Q J Med 2003; 96: 177-178
© 2003 Association of Physicians
Coda |
Mentioned in passing
For twenty years, my main place of work has been in Edmonton. As London suburbs go, Edmonton is definitely not chic. Some Londoners have never even heard of it. Others only know it as the place where most of London's garbage is incinerated. Most simply have a vague impression of it as somewhere that flashes by on the North Circular Road, or on the A10 to Cambridge. Essentially, Edmonton is on the way from somewhere to somewhere else.
Edmonton is transitional in other ways too. Few of our patients were actually born here. Even fewer dream of living out the rest of their days in Edmonton. Some have moved here from Hackney or Tottenham in order to buy their first property, and now their greatest hope is to move out of London altogether, to the leafy vales of Broxbourne or Waltham Abbey. Others have arrived as asylum seekers, but once they know London better, they have no wish to stay in Edmonton any more than they want to return to Kosovo, Somalia or Kurdistan. For them too, Edmonton is a staging post.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Edmonton was once a staging post in a quite literal sense. Before the railway came, turning Edmonton from a pretty Middlesex village into a characterless London suburb, the stage coaches stopped here on their way out of the city and into Hertfordshire. Ironically, many Londoners over the centuries must have taken their first breath of country air around Edmonton Green.
Back in its village days, Edmonton had many literary connections, especially around the turn of the nineteenth century. Curiously, nearly all of these are of medical or psychiatric interest. One of Britain's most popular poets, John Keats, was apprenticed to a Dr Hammond in Church Street. Keats never completed his training, and later he moved to Hampstead. Nevertheless, on the site of Hammond's surgery there is now a Keats Parade with a Keats Pharmacy. Nearby, there is a Keats Surgery. The North Middlesex Hospital, which squats like a carbuncle on the North Circular Road, boasts a Keats Ward. Keats could hardly complain we have forgotten him.
Keats is not Church Street's only literary figure from that time. In the churchyard itself is the grave of Charles Lamb and his sister Mary—known to generations of children as the authors of ‘Tales from Shakespeare’. Their original reason for leaving London was that Mary had murdered their mother while in the grip of delusions. Astonishingly for the time, she was not incarcerated, but allowed to stay in the care of her brother. They first moved to Enfield, but then came to Edmonton to obtain medical treatment for Mary's worsening schizophrenia. Alas, the task of being her carer told on Charles. He took to the bottle, and eventually died from the consequences of a fall. Mary never again recovered her sanity.
As well as figuring in these literary lives, Edmonton appears in one of England's best known comic poems: the ballad of John Gilpin. The ballad tells of a luckless London merchant who wanted to join his family at the Bell Inn in Edmonton, in order to celebrate his wedding anniversary. The celebration never happens. Through a farcical series of frights and mishaps, Gilpin is unable to stop his horse galloping past Edmonton into Hertfordshire, and then galloping straight back into London. The ballad is obviously poking fun at its hero, but could it be making a point about Edmonton as well? One is left wondering what is it about the place that has this effect on bipeds and quadrupeds alike.
The ballad's author, William Cowper, was never a resident of Edmonton, but he must have known it well as a passing place. He has since been adopted as an honorary Edmontonian: the Bell was renamed the John Gilpin Bell, and there is now a John Gilpin Ward at the ‘North Midd’ too.
Cowper himself led a life in many ways similar to Mary Lamb's. He spent most of it in the grip of a terrifying depressive psychosis. Like Mary Lamb, he had a devoted carer for many years—in his case, a widowed woman friend called Mrs Unwin. He too sank into permanent despair once his carer died. Before that, he wrote some of the most poignant descriptions we have of melancholy and paranoia. In his letters, Cowper explained that he wrote John Gilpin and many of his other poems in order to keep insanity at bay. He translated the whole of Homer not once but twice, doing a certain number of verses each day to fend off ‘Mr Bluedevil’.
Unlike Keats, Cowper is no longer popular. You can go into just about any second-hand book shop in the country and pick up a long-discarded volume of his verse for fifty pence. Sadly it is unlikely to include his Homer, which is a masterpiece, and possibly the greatest of all the English translations. (His Iliad is out of print, but his Odyssey is still available in the Everyman edition.) I would take Cowper's complete works to my desert island in preference to Keats's poetry any day. But then I have always rebelled against fashion—which is probably why I still have a soft spot for Edmonton after all these years.
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