Bedlam

A Novel

Jennifer Higgie

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781836742050
• Subtopic: Historical Fiction
• Index: Literature

Jennifer Higgie presents a year in the life of Rich?ard Dadd, infamous inmate of one of England's most notorious sanitariums, London's Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam.

A young man of great promise, Dadd embarks on a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The two men travel through German forests, Alexan?drian brothels and across the desert to the Nile. By the time they find themselves beneath the unforgiving sun of Syria and Palestine, Dadd's fraught mind has been taxed to the limit with extraordinary images. He becomes stranger and more violent, changes his companion attributes to sunstroke. But in Dadd's imagination he has become a devotee of the god Osiris. Shortly after his return to England in 1843, the god directs him to take a life, and Dadd is set on the road to Bedlam.

At once jarringly acute and alarmingly askew, Dadd's voice is rendered with both empathy and acuity by Higgie. This is a poetic and consid?ered portrait of an artist, as well as an intriguing mystery about how, and why, a mind can go so swiftly and dangerously awry.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Broadmoor Hospital, 1885
• London, July 1842
• Time
• The First Room
• A Child Talks of Death
• Sea Travel
• A Family
• Disorientation
• Ostend
• A Woman Who Weeps and Speaks English
• Supper and Painting
• In a Coach
• First Night in Germany
• The Feeling When You Are Almost Awake in Another Country
• An Alpine Way
• A New Place to Sleep
• An Exercise
• Did He Exist?
• Small Things
• What Sir Thomas Loves
• Families
• Fathers and Sons
• Climbing
• Drinking
• Nights in a German Inn
• Wood in Germany
• Guilt
• The Idea of Italy
• Different Architects
• Another Arrival
• Mothers and Fathers and Children
• Religious Sense
• Venice
• Italian Painting
• Ballad Mongers
• Letters Home
• Maria Writes
• It Is Difficult to Believe It Exists
• A Dream in Rome
• The Colosseum
• Greece
• Everything Exists Only Once
• Looking Becomes Lines
• Bathing
• The Sea that Surrounds Greece
• The Parthenon
• Rhodes
• The Gulf of Corinth
• Delphi
• Fictions
• What Do I Draw?
• A Song
• A Conversation
• Night Again
• Speaking with Women
• The Impossibility of Sleep
• Lust
• How We Speak of Lust
• Convinced of Pursuit
• Productivity
• The Desert
• The Unsent Letter Home
• Cairo
• I Decide to Study the Egyptians
• The Lebanese Mountains
• The Inability to Speak
• Myths
• Speed
• I Read
• Another Letter from Home
• My Head Is a House
• Osiris
• The Solace of Some Words, the Difficulty of Others
• Buried Among the Ruins of Solitary Limbs
• Hardship in Palestine
• We Float Together, in Light
• Where Do Pictures Go if They Are Not Born?
• Almost Christmas
• We Go Ashore
• The Sun
• Banishing Sunlight
• The Return
• Destroying the Mark of the Devil
• Paris
• Arrival London, 1843
• Grass
• Nourishment
• A Visit
• The Beginnings of a Plan
• A Visit to a Doctor
• The End, Again
• Broadmoor Hospital, 1885
• Acknowledgments