Hostname: page-component-669899f699-cf6xr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-25T21:26:40.461Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The diary of a madman, seventeenth-century style: Goodwin Wharton, MP and communer with the fairy world1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

Roy Porter
Roy Porter*
Affiliation:
The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London
*
2Address for correspondence: Dr Roy Porter, The Welicome Institute for the History of Medicine, 183 Euston Road, London NWI 2BP
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Synopsis

Goodwin Wharton (1653–1704) was a nobleman's son and a Whig MP who played no small part in English public life. His manuscript journal shows, however, that he also lived a bizarre secret life of the mind of a kind which, in later generations, would have led to his confinement as suffering from mental illness. Above all, through the offices of his medium and lover, Mary Parish, he entered into elaborate relations both with the fairy world and with God and His Angels. This paper examines our records of Wharton's consciousness

Type
Research Article
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , August 1986 , pp. 503 - 513
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

1

This paper is based on the Squibb Lecture, delivered at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, in June 1985.

References

Ashley, M. (1947). John Wildman, Plotter and Postmaster. Jonathan Cape: London.Google Scholar
Barham, P. (1984). Schizophrenia and Human Value. Basil Blackwell: Oxford.Google Scholar
Bynum, W. F. & Neve, M. R. (1985). Hamlet on the couch. In The Anatomy of Madness. Essays in the History of Psychiatry. Vol. 1: People and Ideas (ed. Bynum, W. F., Porter, R. and Shepherd, M.), pp. 289–304. Tavistock Publications: London.Google Scholar
Clark, J. K. (1984). Goodwin Wharton. Oxford University Press: London.Google Scholar
Dale, B. (1906). The Good Lord Wharton. His Family, Life and Bible Charity. The Congregational Union of England and Wales: London.Google Scholar
Freud, S. (1923). A neurosis of demoniacal possession in the seventeenth century. In Collected Papers, vol. 4, pp. 436–472. Hogarth Press: London (1925).Google Scholar
Hill, C. & Shepherd, M. (1976). The case of Arise Evans: a historico-psychiatric study. Psychological Medicine 6, 351–358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, G. F. T. (1967). Saw-pit Wharton. The Political Career from 1640 to 1691 of Philip, fourth Lord Wharton. Sydney University Press: Sydney.Google Scholar
Macalpine, I. & Hunter, R. (1956). Schizophrenia 1677. A Psychiatric Study of an Illustrated Autobiographical Record of Demoniacal Possession. William Dawson and Sons: London.Google Scholar
Peterson, D. (1982). A Mad People's History of Madness. Pittsburgh University Press: Pittsburgh.Google Scholar
Porter, R. (1985 a). Introduction. In Patients and Practitioners. Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-industrial Society (ed. Porter, R.), pp. 1–22. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.Google Scholar
Porter, R. (1985 b). ‘The hunger of imagination’; approaching Samuel Johnson's melancholy. In The Anatomy of Madness. Essays in the History of Psychiatry, Vol. 1: People and Ideas (ed. Bynum, W. F., Porter, R. and Shepherd, M.), pp. 63–88. Tavistock Publications: London.Google Scholar
Spufford, M. (1981). Small Books and Pleasant Histories. Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth Century England. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.Google Scholar
Szasz, T. (1972). The Manufacture of Madness. Paladin: London.Google Scholar
Thomas, K. (1971). Religion and the Decline of Magic. Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London.Google Scholar
Walker, D. P. (1981). Unclean Spirits. Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries. Scolar Press: London.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wharton, G. The autobiography of Goodwin Wharton (2 vols). British Library, Add. MSS 20,006–7.Google Scholar