Anne here, and today I'm musing on the subject of madness. I've always liked the Regency expression "blue-devilled" and this drawing by Cruikshank illustrates it perfectly. But blue-devilled, depressed, beset by anxiety, or mad — it's a fine line that separates them.
You might think madness is a strange subject for a Regency romance writer to be talking about, but recall if you will, the Regency period (1811—1820) came about because King George III was believed to be mad, and was incarcerated and treated for insanity. His eldest son, the Prince of Wales, was thus declared the Regent and ruled in his place until the king died.
These days some researchers believe that the poor king had a disease called porphyria, and was not insane at all. Porphyria involves a problem in the production of heme, which is a component of the protein in red blood cells. Heme production, which occurs in the bone marrow and liver, involves eight different enzymes and a shortage (deficiency) of a specific enzyme determines the type of porphyria. One of the possible symptoms of porphyria are mental changes, such as anxiety, confusion, hallucinations, disorientation or paranoia. (Information from this site.)
But the question is still being debated, and some historians today believe the king was insane after all, and exhibited classic signs of psychiatric illnesses such as bipolar disorder. More information about this theory here.
Whatever the truth, poor King George was considered to be mad, and received all kinds of horrible treatments intended to shock him back to sanity, but which to our eyes today seem more like torture. Ascribing his various symptoms to "evil humours" and having no real idea of how to treat them, his various doctors tried all kinds of extreme treatments — purging, blood-letting, blistering with arsenic powder, various toxic drugs and more. The king's final months were spent being bound in a straitjacket and sometimes chained to a chair. Towards the end, he was deaf and blind and living in misery. You might have seen the movie, The Madness of King George. (The image is from the stage play, staring the brilliant Nigel Hawthorne.)
History was not kind to those deemed "mad." If this was how they treated the king, imagine what conditions were like for ordinary folk.
As well, in a time when women were regarded as the property of their fathers, husbands or guardians, they could be placed in an insane asylum on the word of their male "protectors". Women were committed for such things as "female hysteria", for "frigidity," for believing in things their husbands did not — in spiritualism, for instance or for exhibiting "religious excitement". More information here.
"Lock hospitals" contained women who had contracted venereal disease — even though some of them had no doubt been infected by their husbands, who walked free to infect others. There are many tragic stories.
And "normal people" could pay a penny or two to visit madhouses and be entertained by the antics of the lunatics locked up inside. (They treated orphanages in the same way, like a kind of zoo.)
Of course rich families could organize to have their "mad" (or inconvenient) relatives treated in private institutions or even hidden away with a keeper or two in some rural retreat. Insanity was thought to be inheritable, and the taint of "bad blood" was something that nobody wanted to have associated with their family. In my novel, The Perfect Rake, this was the final decision Great-uncle Oswald made about his seriously unbalanced older brother — he was kept securely at home, in the country, with a keeper. (And yes, that's a new cover.)
So enough of gloom and misery and depressing tales, let's turn to other novels and romances that have dealt with or at least touched on madness in the regency and Victorian eras.
One of my all-time favorite novels that deal with this topic is Flowers From The Storm, by the wonderful Laura Kinsale. In it, the hero, The Duke of Jervaulx, considered dissolute, reckless, and extravagant, is also a mathematical genius and corresponds with a Quaker mathematician. Later he disappears and the Quaker's daughter finds him — in a madhouse. It's a superb novel, and for years has been voted one of the top ten all-time favorite romances.
Another book that deals with madness is The Madness of Lord Ian McKenzie, by Jennifer Ashley.
As a child young Lord Ian was placed in an asylum by his father, an Earl, for exhibiting symptoms which modern readers would recognize as Asperger's Syndrome, a form of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Years later, after his father's death, his older brother, the new earl, has his younger brother brought home. A wonderful romance, and currently on special.
A third book that uses the spectre of inherited insanity in a wonderfully creative way is Eva Ibbotson's A Countess Below Stairs (also called The Secret Countess.) I shan't spoil it by explaining how it happens, but I do strongly suggest that if you haven't yet read this book, you've missed a real treat.
So, have you read any of the books I've mentioned? Can you think of any other novels that touch on the subject of madness? Do you find the way "madness" was treated in the past fascinating? Or is it a topic you'd much rather avoid?