Chance Encounters in the Museum 4

Here we resume a series of posts detailing some of the unanticipated intersections of interest that museum visitors bring to our notice from time to time. Regular readers may recall that the first in the series concerned a scholar who came a considerable distance solely to see Cauis Gabriel Cibber’s statues of ‘Raving and Melancholy Madness’. Many others have beaten a path to our door for the same reason, among them Nicholas Roe, Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. His new biography of John Keats is published this month by Yale University Press.

The publisher’s blurb states that “Roe is the first biographer to provide a full and fresh account of Keats’ childhood in the City of London and how it shaped the would-be poet”, and that “the mysterious early death of Keats’ father, his mother’s too-swift remarriage, living in the shadow of the notorious madhouse Bedlam – all these affected Keats far more than has been previously understood”. Readers of the biography will discover that Professor Roe locates the intersection between the life of the poet and the life of the Hospital precisely at the foot of Cibber’s statues, in the shadow of which Keats spent his childhood, and which (according to Roe) “lingered deep in his memory as gigantic embodiments of anguish, awaiting their summons to reappear as the fallen Titans in Hyperion”.¹

 “Instead of thrones, hard flint they sat upon,
Couches of rugged stone, and slaty ridge
Stubborn’d with iron.
…

Dungeon’d in opaque element, to keep
Their clenched teeth still clench’d, and all their limbs
Lock’d up like veins of metal, crampt and screw’d;
Without a motion, save of their big hearts,
Heaving in pain, and horribly convulsed…”²

Those who are captivated by Cibber’s statues will be interested to know that our Archivist is delivering a public lecture about them at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Pathology Museum on the evening of Wednesday 14 November (the talk is sold out, but demand has been such that we aim to offer a similar session in our Saturday lecture series for 2013); and those who are equally captivated by Keats may visit the Facebook page for the new book.

¹ Nicholas Roe, John Keats. A New Life (Yale University Press, 2012), p. 16.

² ibid., p. 273.

First Person Narratives 7

Gail Hornstein, Professor of Psychology at Mount Holyoake College and sometime visitor to the Archives & Museum, makes passing reference to our modest displays (though not to her visit) in her recent book Agnes’ Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness. She is also the author of To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World, a biography of the psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Fromm-Reichmann is most well-known today for being the real-life “Dr Fried” in Joanne Greenberg’s fictionalised autobiography, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, about which we have previously blogged. A Jewish psychoanalyst, who emigrated to America in the 1930s, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann controversially – but apparently, at least in some cases, successfully – treated schizophrenia with psychotherapy (and not medication).

Dr Hornstein has recently made the latest edition of her bibliography of ‘first person narratives of madness’ available on her website. We think we have spotted at least one unchecked (and uncheckable!) reference in this bibliography. Alas, as far as we know the existence of a 1620 Petition of the Poor Distracted Folk of Bedlam is no more than a rumour. Naturally, we would be delighted to be proved wrong about this! The bibliography is nevertheless an extremely valuable resource for those interested in first person narratives of mental distress.

Moving from first to third person narratives, we are glad to say that a short e-book entitled Illustrious Company: Authors, Artists and Other Adventurers in Bethlem Hospital is now available for download onto Kindle e-readers at Amazon and Amazon UK. It has been written by our Archivist with contributions from Canadian authors Aislinn Hunter and Lesley Krueger. Regular readers of this blog may recognise some but not all of its text. The book is already cheap to download, but watch out for special promotions to make it even cheaper over the summer.

Just Visiting: Charlotte Bronte (1 of 2)

This month’s post (and another one to be published in July) on Charlotte Brontë in the Just Visiting series is written by our guest blogger, the Canadian author Lesley Krueger.

My small quest began with a plan mentioned in one of Charlotte Brontë’s letters, written on January 19, 1853 while she was on a visit to London from her home in Haworth, Yorkshire. “Being allowed to have my own choice of sights this time—I selected the real rather than the decorative side of Life—I have been over two prisons ancient & modern—Newgate and Pentonville—also the Bank, the Exchange ‘the Foundling Hospital,’—and to-day if all be well, I go with Dr. Forbes to see Bethlehem Hospital.”¹

Did Charlotte Brontë actually go to Bethlem? I scribbled a note at the time to check whether the visit came off, little knowing how crooked a trail I would walk before satisfying myself—more or less—of the answer.

It’s such a tiny detail, of little importance to most of the biographers who have excavated the life of Charlotte Brontë from her birth in 1816 through her authorship of Jane Eyre to her death in 1855, about two years after the planned visit. Most of those who mention her January sightseeing tour skim over the details while using it to speculate about Brontë’s psychology and perhaps her intentions. Did she plan to write one of the social-issue novels so popular at the time? Was she drawn to prisons and hospitals for the insane because of the mental and physical breakdown of her brother, Branwell Brontë, before his death in 1848?

My focus was different. I had dipped into Margaret Smith’s magisterial three-volume compilation of Charlotte Brontë’s letters while starting research on my fifth novel, ranging over mid-nineteenth century sources to get a feel for the texture of the period. I knew that my novel would be centred on a notorious member of my husband’s family who was incarcerated in the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum at the Bethlem Royal Hospital during the 1840s and 50s. Drawn up short by reading that Brontë might have visited Bethlem at the time, I wanted to confirm the visit and, more important, discover whether she had left any record of her impressions of the hospital and its inmates.

I quickly found that there is no further reference to Bethlem in any known Brontë letter, and the many biographers whose books I consulted wrote that the visit had come off without saying how they had confirmed this. In a footnote, Margaret Smith writes that on January 28, Brontë presented a copy of her new novel, Villette, to Dr. John Forbes, the physician who was supposed to take her to the hospital, inscribing it personally “in acknowledgment of kindness.”² This could be taken as confirming the visit, but I wondered if it was enough.

Forbes was a distinguished lung specialist, a friend of Brontë’s publisher George Smith and a former schoolmate of Smith’s father in Scotland. In 1849, at Smith’s suggestion, Brontë had consulted Forbes about the care of her sister, Anne Brontë, who was dying of tuberculosis. It seemed possible that the visit to Bethlem had not come off, but that Brontë wished to thank Forbes for agreeing to take her, and for his help with Anne. After all, she signed books on January 28 for several friends and acquaintances.

Why was I sceptical? Brontë was often ill and painfully shy, and it was common for her to cancel visits. In her biography, Elizabeth Gaskell records a rather charming incident during a visit Brontë made to her house in Manchester in April, 1853.

“One evening we had, among other guests, two sisters who sang Scottish ballads exquisitely. Miss Brontë had been sitting quiet and constrained till they began “The Bonnie House of Airlie,” but the effect of that and “Carlisle Yetts,” which followed, was as irresistible as the playing of the Piper of Hamelin. The beautiful clear light came into her eyes; her lips quivered with emotion; she forgot herself, rose, and crossed the room to the piano, where she asked eagerly for song after song. The sisters begged her to come and see them the next morning, when they would sing as long as ever she liked; and she promised gladly and thankfully. But on reaching the house her courage failed. We walked some time up and down the street; she upbraiding herself all the while for folly, and trying to dwell on the sweet echoes in her memory rather than on the thought of a third sister who would have to be faced if we went in. But it was of no use; and dreading lest this struggle with herself might bring on one of her trying headaches, I entered at last and made the best apology I could for her non-appearance.”³

A woman so highly strung, burdened with memories of her brother’s breakdown and facing the daunting edifice of Bethlem, might just as easily have paced up and down outside, got back in the carriage and asked to be driven home.

( to be continued )

¹ From The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, volume 3, 1852-1855, edited by Margaret Smith, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2004. p. 108.

² ibid. p. 109.

³ The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell, Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1874 edition. p. 416.

Just Visiting 2: Samuel Beckett

Next Monday (19 March 2012), the Archivist will give a Gresham lecture at the Museum of London on the subject of unrestricted public visiting to Bethlem, a phenomenon which effectively ceased in 1770. In contrast, this series of blog posts will concentrate on visitors to the Hospital from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Having profiled Queen Mary in January, this month we feature the Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett, who drew inspiration from visits he made to Bethlem in the composition of his first novel, Murphy (1938).

A friend of his, Dr Geoffrey Thompson, was Bethlem’s Junior House Physician from February 1935, and Acting Senior House Physician from May of the same year, until his resignation that October. “This gave Beckett the chance to come to Bethlem, where he walked in the grounds, visited the wards and played chess with Dr Thompson”, according to the author of a published history of the Hospital. “Beckett himself acknowledged that he used Bethlem as a point of departure for his novel Murphy, which had as its setting a sanatorium for the mentally ill, called the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat”.¹

An acknowledged point of departure is one thing; a recoverable string of point-by-point correspondences between Bethlem and Beckett’s Mercyseat is quite another. It has been said that “the novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel” and that “a novelist’s biographers thus undo what a novelist has done, and redo what he undid” but “all their labour cannot illuminate either the value or the meaning of a novel, can scarcely even identify a few of the bricks”.²

Attempts at tracing the sources of Beckett’s inspiration have been made nonetheless, most notably in Chris Ackerley’s Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy (Edinburgh, 2004), in which identifications of varying degrees of plausibility are advanced: between ‘Dr Killiecrankie’ and Murdo Mackenzie, Bethlem’s Senior Assistant Physician, between Beckett’s county coroner and John Porter-Phillips, the Physician Superintendent, and between ‘Bim Clinch’ and Kenneth Cantle, deputy chief male attendant at the time of Beckett’s visits.

To these proposals we venture to add our own simple suggestion: that criticism should accord ample space to Samuel Becket’s storytelling powers, not to mention his caustic wit. Reading that no female nurse at the Mercyseat ‘had taken a male nurse to husband within living memory, though one had once been almost obliged to’,³ for example, is not meant to send us scurrying to Bethlem’s staff records looking for real-life scandal. It is meant to make us laugh, while simultaneously discomforting us.

¹ David Russell, Scenes from Bedlam (London, 1997), pp. 142-143.
² M. Kundera, The Art of the Novel (1986).
³ Samuel Beckett, Murphy (Calder, 1993), p. 93.

An Extraordinary Life 1

Antonia White’s Beyond the Glass, the last in the sequence of autobiographical novels which began with Frost in May, was briefly reviewed on this blog last year; a biographical sketch of the author herself appeared at the same time. In the book, White fictionalises the experiences of her early adulthood: her dysfunctional relationships, mental breakdown, treatment at Bethlem Hospital, subsequent recovery and discharge, and religious disaffection. According to the preface of the 1979 edition, her “relationship with Catholic belief and practice has always been intense, a wrestling to live within its spiritual imperatives in a way which accorded with her own nature, clinging to her faith, as she says, ‘by the skin of my teeth’.”

“To a modern reader”, the preface continues, “these could be seen as experiences intimately connected with [her principal character’s] slow progress towards madness, but to Antonia White they were influences which were also profoundly enriching, in no way negative, part of an extraordinary life which she recalls with a mixture of astonishment and laughter”.¹

The letters which were published as The Hound and the Falcon: The story of a reconversion to the Catholic faith form a fascinating counterpoint to Beyond the Glass. In 1942 White was asked by the editor of Horizon to write something about her recent return to the Catholic fold after fifteen years away from it. She did so diffidently, conscious that her non-Catholic friends were “extremely kind” to her whenever the subject arose in conversation “as they would be to someone suffering a distressing illness or a mental aberration”.² In the event, the editor refused to publish the piece she wrote, saying that reading it “was like watching a person making desperate attempts to retain their reason and finally lapsing into insanity”.³ Many years later, it was published alongside a series of letters written by White to a confidante in 1940-41, the time of her reconversion. These letters demonstrate an earnestness, a warmth and a humanity which gives the lie to any lazy, blanket equation of intense religious concern with mental imbalance – an equation with as little genuine foundation, but perhaps as much intellectual allure, as the one that is sometimes posited between creativity and ‘madness’.

¹ Antonia White, Beyond the Glass (Virago, 1979), p. 6.

² Antonia White, The Hound and the Falcon: The story of a reconversion to the Catholic faith (Virago, 1990), p. 162.

³ ibid., p. xix.