- Published in:
- Pseudopod
- Publication date:
- 10 Aug. 2007
Listen to this story, read by Paul S. Jenkins, at Pseudopod.
St. Mary of Bethlehem’s — or Bedlam as it was more widely known –was one of the first places in England dedicated to the care of the mentally ill. In its early incarnation in Bishopsgate — on the site of Liverpool Street station — this care largely amounted to restraining the lunatics. Later, by the time the hospital had moved to Moorfields, things had improved, but only slightly; lunatics were divided into the “curable” and the “incurable”. In fact, a sign of the impoverished state of thinking about mental illness at the time is encapsulated by the two statues that flanked the hospital gates in the 1800s: Raving Madness and Melancholy Madness.
Additionally, an entrepreneurial spirit meant that members of the public were actively encouraged to visit the “freaks” for a penny a time. At the cells visitors were allowed to poke the patients through the bars, egging them on into violent or sexual acts.
The grim conditions combined with the battle between Age of Enlightenment thinking and primitive beliefs about the causes of madness (often thought to be a result of moral weakness), marked this time and place out as a great place to set a story. The fact that the patients were both mentally ill and deprived of their rights allowed me to identify them as potential pawns in a wider conflict. When I fused these ideas with the concept of shadows being receptacles for dark thoughts I had the skeleton of a story that just needed a main character.
This piece, although my second sale, was actually the first to be published. I first listened to it at the house of B. K. Dunn — a Clarion classmate — in Orange County, California, feeling incredibly happy and mortified at the same time. One thing I was glad about was that I didn’t have to narrate it myself. In fact, Paul S. Jenkins did a fabulous job–both by being equipped with an English accent, and injecting a large degree of creepiness into the reading.