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Mike Jay, The air loom giwg: the strange and true story of James Tilly Matthews and his visionary madness, London and New York, Bantam Press, 2003, pp. xiv, 306, illus, £12.99 (hardback 0-593-04997-7); £7.99 (paperback 0-553-81485-0).
For a man who spent much of his life incarcerated in English asylums and French prisons, James Tilly Matthews enjoyed a remarkable and varied career. A sometime tea-merchant, peace activist, secret agent, draughtsman, mesmerized pawn, lunatic and self-styled "Omni-Imperious Arch-Grand-Arch Emperor Supreme", he is now better remembered as a psychiatric exemplar: joining Freud's Dora, Judge Schreber, Sally Beauchamp and Mary Barnes in the addled pantheon of representative case histories on which psychiatrists and historians draw in their arguments over the nature of illness and politics of diagnosis. Yet in Matthews' case, the academic co-option of his troubled life does, for once, seem oddly appropriate. As Mike Jay shows in this brilliant historical account, Matthews' biography can be characterized as a struggle for self-determination within the competing philosophical schemes and political agendas of Hanoverian England.
Matthews is now remembered as a prototypical schizophrenic. A philosophical radical and follower of...