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The fashionable and well-known physician George Cheyne (1671–1743) regarded the corrosive and viscid humour associated with splenetic disorders as being caused by 'the English climate, the richness and heaviness of our food, the quality of the soil, the wealth and abundance of the inhabitants, the inactivity and sedentary occupations of the better Sort and the Humour of living in great, populous and unhealthy towns'. However, he attached prime importance to diet and in his Essay on Health and Long Life (1724) he advocated a milk and seed diet. Nevertheless, madness continued to be associated with inner excellence and social quality. Cheyne himself suffered from depression and claimed that 'those of the liveliest and quickest natural Parts ... whose genius is most keen and penetrating', were most prone to such disorders. First, the spleen, unlike lowness of spirits, was an indicator of high social rank. Secondly, it also implied a degree of intelligence, imagination, and sensitivity in the sufferer. As a youth, David Hume was in correspondence with Cheyne. After describing his symptoms, Hume was flattered and reassured to learn that his was no ordinary complaint, but 'a disease of the learned'. Thus, even a rank order in illnesses was acknowledged. Eighteenth-century writers on the spleen were also concerned with the relationship between imagination and the spleen and, in particular, with the possible dangers of too much imagination. The fear of imagination developed from and is related to the fear of passion. Thomas Wright was able to voice these fears most clearly and forcefully (The Passions of the Minde in Generall, 1620). He described the evil effects of unrestrained passions as: 'blindness of understanding, persuasion of will, alteration of humours; and by them maladies and diseases and troublesomeness and disquietness of the soul.' The paradoxical demands of reason and imagination and the precariousness of their relationships were recognized well in advance of Freud's discussion of the dilemmas of civilized man. Foremost among the 18th- century distrusters of imagination was Samuel Johnson, who waged a lifelong battle against melancholy. Idleness and solitude were both to be avoided on the grounds that they provided a fertile breeding ground for the imagination. Solitude 'is dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue. ... Remember ... that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious and probably mad: the mind stagnates for want of employment, grows morbid and is extinguished like a candle in foul air.' Idleness was condemned not because of its later associations with poverty, but because it promotes inner stagnation and decay. Early 19th-century writing on insanity was dominated by the work of the moral managers. Their ideas developed from faculty psychology, according to which man possessed three souls: the rational, the sensitive, and the vegetative. The rational soul is concerned with understanding and the will; the sensitive soul is concerned with the imagination, memory, and perception; and the vegetative soul is concerned with growth, nutrition, 1

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The fashionable and well-known physician George Cheyne (1671–1743) regarded the corrosive and viscid humour associated with splenetic disorders as being caused by 'the English climate, the richness and heaviness of our food, the quality of the soil, the wealth and abundance of the inhabitants, the inactivity and sedentary occupations of the better Sort and the Humour of living in great, populous and unhealthy towns'. However, he attached prime importance to diet and in his Essay on Health and Long Life (1724) he advocated a milk and seed diet. Nevertheless, madness continued to be associated with inner excellence and social quality. Cheyne himself suffered from depression and claimed that 'those of the liveliest and quickest natural Parts ... whose genius is most keen and penetrating', were most prone to such disorders. First, the spleen, unlike lowness of spirits, was an indicator of high social rank. Secondly, it also implied a degree of intelligence, imagination, and sensitivity in the sufferer. As a youth, David Hume was in correspondence with Cheyne. After describing his symptoms, Hume was flattered and reassured to learn that his was no ordinary complaint, but 'a disease of the learned'. Thus, even a rank order in illnesses was acknowledged. Eighteenth-century writers on the spleen were also concerned with the relationship between imagination and the spleen and, in particular, with the possible dangers of too much imagination. The fear of imagination developed from and is related to the fear of passion. Thomas Wright was able to voice these fears most clearly and forcefully (The Passions of the Minde in Generall, 1620). He described the evil effects of unrestrained passions as: 'blindness of understanding, persuasion of will, alteration of humours; and by them maladies and diseases and troublesomeness and disquietness of the soul.' The paradoxical demands of reason and imagination and the precariousness of their relationships were recognized well in advance of Freud's discussion of the dilemmas of civilized man. Foremost among the 18th-century distrusters of imagination was Samuel Johnson, who waged a lifelong battle against melancholy. Idleness and solitude were both to be avoided on the grounds that they provided a fertile breeding ground for the imagination. Solitude 'is dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue. ... Remember ... that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious and probably mad: the mind stagnates for want of employment, grows morbid and is extinguished like a candle in foul air.' Idleness was condemned not because of its later associations with poverty, but because it promotes inner stagnation and decay.

Early 19th-century writing on insanity was dominated by the work of the moral managers. Their ideas developed from faculty psychology, according to which man possessed three souls: the rational, the sensitive, and the vegetative. The rational soul is concerned with understanding and the will; the sensitive soul is concerned with the imagination, memory, and perception; and the vegetative soul is concerned with growth, nutrition, and reproduction. Health depends upon the right relationship between the rational and the sensitive soul, namely one of dominance and control. The moral managers held that insanity was a 'lesion of understanding' and that the will could be trained to cope with the possibility of madness. John Locke had first put forward the view that madness was a self-contained defect of reason and thus left open the possibility that other parts of the self could be enlisted to combat this weakness. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke wrote that:madmen do not appear to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some ideas very wrongly they mistake them for truths ... as though incoherent ideas have been cemented together so powerfully as to remain united. But there are degrees of madness as of folly; the disorderly jumbling ideas together in some more, in some, less. In short, herein seems to lie the difference between idiots and madmen. That madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from them. But idiots make very few or no propositions, but argue and reason scarce at all.Now that the seat of madness had been isolated, optimism and cure became possible. In fact, much of the writing on insanity in the first half of the 19th century was concerned with delineating the strategic role played by the will. One such book which crystallizes the early 19th-century outlook is called Man's Power over Himself to Prevent or Control Insanity, published anonymously in 1843. The author assigns the following role to the will:The affection of the brain which causes delusions is not madness, but the want of power or will to examine them, is. Nothing then but an extent of disease which destroys at once all possibility of reasoning, by annihilating, or entirely changing the structure of the organ, can make a man necessarily mad. In all other cases, the being sane or otherwise, not withstanding considerable disease of brain, depends on the individual himself. He who has given a proper direction to the intellectual force and thus obtained an early command over the bodily organ by habituating it to processes of calm reasoning, remains sane amid all the vagaries of sense.

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Within asylums treatment consisted of the cultivation of character and the rediscovery and strengthening of will power.

During this period there was one important change of emphasis in the accounts of madness. James Cowles Prichard, ethnologist and physician, first introduced the term 'moral insanity' in 1833, and defined it as follows: 'This form of mental disease ... consists of a morbid perversion of the feelings, affections, habits, without any hallucination or erroneous conviction impressed upon the understanding; it sometimes coexists with an apparently unimpaired state of the intellectual faculties.' Thus the will was no longer the impenetrable stronghold against insanity, and madness had shifted from defective reasoning to the emotions. Given that the will in man was seen to be like a pilot in a ship, this reappraisal constituted a far more serious threat to man's supremacy over madness. Incidentally, the term 'moral insanity' is often, but erroneously, claimed to be the forebear of the modern 'psychopathic personality', whose cause still remains a matter for debate.

The theme of moral decline which lunacy represented was developed in a more systematic way and on a larger scale in the last third of the 19th century. Henry Maudsley published Responsibility in Mental Disease in 1873. Misleadingly titled, it was in fact a claim for non-responsibility in mental disease (although not in any indulgent sense) and was largely an argument against the claims of the moral managers. Maudsley was not concerned with cure so much as with identifying and segregating the morally degenerate. Man's life is governed by genetic laws, and thought and volition are determined by them as much as are all other aspects of human life. Maudsley called this genetic determinism 'the tyranny of organisation'. He writes:Individuals are born with such a flaw or warp of nature that all the care in the world will not prevent them from being vicious or criminal, or becoming insane. ... No one can escape the tyranny of his organisation; no one can elude the destiny that is innate in him, and which unconsciously and irresistibly shapes his ends, even when he thinks he is determining them with consummate foresight and skill.Whatever the complex intellectual and social changes that contributed towards this position (see asylums: a historical survey), it is a startling reversal of earlier accounts. Maudsley brings the dialogue with the irrational to a bleak and abrupt close. His concept of the 'tyranny of organization' seems to have been taken to its logical conclusion by Johannes Lange in his book Crime and Destiny (1930). Later studies of twins involved in crime have given as much emphasis to environmental as to hereditary factors as causes of felony.

(Published 1987)

Insanity and Spiritual Songs in the Soul of a SaintThe second reason I am drawn to William Cowper is that I want to know the man behind the hymn, "God Moves In a Mysterious Way." Over the years it has become very precious to me and to many in our church.God moves in a mysterious wayHis wonders to perform;He plants his footsteps in the sea,And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable minesOf never failing skill,He treasures up his bright designsAnd works his sovereign will.Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,The clouds ye so much dreadAre big with mercy, and shall breakIn blessings on your head.Judge not the lord by feeble sense,But trust him for his grace;behind a frowning providenceHe hides a smiling face.

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

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Between 1749 and 1756 Cowper was falling in love with his cousin Theodora whose home he would regularly visit on the weekends. She became the Delia of his love poems. They were engaged, but for some mysterious reason her father, Ashley Cowper, forbade the marriage. His apparent reason was the inappropriateness of consanguinity. She was William's cousin. But it seems strange that the relation was allowed to develop for seven years as well as the engagement only to shatter on a brick wall at the last minute. Probably her father knew things about William that convinced him he would not have been a good husband for his daughter. This is probably true.But it didn't turn out the way he hoped. Though they never saw each other again after 1756, Theodora outlived him but never married. She followed the poetic career of William from a distance and sent him money anonymously when he was in need, even a regular stipend at one point.We know of 19 poems that he wrote to her under the name Delia. One of them, written some years after their parting, shows the abiding pain:But now, sole partner in my Delia's heart,Yet doomed far off in exile to complain,Eternal absence cannot ease my smart,And hope subsists but to prolong my pain.What we find is that William Cowper's life seems to be one long accumulation of pain.

In 1759 when he was 28 years old he was appointed, through the influence of his father, Commissioner of Bankrupts in London. Four years later he was about to be made Clerk of Journals in Parliament. What would have been a great career advancement to most men struck fear in William Cowper—so much so that he had a total mental breakdown, tried three different ways to commit suicide, and was put into an asylum.His father had arranged for the position. But his enemies in parliament decided to require a public interrogation for his son as a prerequisite. Cowper wrote about the dreadful attack of 1763:All the horrors of my fears and perplexities now returned. A thunderbolt would have been as welcome to me as this intelligence (=interrogation) ... Those whose spirits are formed like mine, to whom a public exhibition of themselves, on any occasion, is mortal poison, may have some idea of the horror of my situation; others can have none (see note 3).For more than half a year his feelings were those "of a man when he arrives at the place of execution." At that point something dreadful returned to his memory that causes us to wonder about what kind of father William Cowper had. The 32 year old Clerk suddenly recalled a "treatise on self-murder" that he read when he was 11 years old.I well recollect when I was about eleven years of age, my father desired me to read a vindication of self-murder, and give him my sentiments upon the question: I did so, and argued against it. My father heard my reasons, and was silent, neither approving nor disapproving; from whence I inferred that he sided with the author against me (see note 4).In the week before his examination (October 1763) he bought laudanum to use as a poison. He pondered escaping to France to enter a monastery. He had illusions of seeing himself slandered in the newspaper anonymously. He was losing his hold on reality almost entirely. The day before the Parliamentary examination he set out to drown himself and took a cab to Tower Wharf. But at Custom House Quay he found the water too low and "a porter seated upon some goods" as if "a message to prevent" him (see note 5).When he got home that evening he tried to take the laudanum but found his fingers "closely contracted" and "entirely useless." The next morning he tried three times to hang himself with a garter. The third time he became unconscious, but the garter broke. The laundress found him in bed and called his uncle who canceled the examination immediately. And that was the end of Cowper's brush with public life—but not the end of his brush with death.Conviction of sin took place, especially of that just committed; the meanness of it, as well as its atrocity, were exhibited to me in colours so inconceivably strong that I despised myself, with a contempt not to be imagined or expressed ... This sense of it secured me from the repetition of a crime which I could not now reflect on without abhorrence ... A sense of God's wrath, and a deep despair of escaping it, instantly succeeded (see note 6).Now everything he read condemned him. Sleep would not come, and, when it did, it brought him terrifying dreams. When he awoke he "reeled and staggered like a drunken man."

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

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His first volume of poems was published in 1782 when he was 51. Three years later came The Task which established his fame. The great usefulness of these poems is that they "helped to spread (the Revival's) ideas among the educated of all classes ... because of his formal alliance with the (Evangelical) movement and the practical effects of his work, (Cowper) remains its (poet) laureate" (see note 14). Perhaps his productivity staved off the threatened breakdown of 1783, the next ten-year interval. But the reprieve did not last. In 1786 Cowper entered his fourth deep depression and again tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide. He and Mary move from Olney to Weston that year and the long decline of both of them begins. He cares for her as for a dying Mother from 1790 to 1796, filling what moments he can with work on his translations of Homer and other Greek and French works. He writes his last original poem in 1799, called The Castaway, and then dies apparently in utter despair in 1800.William Cowper's melancholy is disturbing. We need to come to terms with it in the framework of God's sovereign power and grace to save and sanctify his people. What are we to make of this man's life long battle with depression, and indeed his apparent surrender to despair and hopelessness in his own life?One thing to notice is that there is some inconsistency in the way he reports his misery and hopelessness. For example, in a letter to John Newton on January (!) 13, 1784 he wrote,arth brilliantly satirizes the often useless and destructive character of Britain's ruling classes.This original engraving was both designed and engraved by William Hogarth and published by William Heath in 1822.

Hogarth: The Rake’s Progress Scene 8The final scene is set in Bethlehem Royal Hospital (Bedlam), an institution for the poor and insane. He is lying in the foreground almost stripped of clothes and thus his social pretensions. Sarah weeps by his side knowing that Tom is beyond her help. Like prisons and other hospitals, Bedlam was open to paying visitors. Within this scene an aristocratic lady and her maid are standing towards the left, amused and disgusted by the antics of the unfortunate people around them. The irony is that, while Tom had set out to mimic the aristocratic lifestyle, he finishes by being one of its entertainments.In the concluding scene Tom has descended into madness and is now in Bethlem Hospital or Bedlam as it was known.He is surrounded by other inLoaded as my life is with despair, I have no such comfort as would result from a supposed probability of better things to come, were it once ended ... You will tell me that this cold gloom will be succeeded by a cheerful spring, and endeavour to encourage me to hope for a spiritual change resembling it—but it will be lost labour. Nature revives again; but a soul once slain lives no more ... My friends, I now expect that I shall see yet again. They think it necessary to the existence of divine truth, that he who once had possession of it should never finally lose it. I admit the solidity of this reasoning in every case but my own. And why not in my own? ... I forestall the answer:—God's ways are mysterious, and He giveth no account of His matters:—an answer that would serve my purpose as well as theirs that use it. There is a mystery in my destruction, and in time it shall be explained. (see note 15)Notice that he affirms the truth of the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints and does not even quarrel with the reality of his own conversion at St. Albans. What he disputes is that the general truth applies to him. He is the lone exception in the universe. He is reprobate though once he was elect. Ask not why. God gives no account. This is his bleakest way of talking. But notice something else. In that same year he was writing The Task. In it he recounts what Christ meant to him in a way that makes it very hard to believe there are not times now when this is still real for him:I was stricken deer, that left the herdLong since; with many an arrow deep infixtMy panting side was charg'd, when I withdrewTo seek a tranquil death in distant shades.There was I found by one who had himselfBeen hurt by th' archers. In his side he bore,And in his hands and feet, the cruel scars.With gentle force soliciting the darts,He drew them forth, and heal'd, and bade me live.Since then, with few associates, in remoteAnd silent woods I wonder, far from thoseMy former partners of the peopled scene;With few associates, and not wishing more.

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

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astronomer and an archbishop. In the door to one of the cells is a man who thinks he is a king - he is naked and carries a straw crown and sceptre.Like the real Bedlam, Hogarth's Madhouse is open to the public. Two fashionable ladies have come to observe the poor suffering lunatics as one of the sights of the town.The ever-faithful Sarah Young sits, weeping, by Tom's side. In the last of a series of paintings depicting the story of the dissolute young man Tom Rakewell, the English artist William Hogarth (1697 – 1764), had given us a rare glimpse of the interior of Bethlem Hospital in the eighteenth century. The paintings were exhibited in 1735 to encourage potential subscribers to pay for a series of engravings, and it is largely through these engravings that the story became known to the public.The engravings depict Bethlem in caricature but of course Londoners and visitors had another, more direct source of information about conditions inside the hospital – until 1770 they could visit the hospital in person without restriction. At holiday times, especially, Bethlem attracted quite large crowds. It was even listed as an attraction in tourist guides of the time. There is no suggestion that the Hospital ever objected to the way in which Hogarth had depicted it – indeed, he was elected onto its Court of Governors in 1752.This last scene takes place in one of the long corridors or ‘galleries’, which ran the length of the building and functioned as ward space. Patients were housed and treated in separate areas of the hospital according to gender and diagnosis. Metal grilles helped maintain the separation. Though some patients were secluded, the majority had relatively free movement through the gallery as can be seen here. Tom Rakewell lies in the foreground in a pose reminiscent of the statues by Caius Gabriel Cibber which surmounted the entrance to the Moorfields building. He already appears to be manacled. His fellow patients exhibit signs of different disorders. The man standing on the stairs represents religious delusion; the seated man below him, disappointment in love. In a cell on the other side of the gallery, a man wearing the crown (but otherwise naked) suffers from delusions of grandeur.Surveying the scene, and using their fans to hide their blushes, are two lady visitors.

Exterior of Bethlehem, New Hospital, Hogarth’s picture of interior, the other hospital’s exterior and interior, 19th century interior of Bedlam. (p. 75 of Lecture Plan)BEDLAM REVISITED: A HISTORY OF BETHLEMHOSPITAL c1634-177OBy Jonathan AndrewsIn delineating the scandalous environment of Bethiem the public visiting of its patients has standardlybeen portrayed by historians as the greatest scandal of all. It has now become almost ahistorical platitude to exemplify the brutalising of the insane in the classical period by describinghow Bethlem's patients were exhibtted, teased, ridiculed, provoked, abused, and otherwisesubjected to the 'impertinent curiosity of sightseers at a mere penny [or tuppence] a time' .As zoo and freakshow, Bethlem has served 'as emblematic of an overriding cosmology of madness,whereby 'the madman in confinement was treated no better than a beast', or 'monster'2.Accordingly, the curtailing of visiting there in 1770 has been seen as signalling the humanisingof the madman, his elevation from animal to patient, a profound disjunction from former attitudes,the product of a new 'Age of Sensibility', a kind of psychiatric peresiroika.The Exhortatory Show And The Visitor Of QualityWho, then, were these 'swarms' of visitors and what were their motives ? The orthodox,ideal visitor, as far as the Governors were concerned was the 'person of quality', who cameto the hospital with the intention 'of doing them [ie.'the poore Lunatiques'] good & releivingthem'43 . I.e. he was defined in accordance with elite notions of morality and charity, andwith Bethlem's function as a charity. As defined by Steele in The Speclator (1712), 'a Man ofCondition or Quality' was 'one who according to the Wealth he is Master of, shews hirnselfjust,beneficent, and charitable' 44 . The term was not generally employed, however, without a heavybias towards the wealthy, better educated and higher bred members of society. Such visitors wereopenly courted by the Governors and conceived of as supporters of charity. Indeed, there is nodoubt from literary and journalistic accounts of visiting Bethlem that the educated and wealthycomprised a considerable proportion of visitors to the hospital throughout the period. Duringmuch of the seventeenth century, the customary donation required at the hospital door mayhave been a greater deterrent than historians have recognised to plebiean visitors, as Ann Cook

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has argued concerning the minimum penny admission fee for pre-Protectorate playgoers45 With the hospital's rebuilding at Moorfields, the connections between charityand the public spectacle of insanity were rendered even more explicit. The blue that had long. been worn by the apprentices of Bridewell and the blue-coat boys of the charity schools, and hadlong represented sombre charity and humility (as well as subservience), was now extended to theinmates and staff of Bethlem. Not only was it adopted as the garb of charity patients (i.e. thoseclothed and maintained at the sole charge of the hospital), and for the Porter's and basketmen'scoats of office; but it was also added to the new poor' boxes carved out of wood in the formof two life-size figures, representing male and female patients/beggars (see Fig. 2c) 52 . Thus,visitors would be even more directly accosted at their entrance or exit by a vivid and calculatedappeal for charity. From 1709, the inscription over the poors' boxes was posted additionallyon the outer and inner doors of the hospital (although rather to prevent embezzlement than toelicit charity) 53 . The stark and shocking image of the insane conveyed by Cibber's statues (seeFig 2d) of raving and melancholy madness displayed over the main gateway to new Bethiem hasreceived a great deal of attention from historians keen to illustrate the prevalence of brutal andfreakish conceptions of the mad in this period. The contrast of the poors' box representationsof patients with the Cibber figures has rarely, however, been commented on by historians, yetquite clearly reflects the coexistence of a rather more generous and practical notion of the plightof the insane and the function of visiting. The best illustration of this dual role of visitors as overseers and benefactors, was when,in the 1690s, the Governors established the Wardrobe Fund. This was directly provoked, iflleralia, by the spectacle of (and the Governors embarrassment at) naked patients exposed before the public eye, which had 'moved some Charitable persons to give Gifts and Legacies' for thesame purpose55.

The Didactic Spectacle: Visiting The Insane As A Moral LessonBesides the hortatory, fund-raising function of exhibiting the insane, the mad were displayedas a didactic spectacle, and it was 'a desire for instruction' which was supposed to 'carry themajority of spectators'—or rather, the 'enlightened' visitor—to Bethlem 63 . Beyond their roleas 'Objects of Charity', Bedlamites served as object lessons, living exemplams of the wages of viceand indulgence, barely removed from their traditional signification as 'the damned'. This wasnot a conscious advertisement on the part of the governing board, of course, but an adventitiousdevelopment, a circumstance, rather than an explanation, of the practice of visiting. One findsit formulated most consummately as an ideology for the educated visitor, in the account of avisit to Betlilem in The World (1753). For the anonymous correspondent, here, there is nobetter lesson [to] be taught us in any part of the globe than in this school of misery. Here wemay see the mighty reasoners of the earth, below even the insects that crawl upon it; and fromso humbling a sight we may learn to moderate our pride, and to keep those passions withinbounds, which if too much indulged, would drive reason from her seat, and level us with thewretches of this unhappy mansion'64It was the utter degradation of the mad, their atavism, their inversion of the natural order,which acted so forcibly on the minds of such visitors. Madness was the beast within that, atclose proximity, operated as both leveller and admonition. It brought man face to face with hisown bestiality and in so doing warned him to keep his baser instincts in check.While this didactic of visiting did not attain its apogee until the eighteenth century, thenotion of madness as a moral lesson, and of the mad as teachers, was, of course, not new. ItGreek and Christian traditions from S,ocrates to Erasmus 65 . The 'good mania' of Christendomand of Heflenic philosophy is, however, less pertinent here than the punitive madness ofprovidential theology. Historians have rarely connected the old, but resilient idea of madness asdivine judgment with the didactic spectacle of visiting the insane in the classical period. … As God (by degrees) stepped back from the worldly arena during the seventeenth century, the relationship between madness/illness and immorality became increasingly direct, and the moral exemplum afforded by the mad/ill was made increasingly explicit66.

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Bethlem was founded in 1247 as a sanctuary, and became an asylum for the insane in the 1370s. It moved from Bishopsgate to Moorfields in 1676, and to Lambeth in 1815, where it remained until 1930. THE REBUILDING OF 'BETHLEM'Following the great fire of 1666, a programme was launched to rebuild London hospitals, displaying the city's wealth and prestige. Surprisingly, the first hospital to be rebuilt was the poor relation of the five London hospitals - the much discredited Royal Bethlehem or 'Bethlem', London's 'asylum for the mad'. Though the old building was undamaged by the fire, the Governors had concluded by 1674 that it was 'too weak and ruinous' and too small to meet demand. By 1676, a new building had been constructed in Moorfields, designed by the eminent scientist and architect Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Light and airy, with landscaped gardens sweeping away from the front entrance, it could house 120 people and was intended to inspire awe and admiration. One Londoner wrote: "So brave, so neat, so sweet it does appear / makes one half-mad to be a lodger there". But as so often in Bethlem's history, it was not the building that caused distress to its residents - it was the people who ran it. By 1750, the acquisitive Monroe family of 'mad doctors' was in charge. With paying visits from the curious public, restraints and purges, it was once again in public disrepute. NEW MILITARY AND OTHER HOSPITALSThe rebuilding of Bethlem had inspired others. Charles II was keen to emulate Louis XIV's great Hôtel des Invalides military hospital in Paris, and in 1682 work began on Christopher Wren's Chelsea Hospital, London for disabled and aged soldiers. By 1691 this building was complete. It was followed in 1694 by the Royal Hospital at Greenwich, London for disabled and aged navy veterans, also designed by Wren. A century of naval hospital building followed - Haslar, Hampshire (1762), Plymouth, Devon (1762), Deal, Kent (1795) and Great Yarmouth, Norfolk (1811). Meanwhile in 1721, Guy's Hospital in London opened its doors, built for the incurably sick and chronic lunatics.Ned WardThus we prattled away our time till we came in sight of a noble pile of building, which diverted us from our former discourse, and gave my friend the occasion of asking me my thoughts on this magnificent edifice. I told him, I conceived it to be the Lord Mayor's Palace, for I could not imagine so stately a structure could be designed for any quality inferior. He smiled at my innocent conjecture, and informed me this was Bedlam, an hospital for mad folks.

"In truth," said I, "I think they were mad that built so costly a College for such a crack-brain society," adding, it was a pity so fine a building should not be possessed by such as had a sense of their happiness. It was a mad age when this was raised, and no doubt the chief of the City were in a great danger of losing their senses, so contrived it the more noble for their own reception, or they would never have flung away so much money to so foolish a purpose. ………

Accordingly we were admitted through an iron gate, within which sat a brawny Cerberus of an indigo colour, leaning upon a money-box. We turned in through another iron barricade, where we heard such a rattling of chains, drumming of doors, ranting, holloaing, singing and rattling, that I could think of nothing but Don Quevado's vision, where the damned broke loose, and put Hell in an uproar.

The first whimsy-headed wretch of this lunatic family that we observed, was a merry fellow in a straw cap, who was saying to himself that he had an army of eagles at his command. Then clapping his hand upon his head he swore by his crown of moonshine that he would battle all the stars in the skies but he would have some claret. In this interim came a gentleman with a red face to stare at him. "No wonder," said his Aerial Majesty, "that claret is so scarce, look there's a rogue carries more in his nose than I, that am Prince of the Air, have had in my belly for a twelvemonth."

"If you are the Prince of the Air," said I, "why don't you command the Man in the Moon to give you some?" To which he replied, "The Man in the Moon's a sorry rascal; I sent to him for a dozen bottles but t'other day, and he swore by his bush, his cellar had been dry this six months. But I'll be even with the rogue. I expect a cloud laden with claret to be sent me by the Sun every day, and if a spoonful of lees would save him from choking, the old drunkard should not have a drop."lees would save him from choking, the old drunkard should not have a drop."

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The London Spy, Ned Ward 1709A Visit to Bedlam[We had been told of a patient] who is said to have crowed all day long like a cock… [The Hospital’s staff] know nothing about him …[but recommended we see another patient instead,] the most foolish and ludicrous of all...because he imagined that he was a Captain and wore a wooden sword at his side and had severall cock's feathers stuck into his hat. He wanted to command the others and did all kinds of tomfoolery; we threw a shilling or two down to him, with which he appeared highly delighted… [We saw milder patients who were] not mad but only deprived of their wits or simple… the females [we saw were]…utterly repulsive.W.H. Quarrell and Margaret Mare (eds) London in 1710

THE MOVEMENT AGAINST 'VAIN MAGNIFICENCE' As a reaction against the merchant-wealth extravagance of these buildings, a lively charitable movement started up. Its intention was to pursue the social aims of supporting the sick and disabled poor rather than to create grand buildings. In 1712, the charitable Bethel Hospital for Lunatics was built in Committee Street (later Bethel Street), Norwich. St Lukes, a charitable asylum for pauper lunatics with a magnificent classical frontage, was built near Bethlem in Old Street, London and became its rival. Run by the eccentric physician William Battie (1703-1776), it advocated (but did not always achieve) a system of non-restraint, activity, fresh air and good food and it rejected the Bethlem-type regime. VOLUNTARY ASYLUMSOther voluntary hospitals sprang up. Small scale asylums housing around 100 people were built in Manchester (1766), Newcastle (1767), York (1777) and Liverpool (1792). Voluntary did not always mean good, however, and York became notorious for corruption and abuse. In 1796, the Quaker community led by William Tuke (1732-1822) decided to establish their own asylum, the York Retreat in Bootham. 'Medical' treatment was replaced by 'moral' means - kindness, reason and humanity in a family atmosphere with no restraint. The Retreat became famous around the world. In England, the foundations were in place for the era of the asylum and the institution.

While the crowds flocked to see the new Bethlem, the building strained under a weight of symbolic meaning (Ingram, 2005). For example, its visual impact was both intensified and undermined by the twin images of madness sculptured by Caius Gabriel Cibber, which from around 1676 adorned the main portico to the institution. Known as ‘raving’ and ‘melancholy’ madness, the statues gave symbolic confirmation that Bethlem was a portal to Bedlam, a world of craziness. It is in this sense of imposing crazy carica tures on the historically real Bethlem that Bedlam serves as both a mask and a mirror of madness (Porter, 1987).

The large number of visitors strolling out to Moorfields to take in Bethlem’s magnificent facade led its governors to seize on a market opportunity, allowing the paying public entry to the hospital to view the inmates. Until at least 1770, viewing the inmates in Bethlem was a popular tourist attraction alongside the lions in the Tower and the attractions of Bartholomew Fair (Porter, 1997). However, the actual numbers of 18th-century visitors entering Bethlem are moot; Macdonald’s (1981) suggestion of 96,000 visitors to the hospital has been rejected by Bethlem’s principal historians (Allderidge, 1985; Andrews et al., 1997) for its dubious projections based on the quantity of money recorded in the poor box takings.

REASONS FOR THE ESTABLISHING AND FURTHER ENCOURAGEMENT G F S^. LUKE'S HOSPITAL FOR LUNATICKS. TOGETHER WITH THE RULES AND ORDERS For the GOVERNMENT thereof. M.DCC.LXXX.

^ a ' ^ H E Ufefulnefs and Neceffity of Hofpltals In general being at prefent fo well iinderllood in this Kingdom, it will be needlefs to offer any Confiderations on thofe Heads. But it may not be improper to lay before the Publick, the particular Rea- fons and Inducements for the fetting on Foot a new Delign of this Sort, for the Relief of poor Lunaticks.

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I, Experience had long fhewn, that the Hofpltal of Bethlem was incapable of receiving and providing for the Relief of all the unhappy Objeds of this Sorty who made Application for it 5 this Truth can be at- tefted by every Governor of that Houfe^ and by tvciy Perfon to whofe Lot it has flillen, to follcit the Ad» miffion of a Patient into it.

2. That the Expence and Difficulty attending the AdmliTion of a Patient into the Hofpital of Bethlem, had difcouraged many Applications for the Benefit of that Chanty, particularly on behalf of the more ne- ceffitous Objedls, and of fuch who refided in the re- mote Parts of the Kingdom.

3. That by this unavoidable Exclufion, or Delay in the Admiffion of Objeds of this Sort, many ufeful Members have been loft to Society, either by the Dif- order gaining Strength beyond the Reach of Phyiick, or by the Patients falling into the Hands of Perlons utterly unt'killed in the Treatment of the Diforder, or who have found their Advantage in negleding every Method neceffary to obtain a Cure.

4. That many Families, (in no mean Circumftances) through the heavy Expence attending the Support of one Obje<ft of this Sort, have themfelves become Objedts of charitable Relief, and thereby doubled the Load and Lofs to the Publick.

5. That the moft fatal Acts of Violence on them- felves. Attendants and Relations, have been often con- fequent on the fmalleft Delay in placing the Afflided with

In 1814, mental health reform campaigners including the campaigning journalist William Hone, and the politically well-connected philanthropist Edward Wakefield, vis ited Bethlem and discovered among its inmates some who were chained to their cell wall (Wilson, 2005). These inmates included James Norris, a former American marine who had been pinioned in the following unique manner:A stout iron ring was riveted round his neck, from which a short chain passed through a ring made to slide upwards and downwards on an upright massive iron bar, more than six feet high, inserted into the wall. Round his body a strong iron bar about two inches wide was riveted; on each side of the bar was a circular projection; which being fashioned to and enclosing each of his arms, pinioned them close to his sides. (quoted in Porter, 2002: 107)Norris had spent around 12 years of his detention in Bethlem pinioned in this custom-built harness. What made it all the more shocking was that Norris could apparently con verse rationally with his visitors. On a further visit to Bethlem, Norris’ visitors included an artist who sketched Norris in his iron structure. Shortly afterwards, the image of Norris in chains was transformed into an engraving and became news.

The image of Norris in chains formed part of a portfolio of evidence for the House of Commons Sub-Committee on Madhouses Enquiry of 1815 (Andrews et al., 1997). The focus was almost entirely on Bethlem, whose officials, including its physician Dr Thomas Monro and the apothecary John Haslam, defended the manner of Norris’ restraint, arguing weakly that it was for his own benefit and that they were about to release him just as the mental health campaigners knocked on their door (Wilson, 2005). For his part, Norris was released from his torment in 1812 only to die weeks later of tuberculosis exacerbated by his years spent in a static position.

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When Bethlem moved to its third premises at St George’s Fields, Southwark in 1815, the ghost of James Norris also relocated. The image of Norris in chains was revived in newspaper stories and mental health campaign pamphlets over the next two decades, whenever the politics of mental health reform were reported (Wilson, 2005). The diffi culty for Bethlem was that the idea of Bedlam could always serve as the bogey image of psychiatric progress (Allderidge, 1985). While the image of Norris in chains added to 19th-century gothic motifs of Bedlam as a madhouse of horrors (Porter, 1997), we shall now see how a Bedlamite figure from the early modern era changed form and meaning in the popular musical culture of the 19th century and later.[“Rivetted alive in iron, & for many years confined, in that state, by chains 12 inches long to an upright massive bar in a cell in Bethlem.”

The sad tale of James Norris (mistakenly called William by the press) captured the attention of the public in 1814 when he was discovered in Bethlem Royal Hospital, mechanically restrained and in poor health, having been confined in isolation for more than ten years. Norris, a seaman from America, was originally incarcerated in ‘Bedlam’ for an unnamed lunacy and was, after a number of violent incidents, restrained in this extraordinary device designed specifically for him. No less than six members of parliament visited Norris during 1814, each maintaining that he was rational, quiet, and capable of coherent and topical conversation.

As a result of the publication of this image and the interest it generated in asylum reform, Norris was released from his restraints in 1814, yet remained confined in Bethlem. However, the conditions he had endured for more than ten years had so weakened his constitution that he died within a few weeks of his release, of either pneumonia or tuberculosis. The case of James Norris, and the public interest it created, was instrumental in the creation of the Mad House Act of 1828, which sought to license and regulate asylums for the insane, and to improve the treatment of the insane.

Three men were responsible for exposing the plight of William Norris, and eventually gaining his release: Edward Wakefield (1774-1854), member of parliament, reformer, and philanthropist, William Hone (1780-1842), political writer and publisher, and James Bevans, architect. These men were concerned by writer and publisher, and James Bevans, architect. These men were concerned by the condition and ill-treatment of patients in lunatic asylums and thus formed a committee with the aim of visiting asylums around the country and making reports on what they found. The illustration of Norris and its subsequent publication was part of an orchestrated drive by these three men to bring the issue of asylum reform to the public. The number of times the image was copied by different artists pays tribute to the vision of the committee. This particular etching by G. Cruikshank, was published in 1815 by William Hone, sketched from life by G. Arnald in 1814.]

Extract from Minutes of Bridewell and Bethlem Governors25 Feb. 1709The Governors ordered that...

“a larger Inscripccion be putt over the poors Box to desire all persons to see the money they give putt into the poors Box.

And that Springs be made to the poors boxes or some other care be taken to prevent the money being pickt out…

And That [a] large Inscripccion be likewise putt over the outward and inward doores of the said hospital of Bethlem desireing all persons to see the money they give putt into the poors box.”

Extract from Minutes of Bridewell and Bethlem Governors21 Nov. 1770“Having taken into Consideration the present Method of Admitting Persons into the Hospital to Visit and View the Patients”, and observing that “great Irregularities are daily Committed the Patients disturbed and

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often Robbed of their Provisions and Cloaths by the Admission of improper Persons into the Hospital” the Governors ordered that…“for the future the Gates of the Hospital should be kept constantly Shut And that no person or persons whatsoever, Except a Governor, or in Company with a Governor and the Officers and Servants of the Hospital be Permitted to enter the same, unless he she or they produce to the Porter of said Hospital a Ticket Signed same, unless he she or they produce to the Porter of said Hospital a Ticket Signed by one of the Governors thereof the said Tickets to be provided by and delivered out under the Direction of the Treasurer & Committee of said Hospital….And that one of the Basketmen and Gallery Maids should attend all such Persons who should come to View the Hospital And upon the Departure of such Persons who should be Admitted no Officer or Servant of or belonging to said Hospital should presume to ask, demand, or receive any Benefaction or Gratuity on behalf of the Hospital or themselves; but whatever such Persons are inclined to give that they be desired to put the same into the Poors Box with their own Hands And the Key for the future be kept by the Treasurer for the Time being, the said Box to be opened the last Saturday in every Month as usual in the presence of the Weekly Committee.And … that such Persons who should become Securities for any Patient Admitted into said Hospital should upon the Admission of such Patient have a Ticket delivered them which upon being produced to the said Porter should Intitle two of the said Patients Friends at a Time to see them Gratis, And that in Case an(y) Steward or Porter of the said Hospital shall disobey and Act in Contradiction of the Rules and Regulations mentioned in the said Memorial that he & they shall be thereupon immediately dismissed and discharged from their respective Offices.1763 SELECT COMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON MADHOUSES2.3.2 THE 1774 Madhouse Bill The Bills that became the 1774 Act were formulated in the context of court cases, such as those considered by the 1763 Select Committee on Madhouses concerning detention of the allegedly sane. The two established remedies for such infringements of the British liberties were an application to the higher courts for a writ of habeas corpus, or a request to a JP to intervene. The confined person was in no position to make such an appeal (*) and those who confined someone did not advertise their actions or allow the confined to communicate with those who might assist (at Turlington's patients were prevented from sending letters). The applicant, therefore, was usually someone who suspected another had been confined. Also a number of precautionary measures regarding the issue of certificates and licenses.(*) Unless, like Alexander Cruden in 1738, he escaped and applied to the public authorities to prevent his recapture. Cruden applied to the Lord Mayor. same, unless he she or they produce to the Porter of said Hospital a Ticket Signed by one of the Governors thereof the said Tickets to be provided by and delivered out under the Direction of the Treasurer & Committee of said Hospital….And that one of the Basketmen and Gallery Maids should attend all such Persons who should come to View the Hospital And upon the Departure of such Persons who should be Admitted no Officer or Servant of or belonging to said Hospital should presume to ask, demand, or receive any Benefaction or Gratuity on behalf of the Hospital or themselves; but whatever such Persons are inclined to give that they be desired to put the same into the Poors Box with their own Hands And the Key for the future be kept by the Treasurer for the Time being, the said Box to be opened the last Saturday in every Month as usual in the presence of the Weekly Committee.And … that such Persons who should become Securities for any Patient Admitted into said Hospital should upon the Admission of such Patient have a Ticket delivered them which upon being produced to the said Porter should Intitle two of the said Patients Friends at a Time to see them Gratis, And that in Case an(y) Steward or Porter of the said Hospital shall disobey and Act in Contradiction of the Rules and Regulations mentioned in the said Memorial that he & they shall be thereupon immediately dismissed and discharged from their respective Offices.1763 SELECT COMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON MADHOUSES2.3.2 THE 1774 Madhouse Bill The Bills that became the 1774 Act were formulated in the context of court cases, such as those considered by the 1763 Select Committee on Madhouses concerning detention of the allegedly sane. The two established remedies for such infringements of the British liberties were an application to the higher courts for a writ of habeas corpus, or a request to a JP to intervene. The confined person was in no position to make such an appeal (*) and those who confined someone did not advertise their actions or allow the

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confined to communicate with those who might assist (at Turlington's patients were prevented from sending letters). The applicant, therefore, was usually someone who suspected another had been confined. Also a number of precautionary measures regarding the issue of certificates and licenses.(*) Unless, like Alexander Cruden in 1738, he escaped and applied to the public authorities to prevent his recapture. Cruden applied to the Lord Mayor. Sometime if the mid 1750s a Mrs Gold suspected her son in law had confined his wife in Miles's Hoxton Madhouse. She asked a local JP for assistance, he drew a confession from the husband and then accompanied Mrs Gold to Miles's where the release of her daughter was secured (1763 SCHC)

The 1774 Madhouses Act established a commission of the Royal College of Physicians

to license and visit private madhouses in the London area. (see law) Each September, from 1774 to 1827, Royal College of Physicians appointed five of its Fellows commissioners for the year. They met in October to grant licences. They could not refuse or revoke a licence. (see law)

At least once in the year they visited each madhouse, making a minute of its condition. Any keeper refusing admission forfeited his licence. (see law)

A Secretary to the Commissioners was to be sent a notice of the admission of every lunatic who was not a pauper to any licensed house in England and Wales. He kept registers of these in which he also entered commissioners' visiting minutes and those sent to him by the clerks of the county visitors (County Clerks). (see law)

28.7.1800 The 1800 Criminal Lunatics Act aimed at the safe custody of criminal lunatics, especially any who threatened the king. The consequent long term detention of lunatics in county gaols triggered the 1808 County Asylums Act. [[Fear of lunatics, heightened by the publicity about Hadfield and the Act, may be reflected in the life of Mary Lamb] See Counter-Revolutionary Panic and the Treatment of the Insane: 1800 by Valerie ArgentUnfit to plead, and acquittal on the grounds of insanity There were two main ways in which insanity in an accused person was taken into account by the courts under the common law. A person who was insane at the time of his trial could be found "unfit to plead":- John Frith, for instance, threw a stone at the coach of George 3rd in 1790 and was brought to trial before Lord Chief Justice Kenyon on the charge of Treason. Despite the fact that Frith strongly protested his sanity and fitness to stand trial, the court set the Jury to try his sanity. The jury heard medical evidence that he was insane and that "there was an order concerning him". They found him unfit to plead and remanded him. ( State Trials 1790 col.307) It is not known if Frith was plead and remanded him. ( State Trials 1790 col.307) It is not known if Frith was ever brought to trial. (see Walker, N. + MCabe, S. 1973, p.250) (Margaret Nicholson, who tried to stab George 3rd with a blunt table knife in 1786 was not ever brought to trial. The Privy Council committed her to Bethlem Hospital after examination by Drs. John and Thomas Munro. (see Hunter, R.A. and Macalpine, I. 1963 p.569 and 1969 pp. 310-13). Alternatively, if a person was tried, they could be proved to have been insane at the time of the offence and found not guilty on that ground. In neither case do the courts appear to have had any problem about ordering the confinement of the accused.

1. Political cartoons and pamphletsChapter 2.Madness and Masculinity in the Caricatures of the Regency Crisis, 1788–89

Jamie Agland, Monash University

When George III descended into madness towards the end of 1788, the ministry of William Pitt the Younger faced the prospect of dismissal should the Prince of Wales, who favoured the Foxite Whigs, become Regent. The Regency Crisis encouraged an outpouring of writings and images, of which its

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caricature prints are especially fascinating. The caricaturists managed and exploited the tensions, uncertainties and opportunities generated by the king’s madness in a uniquely visceral fashion. Already highly proficient in the manipulation of political figures, the caricaturists contrasted and intermeshed various ‘ways of being mad’ with existing political masculinities to both augment and defuse political vices, follies and (to a much lesser extent) virtues. The imagery of mania and ‘raving madness’ has tended to dominate inquiries into the relationship between madness and politics in the late eighteenth-century, but representations of melancholy and despair were also highly significant, and these played an important role during the Regency Crisis.

The king was treated respectfully in the caricatures of the Regency Crisis. Christopher Reid, in his study of the rhetoric surrounding the king’s illness, observes that while the ‘analogy between madness and political and cultural disorder … appeared to have materialised as a political fact, the possibilities of representation were … severely constrained by considerations of delicacy and protocol’. The king’s condition was ‘spoken of hesitantly, through coded reference and studied circumlocution’ in the parliament and in the press. 11 Reid notes that King Lear ‘had become virtually a forbidden text’, and that the Prince of Wales’ physician, Dr Richard Warren, was chastised for his use of the term ‘insanity’. 12 The caricatures produced during the crisis reflect these sensitivities.This respect for the king is largely explained by the growing popularity of George III in the 1780s. This was partly dependent on his observance of domestic virtues. It was perhaps equally dependent on the growing unpopularity of the notoriously disobedient and dissolute Prince of Wales. The Prince’s reputation for gambling, drinking and extravagant spending contrasted sharply with his parents’ modest and homely image. The Prince’s ‘secret’ marriage to his Catholic mistress Maria Fitzherbert in 1785 (the 1701 Act of Settlement excluded those who had married a Roman Catholic from succeeding to the throne), and his amicable relationship with the Foxite Whig opposition, had further soured his relationship with the king and his public image. 13

Representations of the king and references to the king’s illness in the caricature prints of 1788–89 strive to reinforce both the humanity and the sanctity of the king’s body, and to amplify the immorality and instability of his political enemies. Isaac Cruikshank’s Frith the Madman Hurling Treason at the King ( Figure 2.1 )was published on 31January 1790, almost a full year after the announcement of the king’s recovery. This image parodies an incident, which was reported on 21 January, in which a ‘disturbed’ man named John Frith threw a stone at the royal coach. Drawing a parallel with the reporting of the Margaret Nicholson affair, Carretta suggests that ‘the king again demonstrated understanding and mercy’ in his response to this incident. 20 Although this print postdates the Regency Crisis, it spectacularly evokes the representational dynamics of the winter of 1788–89, and highlights the ongoing impact of the crisis on the satirical identities of the key political actors

In Cruikshank’s print, George III is seated in the royal coach, which is surrounded by Yeoman of the Guard and mounted Life Guards. Dignified and almost angelic, he is not at all concerned or flustered by the surrounding activity. Edmund Burke is cast as the stone-throwing John Frith. He is being restrained by a vigorous looking protector of the king and by a young man who resembles the Prince of Wales. Burke is accompanied by Fox, who is dressed as a woman, and Prince of Wales. Burke is accompanied by Fox, who is dressed as a woman, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who is dressed as a sailor. The three opposition figures are unshaven, dishevelled and ragged, and they stand in stark contrast to the noble king, and the sturdy guards who attend to his safety. Fox holds a paper titled ‘Dying Speech’ and Sheridan a paper titled ‘[Ki]ngs last speech’. Above Fox’s head is inscribed the words: ‘Creul [sic] Fortune thus our hopes Destroy’, and Sheridan laments: ‘Dam’d unlucky’, suggesting the unprincipled and cruel opportunism of their political position ‘against’ the vulnerable king during the crisis of 1788–89. Their disorderly dress, dejected countenances, and complete lack of manly deportment, denote shame and failure. This is exemplified by the despondent, effeminised Fox. 21 Fox’s transgression of ‘natural’ gender roles may also signify a propensity for falseness and deception through masquerade. 22 Jane Kromm notes the prominence in the 1780s of female figures ‘whose agency, unnaturalness, and immodesty bear the paticular imprint of maniacal excess’, but in this instance Fox’s female clothing and tearfulness suggest a weakness for feminine passions that undercuts his efficacy as a public man. 23 The incongruity inherent in Cruikshank’s picturing of Fox amplifies his political impotency, while simultaneously pointing to some of the vices and weaknesses underlying his predicament. Cruikshank uses the imagery of the royal procession as a metaphor for the state of the nation, a strategy that distinguishes two other prints of the Regency Crisis, The Grand Procession to St. Paul’s on St. George’s Day (1789) and Going in state to the House of Peers (1789). All

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three of these prints employ grotesques, mostly plebeians, as signifiers of folly and disorder. Distinguished by their torn clothing, their exaggerated noses and chins, their gangling limbs, and their disorderly comportment, these grotesques threaten to exercise an undue influence on the conduct of the state coach. In these prints, political virtue is set between the opportunism of parliamentarians, on the one hand, which is seen to foster degradation, and plebeian politics, on the other, which marks the realisation of that degradation. The demotic physiognomies, posture and dress of the Foxite Whigs in Frith the Madman connotes the ‘unnaturalness’ of their politics, and the decline of their political sensibilities and fortunes. 24

The king seems impervious to the disruption. His profile, which is reminiscent of representations of George III on medals and coins, suggests solidity and reliability, and his composure denotes a benign and unflinching devotion to duty. The king’s pose, furthermore, underlines the potentially disastrous consequences, for national health and prosperity, of Burke’s assault. 26 Atop the coach, however, there health and prosperity, of Burke’s assault. 26 Atop the coach, however, there crouches a devilish imp, playing a fiddle, which suggests the existence of an undesirable influence on the king, most probably William Pitt. Perhaps Cruikshank is implying that the king is unapproachable, unreachable, and oblivious to the concerns of the lower orders. Whether the king’s pose indicates fortitude and clarity of mind, or insensibility and vulnerability to exploitation, Cruikshank nevertheless surrounds the king with a supportive, robust presence. The endangered king serves as a rallying-point, as a locus of cohesion and solidarity. His centrality to political virtue is not undermined by his weaknesses, as these weaknesses invite unity of purpose and vigilance in the interest of steady progress. 27 The casting of Burke as John Frith, of course, taints the Foxite Whigs with the political symbolism of physically violent forms of madness. His aggressiveness signifies an absence of good sense, control and solidarity. This is demonstrated by Fox and Sheridan, who turn away from their disturbed colleague, and by the Prince, who attempts to contain him. Burke’s characteristically intense rhetorical style left him vulnerable to accusations of mental instability. In February 1789, for example, he infamously declared that George III had been ‘hurled by Providence from his throne’. 28 Cruikshank exploits the heatedness of Burke’s oratory to suggest the irony and hypocrisy of his attitude towards the stricken king. Burke’s treatment of the king in Frith the Madman also connotes a general lack of compassion and sensibility, a charge that was repeated by Mary Wollstonecraft in the same year that this print was published. 29 The picturing of a physically threatening form of madness in this print amplifies the ineffectuality and instability suggested by the Whigs’ depressed and ragged state.

Several Regency Crisis prints employ the striking imagery of the asylum interior. In these prints the political players are often subjected to restraint, in the form of shackles and straightjackets. These figures are tainted with dangerous and threatening forms of madness, which connote the complete and irreversible degeneration of their political minds. In The Hospital for Lunatics ( Figure 2.5 ), for example, we are presented with three cells of ‘Incurables’. The first contains William Pitt, who sits on a chamber pot wearing a crown of straw. He is naked below the waist. Above Pitt’s head is written ‘went mad supposing himself next heir to a Crown’. 36 Richmond, the Master of the Ordnance, occupies the second cell. He wears a chamber pot on his head and a simple night shirt, and he is surrounded by a ring of toy cannons. The third cell contains a woman who, we are told, was ‘Driven mad by a Political itching’. She resembles the Duchess of Gordon, a Tory health and prosperity, of Burke’s assault. 26 Atop the coach, however, there crouches a devilish imp, playing a fiddle, which suggests the existence of an undesirable influence on the king, most probably William Pitt. Perhaps Cruikshank is implying that the king is unapproachable, unreachable, and oblivious to the concerns of the lower orders. Whether the king’s pose indicates fortitude and clarity of mind, or insensibility and vulnerability to exploitation, Cruikshank nevertheless surrounds the king with a supportive, robust presence. The endangered king serves as a rallying-point, as a locus of cohesion and solidarity. His centrality to political virtue is not undermined by his weaknesses, as these weaknesses invite unity of purpose and vigilance in the interest of steady progress. 27 The casting of Burke as John Frith, of course, taints the Foxite Whigs with the political symbolism of physically violent forms of madness. His aggressiveness signifies an absence of good sense, control and solidarity. This is demonstrated by Fox and Sheridan, who turn away from their disturbed colleague, and by the Prince, who attempts to contain him. Burke’s characteristically intense rhetorical style left him vulnerable to accusations of mental instability. In February 1789, for example, he infamously declared that George III had been ‘hurled by Providence from his throne’. 28 Cruikshank exploits the heatedness of Burke’s oratory to suggest the irony and hypocrisy of his attitude towards the stricken king. Burke’s treatment of the king in Frith the Madman also connotes a general lack of compassion and sensibility, a charge that was repeated by Mary Wollstonecraft in the same year that this print was published. 29 The

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picturing of a physically threatening form of madness in this print amplifies the ineffectuality and instability suggested by the Whigs’ depressed and ragged state.

Several Regency Crisis prints employ the striking imagery of the asylum interior. In these prints the political players are often subjected to restraint, in the form of shackles and straightjackets. These figures are tainted with dangerous and threatening forms of madness, which connote the complete and irreversible degeneration of their political minds. In The Hospital for Lunatics ( Figure 2.5 ), for example, we are presented with three cells of ‘Incurables’. The first contains William Pitt, who sits on a chamber pot wearing a crown of straw. He is naked below the waist. Above Pitt’s head is written ‘went mad supposing himself next heir to a Crown’. 36 Richmond, the Master of the Ordnance, occupies the second cell. He wears a chamber pot on his head and a simple night shirt, and he is surrounded by a ring of toy cannons. The third cell contains a woman who, we are told, was ‘Driven mad by a Political itching’. She resembles the Duchess of Gordon, a Tory ‘Driven mad by a Political itching’. She resembles the Duchess of Gordon, a Tory figure. 37 A doctor approaches saying ‘I see no signs of convalescence’. The attendant behind him responds: ‘No damme. they must be all in a state of Coercion’. The political illegitimacy and ineffectuality of these figures is established through their appropriation of the visual and verbal indicators of incurable madness. The suggestion of sexual debauchery was a stock weapon of political satirists, but in this instance it is used to reinforce the link between political vices and madness. The connection between overweening political ambition and sexual desire is suggested by the Duchesses’ ‘Political itching’. For many eighteenth-century writers a corrupt and effeminate polity was linked to the political influence of women, who might use their emotional and sexual leverage over powerful men to weaken the body politic. 38 In this case the Duchess has contracted venereal disease (‘itching’) through her political-sexual misconduct, and this in turn has reduced her to madness and misery. The Duchesses’ condition, furthermore, underscores the deluded thinking and emasculation of her fellow inmates.James Gillray’s Cooling the Brain or – The Little Major, shaving the Shaver ( Figure 2.6 ), contains a particularly confronting and downright portrait of raving madness. In this print we see Burke on the straw-covered floor of a madhouse, his right wrist and left ankle chained to the floor. He is bare-chested except for a rosary and crucifix, and his head is being shaved to enable it to cool, a familiar remedy for the intemperately mad. Burke’s muscularity is striking, and his fists are clenched with rage. These chains, then, restrain an obvious physical menace, and the process of ‘Cooling the Brain’ is clearly overdue. His sympathy for Catholics, as signified by the rosary and the crucifix, underscores his political recklessness and illegitimacy. 39 Christopher Reid details the ways in which Edmund Burke worked ‘imaginatively on the medical evidence he had gathered’ on maladies of the mind to suggest that Pitt and his ministers were ‘grotesquely inverting political rationality and correct constitutional practice’ during the Regency Crisis. 40 But ironically, the complexity and violence of Burke’s oratory left him vulnerable to charges of irrationality and even outright madness. A notice commenting on Burke’s behaviour, a parody of Willis’ reports on George III, was actually posted at Whitehall during the Regency debates: ‘calmer this morning but tending towards unquietness’. 41 Gillray’s portrait of Burke as a stereotypical Georgian lunatic, then, underscores his hypocrisy and intemperance, and thereby his political judgement and efficacy, in a vivid and arresting manner. ‘Inconstancy of temper’, wrote Benjamin Fawcett, is ‘deplorable … as it is almost incurable. It puts the whole mind out of order, and taints every object of every sense’. 42

The metaphor of the madhouse connotes a loss of political reason, potency and influence. The restraint to which these figures are subjected heightens the comedic potential of such scenes, as the anxiety associated with violent displays of madness is contained. Rowlandson and Gillray had at their disposal a wide and overlapping variety of late eighteenth-century discourses on madness, many of which, such as ‘Incoherent Insanity’, were rich in political overtones. For Thomas Arnold, writing in the 1780s, this state of mind was characterised by ‘an incoherency of ideas, occasioned by an Excessive, Perverted, or Defective activity of the imagination and memory, accompanied by images existing in the mind, which do not exist externally’. 43 The king’s illness permitted the political connotations contained in eighteenth- century treatises on delusion, incoherency, and raving madness to resonate, and encouraged the caricaturists to enlist them in the process of unmasking and indelibly marking the factional players.

The Regency Crisis spurred the development of ‘raving madness’ as a political metaphor in caricature prints, and the French Revolution encouraged its continued use and development. As Jane Kromm argues, an emphasis on images of mania in political culture is justified on the basis that ‘the political participation of the era was imbued with maniacal tendencies, whether these inhered in the noisy activities of majority or opposition, or in the assaultive responses their verbal and visual rhetoric provoked’. And, more importantly, mania deserves special attention due to the conflation of ‘the dynamics of mania’ and the

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‘forces of revolutionary change’ in the artistic production of the 1790s. 46 The gendered dimensions of this change in the general application of maniacal traits from male parliamentarians to female radicals, is especially noteworthy. The vanguard of revolutionary politics in the caricatures of the 1790s are frequently ‘insane female personifications and female revolutionaries’, especially those ‘whose militarism did much to revive the warrior ethics and the iconography of ira and furor’. The observations of French commentators ‘about the indecent and demented character of revolutionary women’, Kromm suggests, ‘could only reinforce the truth claims of foreign political caricatures in which the revolution and its philosophy appeared as furious madwomen’. 47 In her characterisation of this development, however, Kromm tends to downplay the significance of Regency Crisis caricatures, which apply maniacal traits to male politicians with remarkable frequency and ferociousness. maniacal traits to male politicians with remarkable frequency and ferociousness. As a result, she also downplays the continuity and resonance, into the 1790s and beyond, of the raving parliamentarian in caricature. Moreover, while Kromm’s emphasis on mania is both justified and important, it neglects the contribution of subtler varieties of madness, and especially melancholy madness, to the political images of the 1780s and the 1790s. Kromm notes the ‘mixed or sequential, rather than entirely distinguishable’ shapes given to mania and melancholy in the works of William Hogarth, but she doesn’t explore the coexistence of mania and melancholy in the prints of the 1780s and the 1790s. 48 Little attention, then, has been paid to the ways in which the prints of this period make use of the ‘various Shapes’ of madness. ‘In some’, explains Alexander Bicknell, madness ‘produces Ravings, Distraction, and all the Symptoms of ungovernable Fury. In others it assumes a gentler form, and terminates in Melancholy, Despondence, and Despair’. 49 Images of ‘Melancholy, Despondence, and Despair’ were extensively used during the Regency Crisis. These images made a significant contribution to the political masculinities of Fox and his allies, as they were central to the attempts of the caricaturists to reflect Pitt’s gradual betterment of the Foxite Whigs.

Portrait of a Nabob: Graphic Satire, Portraiture,and the Anglo-Indian in the Late Eighteenth CenturyChristina Smylitopoulos, Postdoctoral Research Associate,Department of Exhibitions and Publications, Yale Center for British Art

The nabob was a significant subject in eighteenth-centuryBritish visual culture. An employee of the East India Company,the nabob was perceived to have returned to Great Britainequipped with ill-gotten affluence, a ravenous appetite for extravagance,and aspirations to rise into elite spheres of powerand influence.2 When featured in graphic satire—a form ofartistic print production which in this period in England appliedridicule, irony, sarcasm, and humour for “the correctionof vice and improper conduct” and the “chastisement of immoralityand folly”3—the figure of the nabob expressed domesticanxieties regarding a foreign, ad hoc empire in India.Contemporary accounts suggest that with “the spoils of Asia,”the nabob had overstepped the prescribed socio-economic limitof his humble beginnings.4 In his freedom from his homeland’sethical constraints, the nabob had committed intemperancein eating “Curries and Peelaws” and drinking “India Madeira”and “arrack,” the catch-all term for spirituous liquors of nativemanufacture in Eastern settings.5 He was guilty of an extravagantviolation of decency, law, and/or morality through outrageousconduct, and he transgressed the limits of moderationby acquiring resources “by art, fraud, cruelty, and imposition.”6Furthermore, when the figure of the nabob emerged in the1760s, the British had already established a tradition of associatingIndia with effortless fertility, casting it as a source of gainwithout toil and a place where men of action became idle and developed “imperial boredom.”7 India itself had therefore beenportrayed through a rhetoric of excess, and by means of thenabob, its corruptive forces were imagined to be travelling to

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the West to infect the metropole. The creation of the nabob as afigure of satire was consequently an act of distancing the rhetoricalterra firma of the metropole from the “Asiatic adventurer’s”8realm of excess.To consider the impact thatgraphic satire seems to have had on portraiture enriches ourunderstanding both of the function of India-inspired graphicsatire and of portraiture’s receptiveness to influence. Graphicsatires of the nabob had such an influence in British visual culturethat as a body they could transform the meaning even of anauthoritative portrait by Van Dyck. Portrait of a Nabob: Graphic Satire, Portraiture,and the Anglo-Indian in the Late Eighteenth CenturyChristina Smylitopoulos, Postdoctoral Research Associate,Department of Exhibitions and Publications, Yale Center for British Art

The nabob was a significant subject in eighteenth-centuryBritish visual culture. An employee of the East India Company,the nabob was perceived to have returned to Great Britainequipped with ill-gotten affluence, a ravenous appetite for extravagance,and aspirations to rise into elite spheres of powerand influence.2 When featured in graphic satire—a form ofartistic print production which in this period in England appliedridicule, irony, sarcasm, and humour for “the correctionof vice and improper conduct” and the “chastisement of immoralityand folly”3—the figure of the nabob expressed domesticanxieties regarding a foreign, ad hoc empire in India.Contemporary accounts suggest that with “the spoils of Asia,”the nabob had overstepped the prescribed socio-economic limitof his humble beginnings.4 In his freedom from his homeland’sethical constraints, the nabob had committed intemperancein eating “Curries and Peelaws” and drinking “India Madeira”and “arrack,” the catch-all term for spirituous liquors of nativemanufacture in Eastern settings.5 He was guilty of an extravagantviolation of decency, law, and/or morality through outrageousconduct, and he transgressed the limits of moderationby acquiring resources “by art, fraud, cruelty, and imposition.”6Furthermore, when the figure of the nabob emerged in the1760s, the British had already established a tradition of associatingIndia with effortless fertility, casting it as a source of gainwithout toil and a place where men of action became idle and developed “imperial boredom.”7 India itself had therefore beenportrayed through a rhetoric of excess, and by means of thenabob, its corruptive forces were imagined to be travelling tothe West to infect the metropole. The creation of the nabob as afigure of satire was consequently an act of distancing the rhetoricalterra firma of the metropole from the “Asiatic adventurer’s”8realm of excess.To consider the impact thatgraphic satire seems to have had on portraiture enriches ourunderstanding both of the function of India-inspired graphicsatire and of portraiture’s receptiveness to influence. Graphicsatires of the nabob had such an influence in British visual culturethat as a body they could transform the meaning even of anauthoritative portrait by Van Dyck.The significance of the nabob, both as an embodiment of corruptionand as a subject of graphic satire, is that he had the abilityto inhabit multiple and contradictory spaces. For example,

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though he was British, venturing to India made him Anglo-Indian. Returning home somehow meant he was invading Britain:a 1785 article in The Times described the many “new-importedNabobs, who have a vast deal of money among them.”22In this sense, the nabob was both a domestic product and a foreignimport infiltrating what was touted as a moral, domesticmarket, and he reinforced eighteenth-century anxiety about thethreat of excess from the over-importation of foreign wares.23The nabob’s liminality—anthropologist Victor Turner uses theterm to describe the condition “betwixt and between establishedstates of politico-jural structure”24—suggests a permeability ofthe conceptual borders defining him. This premise benefits considerablyfrom the theoretical foundations laid by scholars whorecognize significant porosity at the boundaries of identity, particularlyat those margins delineated by empire.25 In essence, ina metropole in the process of fashioning a national identity, thenabob embodied imperial anxiety.26 The nabob could thereforebe described as both a product of, and a reaction to, uncertaintyin an emerging debate regarding national distinctiveness.Anglo-Indians, according to Jitender Gill, were colonials who“come to/from” India; this back-and-forth quality of the nabobalso implies marginality.27 As the anthropologist Mary Douglasexplains, danger lies in the transitional states inhabited bymarginal beings and the individual who passes from one stateto another is not merely a danger to himself, but a menace tothe blameless inhabitants of the interior.28 The perception ofthe nabob’s transitional status helps to illuminate why he was soreviled in eighteenth-century Britain.According toart historian Herman Goetz, the “bizarrerie” of Persian fancydress found a welcome home among European absolutists inBaroque Europe as they became interested in Eastern despots,resulting in the custom of sitting for a portrait “costumed asan Oriental nobleman.”51 In the eighteenth century the TurkishStyle was also often seen in the portraiture of British andAmerican women, a fashion that continued well into the nineteenthcentury, when turban-like headdresses were “universallyadopted” and frequently adorned with pearls, lace, or ostrichfeathers.52 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s repeated use of theturban in her portraits not only referenced her life in Constantinopleas wife to the British Ambassador to Turkey, but alsosignified her intellectual engagement with the East.53 Turbanlikeheaddresses continued to appear throughout Regency portraiture,exemplified by Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Mrs.Jens Wolff, a friend and possible lover of the artist.54Even so, there is evidence at this time that sartorial homagesto India by Company men in London were beginning to bereflected upon comically.The various descriptions of Eastern dress in magazines andnovels are examples of the laying out of the excesses of Easternrulers for British audiences. In an excerpt from Zulima: AnOriental Tale (1764), for instance, the author creates a literaryrepresentation of a figure whose “dress was purple enriched withgold, and the jewels in his turban glittered like the rays of thesun.… Yet in the midst of his riches Hamed was temperate; fiftywomen only had he in his Harem.”57 Turbans, in particular,

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were being associated with foolishness. The following passagefrom “A Description of the Curious Boat, Lately Brought fromIndia, and Presented to Their Majesties by Gov. Vansittart”(1768) describes one officer’s exotic job on the boat:Such an officer as is here mentioned, is at this day actuallyemployed in most of the row-gallies in the East Indies,particularly gallies of state—as is the vessel we are nowdescribing—his province is to make the rowers cheerful. Heis dressed in a fantastic habit with feathers in his turban andbells on his arms and legs, assuming a character not unlikeour Merry Andrew, and is known by the name of the foolof the boat.58Hastings, the first Governor-General ofBengal (1773–85), is the figure most frequently lampooned asa nabob through the satirical device of dressing him in exaggeratedIndian costume. Even so, there is evidence at this time that sartorial homagesto India by Company men in London were beginning to bereflected upon comically.The various descriptions of Eastern dress in magazines andnovels are examples of the laying out of the excesses of Easternrulers for British audiences. In an excerpt from Zulima: AnOriental Tale (1764), for instance, the author creates a literaryrepresentation of a figure whose “dress was purple enriched withgold, and the jewels in his turban glittered like the rays of thesun.… Yet in the midst of his riches Hamed was temperate; fiftywomen only had he in his Harem.”57 Turbans, in particular,were being associated with foolishness. The following passagefrom “A Description of the Curious Boat, Lately Brought fromIndia, and Presented to Their Majesties by Gov. Vansittart”(1768) describes one officer’s exotic job on the boat:Such an officer as is here mentioned, is at this day actuallyemployed in most of the row-gallies in the East Indies,particularly gallies of state—as is the vessel we are nowdescribing—his province is to make the rowers cheerful. Heis dressed in a fantastic habit with feathers in his turban andbells on his arms and legs, assuming a character not unlikeour Merry Andrew, and is known by the name of the foolof the boat.58Hastings, the first Governor-General ofBengal (1773–85), is the figure most frequently lampooned asa nabob through the satirical device of dressing him in exaggeratedIndian costume.Andrew Scull observes, in agreement with many others, that ‘At themargin, what constitutes madness strikes me as fluctuating andambiguous, indeed theoretically indeterminate, making its boundariesthe subject of endless dispute and anxiety.’18 One meaningful boundary,nevertheless, for most eighteenth-century Londoners – and in representationfor most eighteenth-century readers – was Bethlem. Herewas where the world of normality, of sane seeing, ended and crazy frivolitytook over. Here was where madness went to hide its face and toemerge 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 transformedInto acceptable forms of madness.

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The English Malady:Enabling and Disabling FictionsEdited byGlen ColburnINTRODUCTION*GLEN COLBURNIn 1733, the famous nerve doctor George Cheyne published his book on anervous disorder believed to be so prevalent among the English that he titledthe treatise The English Malady. In literary circles, writers called it spleen,vapors, or hyp. In medical circles, it was called hysteria when it afflicted awoman, hypochondria when a man, or it was vaguely referred to as a nervousdisorder.1 The variety of names hints at the mysteriousness of the disease, soit is not surprising that physicians throughout the period complained aboutthe protean nature of the English Malady. In 1682, the prominentphysician Thomas Sydenham described it as “so strangely various, that itresembles almost all the Diseases poor Mortals are inclinable to.”2 Someseventy years later, Sir Richard Manningham lamented that in trying todiagnose the disease, "both the Patient and the Physician are very liable tobe deceived."3 One might therefore apply to the English Malady whatSusan Sontag wrote about cancer thirty years ago: "diseases thought to bemulti-determined (that is, mysterious) . . . have the widest possibilities asmetaphors for what is felt to be socially, or morally, wrong."4 Givenuncertainty about its causes and symptoms, as well as the belief that it hadreached epidemic proportions, theorizing about the English Malady in theeighteenth century—whether medical or literary—almost inevitably turnedtoward discussions of the social and moral ills this mysterious disease wasfelt to represent, and medical diagnoses frequently implied social andmoral prescriptions for English women and men.Though Foucault has claimed that in the Enlightenment, an analytical,disjunctive epistemology replaced the mystical, homological thinking ofthe late Middle Ages, one might argue instead that a new kind of mysticalhomology arose in the eighteenth century: the body social came to replacethe body politic. The concern was with society more than government, orwith society as the basis of government, a concern embodied in politicalhistory by Locke’s substituting the consent of the governed—that is, ofsociety—for jure divino, the consent of God, as the warrant ofgovernment. The shift to a secular paradigm for questions of politicalauthority becomes clear when, in the middle of the eighteenth century,Rousseau theorizes government as a social contract. The dominance of asecular paradigm for questions of moral authority becomes equally clear inthe literary productions of the period, as when Pope has Clarissa adviseBelinda to accept a domestic role not because religion demands it, butbecause this is the only way “well [her] power to use.”Cheyne’s The English Malady illustrates dramatically the way in whichambivalence makes the analyst’s narrative itself become hysterical.15Cheyne acknowledges that contemporary economic and social changesfoster disorder (medical and otherwise), but he also describes thesechanges in positive terms:Now since this present Age has made Efforts to go beyond former Times, inall the Arts of Ingenuity, Invention, Study, Learning, and all the contemplativeand sedentary Professions, (I speak only here of our own Nation, our ownTimes, and of the better Sort, whose chief Employments and Studies theseare) the Organs of these Faculties being thereby worn and spoil'd, must affectand deaden the whole System, and lay a Foundation for the Diseases ofLowness and Weakness. (37-38)Even more striking is Cheyne’s belief that the condition responsible forthe English Malady is also necessary to refinement, taste, and virtuous

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sentiments: “it is a Misfortune indeed, to be born with weak Nerves, but ifright us’d and manag’d, . . . it may be the Occasions of greater Felicity.”Weak nerves create a greater appreciation of “the innocent Enjoyments oflife,” particularly “intellectual Pleasures” (14-15). The body of the textbecomes hysterical to the degree that it is nervous, loquacious, selfcontradictory,sometimes incoherent; it is fitting, then, that the text should end with “The Author’s Case,” in which Cheyne describes his ownstruggles with the malady.16G. S. Rousseau points out in his centrally important study of early-modernwriting about hysteria, "Melancholy, madness, hysteria, hypochondria, dementia,spleen, vapors, nerves: by 1720 or 1730 all were jumbled and confused with oneanother as they had never been before" ("A Strange Pathology,” 153). In bringingtogether the present collection of essays and writing an introduction for it, I haveimitated this discursive conflation--without, it is hoped, reproducing theconfusion—by using the terms English Malady, hysteria, hypochondria, vapors,and the spleen interchangeably.In Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century, Karen Harvey’s argument about thecultural role of erotica in the period provides a useful analogy for thinking aboutthe role of the English Malady. Harvey summarizes historians’ conflicting versionsof the century as “a time of control and restraint” or “a time of freedom andlicence” (1), then argues that erotica reconciled the opposing tendencies of theperiod because its use of metaphor and allusion, as well as its frequent deferral ofthe sexual act, combined license with restraint; whereas pornography’s graphicdepiction of genitalia and coition nakedly appealed to readers’ prurient desires,erotica maintained at least the veneer of genteel self-restraint. Similarly, one mightargue that the English Malady offered its diagnosticians, medical and otherwise, aconceptual site for examining the vexed relationship between liberation andrestraint, progress and order.

WikipediaDe Sade lived a scandalous libertine existence and repeatedly procured young prostitutes as well as employees of both sexes in his castle in Lacoste. He was also accused of blasphemy, a serious offense at that time. His behavior included an affair with his wife's sister, Anne-Prospère, who had come to live at the castle.Beginning in 1763, de Sade lived mainly in or near Paris. Several prostitutes there complained about mistreatment by him and he was put under surveillance by the police, who made detailed reports of his activities. After several short imprisonments, which included a brief incarceration in the Château de Saumur (then a prison), he was exiled to his château at Lacoste in 1768.[8]

The first major scandal occurred on Easter Sunday in 1768, in which de Sade procured the sexual services of a woman, Rose Keller;[9] whether she was a prostitute or not is widely disputed. He was accused of taking her to his chateau at Arcueil, imprisoning her there and sexually and physically abusing her. She escaped by climbing out of a second-floor window and running away. At this time, la Présidente, de Sade's mother-in-law, obtained a lettre de cachet (a royal order of arrest and imprisonment, without stated cause or access to the courts) from the king, excluding de Sade from the jurisdiction of the courts. The lettre de cachet would later prove disastrous for the marquis.In 1772, an episode in Marseille involved the non-lethal poisoning of prostitutes with the supposed aphrodisiac Spanish fly and sodomy with Latour, his manservant . That year, the two men were sentenced to death in absentia for sodomy and said poisoning. They fled to Italy, and de Sade took his wife's sister with him. De Sade and Latour were caught and imprisoned at the Fortress of Miolans in late 1772, but escaped four months later.De Sade later hid at Lacoste, where he rejoined his wife, who became an accomplice in his subsequent endeavors. He kept a group of young employees at Lacoste, most of whom complained about sexual mistreatment and quickly left his service. De Sade was forced to flee to Italy once again. It was during this time he wrote Voyage d'Italie, which, along with his earlier travel writings, has never been translated into English. In 1776, he returned to Lacoste, again hired several servant girls, most of whom fled. In 1777, the father of one of those employees went to Lacoste to claim his daughter, and attempted to shoot the Marquis at point-blank range, but the gun misfired.

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Later that year, de Sade was tricked into going to Paris to visit his supposedly ill mother, who in fact had recently died. He was arrested there and imprisoned in the Château de Vincennes. He successfully appealed his death sentence in 1778, but remained imprisoned under the lettre de cachet. He escaped but was soon recaptured. He resumed writing and met fellow prisoner Comte de Mirabeau, who also wrote erotic works. Despite this common interest, the two came to dislike each other intensely.[10]

In 1784, Vincennes was closed and de Sade was transferred to the Bastille. On 2 July 1789, he reportedly shouted out from his cell to the crowd outside, "They are killing the prisoners here!", causing something of a riot. Two days later, he was transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton near Paris. The storming of the Bastille, a major event of the French Revolution, would occur a few days later on 14 July.He had been working on his magnum opus Les 120 Journées de Sodome. To his despair, he believed that the manuscript was lost during his transfer; but he continued to write.In 1790, he was released from Charenton after the new Constituent Assembly abolished the instrument of lettre de cachet. His wife obtained a divorce soon after.De Sade lived a scandalous libertine existence and repeatedly procured young prostitutes as well as employees of both sexes in his castle in Lacoste. He was also accused of blasphemy, a serious offense at that time. His behavior included an affair with his wife's sister, Anne-Prospère, who had come to live at the castle.Beginning in 1763, de Sade lived mainly in or near Paris. Several prostitutes there complained about mistreatment by him and he was put under surveillance by the police, who made detailed reports of his activities. After several short imprisonments, which included a brief incarceration in the Château de Saumur (then a prison), he was exiled to his château at Lacoste in 1768.[8]

The first major scandal occurred on Easter Sunday in 1768, in which de Sade procured the sexual services of a woman, Rose Keller;[9] whether she was a prostitute or not is widely disputed. He was accused of taking her to his chateau at Arcueil, imprisoning her there and sexually and physically abusing her. She escaped by climbing out of a second-floor window and running away. At this time, la Présidente, de Sade's mother-in-law, obtained a lettre de cachet (a royal order of arrest and imprisonment, without stated cause or access to the courts) from the king, excluding de Sade from the jurisdiction of the courts. The lettre de cachet would later prove disastrous for the marquis.In 1772, an episode in Marseille involved the non-lethal poisoning of prostitutes with the supposed aphrodisiac Spanish fly and sodomy with Latour, his manservant . That year, the two men were sentenced to death in absentia for sodomy and said poisoning. They fled to Italy, and de Sade took his wife's sister with him. De Sade and Latour were caught and imprisoned at the Fortress of Miolans in late 1772, but escaped four months later.De Sade later hid at Lacoste, where he rejoined his wife, who became an accomplice in his subsequent endeavors. He kept a group of young employees at Lacoste, most of whom complained about sexual mistreatment and quickly left his service. De Sade was forced to flee to Italy once again. It was during this time he wrote Voyage d'Italie, which, along with his earlier travel writings, has never been translated into English. In 1776, he returned to Lacoste, again hired several He had been working on his magnum opus Les 120 Journées de Sodome. To his despair, he believed that the manuscript was lost during his transfer; but he continued to write.In 1790, he was released from Charenton after the new Constituent Assembly abolished the instrument of lettre de cachet. His wife obtained a divorce soon after.De Sade lived a scandalous libertine existence and repeatedly procured young prostitutes as well as employees of both sexes in his castle in Lacoste. He was also accused of blasphemy, a serious offense at that time. His behavior included an affair with his wife's sister, Anne-Prospère, who had come to live at the castle.Beginning in 1763, de Sade lived mainly in or near Paris. Several prostitutes there complained about mistreatment by him and he was put under surveillance by the police, who made detailed reports of his activities. After several short imprisonments, which included a brief incarceration in the Château de Saumur (then a prison), he was exiled to his château at Lacoste in 1768.[8]

The first major scandal occurred on Easter Sunday in 1768, in which de Sade procured the sexual services of a woman, Rose Keller;[9] whether she was a prostitute or not is widely disputed. He was accused of taking her to his chateau at Arcueil, imprisoning her there and sexually and physically abusing her. She escaped by climbing out of a second-floor window and running away. At this time, la Présidente, de Sade's mother-in-law, obtained a lettre de cachet (a royal order of arrest and imprisonment, without stated cause

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or access to the courts) from the king, excluding de Sade from the jurisdiction of the courts. The lettre de cachet would later prove disastrous for the marquis.In 1772, an episode in Marseille involved the non-lethal poisoning of prostitutes with the supposed aphrodisiac Spanish fly and sodomy with Latour, his manservant . That year, the two men were sentenced to death in absentia for sodomy and said poisoning. They fled to Italy, and de Sade took his wife's sister with him. De Sade and Latour were caught and imprisoned at the Fortress of Miolans in late 1772, but escaped four months later.De Sade later hid at Lacoste, where he rejoined his wife, who became an accomplice in his subsequent endeavors. He kept a group of young employees at Lacoste, most of whom complained about sexual mistreatment and quickly left his service. De Sade was forced to flee to Italy once again. It was during this time he wrote Voyage d'Italie, which, along with his earlier travel writings, has never been translated into English. In 1776, he returned to Lacoste, again hired severalLesley HallThe pains of love and the agonies of unrequited desire have formed a constant theme in art from antiquity to the latest pop song. However, in most cases these pains and agonies are emotional or metaphorical, not literal bodily pain. But for some people, pain and love, or at least sexual pleasure, are intricately intertwined - and have been for many centuries.

been translated into English. In 1776, he returned to Lacoste, again hired several servant girls, most of whom fled. In 1777, the father of one of those employees went to Lacoste to claim his daughter, and attempted to shoot the Marquis at point-blank range, but the gun misfired.Later that year, de Sade was tricked into going to Paris to visit his supposedly ill mother, who in fact had recently died. He was arrested there and imprisoned in the Château de Vincennes. He successfully appealed his death sentence in 1778, but remained imprisoned under the lettre de cachet. He escaped but was soon recaptured. He resumed writing and met fellow prisoner Comte de Mirabeau, who also wrote erotic works. Despite this common interest, the two came to dislike each other intensely.[10]

In 1784, Vincennes was closed and de Sade was transferred to the Bastille. On 2 July 1789, he reportedly shouted out from his cell to the crowd outside, "They are killing the prisoners here!", causing something of a riot. Two days later, he was transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton near Paris. The storming of the Bastille, a major event of the French Revolution, would occur a few days later on 14 July.He had been working on his magnum opus Les 120 Journées de Sodome. To his despair, he believed that the manuscript was lost during his transfer; but he continued to write.In 1790, he was released from Charenton after the new Constituent Assembly abolished the instrument of lettre de cachet. His wife obtained a divorce soon after.In The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography (1979), Angela Carter provides a feminist reading of de Sade, seeing him as a "moral pornographer" who creates spaces for women. Similarly, Susan Sontag defended both Sade and Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil (Story of the Eye) in her essay "The Pornographic Imagination" (1967) on the basis their works were transgressive texts, and argued that neither should be censored. By contrast, Andrea Dworkin saw de Sade as the exemplary woman-hating pornographer, supporting her theory that pornography inevitably leads to violence against women. One chapter of her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1979) is devoted to an analysis of de Sade. Susie Bright claims that Dworkin's first novel Ice and Fire, which is rife with violence and abuse, can be seen as a modern retelling of de Sade's Juliette.[18]

Pain and the Erotic

Sadomasochistic practices have a long, if largely hidden, history. There appear to be depictions of some kinds of sadomasochistic practice in the art and poetry of antiquity, but as with everything else about classical sexuality, controversies rage over the exact meanings. Given the power relations in Greece and Rome, can the consent of all participants be assumed? The picture is further complicated by the innate violence and cruelty of these societies, exemplified by events such as gladiatorial games.More explicit reference was made in the famous Sanskrit text Kamasutra, composed somewhere in the north of India, probably late in the third century AD. Its recommendations for the use of scratching, biting and slapping presented these as ritualized concomitants of eroticism rather than the overflow of aggressive passion. However, again questions of consent arise from male-centred assumptions that the woman's cries, whimpers and protests were merely an equally ritualized response of pleasure. By contrast, Van Gulik claimed in The Sexual Life of Ancient China (1961, republished 2003) that episodes of sexual sadism and

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masochism in China were very rare in either handbooks of sex, or erotic and pornographic literature, in spite of (or because of) the general pervasiveness of cruelty, by modern Western standards.The potential for erotic arousal among participants or viewers of Western European medieval religious ceremonies involving flagellation remains a matter for speculation, although Gibson, in The English Vice (1978), draws attention to an early fifteenth-century Catalan painting, 'Flagellation of Christ', in which the floggers certainly appear to be deriving sexual pleasure from their work. Renaissance humanist Pico della Mirandola described the passive flagellatory desires of a friend, which he found both puzzling and amusing. Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and poetry include motifs of sexualized violence, for example Cleopatra's allusions to the “lover's pinch, which hurts and is desired”. In the Restoration period, Snarl in Shadwell's The Virtuoso (1676) made, perhaps for the first time, the connection between pedogogical punishment in English schools and addiction to 'le vice anglais' in later life. Otway, in Venice Preserved (1682), depicted a masochistic Venetian senator engaging in what might today be termed 'puppy-play' or 'kennel-training' with his mistress. The birch over the bed in Hogarth's series of 'The Harlot's Progress' alludes to flagellation as an erotic speciality for hire, further attested to by inventories of paraphernalia confiscated in raids on London brothels. 'Fladge' as a subgenre in pornography emerged before the end of the eighteenth century and proliferated during the Victorian era. Erotic response to being flagellated was thus reasonably well documented from the Renaissance period, but there was less evidence for the erotic reaction of the actual flagellator. Havelock Ellis, in Love and Pain (1913), one of the first major studies of the subject, gave the earliest reported example he could find of “sadistic pleasure in the sight of active whipping” as 1672 (though Gibson, as mentioned, found an earlier visual allusion). Ellis pointed out that whipping as a punishment was common in European societies for many centuries, and beating of wives, children and servants an accepted practice: therefore devotees did not need to go far to seek it out and observe it for their own pleasure. By contrast, the desire of powerful members of society for apparently humiliating punishment was highly puzzling.Theorizing painful pleasuresAlthough flagellation is often considered to be 'le vice anglais' par excellence, the first medico-scientific treatise on the subject probably came from Germany. De Flagrorum Usu in Re Veneria & Lumborum Renumque Officio (On the Use of Rods in Venereal Matters and in the Office of the Loins and Reins), by the German doctor Johann Heinrich Meibom, known as Meibomus, was first published in Leiden in 1629. It attempted to explain, in the light of contemporary understanding of anatomy and physiology, why chastisement might be arousing. A more psychological explanation was given in the personal testimony of the Swiss Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his frank, though posthumously published, Confessions (1782). Rousseau recounted the lasting effects of youthful experiences of corporal punishment at the hands of his schoolmaster's sister. Themes of sadism and masochism famously pervaded the schoolmaster's sister. Themes of sadism and masochism famously pervaded the works of the eventually eponymous Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), alongside other forms of sexual transgression, and their philosophical underpinnings were expounded upon at great length. These themes also figured in the fiction of the late nineteenth-century Austrian writer, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895), author of Venus in Furs (1870), who gave his name to the passive endurance of painPeter Brook’s infamous filming of Peter Weiss’ MARAT/SADE is one of the screen’s great depictions of unfettered insanity, as well as a historical drama with definite contemporary relevance. About a play performed by maniacs under the direction of the notorious Marquis de Sade, it’s confrontational, provocative and stunningly filmed--in short, a classic.The Package     The Royal Shakespeare Company first performed Peter Weiss’ 1963 play THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF JEAN-PAUL MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE--invariably shortened to MARAT/SADE--under the direction of Peter Brook on Broadway in 1965. The production, set in the early 19th Century during Sade’s final years spent in the Charenton asylum, was a Tony Award winning success. This film version, directed by Brook and starring the Royal Shakespeare Company, was released in 1967.     Critics were initially unresponsive to the film, claiming Brook ruined his distinctive circus-like staging with close-ups and cutaways. Still, the film was staggeringly influential. It provided a conceptual blueprint for subsequent plays and movies about Sade, which like this one are largely set during Sade’s final years

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

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veneer. I’m not bothered by such scenes, as they contribute immeasurably to the overall atmosphere of barely contained hysteria.      That hysteria boils over completely in the final scenes, an awe-inspiring cavalcade of mayhem. I understand it was mind-blowing to be present during the original Broadway performance of those final moments. Obviously nothing in this film can come close to matching that experience, but the brilliance and conviction of Brook’s staging is as fine as can be imagined.      There are moments of impudence (the “general copulation” music number), sheer weirdness (Sade flogged by a woman’s hair) and bone-chilling eeriness (the aforementioned nightmare sequence), and even some memorable tunes (“15 Glorious Years” in particular). The performances of the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing crazy people impersonating actors, are simply brilliant, with standouts being a debuting Glenda Jackson as the narcoleptic playing Corday andstandouts being a debuting Glenda Jackson as the narcoleptic playing Corday and an even more grandiose than usual Patrick Magee as the Marquis de Sade. There exist quite a few movies about the “Divine Marquis,” but MARAT/SADE is without question the one to see. Vital StatisticsMARAT/SADE (THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF JEAN-PAUL MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE)The Royal Shakespeare Company/Metro Goldwyn MeyerDirector: Peter BrookProducer: Michael BirkettScreenplay: Adrian Mitchell(Based on the play by Peter Weiss)Cinematography: David Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (popularly known as Fanny Hill) is an erotic novel by John Cleland first published in England in 1748. Written while the author was in debtors' prison in London,[1][2] it is considered "the first original English prose pornography, and the first pornography to use the form of the novel."[3] One of the most prosecuted and banned books in history,[4] it has become a synonym for obscenity.[5]

The novel was published in two instalments, on November 21, 1748 and February 1749, respectively, by "G. Fenton", actually Fenton Griffiths and his brother Ralph.[6] Initially, there was no governmental reaction to the novel, and it was only in November 1749, a year after the first instalment was published, that Cleland and Ralph Griffiths were arrested and charged with "corrupting the King's subjects." In court, Cleland renounced the novel and it was officially withdrawn. However, as the book became popular, pirate editions appeared. It was once suspected that the sodomy scene near the end that Fanny witnesses in disgust was an interpolation made for these pirated editions, but as Peter Sabor states in the introduction to the Oxford edition of Memoirs (1985), that scene is present in the first edition (p. xxiii).In the 19th century, copies of the book were sold "underground." The book eventually made its way to the United States, where in 1821 it was banned for obscenity. It was not until 1963, after the failure of the British obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 that Mayflower Books, run by Gareth Powell, The trial took place in February 1964. The defence argued that Fanny Hill was a historical source book and that it was a joyful celebration of normal non-perverted sex—bawdy rather than pornographic. The prosecution countered by stressing one atypical scene involving flagellation, and won. Mayflower decided not to appeal. However the case had highlighted the growing disconnect between the obscenity laws and the social realities of late 1960s Britain, and was instrumental in shifting views to the point where in 1970 an unexpurgated version of Fanny Hill was once again published in Britain.The novel was published in two instalments, on November 21, 1748 and February 1749, respectively, by "G. Fenton", actually Fenton Griffiths and his brother Ralph.[6] Initially, there was no governmental reaction to the novel, and it was only in November 1749, a year after the first instalment was published, that Cleland and Ralph Griffiths were arrested and charged with "corrupting the King's subjects." In court, Cleland renounced the novel and it was officially withdrawn. However, as the book became popular, pirate editions appeared. It was once suspected that the sodomy scene near the end that Fanny witnesses in disgust was an interpolation made for these pirated editions, but as Peter Sabor states in the introduction to the Oxford edition of Memoirs (1985), that scene is present in the first edition (p. xxiii).

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Smart is s ‘willing to be called a fool of God for the sake of Christ.” (B 51) He aligns himself with his Saviour in suffering the same hostile interpretation of his challenge to conventional decorums. ‘For I am under the same accusations with my Saviour – for they said he is beside himself.’ (B 151)Rejoice in God, O ye tongues, give glory to the Lord, and the Lamb,Nations, and languages, and every Creature, in which is the breath of Life.Let man and beast appear before him, and magnify his name together.

For by the grace of God I am the reviver of adoration amongst English- men.

For I am the Lord’s news-writer, the scribe evangelist.

For I am not without authority in my jeopardy, which I derive inevitably from the glory of the Name of the Lord.

For my existimation is good even amongst the slanderers and my memory shall arise for a sweet savour unto the Lord.For I preach the very GOSPEL of CHRIST without comment and with this weapon shall I slay envy.For Newton nevertheless is more of error than of the truth, but I am of the Word of God.

For I bless God in the libraries of the learned and for all the booksellers in the world.For I pray the Lord Jesus that cured the lunatick to be merciful to all my brethren and sisters in these houses.For they work me with their harping-irons which is a barbarous instrument, because I am more unguarded than others.For I have a greater compass of mirth and melancholy than another.

God be merciful to all dumb creatures in respect of pain. For THUNDER is the voice of God direct in verse and musick.For lightning is a glance of the glory of God.For the brimstone that is found at the times of thunder and lightning is worked up by the Adversary.

For God has given us a language of monosyllable's to prevent our clipping.For a toad enjoys a finer prospect than another creature to compensate his lack.Tho toad I am the object of man's hate.Yet better am I than a reprobate. (who has the worst of prospects).For there are stones whose constituent particles are little toads.For the spiritual music is as follows.Per there is the thunder-stop, which is the voice of God direct.For the rest of the stops are by their rhymes.For the trumpet rhymes are sound bound, soar more and the like.For the harp rhymes are ring string and the like.For the shawm rhymes are lawn fawn moon boon and the like.For the cymbal rhymes are bell well toll soul and the like.For the flute rhymes are tooth youth suit mute and the like. For the dulcimer rhymes are grace place beat heat and the like.For the clarinet rhimes are clean seen and the like.For the Bassoon rhymes are pass, class and the like. God to be gracious to Baumgarden.

For all the creatures mentioned by Pliny are somewhere or other extant to the glory of God.

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For languages work into one another by their bearings.For the power of some animal is predominant in every language.For the power and spirit of a CAT is in the Greek.

For it is the business of a man gifted in the word to prophecy good.For it will be better for England and all the world in a season, as I prophecy this day.For I prophecy that they will obey the motions of the spirit descended upon them as at this day.For they have seen the glory of God already come down upon the trees.For I prophecy that it will descend upon their heads also.For I prophecy that the praise of God will be in every man's mouth in the Public Streets.For I prophecy that there will be public worship in the cross ways and fields.For I prophecy that there will be more mercy for criminals.For I prophecy that there will be less mischief concerning womenfor I prophecy that they will be cooped up and kept under due controul.For I prophecy that the clergy in particular will set a better exampleFor I prophecy that they will not dare to imprison a brother or sister for debt.

But is there so great Merit and Dexterity in being a mad Doctor? The common Prescriptions of a Bethlemitical Doctor are a Purge and a Vomit, and a Vomit and a Purge over again, and sometimes a Bleeding, which is no great mystery

Alexander Cruden, The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured, 1739.[92]

... you find yourself in a long and wide gallery, on either side of which are a large number of little cells where lunatics of every description are shut up, and you can get a sight of these poor creatures, little windows being let into the doors. Many inoffensive madmen walk in the big gallery. On the second floor is a corridor and cells like those on the first floor, and this is the part reserved for dangerous maniacs, most of them being chained and terrible to behold. On holidays numerous persons of both sexes, but belonging generally to the lower classes, visit this hospital and amuse themselves watching these unfortunate wretches, who often give them cause for laughter. On leaving this melancholy abode, you are expected by the porter to give him a penny but if you happen to have no change and give him a silver coin, he will keep the whole sum and return you nothing“”Inveterate letter-writer César de Saussure's account of Bethlem during his 1725 tour of London's sights.[153]

The late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries are typically seen as decisive in the emergence of new attitudes towards the management and treatment of the insane.[192] Increasingly, the emphasis shifted from the external control of the mad through physical restraint and coercion to their moral management whereby self-discipline would be inculcated through a system of reward and punishment.[193] For proponents of lunacy reform, the Quaker-run York Retreat, founded in 1796, functioned as an exemplar of this new approach that would seek to re-socialise and re-educate the mad.[193] Bethlem, embroiled in scandal from 1814 over its inmate conditions, would come to symbolise its antithesis.[194]

Through newspaper reports initially and then evidence given to the 1815 Parliamentary Committee on Madhouses, the state of inmate care in Bethlem was chiefly publicised by Edward Wakefield, a Quaker land agent and leading advocate of lunacy reform.[n 19] He visited Bethlem several times during the late spring and early summer of 1814.[n 20] His inspections were of the old hospital at the Moorfields site, which was then in a state of disrepair; much of it was uninhabitable and the patient population had been significantly reduced.[199] Contrary to the tenets of moral treatment, Wakefield found that the patients in the Contrary to the tenets of moral treatment, Wakefield found that the patients in the galleries were not classified in any logical manner as both highly disturbed and quiescent patients were mixed together indiscriminately.[200] Later, when reporting on the chained and effectively naked state of many patients, Wakefield sought to describe their conditions in such a way as to maximise the horror of the scene while decrying the apparently bestial treatment of Bethlem's inmates[n 21] and the thuggish nature of the asylum keepers.[n 22] Wakefield's account focused on one patient in particular, James Norris, an American marine

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reported to be 55 years of age who had been detained in Bethlem since 1 February 1800. Housed in the incurable wing of the hospital, Norris had been continuously restrained for about a decade in a harness apparatus which severely restricted his movement.[n 23][203] Wakefield stated that:... a stout iron ring was riveted about his neck, from which a short chain passed to a ring made to slide upwards and downwards on an upright massive iron bar, more than six feet high, inserted into the wall. Round his body a strong iron bar about two inches wide was riveted; on each side of the bar was a circular projection, which being fashioned to and enclosing each of his arms, pinioned them close to his sides. This waist bar was secured by two similar iron bars which, passing over his shoulders, were riveted to the waist both before and behind. The iron ring about his neck was connected to the bars on his shoulders by a double link. From each of these bars another short chain passed to the ring on the upright bar ... He had remained thus encaged and chained more than twelve years.[204]

Wakefield's revelations, combined with earlier reports about patient maltreatment at the York Asylum,[n 24] helped to prompt a renewed campaign for national lunacy reform and the establishment of a 1815 House of Commons Select Committee on Madhouses which examined the conditions under which the insane were confined in county asylums, private madhouses, charitable asylums and in the lunatic wards of Poor-Law workhouses.[205]

In June 1816 Thomas Monro, Principal Physician resigned as a result of scandal when he was accused of ‘wanting in humanity’ towards his patients.[206]

St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics was founded in London in 1751 for the treatment of incurable pauper lunatics by a group of philanthropic apothecaries and others. It was the second public institution in London created to look after mentally ill people, after the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlem (Bedlam), founded in 1246). History1246). HistoryThe first chief physician was Dr William Battie who was renowned as ‘an eccentric humorist’. He believed ‘the patients of this hospital shall not be exposed to publick view.’ Medical treatment consisted of cold plunge baths to shake lunatics out of their insanity. A system of non-restraint was professed, however manacles and other restraints were sometimes used.[3]

The hospital was originally housed in a converted foundry in Windmill Street, Upper Moorfields, close to Bedlam. It was designed by George Dance the Elder in 1750-1 and after his death, his son George Dance the Younger succeeded him as surveyor to the hospital. It was originally built for 25 patients, but was enlarged and by 1771 was overcrowded. A decision was made to build a larger hospital on a new site. The design was put out to competition which was a novelty at the time. None of the competition entries was successful however and Dance was asked to design the new building.[4]

In 1786 it moved to Dance's purpose-built premises on Old Street, between Bath St and what is now the City Road roundabout. The building had a magnificent frontage of clamp brick, 500 feet (150 m) long,[4] which had a central entrance, with the male wards to the left and female wards to the right.[3] The building contained single cells for 300 patients, each with small windows set high in the wall, no heating, and loose straw on wooden bedsteads.[3]

By 1865 it had a population of 150 to 160 patients, taken from the middle classes, its original purpose of supporting paupers having been abandoned.[5] The proportion of cures at St. Luke's was 67 to 70 per cent compared to that of only 15 per cent at pauper lunatic asylums .[1]

Behind the main building were two gardens for the exercise of the less disturbed inmates, one for men and another for women. More dangerous residents were kept inside, or in their cells. The treatment regime consisted of cold plunge baths, and a focus on the gastrointestinal system with the administration of anti-spasmodics, emetics (to induce vomiting) and purgatives.[3]

The patients were transferred to other institutions or their homes in 1916, and the buildings were acquired by the Bank of England to become the St Luke's Printing Works, used for printing bank notes until the early 1950s.[5][6] The building was demolished in 1963.[3]

In 1922 it was suggested that a psychiatric unit should be instituted by the St Luke's charity in cooperation with a general hospital. This led to the funding by the charity of both an out-patient clinic and a psychiatric in-patient ward at the

charity of both an out-patient clinic and a psychiatric in-patient ward at the Middlesex Hospital and then to a new St Luke's, the third, opening at Woodside Avenue, Muswell Hill, in 1930. This was variously known as Woodside Nerve Hospital, St Luke's Woodside Hospital for Functional Nervous Disorders and from 1948 as St Luke's Woodside.[5]

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

Notable patients The poet Christopher Smart (1722–1771) was confined in St Luke's from 1757 to 1763. Jonathan Martin, brother of John Martin (1789–1854), the English Romantic painter. Confined

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

The battle of the lunatic asylums in eighteenth-century York Tuesday 11 June 2013, 6.30PM Speaker: Dr Ann-Marie Akehurst, Department of History of ArtLifelong Learning LecturesThe York Lunatic Asylum opened in 1777, but by 1788 it was at the centre of a public controversy, and in 1790 a patient died there without the requested solace of her fellow Quakers. This narrative forms part of the founding myth of the York Retreat, an independent lunatic asylum established by the Society of Friends in 1792. The relationship between the two asylums was therefore, from the outset, capable of bearing an oppositional character – but all was not quite as it seemed…This talk reveals the secret political origins of the foundation of the York Asylum, and its presentation as a metaphor of corruption as an act of partisan revenge. And while the Retreat emerged directly out of Quaker philosophy and a renaissance in institutional foundation, it was only with the publication of Samuel Tuke’s innovative Description of the Retreat, two hundred years ago this year, that its celebrated success made the contrast with the Asylum more striking. In 1814, early-morning visitors to the York Asylum discovered thirteen old women in tiny cells, inches deep in excremental filth. The very particular problems there were exposed in Parliament, and the relationship between these two York institutions acted as a catalyst for national reform of both asylum design and the treatment offered within their walls.

It may be observed here that John Wesley prescribed at this period formadness, as well as for irreligion.[112] One of his remedies was thatthe patient should be exclusively fed on apples for a month--a regimenwhich recalls the starving treatment of epilepsy prescribed, at arecent date, by Dr. Jackson, of Boston. Wesley's prescriptions for"lunacy" and "raving madness" are given with almost as much confidenceof success as those we have cited from the Saxon leech-book.

"For Lunacy:

1. Give decoction of agrimony four times a day.patients. Although inmates slept in unheated cells and were subjected to cold water plunges to shock them out of their madness, the hospital had a reputation for its supposedly enlightened approach towards mental illness.

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The battle of the lunatic asylums in eighteenth-century York Tuesday 11 June 2013, 6.30PM Speaker: Dr Ann-Marie Akehurst, Department of History of ArtLifelong Learning LecturesThe York Lunatic Asylum opened in 1777, but by 1788 it was at the centre of a public controversy, and in 1790 a patient died there without the requested solace of her fellow Quakers. This narrative forms part of the founding myth of the York Retreat, an independent lunatic asylum established by the Society of Friends in 1792. The relationship between the two asylums was therefore, from the outset, capable of bearing an oppositional character – but all was not quite as it seemed…This talk reveals the secret political origins of the foundation of the York Asylum, and its presentation as a metaphor of corruption as an act of partisan revenge. And while the Retreat emerged directly out of Quaker philosophy and a renaissance in institutional foundation, it was only with the publication of Samuel Tuke’s innovative Description of the Retreat, two hundred years ago this year, that its celebrated success made the contrast with the Asylum more striking. In 1814, early-morning visitors to the York Asylum discovered thirteen old women in tiny cells, inches deep in excremental filth. The very particular problems there were exposed in Parliament, and the relationship between these two York institutions acted as a catalyst for national reform of both asylum design and the treatment offered within their walls.

It may be observed here that John Wesley prescribed at this period formadness, as well as for irreligion.[112] One of his remedies was thatthe patient should be exclusively fed on apples for a month--a regimenwhich recalls the starving treatment of epilepsy prescribed, at arecent date, by Dr. Jackson, of Boston. Wesley's prescriptions for"lunacy" and "raving madness" are given with almost as much confidenceof success as those we have cited from the Saxon leech-book.

"For Lunacy:

1. Give decoction of agrimony four times a day.patients. Although inmates slept in unheated cells and were subjected to cold water plunges to shock them out of their madness, the hospital had a reputation for its supposedly enlightened approach towards mental illness.

The battle of the lunatic asylums in eighteenth-century York Tuesday 11 June 2013, 6.30PM Speaker: Dr Ann-Marie Akehurst, Department of History of ArtLifelong Learning LecturesThe York Lunatic Asylum opened in 1777, but by 1788 it was at the centre of a public controversy, and in 1790 a patient died there without the requested solace of her fellow Quakers. This narrative forms part of the founding myth of the York Retreat, an independent lunatic asylum established by the Society of Friends in 1792. The relationship between the two asylums was therefore, from the outset, capable of bearing an oppositional character – but all was not quite as it seemed…This talk reveals the secret political origins of the foundation of the York Asylum, and its presentation as a metaphor of corruption as an act of partisan revenge. And while the Retreat emerged directly out of Quaker philosophy and a renaissance in institutional foundation, it was only with the publication of Samuel Tuke’s innovative Description of the Retreat, two hundred years ago this year, that its celebrated success made the contrast with the Asylum more striking. In 1814, early-morning visitors to the York Asylum discovered thirteen old women in tiny cells, inches deep in excremental filth. The very particular problems there were exposed in Parliament, and the relationship between these two York institutions acted as a catalyst for national reform of both asylum design and the treatment offered within their walls.It may be observed here that John Wesley prescribed at this period formadness, as well as for irreligion.[112] One of his remedies was thatthe patient should be exclusively fed on apples for a month--a regimenwhich recalls the starving treatment of epilepsy prescribed, at arecent date, by Dr. Jackson, of Boston. Wesley's prescriptions for"lunacy" and "raving madness" are given with almost as much confidence

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of success as those we have cited from the Saxon leech-book.

"For Lunacy:

1. Give decoction of agrimony four times a day.

2. Or, rub the head several times a day with vinegar in whichground ivy leaves have been infused.

3. Or, take daily an ounce of distilled vinegar.

4. Or, boil juice of ground ivy with sweet oil and white wineinto an ointment. Shave the head anointed therewith, andchafe it in, warm, every other day for three weeks; bruisealso the leaves and bind them on the head, and give threespoonfuls of the juice warm every morning.This generally cures melancholy. The juice alone taken twicea day will cure.

5. Or, electrify. Tried.

For Raving Madness:

1. It is a sure rule that all madmen are cowards, and may beconquered by binding only, without beating (Dr. Mead). Healso observes that blistering the head does more harm thangood. Keep the head close shaved, and frequently wash it withvinegar.

2. Apply to the head clothes dipt in cold water.

3. Or, set the patient with his head under a great waterfall,as long as his strength will bear; or pour water on his headout of a tea-kettle.

4. Or, let him eat nothing but apples for a month.

5. Or, nothing but bread and milk. Tried."

In all hypochondriacal cases, and in obstinate madness, Wesleyrecommended the following, wherein we see a return to the almostinevitable hellebore: "Pour twelve ounces of rectified spirits of wineon four ounces of roots of black hellebore, and let it stand in a warmplace twenty-four hours. Pour it off and take from thirty to forty dropsin any liquid, fasting."

Lastly, for all nervous disorders, he recurs to what was his favouriteremedy, and says, "But I am firmly persuaded that there is no remedy innature for nervous disorders of every kind, comparable to the properand constant use of the electrical machine."

Electrical machine designed by John Wesley for the treatmentofmelancholia in the 18th centuryCintio d'Amato, "Bloodletting Scene" (1671)Thomas Rowlandson’s Gall Caricature by Thomas Rowlandson, 1808

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Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) leading a discussion on phrenology with five colleagues, among his extensive collection of skulls and model heads. The three shelves of model heads behind Gall are labelled: "Lawers, thieves & murderers", "Poets, dramatists, actors", "Philosophers, statesmen & historians”. Franz Joseph Gall’s rightfully recognised as a great anatomist , pioneering the concepts of localized functions in the brain. He developed the “cranioscopy”, a method to try the personality, mental faculties on the basis of the external shape of the skull. Cranioscopy from cranium : skull and scopos : vision was called later to phrenology from phren : mind and logos : study by his pupil Johann Christoph Spurzheim (1776-1832). In 1791, the first Gall’s publication were two chapters appeared in Philosophisch-medicinische Unlersucliungen-uber Natur u. Kunsi im kranken u. gesunden Zustande des Menschen. In 1810, he published his main work In 1810, he published his Anatomie et physiologie du systeme nerveux en general, et du cerveau en particulier, avec des observations sur la possibilite de reconnaitre plusieurs dispositions intellectuelles et morales de l'homme et des animaux, par la configuration de leur tetes, the first two volumes of which were written with Spurzheim. Image by Wellcome Library n° 11368James Gillray’s true faces Doublûres of Characters or striking resemblances in Physiognomy. Caricature by James Gillray (1756-1815), published by John Wright (active in 1798) on 1stIn all hypochondriacal cases, and in obstinate madness, Wesleyrecommended the following, wherein we see a return to the almostinevitable hellebore: "Pour twelve ounces of rectified spirits of wineon four ounces of roots of black hellebore, and let it stand in a warmplace twenty-four hours. Pour it off and take from thirty to forty dropsin any liquid, fasting."

Lastly, for all nervous disorders, he recurs to what was his favouriteremedy, and says, "But I am firmly persuaded that there is no remedy innature for nervous disorders of every kind, comparable to the properand constant use of the electrical machine."

Electrical machine designed by John Wesley for the treatmentofmelancholia in the 18th centuryCintio d'Amato, "Bloodletting Scene" (1671)Thomas Rowlandson’s Gall Caricature by Thomas Rowlandson, 1808 Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) leading a discussion on phrenology with five colleagues, among his extensive collection of skulls and model heads. The three shelves of model heads behind Gall are labelled: "Lawers, thieves & murderers", "Poets, dramatists, actors", "Philosophers, statesmen & historians”. Franz Joseph Gall’s rightfully recognised as a great anatomist , pioneering the concepts of localized functions in the brain. He developed the “cranioscopy”, a method to try the personality, mental faculties on the basis of the external shape of the skull. Cranioscopy from cranium : skull and scopos : vision was called later to phrenology from phren : mind and logos : study by his pupil Johann Christoph Spurzheim (1776-1832). In 1791, the first Gall’s publication were two chapters appeared in Philosophisch-medicinische Unlersucliungen-uber Natur u. Kunsi im kranken u. gesunden Zustande des Menschen. In 1810, he published his main work In 1810, he published his Anatomie et physiologie du systeme nerveux en general, et du cerveau en particulier, avec des observations sur la possibilite de reconnaitre plusieurs dispositions intellectuelles et morales de l'homme et des animaux, par la configuration de leur tetes, the first two volumes of which were written with Spurzheim. Image by Wellcome Library n° 11368

James Gillray’s true faces

Doublûres of Characters or striking resemblances in Physiognomy. Caricature by James Gillray (1756-1815), published by John Wright (active in 1798) on 1st November, 1798. This explicit print played on the recent success of Lavater’s Essay. By manipulating the principle that heart and face were essentially connected, Gillray ironically unveiled the ‘true’ faces of the opposition party by pairing their public face with its corrupted countertype. So, for example, we see ‘The Patron of Liberty’ turned into ‘The Arch-Fiend’ or a ‘Character of High Birth’ as ‘Silenus debauching’. Bust portraits of seven leaders of the Opposition, each with his almost identical double, arranged in two rows, with numbers referring to notes below the title. The first pair are Fox, directed slightly to the left, and

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Satan, a snake round his neck, his agonized scowl a slight exaggeration of Fox’s expression; behind them are flames. They are ‘I. The Patron of Liberty, Doublûre, the Arch-Fiend’. Next is Sheridan, with bloated face, and staring intently with an expression of sly greed; his double clasps a money-bag: ‘II. A Friend to his Country, Doubr Judas selling his Master’. The Duke of Norfolk, looking to the right, scarcely caricatured, but older than in contemporary prints. His double, older still, crowned with vines, holds a brimming glass to his lips, which drip with wine: ‘III. Character of High Birth, Doubr Silenus debauching’. (Below) Tierney, directed to the right, but looking sideways to the left: ‘IV. A Finish’d Patriot, Doubr The lowest Spirit of Hell.’ Burdett, in profile to the right, with his characteristic shock of forward-falling hair, trace of whisker, and high neck-cloth, has a raffish-looking double with similar but unkempt hair: ‘V. Arbiter Elegantiarum, Doubr Sixteen-string Jack’ [a noted highwayman]. Lord Derby, caricatured, in profil perdu, very like his simian double, who wears a bonnet-rouge terminating in the bell of a fool’s cap: ‘VI. Strong Sense, Doubr A Baboon.’ The Duke of Bedford, not caricatured, and wearing a top-hat, has a double wearing a jockey cap and striped coat: ‘VII. A Pillar of the State, Doubr A Newmarket Jockey’. After the title: ‘“If you would know Mens Hearts, look in their Faces” Lavater.’ 1 November 1798 Hand-coloured etching and stipplePhysiognomy by the study of facial features and the shape and size of the skull

Artificial LeechThe artificial leech was created roughly near the end of the eighteenth century as a way to diminish the use of real leeches in medical practices. The artificial leech was way to diminish the use of real leeches in medical practices. The artificial leech was a prominent tool in blood letting and proved to be a more sterile, an efficient method of bloodletting; however, its gruesome appearance and methods were viewed as being slighty frightentning. The artificial leech was made out of an aluminum tube with small blade on one end and a pump on the other. The leech was then applied to the patient where the blades began bleeding the patient. The pump could be pulled which helped keep blood flowing and which effectively captured the blood.Clysters (Enemas)According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a clyster, or enema, is when "a medicine injected into the rectum, to empty or cleanse the bowels, to afford nutrition" (Oxford English Dictionary). In other words, stool is manually forced out of the body. This treatment was just one more way to purge the ailment out of the body and mind along with vomiting and bloodletting. Dr. John Woodward, an 18th century British physician, was well known for prescribing this treatment to his patients along with the other methods of purging the body. According to a vivid description by Dr. Woodward, the enema of one hysteric patient "was made of wind and matter, foetid, green, froathy, and sour" (Woodward 64).Cold bathingDuring the 18th century, cold bathing and cold water was thought to be of use in curing many ailments. One of the most prominent uses of cold bathing is for fever reduction. A differing modern practice requires a tepid bath because a drastic difference in temperature between the body and the bath could cause shock. Other uses of cold bathing are the cessation of convulsions, insanity, plagues, typhoid fever, and drunkenness. JugumThe jugum was an instrument used to treat "spermatorrhoea" in the 18th century. Men who were "feeling anxious, tired, and irritable" were diagnosed with this condition; the cause was attributed to masturbation.[1] In 1758, doctor Samuel Auguste Tissot published his theory on masturbation stating it was more devastating than smallpox since the act robbed the body of sperm, the "carrier of vital energies."[1] By the late 1700s, the jugum was created to prevent male genitalia from releasing sperm. The release of sperm was considered to be a serious detriment to physical and mental health. Eighteenth-century medical practitioners felt that too much masturbation could cause weakness, loss of vision, and loss of hearing. More importantly, it was also understood to cause insanity, epilepsy, and way to diminish the use of real leeches in medical practices. The artificial leech was a prominent tool in blood letting and proved to be a more sterile, an efficient method of bloodletting; however, its gruesome appearance and methods were viewed as being slighty frightentning. The artificial leech was made out of an aluminum tube with small blade on one end and a pump on the other. The leech was then applied to the patient where the blades began bleeding the patient. The pump could be pulled which helped keep blood flowing and which effectively captured the blood.

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

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