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'.

A Poet's Christmas by Judith Allnatt

At the height of his fame, John Clare, the nineteenth century peasant poet enjoyed receiving Christmas gifts that he could never have dreamed of as a Northamptonshire pot-boy, lime-burner or ploughman. Silk neckerchiefs, eau-de-cologne and gold-tooled books arrived as presents from publishers and patrons: unaccustomed luxuries for a man more used to working in the fields to feed a large family, crammed into a tiny labourer’s cottage. The contrast between past poverty and relative wealth was nowhere as sharply demonstrated as through the replacement of his battered old fiddle with a faultless, polished Cremona violin.

Clare stood astride two worlds. In London, for a time, he was feted in literary circles, wined and dined. But returning to his native village, promised patronage was often late or forgotten and he had to return to manual work in order to keep food on the table. His literary fame became a burden at home. He felt increasingly isolated from his fellow villagers whom he feared saw him as filled with ‘airs and graces’. Sometimes he was called home from the fields to meet a visitor: a genteel fan in search of a literary chat who gave never a thought to the fact that leaving his post would cost him his whole afternoon’s wages.

The strain of trying to live in these two very different worlds, whilst fitting into neither, began to tell and may have contributed to his growing mental frailty. In later life , he became prone to delusions, sometimes believing he was Byron, Admiral Nelson or, alarmingly, the boxer Jack Randall. He also came to believe that he had two wives” his real wife Patty and his childhood sweetheart, Mary Joyce. This odd dilemma for Patty was the inspiration for my novel ‘The Poet’s Wife’ , in which Patty tried to fight John’s demons and get back the man she married.

John Clare’s obsession with his childhood sweetheart is in a way unsurprising in a man who clung to the past. His personal past was precious to him and he writes of the freedom of his boyhood collecting birds’ eggs and pooty shells (snails), and once wandering so far across the heath that he thought he could come to the edge of the world. He also treasured a common past: the seasonal rhythms of farming life and the traditions of a rural community. He records in his poem, ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’, the traditional entertainments of Christmas: the wassail singer, the Mummers’ play and how ‘harlequin, a laugh to raise/ Wears his hump back and tinkling bell.’ Just as the enclosure of common land had deprived him of his freedom to roam, he feared that as farming became mechanised and labour migrated to the cities treasured traditions would fall away.

He writes, with great affection, of a country Christmas, of a bright hearth and a sanded floor, of yew, holly and ‘mizzletoe’ decking candles and pictures - greenery brought indoors as a symbol of eternity. He lingers with relish on ‘boiling eldern-berry wine’, pudding wrapped in muslin, sage-stuffed sausage drying in the chimney nook and sugar plums. Once when I was giving a talk on ‘The Poet’s Wife’ I was afterwards treated to a plate of sugar plums, in celebration of a Christmas scene in the novel. In rural Northamptonshire it e=seems that some of Clare’s beloved traditions still linger. Long may they last.