Jacobin “Air Looms” in London

James Tilly Matthews (1770-1815) came to London from Wales to work as a tea broker in the early 1790s.

He became an acolyte of the Rev. David Williams (1738-1816), a reformist minister and philosopher who had hosted Benjamin Franklin back in 1774 when the American needed a refuge from the political pressure over his leak of Thomas Hutchinson’s letters.

In the early 1790s, Williams was active in promoting peace between Britain and Revolutionary France, but the execution of Louis XVI discouraged him. Matthews kept at that campaign, though, working through Girondist contacts.

Then a change of government in Paris brought the Jacobins to power and Matthews under suspicion. He was locked up for three years as a possible British spy. Eventually a new French government concluded Matthews was insane and sent him back to Britain.

On 30 Dec 1796 Matthews went into the House of Commons and started shouting that the Home Secretary, Lord Liverpool, was a traitor. The British government also decided Matthews was insane, and by January 1793 he was in the Bethlem or Bedlam Hospital, where he spent the next two decades.

In 1809 there was a dispute among doctors over whether Matthews was rational. The Bethlem apothecary, John Haslam, supported his position with a book describing Matthews’s delusions in detail, complete with pictures. The Public Domain Review shares Mike Jay’s article about that book.

In particular, Matthews said, he was tormented by a gang of people operating a nearby “Air Loom”:

The Air Loom worked, as its name suggests, by weaving “airs”, or gases, into a “warp of magnetic fluid” which was then directed at its victim. Matthews’ explanation of its powers combined the cutting-edge technologies of pneumatic chemistry and the electric battery with the controversial science of animal magnetism, or mesmerism. The finer detail becomes increasingly strange. It was fuelled by combinations of “fetid effluvia”, including “spermatic-animal-seminal rays”, “putrid human breath”, and “gaz from the anus of the horse”, and its magnetic warp assailed Matthews’ brain in a catalogue of forms known as “event-workings”. . . .

The machine’s operators were a gang of undercover Jacobin terrorists, who Matthews described with haunting precision. Their leader, Bill the King, was a coarse-faced and ruthless puppetmaster who “has never been known to smile”; his second-in-command, Jack the Schoolmaster, took careful notes on the Air Loom’s operations, pushing his wig back with his forefinger as he wrote. The operator was a sinister, pockmarked lady known only as the “Glove Woman”. The public face of the gang was a sharp-featured woman named Augusta, superficially charming but “exceedingly spiteful and malignant” when crossed, who roamed London’s west end as an undercover agent.

Similar machines were at work in other parts of the capital, Matthews said, and Prime Minister William Pitt was under the gang’s control.

James Tilly Matthews is now considered one of the earliest well documented cases of paranoid schizophrenia. He’s also notable because he interpreted the voices and impulses he experienced not through supernatural or spiritual factors but through newly emerging science. Matthews is thus also one of the earliest examples in Jeffrey Sconce’s 2019 study, The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity.

Back in 2010 I wrote about another such example. In 1776 Lt. Neil Wanchope of the Royal Navy’s marines began to alarm fellow officers aboard H.M.S. Thetis, “knocking against the 1st Lieutenant’s cabin desiring him to leave off electrifying and murdering him.” Like Matthews, Wanchope understood his mental experiences using one of the period’s most advanced scientific concepts.

“His looks were as mad as could be”

Yesterday I pointed to Don Hagist’s report on British Army private William Whitwell, who went insane on a military transport ship. Here’s a parallel case of a British Marines officer which Lee Bienkowski, author of Admirals in the Age of Nelson, unearthed in the National Archives of Britain and shared with the Revlist back in 2002.

On 21 Sept 1776, the navy tried Lt. Neil Wanchope to determine if he was lunatic. A lieutenant on the Thetis named (like the American general) William Heath testified:

His conduct has been insulting and improper. . . . This was after a very severe fit of madness when we were obliged to have four people hold him in his bed. I was frequently obliged to go to quiet him. He was knocking against the 1st Lieutenant’s cabin desiring him to leave off electrifying and murdering him. He regarded me more than anybody. He never insulted me till lately.

He grew better in about three weeks and returned to our mess. We used to send him his victuals when he was mad, and made the servant taste it first, for fear we should poison him. He did not eat at first for some time for that suspicion. At St. Helena he got better and conversed; he talked sensibly.

About the 21st of June at St. Helena at breakfast we sent to let him know breakfast was ready. He came with a bottle of porter in one hand and a tumbler in the other. Somebody just put his cup over to him. He said, “Gentlemen, I’ll have none of your tea.” His looks were as mad as could be. He said we had electrified him under cover and hurt his constitution, and he would take a turn with us all round one by one. He loaded his pistol that night.

Wanchope eventually challenged another lieutenant to a duel and then stabbed him superficially in the belly. He was found insane and discharged.

Wanchope’s rank suggests that he was a young man, and his paranoia indicates he might have been suffering from schizophrenia, which often becomes apparent in youth. I was particularly struck by how his anxieties focused on being “electrified,” the latest technology of the day, the way some people today worry about computer chips implanted inside them.

At last spring’s Organization of American Historians meeting, Dr. Nassir Ghaemi observed that schizophrenia (along with bipolar/manic-depressive disorder) is found at a fairly steady rate across all societies. In other words, Wanchope and Whitwell might or might not have suffered from schizophrenia, but we should assume that about one in a hundred men of their time did.