Voices of Madness, 1683-1796 - Hardcover

Ingram, Allan

9780750912105: Voices of Madness, 1683-1796

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0750912103 ISBN 13: 9780750912105

Publisher: Sutton Pub Ltd, 1997

Four mad individuals, or four people who were regarded as mad at least once in their lives, speak of their experience, of their treatment by others, and of their understanding of what has happened to them. The most direct is A Narrative of God's Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs. Hannah Allen (1683), which describes Allen's breakdown and depression from a religious point of view. Alexander Cruden's The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured (1739), on the other hand, is a work of outraged protest at wrongful confinement in a madhouse and of accusation against those who conspired to put him there. Samuel Bruckshaw too, in One More Proof of the Iniquitous Abuse of Private Madhouses (1774), protests against wrongful confinement with a detailed account of the events leading to his detention and his subsequent legal efforts to obtain redress. William Belcher's Address to Humanity: Containing, a Letter to Dr. Thomas Monro; a Receipt to Make a Lunatic, and Seize his Estate; and a Sketch of a True Smiling Hyena (1796) is a sustained diatribe by a writer who described himself as a 'Victim to the Trade of Lunacy'.
Together these writings afford a greater understanding of attitudes towards and treatment of madness during this period, and of the ways individuals responded to mental and physical suffering. Though different in circumstances and intention, they provide, as Professor Ingram makes clear in his detailed introduction, insight into the realities of madness in the eighteenth century and the ways in which language and literary conventions were adapted to address those realities.

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