The Air Loom James Tilly Matthews

The Air Loom - James Tilly Matthews, (11 St James)

Illustrations of Madness: James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom – The Public Domain Review

All Matthews’ convoluted tales of espionage and conspiracy were considered by Haslam merely as a symptom of his madness, and dealt with accordingly. His treatment of lunatics, as described in his earlier book Observations on Insanity (1798), stressed the need to "obtain an ascendancy" over the patient, a process comparable to training a dog or breaking in a horse. To debate with lunatics about their beliefs was to enter a "perplexity of metaphysical mazes". Matthews in turn refused to acknowledge Haslam's authority, maintaining that he was merely a stooge of the Home Secretary, yet another bit-player in the international conspiracy to silence him.

Confined and neglected, Matthews’ persecutory fantasies intensified. But his family refused to accept that he was mad. To them he still appeared his lucid, intelligent and gentle self: it was tragic but understandable that his traumatic experiences had left him with some cranky political views. Haslam’s theory of insanity, however, allowed for no such generosity. As he put it in Illustrations of Madness, "Madness being the opposite to reason and good sense, as light is to darkness, straight is to crooked &c., it appears wonderful that two opposite opinions could be entertained on the subject". Matthews was mad: no-one who believed they were controlled by an Air Loom could be otherwise, and "there are already too many maniacs allowed to enjoy a dangerous liberty". He banned Matthews’ wife from visiting him in Bethlem

Matthews’ family persisted with their case that he was sane, and offered to guarantee his good behaviour if he were released. Finally, in 1809, they were permitted to engage two physicians named Henry Clutterbuck and George Birkbeck to examine Matthews independently. Both concluded that he was in his right mind, and that his alleged symptoms of madness - hostility to authority and insistence that he was being conspired against – could equally be seen as the responses of a sane man unjustly confined.

On the basis of this testimony Matthews’ family served Bethlem with a writ of Habeas Corpus, forcing the governors to state their legal reasons for holding him. Haslam wrote a lengthy affidavit on Matthews’ case, detailing his delusions and claiming that he had made violent threats against the life of George III. In the end, however, the case turned on a short letter from the Home Secretary recommending "that you do continue to detain in your hosp[ital] as a fit and proper subject James Tilly Matthews a lunatic who is at present under your charge". The Bethlem governors justified Matthews’ detention on the basis that he was "in the Hospital by the order and with the knowledge of Government", and the writ of Habeas Corpus was rejected. Matthews, it seemed, was not a lunatic but a political prisoner, just as he had always maintained.

Having his medical opinion dismissed in this way spurred Haslam to publish a full account of the case. Illustrations of Madness opened with a withering attack on Clutterbuck and Birkbeck: "how they failed to detect his insanity is inexplicable". He paraded Matthews’ delusions like a ringmaster in the circus of lunacy, advertising on the title page ‘a singular case of insanity, and a no less remarkable difference in medical opinion’, and tantalising the reader with the prospect of "a description of the tortures experienced by bomb-bursting, lobster-cracking and lengthening the brain". All this was "embellished with a curious plate" – Matthews’ drawing of the Air Loom – and accompanied by excerpts from Matthews’ own notes on the "mischievous and complicated science" that lay behind it.