The 1830s were dominated by the cholera pandemic (1826−37) and epidemics of influenza, typhus, and typhoid (1836−42). These events were so important at the time that the discourse of popular protest became interwoven with the language of contagion and of sanitary reform. The reformist unrest of the 1830s was recast in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841) as the 1780 Gordon riots. This chapter explores the extent to which the political and religious unrest in Barnaby Rudge mimics epidemic transmission by placing the novel alongside modern epidemiological studies of urban riots. Further, Dickens connects the 1830s discourses of epidemic and riot with madness, focussing on the problem of the undiagnosability of madness. Barnaby Rudge raises important questions about the transmission of dangerous ideas. Moreover, it connects these to the problem of individual culpability in the case of intellectual disability.

Swift specialised in playing with distinctions between reason and unreason. This chapter focuses on two major works, A Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in which Swift’s blurs the line between reason and unreason: firstly in ‘A Digression concerning the Original, the Use and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth’, and secondly in Gulliver’s fourth voyage to the Yahoos. Swift repeatedly engages in a sleight of hand, obliging readers to appreciate the ease with which reason can slip into madness. But in the voyage to the Yahoos, this chapter argues, readers find Gulliver’s self-loathing and misanthropy to be a step too far. Swift’s skill is to make his reader question their own perspectives and their own balance between reason and unreason.

In descriptions of the interior drama of the wager, or of the game, or of the convoluted sequence of emotions suddenly untethered and allowed free expression, we see not only the ways that gambling generated emotional intensity in players, but also how it invited closely detailed descriptions of the ways emotions were experienced. Play and the creation of Blanc-style casinos created a social space and a set of images of gambling that provided Europeans from differing backgrounds a common language of emotion that was developed through a discussion of the ways that emotion was contained and expressed in the environment of the casino, an entity typically described as being passionless.

It is the argument of this chapter that in the 1830s and 1840s, the pressure of memorialising old friends who had suffered or died with madness caused Wordsworth to write a kind of poetry that responded to (what he saw as) deformity. In the process, fraught with difficulty, he modified his epitaphic poetics: a series of memorials mixed the traits of his elegiac verse with those of his epitaphs and inscriptions.

In this chapter, I assess a pair of poems linked by their occasion – the moon seen from the seashore – by their place of composition – the Cumbrian coast—by their date – the mid 1830s – and by their scenario – the lonely sailor at sea in the dark allegorising men and women’s position in the world. I construe the poems as among Wordsworth’s most searching meditations on disappointment, alienation, loss and depression – and on poetry’s role in articulating aspects of spacetime that might mollify, if not cure, what he reveals to be the human predicament.

This chapter considers how Samuel Johnson’s various disabilities shaped perceptions of him during his lifetime and continue to influence critical and biographical assessments of his personality, conversational prowess, and literary style. Given that modern conceptions of disability formed in the nineteenth century, I discuss why interpretations of Johnson’s mental and physical impairments might be better served by focusing on terms that were current in the eighteenth century, such as melancholy and peculiarity. Johnson’s friends and associates frequently commented on the “peculiarity” of his bodily movements. I examine episodes in which these peculiarities inspired people to stare at Johnson or to imitate him. These episodes reveal the deeper significance that eighteenth-century men and women ascribed to unusual and surprising forms of embodiment. I conclude by exploring the intriguing connections critics have made between Johnson’s “peculiar” body and his distinctive prose style.

A lack of self-recognition may point to psychological disorder and self-estrangement, and this chapter tackles the problematic notions of late style and madness in Schumann’s oeuvre. Still, misrecognition, mishearing, and their resulting subjective estrangement is wound throughout Schumann’s oeuvre, from the close of the Op. 35 Kerner cycle and the enigmatic piano miniature ‘Vogel als Prophet’ to the magical mirror scene from Genoveva; in extreme form it is manifested in the depiction of madness in the Andersen setting ‘Der Spielmann’. Most troublingly, the loss of musical self-recognition is epitomised autobiographically in the theme of the late Geistervariationen, with its reworking of an idea found in the slow movement of the Violin Concerto, but one which Schumann misattributed to the spirits of Schubert and Mendelssohn. Yet as I argue at the chapter’s close, the psychological state of the music’s virtual subjects often bear scant relation to anything that can be shown to apply to the actual biographical subject, Robert Schumann. In recognising signs of insanity in Schumann’s music, commentators are often only reading their own presuppositions into it.

Mental illness is not strictly divisible from physical for much of the long eighteenth century: many mental disorders were thought to originate from physical causes and were treated by similar methods. But this category of disease had an enormous influence on literary productions throughout the period. In the early years, in Swift, for example, and in Pope and in adaptations of Shakespeare, being mad, or eccentric, tended to figure largely, while after the rise of the novel, and of sensibility in particular, the figure of the madman, and especially madwoman, featured prominently as a means of arousing fine feelings, as in Richardson, Sterne, and Henry Mackenzie. Similar currents developed within medicine and psychiatry, not least the movement towards ‘moral management’, taking the mad more seriously, and identifying them as a specialist branch of scientific understanding and treatment. These tendencies reached their height within the Romantic period, with madness being seen by Wordsworth, for example, as one danger of the heightened imagination, but also being valorised, as by Blake, as an exceptionally sensitive and privileged condition. This chapter analyses the major types of mental illness that dominated during the period and the ways in which they were discussed and represented.

King Lear was considered as David Garrick’s most significant part. I argue that this judgement depends on the extent to which this play (following Nahum Tate’s and Garrick’s alterations of Shakespeare’s text) offered a remarkable sequence of contrasting emotions through the performance of madness. The representation of Lear’s insanity required a mastery of the art of transition, yet Garrick’s practice of such an art was not without its challenges. While his critics explored the aesthetic, sociological, and psychological questions of how to perform a king’s madness, performance editions and promptbook markings reveal Garrick’s own efforts to render the part’s transitions with everything from innovative make-up to minute textual editing. Such transitions, and those of Edgar’s pretend madness, ultimately performed an essential function, moderating and so maintaining spectators’ emotional engagement in the Tate-Garrick tragedy. Such moderation is alien to Shakespeare’s play of 1608, and, while the eighteenth-century Lear can tell us much about a celebrated performance in Georgian London, it thus also serves as a critical standpoint for re-evaluating the structures of Jacobean tragedy.

After providing an overview of modernist disability studies, this essay uses three prone modernist bodies to explore some of the ways weakness, illness, madness, and disability suggest a revisitation of what Paul Saint-Amour has called “the politics of force or strength.” The prone and potent bodies of Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz and Elizabeth Bowen’s Madame Fisher and Josephine Mather blur the distinction between active and passive, their strength inseparable from their weakness. Disability in these texts is able to infect the self of the “normate,” replacing the oppositions of self and other, normate and abject, with characteristically modernist instability. By highlighting the ways the prone bodies of these characters collapse such distinctions, this essay sheds light on the ambivalence folded within modernism’s embrace of the active and the fit.

Chapter Five brings tragedy and comedy together to explore the links between female solo dance and madness in Euripides and Aristophanes. I begin by considering two instances of female dance that are described – but not performed – on the Athenian stage: Agave’s movement surrounding the murder of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae and the dance of Demostratus’ wife in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. I argue that the projection of these dances outside the theatrical space itself exposes anxieties about the unruliness of female bodies engaged in ritual performance – especially the singular dancer separated from the chorus. I conclude with a contrasting example, exploring how Cassandra’s performance in Euripides’ Trojan Women brings mad female dancing onstage, and, like Io’s dance in Prometheus Bound (Ch. 2), tests the bounds of tragic theatricality.

Chapter 8: This chapter analyzes the legacy and influence of the diagnostic gaze in contemporary British theatre, examining how theatre can offer a site to negotiate the complex dynamic between psychiatric institutions and the experiences of patients. Contemporary psychiatry has overseen a vast expansion in the categorization of mental illness. Mental disorders can be identified and ascribed to individual patients in an act of diagnosis that signals mental illness as a ‘performative malady’. Alongside reflecting shifts in the etiology of mental disorder (increasingly focused upon a biomedical model), the speech-act of diagnosis has implications for the legal status and care of the patient. Analyzing works such as Joe Penhall’s Some Voices and Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, this chapter suggests how theatre can offer a reimagination of diagnosis by situating and troubling the role of the psychiatric user.

A brief entry in Jerome’s Chronicle – the only Life of Lucretius surviving from antiquity – claims that he wrote De rerum natura ‘in the intervals of insanity’ before committing suicide. Jerome’s brief Life and its early modern accretions became a virtual blueprint for reading Lucretius’ poem in biofictional terms. De rerum natura was seen as a document of a mind divided against itself: the Life interacted with contradictions in the text to read Lucretius’ poem as a dramatized version of a modern subject facing the competing pressures of religion and its scientific other. This chapter looks at how Victorian readers engaged in biofictional receptions of De rerum natura as a means to thinking through psychological modernity. Lucretius’ popularity – as is now widely acknowledged – was crucial to the scientific culture of the period. But his Life and his poem were associated with another sort of inquiry: the psychological investigation of the human mind. Focusing on Matthew Arnold and Alfred Lord Tennyson, the chapter examines how these writers, in exploring the make-up of the human psyche at the crisis of modernity, used biofictional reading of Lucretius’ to work through contemporary cultural anxieties. The Roman poet was co-opted as an ersatz Victorian, and, in the process, modern subjectivity itself could be discovered.