Jay - Mad with reason

MIKE JAY investigates the extraordinary Air Loom machine designed by a mentally ill inmate of Bedlam, James Tilly Matthews, providing a profound insight into power relations between doctors and patients

As the twenty-first century unfolds, the notion of the ‘influencing machine’ is entering the mainstream of our culture by stealth, from a thousand different sources. Covertly operated devices that use futuristic technology to send messages and control minds have become a staple of mass-entertainment science fiction and conspiracy narratives from the X-Files to The Matrix to The Manchurian Candidate. The internet hums with rumours and first-person testimonies of mind control, electronic implants and subliminal influencing devices.

All this represents a striking transition from a century ago, when the influencing machine was just beginning to be glimpsed within psychiatric practice as a strange denizen from the far shores of insanity, recorded among the baroque hallucinations of a few celebrated subjects such as Daniel Paul Schreber and August Strindberg,. It is a serious challenge to the imagination, then, to comprehend just how uncanny it must have seemed a century earlier still when, in 1810, the prototype for all these spectral-cum-mechanical devices, James Tilly Matthews’ Air Loom, was first presented to the public.

Nor was the Air Loom a distant ancestor, a rough sketch or fleeting glimpse that would need to be filled in with hindsight by succeeding generations. The influencing machine emerged fully formed. Where we might have expected to see vague jottings and incoherent scribbles, we have instead a precise and beautiful image such as we might expect to find in a scientific or technical journal of the time. Barrels, tubes, levers and cylinders are elegantly rendered and delicately shaded; figures are carefully dressed and artfully posed; components are finished with understated brass fittings and neatly keyed with copperplate lower-case initials. There is a coolness and conviction about the whole image, a sense that the artist has worked carefully to illustrate something highly complex in the simplest and most elegant form. Such coolness has a curiously unnerving effect. We wonder if we might have been convinced of the reality of the machine, had it not been presented as the production of a long-term incurable inmate of Bedlam, the world’s most famous asylum for lunatics.

But the reader of 1810 was not expected to admire the artistry of the Air Loom, or to contemplate the subtleties of the imaginative world that lay behind it. John Haslam, the resident apothecary at London’s Royal Bethlem Hospital – known popularly for centuries as Bedlam – included the image in his book Illustrations of Madness, at that time the longest psychiatric report ever written on a mad patient’s delusions, with two clear purposes in mind. One was professional: as the title of his book indicates, he wished to illustrate madness in its most florid form, and by the same token illustrate that he himself was the model for a new and specialist category of “mad-doctor”. The other was rather more personal: he was determined to prove, against contrary opinion from his family and others, that the artist, James Tilly Matthews, was indeed mad, and that those who had argued otherwise had proved themselves unfit to make such diagnoses.

The text that accompanied the illustration painstakingly reconstructed the world of the Air Loom, as conveyed to Haslam by his patient over many years. Matthews was convinced that outside the grounds of Bedlam, in a basement cellar by London Wall, a gang of villains were controlling and tormenting his mind with magnetic fluids and rays. The machine they had developed for this purpose, the Air Loom, combined recent developments in gas chemistry with the strange force of animal magnetism, or mesmerism.

It incorporated keys, levers, barrels, batteries, sails, brass retorts and magnetic fluid, and worked by directing and modulating magnetically charged airs and gases, rather as the stops of an organ modulate its tones. It ran on a mixture of foul substances, including “spermatic-animal-seminal rays”, “effluvia of dogs” and “putrid human breath”, and the discharges of fluid extracted from these substances were focused to deliver thoughts, feelings and sensations directly into Matthews' brain. There were many of these modulations, or “event-workings”, all classified by vivid names: “fluid locking”, “stone making”, “thigh talking”, “lobster-cracking”, “bomb-bursting”, and the dreaded “brain-saying”, whereby thoughts were forced into his brain against his will. To facilitate this process, the gang had implanted a magnet inside Matthews’ head. As a result of the Air Loom, he was tormented constantly by delusions, physical agonies, fits of laughter and being forced to parrot whatever nonsense they chose to feed into his head. His confinement in Bedlam represented the success of their strategy in making him appear mad.

The Air Loom was being operated by a gang of undercover Jacobin revolutionaries, who had forced Britain into a disastrous war with revolutionary France and were bent on maintaining hostilities between the two nations. These characters, too, Matthews could describe with eerie precision and detail. They were led by their sadistic puppet-master and strategist, named “Bill the King”; all details were recorded by his sarcastic and punctilious second-in-command, “Jack the Schoolmaster”. The French liaison was accomplished by a woman called Charlotte, who seemed to Matthews to be as much a prisoner as himself, and was often chained up near-naked. ‘Sir Archy’ was a woman who dressed as a rough, uncouth man and spoke in obscenities; the machine itself was operated by the sinister, pockmarked and nameless “Glove Woman”. When Matthews slept, this gang materialised in his dreams, “forcing their phantoms and grotesque images on his languid intellect” and gathering the secret information they needed to plot his assailment for the following day.

But the gang’s activity was not directed solely at Matthews; rather, he was the only witness to a conspiracy that had already engulfed Europe. There were many Air Loom gangs all over London, influencing the minds of politicians and public figures, and with a particularly firm grasp of the prime minister, William Pitt, whom they could puppet like a child’s toy whenever he addressed Parliament. In Paris, too, the French Directory was being manipulated by Air Looms, as were the crowned heads of Prussia and beyond.

By poisoning the minds of politicians on both sides of the Channel with suspicious and belligerent “brain-sayings”, the gangs were threatening national and international catastrophe. They were everywhere, lurking in streets, theatres and coffee-houses, where they tricked the unsuspecting into inhaling the magnetic fluid that would place them under the control of the Air Loom, and they carried magnetic batons that they could grasp to make themselves invisible if they were discovered.

John Haslam offered “the peculiar opinions of Mr Matthews” not merely to titillate the reader with extravagant lunacy – though he clearly hoped that this might entice the general reader to buy his book – but, more urgently, to announce his theory of madness to his professional colleagues. “Madness being the opposite to reason and good sense”, he patiently explained, “as light is to darkness, straight to crooked &c., it appears wonderful that two opposite opinions could be entertained on the subject”. Let no doctor take refuge behind the idea that madness is in some sense in the eye of the beholder, an abstract or relative concept on which experts might agree to differ. “A person”, Haslam insists, “cannot correctly be said to be in his senses and out of his senses at the same time”. The only way to proceed in the diagnosis of madness was by careful examination of the facts of the case, and this was the spirit in which the Air Loom was offered to the reader.

But the irony of Illustrations of Madness is that it’s now virtually impossible to read it in the way the author intended. Too much of the revolutionary zeitgeist of the 1800s screams out at us from the page; too much of the subsequent progress of psychiatry sends beams backwards in time to illuminate this detail or that, and receives answering winks in reply. Most of all, the facts of James Tilly Matthews’ life before his admission to Bedlam make it clear that we are in a looking-glass version of a true story – a version not simply deranged but somehow artful, pointed, inspired, at times even deliberately witty. We could grasp none of this if Haslam had not recorded it, but we must somehow bypass the author’s intention to unlock its true meaning. It is a book that cannot simply be read: it demands to be hijacked.

Illustrations of Madness must be regarded not simply as a doctor’s psychiatric report on his patient but a genuine collaboration between the two men. Matthews and Haslam were tireless antagonists throughout the years, each ready at any moment to denounce the other as raving lunatic or sadistic fraud. While Haslam was taking notes on his patient, Matthews was simultaneously taking notes on his doctor, and his lengthy accusations of ill-treatment would eventually see Haslam dismissed from his post and professionally disgraced.

Yet Haslam commissioned the image of the Air Loom from Matthews, and Matthews was happy to oblige; Matthews read the finished manuscript, which included large sections in his own hand, and approved the final text. Haslam made a point of declaring that “these opinions have been collected from the patient...where inverted commas are used, the manuscript of Mr Matthews has been faithfully copied; and that for thus introducing his philosophic opinions to the notice of a discerning public, he feels ‘contented and grateful’”. There is no reason to disbelieve Haslam on this – indeed, it would have been important to his claims of skilled observation that the patient should recognise the account that the doctor gave of him.

Rarely can a collaboration have taken place between two authors with such different intents. Haslam preserved the Air Loom for posterity to buttress his claims to psychiatric authority; Matthews contributed in order to warn the world of the dark forces that had already achieved the ultimate coup d’êtat, one that had taken control of the world in such a way that only one person had noticed.

But two centuries later, the Air Loom has become something that neither of its authors could have guessed at: not the solipsistic ravings of a forgotten lunatic, but the first occurrence of a new myth of the modern age. The machine that controls the mind has emerged from its obscure corner of psychiatry to mesmerise the broader culture, its image now endlessly amplified and recycled through the mass media and the Hollywood dream machine. The Air Loom is an act of the imagination that has become ever more recognisable as telephone, television and computer have colonised the texture of our reality, creating a world where rays, ethers, beams and particles assail us constantly.

In 1810, the Air Loom was real – but only to James Tilly Matthews. Now, perhaps, it is beginning to come into focus for the rest of us.

Mike Jay is the author of The Air Loom Gang: The Strange and True Story of James Tilly Matthews and his Visionary Madness (Bantam 2003).