Bedlam: London and Its Mad

Bedlam—the very name conjures up graphic images of naked patients chained amid filthy straw, or parading untended wards deluded that they are Napoleon or Jesus Christ. We owe this image of madness to William Hogarth, who, in plate eight of his 1735 Rake’s Progress series, depicts the anti-hero in Bedlam, the latest addition to a freak show providing entertainment for Londoners between trips to the Tower Zoo, puppet shows, and public executions.

That this is still the most powerful image of Bedlam, over two centuries later, says much about our attitude to mental illness, although the Bedlam of the popular imagination is long gone. The hospital’s roots go back nearly eight hundred years—it was referred to in Shakespeare’s King Lear—and it became notorious by the dawn of the Victorian era for its brutal atmosphere and crumbling conditions. This absorbing book tells the story of this institution in thought-provoking detail, dealing with a subject still relevant in a society struggling with how to best care for the mentally ill.