Bedlam
Page 41
She did not look like the mother of a saint.
Acknowledgments
This novel owes a great deal to the brilliant work of the late Roy Porter, without whose encouragement it would not have been written.
The best accounts of James Tilly Matthews are by Roy Porter and Mike Jay. My own primary source has been Roy Porter’s edition of John Haslam’s Illustrations of Madness (1810; London and New York 1988). Mike Jay has kindly let me see proofs of his nonfiction study of Matthews, The Air Loom Gang (London 2003). Among other twentieth-century sources, the richest have been Jonathan Andrews et al., The History of Bethlem (London 1997) on Bethlem Hospital; Erving Goffman, Asylums (New York 1961) on psychiatric institutions; Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles (Cambridge 1987) on eighteenth-century madness; and Andrew Scull et al., Masters of Bedlam (Princeton 1996) on John Haslam.
As well as his Illustrations of Madness, works by Haslam I have used, now and then for his own words and phrases, include his Observations on Insanity (London 1798), Observations on Madness and Melancholy (London 1809), Observations of the Physician and Apothecary of Bethlem Hospital (London 1816), Considerations on the Moral Management of Insane Persons (London 1817), A Letter to the Governors of Bethlem Hospital (London 1818), Sound Mind (London 1819), and On the Nature of Thought (London 1835). I have also drawn, again at times verbatim, from Britain’s Parliamentary Papers (1815), Report (4) from the Committee on Madhouses in England, House of Commons; Anon., Sketches in Bedlam (London 1824); John Perceval, A Narrative of the Treatment Received by a Gentleman, During a State of Mental Derangement, 2 vols. (London 1838, 1840); Anon., The Mysteries of the Madhouse (London 1847); and M.G. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, 1815-1817 (London 1929).
The artist Rod Dickinson has constructed an Air Loom based on Matthews’ engravings. It may be seen at www.theairloom.org.
For their generous assistance, I thank the staffs of the Wellcome Institute Library, Bethlem Royal Hospital Archive, British Library, Archives des Affaires Étrangères, and Public Record Office. Jonathan Andrews has been extraordinarily helpful with details pertaining to Bethlem and its staff and residents. Any omissions, errors, and conflations and broadenings of historical figures are my doing, not his. For their warmth and hospitality on my several research trips to London, I owe more than a Bethlem Archive souvenir coffee mug to my friends Doug and Judy Vickers. For her clerical support, I thank Marcie Whitecotton-Carroll. For advice on, and contributions to, the work in progress, I am grateful to Jonathan Andrews, Siobhan Blessing, Pamela Erlichman, John Glenday, Mike Jay, Terry Karten, Nicole Langlois, Anne McDermid, Mark Morris, Rosa Spricer, Bruce Stovel, and my wise and tireless editor and champion, Phyllis Bruce.
Praise for Bedlam
“Hollingshead has long used empathy, wit and lucid prose to nail contemporary manners. Now he has applied those same qualities to a very different epoch, and, as a good historical novel should, Bedlam shows how some things may not have changed as much as we think.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“An imaginative tour de force. Bedlam has the slippery lucidity of its subject: knowing madness in a world gone mad.”
—Elizabeth Hay
“Hollingshead’s use of three narrators to tell the same story gives Bedlam a multifaceted depth and complexity few contemporary Canadian novels achieve.”
—Calgary Herald
“A rich, complex and often disturbing novel about an extraordinary man.”
—The Hamilton Spectator
“[Hollingshead] has brilliantly brought to life the atmosphere, ideas and language of late-18th-and early 19th-century England…With a pair of rich characters (and Matthews’ wife is no small achievement, either), a vivid setting and a nuanced, thought-provoking set of ideas, Bedlam ought to attract considerable attention this year in Canada and internationally.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“Meticulously crafted.”
—The Chronicle Herald (Halifax)
“An important and compassionate contribution to the literature of madness.”
—The Vancouver Sun
Copyright
Bedlam
© 2004 by Greg Hollingshead.
P.S. section © Greg Hollingshead 2005
All rights reserved.
A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by
HarperPerennial, an imprint of
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
www.harpercollins.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Hollingshead, Greg, 1947–
Bedlam: a novel / Greg Hollingshead.–
2nd ed.
“A Phyllis Bruce Book.”
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EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN:978-1-554-68969-9
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PS8565.0624B43 2005 C813’.54
C2005-901801-1
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