Location, Location 2

Whereas “old Bethlem was built over a regularly blocked common sewer”, as we reported on this thread in January, new Bethlem (built in 1676 half a mile to the west at Moorfields, on the south side of what is now Finsbury Circus) “suffered from subsidence upon the site of the old city ditch, used as a dump for rubbish and waste”.¹ Yet this unpromising fact was invisible to the building’s first admirers. Robert Hooke’s Bethlem Hospital at Moorfields was “London’s first great public construction in half a century [after the Royal Exchange and the Custom House]… surpassing the other two in size, stylishness, ornament and, not least, superb siting”, ² the Moorfields area then being known for the relatively pure (and, it was supposed, restorative) quality of its air. It was built on a strip of land 740 feet wide and 80 feet deep, which Bethlem’s Governors had secured on a 999-year lease at a nominal rent from the City of London. “Most fundamental to understanding” its architectural grandeur, according to the historian Christine Stevenson, “is the [Bethlem] Governors’ conception of Hooke’s building as the home of an ancient Christian charity, one all the more noble because [it was thought that] its recipients could not be grateful nor, indeed, comprehend the nobility of the building”.³ The irony of this was not lost on seventeenth century commentators, one of whom wrote cynically:

“Bedlam is a pleasant Place, that it is, and abounds with Amusements; the first of which is the building so stately a Fabrick for Persons wholly unsensible of the Beauty and Use of it: the Outside is a perfect Mockery to the Inside, and Admits of two Amusing Queries, Whether the Persons that ordered the Building of it, or those that inhabit it, were the maddest?”⁴

However dramatic the siting of the building, however admirable its architectural aspirations, by the end of the eighteenth century considerations such as these had been overtaken by pressing engineering concerns. “Want of skill or attention are obvious in the carpentry of the walls and floors, below the roofs; there being no bond, or tyes, between the several parts, which should have been strongly connected”, wrote James Lewis, the Hospital’s Surveyor, in 1800 – or, as Christine Stevenson puts it, “Nothing aside from the tie-beams…actually joined the front to the back. No floor was level, no wall upright.”⁵ In the opinion of Lewis, “the present condition of the building is not in such a state as to warrant any other repair to be made thereto, than to preserve it…by such works as may be requisite…it is incurable.”⁶ With over 85% of their 999-year tenure remaining, Bethlem’s Governors were obliged to contemplate another move.

¹ Jonathan Andrews et al, The History of Bethlem (Routledge, 1997), p. 206.

²ibid., pp. 230-231.

³ibid., p. 252.

⁴ …cited in ibid., p. 232.

⁵ibid., p. 252.

⁶ James Lewis, Report respecting the present state and condition of BethlemHospital (London, 1800).

Bedlam at the Globe Theatre

The Archives & Museum was recently visited by the cast of the forthcoming production at Shakespeare’s Globe, Bedlam. Playwright, Nell Leyshon, covered her own visit in an article in The Evening Standard (read it here): interestingly her conclusions bore remarkable similarity to those of the Illustrated London News correspondent who visited Bethlem in 1860. Remarking on what he saw as evident progress in the Hospital since the eighteenth century, this could do little to fill “the vast abyss of human mental misery.”

We should remember that the progress remarked on in 1860 reflected much wider changes – in medical treatment (with the declining popularity of bleeding and purging as a standard response to both physical and mental disease), and the growth of the county asylum system, and an increasingly bureaucratic and professionalised mental health field. For some, however, seemingly outdated treatments continued popular: in 1860, one 38 year old housewife at Bethlem demanded to be cupped and bled “as the only means to relieve the distress of her head.” The medical officers did not comply with her requests.

Yet, it seems fitting that Leyshon’s play reflects the use of the word ‘Bedlam’ in the Globe’s heyday. In the 1600s, the term entered popular parlance as a general term for insanity, chaos or riotousness, as well as referring specifically to the Hospital and its former inmates. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Edgar disguises himself as a “Tom o’ Bedlam,” a common term to refer to former inmates who might subsequently become wandering vagrants, while the Hospital itself appeared in the early Jacobean satire, Northward Ho, written by Thomas Dekker and John Webster. Such plays tend to provide romanticised or exaggerated views of asylums and the mad, for dramatic effect, humour, social commentary or political allegory. They provide better insights into the fears and obsessions at large in the world outside the hospital, than they do about conditions that actually obtained inside it.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Bedlam, by Nell Leyshon, runs from 5 September to 1 October at Shakespeare’s Globe, complemented by an art exhibition previously on show at the Bethlem Gallery – Portraits: Patients and Psychiatrists.