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

It is merely the ingenuousness of the young lady visitor of Richardson's Familiar LeUers
(1141), which is manifested by her inability to 'credit' what she has heard about Bethlem being
'often used for the resort of lewd persons to meet and make assignments' 321 . Yet such represen-
tations of the environment of the hospital, if regurgitated without qualification by historians,
remain distorted322 . Much of this is scurrilous scandal-mongering and muck-raking, and is
coloured by educated disdain. It is questionable just how much observers relied on each other
and how objectively on the reality they observed. Neither such conduct, nor the polemic that
accompanied it, were unique to Bethiem, but are encountered also in accounts of visitors to St.
Paul's, Westminster Abbey, and other sights and buildings open to the public. Of course, these
accounts and the writings and journals of members of the elite themselves demonstrate just how
endemic and tolerated prostitution was in early modern London 323 . Often, however, the type of
courting that went on at Bethlem must have been much closer to the more innocent practices
witnessed at many a local fair, and portrayed at Bethiem by Carey, in 1713324. At mid-century,
the oculist John Taylor ('only son of the celebrated [oculist Chevalier Taylor'), and his future
wife, 'chose...I3edlam' 'for their courtship' simply because the latter's father 'strongly opposed
their union', and the crowds of I3ethlem certainly provided perfect cover (as well as diversion)
for those 'obliged to court in secrecy'. That looking back from the perspective of the nineteenth
century, the author (also) John Taylor regarded his parents' choice of rendezvous as 'strange'
and the admission of 'casual visitors' to the hospital as a 'disgrace', is a measure of how much
'respectable' attitudes towards the insane had changed over the intervening period325.
Just as prostitutes inevitably pursued the crowds at Bethlem and elsewhere, hucksters and
thieves, too, infiltrated the ranks of visitors. Hucksters hawked their wares of 'Nutts Cake
[and]...fruite' to the patients and visitors, contributing to the fairground atmosphere of the
hospital326 . Exactly how customary this was is difficult to ascertain, nevertheless. Hucksters
(Oxford,
Clarendon, 1977), 271-2, Is 39-45.
321 Familiar LeUer,, 201-2.
322 See e.g. Altick, Show., 45.
See e.g. James Boswell, Bo,vell', London Jo.rnal (ed), FederickA. Pottle (London, Book Club Associates,
1974), 54, 240-41, 263-4 & paasi,n.
324 Henry Carey, Poem,, 128.
325 Taylor, Record. of mp Life, i, 3.
326 BC'GM, 30 March 1677, b1 358.
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