Found Verse

Captives of The Air Loom

We are captives of the Air Loom

in popular slang, Bedlam

James Tilly Matthews is patient zero

Levers, barrels, batteries, brass retorts and cylinders are rendered with the cool conviction of an engineer’s blueprint

it would hardly have looked out of place in the scientific journals or enyclopaedias of its day.

The Air Loom worked, as its name suggests, by weaving “airs”, or gases, into a “warp of magnetic fluid” which was then directed at its victim

a catalogue of forms known as “event-workings”. These included “brain-saying” and “dream-working”

Bill the King, was a coarse-faced and ruthless puppetmaster who “has never been known to smile”; his second-in-command, Jack the Schoolmaster, took careful notes on the Air Loom’s operations, pushing his wig back with his forefinger as he wrote. The operator was a sinister, pockmarked lady known only as the “Glove Woman”. The public face of the gang was a sharp-featured woman named Augusta, superficially charming but “exceedingly spiteful and malignant” when crossed

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”.