Asylum confinement of Christopher Smart

Smart was diagnosed as "incurable" while at St Luke's, and when they ran out of funds for his care he was moved to Mr. Potter's asylum, Bethnal Green.

Smart's isolation led him to abandon the poetic genres of the 18th century that had marked his earlier work and to write religious poetry such as Jubilate Agno ("Rejoice in the Lamb").

Late 18th-century critics felt that Smart's madness justified them in ignoring his A Song to David, but during the following century Robert Browning and his contemporaries considered his condition to be the source of his genius.

During the 18th century, madness was "both held to reveal inner truth and condemned to silence and exclusion as something unintelligible by reason, and therefore threatening to society and to humanity".

[2] Physician William Battie—who later treated Smart—wrote: [We] find that Madness is, contrary to the opinion of some unthinking persons, as manageable as many other distempers, which are equally dreadful and obstinate, and yet are not looked upon as incurable, and that such unhappy objects ought by no means to be abandoned, much less shut up in loathsome prisons as criminals or nuisances to the society.

[6] Agreeing with Szasz's position, philosopher Michel Foucault emphasized that asylums were used in the 18th century to attack dissenting views and that the idea of madness was a cultural fear held by the British public, rather than a legitimate medical condition.

[8] This description is consistent with Smart's 1760s writings on the subject in which, according to Thomas Keymer, "the category of madness is insistently relativized, and made to seem little more than the invention of a society strategically concerned to discredit all utterances or conduct that threatens its interests and norms.

"[9] 18th century treatment of inpatients was simple: they were to be fed daily a light diet of bread, oatmeal, some meat or cheese, and a little amount of beer, which were inadequate in meeting daily nutritional needs;[10] they were denied contact with outsiders, including family members;[4] and they would be denied access to that which was deemed to be the cause of their madness (these causes ranged from alcohol and food to working outside).

In 1750, Smart started to familiarise himself with Grub Street, London's writing district, and met John Newbery, a publisher.

[18] The publication of Hymn to the Supreme Being marked the beginning of Smart's obsession with religion and eventual confinement for madness because he began praying "without ceasing".

[22] Christopher Hunter, Smart's biographer and nephew, described the situation: Though the fortune as well as the constitution of Mr. Smart required the utmost care, he was equally negligent in the management of both, and his various and repeated embarrassments acting upon an imagination uncommonly fervid, produced temporary alienations of mind; which at last were attended with paroxysms so violent and continued as to render confinement necessary.

[32] During his time in asylum, Smart busied himself with a daily ritual of writing poetry; these lyric fragments eventually formed his Jubilate Agno and A Song to David.

[33] Although 20th-century critics debate whether his new poetic self-examination represents an expression of evangelical Christianity, his poetry during his isolation does show a desire for "unmediated revelation" from God.

[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.

[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).

[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.

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.

[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".

'Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labour; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

The view was widely held, and the poet William Mason wrote to Thomas Gray, "I have seen his Song to David & from thence conclude him as mad as ever.

"[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.

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.

"[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.

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.

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.

"[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.

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.