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

e sad', indicates how little had changed 316. The mad were still oddities, as nineteenth century
anecdotal collections of Bedlamites show. Even the first English publication devoted to a single
psychiatric case history was 'not free of a tendency to make cheap fun of a lunatic'317.
Ulterior Motives For Visiting
Not all those who came to Bethiem came only or primarily to see the patients. According to
literary and journalistic sources, the hospital served as adequately as did Whetstone's Park
as a place for elicit assignations315. In one Jacobean drama after another, the players are
drawn into (or references made to) amorous intrigues in Bedlam 319 . Despite the extremity of
Brown's and Ward's caricatures of the 'looseness of the spectators' a century later, the line of
descent to Jacobean times is discernible enough. Ward lampooned the hospital as 'a showing
room for harlots [and] a sure market for lechers', where 'every fresh corner was soon engaged
in an amour', who even 'though they came in single they went out in pairs'. Brown spread
opprobrium even further, describing 'half a Turn in a Long Gallery' as a means by which V.D.
was bargained for. Their allegations concerning the soliciting and permissiveness of Bethiem
receive limited confirmation from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in 1733, who condemns the
attitude of experience that:
...those Virgins act the Wiser Part,
Who Hospitals and Bedlams would explore,
To find the Rich and only dread the Poor;
Who legal Prostitutes for Interest's sake,
Clodios and Ti,nons to their Bosom take,
And (if avenging Heav'n permit Increase)
People the World with Folly and Disease320.
316 Cowper, Leuers, vol. ii, hr to John Newton, dated 12 July 1784, 265; Alexander Pope, Character,, 119.
317 Namely, John Haslam's Jilnatra lions of Maine,, (London, 1810), based on the case of James Tilly Matthews,
in Bethiem from 1797-1813; (ed.), Roy Porter (London, Routledge, 1988). For quote, see Porter's intro. xxxvi.
318 See Ward, London Spy, 55; Brown, Amnaemenl,, 35-6, and infra.
See e.g. Micldleton & Rowley, The Changeling; Ben Johnson, Bartholomew Fayre. Possibly this derives
from the controversial privileges of the hospital as a sixteenth century Gretna Green, outlined by O'Donoghue
and Reed. It seems highly improbable, however, that the celebration of unlicensed inamages at Bethlem survived
into the seventeenth century, outside iA literary tradition.
320 See The Answer to the foregoing Elegy (London, 1733)—i.e to An Elegy To A Vo-ang Lady, in the Manner
of Ovid.
With an Answer: By • Lady, Asthor of the Verses to the imitator of Horace, 1733 (London, 1733)—in
Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy (ed.), Robert Halaband & Isobel Gnmdy
71