Padlocks and plum cake
Jonathan Keates
THE HISTORY OF BETHLEM by Jonathan Andrews, Asa Briggs, Roy Porter, Penny Tucker, and Keir Waddington Routledge, £150, pp. 768 Let those who mourn the passing of venerable British institutions — hunting, the House of Lords, the royal yacht draw some comfort from the continuing existence of Bethlem Hospital, 'like an old lady with a very strong and distinctly per- verse character', as one contributor to its newest history so nicely puts it, Europe's oldest psychiatric establishment simply refuses to fade gently into the dubious twilight of what is nowadays referred to by that dismal blanket term 'heritage'. The mad, who while not necessarily bad, are sometimes dangerous to know, we have always with us. Unless global warming induces a nationwide outbreak of sanity, Bethlem in whatever form looks set to abide this and subsequent millennia.
The foundation which gave us the word Bedlam was the result of archetypal English fudging and compromise. Simon fitzMary, who paid for building the Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem in 1247 on fields now occupied by Liverpool Street station, was probably less interested in pauper lunatics than in a mediaeval version of muscular Christianity as practised by the Bethlemite Order, devoted to raising alms for funding crusades against European heretics. The 'poor distracted persons' appear to have remained a sideline, at least until the early 16th century, when the Corporation of London took control and dedicated the priory's premises to the care of the indigent insane.
Lying in their nests of straw or on pallets made from recycled coal sacks, the lunatics were either fettered and manacled, or else subjected to a standard therapy of 'betyng and coreccyon'. Some of them, like the prophetess Lady Eleanor Davies, to whom a spell in Bedlam meant 'as it were to exchange the grave for hell, such were the blasphemies and the noisome scents', were patently not mad at all. Others had simply been committed through the government's vengeful spite as a punishment for sedition, or out of sheer impatience with their anti- social behaviour. Then as later, women seemed to lurch more easily than men towards wholesale raving, several of them, like the Elizabethan 'Joanne of the hospital' and 'Old Maddam', clinging to the institution's meagre comforts with recidivist nostalgia.
Reborn in 1678 as a French Baroque ensemble of cupolas, turrets and pavilions, palatial of aspect, jerrybuilt and impractical in actuality, Bethlem entered its most pub- lic phase as one of the tourist sights of London. The trip to Bedlam, as immor- talised in Hogarth's 'Rake's Progress' series, with its crazed fiddler, mock pope and moonstruck astronomer, combined the fascinations of a zoo or a freakshow with the impetus towards a little complacent moralising on Divine Providence which, at a stroke, might 'drive Reason from her seat and level us with the wretches of this unhappy mansion'.
Even under a more benign Victorian dis- pensation;. the Bedlamites, in handsome new premises in Southwark now occupied by the Imperial War Museum, with their straitjackets and leg-irons removed, suffi- cient heating and exercise, wine with their dinners and 'a supply of plain plum cake and negus' at Christmas, were seen as hav- ing, in some degree, brought their suffer- ings upon themselves. So-called moral insanity consisted of 'a morbid perversion of the natural feelings without remarkable defect of the interest', whatever that might mean. Women remained particularly at risk, it seemed, their various lunacies exac- erbated by the dire effects of menstruation and ovarian disturbances.
The successive shifts in our perceptions of mental disorder are pithily disclosed in the current London Museum exhibition, managing within a severely cramped dis- play space to embrace everything from padlocks and strait-waistcoats to the crazed creativity of such inmates as the Georgian pyromaniac Jonathan Martin, Louis Wain the cat painter, whose feline obsessions carried him far across the divide between whimsy and creepy, and Richard Dadd, would-be assassin of the Devil, the manic meticulousness of whose major works took shape in a world of wards and cells. As an accompanying tribute to the hospi- tal's endurance between mediaeval monas- ticism and its present NHS Trust avatar as part of the Maudsley, The History of Bethlem is as rich and fortifying as that plum cake and negus administered to the Victorian inmates. Neither a desiccated sequence of annals nor a strident polemic bewailing immemorial prejudice, the book, through the no-nonsense clarity of its con- tributors' shared style and the opulent breadth of detail strewn throughout its chapters, brings us uncomfortably within range of those rolling eyeballs under jutting foreheads staring from an array of mid- 19th century mugshots forming one of the most compelling items in the Museum of London exhibition. There but for the grace of God etc., so thank heavens for Bedlam.
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