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

a similar fashion, in The Changeling (1622), Isabella asks Lollio, the keeper, to 'Afford me then
the pleasure of your bedlam"39.
Londoners and tourists from the country and abroad flocked to Bethlem in droves, as one of
the wonders of the city. Bethiem was, typically, just one stop on a tour that could include any or
a number of the sights; Fisher's Folly, the Tower, Westminster Abbey, the Zoo, the Waterworks,
London Bridge, the Exchange, Whitehall, the China houses, the theatre, the gardens of London,
and the other amusements of Moorfields. Obviously, one needs to escape from exaggerated
statements like 'everybody who lived in London or ever came to London visited I3ethlem as a
matter of course' 140. There is no doubt, however, that, like its patients, the majority of Bethlem's
visitors must assuredly have hailed from London and its environs, and that Bethlem was one of
the major attractions for visitors from outside the capital. Indeed, native Londoners and other
residents seem to have felt a real obligation to show their guests Bethlem. It is according to this
tradition, transposed to Spain in Fletcher's The Pilgrim, that Pedro, as a stranger to Segovia,
is conducted to the city madhouse by a resident gentleman. For such gentlemen, Bethiem was
merely a 'showe' 'worth view', and might even cheer and divert them (as it was intended for
Pedro) from their own melancholy. Thus, also, Mackmode, in George Farquhar's Love and a
Bottle (1697/8), as an Irishman visiting London (as was Farquhar himself, in 1697/8), 'longs',
'Of all the Rarities of the Town', 'to see nothing more than the Poets [i.e. Poets' Corner, in
Westminster Abbey] and Bedlam" 41. However inhumane visiting the insane was to appear by
the latter eighteenth century, to polite society formerly it might on the contrary, be considered
'barbarous not [my italics] to have let' a young lady down from 'the Country' 'see the Tower,
the abby, and Bedlam, and two or three Plays'142.
Quite apart from fiction, in 1610, Lord Percy, Lady Penelope and her two sisters 'saw the
lions, the shew of Betlilem, the places where the prince was created, and the fireworks at the
Artillery Samuel Pepys sent his cousin's children (down from Cambridge fot a
fortnight) 'to see Bedlam', in 1669, as their first treat on an itinerary that was to embrace
139 CFizngeling, Ill, iii, I 21; 45.
140 O'Donoghue, Bethlehem, 152.
141 jj, jj , l 346-8.
142 See Fielding, CC), No.54. 1752, 294.
143 See MSS. Repori VI, p1.1, appendix, 229b, 8 February 1610; O'Donoghue, Bethlehem, 405.
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