Of what followed for the next few days I cannot say much; for my head was then so thoroughly weakened that I had almost lost all count of time. It was a very merciful weakness, for without it I do not think that a sensitive brain could have borne a succession of shocks such as I described at the end of my last chapter. There was a very large number of madmen in the place, which was avowedly regarded as an asylum chiefly for ‘incurables,’ whence I conclude that it was thought convenient in my case to take the extremest view of matters at once. So little was I myself able to realise that resort could have been had with me to such a step as this, that, strange as it may seem, some months passed before I knew that I was the inmate of an asylum. I thought, in the dazed state of trance in which I contrived to exist from hour to hour, that I was in some sort of establishment devoted to nervous patients, whence I should be removed in due course of time; though, in the vague and dreamy speculations which occupied my days, I was wont inwardly to wonder what possible effect for good those broken nerves of mine could derive from constant association with a variety of people who were ‘nervous’ to such a very marked degree. Their ailments used at times to cause me much inward perplexity. One of them used to rush wildly about the passages of the house—generally with a file of old numbers of the ‘Times’ under his arm, in all sorts of wonderful costumes, which he was very fond of changing, an Inverness cape and a velvet cap being his garments of choice—shouting out scraps of song in a discordant voice. Another always wished to shake hands with me, and recite medical prescriptions at hazard; at supper, when a number of us sate down at a long table to consume some incredible beef-sandwiches as a wholesome prelude to quiet sleep, he would finish by crossing himself and eating the parsley. Tobacco he was rather fond of eating, too, poor fellow. He is dead now, thank God for it; for even in his vagaries and in my illness he impressed upon me with singular force the idea that he was exceptionally a ‘gentleman,’ and a good one. A few days before his end—he died of Bright’s disease, good reader; and he wanted something more, I think, than asylum treatment—I remember his expressing his dislike to sitting down at dinner in a lady’s company without being properly dressed. One of the ‘matrons’ was in charge of us at the time; a kind-hearted, clear-headed woman, to whom I was to owe my first release (I was condemned twice to my fate). From her first I learned exactly where I was, and the sort of net that had immeshed me; and, after she had talked to me once or twice for five minutes, ‘This,’ she said, ‘is a cruel and a shameful thing. You have no business to be here. Your friends should remove you instantly.’

But I am anticipating a little. I met this lady, happily for me, at a seaside ‘house of ease,’ to which some few of the patients were periodically sent from the ‘Establishment,’ as the asylum was euphemistically called (we were very refined and Pickwickian altogether, and our warders were our ‘attendants’), for change of air. To obtain even that slight relief, an order from the magistrates, who execute justice and maintain truth—and in this case were connections or near neighbours of the head of the establishment—is considered necessary. No loophole for escape was left us which the law can sew up. For five fearful months I lived at head-quarters in the asylum, the whole morale of heart and mind being more played upon and shattered every day. I have described the ways of two of my companions. Another, with an abnormally large head of hair, had a way of skipping about the house with startling entreaties for ‘baccy,’ or singing to himself a favourite little song, which ran thus: ‘Hey-diddle-diddle, I want some more beer.’ Yet he could be consecutive sometimes, too, when one talked with him; and under the care of the same matron he sensibly improved, as, when I met him again afterwards—how shall in due course be told—he had sensibly deteriorated. He was mad, no doubt, quite mad, but very gentle; and I ask all good and reasonable people, on every good and reasonable principle, how such a malady as his can be bettered by constant association with other mental maladies of every sort and kind? For myself—I say it again—my physical weakness saved me, with the consequent incapacity of the brain to receive immediate impressions strongly. But the impressions were made, deep and enduring; and they come out afterwards in the light of health and freedom, as the photograph takes form and strength under the action of the chemicals. Now, happy and free, the horrors that were like dreams at the time seem to shake me as I write; and strongly balanced as I know my brain to be, I doubt if the companions who in sickness but vaguely frightened me, in health would not break me down. There is a very fearful responsibility somewhere for what was done to me.

Patients there were of other and of many kinds. There was one black gentleman from India who never spoke; but who used ever and anon to glare at me, and make one or two steps towards me as if meditating a rush. Then he would lick his lips with a very red tongue, sit down opposite me, calmly pull off his boot and stocking, and nurse his foot. I think that he had for me the greatest fascination of any of them; and I remember being at times under the impression that he was a wild animal in disguise. One poor creature there was whom I dimly but firmly believed to be an ape; truly, for my desire in writing these papers is neither to extenuate nor set down aught in malice. He was in truth, I have been assured, a gentleman of large private fortune; but never have I seen humanity so fearfully lowered. He was very ape-like, small and muscular. His chief employment was to sit over old volumes of the ‘Illustrated London News,’ which periodical was weekly sent to his address and taken in for him; to lick his fingers, and turn the pages rapidly over, crooning the while some horrible gibberish to himself in a voice quite inhuman, without two consecutive syllables or one ray of reason; to tear out little bits or whole pages of the volume, and throw them away with a triumphant yell, which curdled all my blood and improved the nature of my dreams, watched over as they were by two or three keepers, who would report me the next morning as having had ‘a bad turn’ if I awoke in the night, utterly nerve-shaken, under the influence of this living nightmare. This hapless youth was known by the name of ‘Jemmy,’ and was a standing jest with the warders, who delighted in playing in every possible way upon his ghastly idiotcies. For he was lower than a madman, far; he was a raving idiot. He would jump at times from his seat, mount on a chair, and play hideous symphonies upon the window-pane to the accompaniment of his own voice; once or twice, I am thankful to say, nature had its way, and he would strike a warder violently between the eyes. When he dealt out this measure, as once he did in my presence, to the servant whom I have described as with me in the forest, who conveyed me to the asylum, and there took service as a keeper—no doubt of personal affection to me—I was, I confess, inwardly but intensely gratified.This was the worst of my companions, certainly; but there were others scarcely less uncanny. There was one poor old man, hopeless and harmless, who wandered constantly from room to room, or up and down the long dining-room, where it was the custom to herd some of us together, murmuring to himself odds-and-ends which I presume to have been original, snapping his fingers and making dreadful faces. His favourite burden was this—which, in spite of all I can do to drive it away, has taken a firm hold on my memory:

Gibbs is a beauty, and Gibbs is a louse;
Gibbs is a pig, and the pride of the house.

The second verse of the ditty running thus:

Gibbs is a beauty, and Gibbs is a bear;
Gibbs has no cap on the top of her hair.

This he would follow up by a delighted laugh over ‘the Dowager Gibbs, the Dowager Gibbs!’ and add, in a tone of pointed regret, ‘A woman without a cap—it’s indecent!’ ‘Miss Lloyd was a fine woman, a very fine woman,’ was another of his favourite meditations as he tramped ceaselessly up and down. He had a younger friend in the house—he must himself have been well over sixty—to whom I contracted an intense aversion; a poor fellow who had a certain liberty about the place, and invested himself with imaginary dignities, acting as postman and bringing our newspapers to our rooms in the morning; superintending the work of the gardeners with an air of personal responsibility, and always reeking of very bad tobacco, and thrusting his confidences under one’s nose accordingly. Among other duties he was allowed to score at our daily cricket-matches in the summer; and well do I remember how when I, weak of head and body, and with no business out of bed, but having yet some cunning at the game, joined in it at this evil place for the first time, I grew puzzled and angry at the astounding arithmetical results of my innings—I could scarcely stand, and the ‘attendants’ bowled a fast round hand at my legs—and failed altogether to appreciate the humour of the thing. I confess that, in the retrospect, I fail to appreciate the especial form of humour now. The postman and marker is dead too,—thank God for him again, and may the peace be with him that man denied him here! He and the poor old man I spoke of were, as I said, sworn friends; and their friendship showed itself in a series of hearty slaps and kicks cheerfully administered by the younger performer, the two apparently fancying themselves schoolboys, with the loud and sympathetic applause of the warders. The elder had been a University man and a scholar, and was still, at his better moments, full of odd scraps of talk and knowledge, and, in his Shakespeare especially, rather deeply read. And next friends and Commissioners and the law nursed his old age like this. There are more things on earth, ye people of England who live at home at ease, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. The less said, in this connection, of the other place mentioned in that famous quotation, I think the better. But nothing brings home the conviction of its reality so strongly to those who have suffered, as the absolute necessity for some other world; for some unerring court of appeal, before which the wrongs of ‘the courts below’ shall be signally and strangely righted.

The pudding-eater of my first evening, whom I introduced at the end of my first chapter, proved one of the pleasant features of the place. I find that I have written down the adjective seriously; let it stand. He was a great sturdy North countryman, without a vestige of sense or connection in his ideas, who was always occupied in imaginary architecture, discovering at the corners of passages or in the middle of a field, or anywhere, the most attractive sites for elaborate buildings, whose height and proportions he would proceed to indicate. He was always laughing in the heartiest and most infectious way; had a conscience and digestion apparently alike without fault, and might be set down by an observer as enjoying life without reserve under conditions which, I venture to think, would have soured Mark Tapley. Everybody liked him and was pleasant with him, as he was with everybody; and it is a matter for strange thought, what could have brought so hard a visitation on so simple a soul. Is it hard in such cases? Who can say? When I wrote in my first chapter that the mad seemed happy enough, I suppose I was thinking of this man; for the faces of most appear to me as I look back like a picture-gallery full of varied expressions of human sorrow, and sorrow debarred from expressing itself. I spoke once to a lawyer who was ‘one of us,’ who talked much to himself in an undertone, and would sometimes answer a question with a monosyllable, and asked him if he had been imprisoned long. ‘Forty years,’ he said, and turned away. Forty years! The answer came upon me with a shock no words can tell. I was feeling unusually well that day, or I should not have mustered courage to speak to him. I was working out my second sentence then, and knew where I was. And I did not believe in my heart, for I knew something of the law’s ways by that time, that earthly power could free me. Nor did it, I think. I believed that I had forty years of life in me. Was I, too, to live them out there, and so? How much and how earnestly, if half unknowing, I prayed from my heart for death, with that unconscious cry of the creature to the Creator which flies up in spite of us in such straits as these, I do not know. I read the other day of a poor fellow in a public asylum (which I believe to be better than the ‘private,’ for the doctors have more the check of fear) who prayed aloud for death under the warder’s hands. How many tortured souls have so prayed is written elsewhere, not here. From me the death that had been so near was then receding, and I seemed to grasp vainly after it to woo it back again. One day, led about the country roads weak and wretched, at a warder’s heels, for the morning’s constitutional, to look right and left of me for a deliverance that came not from the east or the west, to be idly and curiously scanned by the passers-by, but looking restfully upon every sane face that was not a keeper’s,—I liked the mad faces better far than theirs,—I threw myself once upon my knees in the middle of the public road, with one silent heartfelt prayer—for what? For annihilation; for every form of possible existence seemed then to me a curse. Mad indeed, was it not? Nor need I say how mad I was then writ down. Yet it was within a few weeks of that time that my prayer was answered, in spite of myself almost, as I said before, and answered with life and freedom. Is there any one, I wonder, amongst our men in power who will be shaken by these words in the complacent selfishness of humanity, and be no longer content to pass those who have so fallen among thieves by on the other side?

The lawyer was not the patriarch of the place; for there were some aged men who had lived their lives there. One old gentleman, known as ‘Daddy,’ and a favourite butt with some of the younger warders—good-naturedly enough, perhaps; but I often felt that I should like to knock them down—was there, I believe, in the last century, and is not quite sure what George is on the throne. I was told that he never spoke at all for many years, until one day—he had never smoked in his life—he was by some means persuaded into a pipe. From that time tobacco became his solace and delight; for that he would ask anybody, and for that alone. His little ‘screw’ became an institution. The silent members of our corporation were very numerous; whether they were silent always, or whether by degrees the habit crept upon them in that fearful mockery of companionship, will not be known here. I have said that for the first few days of my first imprisonment—to take up again the thread of my personal story—I was too ill and weak to observe or to care for anything. I think that I must have been in bed for a few days, dying alone; but that I do not remember. After that immediate danger had passed, I must have been one of the silent for some time; for I well remember the expression of astonishment which came over the faces of some of the warders in attendance when a letter was one day brought to me in the common room which had forced the passage somehow, and I answered to my name. The correspondence of the prisoners is conducted under difficulties. All letters, written or received, pass through the doctor’s hands, whether opened or not I do not know; and those that they write go through him, not to those to whom they are addressed, but to the persons responsible for their imprisonment. There lies another royal road to the discovery of truth. A fellow-prisoner, who became a friend of mine in prison (it is the shortest and truest word to use), who was as sane as I, but, happily for him, stronger in health, conquered this difficulty by writing letters to every quarter whence he thought help might come, and posting them by various contrivances in the country villages when he took his walks and drives abroad. He won his freedom; and the first use he made of it was to bestir himself to win me mine. Does this read like ‘England in the nineteenth century,’ I wonder? Or need we go to the Alfred Hardys and Mrs. Archbolds of Charles Reade to tell us again that fiction is not so strange as truth? He imagined; I describe. Which is the stronger?

When I first broke silence on this communication from the outer world—it was from a club friend, I remember, giving me some account of old literary and dramatic mates, who seemed to have passed into another sphere for me—I was stupidly observing my surroundings from the depths of an old armchair. The ‘Dowager Gibbs’ was shuffling and chanting up and down the room; the patriarch was puffing at his screw; the man-monkey was howling and gesticulating, and tearing up the ‘Illustrated;’ the postman was grinding out indecencies, which haunt me, in a harsh strident voice; the good fellow, who is safe in harbour now, was muttering a series of prescriptions of potassium, bromides, and iodides, and other kindred horrors (he had been an eminent man in his time, I heard, and had suddenly broken down—how I hated the warders for their patronage of him!); the lawyer was making notes in a red pocket-book, or stealing from a plate surreptitious gingerbreads, of which he was very fond; and the whole Witches’ Sabbath was in full play. The keepers told off to watch us were holding more consecutive, but not more edifying, conversation about horses and bets and races, which appear to absorb their faculties much as they do those of many higher minds, varying it with local gossip and bad language, and much rough horse-play at our crazy expense. I wonder sometimes what effect it might have had upon them, if it had dawned upon them that among their unconscious charges there was a ‘chiel amang them takin’ notes,’ quite involuntary, but photographic in truth at least.

I should have had no place in that common room, I believe, except when I wished it; for I was on the footing of a ‘first-class patient,’ and had a private room of my own. Those who had not had no choice but to grow worse year by year from the enforced companionship that I have written down. But I was too ill to have wish or power of my own. I was absorbed for the time in the servant I have more than once mentioned, who was my master, and knew and rejoiced in it. He was soon tired of his duty, which was to keep me ‘company’ (Heaven save the mark!) in my room, and preferred to transfer me to the larger, where he might consort with his mates, and I with mine. The chief doctor, when I was at my worst, came to see me once a day. And I well remember the threats with which my ‘attendant’ would deter me, ill and broken as I was, from complaining of the life I had to lead. If he had known my illness and powerlessness to the full, he would have had no need to do it, for I did not know what I had to tell. But well do I remember how some words seemed to be struggling within me for utterance during the five minutes allotted me, to which I vaguely looked forward with a sort of daily hope of something; something which came not—justice, I fancy. I was tongue-tied by misery and illness, and my ‘servant’ stood behind the door while the doctor was with me. And so the days went by. Here I must ask my readers to remember that my brain was very weak, and that, as far as these warders are concerned, I am trying to disentangle the literal facts from my memory as exactly as I may. They are supposed to be the qualified nurses of the sick; they are men of the most ignorant class, without one single qualification for that duty—discharged soldiers, sailors, footmen. And they are the absolute masters of these asylums (of which I, remember, inhabited what has been called the best), and of the lives and liberties imprisoned there.