Allan Ingram

Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century

This book arises out of a major research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, on depression in the eighteenth century. It discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and in terms of individual attempts to describe and live with suffering. Different chapters, each by an authority in the field, look at depression, or, in the terms of the time, melancholy, spleen and hypochondria, as it is reflected in medical writing, philosophical writing, poetry, in the novel and in autobiographical writing, this last based on material which is currently unpublished. The book concludes by comparing eighteenth-century medical practice with contemporary structures for treating the depressed, and by asking what present-day society can learn about depression and its treatment from the experience of this previous era.

Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth Century Writing

This major monograph deals with the annexation of the concept of madness by eighteenth-century writers and artists in the service of a sane agenda, and of the figure of the madman or woman for satirical, sentimental or other purposes. A wide range of writers and artists are looked at, including Pope, Swift, Fielding, Addison, Rowe, Tate, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Crabbe, Cowper, Hogarth, Rowlandson, Fuseli and Gillray. Palgrave’s reader called it ‘a powerful study, amply documented, and persuasively shaped’. In the words of Rebecca Rees in Review of English Studies it ‘offers insightful new readings of familiar literature as well as demonstrating the importance of non-literary and non-verbal texts to understanding the cultural milieu of the eighteenth century’. Chapter 6, ‘A Gendered Affliction’ (pp 136-69) is written by Michelle Faubert. Two PhD students are currently working with Ingram on topics related to this research, one of which is fully funded by Leverhulme.

Introduction: Depression before Depression

There are many definitions of depression, from the simple statement of lowness of spirits of the standard dictionary to the clinical symptoms of the medical compendium and the changes in linguistic emphasis and usage of the historical dictionary. Perhaps the most telling definition, though, is actually a description, a bald account (and all the more powerful because of its baldness) of what it is like to experience depression. This is Kay Redfield Jamison, from her book An Unquiet Mind:

‘The Gloom of Anxiety’: Fear in the Long Eighteenth Century

Fear in the long eighteenth century was inflected by the specific historical concerns of the time, but it did not stand apart from pre-existing discourses. In this essay, we will address briefly some of the more general issues with the historical legacy of fear before moving to the particular and sometimes peculiar manifestations of fear in this transitional period. We argue that literary, medical, philosophical and religious discourses, among others, played a crucial role in ‘producing’ fear in the alleged Age of Reason. Fear, we will show, was regarded as a complex emotion, and as a phenomenon not solely pathological or negative in its manifestations and uses.

Introduction: Fashioning the Unfashionable

This volume is one of the publications arising out of the Leverhulme Trust research project ‘Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, 1660–1832’, which was conducted between 2013 and 2016 by members of the English division at the University of Northumbria and of the History Department at the University of Newcastle. The purpose of the project was to investigate how certain diseases, some of them extremely unpleasant, or even destructive to life, became fashionable during certain periods, as ideas about culture and the valuation of specific modes of living, suffering and dying change. In the period of the project, for example, mental conditions such as melancholy continued, at least in certain circles, to enjoy a high degree of fashionability, as they had since the early seventeenth century, partly because of their association with intelligence and creativity, and subsequently with nerves and sensibility.

Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

This collection examines different aspects of attitudes towards disease and death in writing of the long eighteenth century. Taking three conditions as examples – ennui, sexual diseases and infectious diseases – as well as death itself, contributors explore the ways in which writing of the period placed them within a borderland between fashionability and unfashionability, relating them to current social fashions and trends. These essays also look at ways in which diseases were fashioned into bearing cultural, moral, religious and even political meaning. Works of literature are used as evidence, but also medical writings, personal correspondence and diaries. Diseases or conditions subject to scrutiny include syphilis, male impotence, plague, smallpox and consumption. Death, finally, is looked at both in terms of writers constructing meanings within death and of the fashioning of posthumous reputation.

How Small is Small? Small Pox, Large Presence

In the second volume of Pamela, Richardson chooses to add to his heroine’s woes by inflicting her new baby son with smallpox. As she informs her sister-in-law, Lady Davers: A new misfortune, my dear lady!—But this is of God Almighty’s sending; so I must bear it patiently. My dear baby is taken with the small-pox!—To how many troubles are the happiest of us subjected in this life!… For, with all my pleasures and hopes; in the midst of my dear parents’ joy and congratulations on our arrival, and on what had passed so happily since we were last here together, (in the birth of the dear child, and my safety, for which they had been so apprehensive,) the poor baby was taken ill. It was on that very Tuesday his papa set out for Tunbridge; but we knew not it would be the small-pox till Thursday. O Madam! how are all the pleasures I had formed to myself sickened now upon me! for my Billy is very bad.

The Madness of a Multitude’: Insanity, People and Prose

‘Cowper came to me’, wrote William Blake in around 1819, nearly twenty years after the earlier poet’s death, and said “O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? I will never rest till I am so. O that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all — over us all — mad as a refuge from unbelief — from Bacon, Newton and Locke.”1

‘The Image of Our Mind’: Seeing and Being Seen

Thus we prattled away our time till we came in sight of a noble pile of building, which diverted us from our former discourse, and gave my friend the occasion of asking me my thoughts on this magnificent edifice. I told him, I conceived it to be my Lord Mayor’s Palace, for I could not imagine so stately a structure could be designed for any quality inferior. He smiled at my innocent conjecture, and informed me this was Bedlam, an hospital for mad folks. ‘In truth,’ said I, ‘I think they were mad that built so costly a college for such a crack-brained society,’ adding, it was pity so fine a building should not be possessed by such as had a sense of their happiness. ‘Sure,’ said I, ‘it was a mad age when this was raised, and the Chief of the City were in great danger of losing their senses, so contrived it the more noble for their own reception, or they would never have flung away so much money to so foolish a purpose.’ ‘You must consider,’ says my friend, ‘this stands upon the same foundation as the Monument, and the fortunes of a great many poor wretches lie buried in this ostentatious piece of vanity; and this, like the other, is but a monument of the City’s shame and dishonour, instead of its glory. Come let us take a walk in, and view its inside.1

Madness Itself: the Real Story

The search for ‘madness itself’, for ‘really’ knowing what madness is, or was, or will be, for the ‘truly insane’, in language, in appearance, in art, in behaviour, or for what I refer to earlier as ‘the wholeness of contemporary insanity’, is long, teasing and irresistible, as peopled by look-alikes as the fields of Troy, as strewn with casualties, as lined by mirrors as any dressing-room or picture gallery, and as encumbered by ham performances as any eighteenth-century stage or inn. Carrying conviction, Garrick-like, or arresting or moving the viewer, like Fuseli or Gillray, takes us some way, but only as far as the conventions of an artistic mode allow, albeit conventions that in Garrick’s case were being rewritten through the medium of his career. Disbelief may be willingly suspended, but we are still faced with what is at bottom a performance, either of lines on a page that get up and speak or of crafting with colour, shape and movement. If these are ‘madness itself’, then they are so only because we recognise the deceptions of these forms and agree to take them as truth. Can we, therefore, only ‘really’ know what madness was through the medium of an art? Is the ‘representation’ that is already a ‘representation’ in fact all that there is, the only way in which this particular ‘illness’, which we join in calling ‘madness’, can be shared and essentially known? Is an understanding of ‘disease’ the best we can do?