Bedlam

The strange and tortured mind of the Victorian artist and patricide Richard Dadd, a painter of fairies who spent most of his life in psychiatric hospitals

Jennifer Higgie presents a year in the life of Rich­ard Dadd, infamous inmate of one of England's most notorious sanitariums, London's Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam.

A young man of great promise, Dadd embarks on a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The two men travel through German forests, Alexan­drian brothels and across the desert to the Nile. By the time they find themselves beneath the unforgiving sun of Syria and Palestine, Dadd's fraught mind has been taxed to the limit with extraordinary images. He becomes stranger and more violent, changes his companion attributes to sunstroke. But in Dadd's imagination he has become a devotee of the god Osiris. Shortly after his return to England in 1843, the god directs him to take a life, and Dadd is set on the road to Bedlam.

At once jarringly acute and alarmingly askew, Dadd's voice is rendered with both empathy and acuity by Higgie. This is a poetic and consid­ered portrait of an artist, as well as an intriguing mystery about how, and why, a mind can go so swiftly and dangerously awry.

Author: Jennifer Higgie
Publisher: Verso
Published: 07/14/2026
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.81lbs
ISBN13: 9781836742043
ISBN10: 1836742045
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Biographical & Autofiction
- Fiction | Historical | General
- Fiction | Thrillers | Psychological

About the Author
Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. Her recent books include The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World and The Mirror & The Palette: Rebellion, Revolution & Resistance, 500 Years of Women's Self Portraits. She is also the author and illustrator of the children's book There's Not One; the editor of The Artist's Joke; and the host of the podcasts Bow Down: Women in Art History and Artist's Artists.