James Tilley Mathews was a London Tea merchant. In Paris in
1793 he obtained a knowldedge of Mesmerism. Distressed by the outbreak
of hostilities between England and France, he planned to use the Mesmeric
doctrine of harmony to mount a peace mission. Following an audience with
Lord Liverpool, he prepared to negotiate with the French. The Jacobins,
however, seized power. They were hostile to Mesmerism, as a fashionable
aristocratic decadence, and distrusted him. Mathews was jailed and only
made it back to England in 1796. By then he convinced that there was a
French plot to steal British government secrets and that it had fallen
to him to be Britain's savior. He believed that what he called "magnetic
spies" had infiltrated England and had stationed themselves in strategic
locations. Because of his earlier associations with Mesmerism, Mathews
was privy to all this, and so he became number one on their hit-list. Eventually
he was confined to Bethlem
Hospital. In 1809 his family pressed for his release, and had two distinguished
physicians testify that he was sane. They were opposed by the medical staff
at Bethlem, who argued that he was as obsessed as ever. John Haslam, the
Bethlem apothecary, believed that the best way to demonstrate Mathews'
continuing delusions was to publish Mathews' own story, taken from documents
written by Mathews himself, in a mischievous but delightful volume entitled
Illustrations
of madness: Exhibiting a singular Case of Insanity, and a No Less Remarkable
Difference in Medical Opinions: Developing the Nature of An Assailment,
And the Manner of Working events; with A Description of the Tortures Experienced
by Bomb-Bursting, Lobster-Cracking, and Lengthening the Brain. Embellished
with a Curious Plate.
From: A Social History of Madness: The World Through the Eyes of the
Insane, Roy Porter [E.P. Dutton, New York, 1989] 54-9