Other Worlds

A History of Delusions: The Glass King, a Substitute Husband and a Walking Corpse

by Victoria Shepherd (2022, Oneworld Publications)

Distorted Mirrors

A book of famous case histories of delusional individuals, could so easily become a distasteful sideshow, like visiting a Hall of Mirrors, or paying your penny to gawp at the inmates in Bedlam. So it is a tribute to the author that she gets the tone right: these are troubled individuals whose voices have been captured from history, largely because – for the most part – kindly and progressive doctors listened to them. We get a glimpse into their Other Worlds, in which they inhabit other fabulous realities where vast conspiracies are manipulating their lives, or where body parts have been changed into glass, celebrities are secretly in love with them, or they have been decapitated and now have the wrong head on.

What do these startling beliefs tell us about these people’s needs, their concerns, the times in which they lived? What does the florid imagination of these people tell us about our own times and our own brains? The extraordinary efforts individuals make to maintain their different realities, against evidence and persuasion to the contrary, somehow stretches our idea of human creativity and resourcefulness. Victoria Shepherd is a compassionate guide.

On this page

• Distorted Mirrors (intro)
• Dressing-Up Box
• Big Book of Sad
• Losing Faith
• Life Raft (conclusion)
• Elsewhere on the Bookshelf
• Elsewhere on the Blog

Dressing-Up Box

Amongst the cast of characters is the tragic “Madame M”. In her mind there is a vast conspiracy being perpetrated in the catacombs under Paris, the result of which is that everyone close to her – her husband, family, friends etc. – are being substituted by doubles, sometimes many times a day! She has somehow found a way to deal with the pains of losing children and surviving trauma of war and deprivation. She inhabits this nightmare complexity of loss & substitution: every time her daughter enters the room she is familiar but strange. I am left trying to imagine myself into her terrifying experience, and can only approach it through the feeling of deja vu – could this be the discomfort of recognition and unfamiliarity out of kilter, but in a different and persistent way?

James Tilly Matthews believed his thoughts were being controlled by the “Air Loom”, a contraption which weaved gaseous vapours to reach out from a distance alter his mind, like a confection of the new power looms in the manufactories of his day and the real mind-altering potential of newly-investigated gases. His was a fascinating and adventurous life amongst real danger and international intrigue; he rubbed shoulders with intellectuals like Priestley who would have told him about emerging scientific ideas. And he lived through unsettling times with new technology and ideas as well as the turmoil of revolution in France. Under great stress he became convinced of a malificent engine. We know his story through the attentions of an attentive but also manipulative doctor who made him into a Bedlam celebrity. (Victoria Shepherd adds to the excellent book by Mike Jay – see below – with new evidence about Matthews’ identity.)

There are other tragic lives here too, including an account of the 14th century French king Charles VI who was convinced that parts of his body were made of glass. It may be bizarre, but it was surprisingly common across Europe for people to hold such a Glass Delusion. So often people seemed to have dressed their fears and anxieties in the clothes of what were to them baffling and marvellous novel technologies.

Big Book of Sad

The story of Robert Burton, the 17th century author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, appears after some lively chapters as an abrupt change of pace and style. The colourful, perceptive and compassionate case histories give way to a more scholarly and historical text. But perhaps this reflects the life of a serious scholar and his cloistered life in Christ Church College Oxford, wrestling with his own demons as well as exploring the shadow of the Black Dog since classical times.

Burton could not be ignored given his hugely influential study which trawled texts from the ancient world onwards, through history and literature. He described and classified disorders of the mind. Delusions were often associated with depressive symptoms under the catch-all term Melancholy.

But as well as producing a famous document, Burton himself endured a life burdened by Melancholy. He wrote about how so many historical cases of delusion embodied a person’s response to feeling powerless. Victims were either convinced they were something powerless (a child, a pawn in some titanic power game) or immensely powerful (a king, a Messiah). Burton wrote that in his worldview there was no meaning. He lived devoid of humour, except the hollow cynical laughter at others’ lives of constant activity.

Like many of his contemporary intellectuals, he was completely in thrall to astrology, and this provided a pseudo-scientific mechanism for his fatalism. As a brilliant scholar, he followed his astrological predications to a morbid outcome: he predicted the date of his own death at the age of 63, and some evidence suggests that he quite calmly prepared and took his own life at the appointed time.

Losing Faith

The case of a Venetian lawyer Francis Spiera (or Spira) was immortalised in Burton’s study. In the 1540s most of Europe was convulsed by the religious polarisation between Catholicism and the new Protestantism. Changing one’s religion was not a light thing – perhaps it never is – one’s immortal soul was in the balance. Spira risked everything to side with Luther, but in the face of civic and clerical threats he retracted his conversion. This immediately put him into such an inner conflict that he saw visions that condemned him as damned. So sure was he that he was irredeemably lost that the poor man fell into despair so deep that his concerned friends could do nothing to revive him. He wasted away physically and mentally. Spira died, convinced that he was predestined for hellfire.

Burton writes about religious manias, but here is a man condemned by his own apostasy. From a modern perspective it may be hard to relate to the near universal late medieval mindset in which nothing mattered more than one’s salvation. But unless someone has lived in a convinced faith community, fully ordering their life according to the accepted principles and role models, and then lost that faith (and the trust and support of the community) then it is very hard to appreciate that inner turmoil.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that the phrase “cognitive dissonance” was coined to aptly describe the kind of inner conflicts and contradictions that can disorder a person’s mind and behaviour. Dissonance is the sounding of two or more musical notes that are not harmonically related. There is no simple mathematical relationship between the frequencies of the harmonics created that we could perceive as pleasant. In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the coexistence of two worldviews whose values or conclusions clash like painful microtones. They cannot resonate together in the same head without consequences.

A Life Raft

Each of these stories stand alone. But told together they illustrate how our minds manage to construct other worlds to ease the stresses, to embody the anxieties, to manage the unexpressed griefs. We all have to construct our versions of reality from our distorted and incomplete perceptions of the world, shaped by our beliefs and unconscious bias. We encounter the boundless imagination that can maintain a person’s calm assertion that they are made of glass, or are being worked like puppets, by mysterious forces.

Under stress, we cling to whatever we can, or hand our stories on what we half-understand, such is the drive for us to make sense of what perhaps is genuinely chaotic and random. In these delusions we hear odd parallels with the florid conspiracy theories that express our contemporaries’ frustration and powerlessness in the modern world. Astrology or pneumatic chemistry or even the wonders of crown glass have given way to 5G masts and microchips beloved of QAnon and anti-vaxxers. But our brains are the same stuff.

In some cases these stories show the efficacy of a sympathetic ear, and the occasional success of a practitioner entering a little way into the delusional world in order to lead someone out. At other times doctors have manipulated and profited from their charges, and engaged in experiments that, however well-meaning, would never pass an ethics panel in the 21st century. I come away from this book, hoping that I can be more empathetic, more understanding and perceptive of peoples’ anxieties and unease with the world as most of us see it. We may not be made of glass, but we are all fragile at some time or another.

Note: I was reading and reviewing a copy of A History of Delusions from the Lord Louis Library in Newport IW (see IW Council Library Online Service) Support our local libraries!

Elsewhere on the Bookshelf

• The Air Loom Gang: the strange and true story of James Tilly Matthews, his visionary madness and his confinement in Bedlam, by Mike Jay (2003, Bantam Press)
• Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad Doctors of Victorian England, by Sarah Wise (2013, Vintage)
• Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay; originally published in 1841 (1st edition) and 1852 (2nd edition) – available in a 1995 edition in the Wordsworth Reference Series

Elsewhere on the Blog

• Thinking Differently – Welcome (grandpops-bookshelf.co.uk) – some thoughts in Mental Health Awareness Week 2022.
• Book Review – Neurodivergence, a view from within – Welcome (grandpops-bookshelf.co.uk) – Dr Camilla Pang’s story is not about delusions, but the remarkable ability of an intelligent mind to construct a world that she can cope with, when the external reality is just so overwhelming.
• Book Review – The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness – Welcome (grandpops-bookshelf.co.uk) – an investigation into mystery illnesses, with real physical symptoms, that are framed by a cultural narrative peculiar to one community. Just as with The History of Delusions, these shared experiences give expression to peoples’ needs and concerns.