"In that direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a
Hatter: and in that direction, "waving the other paw, "lives a March Hare.
Visit either you like: they’re both mad."
"But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that, "said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad.
You’re mad."
You can appreciate Alice’s problem. Although the narrative parameters of
"Alice in Wonderland" place her in a dreamland, a oceanic maelstrom of
irrationality and unreality, within the context of the hyper-reality often
experienced in dreams she’s constantly sub-
consciously conscious of being the only sane Ulysses on an insane Odyssey.
But things wouldn’t have been much better once she woke up. Mad hatters
were proverbially mad as an occupational hazard: the mercurial steam they
used to mould the material they made the hats from drove them mad as a
matter of course; likewise, hares in March, in rutt, behave with such abnormal
abandon (for hares) that they are, by definition, mad.
But let’s stick with humans. Back from the rather terrifying (if amusing)
endemic madness of Wonderland, Alice found herself in a society which was
also endemically mad. The free and legal availability of opiates, taken with the
cocktail of chemicals the Victorians breathed courtesy of their industrial
revolution, meant that most of them were, at the very least, peculiar: the
cavalcade of eccentrics portrayed by Dickens are, by these lights, less likely to
be irritating whimsy than rather grim documentary. And it’s a small step from
that eccentricity to the Victorian fondness for Nonsense. Edward Lear’s fear
of his epilepsy (is that a kind of madness?) led him to disguise it with a
studied eccentricity that teetered on madness - he couched his only proposal of
marriage in an earnest inquiry of whether his beloved could sharpen pencils:
she said she couldn’t, so he said "oh dear" and walked away - while he found
comfort in Nonsense, an irrational security blanket to clutch in the face of an
unforgivingly Rational world.
After a career depicting the madness of the World, the great satirical
caricaturist James Gillray is believed to have leaped to his death from his
garret window above Mrs Humphrey’s print shop, a fortnight before the Battle
of Waterloo and eight years after he’d sunk into madness himself. He was the
only one of six children to reach adulthood, and was brought up as a
Moravian, a Protestant sect that viewed the world with horror and welcome
death as a (literally) blessed release; as he got older he suffered increasingly
from morbid depression and was growingly obsessed by his failing eyesight, a
condition exacerbated by his prolonged exposure to nitric acid, a chemical
central to the etching process. Did that help him, like the Mad Hatter, go mad,
or was it the circumstances of his childhood? Whatever the cause (and we
shouldn’t forget another kind of occupational hazard, the savage intensity with
which he chronicled a Mad World driving him, like Swift and Goya, mad too)
during a period of brief lucidity in 1813 Gillray gave an audience to Mrs
Humphrey’s latest protege George Cruikshank. The purpose of the audience
seems to have been a sort of satirical blessing, a kind of caricaturist’s apostolic
succession, but all Gillray would say was "You are not Cruikshank, but
Addison; my name is not Gillray, but Rubens." Cruikshank went away
unblessed, but later acquired Gillray’s table if not his madness. Later in his
career, when most people dismissed him as irredeemably eccentric,
Cruikshank became a warrior for Temperance, the Victorians’ very own War
on Drugs, against a self-imposed and not always temporary madness. Indeed,
they called it "Drink-madness", a blight on both productivity and decent
morality, even though, in his will, Cruikshank left his wine cellar to his
mistress.
No human society has ever existed without some psychotropic or mood-
altering mechanism to allow us to look at the world in a different light to the
harsh and unbearable glare of Reality, be it booze, fags, dope, chocolate,
Dionysiac frenzies, political monomania or just sitting still and meditating on
the unknowable infinite. I’m told that if you don’t eat for a fortnight you get
wonderful visions, as religious mystics have for centuries. You can achieve
the same effect with Benalyn expectorant and vodka chasers. Gillray’s
contemporary William Blake seems to achieved this without the outside
catalyst, and is now universally recognised as the greatest English visionary,
offering us sight, two hundred years later, of a different, mystical, spiritual
England in opposition to the tyranny of Reason we’re currently enthralled to.
But look at his work, at those tiny, tiny printed pages (produced and coloured
in the same poisonous miasma that Gillray worked in) crammed with text
which then curls, madly, up into the margins to hammer the elusive point
home. This is the text-book stuff of schitzophrenia.
But so what? About twenty years ago an article in the British Medical Journal
deplored advances in the treatment of syphilis because the extirpation of
General Paralysis of the Insane, a frequent symptom of tertiary syphilis,
denied our antiseptic world the mad genius of Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Schubert
and many others. Unkissed by Venus, the Victorian painter Richard Dadd did
his best work in Bedlam, after going mad and killing his father with an axe.
The cat painter Louis Wain ended up in the same place, only with difficulty
explaining to a passing visitor that not only did he paint like Louis Wain, but
he was Louis Wain. "Of course you are," purred his well-meaning
interlocutor. Earlier, of course, Hogarth’s Rake ended up in a different
Bedlam, elsewhere, as an awful warning to the rest of us, before Madness
came to rank equal with Death as an exquisite and slightly delicious Romantic
fate. Think of Ruskin and the first Mrs Rochester. Much later think of hippy
Romance and the Rock ‘n’ Roll martyr Syd Barrett, the founding genius of
Pink Floyd, still alive but lost to us forever after frying his brain with LSD,
opening the Doors of Perception and thereafter drawing a blank.
And let’s finish with mad Dean Swift writing, in A Tale of a Tub, his
"Digression concerning the Original, the Use, and Improvement of Madness in
a Commonwealth", where madness, as manifested in political megalomania
and belicosity, is equated with an excess of semen being diverted to and
infecting the brain or the inability to have a damn good shit. The gag - the
ironic point - is that the inmates of Bedlam would function perfectly well in
the law, medicine, the church and politics if released into the outside world. In
between the ironies, however, is Swift’s true lesson, which is tolerance: it’s
the truly mad who, through philosophy, religion or politics, seek to make
everyone the same as them. In the face of this universally prevalent Madness,
Swift advises that we seek "the serene peaceful state, of being a fool among
knaves."