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Bedlam:A Novel
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The strange and tortured mind of the Victorian artist and patricide Richard Dadd, a painter of fairies who spent most of his life in psychiatric hospitals
Jennifer Higgie presents a year in the life of Richard Dadd, infamous inmate of one of England’s most notorious sanitariums, London’s Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam.
A young man of great promise, Dadd embarks on a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The two men travel through German forests, Alexandrian brothels and across the desert to the Nile. By the time they find themselves beneath the unforgiving sun of Syria and Palestine, Dadd’s fraught mind has been taxed to the limit with extraordinary images. He becomes stranger and more violent, changes his companion attributes to sunstroke. But in Dadd’s imagination he has become a devotee of the god Osiris. Shortly after his return to England in 1843, the god directs him to take a life, and Dadd is set on the road to Bedlam.
At once jarringly acute and alarmingly askew, Dadd’s voice is rendered with both empathy and acuity by Higgie. This is a poetic and considered portrait of an artist, as well as an intriguing mystery about how, and why, a mind can go so swiftly and dangerously awry.
Reviews
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Higgie’s prose is fragmentary yet lucid, and the novel evokes the inextricable beauty and terror of Dadd’s sensory journey, while raising some of the philosophical questions it poses about art, language and other minds. Bedlam is a mystery story in which we search for clues as to how an individual might go from precocious talent to parricide.
TLS -
Higgie’s sumptuous biographical novel covers the time that English artist Richard Dadd spent confined in a sanatorium…a haunting literary novel about a painter’s mental decline.
Foreword Reviews -
Higgie returns with a poetic novel that tenderly embodies the voice of Victorian-era painter Richard Dadd, who is now remembered primarily for the tragic details of his life and institutionalization. Higgie threads the needle of his complex legacy with the compassion so often denied to historical figures whose struggles with mental health were criminalized and reduced to “lunacy.” The “art novel” genre is undoubtedly making the rounds in publishing right now, but by bringing Dadd’s interiority back to life, this one promises to challenge and move us in equal measure.
Hyperallergic, 12 Art Books to Kick Off Summer
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The Other Side lit up my brain. A radical, fascinating exploration of art and the otherworldly, Higgie is an expert and erudite guide in this brilliant reclamation of female artists.
Katy Hessel, author of The Story of Art Without Men -
Higgie chronicles with an illuminance that welds her readers to the page
, The Violet Book -
Elegantly expanded my thinking on the eternal mystery of where art comes from.
Sinéad Gleeson