Bedlam

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.

Incarcerated, Dadd thoughts return to a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East taken with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The two men travelled through German forests, Alexandrian brothels and across the desert to the Nile. By the time they found themselves beneath the unforgiving sun of Syria and Palestine, Dadd’s fraught mind was taxed to the limit with extraordinary images. He became stranger and more violent, changes his companion attributed to sunstroke. But somewhere on that journey, Dadd had become a devotee of the god Osiris. Shortly after his return to England in 1843, the god directed him to take a life, and Dadd was 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.