Review: The Mad Crew: A Ranter Anthology

The Mad Crew: A Ranter Anthology is a book edited by Kirk Watson and sold through Amazon’s self-publishing division. I’m not saying all books published this way are bad (I’ve got my own book, Death of a Dream-Pedlar on sale there at a very reasonable price) but for classics and non-fiction alike, it can often be a cynical cash-grab.

The Mad Crew is very nicely formatted collection of well chosen piece, with each piece conveying a different aspect of some of the loose collection of people who are now known as Ranters. These were the extreme edges of the many ideas swirling through the early days of The Commonwealth. The country had declared war on the King, fought him, beat him, put him on trial and executed him. As the King was the microcosm of God’s macrocosm – it was like all bets were off and all new futures possible. There were the Levellers who called for smaller wealth disparity, Diggers who held land in common… and the Ranters, something of the lunatic fringe.

One thing that ties the Ranters together is a belief that God is all and so nothing can happen outside of God. This means that even acts considered sins are done through God. What’s more, the Original Sin, eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge brought the concept of sin into the world and salvation lies in being as innocent of good and bad as Adam and Eve. What’s more, if God is one, then all people are one and wealth should be shared (and wives…possibly).

I’m not very sure if the first piece, ‘The Mad Crew’ is really a piece of Ranter writing, I think it’s more a case of attacking through parody. Not only are the Ranter arguments presented very weakly, quite absurdly, but there’s an almost moronic glee taken in the notion that who sins most is most holy. What’s more, the anonymous author of ‘The Mad Crew’ has a habit of expressing things in the most eye-catching but provocative way. The oneness of God is described as, “When people drink, they drink God. They lie with God in their beds.” There’s also the very striking, “God is the whore and the whoremaster.” A lot of the book is about whoring and drinking – he repeats many times how he enjoys it, that God loves him for it and he will continue doing it. The level of cartoonish glee is what makes the piece seem a possible parody.

Laurence Clarkson’s ‘A Single Eye’ is a far more mystical work, phrased as a dialogue, it tries to use classical logic and scholastic-type arguments to argue the case of Ranter ideas. He has some very interesting notion, that God saying “let there be light” is God creating himself, that all people have the light of God in them and they can bring it out more. It defines sin as a product of human imagination and almost sounds a little Alestair Crowley-esque, “If that within thee, do not condemn thee, thou shalt not be condemned.” It’s a pretty cogent piece of explanation but it lacks the energy and glee of the first.

Poor old ‘A Single Eye’ also pales in comparison to Abiezer Coppe’s wonderful ‘A Fiery Flying Roll’ (and its sequel ‘A Second Fiery Flying Roll’). This is an energetic, brilliantly rhythmic, passionate piece of prose. It grabs at the beginning with its call to, 

    “My Dear One

All or None

Everyone under the Sunne

Mine Own

 

Though he does talk about, “sin and transgression is finished and ended’, he’s not really talking about those aspects. His big thing is simple. God is coming back and the rich ought to be donning their brown trousers in preparation. He calls God the ‘might Leveller’, though says he wasn’t involved in the Civil War himself. God’s not just coming like a thief in the night, he’s coming like a highwayman, thundering and demanding money. He will break the rich with his little finger and they are to “bow or howl.” The rich that look away from the poor with have their eyes ripped out and those whose hands are stained in blood will have it up to their elbows till soap won’t wash it off.

He talks about his visions, of being forcefed the word of God till he shat it out into the form you are reading it. He talks of his, “secret mysteries and mysterious secrets”. He talks about how he stares at posh carriages and gnashes his teeth, but how he hugs beggars, even noseless ones. What’s more;

“I am about my act. My strange act and when you hear of it both your ears will tingle.” I’m not sure about ears, but the hairs on the back of my neck tingle a number of times whilst reading this book.

The last piece, “The Light and dark Sides of God’ by Jacob Bauthumley is a huge shift. This takes a very reasonable tone, seemingly neither trying to argue or preach, only meditate out loud. It argues that God is unknowable because he is so inextricably linked with what there is to experie
nce and how we can experience it. God merelys says, “I AM” and that’s all that can be said about him. He’s in all things, which makes organised religion a bit pointless. He’s “one, intire, perfect and immutable being”, there is no bad in God – it can’t even be understood. There are, “no distinctions in God.”

I really enjoyed Bauthumley’s description of the Trinity. The first is God’s love for us, the second is our love for God and the third is our love for each other. Communion is the act of coming together and sharing. Heaven is a state of peace and not a place in the sky. Sin is taking the self away from God – many of them notions that have some currency today.  For this thoughtful, non-violent and peaceful book, he had a hole drilled through his tongue. 

While Abiezer Coppe and his fiery, flying rolls were the easy highlight of the book, the more thoughtful pieces gave greater nuance to the ranter notions, whilst ‘The Mad Crew’ made it cartoonish. The Mad Crew as a collection, however, is extremely well put together and interesting.

 

Review: Mania and Literary Style by Clement Hawes

 

Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart begins with a sincere belief, that understanding supposed ‘mad’ writing through pathological means is wrong. This is not only because it puts a needless straitjacket on interesting and creative interpretations of a work but because it’s what the rich and powerful want you to do, they want you to dismiss new ideas and enthusiasm as madness. People like Christopher Smart wrote as they did, not because of madness, but because they were writing in a rhetoric of mania.

First the book needs to define the manic style, give examples of its use and then apply it to the writing of Christopher Smart – and the book does it very well. I was a little sceptical at first – Jubilate Agno certainly struck me as a work where Smart is working through his thoughts, ideas and psychoses but it is also true that writing it off as only the product of an unspecified madness is to diminish an extraordinary work of literature. 

 

Hawes begins by defining the features of this manic rhetoric. Beginning with a feeling of socio-economic resentment, a use of lists, mixtures of genre bending and a ‘peculiarly serious playfulness with language’. All of this grounded in what he calls the ‘manic first person’, a peculiar, porous form of first person that sometimes incorporates the divine and the listener within it. The manic rhetoric also includes certain tropes and ideas, many of them with a biblical base. He calls them topos and topoi. As a writer, Hawes loves his topos and topoi, everything is a topos or topoi, at one point I began wondering whether I was a topos or topoi.

 

The book theorises this manic style was developed in the messy time of the English Civil War and the Commonwealth period shortly after. In this time, the people went to war against their anointed king, won it, put him on trial and executed him. With the old way of structuring society ripped up, there was a brief period where multiple alternatives competed for dominance. Being the time it was, these ideas were naturally conceived and disseminated within biblical example and structures. While this revolution seemed to have ended with the reversion of the status quo, one of the groups vying for a say were those later known as ranters. One of these ranters that forms a case study in this book was called Abiezer Coppe. 

 

I have to thank Hawes for introducing me to Abiezer Coppe and his Fiery, Flying Roll in particular. Immediately after reading this I bought myself a copy of it and will write about it separately, but it’s a phenomenal, strange, funny and powerful work. In his writing, Coppe took is place as an outsider, thinking thoughts that were considered extreme even in that time of intellectual maelstrom and turning it into a liminal space - essentially he positions himself as someone who is not on the edge but the doorway between different worlds.

 

As a random aside, I also learnt a little about a Quaker called James Naylor who rode into Bristol on a donkey with naked women praising him and singing, and that the Quaker mode of calling each other ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ was not a symptom of excessive formality but actually of radical informality - those being the informal versions of ‘you’ and ‘your’.

The next writer who serves as a case study is Swift. He’s adopting the rhetoric of mania to parody it. He uses many of the features that Hawes finds in Coppe and will later find in Smart. Swift also supposes this manic rhetoric to be the default mode of a Grub Street hack, as he particularly shows in the narrator of A Tale of the Tub. Swift doesn’t get a lot of space though, as Hawes is keen to move onto the real subject of the book (and the reason I got it), Christopher Smart and Jubilate Agno.

First, Hawes locates Jubilate Agno as a work that sits in almost the exact space as Swift’s parody writer, between the ranters and Grub Street, but for real. There’s a lot of interesting discussion about the structure of the piece, particularly the alternating of ‘versicles’ beginning ‘let’ and those beginning ‘for’. There’s been a lot of rethinking about the poem from this angle, with it first being printed as clumps of ‘let’ followed by clumps of ‘for’, to being published with alternating ‘let’ and ‘for’. One interesting idea in this book is that it was not intended to be read by two people, one reading ‘let’ and one ‘for’, but for one person reading the ‘let’ parts out loud and the ‘for’ parts in their head. The idea that the poem is celebrating the public and the private. Personally, I feel that the purpose of the poem changed as it was being written and so may have been intended to be read in different ways at different times - and then not intended to be read at all.

One thing Hawes does brilliantly is show how wonderfully slippery Jubilate Agno is and how the constant wordplay and constant shifts of meaning in it make it at once elusive and all-encompassing. He states that the poem works in “a state of absolute metaphor in which anything can potentially stand for anything else”. He also says that in the poem, “all creation is related, so that arbitrary connections are just as meaningful as logical ones.” Another quote I wrote down as being extremely accurate to reading Jubilate Agno was, “Smart’s wordplay is a renegotiation of the gulf between the immeasurable realms of the private and idiosyncratic, on the one hand, and the universal on the other.” It’s a poem where the word ‘translated’ is used a lot and things are constantly being translated into other things.

He’s great at unpacking lines of Smart, in more detail than even the footnotes of the Oxford edition. He writes a chapter about the ‘horn’ section of the poem, where Smart uses metaphors of horns to write of his emasculation and the loss of his inheritance and family, transfers into boasting about the Horned Moses (an idea born of mistranslation that Moses has horns), which then transfers into talk about horns of plenty. His point is to explain how these different elements reposition Smart and his masculinity in different ways, leading to a writing that is oddly positioned outside gender in a way he saw a similar to a passage in Coppe. Personally, I saw it as a way of self therapy, the section starts with huge hostility to his wife, who he sees as cuckolding him, working through those feelings and ending up as a call for God to be merciful to his wife.

Finally, Hawes arrives at his last big idea on Jubilate Agno, which he really bigs up as the key to the poem. A notion of space in the poem, redrawing boundaries between those inside his Godly ark and outside. It was a complicated idea, but I took it to mean that this manic rhetoric grew as a way of expressing a utopia but the trouble with utopias is that they are dead on arrival - and so the slipperiness of manic rhetoric is to create an idea of utopia that doesn’t congeal into something dead but stay as an alive idea. He says, “Smart’s incessant wordplay, which often induces a sense of infinite semiotic regress, works against any possible petrification of his exuberant work into dogma.”

The last part of the book is about how Smart has been read and interpreted and about how he’s ultimately been done dirty and reduced into a diagnosis (often the diagnosis I’ve made of him having a bi-polar disorder). While he doesn’t deny that Smart may have been suffering a neurochemical illness, his writing is more than that. As Hawes sees it, his writing (like Abiezer Coppe’s before him) is political, not pathological and to read it as the later ultimately serves the voice of the powerful over the powerless.

 

 

On Idler 32: On Sleep

 I have a few books to review but my thoughts on them have not properly formed yet, so I go, as I often do to one of Johnson’s essays. The one I picked was from the 25th of November, close to the date I am writing this but from the year 1758.

It’s about sleep and that appealed to me because I am currently feeling very sleepy. However, Johnson’s thoughts on sleep spin off into some very uncomfortable directions, ones that may keep a reader awake.

He begins neutrally (and Johnsonianly) enough, by talking about how we are so used to sleep that we accept it as a given and ask few questions about it. Yet sleep is a very strange thing. Even in the twenty-first century we have only flimsy ideas of what it is and why we need it. We have theories about the repackaging ideas and strengthening neural paths. We know good sleep knits our bodies back together and reduce stress - we still don’t know exactly why or how.

Sleep is a huge change in us. We go from moving, active souls to ones dead to the world (even those who move around a lot as I do). As Johnson says; “the gay and the gloomy, the witty and the dull, the clamorous and the silent, the busy and the idle, are all overpowered by the gentle tyrant, and all lie down in the equality of sleep.”

Sleep is a great leveller. All people need it and succumb to it eventually. Even Alexander the Great needed sleep, and regarded that as one of the main things that reminded him that he was human. There have been people who tried to do without it, Margaret Thatcher famously said she only had four hours of sleep a night, we don’t know how that affected her or helped cause the dementia she suffered late in life. Ronald Reagan also claimed to sleep four hours a night and succumbed to it, Trump claims to have only three.

Johnson also notes that sleep is the end of waking emotion, that all emotions are turned off by sleep - and that we are glad to do it. This is where he starts walking down a very dark path. 

“There is no height of happiness or honour, from which man does not eagerly descend to a state of unconscious repose.” Even the happiest, most fulfilled person reaches a part of the day when they want nothing more to do than sleep. In some ways it makes us equal, there is not state or position in life which we don’t want to let slide into unconsciousness. Those “distinctions of mankind are more show than value” if even the greatest can’t bear to be conscious of their greatness for more than a few hours. Johnson sees people’s desire to sleep as a sign of their unhappiness at being awake. “All envy would be extinguished, if it were universally known that there are none to be envied, and surely none can be much envied who are not pleased with themselves.”

What’s more, sleep is not enough. We try and escape ourselves in other ways too. As well as sleep, Alexander took away his consciousness by drinking. If it’s not drink, it’s a daydream, being lost in a good book, music. “Almost every man has some art by which he steals his thoughts away from his present state.” To Johnson we need sleep because being awake is such a painful state.

Although Johnson would lay in long, he wasn’t very good at getting to sleep and would have people talking to him till late in the night. He mentions this as well, saying that company is just another way of being outside oneself. “In solitude we have our dreams to ourselves, and in company we agree to dream in concert.” 

In the end, for Johnson all we really want in life is “forgetfulness of ourselves”. That is a gloomy thought but I’m in a gloomy mood. Off to bed. 

Review: The Early Career of Samuel Johnson by Thomas Kaminski

 The Early Career of Samuel Johnson is a book that should be right up my alley. It deals with Samuel Johnson, what’s more, it deals with him from the time he ran off to London at the age of twenty-seven to his commission for the Dictionary - Samuel Johnson: The Grub Street Years. Yet, I found this book curiously flat.

The research is great, it really gets a grip on what Johnson was working on and when, who he was working for and the probable income he was getting for it. The writing was also blessedly free of academese, straight-forward and understandable at all times, just… curiously bloodless.

Johnson arrives into London with a letter of recommendation and some of the play Irene. He shares theatrical contacts with his pupil David Garrick and, presumably thinks his ascent into the tragedian’s sphere would be as easy as Garrick’s as an actor. This doesn’t happen, and Kaminski reckons this is when he sells the silver cup bought for him when he came to London as a child. Perhaps he lived off what was left of Tetty’s money after the Edial School misadventure.

Eventually he approaches Cave, a man he had written to quite haughtily under an assumed name. Cave employs him on his Gentleman’s Magazine, initially providing a few epigrams - little zingers to spice up the content and fill space. The magazine at the time wasn’t really a place for new writing, it was more a place where other information was compiled, collated and summarised. The idea it was a publication for the busy gentleman on the go who didn’t have time to search and collect all the things causing a stir and so read an editorialised version in The Gentleman’s Magazine.

I suppose a part of the ‘flatness’ of this book is the pretty comprehensive take-down of the idea that St John’s Gate was a seething meeting place of writers, poets and journalists all hanging out and having exciting ideas. The magazine employed very few people, most of the writing could be done in the author’s own houses or in coffee shops and other bits of original material could come by letter. Though Johnson may have met Savage or Carter in the little room above the gatehouse, it’s more likely he met them in taverns and coffeehouses. The demystifying is part of the purpose of the book but sometimes it’s no fun to be demystified. 

Johnson didn’t have much work to do on the magazine. He may have written the odd longer piece, selected some of the poetry (he very pointedly did not choose the poetry prize winner). It’s likely Cave had him on the books for his longer project, the translation of The History of the Council of Trent, a work Kaminski reckons he must have almost finished before claims of a rival translation stopped the project.

He did publish London about this time and it had moderate commercial success and quite a lot of critical. It was the second time Pope noted a person who could be his successor (following the publication of Johnson’s translation of Pope’s Messiah). He also tried his hand at political satire with Marmor Norfolciense. It’s pointed out how Johnson had tried three routes to literary success; a play, a popular poem and political satire, but with no success. 

Johnson then went back to the Midlands for a while and tried to get other teaching jobs, there was even a desperate attempt to get him an AM from Trinity College in Dublin via a very tenuous link to Swift. Then he came back and, seemingly reluctantly, settled down to being a Grub Street Hack.

Then Johnson’s hand is seen more throughout The Gentleman’s Magazine. There is more editorialising, better poetry and the inclusion of Johnson’s own proto-biographies. Kaminski notes how there was an “improvement of the magazine’s intellectual character whenever such things were handed over to Johnson”. Two years of doing this and he then took over the parliamentary reports - works he may have had a hand in buffing up but now became his to write. This sort of work not really suiting Johnson’s working practises, he was more a person who worked very hard for a week and then coasted for a month, rather than steady drudgery.

The book really emphasises how it was possible to lead a moderately successful middle class life as a Grub Street Hack, earning equal to a good craftsman as long as you weren’t silly with the money. Even Samuel Boyse, the poster child of Grub St extremes (he’d spend a week in bed writing because he had no clothes, get them out of a pawn shop on Sunday to walk about, repawn them and then go back to bed and write for the week) was portrayed as a simple, diligent writer - with the other stories being merely hearsay and tales. It’s probably a truer picture, but the image of Johnson as a professional, reliable writer living a moderately comfortable life doesn’t have the oomph that his suggestions of extreme poverty.

Johnson and Cave came together for another big project that was stopped, a version of Shakespeare. He published his thoughts on Macbeth, Kaminski reckons the book was probably quite far along though, as an advertisement for a project wasn’t released until the book was close to print and it was the advertisement that brought those who claimed copyright to Shakespeare on their heads. It does ask the question of why Johnson’s version of Shakespeare took so long when he did work on it though. 

Johnson’s next project was the Harleian Catalogue, produced with that little shit, Thomas Osbourne. He bought the huge library of Lord Harley and wanted to flog it off, but he also wanted to earn money on the auctioneer’s catalogue so got Johnson and Harley’s librarian to create a catalogue that was a work of academia in itself. Yet he didn’t give them time to do the job he had promised and Johnson even beat him up with a Greek Old Testament. 

This means when Dodsley suggested Johnson to a consortium of booksellers who wanted to create an English Dictionary, Johnson had already had a number of big projects come to nothing. It’s no wonder he initially declined the job, and I imagine he worried the whole time about this latest project would come to nothing, especially as the years and money wore on. We know this one was a success though and Johnson’s Grub Street years were over, though he never forgot where he had started and often tried to give a leg up to writers in similar positions.

This book left me torn. I want to know all about Samuel Johnson and I’d like that information to be reliable and trustworthy and I reckon this book is all those things. Yet, i also want a glimpse of Johnson as a larger-than-life figure and his successes to be after huge hardship, and this book cast him and his hardships in a smaller, realer and more human life. Thus I appreciated the book for the knowledge I gained from it but was left cold by its lack of personality. When you read Johnson books and meet Johnsonians, there is always a lot of personality, and here there simply wasn’t. 

Review: Munster Village by Mary Hamilton

Mary Hamilton’s Munster Village can be found in a collection called ‘Mothers of the Novel’ that was published in the ‘80s. I had a mixed bag with my anthology of women’s amatory tales of the early eighteenth century but these were later, from the 1770s to the 1830s, with Munster Village being written in 1778.

It’s a remarkably inconsistent book and, in its brief 150 pages lurches in tone, style and purpose.

It starts off with a fairly engaging description of an ambitious Lord who is disappointed in his political endeavours and responds by sulking. He has two children who are being raised by guardians far more moral than he. His son’s guardian is raising the boy along with his own daughter and of course the son of the Lord loves the daughter, so does the Lord. His son runs off with the woman they both love and he disowns him.

The couple live long enough to have a son and daughter of their own, then the Lord dies, his son dies and the wife dies - leaving the estate to the daughter, Lady Frances, who takes the children in.

All these shenanigans only really exist to get the estate of Munster Village into Lady Frances’s care so she can turn it into an arts and crafts utopia. There are workshops, a garden by Capability Brown and, at the centre, a grand library. Women are not excluded from this educational Eden, being given places to learn, to create and to grow. Lady Frances also takes in women who have been ill-treated by their husbands and provides them with a safe respite. One of these women says a line I think I’ve read quoted somewhere else, “I hate your wise ones, there is no opinion so absurd but it hadn’t been mentioned by some philosopher.” Though I’m not sure where I would have heard it before.

The majority of the first volume is taken up with describing this paradise, but not really how it works. We learn how it is laid out, are often told that it is beautiful and useful, and we also find out that the care taken in planning the place out increases its yield - but we don’t really get a clear picture of life there. We do learn that she uses buffaloes to drive her ploughs though - as they are stronger than oxen.

Then, when the young man comes of age, there’s a grand presentation where she gives Munster Village to him and finds herself free to marry Lord Darnley, a man she has long loved but felt she couldn’t marry until she has fulfilled her duties to niece and nephew.

In the second volume, it’s revealed the nephew is very upset. He’s fallen in love with two unattainable women and can’t decide which he loves, or if he can get any. The daughter goes to London where she assesses her picks of husband and writes to her friend. These letters are the liveliest parts of the book where she and her friend laugh at an old lady who “has more diseases than even Galen knows of, and a cough that relieves he of teeth”, or at a stupid lady who “seems to be a person created, rather to fill up a vacuum in nature than perform any good in it.” She’s also shocked at the fashionable women’s need to kneel in their sedan chairs because there’s no room for their enormous wigs otherwise.

There then follows a vast succession of interrelated amatory tales, whole novels worth of plot told in a few pages. Some about cruel fathers, others about brigands, one about the cruelty of being a galley slave - a plight described in detail (including the detail that the slaves row completely naked, wouldn’t that chafe?). All these events transpire so our young people and all their friends can be happily matched by the end of the book. 

The book ends with a masque give to celebrate Frances’s birthday, where figures from history all come forward to tell their stories and to praise the wisdom of Lady Frances. There’s a huge, long part that cribs off Ossian, making something more turgid than Ossian - Ossian fan-fic.

Then the book ends.

This is such a strange and inconsistent book. Is it a philosophical description of a utopia? A political novel? A series of amatory tales? Sometimes it’ll drag for pages, such as the masque and description of the layout of the village and sometimes it’ll cram series worth of events in a few paragraphs. The strangest element is how the book is mostly told in the past tense but will have the occasional sentence or paragraph in the present tense. All of this means that a slim book feels interminably long. While there were plenty of interesting and/or entertaining elements to pluck out the book, it barely holds together as one piece. I look forward to more luck with the next book of the series I read. 

A List of Everything I Reviewed

I reviewed theatre in London for just over a year. In that time I wrote 58 reviews, which averaged out about one a week. In truth, the volume of plays came in waves.

It started with a surreal cabaret that involved cross-dressing Rasputin with a wooly willy and ended in the joke "Campanology is a great way to hang out at the weekend with big dongs."

Highs along the way included a tight horror story, a moving tale of a piano, a court masque and a three person Dickens show.

Low points included a repeated question about a mouse, a badly rehearsed thing in a tower block and tiring relationship drama with not enough aliens. 

Now I am a long way away from the bright(ish) lights and pub backrooms and, to be honest, I miss it a little. However, I am in a play - and every time I sat to review a piece of theatre, I had a yearning to be in one. 

However, for my own use more than anything else, here is a clickable list of everything I reviewed in that time. 

• Thick & Tight: Tits & Teeth: A Retrospective of a Dazzling Career
• I Fucked You in My Spaceship
• David Copperfield
• Home X
• Healing King Herod
• Caligula and the Sea
• Clementine
• The Blue Pool of Questions
• How To Be a Pirate
• The Black Cat
• Creature
• Sasha Ellen: Character Building Experience
• Quality Street
• The Rotting Hart
• Sweeney Todd
• Glory Ride
• Candy Gigi: Friday Night Sinner
• Venus and Adonis
• Stuart Michael: Psychic Medium
• Frankie & Beausy
• Hope Has a Happy Meal
• Lost in Music
• Mrs Doubtfire
• Cheesy Cheesy Catchy Mousey
• Touch Miracle
• Tarantino Live
• Sh!t-Faced Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing
• Illusionaries Presents: Memoirs of a Dead Poet
• 80s Live
• Defective Inspector: A Stitch in Time
• King Stakh's Wild Hunt
• Compositor E
• Oubliette
• Trompe-L'oeil
• Amendments - A Play on Words
• Elephant
• Guy Fawkes It Up
• Monster Show
• The Devil's Passion
• To Have and to Hold
• A Brief History of Chairs
• Cinderella
• Odyssey: A Heroic Pantomime
• Moth
• Macbeth
• Fire, Embers, Ash
• Dear Adult
• DIY
• Frank Skinner: 30 Years of Dirt
• The Life and Death of Richard III
• Slush Pile
• Puddles Pity Party
• Company Wayne McGregor: Universe: A Dark Crystal Odyssey
• Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle
• Deaf as a Post
• Agathe
• The Fairy Queen
• Clinton Baptiste: Roller Ghoster

The play I am in is One Man, Two Guvnors at the Caxton Theatre. I play one of the guvnors, Stanley Stubbers, and you can find more about that here.

Was Christopher Smart mad?

Whether Christopher Smart was and is a question that frequently occurs when talking about him and his work. Moira Dearnley, in her analysis of his poetry, can’t help but opine that he was clearly mad and it oozes all over his poetry. Clement Hawes argues that there is a specific manic rhetoric style that Smart adopts that is not necessarily an indiction of mania itself. Chris Mounsey is convinced that Smart’s reputation and incarceration for madness was a concerted scheme by Newbery.

In many ways, it’s a useless question because the definition of madness is so nebulous. The fact that what passed as professionals at the time assessed Smart, treated him and then kicked him out as incurable means that under the wibbly standards of the time, he was mad - madness being a display of beliefs and behaviours deemed irrational by the society at the time. 

Yet, did Christopher Smart suffer from what we would call a mental illness today?

Again, it’s something of a fool’s question, Smart didn’t have the cultural or mental apparatus to understand the mind the way we do. Even if he suffered the same experiences or chemical imbalances of a modern mental health patient, his conception of the mind’s workings would have been so different that a modern diagnosis would have been pointless to him. That’s beside the fact that we only have glimpses of Smart, both in other people’s record and his own. He’s simply not around to answer the kinds of questions that would lead to a certain answer.

This doesn’t stop his contemporaries being analysed and diagnosed though. Samuel Johnson has long been a poster boy for depression, it’s generally accepted as having a form of Tourette’s Disease and OCD UK have adopted him also. To be fair, Samuel Johnson was one of the most written about people of his era and so there is a greater wealth of evidence - but there’s still an element of hurling a small light down a deep well.

All those caveats aside, I’m quite convinced that Christopher Smart did suffer from a mental illness which we recognise and classify today, Bipolar Disorder.

The first indication of this is a point he makes in Jubilate Agno, “For I have a greater compass both of mirth and melancholy than another.”

But there are a number of other hints that point in that direction.

Smart was a known drunkard in an age of drunkenness. Johnson quips about him walking to the pub but being carried back. In his years as student, and even as fellow, he was known for carousing in the pubs. His actual admittance to St Luke’s Madhouse was for alcoholism and it was generally said that his later ‘attacks’ of prayer were often after drinking sessions. Substance abuse is often a sign of various mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder, with the person going on excessive binges whilst manic and self-medicating with alcohol when depressed.

There’s also the claim (that I still can’t find the source of) that Smart was addicted to hartshorn, an ammonia-like substance. I’ve written before how this was a treatment for asthma, which Smart did have and that his suddenly stopping to pray may have been a response to the feelings of doom an incoming asthma attack can cause. However, I don’t think these negate possible symptoms of bipolar, only that they are a different problem that run alongside it.

Smart engaged in many behaviours that constitute a manic state. Gray mock’s Smart’s giddiness when producing the student play, The Grateful Fair, or, A Trip to Cambridge, and the young fellow later needed a subscription to bail him out of financial problems after excessive spending. This habit of excessive spending followed him his whole life, with him as debtor, giving away the last of the money which had been given to him charitably. 

He exhibits burst of manic energy at new projects, like The Midwife which floundered after the burst of a new project, The Old Woman’s Oratory. He signed a 99 year contract for the Universal Visiter. Samuel Johnson said, "I wrote for some months in 'The Universal Visitor for poor Smart, while he was mad, not then knowing the terms on which he was engaged to write, and thinking I was doing him good. I hoped his wits would soon return to him. Mine returned to me, and I wrote in 'The Universal Visitor' no longer.”

A person in a manic episode often sleeps little, talks lots and engages in risky behaviours. It was around the time of The Old Woman’s Oratory that rumours started to circulate that Smart was going into Molly Houses and there were snide insinuations that he should be referred to as ‘Kitty’ rather than ‘Kit’. His companion on this journeys was supported to be Samuel Foote, who was later accused of forcibly buggering a man, something he denied because he literally only had one leg to stand on. Yet, Foote’s modern biography does point out that his accuser did have some very specific details, and Foote’s own behaviours had been growing more reckless after the near death experience that lost him his foot.

Examples of the depressive phase are harder to find, which makes sense as they tend to be quieter. There are times throughout his writing career where the words just stop, or where he is reported being out of action due to some illness. These illnesses may have been asthmatic flare-ups, the colds and fevers that regularly put city dwellers out of commission or the ghostly apparition of a depressive period.

Certainly, the poem he wrote at the conclusion of one of these illnesses, Hymn to the Supreme Being does include a very recognisable and gripping account of depression - even as his father-in-law tried to use it to sell fever powders. In the poem, Smart talks about sending his thoughts back through his life to find at least element of goodness. He compares it to Noah, sending birds to look for dry land but says that, for him, there’s no dove with an olive branch, his life is wholly and completely wicked and useless. If this is not a vivid description of depression, I don’t know what is.

I think it would be very interesting to read/analyse Jubilate Agno with the idea of bipolar disorder in mind, to see if highs and lows in his emotional state can be traced in it. As far as we know, he wrote a couple of lines of it a day, so it could provide the closest to a daily ‘check in’ we have. That said, it’s not the perfect document to show his mental state, it’s not a diary but a poem, with aesthetic and literary rules and limitations - but it could be worth a whack.

I need Samuel Johnson to conclude this post, he had a knack for balancing different views in one sentence. On one hand, I feel that ‘knowing’ whether Smart had a mental illness like bipolar disorder would make him more understandable but on the other, it makes no difference at all. That he suffered in life is true, but that he experienced a lot of joy is also. All that’s left of him are a few anecdotes and a body of work, a body of work that gives me a lot of joy. I come, as I often do, back to the his line in On a Bed of Guernsey Lillies, “we never are deserted… quite.”