The Madhouse of Language

Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century

Allan Ingram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134968978
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Language has always been used as a measure of social, ideological, and psychological contexts for the exploration of madness. The Madhouse of Language considers the relations between madness and language from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, focusing on the close analysis of both medical records and texts by mad writers. It presents a highly original account of the linguistic relations between madness and sanity, of the appropriation by sane writers of the forms of English, and of attempts by mad patients to gain access to the expressive potential of language.

1
Introduction: to Build a House for Fools and Mad

In the early hours of the morning of Friday, 7 November 1788, after two days of delirium, George III arose from his bed and walked into the next room to find a conference of his sons, his physicians, his equerries and his pages. He expressed amazement and consternation. He demanded to know the meaning of the gathering. He grew angry, and publicly berated his personal physician, Sir George Baker, penning him into a corner and calling him an old woman whose advice he never should have followed. No one had the temerity to intervene until at last one of those present, a Mr Fairly, took him by the arm and got him back to bed.¹

There was no escaping the magnitude of the disaster.

Here, then, was the turning point. This was the precise moment when ceased the dominion of a Sovereign over his subjects, and when began, on the contrary, the dominion of sound minds over an unsound one. Here, then, let History pause.²

Before his recovery, many more violent means were to be adopted in order to keep him in his bed, or to subdue his agitations, including medicines, blisters, the strait-waistcoat and the restraining-chair.

George's first bout of serious mental illness began properly in October 1788, at Windsor, and lasted through a winter of confinement at Kew until March 1789. The acknowledgement of a mad king on the throne of England brought many issues into play, and there were many other 'pauses' during the crisis. Not least, the government of the country was thrown into a state of perpetual pause, with the Prince of Wales and Opposition figures like Burke, Fox and Sheridan intriguing for a Regency, while the Prime Minister, Pitt, and other ministry figures waited in the hope of a complete recovery. Yet recourse to a regency itself suffered from pause, as William Grenville noted:

No Regent can be appointed or authorized to exercise acts of royal authority but by Act of Parliament; nor can any such Act be valid and binding in law without the King's consent. . . . It is a heavy calamity that is inflicted upon us in any case except that of his perfect recovery; but in the event which there seems most ground to fear, it may give rise to serious and difficult questions, such as cannot even be discussed without shaking the security and tranquillity of the country.³

At least one of the royal physicians, Dr Richard Warren, was known to support the Prince of Wales and to have, therefore, an interest in the king's continuing insanity, though Baker and others were simply at a loss as to how to diagnose or treat the illness, or even how to approach their patient. The constitutional pause was mirrored by a professional and medical one, which was itself complicated by a pause in propriety. Accustomed to receive orders when called in to a royal consultation, physicians had no precedent for prescribing, still less for enforcing instructions of their own. Warren had to form his first opinion of the royal state of mind by listening at a keyhole when George refused to see him. Early in the crisis, Fanny Burney, then a lady-in-waiting to the queen, recorded: 'It seems, but Heaven, avert it! a threat of a total breaking up of the constitution.'⁴ Her concern is for the king's health, but she automatically expresses it in terms that reflect the threat to the political sanity of the entire nation.

One of the earliest signs of the impending collapse was George's 'incessant loquaciousness'.⁵ Fanny Burney reported on Saturday, 25 October, that 'He spoke, with a manner so uncommon, that a high fever alone could account for it; a rapidity, a hoarseness of voice, a volubility, an earnestness — a vehemence, rather — it startled me inexpressibly.'⁶ Ironically (and the crisis is as full of ironies as of pauses), while Grenville refrained from even discussing the madness issue for fear of'shaking the security and tranquillity of the country', and the royal physicians struggled to discover the proper address to an unsound royal mind, the king talked himself into hoarseness. His 'ramblings', records Robert Fulke Greville, a royal equerry, 'continued, and were more wild than before, amounting alas to an almost total suspension of reason - No sleep this Night The Talking incessant throughout'.⁷ At times the king spoke with an almost Shakespearian sense of enigma:

I am not ill, but I am nervous: if you would know what is the matter with me, I am nervous. But I love you both very well; if you would tell me the truth: I love Dr Heberden best, for he has not told me a lie: Sir George has told me a lie — a white lie, he says, but I hate a white lie! If you will tell me a lie, let it be a black lie!⁸

As his illness progressed, the ramblings became more indecent, with constant allusion to Lady Elizabeth, Countess of Pembroke. He worried, too, about the imminent flooding of London, and he called upon his youngest daughter (then aged 5) to save him from his tormentors.

As the king's language became wilder and less restrained, those around him, and those at the head of the nation, became more and more cautious over every word they let out. 'Rex noster insanit', wrote Warren, confidentially, to Lady Spencer.⁹ Sheridan, in a letter to J.W. Payne concerning a proposed statement from the Prince of Wales, pointed out: 'Every syllable of the Declaration will be canvass'd and all sort of meaning discovered in every syllable.'¹⁰ The Morning Post reported on an attempt by 'one of the leaders of Opposition . . . to induce the Conductors of the Public Prints not to mention the illness of the KING'.¹¹ Dr John Willis, in attendance day and night, maintained discretion even in his private journal, reducing his record of the application of the strait-waistcoat to the decency of'&c'.¹² But it is in the daily health bulletins, released by the physicians from Kew, that the delicacy of the language issue is most sharply focused. On the state of the king's health depended not only the professional reputations of the physicians, but the prospects for a regency. Each word, then, was weighed in the scales of professional and political rivalry. On the morning of 16 December, for example, Francis Willis (father to John) proposed the wording 'a very good night' after the king had slept for six hours. However,

The 6 hours sleep was composed of 3 different sleeps. Upon which Sir L. Pepys said, 'you see Dr Willis, do what you will, you cannot make it a good night without splicing'. Dr Willis would only sign to very good night. Sir G. Baker would not sign to the word very.

The bulletin, signed by all three men, eventually read: 'His Majesty had a very good night having had six hours sleep.'¹³ Willis's reputation moved up a couple of syllables, Baker's down, and a regency became a fraction less likely.

The whole crisis was complicated still further by the compelling figure of Francis Willis. When the royal physicians failed to make any progress, despite frequent additions to their number, desperate measures were recognised as necessary. Willis was not a regular doctor, not orthodox, hardly respectable. He was a clergyman turned madhouse keeper from Lincolnshire, already in his seventies, with a reputation for 'breaking in' patients. When proper professional address failed, the professionals agreed to try someone they did not even regard as a medical man. And Willis's approach was quite different from Warren taking notes through the keyhole, or Baker suffering ignominious verbal abuse from an unsettled sovereign.

His usually friendly and smiling expression changed its character when he first met a patient. He suddenly became a different figure commanding the respect even of maniacs. His piercing eye seemed to read their hearts and divine their thoughts as they formed. In this way he gained control over them which he used as a means of cure.¹⁴

Language, in Willis's approach, was secondary. The eye was the medium of address, not the voice, though the eye achieved its supremacy by seeming to 'read' the patient himself. Willis was quite capable, however, of utilising language as part of his treatment.

Dr Willis had the King confined to his Chair this Morning for a short time, & gave Him a severe lecture on his improper conversation, Eliza, &c.; H. My. becoming more loud & impatient under this Lecture, Dr Willis ordered a Handkerchief to be held before his Mouth, & He then continued & finished his Lecture.¹⁵

Language, though, is made to support an entire regimen in which subordination of the patient is paramount — physical confinement, mental surveillance, linguistic restraint. Willis lectures the king on his conversation. Language is used to subdue language, but depends for its efficacy both on Willis's insight into the patient's mind and on his employment of the res training-chair and the gag.

When Willis and his team of sons and keepers entered the corridors of the royal mind, they brought the management of madness to the very centre of national consciousness. Private madhouses had been in existence since at least the seventeenth century, and had developed throughout the eighteenth, unregulated until the Act of 1774 (which related only to houses within a seven-mile radius of London). They offered confinement for usually only a few patients whose family could afford to be relieved of a public embarrassment. James Boswell's elder brother John spent most of his life in a private madhouse in Newcastle, paid for by his father, the Scottish law lord, Lord Auchinleck. Medical, or semimedical, treatment was also provided.¹⁶ Suddenly, in December 1788, the private world of discreetly concealed lunacy was in the public domain. The royal palace at Kew had itself become a house of madness, complete with mad-doctor, strong attendants, restraining apparatus, and a raving madman who really was king of England.

The crisis of 1788-9 was a personal one, for the king apparently came close to death during the early part of his illness, and, once recovered, never forgot the treatment to which he had been subjected. It was a political crisis, and also a medical one. It raised issues of power and authority. What happens to constitutional power when the head is deranged? How should the balance of power between physician and patient be understood, between mad-doctor and madman, now that psychiatry had been invited in from the cold? But it also brought into focus an issue which will be the subject of this book: the relationship between the power of insanity and the authority of language.

One of the most influential books to be written this century on the subject of madness is Foucault's Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.¹⁷ Foucault argues two major theses: that madness during the age of reason was subjected to an increasingly rigorous physical confinement, and that what madness had to say for itself was effectively reduced to silence. The first of these claims has been largely invalidated by the researches of more recent historians of madness: with only around 5,000 people estimated as inmates of asylums by 1800, the eighteenth century in England cannot properly be regarded as the age of 'The Great Confinement'.¹⁸ But confinement does not need to be physical to be effective. For Foucault, madness in the eighteenth century was permitted no language because it had nothing to say. It was heard to be speaking only its own 'scandal' and to the ears of reason had therefore no special truth to communicate. While the religiously inspired madman or woman, or the witty fool, of earlier periods was granted a privileged role within the social framework, and thereby retained a voice in the acknowledged discourse of sanity, a more rational age heard nothing but the threat of impending 'unreason' in the unrecognised logic of the mad. Foucault's exploration of the discourse of madness, its structures and imperatives, its parody of the forms of reason in the face of reason's obstinate inattentiveness, is the history of a resolute linguistic repression.

Foucault regarded discourse as historically located, and insisted on dealing with discursive practices rather than with general descriptions of discourse. We are enabled to speak of certain subjects at certain times because certain discursive practices allow us the language and freedom to do so.¹⁹I propose to examine the language of the mad between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries, both the accounts of madness produced by madmen and former madmen like Alexander Cruden and Urbane Metcalf, and the poetry and more acknowledged literary productions of, for example, Cowper and Smart. In order to do so, however, I shall spend some time in providing a linguistic and medical context for the discursive practices of the eighteenth-century mad. George Rosen, in 1967, argued for the importance of context in conducting medical history:

to view health and its problems within a societal context rather than as defined by the professional interests of physicians, it becomes necessary to learn about people with whom the healers at any given period are concerned. This involves the ascertainment as far as feasible of population structure and change, modes of life, occupations, social organization, including such matters as the social position of women.²⁰

Such a broad context is beyond my reach. But no less demanding is the context provided by contemporary linguistic practice. The editors of The Anatomy of Madness argue that

the recognition and interpretation of mental illness, indeed its whole meaning, are culture-bound, and change profoundly from epoch to epoch, in ways inexplicable unless viewed within wider contexts of shifting power relations, social pressures, and ideological interests.²¹

Language, above all, remains from earlier periods as a measure of social, ideological and psychological contexts for the exploration of madness. Ways of being mad are held 'to show most clearly the cultural, social, and ideological factors which influence definitions and perceptions of disease and constrain the behaviour of both patients and their doctors'.²² The language in which madness is discussed — its structures, its devices, its silences — is a key to such factors.

The first part of this study will concern itself with the question: what forms of expression already existed for talking and thinking about madness? In Chapters 2 and 3 I shall give a survey of attitudes to the causes and cure of madness in the works of some of the more significant theoreticians and practitioners of the period, and in Chapter 4 will turn to closer analysis of the expression of attitudes towards the mad in literary and semi-literary works. This will involve looking beyond medical books and pamphlets to a range of contemporary writing — essays, journals, correspondence, conversation, legal opinion, and also the works of recognised writers, including satirists like Swift and Pope and novelists like Smollet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 INTRODUCTION: TO BUILD A HOUSE FOR FOOLS AND MAD
• 2 THE HISTORY OF SILENCE
• 3 CRACKS IN THE WALLS
• 4 BORROWED ROBES
• 5 THE STRUGGLE FOR LANGUAGE
• 6 THE INNER VOICE
• 7 RHYME AND REASON
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index