Bedlam

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The text that forms the majority of this story was originally written for the third Young Sherlock Holmes adventure — Black Ice. It formed a self-contained section just after Sherlock is attacked by a steel-clawed falcon in the Passmore-Edwards Museum and just before he heads off to Russia. It was removed because it slowed the story down, and because it didn’t have very much to do with the rest of the plot. I always regretted its loss, so I present it here as a short story in its own right. The action now takes place between the end of Black Ice and the beginning of the fourth Young Sherlock Holmes adventure, Fire Storm.

Sherlock’s brief imprisonment in the madhouse known as ‘Bedlam’ (or, more properly, the Bethlehem Hospital) is as accurate as I could make it. Actually, I could have put a lot more detail in there, but I wasn’t sure that a full-blown description of a London madhouse of the 1860s was entirely appropriate for a story like this. They weren’t nice places. Anyway, the books I used for research were:

Bedlam: London and Its Mad by Catharine Arnold (Simon & Schuster, 2008)

Bedlam: London’s Hospital for the Mad by Paul Chambers (Ian Allan Publishing, 2009)

Richard Dadd, the artist who engages Sherlock in conversation in the asylum, was indeed a patient at Bedlam for a number of years. He was, at one stage, moved to the newly opened Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, but I’m assuming in this story that he was moved back to Bedlam for a while — possibly for good behaviour.

The building occupied by the Bethlehem Hospital is now the Imperial War Museum in South London. My grandmother used to live just around the corner from it, and I have distinct memories as a child of being taken through the grounds, past the building, and looking up at it nervously, knowing that it had once been inhabited by lunatics. Apparently the staff of the museum still don’t like going down into the basement to the storerooms. They say there’s a ‘feeling’ about the place. Sherlock wouldn’t believe in ‘feelings’, but me? I’m not so sure…

Andrew Lane