Product Description

The year is 1796. The French Revolution has drawn to its bloody conclusion and now war is rampaging across Europe as Britain faces up to the aggression of the republican masses led by the young general, Napoleon Bonaparte. Against this dramatic backdrop a strange scene unfolds in the Houses of Parliament. Lord Liverpool, the Home Secretary, is addressing the House, calling for increased action against the upstart French. A man shakily rises to his feet in the public gallery. Looking faint and worried he pauses for breath before bellowing a single word: "Treason!" The man is James Tilly Matthews. Across the city in a dank cellar another extraordinary scene unfolds. A gang of anarchists are at work with their diabolical machine, the Air Loom. The machine works by animal magnetism, sending invisible rays to control the minds of its victims, forcing thoughts into their heads and tormenting them with unbearable agonies if they attempt to resist. The gang has control of the minds of politicians and generals and is determined to plunge England further into the war with France. The only man who knows of this fiendish plot and believes he can stop it is the same James Tilly Matthews. "The Air Loom Gang" recounts the remarkable true story of Matthews: a peace activist caught up in the war between England and France who becomes convinced of an elaborate conspiracy aimed at the very heart of power. It tells of his arrest after his outburst in Parliament; his incarceration in England's most notorious madhouse, the Bethlam Royal Hospital, "Bedlam", and his fateful meeting with the surgeon, Dr John Haslam. Haslam becomes obsessed with Matthews and his precise paranoid fantasy. The contest between the two men runs for 20 years and becomes the defining test case for the new science of psychiatry.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35650 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 259 pages

Review
In 1796 James Tilley Matthews was committed to the infamous Bedlam madhouse after shouting out 'treason' at the Home Secretary, Lord Liverpool, during a debate in the House of Commons. Matthews would talk wildly of his involvement in secret negotiations with Republican France - but also of a fantastic device, the Air Loom Machine, that was able to control minds. He clearly suffered from a paranoid delusion, yet Matthews' claim to be involved in international diplomacy was genuine enough for Lord Liverpool to ensure that Matthews would be incarcerated in Bedlam until 1813, when he was allowed to live out his last 16 months in a private institution. Jay writes knowledgeably about how insanity was treated at the time and about how Matthews' battles with the surgeon Dr John Haslam led to new ideas and understanding.

From the Publisher
'I have never seen the logic of madness, of a particular delusion, presented so clearly and convincingly. The Air Loom Gang is a wonderful book to read, combining exceptional scholarship and psychological insight with deep empathy for the tormented but always gentle and dignified Matthews. And it is beautifully written, with all the drama, the rich characterization, the subtlety, of a fine novel.' Oliver Sacks

From the Back Cover
London, the 1790s. Europe has been turned upside down by the French Revolution and the bloody Terror that followed it. Plots, counterplots and conspiracies seem to be edging England into a disastrous war with France. Operating undercover across the city as a gang of revolutionary 'terrorists' armed with a machine unlike any the world has ever seen. They call it the Air Loom.

The Air Loom works by animal magnetism, sending invisible rays to control the minds of its victims, forcing thoughts into their heads and tormenting them with unbearable agonies if they resist. The gang has control of the minds of politicians and generals and is bent on plunging France and England into war. The only man aware of the Air Loom Gang and their diabolical machine is a tea merchant from Wales called James Tilly Matthews. But Matthews is a long-term resident of the Bethlem Royal Hospital - Bedlam.

The Air Loom Gang tells James Tilly Matthews' remarkable true story. Incarcerated in the world's most notorious madhouse, his delusions became celebrated as the most complex and bizarre ever recorded. He remains one of the most famous cases in psychiatric history - the first man to believe that his mind was being controlled by an 'influencing machine'. But the truth of his case was even stranger than his doctors realized: many of the incredible conspiracies in which he claimed to have been involved were entirely real.

The Air Loom Gang is a gripping detective story set in a world bedevilled by conspiracy and paranoia, war and revolution, which shines a light into the darkest recesses of Georgian England and witnesses the convulsive birth-pangs of modern psychiatry. More than just a fascinating and improbable tale and one of the most colourful case studies in the history of madness, The Air Loom Gang is a startling portrait of a society poised to break through into the modern age.

'I have never seen the logic of madness, of a particular delusion, presented so clearly and convincingly. The Air Loom Gang is a wonderful book to read, combining exceptional scholarship and psychological insight with deep empathy for the tormented but always gentle and dignified Matthews. And it is beautifully written, with all the drama, the rich characterization, the subtlety, of a fine novel.' Oliver Sacks

Customer Reviews

Cabbage and the origins of alien abduction fantasy
Start reading page one of the Air Loom Gang and you're in trouble.

The author has a very crafty way of taking a story that - to me at least - was quite obscure, and getting you really stuck into it. It's fun, engaging, and then he explains why it's far more important than one might realise.

Around the central figure of one man, James Tilly Matthews, he develops fascinating themes: spying in the French Revolution, the bureaucratic nightmare of the Terror, paranoia and insanity. Heuses haunting settings - Bedlam, the House of Commons, revolutionary France.

This is fine and you're thinking - hooray, what a great book, really well written, what a hilarious scheme to bust out of jail by proposing an ingenious master plan for new ways to grow cabbages for the revolution. Are our present leaders any more sane?

But then Mike Jay presses the warp drive and proves the several ways in which James Tilly Mathews' story is pivotal - to the emergence of politics of left and right in European history, to the transition of paranoid fear from demons to mind-control machines and emergence of phenomena like alien abduction experiences, the battle between medicine and religion for control of the vulnerable mentally ill. He shows the world in a grain of sand.

How many writers can take something we've never heard of, make it familiar and clear to understand, then seduce us down the path of understanding until we realise its unversal importance.

Hooray for Jay, I say.

William Heath

Evokes the past like a treasured heirloom
What a charming book! I love these historical biographies of little-known characters and their quirky stories, and this is nothing if not quirky.

I can honestly say that I had never heard of James Tilly Matthews before, and Mike Jay has done a fantastic job of bringing his story to popular attention. It seems to be a particularly sad miscarriage of justice. These days Mr Matthews would probably have just been an out-patient who was prescribed anti-psychotic medication. He was deluded, but not dangerously so.

I particularly liked the little sojourn into the French Revolution, too, which was explained, like everything else, very simply and straightforwardly. Jay has a particular talent in that respect: he takes the trouble to state the obvious without sounding patronising, whereas many authors would presume the reader had made a particular mental leap.

What's all the more remarkable is that Jay makes the reader care so much about a man who we don't even have a likeness of! There isn't so much as a rough sketch of the man, never mind a formal portrait. Which is a shame. I would have so much liked to have known what he looked like. In a similar vein, we only first encounter him as a tea merchant with a young family, so his early life is tantalisingly just out of reach.

But as I often think with these books, where the extant documentary evidence of a life is only patchy and largely incomplete, it's easy to become sentimental about the subject, whereas subjects of contemporary biographies are too human and so less likeable. But overall I think Jay didn't fall into the trap that Matthews's gentle character could have led us: to put him on a pedestal.

There are also a generous number of illustrations, which I am always pleased to discover. I think it's nice to pause when I reach one to mull over what I have just read.

I think I would give this book four-and-a-half stars.

Conspiracy Theories are not that new
This is an excellent book. Well researched. Fast paced and thoroughly engaging. Showing how one man's madness developed and then was used by the society of the time