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

tered, and gradually withdrew from entertainments and recreations they had once shared2".
The exclusion of the general public from visiting lunatic hospitals, such as Bethkm, St. Luke's,
St. Patrick's and Manchester, in the second half of the eighteenth century, with the exception
of patients' friends and moreover, those authorised by a governors' ticket (i.e. the governing
classes, or 'persons of quality'), must be seen very much as part of the same transition.
While the significance of this shift in attitudes towards (the exhibition of) the insane is
beyond doubt, its abruptness and extremity has been exaggerated. Even Porter, who admits
the 'maudlin' property of the 'new feeling', affirms the 'break' between early and late eighteenth
century accounts of visiting as 'total', and finds 'little sign', 'before mid-century', 'that visitors
treated Bethlem other than as a side show'226.
Already, by the early seventeenth century, however, laughing visitors were being asked
indignantly by patients, 'Do you laugh at Cod's creatures ? do you mock old age you roagues
7', and were being forced to own a certain kinship with the mad 227. Granted, making fools
of visitors, was itself all part of the entertainment, and the mirror of ridicule might just as
easily be turned back upon the delusions of the patient 228. l3cthlem was not, nevertheless,
simply 'good, clean fun' 229 . Even the gay gentleman who extolled the delights available to the
madhouse visitor in The Pilgrim, and compared the 'fancies' of patients to buzzing flies, so
'light. ..that [they] would content ye', recognised that there were 'some [patientsj of [such] pitty,/
That it would make ye melt to see their passions', and that there were some visitors whose
'temper[s] were 'too modest,! [and] too much inclined to contemplation', to enjoy the sight'230.
Although many contemporaries partook of this 'mirth in madness', others, like the Royalist poet,
Cowley, found (1666/7) 'no great pleasure' in it, so 'tender' was their 'compassion', and many
more acknowledged the ambivalence of the experience 231 . Cowley's visits to Bethiem 'wrought
225 See Burke, Pop iilar & Elite Culture; Malcoimson, Recreations.
226 Porter, Manacles, 91-2.
227 Thomas Dekker, The Honest Whore, Part I, V, ii, Is 201-2, in The Dramatic Work, of Thomas Dekker
(ed.), Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, CUP, 1955), vol. ii, 99.
228 See ihid, Is 200-227, 99-100, where 'I. Madman' makes a fool of Pioratto (who had answered in the affirmative
when asked if he was the madman's eldest son) but proceeds to mistake the Duke instead for his son, and falls
into ihe delusion that his visitors are the pirates who sunk his ship.
229 Porter, Manacles, 91-2.
230 i, vi, Is 6-19.
231 Essap,, 93-4.
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