In the Spotlight: John Robert Cozens and Bernardo Amiconi

This month we feature two artists, only one of whom was ever a Bethlem patient, the other being widely (and mistakenly) reported to have been such. One was a pioneer watercolourist of Georgian England; the other was an Italian artist of the Victorian age whose biography has been forgotten to such an extent that all our efforts at research have so far ended in frustration.

The works of landscape artist John Robert Cozens (1752-1797) exerted a remote but formative influence on English Romantic painters such as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, and were the subject of a documentary on watercolours recently shown on BBC1. The documentary’s narrator recounted what has come to be the received version of Cozens’ final years:

A doctor diagnosed him as suffering from ‘a decay of the nervous system’. Today, we’d call it a breakdown. At the age of 42, he was committed to the lunatic asylum, Bedlam. There is a final, bittersweet twist to Cozens’ story. The doctor that looked after him in Bedlam happened to be an art collector, and recognising Cozens’ brilliance, he bought up his pictures, and used to hold get-togethers of up-and-coming young artists, and he would sit them down and suggest that they copied Cozens’ work. Thus it was that a future generation of watercolourists were inspired by a man languishing in an asylum.

This is the received version, but it is incorrect in one important particular. John Cozens certainly was a patient of Thomas Monro, Bethlem’s physician from 1787 to 1816, but he was never a patient at Bethlem. Admissions to the eighteenth-century Hospital were not only restricted to those whose prognosis was promising – as previously noted on this blog – they were overwhelmingly constituted of paupers and the ‘middling sort’. Gentlemen suffering ‘a decay of the nervous system’ would consult ‘mad doctors’ such as Thomas Monro in a private capacity, if at all. This seems to have been exactly what happened to John Cozens: in February 1794 he was received into Dr Monro’s private care, and December 1797 he died whilst still in it. ¹

By contrast with Cozens, whose life and works have been the subject of much comment and criticism, the London-based Italian artist Bernardo Amiconi seems to have left little biographical trace, at least online. We can say that Amiconi was brought to Bethlem Hospital at the age of 48 in mid 1877, fresh from being apprehended by police in the course of attempting to enter Buckingham Palace. Apparently he had claimed not only an appointment with Her Majesty, but a shared nuptial understanding. Within six months, he had died in the Hospital, the inevitable outcome of so-called ‘general paralysis of the insane’, a terminal neurological condition for which no pathological description, let alone cure, was available in the nineteenth century. Why (in the light of Bethlem’s restrictions on admission) was he allowed into Bethlem in the first place? Those suffering from general paralysis ”would not be admitted if the Committee acted strictly within the limits of the regulations”, wrote the Hospital’s Physician Superintendent  in 1883, but ”if [GPI] be not studied in a hospital like Bethlem, which is essentially a hospital for cure and alleviation, I do not see much prospect for its future relief”. In short, Bethlem made an exception to its rules of admission for patients suffering from general paralysis (and then only for those whose families were able to pay for their hospital care). A cure for GPI was eventually found, but not at Bethlem and in any case not until the twentieth century, too late for Bernardo Amiconi and many others like him. To our knowledge, the world awaits a connected narrative of Amiconi’s life and works. We would be glad to hear from anyone who can supply reliable sources on the subject.

¹ A.P. Oppé, Alexander and John Robert Cozens (London: A&C Black, 1952), pp. 116-119.

In the Spotlight: Relatives 2

Having focussed on relatives of those historically associated with Bethlem or the Maudsley Hospitals in July, this month we turn our attention to three Bethlem patients who were related to people who were otherwise well known in their time, and to a fourth person who, while related to someone famous, was never a Bethlem patient – but is widely believed to have been.

At the start of the nineteenth century, Bethlem Hospital was locked in bitter rivalry with its near neighbour St Luke’s Hospital, whose founding physician William Battie made a point of admitting patients who had been discharged uncured from Bethlem for treatment. (As far as the patients were concerned, it may have been a case of ‘a curse on both your houses’. According to one of their number, popular wisdom about the respective regimes held that ‘St Luke’s is clean with tyranny; Bedlam’s all filth with liberty’.¹) Bethlem was not in the habit of returning this favour, but did so for one Mary Turner, who had been admitted aged around sixty to St Luke’s in November 1799 and discharged uncured in December 1800. Mary arrived at Bethlem shortly after Christmas in that year, and stayed until her death in April 1804. Today she is chiefly remembered as the mother of the artist J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). Since medical records were not kept by Bethlem at the time of Mary’s residence, Turner’s biographers have been able to do no more than speculate as to the reasons for her admission to the Hospital, the nature of her progress (in fact decline) there, and any possible effects on her artist son.²

Elizabeth Catlett, a beloved niece of the slave-trader turned evangelical preacher and hymn-writer John Newton, was admitted to Bethlem Hospital on 1 August 1801, spending about a year there before being discharged recovered. At the time of her residence, Newton was elderly, infirm and rather short-sighted, yet, according to his biographer Josiah Bull, ‘it was [his] custom to walk every morning at a certain hour to the hospital [in the company of a friend], and to look up to the window of the poor patient’s ward, and for each party to make an understood sign of recognition … at the turn…Pointing to the window, he would say [to the friend next to him], ‘ Do you see a white handkerchief being waved to and fro ?’ — he could not see himself — and being satisfied the good man returned home.’³

Bethlem Hospital was relocated, reformed and changed beyond recognition in the course of the century that followed the admission of Mary Turner and Elizabeth Catlett. By 1904, the London Argus could opine that its arrangements were ‘not so much those of an asylum or a hospital as of a first-class hotel’.⁴ Into this institution stepped a patient on transfer from the privately-run Bethnal House in May 1901, one Bertha Lawson, then wife of the Australian poet Henry Lawson. The pair had come to London with their two young children in the hope that they could make their living by Henry’s pen. (Incidentally, it would be unfair to consider Bertha solely under the rubric of her husband’s talent. She was an aspiring author in her own right. In London, however, her responsibilities were limited to childcare.) This hope was to be disappointed. Shortly after their arrival. Bertha’s health broke down – no thanks to her husband, according to his biographers – and she was hospitalised. Within three months of her transfer to Bethlem, she had recovered and left. However, Henry had been unable to establish a writing career in London in the interim, and the family returned to Sydney in 1902. Sadly, their return marked a decline in Henry’s fortunes from which he seems never to have recovered. A suicide attempt on the part of Henry, and an application for marital separation on the part of Bertha, followed in quick succession; and it was Henry, rather than Bertha, whose later years were spent in and out of Australian mental hospitals.⁵

That Hannah Chaplin (1865-1928), mother of the comic actor and film director Charlie Chaplin, was at one time a Bethlem Hospital patient is an established piece of wiki-orthodoxy, but one without any foundation in fact. Since the Hospital’s admission records, complete and comprehensive for the term of Hannah’s life, are held here at the Archives & Museum, we are in a position to be quite certain about this. In the 1890s, poverty forced Hannah and her sons Sydney and Charlie into temporary periods of residence at Renfrew Road Workhouse in Lambeth, an institution which had nothing to do with Bethlem Hospital other than being within sight of its distinctive dome. She later spent time at Cane Hill Hospital and Peckham House, but she was never admitted to Bethlem. How, then, to account for the persistence of rumours to the contrary? Is there, perhaps, something about the association of acknowledged celebrity with assumed notoriety which defies correction?

1 Mike Jay, The Air Loom Gang (London, 2003), p. 220.

2 Cecilia Powell, ‘Turner’s Women: Family and Friends’, Turner Society News (no. 62, December 1992), pp. 10-12.

3 Jonathan Andrews et al, The History of Bethlem Hospital (London 1997), p. 543.

4 Josiah Bull, But Now I See: The Life of John Newton (Edinburgh 1998).

5 Brian Matthews, ‘Henry Lawson’, Australian Dictionary of National Biography, volume 10 (Melbourne 1986), pp. 18-22; Meg Tasker and Lucy Sussex, ‘That wild run to London’: Henry and Bertha Lawson in England’, Australian Literary Studies (October 2007).

In the Spotlight: Relatives 1

We are about halfway through our 2011 series of blog posts that put former patients of note In the Spotlight. This month and next we are taking a slight detour from the original rationale of the series in order to highlight a number of Bethlem patients who are rather less well known than one or more of their relatives. Their ‘celebrity’, such as it was, was unsought, and theirs was a reflected glory. This month we focus on relatives of four people associated with Bethlem or the Maudsley; next month we turn our attention to relatives of people who were otherwise in the public eye.

George William Dadd was admitted to Bethlem in the same year (1843) as his artist brother Richard, Richard being of course one of Bethlem’s most notable patients, the subject of an ongoing exhibition at Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham and a new book by Nicholas Tromans. Like his brother, George spent the remainder of his life in hospital, dying in 1868; unlike him, he had committed no crime and was not confined in Bethlem’s Criminal Lunatic Department. Security was such in this ward that it is unlikely that the brothers ever met in hospital, despite being under the one roof.

Anna Maria Haydon was admitted as a Hospital patient in 1866 and, like the younger Dadd, stayed there until her death in 1899. She was the sister of George Henry Haydon, long-serving Bethlem Steward, one-time colonial explorer and author of Five Years in Australia Felix (London, 1846). Anna’s thirty-three year stay in an institution that divested itself of most of its uncured patients on after twelve months is probably an index of the esteem in which her brother was held throughout the Hospital. There is more about Haydon (George, that is) in the Australian Dictionary of National Biography.

Frances Ada Hood, daughter-in-law to Dr W. Charles Hood, Bethlem’s reforming Resident Physician of the 1850s, was brought for admission to the Hospital by her husband Basil Hood on 31 December 1887. Like Anna Haydon, she did not recover at Bethlem. Unlike her, however, she did not remain there. Despite representations made by the Lunacy Commissioners for an extension to her stay in consideration of the services her father-in-law had rendered to the Hospital, she was discharged uncured after twelve months, and transferred to Berry Wood Asylum in Northamptonshire, staying there 26 years before a further transfer to Coton Hill Hospital in Stafford.

Mary Mapother was a Bethlem patient for two months at the age of thirty-five in 1908, and for a later three-year period. She also had periods of residence in Burgess Hill Hospital in Sussex and Coton Hill Hospital in Stafford. Her 1908 admission papers were signed by her younger brother Edward, then a medical student at University College Hospital. Later that year, Edward joined the staff of Long Grove Asylum, where he worked until the outbreak of the First World War. After distinguished service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, Edward was appointed by the Ministry of Pensions to run the Maudsley Hospital, which had been requisitioned by the military. Then, when the Maudsley was turned over to civilian use in the early 1920s, he was re-appointed by London County Council as the Maudsley’s medical superintendent, a post which he held throughout the remainder of that decade and the entirety of the one that followed. Edward Mapother is generally credited with setting the new hospital on a course which led to an international reputation for excellence in psychiatric research and teaching as well as clinical practice. The fact of his sister Mary’s admission to Bethlem in the closing months of his medical training raises the intriguing possibility that the experience of mental distress within Edward’s own family had some bearing upon the trajectory of his eminent medical career.

Photograph of Sir William Charles Hood

Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives & Museum

In the Spotlight: A.W. Pugin

With due respect to those who have been put In the Spotlight so far, it cannot be said that any of them are actually household names. We warned about this at the outset of the series. Only a few of the patients we are featuring emerged from relative obscurity in their own lifetimes, and (given that all were admitted before 1939) their stars have long since waned. Last month’s post is a case in point. George Gilbert Scott Junior’s architectural achievements warrant recognition; yet who remembers him today? That said, the contemporary profile of this month’s subject, like Scott Junior an architect (and like him a convert to Roman Catholicism), is a little higher than usual. His principal works (the clock tower at Westminster popularly known as ‘Big Ben’ and the spire of Tolbooth St John’s among them) continue to define the skylines of British cities. Of him, Scott’s more famous father could write, ‘He was our leader and our most able pioneer’.¹ His name, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, is virtually synonymous with the Gothic Revival.

This is not the place to attempt a biography of the man (interested readers may follow the footnotes to this piece to find one), or to do anything other than place on record (as biographers have previously done) his five and a half weeks’ residence at Bethlem in the summer of 1852, suffering what a contemporary psychiatrist with access to Pugin’s Victorian medical notes has described as ‘mania without psychotic symptoms’ (F30.1 in the 1992 edition of International Classification of Diseases), and in a state of collapse following a sustained period of overwork. At one point Pugin’s Bethlem doctor, Alexander Morison, described how he ‘got him to make a sketch of his church at Ramsgate’ – St Augustine’s, on which he had been working since 1845 – but ‘so soon as he had completed [the sketch], he tore it up’. No mental improvement was recorded by Morison, yet at the end of July Pugin was discharged at the request, and into the care, of his friends and family. He died within seven weeks of leaving the Hospital, the cause of death recorded as ‘convulsions followed by coma’.² His life, though short, left a legacy which can still be seen today in the built heritage of Britain. It is appropriate, perhaps, that the once-derelict house in Ramsgate in which he lived and died, The Grange, has been restored by a conservation charity and is now available for holiday lettings.

¹ Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Penguin, 2008), p. 1.

² ibid. p. 492

In the Spotlight: George Gilbert Scott Junior

Since the subject of this month’s In the Spotlight is George Gilbert Scott Junior (1839-1897), arguably one of the least known of a family of prominent architects, one might be tempted to (unkindly) dub it ‘In the Shadows’. Scott’s father of the same name was a key figure in Victorian architecture’s Gothic Revival, and was responsible for the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, the Foreign Office, and the University of Glasgow’s Bute and Randolph Halls, along with many other domestic, public and ecclesiastical buildings. His son, Giles Gilbert Scott, was behind such ‘Gothic-modernist’ projects as Liverpool Cathedral, Battersea Power Station, Cambridge University Library and William Booth College in Denmark Hill, but is best remembered for having designed the iconic red London telephone box. His brother, John Scott, and remote cousin Elisabeth Scott, were also well-known architects of their respective generations.

Certainly George Gilbert Scott Junior had his own share of success, but he is less well remembered today, perhaps because two of his masterpieces (the Anglo-Catholic churches of All Hallows, Southwark and St Agnes, Kennington) were destroyed in the Blitz. The survival of a third signature ecclesiastical work (St John’s, Norwich, now a Roman Catholic diocesan cathedral) might be thought to be wryly appropriate in the light of his own conversion to Rome in 1880. Scott’s career was also disrupted by ill-health, both mental and physical, and alcoholism. Following a period of erratic, delusional and occasionally paranoid behaviour, he was admitted to Bethlem Hospital in July 1883. While in hospital, Scott commenced work on another of his ecclesiastical commissions, St Augustine’s Church in Hull. According to his modern biographer, the “notes [and] drawings made while he was confined were meticulously dated, as if to engage in academic or artistic activity…gave him a feeling of security and a hold on his sanity”.¹

Three months after his admission, Scott escaped the Hospital and fled the country, but shortly afterwards returned to England and to hospital, though not this time to Bethlem. He spent the next ten years in and out of hospital, but continued to “devote his best energies” to his architectural work, his attacks having “not affected his business capacity at all”, as his brother John wrote to one worried client.²

Scott died of cirrhosis of the liver and heart disease at the age of 67, while resident at the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station (ironically another of his father’s best known works, now restored and renamed the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel). The most affecting tribute to him came many years later, in his son Giles’ judgement of the respective professional merits of George Gilbert Senior and Junior: “Grandfather was the successful practical man, and a phenomenal scholar in Gothic precedent, but Father was the artist”.³

1 Gavin Stamp, An Architect of Promise: George Gilbert Scott Junior (1839-1897) and the Late Gothic Revival (2002), p. 334.

2 ibid., p. 337.

3 ibid., p. 361.