About the Book
'Bedlam!' The very name conjures up graphic images of naked patients chained among filthy straw, or parading untended wards deluded that they are Napoleon or Jesus Christ. We owe this image of madness to William Hogarth, who, in plate eight of his 1735 Rake's Progress series, depicts the anti-hero in Bedlam, the latest addition to a freak show providing entertainment for Londoners between trips to the Tower Zoo, puppet shows and public executions.
That this is still the most powerful image of Bedlam, over two centuries later, says much about our attitude to mental illness, although the Bedlam of the popular imagination is long gone. The hospital was relocated to the suburbs of Kent in 1930, and Sydney Smirke's impressive Victorian building in Southwark took on a new role as the Imperial War Museum.
Following the historical narrative structure of her acclaimed Necropolis, BEDLAM will examine the capital's treatment of the insane over the centuries, from the founding of Bethlehem Hospital in 1247 through the heyday of the great Victorian asylums to the more enlightened attitudes that prevail today.
About the Author :
Catharine Arnold read English at Cambridge and holds a further degree in psychology. A journalist, academic and popular historian, Catharine's previous books include the novel "Lost Time", winner of a Betty Trask award. Her London quartet for Simon & Schuster comprises of "Necropolis: London and Its Dead", "Bedlam, London and Its Mad", "City of Sin, London and Its Vices" and "Underworld London, Crime and Punishment in the Capital City".
Review :
'Arnold has written a brilliant history not only of Bedlam, but of madness and the responses it has generated through the ages' Waterstones Books Quarterly June issue 'While Arnold searches for connections between the city and its asylum, she provides an anecdotal history of madness. Melancholy, for example, was considered the English disease. In the 18th century doctors discerned that it was caused by 'self-abuse', drinking too much tea and, according to one commentator, a combination of bad weather, beef, beer, the rigours of Nonconformity and the tedium of the English Sunday...The history of Bedlam reminds us of the terrible pains of madness and the continual failures of treatment and care. Science may have allowed us to understand the pathology of madness but do the 'chemical cosh' or 'care in the community' represent progress?' Seven, Sunday Telegraph 10/8 'London has rarely been kind to the insane. In medieval times, "therapy" for the unbalanced could mean anything from beatings and chains to solitary confinement and exorcism. The Saxons favoured porpoise-hide whips, the Romans a primitive form of trepanning (several skulls with tell-tale holes have been recovered from the Thames, some with bone tissue that suggests the patients may have survived their ghoulish operations).' The Sunday Times 10/8 'The mad are particularly with us in London -- as anyone who has travelled the Northern Line will know -- and Bedlam might seem the ideal prism with which to view the history of madness in the city where, as Shakespeare's gravediggers tell Hamlet, "they are all as mad as he"...Bedlam history takes us from the ghoulish and ghastly early history of mental illness all the way to Care in the Community. There are unexpected cameos -- the last "Bishop" of "Bethlam Hospital" before the Reformation was George Boleyn, benighted brother of Anne. There is a beautifully handled overview of the madness of George III...' The Times 2/8 'William Blake understood that industrialised London, a city of darkness inhabited by miserable, sickly natives and rootless migrants who had left their pastoral idylls for a life of hardship in overcrowded asylums, was enough to drive anyone to madness. In Catharine Arnold's elegantly written and richly anecdotal study, it is salutary to learn that it was not until 1890 that the status of lunatics was changed, by Parliamentary legislation, from prisoners to patients...This is a thought-provoking book on a melancholy subject, with many parallels to the present. The mentally ill, like the poor, are always with us. The closure of asylums in the 1980s in favour of 'care in the community' proved disastrous. Many took to the streets, sleeping rough, as riddled with lice and despair as the medieval Bedlam beggar; others killed innocent citizens' Daily Mail 8/8 'Sympathetic and entertaining' thelondonpaper 12/8 'What a dark undertow tugs away at the reader's imagination in this smoothly written, densely researched book. Remaining rigorously focused on her subject, historian and psychologist Arnold treads a sensitive path through eight of the most turbulent centuries in our country's development...Today, we wash our hands of the mentally afflicted as effectively as the favoured approach in 1247, which was whippings, chains and solitary confinement' Sunday Express 17/8 Two-page feature 'What a dark undertow tugs away at the reader's imagination in this smoothly written, densely researched book. Remaining rigorously focused on her subject, historian and psychologist Arnold treads a sensitive path through eight of the most turbulent centuries in our country's development...Today, we wash our hands of the mentally afflicted as effectively as the favoured approach in 1247, which was whippings, chains and solitary confinement' Sunday Express 17/8 'Asylum seekers: There's no shortage of competition for places in a chart of London's maddest people. We asked Catharine Arnold, author of a brilliant new history of the capital's treatment of its insane, to compile her personal top ten' Time Out 21/8 'Catharine Arnold has not restricted herself to a narrow view of her subject. She has roved widely, and peppers her narrative with startling anecdotes and brief sketches of such characters as Henry Maudsley, "the gloomy genius of late Victorian psychiatry". Maudsley, who gave his name to the famous clinic across the road from King's College hospital in Camberwell, was a proponent of the view that insanity was hereditary, that it spelled the extinction of humanity, and that in the twilight of empire England had become the asylum of the world' Guardian 23/8 'This is a finely written, thoroughly researched and humane book, packed with moving stories. But its message is grim -- how inhuman our treatment of the mad has been, and continues to be' Independent 12/9 'Fresh from writing about London's dead in Necropolis, her new tale of madness interweaves the history of the Bethlam Hospital with that of changing attitudes towards the insane. Bethlam was mostly a ghastly place, home to the violent, the depressed and the simply dotty, such as Margaret Nicholson, who tried to kill George III with a cake knife' The Times, 6/12 'More than any other form of illness, madness has battled and beguiled society since earliest times...The death in 1815 of a sailor, James Norris, who had been shackled in chains for 14 years, prompted outrage and pledges of change. Only a few decades later, allegations of cruelty re-emerged when Ann Morley was revealed to have slept naked on straw and been hosed down with freezing water...As mental illness remains an enigma, Arnold's anecdotal book provides a lively and moving guided tour through 750 years of London's "mad"' The Times 1/8 'The mad have always been with us but how they have been treated has changed through the ages. This 750-year history of Bedlam, London's Bethlehem mental hospital, exposes the conditions and treatments that the insane have endured since its foundation in 1247. An informative and thought-provoking read' Express 31/7 'More than any other form of illness, madness has battled and beguiled society since earliest times...The death in 1815 of a sailor, James Norris, who had been shackled in chains for 14 years, prompted outrage and pledges of change. Only a few decades later, allegations of cruelty re-emerged when Ann Morley was revealed to have slept naked on straw and been hosed down with freezing water...As mental illness remains an enigma, Arnold's anecdotal book provides a lively and moving guided tour through 750 years of London's "mad"' The Times 1/8 'The mad have always been with us but how they have been treated has changed through the ages. This 750-year history of Bedlam, London's Bethlehem mental hospital, exposes the conditions and treatments that the insane have endured since its foundation in 1247. An informative and thought-provoking read' Express 31/7 'Madness, says Catharine Arnold, "runs like a watermark through the history of London". Skulls found in the Thames show the Romans drilled holes into the heads of the afflicted; some even survived. Bethlehem Hospiatl (aka Bethlem, or Bedlam in the local argot) was founded in Bishopsgate in 1247. From the star, it had a reputation for degeneracy and corruption; by the 17th century, it was "a byword for pandemonium" and a place of "horror and chaos". Writers from Shakespeare to Swift visited in search of inspiration, as did artists (notably Hogarth), and for many years it was a must-see tourist destination...A very readable popular history of how madness has figured in the life of the capital' Guardian, 15/8 'In crisp prose, she guides us through Bedlam's transformation from nightmarish "whips, gags, manacles, straitjackest, chains" to "female wards...[that] could be mistaken for the drawing room of a ladies' club". She also charts the stereotyping of madness as the melancholy young man of the 17th century becomes the Victorian madwoman in the attic (and elsewhere), when belief held that "merely to be in possession of a cervix predisposed one to insanity."' Observer 30/8
