Christopher Smart's Asylum Confinement - Asylum

Asylum

During the 1740s, Smart published many poems while a student at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He eventually left the university in 1749 in order to devote his time to poetry. In 1750, Smart started to familiarise himself with Grub Street, London's writing district, and met John Newbery, a publisher. Soon after, Newbery began publishing Smart's works in various magazines and in collections, including Poems on Several Occasions (1752). Of these works, Smart was known for his Seatonian Prize-winning poems, his pastoral poem The Hop-Garden, and his mock epic The Hilliad. In 1752, Smart married Newbery's daughter, Anna Maria Carnan, and had two daughters with her by 1754. Although many of Smart's works were published between 1753 and 1755, he had little money to provide for his family. At the end of 1755, he finished a translation of the works of Horace, but even that provided little income. Having no other choices, Smart signed a 99-year long contract in November 1755 to produce a weekly paper entitled The Universal Visiter or Monthly Memorialist, and the strain of writing caused Smart's health to deteriorate.

On 5 June 1756, Smart's father-in-law Newbery published, without permission, Smart's Hymn to the Supreme Being, a poem which thanked God for recovery from an illness of some kind, possibly a "disturbed mental state". During the illness, Smart was possibly confined to Newbery's home and unable to write or be socially active. Out of sympathy for Smart, many of his friends, including writer and critic Samuel Johnson, began to write in the Universal Visiter to fulfill Smart's contractual obligation to produce content for the magazine. The publication of Hymn to the Supreme Being marked the beginning of Smart's obsession with religion and eventual confinement for madness because he began praying "without ceasing".

Smart's behaviour was probably influenced by St Paul's command in the First Epistle to the Thessalonians to "Pray without ceasing" and William Law's The Spirit of Prayer, which argues that a constant state of prayer will establish a connection with God. Smart began by praying at regular intervals but this slowly deteriorated into irregular praying in which he would interrupt his friends' activities and call them into the street to pray with him. These calls for public prayer continued until an incident that Smart later described in Jubilate Agno: "For I blessed God in St James's Park till I routed all the company... For the officers of the peace are at variance with me, and the watchman smites me with his staff" (Jubilate Agno B 90–91).

Christopher Hunter, Smart's biographer and nephew, described the situation:

Though the fortune as well as the constitution of Mr. Smart required the utmost care, he was equally negligent in the management of both, and his various and repeated embarrassments acting upon an imagination uncommonly fervid, produced temporary alienations of mind; which at last were attended with paroxysms so violent and continued as to render confinement necessary.

Hunter reports that Samuel Johnson visited Smart during the latter's confinement, and it was Johnson that, "on the first approaches of Mr Smart's malady, wrote several papers for a periodical publication in which that gentleman was concerned." However, at no time did Smart ever believe himself to be insane; these meetings began before Smart was ever put into asylum because he still contributed, although not as significantly, to the Universal Visiter. In joking about writing for the Universal Visiter, Johnson claimed: "for poor Smart, while he was mad, not then knowing the terms on which he was engaged to write ... I hoped his wits would return to him. Mine returned to me, and I wrote in 'the Universal Visitor' no longer."

There are other possibilities beyond madness or religious fervor that may have led to Smart's confinement: Newbery may have used the imprisonment of his son-in-law as leverage to control the publication of Smart's work and as a warning to others who worked for him not to cross him. Another theory suggests Smart's actions were a result of alcohol, and had nothing to do with a mental imbalance. However, Smart may have been imprisoned for embarrassing his father-in-law in some way, which could have resulted from an incident in which Smart drank. Hester Thrale reinforced this latter possibility when she claimed that Smart's "religious fervor" tended to coincide with times that Smart was intoxicated. Smart's own testimony that he "blessed God in St. James's Park till I routed all the company" (Jubilate Agno B 90–91) as representing his religious madness is equally dismissed as resulting from drinking, as he was known for pulling pranks and the Board of Green Cloth, the government body that controlled St James's Park, would treat most disturbances in the park as resulting from madness. If Smart was placed into the asylum as a result of actions at St James's, he would not have been the only one, since records show that the Board of Green Cloth was responsible for admitting sixteen people to Bethlem Hospital for "frenzy" at St James's Park during the century prior to Smart being placed in St Luke's.

The specific events of Smart's confinement are unknown. He may have been in a private madhouse before St Luke's and later moved from St Luke's to Mr Potter's asylum until his release. At St Luke's, he transitioned from being "curable" to "incurable", and was moved to Mr Potter's asylum for monetary reasons. During Smart's confinement time, his wife Anna left and took the children with her to Ireland. There is no record that he ever saw her again. His isolation led him into writing religious poetry, and he abandoned the traditional genres of the 18th century that marked his earlier poetry when he wrote Jubilate Agno.

During his time in asylum, Smart busied himself with a daily ritual of writing poetry; these lyric fragments eventually formed his Jubilate Agno and A Song to David. Smart might have turned to writing poetry as a way to focus the mind or as self-therapy. Although 20th-century critics debate whether his new poetic self-examination represents an expression of evangelical Christianity, his poetry during his isolation does show a desire for "unmediated revelation" from God. There is an "inner light" that serves as a focal point for Smart and his poems written during his confinement, and that inner light connects him to the Christian God.