The Most Dreadful Visitation: Male Madness in Victorian Fiction

Pedlar’s new book provides a fresh new perspective on the study of madness in Victorian literature. Focusing on male madness, in contrast to the fashionable emphasis on female mental disorder in this period, ‘The Most Dreadful Visitation’ is an extraordinary study of a largely ignored aspect Victorian literature. Pedlar investigates the relationship between ideas and images that appear in imaginative writings and the ideas and images expressed in the writings of medical men and psychologists, placing this relationship in the context of the increasing institutionalisation of madness and the movement for reform. Chapter One provides a study of Barnaby Rudge and the notion of Idiocy. The novel is discussed in the context of various of Dickens’s other writings, especially his journalistic articles about mental disorder. Chapter Two examines Wilkie Collins’s Basil and Tennyson’s Maud as representations of male insanity resulting from thwarted love. The theme of Chapter Three is wrongful confinement on the grounds of supposed insanity. This chapter considers a number of texts including Henry Cockton’s The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, the Ventriloquist, Charles Merivale’s autobiographical account of incarcerationinan asylum and Charles Reade’s Hard Cash. Chapter Four concentrates on madness and marriage with reference to Reade’s Griffith Gaunt, Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, Mrs Henry Wood’s St Martin’s Eve, Eliza Lynn Linton’s Sowing the Wind and Mary Braddon’s The Fatal Three. Chapter Five is an analysis of Dracula with reference to the fin-de-siecle preoccupation with degeneracy.