A Visionary Madness (2003) by Mike Jay

Book Review

A Visionary Madness (2003)

by Mike Jay

   I heard about this book on Instagram, via an account of an academic I follow.  Despite widespread acceptance of the idea that the internet makes everything available forever, this simply isn't proving to be the case.  A good example is the journalism written during the internet era for outlets like Vice Media or the Gawker blog family.  All that stuff is just gone.  I've observed this interesting dynamic between the operation of copyright upon the ability of audiences to spread a given work vs. the dynamic of public domain materials which conversely effects the ability of publishers to generate interest in a given work.   This dynamic tracks the release cycle for a specific work, with the former dynamic operating at the beginning and the latter taking over after a certain number of years.

   I mention that because I'd never heard of The Air Loom Gang before I saw it on instagram.  It's a good example of a book that exists as a cult classic, though not a particularly succesful example of that genre.  Jay writes about James Tilly, a real person who lived in the UK (with short trips to France) around the time of the French Revolution.  He showed up in London after said Revolution and demanded an audience with Lord Liverpool and when he was refused he made public accusations that Liverpool was a traitor to the crown.  He claimed he was part of a secret mission to France to broker a peace between the UK and revolutionary France.

 At Lord Liverpool's request, he was committed to the then new insinuation of the insane asylum, known as Bedlam where he spent the next couple decades loudly proclaiming his sanity.   The book delves into the nature of his madness, which is revealed as the first technologically driven episode of paranoid-schizophrenia.  He makes this argument because Tilly claimed to be the victim of a secret influencing machine that was hidden below the streets of London.  He sketched the device, which was equally intricate and insane.  As Jay makes clear, Tilly was insane, but in a very interesting way.  It's a book that deserves to be on any shelf where Discipline and Punishment by Michel Foucault resides but I'm pretty sure finding a hard copy outside a library is rough.