Aged twenty-seven, admitted August 8th, 1822. This smart little fellow
was a conveyancer by profession, but became unfortunately involved in
one of the traps of the law: he was arrested for a small debt of £20,
which he was unable to pay, and therefore was consigned to the Fleet
Prison--a kind of hotel not very reconcilable to the patience of even
a stoic philosopher, without the means of existence. In a little time
poor Adams, by the rapid movement of his mind, passed through all
the gradations from chagrin to insanity; and it became necessary to
transfer him hither, without the ceremony of _Habeas Corpus_.
However extensive may have been the range of his professional talents,
it must have fallen infinitely short of the scope and versatility of
his imagination in his state of derangement. Wholly unlimited by the
identities of time, place, or person, he instantly accommodates each
to his fancy in a moment, and he is any where, and every where, and
any body, by turns. At one time he imagined himself to be the Lord
Chancellor, or, as he emphatically stated himself, “Young Baggs;” and
no mortal tongue ever maintained the loquacity of the law, or talked
with more incessant volubility, than his imaginary lordship. He would
decide ten thousand causes in a day; he would accuse, try, condemn,
and execute whole nations in a breath. His language was as wild and
far-fetched as his fancy was various; topics of all kinds seemed to
come tumbling into his mind, without order or connexion. Of every name
he heard mentioned he instantly became the personal representative, and
says, “I am he;” thus he is by turns Buonaparte, the King, the Duke of
Wellington, Lord Londonderry, the Persian Ambassador, Mr. Pope, Homer,
Smollett, Hume, Gibbon, John Bunyan, Mrs. Clarke, the Queen, Pergami.
He is successively a Hottentot, a Lascar, a Spaniard, a Turk, a Jew,
a Scotsman, a member of any religious sect, except a methodist. He has
been in all situations and occupations of life, according to his own
account; a potboy at Hampstead, a shoeblack, a chimney-sweeper, an
East-India Director, a kennel-raker, a gold-finder, an oyster-woman, a
Jew cast-clothesman, a police justice, a judge, a keeper of Newgate,
and, as he styles it, “His Majesty’s law ironmonger for the home
department:” nay, he has even been Jack Ketch, and has hung hundreds;
he has been a soldier, and has killed thousands; a Portuguese, and
poignarded scores; a Jew pedlar, and cheated all the world; a member
of Parliament for London, and betrayed his constituents; a Lord Mayor,
a bishop, an admiral, a dancing-master, a Rabbi, Grimaldi, in the
pantomime, and ten thousand other occupations, that no tongue or memory
but his own could enumerate. The specimen just given may serve as a
sample of what is passing in his fancy.
All the world belongs exclusively to him, and he will dispose of it
just as he chooses. He will massacre all blacks, Jews, Roman Catholics,
and Quakers, hackney-coachmen, pawnbrokers, lawyers, and lunatics. The
last he will first turn out of this house, and have their places filled
by wild beasts; all the old women, the lame and blind, all virgins,
soldiers, sailors, and children in the small-pox, cripples of every
description; all criminals shall be sent here, and debtors from all the
prisons and lock-up houses; he will feed them all himself--and then
he will be happy. These and the like topics occupy his whole time and
conversation from morning till night. His tongue goes incessantly at
full gallop, without a moment’s respite. Those whom he threatens to
destroy at one hour, are in the next the objects of his favour, and
all others are to be destroyed in their stead. It would be scarcely
possible to believe, that such a heterogeneous infinity of topics could
so rapidly pass through the wildest imagination, if this man did not
exemplify the fact. The series goes on in the same endless current,
and without a moment’s hesitation, his fancy plies his tongue with new
topics.
When he is tired of ranging the airing ground and lower regions of
the building, the spirit carries him to the upper galleries, and at
the same time elevates to immortality and omnipotence his notions of
his own being and attributes. He sometimes styles himself God: loves
the top gallery, because it affords him a fine view, and a pleasing
opportunity to look down from Heaven, as he says, upon his subjects
below.
Another unfortunate maniac here, named Joseph Panter, supposes himself
to be our Saviour. One day, when Adams found the door leading to the
top gallery open, he ran up stairs to heaven, as he calls it, where
he met Panter, who, much out of humour at his appearance, told Adams
he had no business to come there, and then gave him a box on the
ear and a kick behind, and sent him tumbling down stairs. Adams ran
immediately to the airing-ground, rushed towards his keeper, and with
frighted looks and almost out of breath, told him that he had been very
ill-used. “I went up stairs,” said he, “to heaven, and saw J---- C----
walking about in white. I said nothing to him: but before I had been
five minutes in heaven he came up to me, and gave me a punch on the
head, and tumbled me down stairs.”
This poor fellow still continues much in the same state as when first
admitted. He styles his wife, who sometimes visits him, “his dear
little black queen,” and proposes to appoint her a maid of honour
to his Queen Charlotte, “for whom,” he says, “he has a much greater
affection.”