This morning I awoke in that anxious state when the most familiar objects assume a hostile cast, and you wonder what on earth could inspire so hateful an array. It was either pace back and forth in an atmosphere of unremitting menace or pass along the gallery and visit our would-be regicide James Hadfield.
I chose Hadfield not for his charms (he has none) but for the magnetic fluid the gang circulate through his cell. The gang’s methods of working are as numerous as their victims, but the essential principle is the magnetic impregnation of unsuspecting men and women in order to suck their secrets, influence their actions, or else slowly destroy them. My hope was inoculation against what they plan for my Saturday appearance before the Bethlem subcommittee. The reason I can come and go (on the men’s side) was nine years ago The Schoolmaster removed my chains for good. Perhaps he remembered it’s discipline he stands for, not punishment. Or wearied of the game of rewarding me by giving me back my engraving tools and punishing me by taking them away again. Perhaps it dawned on him there’s something wrong when removal of a deprivation is counted as a privilege. So for nine years I’ve had the care of a small garden plot among the ruins of the inner wall, and he’s let me come and go there as I please.
In my freedom from chains I’m luckier than Hadfield, who though he’s got his own room has been shackled the better part of seven years, ever since he knocked Benjamin Swain over a bench and so qualified Swain in the governors’ published statement to have died of natural causes. What more natural than a blow from a lunatic? A lie to the public? Four months later, in July, Hadfield enjoyed a brief hiatus from restraint when he escaped in the company of John Dunlop. They got as far as Dover, where a whore they jumped lived long enough to report them to the authorities. After that the governors required Sir Archy and The Schoolmaster to put in writing their thoughts concerning hospital security. This they did to everyone’s satisfaction, although Sir Archy’s failure at the time of escape to tell anyone two patients were missing the subcommittee found “highly reprehensible.” Of course nothing changed. The surveyor was called in to inspect the locks and that was the end of the episode. People are always escaping from here, whether or not they’ve slipped Sir Archy a quid for the privilege. The more of us on the streets or in private care at private expense or stuck like a pin-auger in the bosoms of our families the better—or so goes the latest thinking.
In this The Schoolmaster’s always been ahead of his time, except when it comes to some of us and the private-care-at-private-expense part, hating as he does anyone who’d make a fortune off mental suffering. An international reputation for himself is another matter.
After his Dover holiday, Hadfield was first returned to Newgate, but since then he’s been back and forth between here and there half a dozen times. No one wants him, but there’s no question they’ve got him. When he’s here, he’s as agreeable as the next base malcontent, cleanly in his person, knacky and ingenious in his amusements. By trade a silversmith, he puts his time to good use weaving straw baskets and writing poems, including a very pretty one on the death of his squirrel Jack, which concludes,
So there is an end to my little dancing Jack
That will never more be frightened by a Cat.
Such nimble productions he sells to the few visitors allowed through, his popularity with them that know him by reputation alone running second only to Peg Nicholson’s and my own. By this means, combined with his government pension of sixpence per day, he dresses nattily and keeps his birds and cats plump on seed and fish scraps and himself mighty on tobacco.
Unfortunately for Hadfield, visitors of late have been scarce. So too admissions. Despite an influx in recent years of mental casualties of Bonaparte’s cannons, our number is now not much over two hundred and dropping fast, most tucked away in chains. Though outraged at the thought of genteel folk shirking the sight of lunatics, The Schoolmaster’s an advocate of the soothing power of darkness, particularly for wet or dirty patients, who end up on straw in the basement. The formula for their condition is insensible to the calls of Nature. Straw, being closer to Nature, must help them to hear her when she calls. They certainly can’t see her. Advice to visitors: Bring a lanthorn, and don’t forget a scented handkerchief—in case they let you in. If the place was a ruin when I first came, at least it was a teeming ruin and not a dank, stenchy desolation of whistling drafts and clanging iron. When much of the east wing went, I lost my longest home here and the women patients their tub bath. Now the ones who won’t or can’t endure the shower-bath you daren’t approach for the stink.
So our alma mater moans and begs in the same street she always did, a grizzled, blasted, rotten veteran of a century and a quarter of government neglect. This, by the way, is largely the result of a Bethlem treasurer named Kinleside absconding twenty years ago—long before either Jack or I arrived—with six thousand pounds. A Select Committee of Inquiry’s judgment of Bethlem’s record-keeping and accounting as “extremely obscure and defective” has resulted in a government policy as good as designed to deepen and justify the shadow, resulting in ideal conditions for the gang to sprawl together in promiscuous intercourse and establish their filthy community.
Meanwhile, most in here have no conception of the treatment they receive as anything other than malevolent and unnatural chastisement for misdoings they can’t begin to conceive. They wake up they-know-not-where, not in their right mind; unable to comprehend anything for certain; unwitting of decisions being made behind their back that yet directly affect their chances of survival; allowed no say, no privacy, no respect for their station—or what was once their station; at the mercy of a cabal of vicious drunks who treat them any way their savage whims dictate. For most it’s like drowning in a pitch-black well while their guardians stand around and lob rocks. It’s farther in here to justice than to sanity. The fist is always right in our face.
But there was a reason beyond outrage and magnetic inoculation I went to see Hadfield on the eve of my hearing, and that was I sometimes think his case might suggest a legal remedy for my own, if only I could figure out what it is.
Like Palmer Hurst, Kooney Nugent, William Wake, and Urbane Metcalfe, to name four others I’ve counted as friends in here over the years, Hadfield is with us as a danger to his Majesty. Nine years ago, the King was making his bows upon entering Drury Lane Theatre, when Hadfield fired a pistol at him from the pit, the ball lodging in the ceiling of the royal box. In the traditional course of things, such overt aggression against the ruling monarch would mean instant hanging. But the defence—none other than my sometime supporter Lord Erskine, arguing before four judges, one of whom (Lord Kenyon) had recently put me away for good—drew attention to Hadfield’s head. Grossly visible there were the sabre wounds he’d received in ‘93 as a soldier in the Fifteenth Light Dragoons at the Battle of Lincelles. These Erskine succeeded in establishing as the manifest source of Hadfield’s intellectual disturbance. Suffering, as a result, extensive intimations of the dissolution of all human things, Hadfield only wanted to kill the King as a means to his own execution and so avoid the dishonour of suicide. A more frequent motive among the general population of assassins than you might suppose.
Even so, Hadfield would not likely have mustered the necessary resolve had he not, while out for a stroll of a Sabbath in White Conduit Fields, been accosted by the religious fanatic Bannister Truelock. It was Truelock who easily convinced him the Bible’s a vulgar and indecent history that fails to contain one solid or sensible argument, the New Testament in particular being a fabric of falsehood and deception of use only for the amusement of its absurdity, whereas for his part Truelock had been pregnant a quarter century with the Messiah, who now stood poised to erupt from his mouth, the only obstacle to this singular advantage to religion being the life of the King.
Such was the argument for the defence. But I should point out Hadfield’s action was only in part the work of a sabre-damaged brain under the sway of little Bannister Truelock (no mean rouser of insurrection, as can be testified by the chaos that erupts in here every time he’s readmitted). Mainly Hadfield’s assault on the King was the doing of French magnetic fluid-working under the direction of Bill the King, who’s said to bear an uncanny resemblance to the late Dr. DeValangin. But unlike that beloved Forceps, Bill’s a mysterious villain of unrelenting treachery. A celebrated master of the Air Loom for as long as anybody can remember, he’s never been observed to smile, except at chess. Bill has his own good reasons for wanting his Majesty dead, but what they are I won’t know until I know who he is, by which I mean who he’s inhabiting. (A significant characteristic of the gang is, they have nothing to say or do in the world until they introject themselves into a human body. If there’s a moral in this I’m not sure what it is, unless it’s that one honest man or woman stands taller than all the evil that ever was.)
In the end Hadfield was found innocent by reason of a delusion, however temporary, but since nobody wanted him loose, a new law was rushed through to enable the incarceration of insane persons charged with treason, murder, or a felony, if they’re deemable a threat to the State—even when by reason of insanity they’ve been cleared of all charges. This is how what’s called the insanity plea came to be and James Hadfield our nation’s first criminal lunatic. Many’s the addle-pate’s been tossed in here after him.
And before. Which is another way Hadfield’s case would seem to touch on my own, for my detention predates that law and is not even, like Peg Nicholson’s, a Green Cloth one. My detention occurred in the days when these things was handled more casually, as by a note to Monro from Lord Liverpool saying, Can you keep this one for us till further notice, Tom, like a good fellow?
Mind you, the crimes of Bethlem’s assorted enemies of the State vary greatly in enormity. Hurst, Wake, Nugent, Metcalfe, and the rest are merely individuals with a habit of wandering onto royal property without the sense to leave before they’re caught. All are sooner or later let go, but most are incorrigible. It’s something about the mighty tug that fame, power, wealth, and authority exert on uncompassed minds.
True lunatic would-be royal assassins such as Hadfield are a rarer breed.
So am I. And after twelve years of not being let go, here’s something I understand. I’m no more here for threatening Liverpool’s life (let alone the King’s) than I am for causing a stir in the public benches of the House. It’s not anything I did. It’s what I know.
Out in the upper gallery it was a quiet morning. Two of our makers and destroyers of universes were hard at work, and I paused on my way to Hadfield to partake of their genius.
The first I came to, standing in the centre of a small crowd, was Alfred Sconser. Alfred has the remarkable talent of eliciting a large amount of green fluid from out of his lungs. Tipping forward from the waist, he drools this ropy, viscous substance in a column a good inch and a half in diameter and perhaps five inches in length. Out of this pendant shaft, in gradual stages, with great care, he blows a grey-green bubble that on a good day reaches three feet in diameter, to general applause. The surface of Sconser’s Sphere, as it’s known, is smooth, with continents of thicker, duskier phlegm in relief upon it. Watching Alfred at work you find yourself witness to the generation of a globe not so very different from the one on which you are standing. When he has got his creation as big as it will go, he maintains it a few minutes (I have never known anyone, however excited they become at the sight of it, to offer to burst it), then with equal painstakingness collapses it, at last drawing the entirety of the heavy fluid back into his mouth and swallowing it all down, with a gratified smile.
This is an accomplished performance, and Alfred has his hat on the floor beside him the while. But unless there are outside visitors present (ones, that is, who don’t recoil in disgust), he rarely receives more than the heartfelt admiration of his colleagues. Lately, it happens, I’ve earned a little from the sale of my engravings to our infrequent tourists, and so today when Alfred finished and the world had been swallowed back down, I placed a ha’penny in the hat before passing on.
Next I spent a few minutes in the company of that other serial destroyer and remaker of universes, Richard Pocock, whose conviction it is that as soon as he thinks of something, it’s destroyed or, as he says, thrown up. Pocock knows he can’t help all the destruction he’s guilty of, because what man alive can stop himself thinking something once he’s set his mind not to? But today he was working away, as he sometimes does, to undo the damage. To accomplish this, he stands with his eyes closed and his body bent double and his hands and arms extended in front of him, like one groping in the dark. He then decries all his previous thoughts, saying, for example, “I never thought of America, nor Jersey, nor Spain, nor Portugal, nor Plymouth Dock. I never thought of a pigsty, nor of Guildford. Oh, poor Guildford! and poor, good Mr. Hastings—” his former master—“and his family, my good and worthy friends who, thanks to me, alas, are no more! I never thought of a ploughshare, nor yet of a knapsack, nor yet of a summer house, nor of a sprocket and faucet, nor a monkey’s beard, nor a hen’s foot, nor a finger-organ, nor a boar’s bristle. I have never thought of a parson, nor yet of a hedgehog, no, nor of a flying squirrel in America, nor of a monkey shaving himself, nor of the hinges of Mr. Hastings’ cellar door, nor of the Polinac River in France, where I sailed from—” etc.
And so I left Richard Pocock to restore one universe even as Alfred Sconser was preparing to disgorge another.
Two doors this side of Hadfield’s cell I next stopped a moment to offer an encouraging word to James Norris, a homicidal American sailor who’s been locked up near a decade now in an iron apparatus special-designed for him by our medical officers after he plunged a knife into the keeper Hawkins, attacked with fatal intent a patient named Thompson rash enough to come to Hawkins’ rescue, and had just bit off Thompson’s finger when he was stopped from doing worse by having his arm smashed by our friend Davies with a shovel. Owing to an oddness of physiology, Norris’s wrists are thicker than his hands, so to him a pair of handcuffs is the gift of a deadly weapon.
The merciful and humane apparatus in which our medical officers have Norris confined is a series of riveted iron rings that encircle his neck, trunk, and upper arms. The neck ring is attached by a short chain to an iron hoop that slides up and down a six-foot iron bar. The trunk and arm rings, which are fused, pinion his arms tight to his sides. All three varieties of ring are connected by two-inch iron bars that pass over his shoulders. A chain around his ankles prevents kicking. For nine years, our American has been able only to lie on his back or else, on account of the shortness of his neck chain (twelve inches), to stand on his bed against the wall. Now that he’s grown emaciated from lack of movement, he can draw his arms from the circular projections from his trunk ring and hold reading material. If he doesn’t, he has no choice but to rest them on the edges of those projections, a position he finds more painful than keeping them inside. These same projections are what prevent him from sleeping on his side.
Norris has the care of a badger-dog-and-terrier cross named Philadelphia, of whom he’s exceeding fond. He’s also a voracious devourer of newspapers and books, which the keepers out of pity (as a cat pities a mouse) supply him with daily. He speaks rationally enough, at times expressing gratitude for his restraint, since he says he don’t feel entirely able to answer for his conduct and otherwise might commit more mayhem in the world than he already has.
Still, it seems a drastic confinement for one so sensible of his condition.
“Heigh-ho, James,” I said as Philadelphia trotted over to sniff at my ankle.
“Heigh-ho, Jimmy,” he replied, setting down his paper. “I see my countrymen are overjoyed this nation’s promised to renew trade with them next spring. The question is, Do they imagine President Madison has conceded, or are they aware you British finally acknowledged Holland’s a free country that can trade with whoever it wants?”
“Whatever your countrymen know, Jim, it’ll be only what they’ve been told.”
“And in that no different from yours, I’ll warrant.”
“No, no difference here.”
“So where are you off to, then, Jim?”
“To see Jim Hadfield.”
“The three Jimmies, we are.”
“That’s us.”
Hadfield I found shackled as usual in his cell, weaving a place-mat of straw. Though too insolent, daring, and violent to be unchained, Hadfield since his murder of Benjamin Swain has run the largest manufactory on the premises. Swain at the height of his activities oversaw a sizable industry in baskets and tablemats but was never a fair employer, choosing as assistants only those well chained. So when he refused to pay them, saying their work was no good, or told them he’d paid them when he hadn’t, or paid them in bad coin, they were not well positioned to come after him. Hadfield, while more dangerous, is fairer, working mainly with his nemesis Bannister Truelock, himself a cobbler by trade, the two of them together by better taste and greater skill far surpassing the former productions of Swain and his iron-indentured crew. (By the way, Hadfield maintains he’s unfairly accused, that he never struck Swain a blow that sent him over a bench head-first into the floor, but rather Swain, jealous of competition, was gathering his force to deliver a fatal blow to Hadfield as he sat innocently at work on a rag doily, when suddenly he dropped to the floor and expired, his head having exploded from the intensity of his rage.)
“Hello, James,” I said. “How goes the trade in placemats?”
“Poor.”
“No gawkers through?”
At first he made no response. He’s one the gang prefer to keep in a twilight state. Six feet from his cell as I’d approached I could feel the insinuation of their magnetic assailment. Like many, Hadfield is so little aware of the primary source of his intellectual darkness that he’d sooner strike you down than acknowledge he suffers any at all. But on occasion he’s been heard to complain that someone’s trying to annihilate his “thinking substance,” and that’s a pretty accurate statement of his case. But he can work, and who will believe himself terminally afflicted who can still work?
“Just as well no bloody gawkers,” he said.
“Why is that?”
“Look at me, damn thee,” he growled.
With his gouged cranium, the bone smashed entirely away on one side, the membrane of skin there palpitant with each throb of his thinking substance, and with his head on a curious permanent angle owing to the position it lay in when surgery became imperative after the muscles of the neck were severed by the same or a different swordblade that penetrated his skull, he is undeniably a grotesque sight.
“You look as you did ever since I first knew you,” I said, to reassure him.
Now he lifted murderous red eyes at me and passed a hand across his shattered skull. “You don’t perceive, I suppose, I am losing my hair?”
“Perhaps a little,” I conceded. We have this conversation often. His hair has grown thin on the diet here, he believes, and no longer has body enough to soften the horror with which the sight of him is apt to strike the unaccustomed eye. I know he has a request in for a wig—because I lettered it, at his dictation. His contention is, he no longer enjoys the same degree of mental binding as the rest of us. Besides this, a good wig would improve his appearance. And yet, while no one ranks higher on the list of Hadfield’s admirers than himself, I suspect his lack of comeliness is of no tangible loss to him except as it might dissuade any but whores from having congress with him. But I can’t imagine what other sort of woman would come near him. It’s not as if he needs to pay whores more because he’s grotesque. They’re used to that. In any case, as long as he has his pension and can work and sell his manufactures, he’ll keep himself sufficiently in pocket to purchase from Sir Archy private time in the visitors’ room and doxies aplenty to visit him there for the satisfaction of every convolution of his lewdness. Of all in here for an incurable term, Hadfield is perhaps the one with least to complain about. But a feature of his condition is that he does complain, constantly. In this he’s like a hypochondriac, who will complain, and live, forever.
“I am losing time,” he told me. “Wasting my best days. I believe, here—” again passing a hand over his skull—“is sufficient proof of the consequence of my confinement.”
Sometimes he groans that for the same reason the teeth are crumbling in his mouth.
“James,” I said. “Let me remind you we’re both victims, to a degree, of a force far greater and of more intrusive malevolence than was ever a product of British justice.”
This only annoyed him. “Bugger off with your French agents, Matthews. I have no patience for your raving at a time when the hair lies so thick on my gown and the floor round about me, I feel I’m at the barber’s.”
Even as Hadfield rejected my reminder, I could sense by a shift in the quality of the force in the room that one of the women (of whom there are three in the gang, to four men) had just taken charge of the Air Loom. My guess was The Glove Woman, who never speaks but is remarkable for her skill in managing that terrible device. Certainly it’s well within her powers to use it to cause loss of hair and have us blame it on the diet. Her own locks have lately been fleeing her upper head for the damper climes of her nostril-aerated lip and night-drool chin, and for this reason she now wears at all times a chip hat draped with black silk. Embalding others is just the kind of game she’d warm to. I can see her now, expertly working the machine while the rest of them banter and pluck at her like rooks at a strange jackdaw.
“There’s talk Lord Sidmouth wants the governors to open two criminal wings that would hold sixty,” I told Hadfield, changing the subject.
“Wings? Good. I’ll fly away, ha ha!”
“These would be part of an entire new building.”
“Where?”
“Nobody knows.”
He grunted.
“I’m before the governors’ subcommittee Saturday,” I next informed him.
This having nothing to do with him, he made no reply. In here you grow accustomed to a relaxed approach to conversation. A person will walk away in mid-sentence and neither of you thinks anything of it. The only reason Hadfield hadn’t already walked away was he was chained to the floor. In fact I would say the explanation for why, aside from the similarities of our cases, I’ve fallen into the custom of visiting him despite no discernible pleasure in his company is the same as why you will fall into the habit of visiting someone you can count on to be always at home and dependable in their reception, however dull.
“At least you’re in by law,” I said.
“I don’t like the way this is going,” he muttered.
“How is that?” I asked, thinking this might be a conversation.
“For God’s sake, can’t you see I am losing my hair?”
Inoculated yet or not, I soon took my leave of James Hadfield. A little of him does me for days. Though less confined than James Norris, he lacks the American’s generosity of mind.
As I passed back along the gallery, I came upon Alfred Sconser completing the deflation of a Sphere. He seemed exhausted. All but one or two of his earlier audience had wandered off. Even lunatics grow tired of the same thing over and over. Suffering at that moment an overwhelming sense of the futility of all human endeavour, I tossed another ha’penny in the hat, which was empty, as before.
As the last of the column of green phlegm retracted slowly into Alfred’s mouth, his eyes fixed hard on me. After swallowing down the entire gob, he bent to retrieve the coin, which he firmly replaced in my palm, saying in a voice of dignity, “I do clean out the hat.”
AUGUST 11TH, 1809
Dearest Jamie,
Though I know unless the Bethlem door that opened a crack to let in Robert Dunbar is now also admitting my letters, this no more than the last will be the first from me you read. Yet I must write, for tomorrow you’re alone before the committee. Our every attempt to persuade them to suspend, even temporarily, the sanctions against me has failed. They want me to regret I was a nuisance in the early days of your imprisonment and seem to take pleasure in reminding me how much it’s diminished my capacity to help you. In this way they’d make me to blame for their failure of compassion. All I can do now is launch my counsel into the abyss like a desperate atheist a prayer, an atheist with every reason to fear hostile surveillance.
Jamie, first, you must face your inquisitors in a calm, reasonable manner. Though we both know you’re not in for being mad, you must take particular care not to appear so. Committees, like water, seek their own level, i.e., the precedence of former rulings. Or think of it this way: Those made accountable for others’ behaviour tend to judge according to what they construe others’ good and not according to their own felt intelligence. Their duty, in other words, makes them rarely wise and frequently arbitrary.
Second, you should not anticipate effective support from John Haslam, whose prime concern will be to defend his medical judgment of your case. Not understanding the reason you are in, and feeling in consequence (if he feels anything at all) susceptible to a charge of ignorance in the matter, he will cloak himself in the power of what he knows—medicine-even as he also knows it’s not the issue.
Third, for your own good you must speak as little as possible of what you did in France. Though your sole intention in peacemaking was the good of your country, any such dealings are lately as much as ever considered traitorous, and you can no more afford to be seen to be concealing your supposed revolutionist connexions than can Bethlem those of an inmate. Jamie, this last advice is extremely important, for a single misstep could mean you not only don’t get your freedom but are hanged for treason. How painful it is to write these words, but the matter is so extremely serious that were the chances you read this a thousand times less than they really are, it would need to be done.
Finally, Jamie, I hope what isn’t necessary to be said is the hearts and thoughts of all who love you will be with you tomorrow.
Your ever faithful Margaret