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

'overpowered...by the solicitations of...friend[sJ' to visit Bethlem 311 . The ingenuousness of the
standard assertion of disinclination was partly belied by the visit and the account of the visit
themselves. 'Benevolus', in The London Chronicle of 1761, became decidedly mawkish when
inveighing over the hard-heartedness of a female visitor and comparing her to his ideal vision of
motherhood, in a painting depicting 'the snowy bosom' of a mother suckling her child 312. Far
from perceiving the insane truly, Mackenzie's Harley repeated the same old caricatures that had
pervaded Bedlam literature for centuries. The brutish keeper vies with the mad mathematician,
speculator, schoolmaster, sultan/king, in a tradition that owes more to Ward, Brown, Swift
and Hogarth, than to the reality of Bethlem 3t3 . Even the celebrated love-sick young lady, who
reduced contemporary readers to tears, seems, to modern eyes, an artificial, stylised model,
derived considerably from the earlier models of Ophelia and Clarissa. harley's sympathy and
charity to the 'unfortunate' girl is also a very old ideal, although driven home with more pathos.
As John Mullan has observed, literary 'sensibility is a construction. The novels which use it as
an incarnation of alienated sensitivity are not reports on social conditions, and resist reduction
to social history'314.
Not all visitors were unconscious of the taint of affectation. Sophie von Ia Roche, for
example, recognised that 'my grief and despair could do the poor sufferers no good' 315 . While
'curiosity' still drew Sophie to Bethlem, it was not to try out the wit and extravagance of the
patients, but 'to test the truth of [the hospital's]...philanthropy'.
That more visitors laughed in spite of themselves or 'angry with myself', like Cowper,
when previously they had laughed 'honestly' or less guiltily, is significative of a real change in
attitudes, arising out of enlightened sensibility. That as late as 1784, however, Cowper and other
paragons of the new feeling still sought to 'excuse' being 'merry where there is more cause to
311 laid; The World, xxiii, 137. This was not an entirely novel device or always disingenuous, of course. Pedro,
in The Pilgrim, had been persuaded by a city gent to visit Bethlem, despite his initial disinclination; Ill, vi, Is
6-23. Cowky, too, claimed to 'have been drawn twice or thrice by company to go to Bedlam, despite having been
sickened by the experience; Euaps, 93.
312 London Chronicle, 21-3 May 1761, 491.
313 Man of Feeling, 29-35. See, also, Everett Zimmerman, 'Fiagments of history and The Man of Feeling: from
Ridard Bentley to Walter Scott', in Eighteenik Cenftiry Stsdiej, vol. 23, no. 3, Spring 1990, 283-300; 291-2 &
note 13, re. the double-edged nature of Mackenzie'g vision of the mad.
314 John Mullan, Sen jimeni and Soc,aih g1. The Lsngteage of Feel,ng in Ike E,gkleenili Cenlsry (Oxford,
Clarendon, 1988), 224 and p5mm, asp. thap. 5.
315 Sophie in London, 166.
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