Abstract
The line between madness and divine experience was blurred in the eighteenth century, just as it is in many places today. Strong religious convictions were subject to satirical attacks as enthusiasm, while Methodists like Wesley and Whitefield had to defend themselves from ridicule and accusations of madness and fanaticism.1 Conversely, despite secularisation, and the association of the Enlightenment with rationalism and materialism, English society was still very religious. While some members of the medical profession asserted that madness was a disease with an organic basis, the material evidence for this was far from established. Where some identified madness, others found a religious epiphany. Moreover, the language employed by mad-doctors to describe the experiences of those designated ‘mad’ was sometimes strongly resisted, not least by the people who found themselves in madhouses. The eighteenth-century poet, Christopher Smart, and one influential mad-doctor who treated him, William Battie, provide a case in point. This chapter will explore the kind of language used to describe madness in the mid-eighteenth century, particularly that centred around confinement, and how and why it was contested. I will draw attention to the rationale for confinement employed by a leading mad-doctor, and the poetic response of a man writing while incarcerated.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Grayson Ditchfield, The Evangelical Revival (London: Taylor & Francis, 1998), p. 73, notes that there were attacks on Methodism as enthusiasm, and that enthusiasm was ‘a term of strong abuse, defined by Dr Johnson as “a vain belief of private revelation; a warm confidence of divine favour or communi cation”, and that Wesley himself defined enthusiasm as “religious madness; fancied inspiration”’.
See Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704) for a sustained satirical attack on religious enthusiasm.
The mad-doctor William Pargeter attacks Methodism as fanaticism in Observations on Maniacal Disorders (1792).
William Battie, A Treatise on Madness (London: J. Whiston and B. White, 1758). Hereafter, A Treatise.
Karina Williamson, ‘Introduction’, in The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart Vol. 1, ed. Karina Williamson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). All refer-ences to the text come from this edition. I will indicate the line number and section of the poem according to Williamson’s editorial arrangement and presentation.
In 1845 two parliamentary acts on lunacy were passed. These established a national inspectorate, made the Lunacy Commission a permanent national body, and made the erection of county and borough asylums compulsory in order to house pauper lunatics. See Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 165.
Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 9–11
Chris Mounsey, Christopher Smart: Clown of God (London: Associated University Presses, 2001), p. 203 and p. 209.
Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987, 1990), p. 202.
Leonard Smith, Lunatic Hospitals in Georgian England, 1750–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 2.
Arthur Sherbo, Christopher Smart, Scholar of the University (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), pp. 122–3.
In my discussion, I am adhering to the Williamson edition of the text, though I agree with Hawes that Bond’s bi-columnar structure may be preferable in highlighting ‘transverse’ relationships between words and images in con secutive ‘Let’ and ‘For’ verses. Clement Hawes, ‘The Utopian Public Sphere: Intersubjectivity in Jubilate Agno’, in Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment, ed. by Clement Hawes (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 200–1.
James Boswell, Life of Johnson: Vol. 1., ed. by G.B. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), p. 397.
Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 22.
Allan Ingram, Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), p. 112.
John Monro, Remarks on Dr. Battie’s Treatise (London: Dawsons, 1758), ‘Advertisement’.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II: Of Ideas (1690; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), p. 157.
Betty Rizzo and Nora Mahoney (eds), The Annotated Letters of Christopher Smart (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), p. xxxv. The editors note that during his confinement, Smart’s wife left him, taking their daughters to Dublin.
Moses Mendez and Paul Whitehead, The Battiad (London: G. Smith, 1750).
William Force Stead, ‘Introduction’, in Rejoice in the Lamb: A Song from Bedlam, ed. by William Force Stead (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), pp. 13–14.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Richard Stern
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Stern, R. (2014). Smart’s Authority and the Eighteenth-Century Mad-Business. In: Harpin, A., Foster, J. (eds) Performance, Madness and Psychiatry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137337252_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137337252_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46374-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-33725-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Theatre & Performance CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)