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

periods, the 'Sport' often became riotous. The (aforementioned) correspondent to The World
of 1753, related seeing:
'a hundred people at least...suffered unattended to run rioting up and down the wards, making
sport and diversion of the miserable inhabitants',
on visiting the hospital during 'Easter-week' 181 . Like Tyon, he had witnessed 'some' of the
patients:
'provoked by the insults of this holiday mob into furies of rage; and...the spectators in a loud
laugh of triumph at the ravings they had occasioned'.
The episode of the young Bristol apprentice, which caused such a stir in the press of the
1760s, involved the same sort of 'insult[s]', 'laughing' and 'interrogatory', detailed by Tryon
and in The World, but with the crowning cruelty of the apprentice spitting in the face of the
patient he was watching, through the wicket of the cell door' 82 . Indeed, the very method by
which many patients were ogled, through these small barred apertures, may have emphasised
the distance, both physical and moral, between the observer and the observed, and acted as an
incitement to cruelty. The prevailing vision of the insane as animals, and the zoo-like conditions
in which many were kept (particularly the 'wet'/incontinent and violent cases); in straw, naked
or virtually so, and in chains; clearly provoked considerable antipathy at the sound, sight and
smell of Bedlamites 183. The pleasure which some visitors received from 'venting' their 'wanton
dispositions' upon such patients was pure sadism (and visiting was curtailed at Bethiem just
decades before de Sade was imprisoned).
To take such representations of visiting Bethlem at face value, nevertheless, is to ignore
their pervasively polemical content. Historians have too often simply echoed the shocked tones
181 The World, xxiii, 138.
182 London Chronicle, 21-3 May 1761, 491; Walpole, Correspondence, ltr to Conway, 29 October 1764; The
Pxblic Advertiser, 29 October 1764; St. James's Chronicle, 27-30 October 1764.
183 Swift's profound aversion to 'the noise, the sight, the scent' of the mad, is only too familiar. See A Character,
Panegyric, and Description of the Legion Clab (Dublin, 1736), in The Poems of Jonathan Swift (ed.), Harold
Williams (Oxford, Clarendon, 1937), 2nd edn (1966), is 52, 234-5, & 153-4, 831-5; Tale of a Trd (1702), 112-3;
'Accost the Hole of another Kennel, first stopping your Nose, you will behold a surly, glaring, nasty, slovenly
Mortal, raking in his own Dung, and dabbling in his Urine. The best Part of his Diet, is the Reversion of his own
Ordure, which escaping into Steams, whirls perpetually about and at last reinlunds...'; Gallsver's Travels (1726),
'A Voyage to Laputa', 178-9; 'I went into another Chamber, but was ready to hasten back being almost overcome
with a horrible stink...'. Thomas Fitzgerald, in his Bedlam. A Poem (1733 & 1776), 13, surely mimics Swift in
his lines about a patient hording 'his slender Meals...'Till to huge Heaps his treasur'd offals swell/ And stink in
every Corner of his Cell'. See, also, Pope, The Dsnciad. For the reality behind these images; e.g. instructions to
staff to remove patients' leftovers from their cells; and the general state of hygiene at the hospital, see chap. 3.
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