In Kew Palace, you can see the empty rooms where various members of George III’s family died, and read short extracts of letters from the princesses who were left behind. It was when Amelia died that George’s second and unending bout of madness began. We do not know what caused George’s illness, but at the end of his life he suffered from some more certain maladies: blindness, dementia, hallucination. He was kept isolated and often conducted long, imaginary conversations. “In short,” wrote one doctor, “he appears to be living in another world and has lost almost all interest in the concerns of this.” He was unable to understand that Queen Charlotte had died. He played the harpsichord loudly, to try and hear something, anything, telling one attendant that the piece he played had been a great favourite of the former king. As John Cannon said, “the last ten years of his life were spent in a twilight world.”
Standing in those rooms, thinking about the cruel way in which George was lost to himself, I thought of Joe Gould and Mr. Dick. There are several Dickensian elements to Joesph Mitchell’s profile Joe Gould’s Secret—the name, Professor Seagull; the physical descriptions of Gould’s filthy condition; the grotesque (literally the comic and the frightful together: that ketchup!); the contrast of simple, honest Joseph with chaotic, ambivalent Joe; the resurgence of romanticism in an age of rational, mechanical progress; the similarity of their names; above all, the fascination with eccentricity and its moral challenges. Who does Joe Gould resemble more than Mr. Dick, Aunt Betsy’s lodger in David Copperfield? Both Mitchell and Dickens were writing semi-autobiographical fiction about an eccentric many would dismiss as mad, or vain, or weird.
And both of them, like poor king George, were lost to themselves.
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