Sketch to Illustrate the Passions: Anger

1854

It was thought that water could confine the anger of mania.

Cold water, of course; plunge baths from wooden bridges, into which a man could be precipitated, clothed or naked. Ice cold and pumped straight from the river, full of mud, it would leave him stranded up to his neck until the flood door was opened. The patient could then be retrieved from the floor, as often as not on his knees by the iron grille of the gate, trying to find his way out with the retreating water.

Shocking treatments would restore sanity to deranged minds; or, at the very least, calm a madman into submission even with the threat of them.

As the second half of the century dawned, Mr. Hood considered the new American treatments. He had an engraving sent to him of the Benjamin Rush tranquilizing chair, the patient being bound by foot and arm restraints and a shoulder brace. At the back of the chair protruded a rod, to which was fixed a head restraint, a box, which was lowered over the patient’s face. It was said that this was calming to those who suffered mania, and, due to its efficiency, many were bound to it for weeks at a time.

There was, too, the Utica crib, a coffinlike bed made of latticed wood. In the New York asylums, those who raved worst were tied to the crib, and the lid shut upon them so that they remained incapable of movement.

Bedlam itself had few such modernities. But in one of the lower rooms was a gyrating chair, held in a frame very like a gallows. It was an eighteenth-century invention, and, as such, inappropriate to the most advanced in modern thinking. For that reason, Hood had never expressly prescribed its use. Nevertheless, it was rumored that some of the keepers had once excelled in it.

The patient was bound to the chair, which itself was bound to a large spindle, turned by a metal rod by an attendant standing on a flight of stone steps. As the rod was pushed, the spindle turned and the patient, consequently, spun round. Some of the oldest attendants took a pride in how long they could turn the rod; moreover, in the days before Hood came, the public would pay gladly to see the entertainment of those released from the chair, for none could walk except in circles. Such delights increased the ticket sales, taken at the main gate by a creature of indigo color, leaning upon a moneybox, like Cerebus guarding the mouth of Hell.

Naturally, the paying public had long since been banned from the hospital. It was not that it was inconvenient; rather the contrary. The amounts paid were a source of needed income. But eventually the walks of the wards of Bedlam became notorious for whores, plying their trade out of the rain. Amours of a kind inhabited every corner. It had been said that at any hour in the day, a sportsman might meet with game for his purpose, as great a convenience to London as was the Long Cellar to Amsterdam.

But that was long ago. The room that held the chair was locked; nor were any of the inmates now chained. Only the water treatments and the Rush chair remained, and now, in the 1850s, Bedlam instigated one of its greatest innovations, a treatment to calm delusions. Each patient upon admission was photographed, the purpose being to confront each man and woman with a true image of himself.

Dadd had already heard about the photograph. One of the Clique had visited him and brought him the news of the fixing of image by Talbot’s calotype. They told him that in Regent Street, photographic establishments were set up, and that persons of quality attended them to record their faces forever in potassium iodide and silver nitrate.

Dadd had thought about it constantly, sitting alone, his eyes watching the slow progression of light across the wall.

This, then, was where the painter died, he considered. The reproduction of the face in art was obsolete; the painter’s interpretation of the soul in the face was not required. Nor was it needed for landscape; in time, he thought, the monochrome plates would capture color. There would be no more need to paint mountains, or trees bent by wind, or bridges, or docks, or rivers. Sooner or later, the photographic plate would take hold of the rushing of water and paste it into chemical, and seal it forever.

Man had stolen time; he had placed it in a lens. He had command of the seasons, capturing them in every mood. And he had command of other men.

A chair was brought into one of the galleries, on the landing before the doors. It was an ordinary kitchen bentwood chair with a rounded back. One morning, Anna Mary Rivers was brought here, a girl of eighteen of good family. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap and her eyes raised to the ceiling. She refused to look elsewhere and was photographed in this attitude, her hair disheveled, a calico hospital gown barely covering her shoulders. She made no attempt to look at the photographer and it is to be doubted if she knew he was there. The records show her date of admittance—1st June 1854—and the date of her discharge, six years later. Nothing else is noted, and the years before and the years after vanished as if they had never been, and all that Anna Mary Rivers ever was, or ever became, was an eighteen-year-old girl on a cheap chair, her upward-looking gaze like some kind of prayer.

Others came that same morning. One William Wright was newly admitted. Fay Reynolds, an old woman of seventy, had been resident at Bedlam for twenty-five years. Wright, in a state of frightened shock, was a schoolmaster, and the only reason found for his despair was his involvement in a drowning the year before, when he had found a woman’s body. Fay Reynolds had been perpetually in prison for prostitution before she refused to sleep, and sang to keep herself awake. They were treated with purges and water, and locked in calming rooms, and Fay Reynolds died and William Wright was released, without ever receiving their diagnoses of melancholia, or tertiary syphilis.

Dadd was brought to the chair just before twelve o’clock.

He did not know William Wright, but he looked carefully at him, thinking that he resembled his own brother. Wright was weeping as the photograph was taken, clutching at his chest. He was whispering to himself.

“Who is this?” Dadd asked the attendant.

“He is a fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge,” was the answer. Dadd was nudged in the ribs. “There you are, Richard,” said the steward, thinking it a joke. “You may talk to him in your Latin and he will understand you.”

Dadd stared at his fellow inmate. “What is the matter with him?” he asked.

“He has basses and trebles in his head,” the attendant replied. “That’s my opinion, Richard. He is a musical scholar, and he has too many basses and trebles muddling his brain.”

More often than not, Dadd would close his ears to this kind of reasoning. He heard it all around him every day. That such-and-such man had been driven mad by drink, or by visiting foreign countries, or by some kind of sin against religion. He knew that Brigham believed that his own illness had been brought about by sunstroke while he was in Egypt.

He did not know if it was the truth or not.

Lately, he had come to believe that Osiris had instructed him while his conscience was not awakened; that the murderous command had entered his head while sleeping, or distracted, and had solidified there, and made his brain its own wriggling, contorted, ungovernable place, so that he could never get the shape or size of it. And that if he slept now, or did not apply himself to concentration, the command would rise again.

And so for the last few weeks he had taken to awakening his conscience by trampling the floor of his sleeping cell. He stamped his feet until they were cracked and bleeding. They allowed him to do it for the first few days, and after that, they had called Mr. Hood. Brigham had suggested a straitjacket, of the kind that Dadd had worn when he had been admitted. But after watching Dadd for some time, and asking him what he was doing, Hood concluded that the straitjacket was not necessary.

“Richard,” he had said, gently laying his hand on Dadd’s arm. “You may rest from your labors. I believe you have vanquished the enemy. He is thoroughly flattened.”

Dadd did not hear the humor. He leaned away from Hood’s touch. “You had better go away,” he said. “Or he will set upon you.”

“Who will?” Hood asked.

“The Piper of Neisse,” Dadd replied.

Hood did not understand at the time; only later, in his study, did he find the reference in papers removed from Dadd nine years before. Dadd had written a manuscript poem, The Piper of Neisse, a Legend of Silesia. In it, a young man is imprisoned for witchcraft, because he can make even the least agile of men dance. He dies there alone and rises up from his grave each night, rousing the dead in phantom dances through the town.

When Hood went back to see Dadd a week later, the stamping had gone. Dadd was lying on his bed, chest rattling with bronchitis.

“How are you?” Hood asked him.

Dadd had turned a perfectly lucid face to him. “I am inhabited by both the piper and the god,” he said. “But they have taken to sleeping.”

“Don’t wake them,” Hood said.

Dadd’s eyes had filled with tears. “I have voices in their place,” he said. “Voices that speak my thoughts out loud. What shall I say to them?”

“Tell them to leave.”

“I cannot,” Dadd said.

And so Hood had sat with him long after it became dark, listening to the silence that Dadd claimed was full of sound.

William Wright was taken away.

The photographer motioned that Dadd should be brought forward.

Dadd stood by the chair, looking intently at all the apparatus; a large darkroom tent had been set up adjoining the washroom. Dadd gazed at the black folds of material and at the darkroom plates.

“Is this calotype?” he asked.

The photographer smiled. “Do you have a knowledge of the process?”

“No,” Dadd said. “But I have heard of it.”

“It is not calotype. It is collodion.”

Dadd put his head on one side. The photographer looked from patient to keeper: Dadd was tall and his beard was turning white. The hair was receding a little from his high forehead; the handsome eyes were piercing and intelligent. He resembled nothing more than an Old Testament prophet.

“Collodion,” Dadd echoed.

“That is correct. Also called collodium.”

“As in colletic, from the Greek, an agglutinant, a glue?”

The photographer paused. What little Greek he had once had was long since lost. Then, his expression brightened. “There is a kind of glue,” he replied. “To be sure there is. Mr. Frederick Archer has perfected it. It is a solution of gun cotton in ether. It is a sticky liquid with which we cover the plates.”

Dadd was silent for a moment. He was not used to conversation. He could hear his voices straining to interrupt his thoughts, and his body tensed.

The photographer had not noticed. “Collodion is more sensitive to light than calotype,” he was saying. “It has reduced the amount of time in which the image develops. It was necessary to wait many minutes with calotype; now the image is ready in two or three seconds.”

“It is sticky,” Dadd murmured. “To capture the image.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“On glass,” Dadd said, looking at the glass plates.

“The collodion is spread over the plate. Then the plate must be sensitized, exposed and developed when it is still wet.”

“To capture the image,” Dadd repeated.

The photographer looked at him expectantly, still waiting for him to sit.

“I have captured images,” Dadd murmured. “But they are not to be seen in the world. They are here.” And he tapped the side of his head. “You cannot take your collodium to them. There is nothing to fix them but my own hand. And they travel…” He extended his arm and pointed with the other hand down from his head, across his shoulder, and down the length of the arm to his fingers. “They travel on thought,” he said. “Which is not to be found in solution, or on glass plates, or in alcohol or water or with Pyro-Gallic.” He stepped toward the photographer. “I have learned all your names,” he said. “And yet you cannot fix me, nor my thoughts.”

He refused to have his photograph taken.

He went back to the criminal quarters and was quiet for hours. He would not answer Brigham’s gentle questions. Only in the evening did he begin to speak, ranting at the murder of portraits, of artists, of inspiration, by the collodion plate. When the rage was finished, he wept bitterly, hiding his face in the coarse pillow, drumming his feet like a child.

The next day, and the day after, he bore all the aspect of grief, unwilling to eat or to wash, throwing his food on the floor in what seemed to be desperate mourning.

He was locked in his room.

On the fifth day, he began to paint.

The watercolor was almost structural, sculptural, in its strong contrast. At the top left-hand corner was a house seemingly ablaze; in the bottom right, a forge. Two figures stood by the fire, their bodies and faces whitened by the glare. A third face was barely visible, in the shadows and staring into the flames.

In the inscription, winding under the heel of one of the figures, he wrote, “Sketch to illustrate the passions. Anger, by Richard Dadd, October 17th, 1854, Bethlehem Hospital, London.”

He gave it to Mr. Hood, who kept it on the wall facing his desk, and stared, too, into the white-hot flames, and what they had consumed.