Summary

Chapter 12 begins at Bedlam, the most famous madhouse in the world, in 1818 with a new narrator. Mr. Wakefield, the head doctor at the madhouse, narrates this chapter as he receives Captain Walton as a visitor. Captain Walton has come to drop off a man who has gone mad. First, however, Wakefield tells readers about Bedlam, the mental hospital. The first Bedlam Hospital in the British Isles was finished in 1676 and designed by Robert Hooke. At the entrance stood a statue of Melancholia and another of Raving Madness. The madhouse itself was a palace, but the insane slept on beds of straw, shackled with irons. Members of the public visited the madhouse to gawk at the inmates. The building, built on marsh land and with an unstable foundation, partially crumbled and eventually the insane were moved to a new facility at St George’s...