The Madness of the Invisible Poet Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
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Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 10 - The Madness of the Invisible Poet
MICHAEL PARK: Back before you could power a bus with an internal combustion engine and choke a cyclist to death in rush hour traffic, taking the omnibus was a much more idyllic way to get to work. Huge horse-drawn carriages would carry commuters through the streets of cities for just a few shillings. I mean … you can say it’s much more idyllic, nobler even, to use horses but then it’s not your job to clean up after them.
Anyway. It is 1847 and it takes more than an hour to walk from the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral to Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea.
Even in 2019 it still takes more than an hour to walk from the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral to Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea. The thing was, in 1847, you might have wanted to walk more than an hour to see Cremorne Gardens in fashionable Chelsea, back when it was a pleasure garden full of intoxicating sights, sounds and smells. In 2019 nothing remains except a restoration of one of the massive iron gates which Victorian hobnobbers would have ignored as they stepped off the omnibus or out of hackney carriages to start their evenings.
A line of those horse-drawn omnibuses sit outside the ornate entrance through which pour the throngs of men in heavily starched suits with equally starched moustaches, and women in dresses which cinch them to within an inch of their lives before billowing out around layers and layers of petticoats. Among them, sheltering himself from the baking summer sun under a conspicuous glengarry bunnet, a middle-aged man with thick spectacles and a pile of papers loosely bound by a belt hurries into the gardens.
From Be Quiet Media, this is Scotland. A podcast about the people and places that made us who we are. I’m Michael Park.
This man sticks out like a sore thumb as he bustles down a boulevard lined by tall trees and interspersed with little coloured lamps, he doesn’t even look up as the sound of an orchestra playing another blasted polka fills his ears. He hates polkas - everyone in polite society has been polkaing non-stop for three years, throwing themselves about like loopy youngsters at the behest of some Czech girl or other. It isn’t for him - unless a fine young lady was to ask.
He ignores the tables of people enjoying a late lunch, the food being served was all pomp and circumstance and unless someone of note was showing him the cuisines of the world, he wasn’t bothered. He has bigger fish to fry.
He’s not bothered by the lights of the steamboats pulling in from the Thames to the spectacularly lit jetties which stick out into the river. More people stream off the boats to join the festivities. Maybe they’re here for one of the Vaudeville shows, or to see a display of aquatic sports. He didn’t really care for any of it.
He didn’t even care for the magnificent flying machine that the famous balloonist Mr Charles Green brought to Cremorne. The lustrous scarlet silk of the balloon wowed the crowds, that was for sure, and for a pretty penny you could even go up in it but that doesn’t mean the damned thing isn’t a death trap. He stops for a moment to watch the balloon rise and listen to the excited chatter from the thrillseekers in the basket - all coo-ees and excitable waving that rocks the flimsy wicker back and forth.
He’s sure he read something in the newspaper years ago… about some aviation nutjob attaching a parachute to the bottom of one of Green’s balloons and trying to leap off from 5,000 feet. He couldn’t remember the gentleman’s name but - he was fairly sure that he died on impact.
The Gardens and their myriad thrills and lavish pleasures stretch all the way from the Thames to the King’s Road, but none of it tempts the man in the Glengarry, because he is on his way to the most important place in all of London.
Tucked away in some quiet corner of the Gardens where a young Victorian dandy may steal away with his one true love to share a moment of what would have passed for passion in Victorian times, lies a little tent. About six feet wide, not much deeper or, for that matter, taller. It’s a little bit tatty, a little bit weather-beaten but it is the only sight that he has wanted to see all day. This tent is the workshop of a genius, this unassuming little structure - in an unassuming corner of a very assuming extravaganza of ostentatious delights, is the business address of the Invisible Poet of Cremorne Gardens.
He turns the sign outside the tent as he steps behind the curtain which hides him from his subjects.
JOHN REID ADAM: “Those who would stir the bright poetic flame,
Must drop into the letter-box a name,
And from the opening, in language terse,
Will issue rapidly four lines of verse.”
MICHAEL PARK: It is 1839.
John Reid Adam has a long eight years to go before he becomes the Invisible Poet.
John has had an interesting life up until now. He’s been a merchant, a soldier, what some might laughingly call an actor, and even a partner in the family bleaching business.
But things are about to change for John Reid Adam because he has just been admitted to the Glasgow Royal Asylum. Money troubles in the family have led John down a dark path, with feelings of humiliation, anger, and injustice all taking an exhausting toll on his mental health. Add to that the death of his son earlier in the year and something is fit to snap in him.
And snap it did. He claimed later - and we’re paraphrasing a bit - that the:
JOHN REID ADAM: ‘subsequent improper conduct of my wife drove me to distraction’
MICHAEL PARK: The admission form that his father filled in tells us something closer to the truth. He was admitted to the Asylum on 22nd October 1839 in a state of delirium tremens due to severe alcohol abuse. If you’re looking for something to relate that to, try that bit in Trainspotting where Renton’s going cold turkey. Close enough.
John is an alcoholic, he has become obsessed with a ‘dread of punishment’ and is convinced that he has committed murder. He hasn’t committed murder, but he did wound his wife with a cutlery instrument three weeks before being admitted to the hospital. Whatever the cutlery instrument was, you can bet it wasn’t a spoon.
You probably have an image in your head of the asylum at which John Reid Adam arrived on that October morning in 1839. And it’s probably of Bedlam, all wailing and gnashing of teeth, people covered in their own faeces, screaming into the abyss while uncaring staff look on or even try to add to the woe of their forgotten charges.
By the time John is admitted to the asylum in Glasgow, that way of dealing with the insane isn’t completely gone, but he’s a fee paying resident so things are at least fairly comfortable for him. It’s not like that for everybody - but we don’t have the time to get into it.
We don’t know much about his time as a sectioned inmate of the asylum, but by 1841 John Reid Adam was cured. And then John Reid Adam did something that might surprise you: John Reid Adam refused to leave.
He stayed on as a voluntary boarder at the asylum for about another three years - bar a little period on the outside when it’s said that he threw poems through the window of Queen Victoria’s carriage. The asylum ended up buying a printing press, believing that giving inmates access to skills that might appeal to employers in the outside world could work as an effective treatment.
In 1842 copies of a periodical titled the ‘Chronicles from the Monastery’ began appearing around Gartnavel. The Monastery was a nickname some of the inmates had given the grand architecture of the hospital and it toed a line between playfulness and respect for the doctors and staff in the asylum.
The opening address in the Chronicles is a thirty-nine verse poem where John twists and turns back and forth between potentially fractious comments and polite observations designed to curry the favour of the doctors.
JOHN REID ADAM: Such matters to decide upon
Seems rather bold at first
Should those young Clinicals agree
On our weak heads to burst, -
And in real earnest should begin
In ire to criticise us,
Their heavier polished metal would
Most certainly capsize us.
But, trust their magnanimity,
They won’t be too severe,
Nor try to sink our fragile barque
With scarce a helm to steer.
MICHAEL PARK: The clinical staff didn’t stop him and John kept writing. Asylum life was complicated and his writing appealed to the doctors who, for all the faults of the system, were trying their best. It also appealed to the patients, many of whom had developed a kind of gallows humour about the often terrible conditions in which they lived.
People in the outside world lived in fear of the Asylum and the people who lived within its walls. For many Victorians the mere idea of finding yourself institutionalised was a fate worse than death.
And that’s where John Reid Adam finds himself. The contributor-in-chief to the account of the damned.
But it isn’t like that for John. Inside the walls of the Glasgow Royal Asylum he’s a celebrity and the asylum itself is his sanctuary. He is friends with most of the doctors he encounters and is regularly the guest of honour at dinners and celebrations they give. They value his talents and his charms in a way that many people in the outside world hadn’t.
They build him up. They believe they’ve cured him of his madness and instilled in him a confidence in his ability that he would carry with him wherever he went.
He left the Royal Glasgow Asylum in 1844 and took a job as a printer. Within months of leaving the asylum he has his own place, a new job, and a book in the works. He publishes ‘The Gartnavel Minstrel’, his own collection of poetry about his time in the Asylum in 1845.
It was full of the poems which had first shown up in the Chronicle and had extras like an ode to the offices of his employer. Safe to say, John was buzzing about his new life - he even wrote a wee poem to caption an illustration of the humble printer at work.
JOHN REID ADAM: ‘My Press, Slab, Rollers, Types, and all,
You’ll find, if e’er you choose to call;
But should it be too far to go,
The above will some resemblance show,
Of what might come within your view
At York Street, Number Sixty-Two.’
MID ROLL
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MICHAEL PARK: It is 1845. John Reid Adam has made his way to London, with his career seemingly set on an ever ascending trajectory.
He appears in a one man show, presumably written by him, in which he treats a large audience to a selection of his poems [beat] and readings from parts of Macbeth and Hamlet. He receives especially rapturous applause for his Ode To Wellington. The Duke of Wellington had defeated Napoleon’s army at Waterloo in 1815, he was the leader of the Tories in the House of Lords and the Iron Duke was still Commander in Chief of the British forces.
Exactly the kind of hero that Victorian theatre-goers could get behind.
Eventually John wrote another book of poetry focusing on the veterans from Waterloo - much of it printed in large type for its aged audience. He sent a copy to Wellington, the .
JOHN REID ADAM: ‘I print at times a book, too;
The last was of the steel-clad brave,
Around the Iron Duke, too.
His patronage I’d hopes to gain,
To the book; but tho’ he kept it,
No F. M. compliments were sent,
Just to say he did accept it.’
MICHAEL PARK: He wrote it for the Duke of Wellington, but he never wrote back.
Without a patron for his poems he tries his hand as an actor, but John - special as he is - can’t cut it with any of the theatre managers who he tries to impress.
But he does manage to find a job. The pleasure gardens at Cremorne need a poet… but not just any poet. They need an invisible poet.
And here we are. Sitting in that little tent in 1847 as a warm summer breeze flutters the canopy and you can see him…
PUNCH: “with his dome-like forehead enveloped in a fourpenny Glengarry; his flashing eye, flashing none the less brightly for the spectacles that add to its force without impairing its lustre. Yes! we saw the Poet of Cremorne enveloped in the summer blouse so well adapted to the perpetual sunshine of his imagination, while ever and anon, he dipped his pen into a wine-glass half filled with cerulean ink, and refreshed his heated brain with a cup of Mocha, which he occasionally pushed from him as if he were mentally ejaculating “All, all – is mochary!”
MICHAEL PARK: That was from Punch Magazine, the Victorian equivalent of the Onion. While people said that he ‘does not spare his quantity, although occasionally his yarns lack quality in a poetical sense’, the ‘gay and thoughtless crowd keep pouring in rapid succession’ to receive four short lines of verse from the Invisible Poet.
Things went off a cliff for John though. It is the summer of 1848 - one year on from that mocking description in Punch.
John Reid Adam, the genius of Cremorne, the invisible poet, is in the middle of the Gardens as disgusted onlookers turn their heads away from the dishevelled character raving on one of the small stages - delivering an incoherent open air lecture on ‘the transition of the soul from the body after death’
The manager of the Gardens isn’t into it. After all, he sacked John weeks ago for overstepping the mark with some of the more suggestive content in his poems. John had never cared much for management. In polite Victorian society, that would never do.
They got into a fight. That was another thing that would never do. He was arrested and thrown in jail for three weeks.
Once he was released, he was on his way home when he realised that he was being followed surreptitiously by a policeman. He had never cared much for the infringement of his liberty either, and he viciously set about the officer.
He found himself in prison again. But this time it was much, much worse.
The Times reported on his trial and the story painted a worrying picture of John’s deteriorating mental health.
THE TIMES: ‘He considered that he was the first and the last man. He was Adam, and as he was the alpha so should he be the omega. His first entrance upon this world was in 1806, and he had the most perfect recollection of the moment of his birth. He remembered the comet which had appeared in the year 1811 had bowed to and smiled at him as it had traversed the Heavens. He was gifted with the most extraordinary powers, of which one was, that he could see the soul leave the human body after death, and even at that very moment he could see the souls of many departed men. […] From his earliest boyhood he had enjoyed this power. […] There had been occasions when he had hung a dozen cats at a time for the sole purpose of seeing their souls emerge from their bodies.’
MICHAEL PARK: He was found not guilty… by reason of insanity
Somehow John Reid Adam made his way back North of the border and found himself in the Royal Edinburgh Asylum.
He believed that he was the victim of a conspiracy and that the guards, police, doctors and lawyers in London had been out to get him from the start because they’d found out he was the heir to the Pollok estate, the home of the incredibly rich Maxwell family.
He felt at home behind the walls of the asylum, he found a sanctuary from the madness of the outside world once again.
For the next 17 years John was the star of the show. He was present at every major event in the asylum, he was the stage director of the theatre group, he was invited on outings with select patients for picnics and excursions. John Reid Adam was special - he was the effusive toast of the doctors and a major contributor to the Morningside Mirror, a publication like the one he’d run in Glasgow.
He paid £120 a year to live in the asylum, that’s about £10,000 in today’s money and for those seventeen years, he lived a fairly comfortable life. John wasn’t poor by any stretch of the imagination, but where exactly his money came from? That remains a mystery.
John died of heart disease on the 17th June 1866 in the Asylum that he had made his home. John would have wanted the last word on his story to be his own, but another contributor to the Morningside Mirror can have the final word on the Invisible Poet…
MORNINGSIDE MIRROR: “Here he is. The most remarkable person in the old house, cidevant [[SEE-devawn]] poet of Cremorne Gardens, and a gentleman of stirring and energetic habits. He is a very prolific poet; quite a dab at an acrostic; and the observed of all observers at the weekly ball, where his presence is indispensable, from his handsome gentlemanly figure, graceful deportment, and histrionic displays, and the reciting of his own effusions, which he does with remarkable force and elocution. A stranger might be puzzled to conceive what were the peculiar qualifications of the intelligent person for an Asylum, or where the shoe pinched; but a closer observation might develop certain vehement and insane prejudices regarding the Queen, some romancing in reference to his wonderful achievements in early life as a gay lothario, and an unswerving belief in the metempsychosis - his remote progenitor having been a lion.”
CREDITS
You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park, and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
This episode is based on the doctoral research of Mila Daskalova who has been an amazing collaborator, regaling us with tales of life in the Asylums. Thank you so much Mila! You can find her on Twitter: @MilaDaskalova and at roomofwonder.com
The score for this episode was by the human jump scare, Mitch Bain. Find him online and listen to more of his great work — search for Mitch Bain Music on Facebook.
The voice of John Reid Adam was Andy Stewart. Andy and Mitch host Strong Language and Violent Scenes, a podcast giving a second chance to films which might not deserve them. You should subscribe if you enjoy both strong language, and violent scenes.
Additional voices for this episode were provided by Leanne Milne and Dan Todd.
You can find out more about the show on our website, thisisscotland.co, and get in touch with your feedback on Twitter… @BeQuietMedia. We’re on Facebook AND NOW INSTAGRAM - if you search for Scotland - Scottish History Podcast.
Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.