Question of the week: With Halloween on the horizon, is there a particular episode from London's history that gives you the shivers? "If you're looking for Halloween horrors, Bethlem Insane Asylum during the 16th and 17th centuries has to make the list. Its reputation for cruelty, callousness, and corruption followed the hospital from it's original home, now buried under Liverpool Street Station, to it's next incarnation in Moorfields. The word 'Bedlam', meaning noise and chaos, is coined from its name.
The glamour and elegance of late seventeenth and eighteenth century fashions take on a rather different cast when you remember that many of those who could afford it would pay a penny to peer at the incurable insane in their cells, even poking them with sticks if they were insufficiently entertaining.
Thomas Tryon complained in 1695 about the public being admitted on holy-days:
"It is a very undecent, inhuman thing to make... a show... by exposing them, and naked too perhaps of either sexes, to the idle curiosity of every vain boy, petulant wench, or drunken companion, going along from one apartment to the other"
In 1815 the hospital moved again, and, as attitudes to insanity changed became a less hellish place. Nowadays is a respected psychiatric hospital on yet another site in south London, but those horror stories about patients being chained up, beaten, starved, and neglected, and then treated as a freak-show linger on in popular memory. "
- Miss Alice
Want to read more? Related books in the LUP Library include:
Mind-Forg'd Manacles : A history of madness in England from the restoration to the regency, by Roy Porter
and
Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900 by Andrew Scull.
* Image: Hogarth's Rake's Progress #8
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