Asylum confinement of Christopher Smart

A page from Jubilate Agno written while in asylum

Few details are known about Smart's time at St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics. He was admitted to St Luke's on 6 May 1757 as a "Curable Patient".[36] It is possible that Smart was confined at Newbery's behest over old debts and a poor relationship that existed between the two; Newbery had previously mocked Smart's immorality in A Collection of Pretty Poems for the Amusement of Children six Foot High.[37] Regardless of Newbery's exact reasons, there is evidence suggesting that Newbery's admittance of Smart into the mental asylum was not based on madness.[27] To have Smart admitted, Newbery probably provided a small bribe, although bribes were against St Luke's policy.[12]

There is little information about Smart's condition during his stay at St Luke's, possibly because Battie's denied his patients from being visited, including by their own family members.[4] One of the few records that survive of Smart's time at St Luke's was an entry in St Luke's Minute Book, which read:

12 May 1758
Dr. Battie having acquainted this Committee that Christopher Smart (who was admitted on the 6th day of May 1757) continues disordered in his Senses notwithstanding he has been admitted into this Hospital above 12 Calendar Months and from the present Circumstances of his Case there is not Suffit. reason to expect his speedy Recovery And he being brought up and examined. Ordered. That he be discharged and that Notice be sent to his Securities to take him away.[13]

During Smart's confinement at St Luke's, not even other doctors were allowed to see Smart unless they had received personal permission from Battie.[38] It was improbable that Smart could have left the asylum without being released by Battie. Even if Smart would have attempted to obtain release via legal means, the rules for subpoenaing release would have been almost impossible to follow based on the system that Battie had in place, which isolated the individual from all contact.[13] Eventually, Smart was deemed "incurable" and would not have been released by the hospital but for its lack of funds.[29]

After being released from St Luke's, Smart was taken to a private madhouse.[39] Elizabeth LeNoir, Smart's daughter, was brought to see her father and stated that he was "committed by Mr Newbery to the care of a Mr Potter who kept a private house at Bethnal Green".[40] She described her experience as being held in a "small neat parlour".[40] However, Mr Potter's private madhouse was not "homely", and Smart's treatments were far worse, as he describes:[39] "For they work on me with their harping-irons, which is a barbarous instrument, because I am more unguarded than others" (Jubilate Agno B 129). Smart was left alone for four years, except for his cat Jeoffry and the occasional gawker who would come to see those deemed mad.[41] Piozzi described Smart's general situation: "He was both a wit and a scholar, and visited as such while under confinement for MADNESS."[9] It is very possible that he felt "homeless" during his confinement and surely felt that he was in a "limbo... between public and private space" from being watched by outsiders.[42]

In London, only a few of his works were still being published, but the proceeds were taken by Newbery.[31] However, Smart did get to see published a collection of his work under the pseudonym "Mrs Midnight" titled Mrs. Midnight's Orations; and other Select Pieces: as they were spoken at the Oratory in the Hay-Market, London.[43] Smart did not profit from the work, but he was able to see at least some of his previous work being printed again.[43] Smart, according to his 20th-century biographer Arthur Sherbo, had only "his God and his poetry".[44] A few of his loyal friends eventually grew tired of the treatment Smart received and freed him from Mr Potter's.[44]

There is little information about how and why Smart was released from asylum, but his daughter claimed: "He grew better, and some misjudging friends who misconstrued Mr Newbery's great kindness in placing him under necessary & salutary restriction which might possibly have eventually wrought a cure, invited him to dinner and he returned to his confinement no more."[31] What is known about the actual events is that John Sherratt, Christopher Smart's friend, believed that Smart's confinement was unfair and wanted to negotiate Smart's release. In January 1763, he met with a parliamentary committee to discuss the issue of individuals falsely imprisoned and abuses that they would receive in asylums. In particular, Sherratt argued that many were admitted for habitual intoxication, which undermined Battie's and other asylum keeper's reputations. A finding by the parliamentary committee released 27 January 1763 bolstered Sherratt's chances to release Smart. To those around him, Smart appeared perfectly sane, and he was most likely released because of legislation concurrently being passed in parliament advocating for a reform to patient care. Smart left the asylum on 30 January 1763 with Sherratt.[45]

Upon leaving asylum, Smart took the manuscripts of A Song to David, many translations of Psalms, and Jubilate Agno. A Song to David was published on 6 April 1763. Harsh reviews followed which mocked Smart's time in the asylum instead of dealing with the poems.[46] Jubilate Agno stayed in manuscript form and passed into the hands of the friends of William Cowper, a poet also placed into asylum and Smart's contemporary, when they investigated the concept of "madness". The work stayed in private holdings until it was rediscovered in the 20th century by William Stead.[47] It was not published until 1939 when it was printed with the title Rejoice in the Lamb: A Song from Bedlam.[48]

It was a century before a positive twist was put on Christopher Smart's time in asylum; the Victorian poet Robert Browning argued that A Song to David was great because Smart was mad at the time.[51] In his poem Parleyings (1887), Browning claimed:

Armed with this instance, have I diagnosed

Your case, my Christopher? The man was sound

And sane at starting: all at once the ground

Gave way beneath his step

* * * * *

Then—as heaven were loth

To linger;—let earth understand too well

How heaven at need can operate—off fell

The flame-robe, and the untransfigured man

Resumed sobriety,—as he began,

So did he end nor alter pace, not he![52]

To Browning, Smart's temporary madness was what allowed him to compose in A Song to David poetry similar to that of John Milton and John Keats.[51] Christopher Smart, as Browning's poem continued,

pierced the screen

'Twixt thing and word, lit language straight from soul,—

Left no fine film-flake on the naked coal

Live from the censer[53]

Browning's remarks brought about a later appreciation of A Song to David and Smart's madness.[54] A review of Browning's Parleying claimed that Christopher Smart was "possessed by his subject... and where there is true possession – where the fires of the poet's imagination are not choked by self-consciousness or by too much fuel from the intellect – idiosyncrasy, mannerism, and even conventional formulae are for the time 'burnt and purged away'."[55]

The 19th-century poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti emphasised the benefits of Smart's madness and claimed that A Song to David was "the only great accomplished poem of the last century."[56] Two years later, Francis Palgrave continued the theme when he wrote that the Song exhibited "noble wildness and transitions from grandeur to tenderness, from Earth to Heaven" and that it was "unique in our Poetry."[57] Seven years after Palgrave, critic John Churton Collins agreed with Rossetti and Palgrave, but to a lesser extent, when he wrote, "This poem stands alone, the most extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps, in our literature, the one rapt strain in the poetry of the eighteenth century, the work of a poet who, though he produced much, has not produced elsewhere a single line which indicates the power here displayed."[58]

Twentieth-century critics favoured the view that Smart had some kind of mental distress when writing his poems.[59] A review by "Mathews" titled "Thin Partitions", on 30 March 1901 The Academy, claimed that:

Now Christopher Smart was a very beggarly poet of the eighteenth century ... but had not the smallest claim to rank with those great men beyond their common trade of poem. Kit Smart, in fact, though he wrote a pestilent deal of verse, could not write poetry—nor anything else ... Legally mad, that is; for he appears to have been very mad in his senses, and a decent citizen out of them. He went mad—legally and medically—once, and nothing came out of it, perhaps because he was not mad enough. Then he went mad again and being duly shut up in Bedlam wrote one of the finest outbursts of lyric genius in the eighteenth century—perhaps the finest-before the advent of Blake ... Smart regained his senses, and therewith his hopeless inability to write poetry. And he never did anything after.[60]

In 1933, A. E. Housman sided with Browning's and Mathew's interpretation and connected Smart's madness with poetic genius in his lecture The Name and Nature of Poetry: "As matters actually stand, who are the English poets of that age in whom pre-eminently one can hear and recognize the true poetic accent emerging clearly from the contemporary dialect? These four: Collins, Christopher Smart, Cowper, and Blake. And what other characteristic had these four in common? They were mad."[61] In 1994, Branimir Rieger differed from Housman's view by distancing Smart from the others when he argued that "Collins and Cowper pine as isolated individuals, guiltily aware of a vitality that is not finally human but divine. Smart soars beyond individuality to embrace that vitality, but at a cost of all human relationship."[62]

However, there are many that disagreed that Smart was mad; Edward Ainsworth and Charles Noyes, when discussing Smart's Hymn to the Supreme Being, said, "The mind that composed this hymn was not deranged. Yet in the poem one sees the morbidly religious mind which, in disorder, was to produce the Jubilate Agno, and, with order restored, the Song to David.[63] Additionally, they claimed that Smart's

preternatural excitement to prayer seems to have been poor Smart's only real mental aberration, unless his drunkenness be considered pathological. When his mind was removed entirely from the field of prayer, he was but little changed from his sane state. His powers of reason, though thus warped, were not taken from him, and he neither raved nor sank into mental lethargy.[64]

Nevertheless, Ainsworth and Noyes were not completely sceptical about Smart's diagnosis when they continued: "But when the desire to pray struck him, Smart abandoned what the world chose to call rationality."[64]

In 1960, neurologist Russell Brain diagnosed Smart as suffering from cyclothymia or manic depression.[65] Brain based his diagnosis on Smart's own claims about how he felt, and he concluded that "in Smart's case the mental illness was not the result of his drunkenness, but he drank because he was mentally unstable."[65] Arthur Sherbo, in 1967, argued that "The nature of Smart's madness is impossible to diagnose at this distance in time" and then argued that:

since Battie himself pronounced him uncured, he must have been subject to hallucinations. Strong drink, taken often enough and in sufficient quantity, will have that effect, of course, but Battie, distinguishing between 'original' and 'consequential' madness ... would allow only that excessive drinking could 'become a very common, tho' remoter cause of Madness.' Others differed: John Ball in his Modern Practice of Physic, 1760, lists 'anxiety of mind' and too much 'strong vinous or spirituous liquors' as 'antecedent causes' of madness. Smart's mania, however it manifested itself, and it usually manifested itself in loud public prayer, did not stem from drunkenness; it was aggravated, however, by frequent recourse to the bottle. Ironically enough, as Mrs. Piozzi recognised, if Smart had prayed in the privacy of his home, all might have been well for him.[66]

The possible religious component of Smart's condition was taken up by 20th-century critics as an explanation for why the 18th century saw Smart as mad.[38] Laurence Binyon, in 1934, believed that religion played a major role in how society viewed Smart: "Smart's madness seems to have taken the form of a literal interpretation of the injunction Pray without ceasing. He embarrassed visitors by insisting on their joining him in his supplications ... Obsession with a fixed idea is a common form of insanity. But such obsessions are a mental imprisonment; whereas the Song is unmistakably the expression of a great release."[67] Binyon's idea was picked up by Sophia Blaydes, in 1966, who pointed out that society was prejudiced against those who experienced enthusiasm, a strong spiritual connection to God. It was against religious prejudice that she argued,

The cause of Smart's eclipse may be traced in part to a prejudice of the age, one which was founded in reason but developed in fear. There was one inescapable fact which hampered any clear perception of Smart's work—he had been confined for madness. It was easier to use a difficult allusion or unusual image as evidence of madness than to interpret it. What could cause a fundamentally rational group of people to react so irrationally? To some degree, it was the fear of 'enthusiasm'.[68]

In the 18th century, as Blaydes continued, the word changed from possessed by god to inspired to falsely inspired. The result of this change was that British society viewed enthusiasm as the enemy to both reason and social order.[69] Thus, "Smart, the hack-writer, would not have been greeted by a hostile audience, but Smart, the enthusiast, would have been condemned immediately. The result would be obvious: his past work, previously lauded, would be ignored, and his future work would receive immediate condemnation. such was the history of Smart's contemporary reputation."[70] In determining if Smart was really mad or not, Blaydes concluded, "in Smart's day, any sign of enthusiasm would have been cause for the judgment of madness ... Two accounts of Smart and the nature of his madness have been preserved for us. Each permits some doubt that the poet was mad and could be regarded so in any age."[71]

Frances Anderson, in 1974 characterised Smart's "illness" as insanity and obsession, but believed that "Smart's madness consisted of his efforts to obey literally St Paul's injunction to the Thessalonians: 'Pray without ceasing.'"[20] During his episodes of illness, as Anderson continued, Smart "probably suffered some periods of delirium" but also "appeared to know what he was doing".[72] Smart's actions were similar to 18th-century Methodists that were "addicted to public prayer with what was thought to be overly charged high spirits. Such displayers of religious emotionalism were often confined not only to private madhouses, but also to Bedlam".[72] Later, in 1998, Charles Rosen pointed out that "The Enlightenment condemned religious enthusiasm as appropriate for the uneducated and the great unwashed" and "it is understandable that the only original and vital religious poetry between 1760 and 1840 should have been written by poets considered genuinely mad by their contemporaries: Smart, Blake, and Hölderlin."[73]

Accounts at the end of the 20th century focused on the effects of Smart's confinement. Clement Hawes, following Michel Foucault's interpretation of the 18th century that there was an "'animality' of madness", believed that Smart emotionally connected with animals because of the "medical stigmatization" he felt at the hands of his fellow man.[74] Chris Mounsey, agreeing with Hawes's interpretation, believed that Smart's treatment was "a bestializing process and had taught him to hold his tongue and sit out his time as quietly as possible."[39] Contrary to the bestialisation, Allan Ingram argued that Jubilate Agno was "a poetic phenomenon that would have demolished contemporary poetic orthodoxies had it been publishable. The mad individual presented a gross distortion of the human form that nevertheless insisted on remaining human, but mad language could be even more disturbing."[75]