Bedlam

The debut novel from one of our most acclaimed art critics takes us into the tortured, strange and surprising mind of the Victorian painter Richard Dadd, painter of fairies and murderer of his father. Bedlam is inspired by a year in the life of Richard Dadd, a great Victorian painter and inmate of London’s Bethlem Hospital. It’s a poetic and considered portrait of an artist, as well as an intriguing mystery about how, and why, a mind can go so swiftly and dangerously awry. In 1842 Dadd took a Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East. Within a year he had become a devotee of the god Osiris, and then become a killer, acting under the assumed direction of the Egyptian divinity.