Beyond Bedlam - by Judith Allnatt

The word ‘bedlam’ conjures up images of chaos and madness. This is hardly surprising since the word is derived from ‘Bethlem’, after London’s Bethlem hospital, notorious for most of its 600 year history for the harsh treatment of its inmates, including the insane. Hogarth’s image from ‘The Rake’s Progress’ shows the Rake being manacled by two attendants whilst one lady visitor whispers to another behind a fan.

The image neatly demonstrates two major elements of the early treatment of the mentally ill. Firstly, that the emphasis lay with custody rather than cure and secondly that sufferers were dehumanised and treated as ‘freaks’ to be viewed for the frisson of shock, pity or sheer amusement. When the hospital was rebuilt in the 1670s, galleries were constructed partly ‘lest such persons that come to see the said Lunatickes may goe in danger of their Lives’. Physical restraint through the ages included manacles, chains, head collars and strait jackets. Although restraint was said to be used to stop patients tearing their clothes or harming themselves or others, it was also for the convenience of the keepers who performed a role that was more custodial than medical. A regime that commonly included cold baths, purges to induce vomiting and ‘voiding of the bowels’, bleeding and blistering seems as likely to have originated in a desire to cow and exhaust inmates into submission as to treat or cure them.

It was against this background impression of brutality and voyeurism that I began to research the treatment of John Clare’s madness for my novel, The Poet’s Wife. What I discovered was a complete surprise.

 

In 1841, John Clare entered what was then known as ‘Northampton Lunatic Asylum’, where he was to live as a patient until his death in 1864. I was fortunate enough to be able to visit what is now known as St Andrew’s Hospital and to be given a tour by its superintendent. The building was brand new when John Clare was brought there; it is built of white stone in a symmetrical  style and is set in extensive gardens. Clare’s maladies included hallucinations (he is reported to have seen ‘devils in a ceiling’), delusions (he believed he was married both to his real wife and to his childhood sweetheart) and at times a fragmentation of personality (adopting the persona of Admiral Nelson, Byron or Shakespeare). In general, his condition was harmless, although occasionally he would see himself as Jack Randall, a prize fighter of the day, which made him a little pugnacious. Yet, far from being restrained, Clare was allowed to wander down into the town where his favourite spot was a seat in an alcove of All Saints church. Here he would write verses in return for a drink of ale or a twist of tobacco to chew upon.

The superintendant explained that during the nineteenth century a large scale change in the care of the mentally ill occurred, thanks to the work of various reformers who, since the late eighteenth century had been championing a new approach that came to be known as ‘moral treatment’. The Enlightenment had brought a new focus of social welfare and individual rights. Perhaps by treating patients as rational beings who could make choices, interventions could be made that would be therapeutic; perhaps, for some patients, a cure might be possible after all.

A founding father of this approach was William Tuke, a Quaker, who created a small community of 30 patients in York in a quiet country house. Patients were given manual work to perform to provide a sense of purpose. His grandson, Samuel Tuke, wrote a treatise on the method, which involved close supervision by staff who were more nurses than ‘keepers’. Good behaviour was rewarded and patients who behaved badly were distracted or lost privileges.

Latterly, John Clare’s illness worsened and sadly disorderly behaviour led to his freedom to roam in the town being curtailed. John struggled with this. He wrote to his sons warning  them not to visit him in case they were 'captured'. Erroneously believing that the superintendent could ‘see’ for a three mile radius all around, he didn’t attempt to escape as he had from an earlier stay at an asylum in Essex but complained volubly that he lived ‘amongst the Babylonians’ where ‘people’s brains are turned the wrong way round’.

 

By W.W. Law - Bonham's, Public Domain

However, moral treatment offered other freedoms. He was allowed to work as a gardener, a role that would have suited him well as he had a great love of nature and the outdoors. (Close scrutiny of the image of the asylum above, reveals a man trundling a wheelbarrow downhill). 

Even more importantly, both for his wellbeing and for posterity, he was given pen, ink and paper and encouraged to write. We would not have the great body of his poems today if the superintendent had not followed the tenets of moral management and supported him. John Clare wrote perhaps his most famous poem ‘I am’ during his time at the Northampton Asylum – a poem that expresses his feelings of bewilderment and exhaustion with his illness and which cannot fail to touch the heart.

Text of 'I am' by John Clare

Hearts, Flowers and Handfasting - more about John Clare's delusions

More about 'The Poet's Wife'.

Mother's Ruin: A Tale of Gin & Drunken Women by Catherine Hokin

Little drops of whisky, little nips of gin. Make a lady wonder, where on earth she's bin...

With only three days to go to the big day I imagine most people are now well into last minute, undoubtedly feverish, preparations - if you are only just starting, I salute your courage. In our house the Christmas countdown begins in early December with our first foraging trip. This takes place in true urban-hunter style at the BBC Good Food show where we ruthlessly track down cheese, fudge and the never-before bought spirit which will form the basis of this year's Christmas morning cocktail. As with hemlines and heel heights, alcohol goes through fashions: this year, if foodie events and bar openings are any indicator, the current spirit of fashionable choice is gin.

 Wine Making, Ancient Egypt

Marking celebrations with alcohol is nothing new and all civilisations show evidence of fermentation-based drinks. Jars dating back to 6500 BC have been discovered in neolithic villages in China with residues from a drink made from grapes, hawthorn berries, honey and rice. The wine-loving cults in Classical Greece and Rome associated with Dionysus and Bacchus are well-documented, wine jars bearing inscriptions attesting to the quality of  their contents were discovered in Tutankhamen's tomb and large-scale production of wine appears to have originated in Iran as early as 5400 BC. Whether the purpose was to honour the gods, provide medicinal relief or because the consequences of drinking water were judged more dangerous than drinking alcohol, it seems that man's desire to turn fruit into something a little livelier is almost as old as the quest for fire.

 Alchemists and Distillation

Spirits, however, require a little more science than wine or beer, in the form of distillation. There are descriptions of water being distilled by Ancient Greek alchemists but it is not until the twelfth century that there is real evidence for the
distillation of alcohol. From that point on, we didn't look back: from eaux-de-vie to akvavit to usquebaugh, the "water of life" was born.

Think of gin and you automatically think of gin and tonic, the quintessential English drink associated (at least in my mind, I live in Glasgow so I haven't actually witnessed this) with long hot summers, floaty frocks and croquet. Gin is widely known as the English drink and the world's oldest working distillery, which has been in production since 1793, can still be visited in Plymouth. The drink, however, originated in Holland where it was known as Jenever: the first mention of medical-tonics containing juniper (thought to be able to protect against a range of illnesses, including plague) is found in a Dutch manuscript dated 1269, with the first confirmed production beginning in the early 17th century, again for medicinal purposes.

Given the social ills eventually laid at gin's door, it is somewhat ironic that it was first prized for its medicinal qualities. The Dutch used it to treat gout, gall stones and stomach complaints and the Royal Navy mixed it with lime cordial to combat scurvy and angostura to combat sea-sickness; given that tonic water contains quinine which has anti-malarial properties, it really was a drink to beat all ills. Gin has also added a couple of phrases to our lexicon which are still in common use: Dutch Courage and Mothers' Ruin. The first has rather heroic connotations with its idea of soldiers stiffening themselves before battle and stems from the morale-boosting and damp-beating tots of Jenever given to British soldiers fighting in the Thirty Years War in Holland (1618-1648). Perhaps the meaning has now become rather more derogatory in the sense of turning to drink for false courage but it is still nowhere near as damning as Mothers' Ruin with its whiff of women whose collapsed morals in the face of the demon drink threaten the very fabric of society.

 Hogarth's Gin Lane

From the accession of William of Orange in 1689 anyone in England could distill gin and was encouraged to do so, to boost trade and provide capital for his ongoing wars. In 1730 there were 7000 gin shops in London alone and the quality was dreadful: the use of cheap additives such as turpentine could leave drinkers crippled, blind or dead. The regulation attempts which began in the 1730s led to the sumptuous gin palaces frequented by the rich in early Victorian England but also pushed the worst traders underground, perpetuating the abuse of unregulated alcohol by the poor. From its earliest appearance in England, gin had female connotations, going by the name of Madame Geneva (a corruption of Jenever). As its less salubrious effects took hold, more common personifications included Jenny Pisspot and Dorothy Addle-Brains and, by 1820, Mothers' Ruin. The origin of the term  is still debated. Some have linked it to the use of gin and hot baths as an abortive device but its hold on the popular imagination comes from the famous Hogarth depiction of Gin Lane whose most squalid inhabitant is the mother dropping the child, probably based on a contemporary convicted child-killer, Judith Dufour.

This depiction of a slatternly woman so lost to drink she has forgotten her most basic role is the first time we see an alcohol-reformer, which is what Hogarth was, portraying a female as a villain rather than a victim of drink. Up to this point, reformers concerned with the drinking of ale tended to paint women as the victims of their neglectful and violent drunken husbands. Gin, however, was not drunk in male-dominated ale-houses, it was made, sold and increasingly drunk by women.

 Hogarth's Beer Street

Gin Lane is full of grisly images of debauched savagery brought on by the evils of drink, specifically gin, with its anti-madonna depiction of the mother and child deliberately centre-stage. It is important to remember, however, that the drawing, although based on some of the poorest and most gin-affected areas around St Giles, was rather more than just a depiction of London life. Gin Lane was produced as part of the movement pushing for the reform of the gin laws and may well have been funded by the beer industry. Its companion piece, Beer Street, depicts a group of happy workers, surrounded by the tools of their trade to advertise the contribution they make to society. There is a woman centre-stage but she is looking down and decorously dressed: she knows her place. The availability of cheap, dangerous alcohol in the eighteenth century was a major social problem and its consequences, particularly for the poor, were terrible but it is hard not to see a very anti-female rhetoric in much of the reforming zeal. Reform, at its heart, fears change and women changing, whether that be their attitudes or their behaviour or their sense of their place in the world, carries a threat to the social order. A ban on selling spirits to women was proposed and the dangers of female drinking became a newspaper staple: "when I behold the woman...degraded into the most infamous habit of drinking...when I see deadness in her features, folly in her behaviour, her tongue faltering, her breath tainted...my concern, like her debasement, is inexpressible (Universal Spectator, 1737).

The debate about the dangers of alcohol continued into the nineteenth century and regulation brought, as it often does, a refinement in quality. Gin's image began to rise. New advances in distilling technology which refined the spirit's taste, its espousal by the Royal Navy and the increasing spread of influence through the Empire made gin (and tonic), rather ironically, a symbol of all that was good about England. With the growing popularity of cocktails after the end of prohibition, gin found itself associated with a new decadence, once that was aspirational rather than feared and Gin and It (Italian sweet vermouth) became the drink of choice for bright young things everywhere, including bright young women.

The gin industry is enjoying another boom with new flavours springing up everywhere (the oddest one I've found so far is marmalade) and the only thing to be feared in the new gin palaces is the ridiculous hipster beards. It's sad that we still haven't, as a society, learnt to manage our relationship with drink. It's sadder still that women are still subject to attacks in the media about drinking which still manages to call morality and their 'role' into question - I've seen so many articles lately about 'Prosecco Mums' but not so many about 'Budweiser Dads'. Still, that's not for this forum - if you want to know more about gin, The Much Lamented Death of Madame Geneva by Patrick Dillon is a good read. And if you want to try our Christmas cocktail, we're making our version of a Moulin Rouge: pink Cava, raspberry vodka, Chambord Black Raspberry liqueur and a good lie down. I don't like gin...

Have a good one!

ANOTHER SIDE OF CHRISTMAS 1918 by Eleanor Updale

Merry Christmas! Today's the day.

I hope you haven't been driven here by a ghastly family argument or loneliness heightened by the propaganda of the season. As you can see, the History Girls never rest, and I have taken time off from basting the turkey to bring you today's reflections on the past.

Most families have long-established traditions for the big day, ranging from the pre-lunch walk to the endless game of Monopoly. My household is no exception, though for us, the pattern is newly formed. Our children lack living grandparents on both sides, and my own father had no history of family Christmases to pass on.
He was brought up in the Foundling Hospital: the great orphanage founded by the extraordinary 18th century philanthropist, Captain Thomas Coram.


Some of you may know the site,near King's Cross in London, where the original building stood. It is now known as Coram's Fields - a splendid play area where no adult is allowed unless accompanied by a child.

Balloting for admission to the Foundling Hospital in the early days:



My father was admitted as a baby in 1913. Like all the Foundling Hospital children, he was baptised with a new name (Edmund Updale) and sent out to a foster family until his fifth birthday, when he was scooped back into the main school. In later life, he talked very little about his experiences there. That was partly because of a lingering (and deliberately induced) sense of shame at his mother's disgrace and his own dependence on charity, and partly a reflection of the age in which he lived. Glorying in disadvantage was not yet fashionable in the brief time we had together. He died in 1976.

Throughout my father's lifetime, the law prevented him from finding out about his true background, but shortly after his death the rules were changed, and I have discovered much of the story, and met some of the foundlings who shared his upbringing. I will keep his personal details for another time (and perhaps another place) but today, since it's Christmas, I will (after a bit of a digression into the history of the Foundling Hospital) tell you about a pair of twins who were classmates of his. I had the privilege to meet them in the 1980s, shortly before they died.

The Foundling Hospital was always good at PR. In its earliest days, with Handel and Hogarth as patrons, it was the glitterati charity of choice, and a venue for society concerts.
The wonderful Foundling Museum still holds an art collection of staggering quality, including this magnificent portrait of Captain Coram by Hogarth, and treasures such a manuscript of the Messiah, donated by Handel himself.

In the 20th century, photographers did their best to portray Christmas at the Foundling Hospital as a time of unrestrained joy.

Mixing the pudding/ Learning Carols /Putting up the decorations:

I think we can all guess the degree to which those images were staged, but no doubt special events did happen. However, for most of the time, nothing was allowed to challenge the rule of routine, and that is where the twins come in.

They were born on Christmas Eve, 1913. One can only imagine the circumstances that drove their mother to give them up. It would be possible now for any descendants to find out her story - up to a point.
Like all official records, the Foundling archives must be approached with caution. Getting your child into the institution was not easy. The mother had to produce a deposition explaining how she had landed in her predicament. Unless she had been widowed, she had to portray herself as as a respectable girl led astray, preferably with the promise of marriage in the background. The midwife was required to declare that this was the unfortunate woman's first confinement. You weren't allowed to make the same mistake twice.
Heaven knows what happened to the children of women who failed the tests. The pressure to lie was intense. My own natural grandmother wrote convincingly of he fiance absconding to America. I traced him through electoral registers, still living in London at the time of my father's birth, and for years afterwards.

Love tokens, left by the mothers of babies given over to the care of the Foundling Hospital:


But back to the twins...

Their first four years were spent in the relative normality of a foster home. During that time they were never disabused of the notion that the people looking after them were their parents, and no one did anything to prepare them for the arrival of a car to take them away on their fifth birthday.

the two old men were visibly moved when they told me about being wrenched from their foster parents. But their sadness was not caused only by losing people they had come to love and depend upon. They were still angry, seven decades later, about missing that family Christmas. The date had given the memory of the separation extra force, and that was why it was one of the first things they spoke of when I met them. Other former foundlings talked of cold dormitories, harsh teachers, and the horror of hitting puberty unprepared. For the twins, it was the lost Christmas that dominated their memories - and of course, though they cannot have known it at the time, it must have been a very special Christmas for families everywhere: 1918 - the first since the end of the Great War.

My father and the twins are probably somewhere in this picture. Apparently the teacher was every bit as nasty as he looks:



These days, it's hard to imagine how anyone could have been so cruel as to deny the twins a few days of family fun. And yet those involved probably felt they were doing the right thing. We are all prisoners of the orthodoxies of our times, and we have different ways of torturing children in care now: from serial fostering to surrounding them with low expectations (including the assumption that most will get only four GCSEs,). Many are thrown into the outside world at 16, and those who want to stay on to do A levels may have to fight - particularly if their eighteenth birthday falls before the exams.

But it's Christmas, and I shouldn't be ranting...

Instead, I can tell you some positive things about what has become of Captain Coram's 18th century vision for deprived children.

The Foundling Hospital no longer exists as a residential institution, but in its new incarnation as the charity, Coram, it is a leading force for improving adoption practice throughout the country. It has a formidable record. 97% of adoptions organised by Coram remain secure (one in five of those arranged by other agencies breaks down). Coram also unites children with their prospective adopters remarkably quickly, which may be a reason for the success.
The charity is also in the forefront of innovation in family law, music and art therapy, and all sorts of services for children and families in need.

You can find out more at www.coram.org.uk where there are links to more details about the history of the Foundling Hospital.
If you haven't yet made your Christmas charity donations, you would be hard-pressed to find a better cause.

I've told you the story of the twins because at Christmas they are always on my mind. But even though, to modern eyes, the authorities acted shockingly in their case, those two boys had a lot to be grateful for. Like their classmate, my father, they may have lacked love, but they were given shelter, healthcare, and an education which fitted them to make the most of the opportunities created by the social upheavals of the 20th century. They were lucky - and to be the child of a foundling is to be privileged indeed.

I never pass the statue of Thomas Coram outside the Foundling Museum without touching his foot and saying thank you.

By saving my father, the philanthropists of long ago made possible my own easy passage through life. Just one generation on, our family's fortunes are transformed. Was that institutional care really so bad?

Now. Why not turn off the computer, go and hug your loved ones, and have a very merry time for the rest of Christmas day?

www.eleanorupdale.com

A Trip to the Sir John Soane’s Museum

by Linda Buckley-Archer

In last Saturday’s post Dianne Hofmeyr described how a dozen or so History Girls met up to push our primarily ‘virtual’ relationships into the real world. And what a lovely day we had. Do take a look at Dianne’s photographs if you haven’t viewed them already.

Our excuse was a group visit to the home of architect Sir John Soane – which has been preserved and renovated to appear as it would have done at the time of his death – and it is my personal take on the museum which is the subject of today’s post.

Ten years ago I told a friend that I was starting work on a children’s novel set in eighteenth-century London. She immediately said: I will take you to the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – you will LOVE it. So she did, and I did, and I have done ever since. In fact, the dates didn’t quite fit in with my fictional narrative but Lincoln’s Inn Fields itself became a setting which I returned to in all three volumes of The Gideon Trilogy. When I subsequently found both a literary agent and a publisher within minutes walk of the museum, visits to the S.J.S.M. became a regular event and it won a firm place in my subjective London atlas. As a novelist rather than an historian, it is less the detail (and heaven knows there’s enough detail here to satisfy anyone) than the spirit of the place that keeps drawing me back. It is a unique space, a London gem, a step back into the home and mind of a great English architect and inveterate collector of artefacts.

As far as I am concerned, London is a never-ending source of wormholes to the past: to walk this city’s streets is to be part of an historical continuum that in varying degrees fascinates, illuminates, humbles and occasionally disappoints (though, as that great biographer of the capital, Peter Ackroyd, asserts, London always survives). So, in the midst of such riches, why should you divert from your path in order to visit the Sir John Soane’s Museum? In no particular order, here are some of the reasons why I suggest that you should: its perfect situation, on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields; the iconic yellow drawing room with its delightful views over the square; the astonishing folding Picture Room (Soane’s ingenious solution to running out of space for his paintings was to insert some extra ‘walls’ and put them on hinges); Soane’s collection of Hogarths (The Rake’s Progress and The Election) and his Canalettos (views of Venice); the Crypt crammed with treasures from the ancient world; Soane’s use of glass, of convex mirrors, and his opening up of dark spaces in order to create effects with light; the juxtaposition of the domestic with the astonishing, cluttered legacy of one of the world’s great collectors of artefacts, ancient and modern. The house is such a tardis: so packed with fascinating objects you always leave vowing to come back, yet it is small enough for you to appreciate properly in one visit. Here is a link to the museum’s website which will give you a taste of the delights contained within its walls – although is absolutely no substitute for going there in person:

http://www.soane.org/

Photograph of Lincoln's Inn Fields by Stephen Craven for the Geograph project.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields has to be one of the loveliest green spaces in London. The square is, to use a hackneyed but in this case appropriate term, a small oasis situated between busy Kingsway, Holborn, Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn itself. But you don’t have to be a lawyer to eat your lunch under a giant plane tree and admire the architecture. First developed in the seventeenth century, it used to boast a theatre (demolished in the mid-nineteenth century) and has long been home to the comfortable professional classes, particularly, of course, the legal profession. The pitiless lawyer, Mr Tulkinghorn, of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, had his offices in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the brass plates of law firms still abound. On the south of the square, opposite the Sir John Soane’s Museum, you can see evidence of another gentlemanly profession: the headquarters of the Royal College of Surgeons. This fine edifice also incorporates the Hunterian Museum (a museum of surgery) which certainly deserves another post all to itself.

This benign and kindly face belongs to Sir John Soane (1753-1837). Apprenticed to the architect George Dance, he studied architecture at the Royal Academy and won a travelling scholarship that allowed him to spend two years in Italy which engendered his lifelong appetite for collecting all things classical. His commissions included the Bank of England, the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Holy Trinity Church at Marylebone. Over the course of his lifetime he acquired and rebuilt three adjacent houses, 12,13 and 14 (in 1792, 1813 and 1823 respectively), and constantly reworked his home and reconceived his displays of artefacts. Before his death he established his home as a museum by Act of Parliament. As Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, he used his displays to teach and test his pupils’ knowledge of classical art and design.

Aside from the extensive collections which Sir John Soane amassed (Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, terracotta and bronze artefacts, reliefs, stucco fragments, sculpture, death masks, paintings, sketch books, etc, etc, etc – pity the poor archivist), the museum gives a wonderful insight into domestic life at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the early nineteenth century. Susan Palmer, of the museum, has written an excellent account of this in her book: The Soanes at Home (a volume to which I have turned in my research and would highly recommend). Drawing on and reproducing original documentation from the museum archives, it is a wonderful source for understanding just how a house was run at this period: the servants, the plumbing, the heating, the cooking, the laundry, mealtimes, the delivery of coal and milk, and so on. (Incidentally, for younger visitors, Fanny, Mrs Soane’s dog, gives a charmingly illustrated account of life at numbers 12 and 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields in her book, The Journal of Mrs Soane’s Dog Fanny, by Herself, written by Mirabel Cecil and illustrated by Francesca Martin. Both books are available from the museum.)

Scaffolding currently envelops Sir John Soane’s home and this is because the museum is undertaking a major project – due to be completed in 2014 – which will restore the entire 2nd floor of no. 13. Visitors will be able to view Soane’s private apartments: bedroom, bathroom, oratory, Mrs Soane’s morning room and her husband’s architectural models room. These exciting renovations will cost £7M. £6.5M has already been raised. If anyone would like to help with the remaining £0.5M, follow the link:

http://www.soane.org/opening_up_the_soane/donate_to_outs/

You can visit the museum in the evening, by candlelight, on the first Tuesday of the month, and, for a princely sum, you can also hire the museum for events. I must admit that my ultimate venue for a book launch has long been Sir John Soane’s dining room and library by candlelight. Future publishers kindly take note...