Bedlam

Heather Doody teaches in the English Department of Sir Wilfred Grenfell
College at the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Spanning the last decade of the 18th century and the first decade of the
19th century, Greg Hollingshead’s Bedlam explores the intersections
between politics, corruption, and madness through two intriguing
historical characters: John Haslam, an apothecary at Bethlehem Hospital,
famous for publishing the first detailed case of paranoid schizophrenia,
and his famous patient, James Tilly Matthews. The argument that Matthews
has been committed for political reasons, given his ties to republicans
in France, has the effect of turning Matthews’s case into a literal
example of the political anxieties raging in London in the wake of the
French Revolution. And the corruption that is seen in Bethlehem, where
letters rarely if ever reach their destination and administrators can be
seen only by bribing the keeper, raises many questions about what can
happen when such vices are abundant among those in power in Matthews’s
time as well as in our own.

Hollingshead strikes a beautiful balance between the characters of
Matthews and Haslam, making the patient at times much more cogent and
grounded than the doctor, who buries himself in his work in order to
escape the pain of his personal life. In adopting a convincing
18th-century prose style and not overindulging in detailed description
reflecting the contemporary writer’s marvel at the past, Hollingshead
manages to offer his readers something of the sensibility out of which
the story emerges in addition to the characters and events themselves.
As a work of historical fiction, Bedlam is a stunning success.