Bedlam
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jul 14, 2026
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- $9.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Higgie, author of The Mirror and the Palette, captivates in this poetic story of English artist Richard Dadd (1817–1886) and his descent into madness. The story opens in Broadmoor Hospital in 1885, where an elderly Dadd was committed years earlier, and where he's made much of his work. Reflecting on his life, he focuses on his travels as a young man with his patron Sir Thomas Phillips, shortly before a psychotic break sent him to a series of hospitals. In 1842, Dadd and Sir Thomas leave London for their tour across Europe to North Africa and the Middle East. Higgie peppers the travelogue with foreshadowing, as when Dadd admits of his time in Venice, "There have been moments when I have exploded with a rage that has surprised even me." In Egypt, he becomes convinced that a man is following him. As the trip draws to a close, Dadd's musings veer into the misjudgments of a madman: "However flimsy the attempt, I must try to protect whatever innocence there may be on board this vessel." Told in short chapters, the story culminates in an act of violence that confirms Dadd's descent into lunacy. It's an arresting meditation on the fragility of sanity.
