Queen Mary and Westfield College London University PhD Thesis ...

een worn by the apprentices of Bridewell and the blue-coat boys of the charity schools, and had
long represented sombre charity and humility (as well as subservience), was now extended to the
inmates and staff of Bethlem. Not only was it adopted as the garb of charity patients (i.e. those
clothed and maintained at the sole charge of the hospital), and for the Porter's and basketmen's
coats of office; but it was also added to the new poor' boxes carved out of wood in the form
of two life-size figures, representing male and female patients/beggars (see Fig. 2c) 52 . Thus,
visitors would be even more directly accosted at their entrance or exit by a vivid and calculated
appeal for charity. From 1709, the inscription over the poors' boxes was posted additionally
on the outer and inner doors of the hospital (although rather to prevent embezzlement than to
elicit charity) 53 . The stark and shocking image of the insane conveyed by Cibber's statues (see
Fig 2d) of raving and melancholy madness displayed over the main gateway to new Bethiem has
received a great deal of attention from historians keen to illustrate the prevalence of brutal and
freakish conceptions of the mad in this period. The contrast of the poors' box representations
of patients with the Cibber figures has rarely, however, been commented on by historians, yet
quite clearly reflects the coexistence of a rather more generous and practical notion of the plight
of the insane and the function of visiting.
Visitors might also act as informal overseers of the hospital, and the displaying of its
standing orders on tables (in the same manner as the benefactors' tables) to be 'scene and
read' by all visitors, plainly had this object in mind (besides that, of course, of appealing for
donors by advertising 'the good government' of the hospital) 54 . Anonymous information given
to the Court concerning abuses and the infringement of rules at Bethlem, must occasionally
have been provided by spectators (even if, more frequently, they preferred to address themselves
to the press).
The best illustration of this dual role of visitors as overseers and benefactors, was when,
in the 1690s, the Governors established the Wardrobe Fund. This was directly provoked, ifller
alia, by the spectacle of (and the Governors embarrassment at) naked patients exposed before
See replica & real almS boxes designed for the Moorfields building, at BRHA & Science Museum; Alideridge,
1976 Catalogue to BRH Museum, 25 & 50; John Thomas Smith, Ancient Topography of London (London, 1815),
33-4; in/re, 'poors' boxes', & chap. 5, esp. ref. 157. In fact, the veneer of charity in this instance soon rubbed
off. No trace of blue appears to survive in the coats of paint subsequently sdded to the poors' boxes, while the
blue-coated charity patients of Bethiem disappear as a distinct group to be seen at the hospital, or recorded in
its minutes, almost immediately after 1676. I sin grateful to Vicky Reed for some of the details of this account
and for reawakening my interest in the design of the boxes.
BCGM, 25 Feb. 1709, fol. 465.
See e.g. BCGM, 22 April 1681, fol. 217, when this is directed for the first time for the new Moorfleldø
building.
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