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Bedlam
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.
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.
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.
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.
- GenresArtFictionHistorical
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 3, 2026
unbelievably arresting. Like notes from underground took a Grand Tour
March 9, 2026
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.
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.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
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.
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.
March 1, 2026
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.
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.
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June 12, 2026I 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.
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.
March 7, 2026
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.
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.
June 10, 2026
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.
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.
March 21, 2013
"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.
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.
June 14, 2016
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.
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October 17, 2016propably an excellent painter but a sad sad story
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December 6, 2016a strange and very sad story
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews