Bedlam

by Jennifer Higgie

I did not write my life, and therefore cannot tell you in simple terms what happened to effect such change.
I have left that task to the images that have fallen from my fingers since my youth.
I have let them fall, so that one day they might be picked up.
My pictures describe me correctly. Jennifer Higgie In 1842 an English artist accompanied a former mayor on a Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East. Within a year he had become a devotee of the Egyptian god Osiris and murdered his beloved father, believing him to be an impostor. Bedlam is a novel inspired by a year in the life of Richard Dadd, a great Victorian painter and inmate of London's Bethlem Hospital – more commonly known as Bedlam. 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. Oliver Harris, Times Literary Supplement Jennifer Higgie is co-Editor and staff writer of frieze magazine. She is the editor of Art and Humour published by the Whitechapel Gallery, London and MIT Press. She also wrote the screenplay for the feature film I Really Hate My Job , which will be on general release in 2007.

Genres: Art, Fiction, Historical

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richly-imagined, intense, lyrical recreation of scenes from the life of eccentric, Victorian painter Richard Dadd - inspiration to artists, musicians and writers from Angela Carter to Terry Pratchett. Informed by biographies and letters, art historian Higgie’s novel reconstructs events leading up to Dadd’s brutal murder of his elderly father, and later incarceration in Bedlam, then Broadmoor asylums. But this isn’t conventional historical fiction. Instead Higgie attempts to rebuild Dadd’s complex inner worlds, his growing belief that everyone around him is somehow off-kilter, sinister, increasingly phantasmagorical. Higgie’s vision of Dadd opens up a path towards the eerie, fairy paintings he’s now known for.

Structured like fragments from an unorthodox travel diary, Higgie’s compassionate, arresting narrative follows Dadd as he journeys across Europe and later Syria, Lebanon and Egypt in 1842. Already hailed as a promising young artist, Dadd’s role was to chronicle the trip for benefactor Sir Thomas Phillips. Although Dadd’s deteriorating condition is linked to exposure to blazing suns and settings that overwhelmed his senses, there’s an impression here too that the prejudices of his age played a part in his unravelling. Dadd is steeped in fear of the other, the racism, xenophobia and orientalism that marked the age in which he lived. But Dadd’s terror and suspicion are tempered by his fascination with his changing surroundings, the landscapes, sounds, and wildlife of each new country. Sights that fuel his fevered, internal debates about the nature and purpose of art. Sights that Higgie’s marvellous use of imagery renders vivid and immediate. The result is moving, disturbing and often strangely, hauntingly beautiful.

[claudia r · Rating 5 out of 5]

unbelievably arresting. Like notes from underground took a Grand Tour

[Unmolt · Rating 5 out of 5]

holy shit.

I found this book whilst browsing the newest releases in Lit Fic, only to discover this book is being republished and has been out for over a decade. Then to my horror, I come to goodreads and find it only has 38 reviews! Guys, how the hell did something this good go under the radar for so long?

The book follows the life of young painter, Richard (inspired by real life painter Richard Dadd) and his journey from London to Egypt. Our protagonist starts as a nervous, lost young man and ends this book in a religious psychosis whilst committing murder.

This book does everything right for me, it doesn’t drag, it’s a relatively short book but much more realised in its concepts than 600+ page books I’ve read in the same genre. The author has a very, very lyrical writing style, and chapters are formatted like rushed diary entries. The author also manages to talk about ‘cringe’ and done to death topics like Jesus and the forever betrayed son trope and bring something new and refreshing to the table. I genuinely, hand on heart, believe we have a classic on our hands.

As appropriate of 1800s London, the book is rife with orientalist views but there’s a sobering self awareness in it that I really appreciate.

[KDub · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was so drawn in by the description of Bedlam and intrigued by its cover. Bedlam is a work of historical fiction about the Victorian artist Richard Dadd. Richard recalls a story about his year of adventure traveling and painting with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. Unfortunately, he's telling this story from a psychiatric hospital in London, where he spent most of his life. Over the course of the infamous travel year, Richard slowly (ever so slowly) loses his mind, leading to an incident when he finally returns home.

This book took a trip to Peru with me and made it to Machu Picchu. I think traveling while reading this story was an appropriate experience, and enhanced it for sure. Bedlam had me looking up fascinating info about Richard Dadd himself, his art, and Bethlem Psychiatric Hospital (aka Bedlam). I love when books take me down rabbit holes I was not even aware existed. I do wish more time had been spent with Richard before and especially after his year spent traveling, but it does let you really get inside his tortured mind.

Thank you to NetGalley and Verso Books for the eARC and the #gifted physical copy.

[Mily · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars !!!

Bedlam was so beautifully written, I am thoroughly impressed by Jennifer Higgie's prose. Richard's thoughts were so relatable, and even quite funny at times. She wrote the unraveling of his mind in such a beautiful way.

Highly recommend, especially if you like or have a background in art.

[Ian, etc. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Art undoes us, the world undoes us. Seeing is undoing and picking apart. And all the time we are building an idea, we are losing the real, exchanging the real for the more real, fearfully. And what happens should we dare form an idea of ourselves. Spark of inspiration I have lit and stoked but is outside of me and large and old as the sun.

Really interesting look at father-son relationships — not all resonant, but enough. Reaches too far, maybe, and this is an attending problem through the book. Lots of light packed into the pages, but the effort sometimes splits the seams. Highly compelling, though. I could see this doing very well.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

"My head is so full of terrible thoughts that at times I have truly doubted my own reason. I have begun to believe that paintings are not imaginary things, while the world I move through is constructed entirely from shadows."
In 1842 painter Richard Dadd toured Europe and the Middle East. In Egypt he becomes an Osiris worshipper, then returns home to London, stabs his father to death and gets locked up in Bedlam. All true - except maybe the bit about Osiris, but then, this is a novel. And a damn fine one that reads like an extended prose poem at times. Desirable as this hardback is though, with its stark grey boards and silver edge painting, the book deserves a wider audience. Why haven't Dedalus republished this as a paperback? It's got their style all over it. Get to it chaps and chapesses.

[Janine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hauntingly lyrical fictional biography focusing on one year in the life of the Victorian painter, Richard Dadd.

First, before I started the book I wanted to know a bit about its subject since I had never heard of him. I learned that in his early twenties he showed such promise he was invited to exhibit at the Royal Academy. Then in 1842 through an invitation from Sir Thomas Phillips, a Welsh lawyer, he joined a group doing the Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East to document its journey. While in Egypt he suffered heatstroke or a mental break down and became a devotee of the god Osiris and upon his return he murdered his father believing he was an imposter - sad tale for sure.

Higgie writes in short pithy sentences, sometimes even using one word or at others in more traditional writing style. I think this contributes greatly to showing how unhinged Dadd’s mind is becoming. It’s around Venice that we start to see a change. The story moves chronologically and the mind grows “so full of terrible thoughts that at times I have truly doubted my own reason. I have begun to believe that paintings are not imaginary things, while the works I move through is constructed entirely from shadows.” Then he learns of Osiris from a book Sir Thomas gave him and Dadd seems in his mind to be better having encountered this god. They journey back home. It’s 1843 and London has become constricting to Dadd, believing he must fight the devil because he’s grown to believe most people in his life are either the devil or imposters. The book ends in 1885 at Broadmoor Hospital with Dadd, now incarcerated as a “criminal lunatic” wondering how he got there.

While strange in a way, the book brilliantly creates the inner workings of a mind in turmoil and descent. The prose-poetry writing I think helps this and I mentioned earlier also contributes well to describing a mind breaking up. Dadd’s comments on his art which he describes in fabulous way is another way Higge captures the mind’s fragility.

For all of the above that I gave this book five stars. I was so interested in the story from the beginning. I was intrigued by the writing style and felt the anguish of a mind disintegrating as I read.

My thanks to NetGalley and Verso Books for allowing me to read this ARC.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review: The Brilliant, Fractured Mind of Richard Dadd
In her evocative new work, Jennifer Higgie manages a rare feat: she captures the precise moment a brilliant mind begins to fray at the edges. The novel follows Richard Dadd—the Victorian painter now infamous for his intricate, supernatural canvases—during his incarceration at London’s notorious Bethlem Hospital. Through Higgie’s empathetic lens, we are invited to retracing the steps of the journey that broke him: a grand tour of the Middle East that began as an artistic pilgrimage and ended in a divine, or perhaps demonic, obsession with the god Osiris.

A Poetic Descent into Madness
The prose is, in a word, superb. Higgie adopts a voice for Dadd that is the "most literary of literary writing"—a style that is at once jarringly acute and alarmingly askew. The early chapters function as a vivid, poetic travelogue, documenting Dadd’s journey with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips, across the European continent and into the unforgiving heat of the Levant.

Higgie’s descriptions are wonderfully insightful, often leaning into a certain "unknowing naivety" that makes Dadd’s observations feel both fresh and haunting. Early in the journey, Dadd muses on whether the cows in the fields yearn to read or look at pictures. It is a moment that hints at an autistic temperament—a mind wired differently from the start—and serves as a subtle, chilling omen for the internal collapse to follow.

The Sun and the Shadow
The turning point of the narrative lies in the shift of the atmosphere. As the party moves from the cool German forests to the scorching deserts of Syria and Palestine, the sun becomes a character in its own right. Dadd’s observation that "the Sun cannot be the same sun that we have in England" is a sentiment many travelers will recognize, yet in his case, it takes on a sinister weight.

What Sir Thomas mistakes for simple sunstroke is, in fact, the total transformation of a man. Higgie masterfully navigates this transition, showing how a mind "taxed to the limit" by extraordinary images can swiftly and dangerously go awry.

[g.m.]

I don’t think I have every read something this beautifully written. My own sadness was that the arc I was given didn’t allow for line by line annotations so I couldn’t underline anything.

I didn’t know this was a fictional biography when reading it, however that didn’t remove the sadness I felt for young Dadd. He had all these exceptional ideas about art and perceiving the world but these thoughts had to exist in isolation. He was so lonely. It was as if he was inside a prison even before he ended up in Bedlam.

I do think I might read this again when I can get a physical copy so I can really hone in on the sensory and philosophical discussion but also track the internal turmoil of the narrator.

[eden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the story chooses the man and wraps him in it until he suffocates.
For me, the sun made up my mind, and the sun became my story.
But what of before?

This slim novel is full of the loveliest prose I’ve read in quite some time. I cannot judge it as a depiction of Richard Dadd specifically, but as a portrait of a shy young man slowly falling to madness, it is brilliantly subtle: the slow curving in on himself until he’s the only real thing, the changing relationship to sun and moon. While it was a bit dry in the middle, the dread continued to grow all the way up to the truly heartbreaking end.

[Ellie Duff · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a strangle little book. It accomplishes it's goal with surprising technical accuracy. That is, the story is crafted and told from the perspective of a man sinking further and further into madness. The voice of the character is fractured, tangential, and laced with mistrust and suspicion in the exact way one might expect from a person suffering from unmedicated schizophrenia. There is no real unifying narrative and the truncated chapters feeling spastic and disjointed. While this mirrors the internality of the schizophrenic mind, it makes for an unsatisfying story. I'm not upset that I read it, but I don't know to whom I would recommend it.

[sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Art critic and Frieze editor Jennifer Higgie imagines the final year of Richard Dadd — a Victorian artist whose European travels spiral into delusion, patricide, and eventual confinement at Bedlam, a well known 17th century insane asylum. It’s a masterclass in fragmentation and so clearly written by someone educated in his history and artistic vision.

Some of Dadd’s most intricate works emerge during his decades of confinement, still charged with the intensity of what he encountered abroad. The Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke, his most famous painting, centres on a woodsman poised to split a chestnut — an act said to enable the construction of Queen Mab’s chariot. Yet the moment resists resolution: suspended between action and aftermath, it holds the viewer in a kind of visual hesitation and gestures towards an almost violent threshold in fantasy itself.

Dadd’s accompanying poem, written in an effort to “fix” the painting’s meaning, only deepens its instability. Rather than clarifying the scene, it simultaneously multiplies its possible interpretations whilst suggesting an underlying anxiety around translation, coherence, and control that Higgie’s novel renders with precision.

German forests, Greek coastlines, Alexandrian brothels, Syrian deserts —none of it gives him the artistic clarity he’s seeking. Instead, experience accumulates into something physically unmanageable: too much beauty, too much meaning and no stable way to translate it without distortion — he says it would be ‘idealist’ or ‘inaccurate’. The prose mirrors this excess — lilting, almost lyrical — threaded with repetitions (Lust and How We Speak of Lust) that suggest a mind circling itself, unable to form its own interpretations. That same density finds an echo in Freddie Mercury’s The Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke, where rhythm and reference collapse into one another without clear meaning.

Dadd becomes an embodiment of a kind of travellers’ paradox: seeing, understanding and belonging are three entirely different experiences. And so, naturally, he tries to force coherence on something that resists it, or more aptly him. In Lust, that impulse becomes disturbingly literal. Then in I Decided to Study Egyptians, he turns to theology, tracing connections to Osiris with the conviction that meaning can be systematised. Devotion replaces understanding and even the body becomes implicated — sleep shifting from impossibility to nourishment, wisdom pursued through acts as strange as consuming an owl piece by piece, as though knowledge might be ingested rather than grasped.

By the time he returns home, familiarity with anything but the spirit world has eroded. His family appear to be impostors and reality demands correction. Convinced the only solution is to reenact Osiris’ cycle of death and rebirth by murdering his father in the hope of finding the “real” one, he does so in one final effort to restore coherence to a world that no longer holds. I genuinely adored the strangeness of this novel, and the way it refuses to fully settle even after the final page.

[Steffi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Über das titelgebende berühmte Irrenhaus in London wird kaum ewas gesagt, dennoch sind die Eindrücke die Dadd, bei der Reise durch Europa bis nach Ägypten beschreibt sehr einprägsam.

[Verfaille Dirk]

propably an excellent painter but a sad sad story

[Verfaille Dirk]

a strange and very sad story