narrating it that makes his account, at least in terms of owned madness telling its own story, so unique. As he observes of his ‘introduction’ to ‘Dr. F.’ and his establishment, ‘I was left to account for my position in that asylum, for I was in Dr. F.’s asylum, to the working of my own, and be it recollected, a lunatic imagination.’26 The Narrative is that exactly: it is the accounting of an imagination recollected as directly as possible as having been lunatic. The details of what happened were real (really experienced), the identity that underwent them was real (really John Perceval), and


the writing perspective that recounts them is also real (also really John Perceval). Here is the self, or rather the selves, that begin to give us some understanding of what ‘madness itself’ might be like. The direct equivalent in fictional, or rather imaginative, writing of the perspectives to be found in Perceval’s Narrative is in the poetry of George Crabbe, a man whose interests in insane states were lifelong and sophisticated. Peter Grimes, for example, which was published as part of The Borough in 1810, is characteristic in that a narrative of a remote, and ultimately a deranged, mentality is given from an external perspective, working with the evidence and the signs available, and later reinforced and reinterpreted by the voice of the malefactor himself, telling it as it was from within. Grimes is allowed to set the record straight, though the mind that is thus seen doing the straightening is itself spiritually and criminally awry, and the manner of the setting is disorientating in the extreme. Even the external account, though, formed from borough perceptions and assumptions, observations and gossip made coherent by the sane reliability of the narrator, is contrived to mould itself to the mentality of the man at the heart of the story. Grimes, who after dubiously losing his father and three successive orphan boys brought from London to be apprenticed to him in his work as fisherman, is described alone amongst his familiar coastal fishing haunts, haunts which, in the describing, begin to merge with the mind that is inhabiting them, lending it their contours, partaking in turn of its pathological features: Thus by himself compell’d to live each day, To wait for certain hours the tide’s delay: At the same times the same dull views to see, The bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree; The water only, when the tides were high, When low, the mud half-cover’d and half dry; The sun-burnt tar that blisters on the planks, And bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks; Heaps of entangled weeds that slowly float, As the tide rolls by the impeded boat. When tides were neap, and, in the sultry day, Through the tall bounding mud-banks made their way, Which on each side rose swelling, and below The dark warm flood ran silently and slow; There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide, There hang his head, and view the lazy tide In its hot slimy channel slowly glide. (ll.171–87)27

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Thus Grimes becomes one with his landscape, the guilt, aridity and hopelessness of his mind not only finding resonance but sustenance, and even expression, in the inertness, hostility and sickliness of the scenes he occupies: He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce, And loved to stop beside the opening sluice; Where the small stream, confined in narrow bound, Ran with a dull, unvaried, sadd’ning sound; Where all, presented to the eye or ear, Oppress’d the soul with misery, grief, and fear. (ll. 199–204) As his derangement increases, the narrative passes beyond perception and gossip and endeavours to engage more intimately with Grimes’ inner experience: Cold nervous tremblings shook his sturdy frame, And strange disease – he couldn’t say the name; Wild were his dreams, and oft he rose in fright, Waked by his view of horrors in the night, – Horrors that would the sternest minds amaze, Horrors that demons might be proud to raise: And though he felt forsaken, grieved at heart, To think he lived from all mankind apart; Yet, if a man approach’d, in terrors he would start. (ll. 223–31) Here are symptoms in plenty, seen still from without, but realised as if from within. Here is ‘interweaving’, an ‘imagination’ close to ‘lunatic’, a voice and language giving what the narrator seems to take, and that we take, as access to a mentality moving into the realms of the unutterable. That is not in fact the case, as we see when Grimes finally collapses into complete, though not inarticulate, derangement. It is, of course, the case that he is racked with horror, self-denial and mental oppression, but these are not brought about by isolation or ostracism, and certainly not by being driven to inhabit certain scenes, though it is in terms of scenery that his madness eventually finds expression. His madness is all that the narrator narrated it as being, and at the same time so much more. Grimes finally runs mad: Furious he grew, and up the country ran, And there they seized him – a distempered man: –


Him we received, and to a parish-bed, Follow’d and curs’d, the groaning man was led. (ll. 251–4) They describe the signs to the priest, mingling fact with interpretation: ‘Look! look!’ they cried; ‘his limbs with horror shake, And as he grinds his teeth, what noise they make! How glare his angry eyes, and yet he’s not awake: See! what cold drops upon his forehead stand, And how he clenches that broad bony hand.’ (ll. 263–7) Grimes is given voice, broken, delirious, diseased, but voice. ‘It was the fall,’ he mutter’d, ‘I can show The manner how – I never struck a blow:’ – And then aloud – ‘Unhand me, free my chain; On oath, he fell – it struck him to the brain: – Why ask my father? – that old man will swear Against my life; besides, he wasn’t there: – What, all agreed? – Am I to die to-day? – My Lord, in mercy, give me time to pray.’ (ll. 270–7) He is given voice, more coherent, articulate enough to relate the delusory in language that sounds rational, and that, but for a few almost closing lines, is even allowed to conclude the poem. What he articulates is the superimposition, over what the narrator has already told, of the madness from within, still believed and still experienced, rather than the signs perceived, or imagined, from without. As Grimes speaks, telling from within, he inevitably revisits the sites and events of the story as already narrated. We have seen Pope’s two Dunciads repeating celebrations and events, all in the name of true madness, the latter correcting the false recognitions of the former. In Peter Grimes we have correction, perhaps on a smaller scale, but we also have, on an equal scale, intensification of the capacity of the single mind for insanity. Grimes retells the scenes first told by the narrator, but in Grimes’ version he is not alone: what inhabits these scenes along with Grimes, and what supplies the missing feature of the narrator’s capacity for seeing, is the spirit of his dead father: My father’s spirit – he who always tried To give me trouble, when he lived and died – When he was gone, he could not be content

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To see my days in painful labour spent, But would appoint his meetings, and he made Me watch at these, and so neglect my trade. (ll. 292–7) Here, then, is the explanation, rational but nonetheless deranged, for Grimes’ lingering in the spots of his trade. Yet there is more: ’Twas one hot noon, all silent, still, serene, No living being had I lately seen; I paddled up and down and dipp’d my net, But (such his pleasure) I could nothing get, … And so I sat and look’d upon the stream, How it ran on, and felt as in a dream: But dream it was not; no! – I fix’d my eyes On the mid stream and saw the spirits rise; I saw my father on the water stand, And hold a thin pale boy in either hand; And there they glided ghastly on the top Of the salt flood, and never touched a drop: I would have struck them, but they knew th’ intent, And smiled upon the oar, and down they went. (ll. 298–301, 304–13) Inertia is in Grimes’ case mentally active, a blank space is peopled and shocking. Moreover, the survival instincts on which Grimes has been accustomed to rely, violence and thoughtless cruelty, no longer hold good. Finally, after long days in which the spirit visitants from Grimes’ brain play with him, tempt him, ‘Enjoy’d my pains and vanish’d in delight’ (l. 347), the awful purpose of the sequence is made clear. On a ‘fierce summer-day’ when his ‘poor brain Was burning hot’ (ll. 348–9), the old man acts: He, with his hand, the old man, scoop’d the flood, And there came flame about him mix’d with blood; He bade me stoop and look upon the place, Then flung the hot-red liquor in my face… . (ll. 356–9) Like Hannah Allen, like William Cowper, like the protagonist of Confessions of a Justified Sinner, like Don Giovanni, Peter Grimes is given a vision of the hell that awaits him: Still there they stood, and forced me to behold A place of horrors – they cannot be told –


Where the flood open’d, there I heard the shriek Of tortured guilt – no earthly tongue can speak: “All days alike! for ever!” did they say, “And unremitting torments every day” – Yes, so they said:’ – (ll. 362–8) This was the crisis: seemingly endless days of inertia, staring at nothing, abruptly end in the image of his guilt. It is, now, truly unutterable. Even language can only go so far into mental torture. Grimes tells his story in all the intimacy that makes it seem real, and then he dies: Then with an inward, broken voice he cried, ‘Again they come,’ and mutter’d as he died. (ll. 374–5) Grimes’ story comprises two incompletes that, unlike Cibber’s brainless brothers, do make a whole, the wholeness of a contemporary insanity. Neither the narrative nor Grimes would make sense alone: he depends upon it for his force, and it depends upon him both for completion and for recognition of how far interpretation has fallen short of reality. The poem Peter Grimes is a containment of ‘madness itself’ within a narrative framework of madness as understood, or almost understood, and even though ‘madness itself’ might be as much of an interpretation as madness as understood, it is a lived and believed interpretation sanctified by the structure and language of the text. It is Grimes’ story, made real by the energies of his mentality and the sway they inevitably exert upon the poem. It is the illness at the heart of disease that actually gives disease its currency, its capacity to mean. What Crabbe began with Peter Grimes is concluded in The Voluntary Insane. Probably written in 1822,28 but unpublished until 1995, indeed unknown until 1989, the story of Matilda is one of seeming mad, acting mad, and being mad, narrated through those interwoven, or rather adjacent, perspectives that Crabbe had deployed as a means into madness in his earlier poem. Indeed, from the very outset the narrator is drawing attention to issues of perspective – seeing, hearing, believing and, above all, judging, both from the position of who we are and, imaginatively casting elsewhere, of who we might be: Is all that we have heard in Youth, All we in after Time have read – All baseless, groundless, void of Truth;

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Of Folly born, by Fancy bred? And, above all, this inward dread Of something that we fear to see? Thou art to thy Opinion wed – But hear, and thou divorced will be. (ll. 11–16) ‘But let us hear the Tale Again’, he concludes his prefatory verses, ‘Then calmly let us judge the Case And thus the latent Truth obtain’ (ll. 30–2). Repetition is not, after all, simply the revisiting of known truths, scenes, faces. To rehearse something already known is to take fresh stock, and in the case of The Voluntary Insane, to experience from a position not our own nor, within the range of insanities on offer over the course of the long eighteenth century, ever likely to be. Matilda is an energetic, balanced, sensible and level-headed young woman who suddenly and, at first inexplicably, becomes melancholy, preoccupied and obsessive to the point of derangement, as inert as Grimes, as prone as he is to haunt certain locations, yet, as the community sees it, guiltlessly and selflessly. The narrator takes the opportunity at this stage, prior to initiating the insanity that is hers, of dismissing those that are not. She is not Crazy Kate, abandoned by a false lover and now run wild and desirable, a template on which men might sketch their fantasies: No treacherous Swain had won her heart Then left in Grief the heart he won; With no dear Friend compelled to part, She felt forsaken and alone: To dismal Thoughts she was not prone, But sang in Solitude, or read, And laughed at Lasses Woe-begone Who dreading, knew not what they dread. (ll. 49–56) Nor is she of the sentimental vein, as much author of her own distress through self-cultivated emotional fragility as Wollstonecraft’s castigated vulnerable females: Romantic Friendships she had none Contracted in a sudden Flow Of Girlish Spirits: bound to One Who must her Bosom’s Secrets know And to no mortal Being show


(Though why, no mortal Tongue can tell), A Trust dissolving like the Snow, That falling, melted as it fell. (ll. 73–80) Yet, apparently invulnerable to the mental frailties of both her sex and her species, she changes: Such was that Being whom I knew – So lively, lovely, frank and gay: But now behold! – Her livid Hue, And Beauties withering all Away, Who never knows one cheerful day; Where sunken Eyes and Looks severe Prove her to ceaseless Grief a Prey! Without an Hope, without a Tear. (ll. 121–8) In changing, too, she even seems to reclaim the Crazy Kate territories: she ‘roams by Night, Or by the Cliff that bounds the Sea, Or by the melancholy Light of Elms, where Rooks returning flee’ (ll. 129–32). Like Peter Grimes, and like Kate and like Martha Ray, She has her Places where she goes To set her struggling Sorrows free – They seem congenial to her woes: She there beholds the restless Sea, The marshy Ditch, the one bare Tree With bending Boughs, the bleak broad Fen – And these with her sad Mind Agree, And soothe her when she flies from Men. (ll. 145–52) All this is clear, as externally visible as any set of symptoms manifested by any patient suffering from any illness, physically or mentally derived. But what is the reason? ‘Opinion’, however, has material to work on: the change is obvious to all, the cause is unknown. But ‘In her lone Walks’ she seems to dwell upon her State, Her Fall, perhaps, perhaps her Fate; And where she thinks herself alone She seems her Story to relate, Murmuring in miserable Tone. (ll. 139–44)

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If ‘her Fate’ suggests that the conventional love-lorn maid is a plausible role for Matilda, capable of harnessing symptoms that way – she has ‘fits of fondness’ for her ‘youthful Friends’ when she joins hands and sheds ‘Tears from tender thoughts’ (ll. 161–4), she sighs deeply ‘Like one who mourns some favourite dead, And longs with Anxious Heart to die’ (ll. 166–8) – other features of her behaviour would equally seem to forbid her interpretation as a Crazy Kate after all, not least her morbid satisfaction in graveyards: She loves the burial Earth to tread On new-dug Graves, alone to go To hold strange Converse with the dead, To Every living Thing a foe; ‘Ah! spend not Life,’ they counsel, ‘so – Come to the Friend who loves thee best.’ She Answers with Derision, No! Here is my Friend, my Hope, my Rest.’ (ll. 193–200) And yet, ‘Opinion’ agrees, Matilda is not mad – at least, while her new manner and haunts would suggest that she is, ‘the rational and the willing’ within her mentality are observably functional and normal: Yet are her Sense and Reason clear, Her Words are all correct, though few; Her Sentiments, although severe, Are to her own Conceptions true; She has no Fancies wild and new, No crazed Enthusiastic Flights; She does what she Designs to do: Though done, in nothing she delights. (ll. 201–8) Not love crazed, not crazy for God, not pregnant, not inarticulate beyond the reach of language, not prey to sentiment, not violent, not lacking in self-control, and yet changed utterly. Here is the first slant on Matilda, a reading based on observations made between section one of the poem, ‘The Character Before’, and the second section, ‘The Change’, bearings as structural as they are speculative, as based in visible differences as in narrative uncertainties. She is mad, but not mad. She resists interpretation, and we are no wiser.


The second slant, and it is indeed a slant, comes with the reason. The third section of the poem is ‘Explanation’. ‘And what the Cause?’ We cannot tell. (l. 273) After this unpromising start, there is, apparently, a cause, though it is ‘the One that she assigns’ and ‘What they affirm who with her dwell’ and ‘What from her, neighbouring Divines Obtained’ (ll. 274–7), and thus as liable to inaccuracies as any observable symptoms of ‘Change’. But it is a distressing one, convincing enough to account for her presence at the edges of emotional collapse. But for the cause – th’unhappy Maid, Whose Pains we mourn, Whose fate we dread, A Visit to some Cousin paid: And there an Infant on its Bed Saw dying, when alone! and this has led To all that now disturbs and grieves. For, since that Day, the Spirit of the Dead! – The Form attends her! Nor an Instant leaves… . To her alone the Shape appears To her! – with Friends and Neighbours by – The Infant’s ghastly Look it bears, As then in pain, as soon to die! On her is fixed its feeble Eye, With deadly wild Expression fraught; By her is heard its feeble Cry, As if it some Compassion sought. (ll. 281–8, 297–304) This, then, must be madness, as surely as Peter Grimes is mad, as surely as Perceval with his spirit voices and his collection of hidden Christs, as Martha Ray, as Belvidera, all seeing what they alone see: ‘O! this is Madness’ – ‘So indeed!’ We said! – ‘but how then so serene Were she, from this one Error freed?’ I know not Mind so clear and clean

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Of Madness, not a Mark is seen; To her on any Subject speak: She is, as she has even been, Not wild, nor vain, nor rash, nor weak. (ll. 305–12) ‘[I]nsane people’, we saw in John Haslam, ‘will often, for a short time, conduct themselves, both in conversation and behaviour, with such propriety, that they appear to have the just exercise and direction of their faculties.’ Matilda does so too, but habitually. Can she then be mad? But let the observer ‘protract the discourse, let him touch the fatal string which throws his mind into discord: let him draw the hairtrigger which inflames the combustible materials of this disease …’ – yet Matilda has no ‘hair-trigger’: her delusion is constant, rationalised and ghastly. Can she then be sane? Indeed, as with Peter Grimes, there is worse to come, a worse that she shares more especially with Cowper, and indeed with Hannah Allen, though in Matilda’s case her deranged preoccupation is not on her own behalf. She hears a preacher preach election: So! at the Preacher’s feet she stood – She who had fled from Reasoners mild – To hear him talk of flesh and Blood By Nature tainted and defiled; To hear him say the New-born Child Is doomed to ever-during flame Unless … (ll.321–7) The ‘map of his mind’, says Haslam, ‘will point out that the smallest rivulet flows into the great stream of his derangement’. An infant damned is more than a rivulet. Matilda, vulnerable to being thus ‘beguiled’ (l. 327), is appalled: ‘O! then’ she cried, with Dread oppressed! ‘That wailing Thing is doomed to pain – I saw it sink, but not to rest. To me it comes and will remain: O! can I peace for it obtain, Or for my troubled Spirit? No! I try, but Trial is in vain – This Man of God proclaims it so. (ll. 329–36)


She tells, unlike Grimes not as a precedent to dying, raving, but rationally, articulately, incurably. She tells, nor deviates in her Tale, That go wherever she wills, this thing, This bloated Infant, wan and pale, Noiseless and moved as on the Wing, Will with her move – will to her cling Th’attendant Curse! All this she states, And tells that Night nor Sleep can bring Repose! – nor Day the stubborn Woe abates! (ll. 345–52) No ‘Murmuring in miserable Tone’ here, no solitary confession to herself alone: it is spoken out boldly, even defiantly, which is also her tone when she accosts the Preacher with what she sees: ‘But come, your Counter Charm apply – There is a Spectre in my View: Lo! – now’; the Preacher turned his Eye On nothing. (ll. 457–60) No passive recipient of male agency, she sends him away, redundant: ‘Be gone – Thou canst not make, nor more or less The mighty Power that Drives me on… . Leave me – ‘ (ll. 470–2, 481). The masculine, the professional, the divine lose out, rendered useless in face of a female made militant by the image of a child. The narrator comes back to the reader. What do we think? Does the multitude have a view? The individual? Do we see anything in Matilda, any reflection to send us back an image of mind that might oblige us to say: yes, insane, or no, rational?: Now judge you; is she or not insane? Soundness you see in all beside; Is it the Mind’s strong Foe, the Bane Of human Reason, human Pride? You may in what she says confide, You may to her your Doubts propound; But for that Daemon at her Side – Who is more rational and sound? (ll. 489–96)

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And with that we are in the territory of the Moral Essays and the Essay on Man, with the single disease that slowly turns bad, and even mad, the health of an entire constitution: Is it in Nature that the Brain Should be of such Disease the Prey, As will this Circumstance explain? Going in just one thought astray – Erring in just that single Way – By that as in a Tempest tossed, Without Direction, Night and Day; By that confounded, led and lost. (ll. 497–504) If the final lines here have just a hint of mortal sin about them, compounding the one error that might mar the ‘clear and clean’ slate of her good grace, nevertheless it is on the pathology affecting a mental organ that the weight of the passage falls, more too than on the moral vitiation of Pope’s deployment of the same figure. As if to confirm the slant, the narrator concludes the ‘Explanation’ with what virtually amounts to a definition of sanity: You think it Madness? O! but then Think with what Sense, and how sedate; Think with what ready Mind and Pen She can her every Purpose state, And all that you require relate: She does what sounder Minds will do, Remembers every Place and Date, And can Life’s Every Act review – . (ll. 513–20) Who could ask for more? Can we ourselves be certain of demonstrating as much? Matilda, spectral image apart, is as sane, or even a good deal saner, than the next person. Then comes the third and final slant, as dependent upon the first two as Peter Grimes’ own narration of ‘madness itself’ depends upon the perceptions and assumptions of his borough neighbours, and as shocking in its impact. Matilda, two years on, has suffered the toll taken by mental torture. She is ‘sinking to the Grave’ (l. 522) and, in section four, ‘Conference’, narrated by the Priest, she is at last given extended voice: “Sit,” she began! “and thou shalt hear, If I have strength! – and let me try


That I am, not what I appear. I would not in Deception die, Nor leave a spotless Name, a Lie. For that would be the greater Sin – But is there none – Come near me! – by? – O! Pride! – When I my Tale begin … ” (ll. 729–36) It is simple – simpler than the narrative veerings have made out. Has she been mad? Has she been sane? She has been sane. Like a classic case from Pope, her ruling passion, she reveals, has been that indeed, acknowledged, accepted, rationalised, celebrated, kept hidden: How strange to you it must appear, An Infant Soul could have the Taint Of Avarice, but I am sincere; And had I Words at will, could paint That strong Corruption! But how faint Are Words, that Evil to deplore – How early was it my Complaint, That, having much, I had no more. This darling Sin was ever fed By all that I observed or saw, By all that I conceived or read: It seemed an everlasting Law That Riches kept Mankind in Awe – I dreamed of Jewels, Garments, Gold: All that admiring Crowds would draw, That they would with Desire behold! (ll. 753–68) In Pope the avarice itself would be sufficient for a diagnosis of moral madness and all that entails for a lifetime spent awry. For Crabbe, Matilda’s ‘darling Sin’ is the beginning of a slide into a sanity so in check as almost to consitute illness, at least if child murder is a mark of illness. The events are as straightforward as her sanity is conspicuous in the telling of them. She inherits her father’s wealth, she is to inherit more from an uncle, but most of the uncle’s fortune will go to the infant. Her visit coincides with the illness of the child. She watches over him constantly: And now returned the frequent Fit, O’erpowering Sense, enduring long,

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While I beside him bore to sit, Indulging Thoughts, a dreadful Throng; But chief, of Riches gained by wrong! And what is wrong, where all would gain? And then I saw Life growing strong! Thus was vexation, Trouble, Pain, Trial and Torment, wearing all My Spirits, when I saw Again The shake, the fit, the chilling call Of Death – and then the creeping small Reviving Pulse Again would beat: Again to rise, Again to fall, And my impatient Hope to cheat. (ll. 889–904) As life ebbs and flows, so her hopes fall and rise in a reverse movement that is therefore governed by the pulse before her, her hopes beating faster as it fades, and more frenetic, with ‘black Thoughts’ ‘rising’, like solitary Achilles, in a more ‘dreadful Throng’ as it revives again. Matilda watches and waits, agonised between the passive and the active. Finally, with the child almost, but not quite, certainly dead, she acts, perhaps too late to make a difference, but she acts, and in doing so confirms the role she will play for the rest of her life: O! it was vile, but Life indeed, Though kindling, was not come – the breast Moved not – though Motion might succeed. ‘It will not die!’ I said, and pressed … My God forgive … and it had rest, That I from that accursed time Never, in one sweet Hour, possessed: So sure does Misery wait on Crime. (ll. 1025–32) But simple though the events are, the moral is not so easy as that, ‘So sure does Misery wait on Crime’, though for Matilda, as for Macbeth and, particularly, for his Lady, who is willing to contemplate what Matilda has done, and suffers for it, misery does wait. So too does madness. Matilda’s madness is oblique, partly derived from an excess of sanity. Not thoughtlessly cruel like Grimes, taking life with grim satisfaction, she is nevertheless under the sway of an alien logic when driven by the


passion of her avarice. What greater madness can a passion bring her than to murder an infant in its cradle? Obliquely, and in a way sanely, she chooses to hide her crime with madness: A Court of Justice came in View, My Trial and the Sentence passed: And from th’appalling Scene I drew My Self-Possession, and I cast My Thoughts around! – and though Aghast At so much Danger and distress, I sought Expedients, and at last – ‘Thus will I do! And this profess – ‘ Then rushed as Maddened from the Scene, And met the Father as he came – ‘Ah! What does all this Terror mean’ He cried, ‘that thus can shake thy frame? Niece, my beloved Niece, O! Name The Cause of such Emotion – Why That frightened Air? Those Eyes on flame? Thy Looks disordered? – O, reply!’ (ll. 1041–56) Already there is a discrepancy, between how Matilda appears now that she is ‘mad’, as observed by her uncle, and Matilda continuing the scene from within her new self, silent as scripted, acting it out as directed: My Part was taken. I must seem To be as One whose troubled Breast, Like those who labour in a Dream, Is by insane sad thoughts possessed. I will not answer – I am pressed By Grief too heavy – So I took His Hand and held it, and he guessed The Evil that my Action spoke! (ll. 1057–64) She is good, better than Dowdy, nearly a female Garrick, certainly capable of producing resonant tears, concern, engagement with her audience, and over the course of years: So have I acted; from that Hour, Appearing never to regain

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My former Self – Without a Power My Case correctly to explain! My Friends sought kindly to obtain Peace, Health and Comfort, and they tried A thousand gentle Means, in vain – My Peace with that poor Being died. (ll. 1089–96) The ersatz Matilda has everyone convinced, successfully replacing the real Matilda as kind ‘Friends’ attempt in vain to rekindle what they had always taken, and erroneously, to be the ‘real’ Matilda. There have been, then, for most of the poem, two Matildas: the one who acts mad, and the hidden silent Matilda who directs that acting, not too much, not too irrational, not overstepping the readiness of the audience, and above all giving nothing away: Nor from that Moment have I dared To meet a Friend, with Mind at rest; But have to all those Friends declared I saw that Being – so it best Seemed for me, that I should attest As frightened, and that dreadful thought Upon my troubled Brain impressed, And in that Day of Horror wrought. Yet dared I not in much beside To seem insane, for well I knew I might in my Discourse be tried; And dreaded to be found untrue – I shunned in fear the observing few, But trusted Folly in the Crowd: I kept my first Design in View And what I then conceived, Avowed. (ll. 1097–1112) Is acting mad also being mad? We glanced by the question with Dowdy, certainly with Garrick, met it briefly with Edgar, saw it in passing with Hamlet. With Matilda it is unavoidable. Putting on a fake mad self in order to hide the real but criminal self, directing that ersatz being sanely and effectively, does not necessarily mean that real directing self is itself sane. Being pretend mad does not guarantee real sanity, indeed might well hold it up to real question, especially when that real sane self thinks it has committed murder when in the grip of an uncontrollable passion. Matilda has created a mad self not in order to


hide her guilty sanity but her criminal insanity. Her mind, as Belcher defined madness, is almost literally ‘out of the body’. One further slant on the interweaving perspective of the telling of Matilda is in the ‘Form’, the image of the child, that attends her, for it is real, or rather for her it is really there: And I do see him: Yes, I see That spectral-Infant; Whom I pressed To stop the Life about to be Awakened in the Frame at rest. To see that Being I professed, And I do see him – the Strong Lie Has to my guilty Soul possessed, That I do see him! – Ever by. (ll. 1145–52) The fake self, after all, is not all that fake. It is differently orientated, perhaps, this real fake self, seeing, as Grimes saw, the forms of its guilt as permanent presences, present to her alone. But clearly not everything about it is fake. Matilda in her own representation, in fact, is proving more true, more genuinely ‘madness itself’, than Matilda who sits apart. They die, fake Matilda and the real, whichever is which, perhaps reunited by her telling it as it ‘really’ was, but we should not allow articulacy and the completed act of articulation to stand in for a resolution of identity such as Pope has Achilles undergo. The performance of sane acts can still play a part in mad transactions, as we saw with Dr Bakewell and Dr Willis. What Crabbe has uniquely done, though, with The Voluntary Insane, is afford a mad voice ownership of a narrative space so completely that not only does her story as she tells it constitute the primary truth of the poem but it also organises the slants in which her voice takes place, contributing to its primary truth, so that fake and ‘real’ depend as much as on who is looking and when as on what is looked at. The perfect female is the ultimate violent woman, the passive recipient the acquisitive aggressor, the potential mother the actual child killer. The mad self, moreover, is indeed the mad self, and the real story is both real and a story, more real, in fact, because more a story. ‘Judge not’, concludes the narrator: Alone she died; no Eye could see The Signs without of Thoughts within – Judge not – thine own Temptation flee. Nor parley with the Strength of Sin – (ll. 1205–8)

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We have to concur. We have no choice but to concur. How, after all, can we judge? How can we judge the representations of the insane?

Notes 1. See my article, ‘Identifying the Insane: Madness and Marginality in the Eighteenth Century’, in Lumen XXI: Memory and Identity: Past and Present, ed. John D. Baird, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003, which addresses just such issues in relation to The Adventures of Alexander the Corrector. 2. See The Madhouse of Language, esp. pp. 124–9, 149–52. 3. William Cowper, Memoir of the Early Life of William Cowper, Esq. (1816) in Dale Peterson (ed.), A Mad People’s History of Madness, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982, p. 73. 4. George Trosse, The Life of the Reverend Mr George Trosse (1714), ed. A.W. Brink, Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974, p. 107. 5. Again, I pay some attention to such writing in chapters six and seven of The Madhouse of Language. 6. Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, p. 98. 7. Belcher, Address To Humanity, in Ingram, Voices, p. 131. 8. Belcher, Address To Humanity, in Ingram, Voices, p. 131. 9. Belcher, Address To Humanity, in Ingram, Voices, p. 133. 10. Belcher, Address To Humanity, in Ingram, Voices, p. 130. 11. Belcher, Address To Humanity, in Ingram, Voices, p. 130. 12. Belcher, Address To Humanity, in Ingram, Voices, pp. 130–1. 13. Belcher, Address To Humanity, in Ingram, Voices, p. 133. 14. Belcher, Address To Humanity, in Ingram, Voices, p. 131. 15. Belcher, Address To Humanity, in Ingram, Voices, p. 131. 16. Belcher, Address To Humanity, in Ingram, Voices, p. 131. 17. Belcher, Address To Humanity, in Ingram, Voices, pp. 129, 131, 133. 18. Belcher, Address To Humanity, in Ingram, Voices, p. 133. 19. Belcher, Address To Humanity, in Ingram, Voices, p. 134. 20. Alexander Cruden, The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured (1739), in Ingram, Voices, p. 32. 21. On this, see Dale Peterson’s prefatory remarks to his extracts from Perceval’s A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman, During a State of Mental Derangement (1838, 1840) in A Mad People’s History of Madness, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982, pp. 92–6. 22. Perceval, Narrative (1838, 1840), in Peterson, p. 97. 23. Perceval, Narrative, in Peterson, p. 103. 24. Perceval, Narrative, in Peterson, p. 102. 25. Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, p. 185. 26. Perceval, Narrative, in Peterson, p. 97. 27. George Crabbe, The Poor of the Borough: Peter Grimes (1810), in George Crabbe: Tales, 1812 and other selected poems, ed. Howard Mills, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967, pp. 106–15.

230 Cultural Constructions of Madness in 18th Century Writing 28. Felix Pryor, who discovered and first published the poem, argues that it was most likely to have been begun by March and ‘more or less finished by 25 November 1822’. See George Crabbe, The Voluntary Insane, ed. Felix Pryor, London: Richard Cohen Books, 1995, p. 37.

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Bibliography 237 Baird, John D. (ed.), Lumen XXI: Memory and Identity: Past and Present, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Bartlett, Peter and David Wright, Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in the Community, 1750–2000, London: Athlone Press, 1999. Bewell, Alan, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in Experimental Poetry, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Bindman, David, Frédéric Ogée and Peter Wagner (ed.), Hogarth: Representing Nature’s Machines, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Boucé, Paul-Gabriel (ed.), Guerres et paix: la Grand-Bretagne au XVIII siècle, Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2 vols, 1998. Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, London: Harper Collins, 1997. Brissenden, R. F., Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade, London: Macmillan, 1974. Bynum, W. F., Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd (ed.), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, Volume II: Institutions and Society, London: Tavistock, 1985. Byrd, Max, Visits to Bedlam, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974. Cohen, Alfred, ‘Prophecy and madness: women visionaries during the Puritan Revolution’, The Journal of Psychohistory, 11:3 (1984). Cooper, Andrew M., ‘Blake and Madness: The World Turned Inside Out’, in English Literary History 57, 1990. Copley, Stephen and John Whale (ed.), Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832, London: Routledge, 1992. Davis, Michael, William Blake: A New Kind of Man, London: Paul Elek, 1977. Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Donnelly, Michael, Managing the Mind: A Study of Medical Psychology in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain, London: Tavistock, 1983. Ehrenpreis, Irvin, Swift: The Man, His Works, and The Age, London: Methuen, 3 vols, 1983. Erskine-Hill, Howard (ed.), Alexander Pope: World and Word, Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1998. Faas, Eckbert, Retreat into the Mind: Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Falco, Maria J., Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Figes, Eva, Sex and Subterfuge: Women Novelists to 1850, London: Macmillan, 1982. Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, tr. Richard Howard, London: Tavistock, 1967. Foucault, Michel, ‘Madness, the Absence of Work’, tr. Peter Stastny and Deniz Sengel, Critical Inquiry (Winter 1995). Fox, Christopher, ‘Of logic and lycanthropy: Gulliver and the faculties of the mind’, in Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century, ed. Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter, London: Routledge, 1993. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

238 Bibliography Gilman, Sander, Health and Illness: Images of Difference, London: Reaktion Books, 1995. Gilman, Sander, Seeing the Insane, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Haslam, Fiona, From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine and Art in EighteenthCentury Britain, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996. Hawes, Clement, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hill, Draper, Mr. Gillray the Caricaturist, London: Phaidon, 1965. Houston, R. A., Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Ingram, Allan, The Madhouse of Language: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century, London: Routledge, 1991. Ingram, Allan, ‘Identifying the Insane: Madness and Marginality in the Eighteenth Century’, in Lumen XXI: Memory and Identity: Past and Present, ed. John D. Baird, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Jones, Vivien, ‘Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams’, in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale, London: Routledge, 1992. Kaufman, Robert, ‘The Madness of George III, By Mary Wollstonecraft,’ in Studies in Romanticism 37.1, 1998. Logan, Peter Melville, Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose, London: University of California Press, 1997. Mack, Maynard, Alexander Pope: A Life, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Marland, Hilary, ‘At home with puerperal mania: the domestic treatments of the insanity of childbirth in the nineteenth century’, in Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in the Community, 1750–2000, ed. Peter Bartlett and David Wright, London: Athlone Press, 1999. Miller, Stephen, Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought, London: Associated University Presses, 2001. Mullan, John, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Paulson, Ronald, Rowlandson: A New Interpretation, London: Studio Vista, 1972. Pevsner, Nikolaus, An Outline of European Architecture, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1943 (1963 edn). Price, Cecil, Theatre in the Age of Garrick, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973. Porter, Roy, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency, London: Athlone Press, 1987. Porter, Roy, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987. Quinlan, Maurice J., William Cowper: A Critical Life, Westpost, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1953. Quintana, Ricardo, Swift: An Introduction, London: Oxford University Press, 1955 (1962 edn). Rawson, Claude, ‘Heroic Notes: Epic Idiom, Revision and the Mock-Footnote from the Rape of the Lock to the Dunciad’, in Alexander Pope: World and Word, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill, Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1998.

Bibliography 239 Roberts, Marie Mulvey and Roy Porter (ed.), Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century, London: Routledge, 1993. Rousseau, G. S., ‘Nerves, Spirits and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility’, in Blue Guitar 2, 1976. Rousseau, G. S., ‘War and Peace: Some Representations of Nostalgia and Adventure in the Eighteenth Century’, in Guerres et paix: la Grand-Bretagne au XVIII siècle, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé, Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2 vols, 1998. Sapiro, Virginia, ‘Wollstonecraft, Feminism, and Democracy: “Being Bastilled”’, in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Maria J. Falco, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Scull, Andrew, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England, London: Allen Lane, 1979. Scull, Andrew, Social Order/Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective, London: Routledge, 1989. Shankman, Steven, Pope’s ‘Iliad’: Homer in the Age of Passion, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Showalter, Elaine, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980, New York: Pantheon, 1985. Small, Helen, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Stack, Frank, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Todd, Janet, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000. Tomory, Peter, The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli, London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. Wagner, Peter, ‘Representation of Time in Hogarth’s Paintings and Engravings’, in Hogarth: Representing Nature’s Machines, ed. David Bindman, Frédéric Ogée and Peter Wagner, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Williams, Carolyn D., Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Classical Learning, London: Routledge, 1993.

Index Page numbers in bold indicate illustrations. acting, 2–3, 5, 7, 44, 99–101, 106–33, 138, 140–1, 154, 175, 189–95, 202, 206–7, 209–10, 216, 225–8 Addison, Joseph, 64, 115 The Spectator, 83, 85–9, 109–10 The Tatler, 83–6, 88 Alcock, Mary ‘A Receipt for Writing a Novel’, 156–7 Alexander, Henry, 196–7 Allderidge, Patricia, 200n Allen, Hannah A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings, 161–2, 164, 169n, 203–6, 215, 221 Allen, Thomas, 2–4, 11 Anacreon, 6 Andrews, Jonathan, 150, 154, 164, 179, 181, 201n animals, 8, 10, 11, 15, 17, 19, 39–41, 46, 56, 61, 64, 65, 86, 94, 99, 102–4, 132, 145, 148–9, 157, 161–2, 175, 179 Arbuthnot, John, 188 Arnall, William, 61 Bacon, Francis, 70, 78–9 Baines, Paul, 77n Bakewell, Thomas, 1–2, 182, 184, 228 Barber, Mary ‘On Seeing an Officer’s Widow distracted’, 159, 161 Barry, Elizabeth, 111 Barry, James, 111 Bathurst, Allen, Earl of Bathurst, 73 Battestin, Martin, 106–7 Battie, William, 18 Baxter, Richard, 18 Beattie, James, 115 Belcher, William, 206 Address to Humanity, 149, 207–10, 228 Bennett, Henry Gray, 21

Bethlem, 2–3, 5–9, 11–14, 18, 21, 23n, 32–3, 38, 59–60, 62, 64–5, 76, 79–82, 85–6, 88–9, 103, 107, 114, 121, 122–3, 147–8, 170–82, 173, 185, 190, 195, 206 Betterton, Thomas, 111, 194 Bewell, Alan, 169n Birch, Thomas, 9 Blair, Jean, 163 Blair, Patrick, 16 Blake, William, 78–9, 81–2, 84, 89, 98, 133, 206 bodies, 5, 11, 12, 14–15, 46–50, 61, 69, 97–8, 107, 125–9, 146–52, 155–9, 163, 173–5, 180–1, 184–5, 190, 192–3, 198–9, 213, 224–6 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 75 Bond, William, 64 Boswell, James, 82–3, 104–5n, 189 ‘The Hypochondriack’, 83, 186–7 London Journal, 1762–1763, 128, 130–1 Boteler, Thomas, 118 Boydell, John, 191 Breval, John Durant, 64 Brissenden, R.F., 145 Bruckshaw, Samuel, 203–4, 207, 210 Burke, Edmund Reflections on the Revolution in France, 139–40 Burney, Frances, 98 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale, 191 Carkesse, James, 10, 206–7 Lucida Intervalla, 2–4, 11, 175 Casaubon, Isaac, 29 Castle, Terry, 76n Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 95 Chapman, George, 29, 36

240

Index 241 Charles II, 75 Cheyne, George, 16, 71, 160 Churchill, Charles, 133n Cibber, Caius Gabriel, Melancholy Madness/Raving Madness, 38, 59, 60, 62, 67, 71–3, 99, 122, 147, 173–5, 174, 179, 216 Cibber, Colley, 56, 58–67, 71, 147, 172–3, 216 Cibber, Susanna, 111, 127, 133n Cibber, Theophilus, 122–3, 173 Clare, John, 76 Cohen, Alfred, 22n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 51 Colman, George, 118 Concanen, Matthew, 61–2, 64 confinement, 1–9, 11, 12–15, 17–18, 61, 79–82, 84–6, 88, 110, 122–3, 129, 137, 141–9, 151–4, 156, 168n, 170–85, 193, 195, 196–7, 203–12 Congreve, William, 64 Conrad, Joseph Nostromo, 121, 135n Cooke, Thomas, 64, 118 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, 29, 145 Coutts, Thomas, 191, 193 Cowper, William, 78–9, 81–2, 84, 89, 132–3 Memoir of the Early Life, 204–6, 215, 221 The Task, 149–52, 157, 196–7, 217–19 Cox, Joseph Mason, 131–2 Crabbe, George Peter Grimes, 212–16, 218, 220–3, 225, 228 The Voluntary Insane, 216–29 Crockat, Agnes, 163–4 Cromwell, Oliver, 70 Cruden, Alexander, 1–2, 11, 71, 201n, 203–6, 207, 209, 210 cure, 1, 5, 19, 39, 44–5, 48–9, 56–9, 73, 95, 115, 121, 129, 131–3, 156, 181–2, 203, 228 Curll, Edmund, 61–4 Dacier, André, 29 Dacier, Anne, 30, 38 Daintree, Mary, 143

Davenant, William, Macbeth, A Tragedy, 114 Davis, Michael, 82 death, 5–6, 9, 28, 30–1, 35, 38–51, 56, 58, 59, 61, 68–9, 71, 73–6, 78, 79, 86, 95–8, 99, 99, 107–8, 108–9, 111, 119, 124, 127, 130–1, 132–3, 144–5, 149, 151–3, 155, 158, 162–4, 169n, 181–2, 186–7, 198, 204, 212–16, 219–28 delusion, 3–4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 33, 44–9, 57–8, 69, 84, 104, 121, 128, 129, 131–3, 164, 176, 203, 210–12, 214–16, 220–8 Dennis, John, 55 devils, 2, 8, 131, 132, 161, 169n, 188–9, 204, 213, 222 dissection, 6, 149 Donizetti, Gaetano, 162 Donnelly, Michael, 148 drink, 1–2, 8, 83, 86, 89, 106, 119, 184, 189 Dryden, John, 28–9, 30–1, 56, 75–6 Ehrenpreis, Irvin, 23n Eliot, George, Adam Bede, 155 ersatz, 45–9, 55, 58, 60, 62–5, 74, 107, 128–9, 227–8 Eusden, Laurence, 59, 71 Evans, Abel, 63 Evelyn, John, 173 family, 5, 18, 19, 38, 50, 54, 56, 59, 60, 67, 71–3, 80, 82, 90, 95, 98, 103, 117–26, 130–1, 133, 143, 146, 149, 152–3, 162–4, 169n, 172, 177, 192–3, 212, 214, 220–8 Farington, Joseph, 195 Fielding, Henry, 180 Tom Jones, 89–99, 100–1, 106–8, 130–1, 184 Tom Thumb, 109 Fielding, Sarah The History of Ophelia, 154 Figes, Eva, 142 Finch Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, 160 ‘The Spleen’, 160

242 Index Fitzmary, Simon, 172 Fontonelle, Bernard le Bovyer de, 88 food, 8, 9–10, 15–17, 147–8, 158, 197 Foote, Samuel, 118, 123 Foucault, Michel, 2, 4, 57–8, 79, 102, 110, 146–7, 202 Fox, Christopher, 10, 15 Fox, Edward Long, 210–11 Fuseli, Henry, 191–8, 202 King Lear, 193–4, 194 Mad Kate, 150–1, 195, 195–9 The Nightmare, 196 The Vision of the Lazar House, 196 Garth, Samuel, 64 Garrick, David, 108, 112, 121–31, 186, 190–4, 202, 226–7 Gay, John, 64 Gentleman, Francis, 116, 118, 121 George III, 182 Gilbert, Sandra, 158 Gildon, Charles, 111 Gillray, James, 188, 202 Pray Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Blind Man, 198–200, 199 Gilman, Sander, 4–5, 81, 107 Godwin, William, Caleb Williams, 98, 101, 136 Gothic, 142, 196 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco José de, 197 Gray, Thomas, 138 Greene, Edward Burnaby, 111 Gubar, Susan, 158 Guthrie, William, 113–14, 122 Hamilton, Gavin, 191 Harper, Andrew, 18, 19–20, 129 Harrison, John, 180 Haslam, Fiona, 172, 181, 200n Haslam, John, 34 Medical Jurisprudence, 33, 69, 91, 221 Observations on Insanity, 5–6, 32–3, 80–1, 149, 221 Hawes, Clement, 4 Hawkesworth, John, 79 Hayley, William, 82, 132 Heraclides, 37 Hesketh, Lady Harriet, 82

Hill, Draper, 198 Hill, John, 127–8 Hogarth, William, 2, 206, 207 The Rake’s Progress, 147, 175, 177–8, 177–82, 185, 186, 188, 191 Hogg, James, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 101, 215 Holcroft, Fanny, 158, 160, 165 ‘Anabella’, 158 Homer, 22, 76, 87, 93–5, 115–16 Iliad, 25–51, 53–6, 62–3, 73, 115, 121, 184, 225, 228 Odyssey, 29, 62 Hooke, Robert, 172 Hoppner, John, 191 Horace, 28–9, 96–7 Houston, R.A., 23n, 163–4 Hume, David, 145 Humphrey, Hannah, 198 Imlay, Gilbert, 167n Inskip, 2, 204 Johnson, John, 132 Johnson, Samuel, 124–5 ‘Life of Pope’, 51 ‘Life of Swift’, 9 The Plays of Shakespeare, 112, 193 Johnstone, Agnes, 164 Jones, Vivien, 140 Kauffman, Angelica, 102 Kaufman, Robert, 140 Kenyon, Lloyd, 1st Lord Kenyon, 132 Lee, Nathaniel, 89, 109–11 The Rival Queens, 110–11 Lintot, Bernard, 61–3 Lloyd’s Evening Post, and British Chronicle, 106–7 Locke, John, 78–9, 83–4, 96 Logan, Peter Melville, 137 Louis XIV, 166n Louis XVI, 57–8 love, 6, 68–9, 71, 73, 75, 93, 101–4, 106, 108, 111, 112, 113–14, 118–19, 121–2, 127, 137, 142–4, 150–9, 163, 165, 169n, 179, 186, 192, 193, 195–7, 217, 219

Index 243 Mack, Maynard, 25–6, 31, 38, 45, 68 Mackenzie, Henry, 98 The Man of Feeling, 14, 152–3 madhouses, 1–9, 11, 12–13, 18, 20–1, 57–8, 71, 79–82, 85, 131–2, 136, 141–9, 151–4, 156, 167n, 168n, 170–86, 195, 196–7, 203–4, 207–12 Malone, Edmond The Plays of William Shakespeare, 112 mania, 5, 11, 12, 25–50, 60–1, 67, 90–2, 99–101, 106–7, 144, 158, 160, 173–6, 179, 183–5, 198, 207, 209 Marland, Hilary, 169n McReady, William, 112 Mears, William, 64 medicine, 3–5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 15–16, 18–21, 60–1, 80, 99–100, 110, 129, 143, 154, 164–5, 169n, 172, 181, 182, 184–8, 195, 198, 207–9 Medicis, Catherine de, 172 melancholy, 5, 12, 15, 18, 60, 67, 83, 111, 132, 138, 144, 150–63, 173–6, 179, 186–9, 198–9, 217–28 Mellor, Anne K., 141, 143 Michelangelo (Michelagniolo di Lodovico Buonarroti), 192 Miller, Stephen, 74–5 Milton, John, 192 Monro, James, 59, 181, 201n Monro, John, 12, 124, 154, 163, 165, 181, 201n Monro, Thomas, 207–8 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat de, 79, 81 moral management, 1–2, 18–20, 129, 131–2, 156, 165, 184–5 Mossop, Henry, 111 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 215 Mullan, John, 147 Murphy, Arthur, 117–18, 123–5, 126, 128, 192 nakedness, 11, 13, 15, 47, 49, 147–8, 152, 156–8, 175, 178–81, 184 nature, 42–4, 57, 61, 68–70, 72, 75, 106, 113, 116–17, 121, 123–4, 126, 138, 151, 153, 165, 190–3, 196, 212–13, 218, 221, 223 Newton, Isaac, 78–9

Newton, Richard, 2, 188 A Visit to Bedlam, 171, 171–2, 176 Nokes, James, 2 Northcote, James, 189, 191 Le Notre, Andre, 172 Oldfield, Anne, 74 l’Orme, Philibert de, 172 Oldmixon, John, 61 Osborne, Thomas, 61 Otway, Thomas, 111, 113–14, 122 Venice Preserved, 108–9, 110–11, 220 Ozell, John, 30 Parliamentary Committee on Madhouses in England (1815), 13, 33, 156, 175, 196–7 Parnell, Thomas, 36–8 Paulson, Ronald, 182, 185 Pearce, Daniel, 106–8, 110, 120, 133, 175, 226–7 Pepys, Samuel, 3 Perceval, John, 76, 220 Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman, 210–12 Peterson, Dale, 229n Pevsner, Nikolaus, 172 Pinel, Philippe, 167n Pitt, William, 189 Plato, 49 Pope, Alexander, 22, 74–5, 83, 87, 89, 95, 97, 101, 115–16, 17, 180, 187, 223 The Dunciad, 53–68, 72, 76, 95, 121, 132, 175, 180, 214 Epilogue to the Satires, 68 Epistle to Burlington, 68, 72 Epistle to Bathurst, 72–3 Epistle to Cobham, 71, 73–4, 101 Essay on Criticism, 171, 200 Essay on Man, 68–71, 223–4 The Iliad of Homer, 25–51, 53–6, 62–3, 73, 76, 89, 90, 94, 101, 121, 175, 184, 225, 228 Imitations of Horace, 28–9, 73, 76 The Odyssey of Homer, 53 The Plays of Shakespeare, 112 The Rape of the Lock, 68, 71, 74, 98, 101

244 Index Porter, Roy, 23n, 78, 89, 135n, 145, 206–7, 211 Porteus, Beilby, 132 Potter, John, 61 Prior, Matthew, 64 Pryor, Felix, 230n Pritchard, Hannah, 192 Raphael (Raffaello Santi), 192 Rawson, Claude, 25, 36 reflection, 2–3, 9, 20, 44–9, 55–9, 64–7, 71–6, 84–5, 98–104, 119–20, 132, 158, 165, 170–1, 176, 185, 197–8, 202, 205–6, 216, 226–8 Reinagle, Richard, 201n religion, 3–4, 5, 8, 9, 18, 22n, 50, 68, 73, 75, 83, 98, 132–3, 151, 161–2, 164–5, 179, 181–2, 203–5, 210–11, 214–16, 219, 221–3, 225–8 restraint, 7, 11, 12–15, 19, 61, 92, 99–100, 146, 156, 168n, 173–6, 180, 184–5, 197, 208 Reynolds, Joshua, 189, 191–2 Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa, 98, 139 Pamela, 98 Sir Charles Grandison, 19, 98 Richardson, William, 111, 119–20 Rieu, E.V., 29, 36 Robinson, Mary, ‘Poor Marguerite’, 157–8, 161 Robinson, Nicholas, 12, 18, 20, 60–2 Rogers, Timothy, 18, 19 Romanticism, 150, 154–7, 190–1, 196 Romney, George, 82, 189, 191 Rousseau, G.S., 53, 137 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 192–3 Rowe, Nicholas, 111 The Tragedy of Jane Shore, 108, 110 Rowlandson, Thomas, 2, 188, 195 Doctor Willis at Home/Doctor Willis Abroad, 182–5, 183, 187–8 The Hypochondriac, 185–8, 186 Salisbury Journal, 107 Sapiro, Virginia, 142 Saussure, César de, 176, 178 Scott, John, 1st Earl of Eldon, 207–8

Scott, Sir Walter, 191 The Bride of Lammermoor, 149–50, 162–3 Scull, Andrew, 7, 150, 154, 156, 164, 179, 181, 201n sensibility, 2, 82, 98, 101–4, 128–30, 137–47, 150–6, 162, 164–5, 166n, 168n, 217–18, 226 Settle, Elkanah, 55–7, 59, 64–5, 71 sexuality, 8–9, 74–5, 114, 121, 136–7, 139, 146–7, 150–2, 155–8, 162, 165, 176, 178, 181, 184, 187, 193, 196–7, 217 Shadwell, Thomas, 54 Shakespeare, William, 2, 21, 25, 109, 189–95 Coriolanus, 31, 191 Cymbeline, 191 Hamlet, 76, 108, 111–12, 114–16, 125, 130–1, 149–50, 153–4, 162–3, 179, 193, 196, 227 King John, 191 King Lear, 76, 108, 111–14, 116–31, 190–4, 227 Macbeth, 111, 113–15, 118, 191, 192, 225 Richard III, 191 The Tempest, 191 Timon of Athens, 111 Titus Andronicus, 115 Shaw, Peter, 18 Shebbeare, John, 129–31 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 101 Sherlock, Thomas, 61 Shirley, William, 127–8 Showalter, Elaine, 150, 196 Siddons, Sarah, 111–12 Small, Helen, 4, 93, 102, 104, 137, 144, 196, 202 Smart, Christopher, 76, 206 Smedley, Jonathan, 61–2 Smirke, Robert, 189 Smith, C. Gregory, 111 Smollett, Tobias Roderick Random, 99–101 Sir Launcelot Greaves, 175 Smythe, James Moore, 63 Socrates, 74

Index 245 Sophocles, 192 Spencer, Christopher, 112 Spurzheim, Johann Caspar, 78–9 Stack, Frank, 28–9 Steele, Richard, The Spectator, 83, 85–9, 109–11 The Tatler, 83–6, 88 Stern, Tina, 22n Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy, 59, 98, 101–3, 196–7 A Sentimental Journey, 98, 101, 103–4, 150, 168n, 196–7 Stubbes, Georga, 114–15 suicide, 5, 48, 61, 108, 145, 149–50, 164, 167n, 186–7, 198, 204 Swift, Jonathan, 2, 9, 59, 63–4, 79–82, 89, 187, 206 Gulliver’s Travels, 10, 12, 13–21, 72, 82, 89, 101, 179 Tale of a Tub, 11–12, 13, 87 Talbot, Anna Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury, 75 Tate, Nahum, 206 The History of King Lear, 112–13, 116–31, 190–4 Taylor, William Cooke, 29 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 9–10 Theobald, Lewis, 54–60, 62, 65, 71, 112, 117, 172, 192 Thompson, John, 2 Todd, Janet, 139–40, 143 Tomory, Peter, 191, 193, 194, 196 Trosse, George, 11, 76, 203–6, 210–11 Tuke, Samuel, 148, 156, 206 Tuke, William, 156 ‘T.W.’, 113 Victoria, 102, 104 Vickers, Brian, 121–2 Villiers, George, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, 75–6, 95 violence, 3, 5–6, 11, 25–51, 55, 61, 90–2, 94–6, 100–1, 113, 119, 121, 159, 161–3, 165, 175, 184, 205, 208, 212–16, 222, 224–8 Virgil, 36, 37, 81 Aeneid, 56, 62, 115

Wagner, Peter, 180 Wakefield, Edward, 156, 175 Warburton, William, 66–7, 75 Ward, Ned, 80, 98, 101, 206 The London Spy, 7–9, 11, 121, 170–1, 176, 178 Warner, Thomas, 64 Warton, Joseph, 88–9, 98 The Adventurer, 79–82 Wedderburn, Alexander, 208 West, Benjamin, 189 Wilberforce, William, 132 Wilkes, Thomas, 125–6 Wilkins, William, 64 William I, 6 Williams, Carolyn, 51 Williams, John Michael, 201n Willis, Francis, 182–5, 228 Willis, Thomas, 12 Wilson, Benjamin, 189 Mr Garrick in the Character of King Lear, 190, 190–1, 193–4 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 98, 136–47, 156, 158, 162, 165, 167n, 168n, 196, 217 Education of Daughters, 138, 142, 144 Mary, A Fiction, 137–8 French Revolution, 139, 141, 166n Vindication of the Rights of Men, 136, 139–41 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 136, 141, 145–6 The Wrongs of Woman, 136, 140, 141–6 Woodward, George, John Bull Troubled by the Blue Devils, 188–9, 188 Woodward, John, 18, 19, 187 Wordsworth, William, 2, 157, 165 ‘The Mad Mother’, 155 ‘The Thorn’, 154–5, 163, 169n, 218, 220 Wright, Matthew, 71, 209 Yorke, Charles, 9 Young, Edward, 9, 63 Zoffany, Johann, 191

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