A Sultry Month by Francesca Wade

Author:Francesca Wade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

XIII

Wednesday 24th June

Was Haydon insane when he killed himself? He is often referred to by modern writers, perhaps too positively, as a manic depressive. Elizabeth Barrett was certain he must have been mad when he committed suicide, and her opinion was shared by most of the public comment at the time. ‘Of his insanity, we cannot entertain a doubt,’ said the Art Union Monthly Journal. But some of those who knew Haydon personally, not just by correspondence as Miss Barrett did, thought otherwise. His pupil Bewick declared that there never was a greater mistake than to say that Haydon was insane. The barrister Talfourd, one of Haydon’s executors, told Browning he did not think Haydon was mad, though ‘of a mad vanity, of course’. Miss Mitford thought that Haydon had killed himself with a quite cold-blooded motive – in the calculation that so desperate an act would ensure that his wife and family were provided for.

The doctors who examined Haydon’s brain after his death both thought that the post-mortem showed conclusively the existence of disease in the brain. One thought that the irritation of the brain was long-standing, the other that the inflammation was comparatively recent. ‘There were innumerable bloody points through the brain.’

Haydon himself had a curious interest in disease of the brain and its connection with suicide. Five years before he killed himself, he wrote in his diary, ‘It may be laid down “that self destruction is the physical mode of relieving a diseased brain”, because the first impression on a brain diseased, or diseased for a Time, is the necessity of this horrid crime.’ In one of the passages in which he dwelt on the suicides of Castlereagh and Romilly he considered that in both cases it was due to excess of blood on the brain; both recovered their reason the moment they had cut their throats and the blood began to flow. Then in the last days of 1845 another well-known man cut his throat. ‘Romilly, Castlereagh and Gurwood!’ wrote Haydon in his diary. His son Frederic thought Gurwood’s suicide affected Haydon more than the failure of his exhibition. As the heat of the summer came on, the idea of a pressure, a congestion in the brain, that had to be relieved, began to grow on him. Three years earlier he had said proudly, ‘I believe I am meant to try the experiment how much a human brain can bear without insanity,’ but in June 1846 he wrote more humbly to Elizabeth Barrett that he hoped his brain would not turn. Those ‘innumerable bloody points through the brain’ were pushing him towards a drastic relief.

In the book which Frederic Haydon made up out of his father’s diary and correspondence, two drawings are reproduced. One – which is now in the National Portrait Gallery – is a head and shoulders of a classically beautiful young man, with fair curls falling on his shoulders, a very high forehead, heavy straight black eyebrows, large dreaming eyes, a Grecian nose,

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