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adjective
Bedlam  adj.  Belonging to, or fit for, a madhouse. "The bedlam, brainsick duchess."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Bedlam" Quotes from Famous Books



... that! It is impossible that you could conceive such a plot and execute it without help, and I am going to sift it to the bottom," was Miss Williams' sharp retort; for she by no means relished being aroused at midnight by such a frightful bedlam, to find herself a prisoner ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... from Barber's Crick wid a string of fish draggin' from her shoulders down to de ground. Me, I laked milk more'n anything else. You jus' oughta seed dat place at milkin' time. Dere was a heap of cows a fightin', chillun hollerin', and sich a bedlam as you can't think up. Dat old plantation was a grand place for chillun, in summertime 'specially, 'cause dere was so many branches and cricks close by what us chillun could ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration

... another bedlam, of joy, this time, instead of despair. Benson hid his amusement at the facility with which all of them were discovering in one another the courage, vision and stamina of true patriots and pioneers. He let it go on for a few moments, hoping to glean ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire

... preposterous things. I can only remember some wild raving I indulged in, and some undeserved rudeness I displayed towards you. But, will you believe, the instant you left me, I recovered my right mind. I am like one returned from bedlam, cured, and you will pardon any incivility I may have done you in my peculiar state, I'm sure, since you speak of having been ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens

... divided with his opponents the honour of Cleveland's nomination. Instead, it practically voted as before. But Albany, Rensselaer, and other counties, catching the tide at its turn, threw the convention into a bedlam. Finally, when Kelly could secure recognition, he changed ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... our author for some time was deprived of his senses, and was confined in Bedlam; and as Langbaine observes, it is to be regretted, that his madness exceeded that divine fury which Ovid mentions, and which usually ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber

... them, such sayings might have been a valuable lesson to one who could reflect and reason upon them, and diligently try to discover how such feelings could have grown up in millions of minds. This, however, the poor queen never thought of doing. She called it madness; and felt as if in Bedlam, while surrounded by those who were of the same mind as ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau

... said at last. "I was coming quietly along, when suddenly Bedlam broke loose, and I have been standing by to go about ever since. No extra lunatics seemed to be needed, or I should have ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards

... I had begun to hope that my old bones would have a rest, I am bundled off to this howling wilderness to strip, and jibber, and be ugly and hairy, and pull down fences and waylay sheep, and waltz around with a club, and play 'Wild Man' generally—and all to gratify the whim of a bedlam of crazy newspaper scribblers? From one end of the continent to the other, I am described as a gorilla, with a sort of human seeming about me—and all to gratify this quill-driving scum of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... are a team, and it takes a strong hand to drive you, but I rather like it. Josie ought to have been my child, and Rob yours, Meg. Then your house would have been all peace and mine all Bedlam. Now I must go and tell Laurie the news. Come with me, Meg, a little stroll will do us good'; and sticking Ted's straw hat on her head, Mrs Jo walked off with her sister, leaving Daisy to attend to the muffins, Ted to appease Josie, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott

... child!" she exclaimed, seizing her arm and pouncing one stiffly gloved hand on the sparkling brooch; "you've stolen that! It's bad enough to be run into by a dirty little thing fresh from Bedlam, without being wicked into the bargain. ...
— Twilight Stories • Various

... contemned parcelled out among a few, while the mass of men hovered countryless—from this had arisen their lucre—their mental quality was too rich in business shrewdness to tolerate in their own case any such Bedlam: yet they stood helpless before the disaster, and only in ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel

... Teddy!" "We want Teddy!" "We want Teddy!" they chanted in unison. Bedlam broke loose at that. Men stood on their seats and waved their hats and handkerchiefs; some took their collars and neckties off; some wept, some cursed for sheer joy and others—I believe that when Gabriel blows his horn and ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat

... every minute!" exclaimed Tutt. "Surely in all this bedlam we ought to be able to acquit our new client Mr. Higgleby of the charge of bigamy. At least you ought to be able ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... shots fired under cover of trees, rocks and stumps. The British were paralysed as they saw their ranks steadily decimated by the fire of an enemy whom they could never see, and who seemed multitudinous as their shrieks and shouts were heard far and wide in that Bedlam of the forest. The leaves that lay thick and deep on the ground were reddened with the blood of many victims helpless against the concealed, relentless savages. The woods of the Chateauguay did not ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot

... priest was gone stark mad. It seems he had begun to revolve the change of his circumstances in his mind, and this put him into an ecstasy of joy: his spirits whirled about faster than the vessels could convey them; the blood grew hot and feverish; and the man was as fit for Bedlam as any creature that ever was in it; the surgeon would not bleed him again in that condition, but gave him something to doze and put him to sleep, which, after some time, operated upon him, and he waked next ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe

... ship was sudden commotion. A scream was cut off sharply. Scurried movement became bedlam. Uproar ceased as if a knife had cut ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen

... himself standing next to an exceptionally clean-cut young fellow of about his own age. This youth appeared a fine specimen of the sane, wholesome, successful young American business man. Yet he was behaving like a madman, yelling like Bedlam, wildly flaunting his hat—a splendid-looking Panama—now and then savagely brandishing his fists at an unseen foe. Queed heard him saying fiercely, apparently to the world at large: "They couldn't lick us now. By the Lord, they couldn't lick ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... stillness; the startled officers, meanwhile, listening to discover the source of the unearthly noise, then, as if Bedlam had broken loose, the concert began once more. It was concentrated around the cabin of the surgeon so disliked. As the quarters of the officers were somewhat removed from the hospital proper, and very near my own, I got the full benefit of the noise. I ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers

... Bedlam seems to be let loose on the stage, and every character has a high claim to an apartment in it. It is indeed suspected that the cardinal had a hand in this anomalous drama, and in spite of its extravagance it ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... it has pleased God to leave in a full state health and strength, but deprived of reason to act for themselves. And it is, in my opinion, one of the greatest scandals upon the understanding of others to mock at those who want it. Upon this account I think the hospital we call Bedlam to be a noble foundation, a visible instance of the sense our ancestors had of the greatest unhappiness which can befall humankind; since as the soul in man distinguishes him from a brute, so where the soul is dead (for so it is as to acting) ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe

... fling. Companies of masks with linked arms and whooping like red Indians swept the streets in crazy rushes while gusts of cold mistral swayed the gas lights as far as the eye could reach. There was a touch of bedlam in all this. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... deck. Moans and shrieks of agony were heard on every side. The surgeons were busy with their glittering instruments. The tramp of men on the decks overhead, and the creaking of the timbers of the water-logged ship, added to the cries of the wounded, made a perfect bedlam of ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... Lopez, give me a little, safe, so that I may know that I shan't see my children want. When I thinks what it would be to have them darlings' little bellies empty, and nothing in the cupboard, I get that low that I'm nigh fit for Bedlam." ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... however, an interruption which put an end to the deadlock and it came from Tarzan's rear. He and the lions had been making so much noise that neither could hear anything above their concerted bedlam, and so it was that Tarzan did not hear the great bulk bearing down upon him from behind until an instant before it was upon him, and then he turned to see Buto, the rhinoceros, his little, pig eyes blazing, charging madly toward him and already so close that escape seemed impossible; yet ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... with no great difficulty—this stern resolve. The mediaeval saying, that laughter has sin for a father and folly for a mother, would have meant to Wesley more than a figure of speech. Nothing could rob him of a dry and bitter humour ("They won't let me go to Bedlam," he wrote, "because they say I make the inmates mad, nor into Newgate, because I make them wicked"); but there was little in his creed or in the scenes of his labours to ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... Several minstrels, mummers, and merry-makers, in various fantastic habits, swelled the throng, enlivening it with their strains or feats; and amongst other privileged characters admitted was a Tom o' Bedlam, a half-crazed licensed beggar, in a singular and picturesque garb, with a plate of tin engraved with his name attached to his left arm, and a great ox's horn, which he was continually blowing, suspended by a leathern baldric ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... to the walls of Onondaga. To whet their appetite, they were kept waiting outside for two whole days. The French took turns in entertaining the waiting guests. Boisterous games, songs, dances, and music kept the Iroquois awake and hilarious to the evening of the second day. Inside the fort bedlam reigned. Boats were dragged from floors to a sally-port at the rear of the courtyard. Here firearms, ammunition, food, and baggage were placed in readiness. Guns which could not be taken were burned or broken. Ammunition was scattered in the snow. All the stock but one solitary pig, ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut

... threat'ning jut like precipices; O'er-arching, mouldy, gloom-inspiring coves, Supporting roofs fantastic, stony groves; Windows and doors, in nameless sculpture drest, With order, symmetry, or taste unblest; Forms like some bedlam Statuary's dream, The craz'd creations of misguided whim; Forms might be worshipp'd on the bended knee, And still the second dread command be free, Their likeness is not found on earth, in air, or sea. Mansions that would disgrace the building taste Of any mason reptile, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... a red haze through which he saw dimly. He was aware of the hailstorm of boulders that were thick in the air. He saw vaguely the white faces and copper-clad bodies of strange men leaping about him, and he heard the wild bedlam of their shrieks as they joined in the mad battle against ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... such talkers as Mr. Dryden: Ridere soleo, cum video homines ab Homeri virtibus strenue declinates, si quid vero irrepsi vitii, id avide arripientes. But I might have spared this quotation, and you your avowing; for this character might as well have been borrowed from some of the stalls in Bedlam, or any of your own hair-brained cox-combs which you call heroes, and persons of honour. I remember just such another fuming Achilles in Shakespeare, one ancient Pistol, whom he avows to be a man of so fiery a temper, and so impatient of an injury, even from Sir John Falstaff ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... at this part of the story, that he would introduce as actors in the Gordon riots three splendid fellows who should order, lead, control, and be obeyed as natural guides of the crowd in that delirious time, and who should turn out, when all was over, to have broken out from Bedlam; but, though he saw the unsoundness of this, he could not so readily see, in Gordon's case, the danger of taxing ingenuity to ascribe a reasonable motive to acts of sheer insanity. The feeblest parts of the book are those in which Lord George ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... storm, Tom Slade paused to think. All about them was Bedlam. Down the precipitous mountainside hard by, were crashing the torn and uprooted trophies of the storm high in those dizzy recesses above, where eagles, undisturbed by any human presence, made their homes upon the crags. The rending and crashing up ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... wool, of which, according to Pliny, Nero had a napkin. Ursus possessed a retort and a flask; he effected transmutations; he sold panaceas. It was said of him that he had once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the honour to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet. This story was probably not true; we have all to submit to ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... the other side! On the other side! Oh, you must somehow see the other side! If you'd repair or clean This delicate old machine, You must have a way to see the other side! —The Inventor's Song in, "Bedlam." ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick

... to do in taking care of his craft; and then he can always look forward to the day he'll get in. But this generalizing, night and day, without any port ahead, and little comfort in looking astarn, will soon fit a man for Bedlam. I just: weathered Cape Crazy, I can tell you, lads; and that, too, in the white water! As for my v'y'ge being desperate, what was there to make it so, I should like ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper

... nozzle of the hose. It was greeted with yells of laughter, not only from those who were passing water in buckets, but even the soldiers joined in the cries. The crowd took up the yells, and in a few minutes it seemed as though Bedlam had ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes

... principles, that had the first colonists of our country ever intimated as a part of their designs the project of founding a great and mighty nation, the finger of scorn would have pointed them to the cells of Bedlam as an abode more suitable for hatching vain empires than the solitude ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams

... just then as if Miss Minerva were going to wreck his life and prepare him accurately for a future in Bedlam. ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... 406 The Tall Irishman. Oliver Cromwell's porter, yclept Daniel, was a giant. This fellow, through poring over mystical divinity, lost his wits: he preached, prophesied, and raved until finally he was incarcerated in Bedlam, where, after a while, his liberty was allowed him. A famous item amongst his books was a large Bible presented by Neil Gwynne. D'Urfey in his Prologue to Sir Barnaby Whigg (1681), has: 'Like Oliver's porter, but ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn

... rest in an enthusiasm for "developing the country." The mania for speculation was nearly universal, especially in the new Western States. Illinois alone projected 1,350 miles of railroad, without money and without credit to carry out this Bedlam legislation, and in almost every village there were "corner lots" enough to be sold to make a great city. Aside from this participation in a bubble destined to burst, and to be followed by disasters, bankruptcies, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord

... well turn in," he suggested. "When Tavish shows up the dogs will raise bedlam and wake us. Throw out Tavish's blankets and put your own in his bunk. I prefer the floor. Always did. Nothing like a ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood

... loose. The convention was bedlam. The friends of the Judge were confounded. They did ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... we say. Perhaps I should write "the things that we think we say," because so many of those who make themselves heard do not weigh words at all, and they imagine themselves to be uttering cogent truths when they are really giving us the babble of Bedlam. If ladies and gentlemen who rant about freedom would try to emancipate themselves from the dominion of meaningless words, we should all fare better; but we find a large number of public personages using perfectly ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... think I should have told your grace's tale. The duchess by his subornation, Upon my life, began her devilish practices; Or, if he were not privy to those faults, Yet, by reputing of his high descent, As next the king he was successive heir, And such high vaunts of his nobility, Did instigate the bedlam brain-sick duchess By wicked means to frame our sovereign's fall. Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep, And in his simple show he harbours treason. The fox barks not when he would steal the lamb.— No, no, my sovereign; Gloster ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]

... a trembling hand the paper was delivered. Then came the storm. Juno, as in the Aeneid, delegated the work of vengeance to Alecto. The Queen was calm and gentle; but Madame Schwellenberg raved like a maniac in the incurable ward of Bedlam! Such insolence! Such ingratitude! Such folly! Would Miss Burney bring utter destruction on herself and her family? Would she throw away the inestimable advantage of royal protection? Would she part with privileges which, once relinquished, could never be regained? ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... his temporary loss of nerve, Daylight returned to his task. The cessation of buying had turned the Stock Exchange into a bedlam, and down all the line of stocks the bears were smashing. Ward Valley, as the ape, received the brunt of the shock, and was already beginning to tumble. Daylight calmly doubled his buying orders. And all through Tuesday and Wednesday, and ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... persons present fell at first breathlessly silent, watching the gallant but quite hopeless adventure. Then, in sheer sympathy with a good man in trouble, one after another we rushed in to help, till the constitution of the University must have seemed indeed a thing of Bedlam to our smiling but much- puzzled guest; and all our cheeks were red. But M. Renan cut the knot. Since he could not understand, and we could not explain, what the constitution of Oxford University was, he suavely took up his parable as to what it should ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... articulate by the resistance of the Elsinore, shouted in all the stays, bellowed in the shrouds, thrummed the taut ropes against the steel masts, and from the myriad tiny ropes far aloft evoked a devil's chorus of shrill pipings and screechings. And yet, through this bedlam of noise, came Captain West's voice, as of a spirit visitant, distinct, unrelated, mellow as all music and mighty as an archangel's call to judgment. And it carried understanding and command to the man at the wheel, and to Mr. Pike, waist-deep in the wash of sea below us. And the man at ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... answered shortly. "I don't think anything, except that the Forward is a ship belonging to the devil, or madmen fit for nothing but Bedlam." ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne

... to me, Miss Cox, as if the wind was a settin' from Bedlam, or may be Colney Hatch," said John, who was considered a humourist among his comrades. "I wouldn't take no liberties with a lady, Miss Cox; but if I might be so bold as to arst ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald

... a bedlam of explanations as they crowded around George. Some came up and felt his arms, and other portions of his body. He smiled meanwhile. It was the only thing he could do, and he knew it would be ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay

... soon a busy scene at the native village, and with the arrival of other tribesmen it seemed as if Bedlam had broken loose. The blacks chattered like so many children as they ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton

... myself in a kind of nightmare museum. There was an unwrapped mummy there, the mummy of a woman—I can't possibly describe it. He had pictures, too—photographs. I shan't try to tell you what they represented. I'm not thin-skinned; but there are some subjects that no man anxious to avoid Bedlam would willingly investigate. On the table by the lamp stood a number of objects such as I had never seen in my life before, evidently of great age. He swept them into a cupboard before I had time to look long. Then he went off to get a bath towel, ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer

... that curious riot of tobacco-girls, had paused on the sidewalk across the street, among the newspaper stands. A strange fascination it had for him, that moving mass of white handkerchiefs drawn tightly over pretty foreheads! What a bedlam! A regiment of females in mutiny! A nunnery gone mad! A meteor-shower of black eyes, that stared at a man boldly, immodestly, stripping the clothes off one, ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... and stairs and landing-places on the river; all which were either burned down or damaged by the great fire of London, the next year after the plague; and of the second sort, the Monument, Fleet Ditch with its bridges, and the Hospital of Bethlem or Bedlam, &c. But possibly the managers of the city's credit at that time made more conscience of breaking in upon the orphan's money to show charity to the distressed citizens than the managers in the following years did to beautify the city ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe

... State Street was a tree-shaded cottage district. The noise and rush and clangour of the Loop had long been familiar to him. But now he seemed to find the downtown trip arduous, even hazardous. The roar of the elevated trains, the hoarse hoots of the motor horns, the clang of the street cars, the bedlam that is Chicago's downtown district bewildered him, frightened him almost. He would skip across the street like a harried hare, just missing a motor truck's nose and all unconscious of the stream of invective directed at him by its charioteer. "Heh! Whatcha!... Look!"—Sometimes a policeman came ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber

... cries of "order," "order," hisses, shouts of "she shall not speak," and above all the voice of Rev. John Chambers, who, pointing his finger at her, cried over and over, "Shame on the woman!" Miss Brown stood an hour and a half on the platform, in the midst of this bedlam, not because she was anxious to speak, but to establish the principle that an accredited delegate to a world's convention should not be denied the right of speech on account of sex; but she was finally compelled to ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... comedian of the Dutch Daly stripe; and his son, who is his secretary, has the physiognomical symptoms of intellectuality that you might expect in a dude who eats with his knife, or any Brummel of "the bad lands." The lower branch of the municipal legislature is a bedlam. Its sessions are eruptions of obscenity. Talk is indulged in that would cause the ejectment of the talker from a bawdy- house parlor. The august body never rouses into activity save over some measure with "stuff" in ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... and dropped through a mat of brambles, dragging my rug after me. The fall landed me on all-fours upon the sunken high road, along which I ran as one demented—stark naked, too—a small Jack of Bedlam under the broadening eye of day; ran past Miss Belcher's entrance gate with its sentinel masses of tall laurels, and had reached the bend of the road opening the low cottage into view, when a sudden ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... of conscience with the help of a draught of wine, and it did me good. Lord, how dangerous is loneliness to a man! Depend upon it, your seeker after solitude is only hunting for the road that leads to Bedlam. ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... afford in their own persons singular examples of the power which habit and custom exercise over the minds of men, and of the little reflection they are apt to bestow on subjects with which every day's experience has rendered them familiar. If Bedlam could be suddenly removed like another Aladdin's palace, and set down on the space now occupied by Newgate, scarcely one man out of a hundred, whose road to business every morning lies through Newgate-street, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... heroine of Bevis of Hampton, and suggesting either an abbreviation of "Josefa y Ana" (at this time, we are gravely informed, there was a prevalent English fashion of taking Spanish names) or else a feminine of "Josias." Moreover, among dozens of other instances of this Bedlam nomenclature, we have a "combat of box" between the Irishman "Phelem-ghe-Madone" (because Irishmen are often Roman Catholics?) and the Scotchman "Helmsgail" (there is a place called Helmsdale in Scotland, and if "gael" why not "gail"?), ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... wuz passin' through one of the narrer streets, through a perfect bedlam of strange cries in every strange language under the sun, so it seemed, and seein' every strange costoom that wuz ever wore, when, happy sight to Jonesville eyes, there dawned on my weary vision a brown linen skirt and bask, made from ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley

... a frenzy of emotion as a cluster of lights came falling from on high. No lone machine gun now that tore the air with this clattering bedlam of shots: the planes of the 91st Squadron were diving from the heights. They came on a steep slant that seemed marking them for crashing death against the huge cylinder flashing past. And their stabbing needles of machine-gun fire made a drumming tattoo, till the planes, with the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... selling?" said Carew, sharply. "Don't flatter your chances so, Master Alleyn. I wouldn't sell the boy for a world full of Jem Bristows. Why, his mouth is a mint where common words are coined into gold! Sell him? I think I see myself in Bedlam for a fool! Nay, Master Alleyn, what I am coming at is this: I'll place him at the Rose, to do his turn in the play with the rest of us, or out of it alone, as ye choose, for one fourth of the whole receipts over and above my old share in the ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett

... communion, and the unreasonableness of their seeking to break us to pieces. At this Mr. William K[iffin], Mr. Thomas Paul, and Mr. Henry D'Anvers, and Mr. Denne, fell with might and main upon me; some comparing me to the devil, others to a bedlam, others to a sot, and the like, for my seeking peace and truth among the godly. Nay, further, they began to cry out murder, as if I intended nothing less than to accuse them to the magistrate, and to render ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... 'Spirits.' On page 73 he pleasantly remarks, 'Now we shall understand that all said hitherto is superfluous,' and he will not reproach the reader who regards seers not as citizens of two worlds (Plotinus), but as candidates for Bedlam. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... prepared for these visitors. All sorts of alarm devices have been put in the house, and the ground for half a mile around it has been electrified. The burglar who steps within this danger zone will set loose a bedlam of sounds, and spring into readiness for action our elaborate system of defences. As for the fate of the trespasser, do not seek to know that. He will never be heard ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... a lesson for architects. Build no shutters to a house when the man that has to live in it has a spark of imagination, else will he go stark raving mad before the mortar's dry. Window shutters are window shutters, but they are the doors of Bedlam as well. Now Gaydon should have slept in this room. Gaydon's a great man. Gaydon has a great deal of observation and common sense, and was never plagued with a flim-flam of fancies. To be sure, I need Gaydon, but since I have not ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason

... with Bedlam freed, And wide the gates were flung; To chaos, while the anarch breed In all the world gave tongue, The common men in close array, By mountain, plain and sea, Went outward girded for the fray, On one dear quest, whate'er they pay In blood ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson

... and are beginning to grow drunk, from that time until they are past their senses, in such a continued horrible noise of cursing, blasphemy, lewdness, scurrility, and brutish behaviour, such roaring and confusion, such a clatter of mugs and pots at each other's heads, that Bedlam in comparison is a sober and orderly place. At last they all tumble from their stools and benches, and sleep away the rest of the night, and generally the landlord or his wife, or some other whore, who has a stronger head than the rest, picks their ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward

... I was going home one night in a nasty drunken condition. . . . I lighted a candle, and lo and behold! Sofya Mihailovna was sitting on my sofa, and she was drunk, too, and in a frantic state—as wild as though she had run out of Bedlam. 'Give me back my money,' she said, 'I have changed my mind; if I must go to ruin I won't do it by halves, I'll have my fling! Be quick, you scoundrel, give me my ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... cowboys from ranches, distant and near, rollicked from building to building, touching elbows with men less picturesquely garbed; the strains of crude music smote the flat, dead desert air; yells, shouts, laughter filtered through the bedlam; an engine, attached to a train of cars on the main track near the private car, wheezed steam in preparation for its eastward trip, soon ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer

... March, "you'd better call this fortnightly of yours 'The Madness o f the Half-Moon'; or 'Bedlam Broke Loose' wouldn't be bad! Why do you throw away all your hard earnings on such a crazy venture? Don't do it!" The kindness which March had always felt, in spite of his wife's first misgivings and reservations, for the merry, hopeful, slangy, energetic little ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... entered through the Kaiser Arch of the Brandenburger Tor, and bedlam broke loose during the passing of the captured cannon of Russia, France, and Belgium—these last cast by German workmen at Essen and fired by Belgian artillerists ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... South London was converted into an asylum for the insane who were at the time called "lunatics." The name Bedlam is a corruption of the Hebrew "Bethlehem"—meaning the House of Bread—and while the name popularly came to signify a noisy place it was the beginning of really scientific treatment for the tragically afflicted insane. While the treatment of the insane in Europe ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various

... Madame Duquesne to be as gently undeceived the next morning as possible with respect to her child; but the reaction and disappointment proved too much for her wavering intellect. She relapsed into positive insanity, and was placed in Bedlam, where she remained two years. At the end of that period she was pronounced convalescent. A sufficient sum of money was raised by myself and others, not only to send her to Paris, but to enable her to set up as a milliner in a small but respectable way. As lately as last May, when ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... when the grown people wanted to "shout," I would not let them, and the occasion closed by their "drawing" candy from C. as they passed out. I daresay this sounds pleasant, and I know they all had a good time; but if you could have looked in, you would have thought it Bedlam ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various

... Bedlam, the celebrated receptacle for lunatics, is situated in St. George's-fields, within five minutes' walk of the King's Bench. There is also another noble establishment in the neighbourhood of Finsbury-square, where ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... The bedlam which had broken loose when Podmore was freed had trailed out to a scatter of noise in the distance. Far away the shrieks of the half-demented man of money still rose above the shouting and cat-calls, but they were growing less frequent and fainter. Podmore was making ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse

... little poem he had no other view than to set forth the beauty of a chaste and disinterested passion, even in the lowest class of human life. The real occasion was this: A shoemaker's 'prentice, making holiday with his sweetheart, treated her with a sight of Bedlam, the puppet-shows, the flying-chairs, and all the elegancies of Moorfields; from whence, proceeding to the Farthing Pye-house, he gave her a collation of buns, cheesecakes, gammon of bacon, stuffed beef, and bottled ale; through all which scenes the author dodged them (charmed with the simplicity ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... Bedlam,' mad-songs they were called, were very commonly sung in England in the 17th century. The tune and words of the original 'Tom a Bedlam' are to be found in Chappell, Vol. I. p. 175. Its date is some time before 1626,[6] ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor

... 'puny'; 'patron' and 'pattern'; 'spital' (hospital) and 'spittle' (house of correction); 'accompt' and 'account'; 'donjon' and 'dungeon'; 'nestle' and 'nuzzle'{114} (now obsolete); 'Egyptian' and 'gypsy'; 'Bethlehem' and 'Bedlam'; 'exemplar' and 'sampler'; 'dolphin' and ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench

... a woman's tongue for foolishness. I've heared a saying too in my family, which be—get a female on to your hearth and 'tis Bedlam ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin

... freely, the old man began to open his eyes; and in a quarter of an hour was well again. But soon remembering this happy change, the joy of which whirled his blood about faster than the vessels could convey it, he became so feverish, as made him more fit for bedlam than any other place. But the surgeon giving him a sleepy dose, he was perfectly composed the ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe

... a bedlam; trunks and chests were locked and tied round with ropes; and a general washing and rinsing of faces and hands was beheld. While this was going on, forth came an order from the quarter-deck, for every bed, blanket, bolster, and ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... shouted. "I'd as soon have a white horse and a minister aboard as to go to sea in a floating bedlam!" ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon

... had to take all that nasty raw meat out of the back seat and throw it out in the ditch to the dogs, and stand up all the way home, bruised as I was, to keep him from falling off the seat. We were in a perfect bedlam there for a while, but it doesn't seem to make any difference to anybody. Nobody ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed

... Islands now and at dawn we neared St. Kitts, of the Leeward group, anchoring a half-mile away from the landing and putting passengers ashore in the small boats that ranged themselves near the steamer. There was a very bedlam of chatter, argument, and recrimination among the black boatmen, mounting at times to furious invective in a patois we failed wholly to understand, for though the majority of the natives speak English on all the islands, whether Dutch, French, or British, they use a language ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... boy, these nights about this burg when the miners and cow- boys have had their pay, are one Bedlam. Decent folks lock their doors and windows and never show a light that might attract any insanely drunken miner. That's why I want you far on your road to camp before these rough foreigners come to town. Jake ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... two strands of rope made of rice straw around the carcass, they inserted a thick bamboo pole under the withes. Then swinging the pole over their shoulders, they started off on a dog-trot to the village, shouting as they went. We followed them, and when near the village gate heard a bedlam of unearthly yells and whoops of triumph from all the boys and girls of the village, who were proud of their famous hunter. We had entered into conversation with him, and learned that his ...
— Harper's Young People, January 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... disarrangement, disorganization, jumble, chaos, litter, irregularity, disturbance, tumult, riot, turmoil, Bedlam, fracas, pandemonium. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... why he is going, and why he is going to-night," she called out. "Really, this table is getting to be more and more like Bedlam every day, with everybody talking at once. Sometimes—I hope God will forgive me—but positively, sometimes I wish Victor would lose ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin

... done by a mob of hysterical ranters. This is fortunately true. To pass from the newspaper offices and political platforms and club fenders and suburban drawing-rooms to the Army and the munition factories was to pass from Bedlam to the busiest and sanest of workaday worlds. It was to rediscover England, and find solid ground for the faith of those who still believed in her. But a necessary condition of this efficiency was that those who were efficient ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... indeed the self-same case 650 With theirs that swore et caeteras; Or the French League, in which men vow'd To fight to the last drop of blood. These slanders will be thrown upon The Cause and Work we carry on, 655 If we permit men to run headlong T' exorbitances fit for Bedlam Rather than Gospel-walking times, When slightest sins are greatest crimes. But we the matter so shall handle, 660 As to remove that odious scandal. In name of King and parliament, I charge ye all; no more foment ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... hoofs, the clashing of horns, the bellowing, the rumble of the wagons over the rocks and the ring of iron-shod hoofs, created a bedlam of sound, which echoed and re-echoed from the towering walls until the ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer

... answering cries, were turning the silence into a bedlam. From every side the cries arose, and the dogs betrayed their fear by huddling together and so close to the fire that their hair was scorched by the heat. Bill threw on more wood, before ...
— White Fang • Jack London

... the narrow, noisome room where, huddled like vermin in sewers, they welter, and sicken, and sleep; where dirt-grimed children scream and fight and sluttish, shrill-voiced women cuff, and curse, and nag; where the street outside teems with roaring filth and the house around is a bedlam ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... the frantic, and again supplying water to quench thirst. On a round table that stands in the centre of the room is a large medicine-chest, disclosing papers, pills, powders, phials, and plasters, strewn about in great disorder. A bedlam of ghastly faces presents itself,—dark, haggard, and frantic with the pains of the malady preying upon the victims. One poor wretch springs from his couch, crying, "Oh, death! death! come soon!" and his features ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... me. "Have you all given cards?" shouted out the man. "Yes," shouted the three women at once. Then we all burst out laughing, and the men went downstairs, leaving the women all talking at once like Bedlam broke loose. ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous

... admiration for Gray and his—temporary—interest in Ossian, Chatterton, and Percy's ballads, he ridiculed Mallet's and Gray's Runic experiments, spoke contemptuously of Spenser, Thomson, and Akenside, compared Dante to "a Methodist parson in bedlam," and pronounced "A Midsummer Night's Dream" "forty times more nonsensical than the worst translation of any Italian opera-books."[11] He said that poetry died with Pope, whose measure and manner he employed in his own ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... last, our guides and servants, mounting to pinnacles and jutting points, and many a frieze and coigne of vantage, placed blue lights on them all, and at the word illuminated all together, there was redoubled bedlam in that abode of Hecate, and the eternal calm of the Boodh became awful. For what deeds of outer darkness, done long ago in that black hole of superstition, so many damned souls shrieked from their night-fowl transmigrations, 'twere vain ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... 8, we went together and visited the mansions of Bedlam[1114]. I had been informed that he had once been there before with Mr. Wedderburne, (now Lord Loughborough,) Mr. Murphy, and Mr. Foote; and I had heard Foote give a very entertaining account of Johnson's happening to have his attention ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... the right and left, in order to secure the finest specimens of the coveted fruit, scarcely allowing himself time to breathe until he had filled his old straw hat, and all his pockets, with apples. To help laughing was impossible; while this new Tom o' Bedlam darted from the house, and scampered across the field for dear life, as if afraid that we should pursue him, to rob ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... voice of one who has given up all hope, the voice of one who has arisen from the grave. In that cold mask of a face I could see no glimmer of the old-time joy, the joy of the season when wild roses were aglow. We both were silent, two pitifully cold beings, while about us the howling bedlam of pleasure-plotters ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... out, "How much would it take to square you?" At once there rose a fierce tropical storm. There were loud shouts of approval—equally loud shouts demanding an instant withdrawal; members rose from every part of the House; in short, it was Bedlam let loose, and a ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... getting ready; the labour-pains are evidently on him; he hurls back his hair, and fixes his eyes upon the moon, (who has been looking at him for several minutes through the window opposite.) Full of her influence, and not knowing there is such a place as Bedlam in the world, he starts upon his legs, makes two or three rapid strides up and down the room, like a lion taking exercise, or a lord of council and session in Scotland preparing to pronounce sentence, and means to be delivered (mercy on us!) exactly opposite our chair! All are attentive to the godlike ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... back—I suppose, to look for the bones of their husbands and families under the rubbish. The prophet of all this (next to the Bishop of London) is a trooper of Lord Delawar's, who was yesterday sent to Bedlam. His colonel sent to the man's wife, and asked her if her husband had ever been disordered before. She cried, "Oh dear! my lord, he is not mad now; if your lordship would but get any sensible man to examine him, you would find he is quite ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole

... nose, could have put no metaphysics into such a boy. Sublime Theodicee (Leibnitzian "justification of the ways of God") was not an article this individual had the least need of, nor at any time the least value for. "Justify? What doomed dog questions it, then? Are you for Bedlam, then?"—and in maturer years his rattan might have been dangerous! For this was a singular individual of his day; human soul still in robust health, and not given to spin its bowels into cobwebs. He is known only to have quarrelled much with ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle

... me I shall give over caring about gentlemen now. The first man that comes to me with four or five thousand a year, I'll take him, though he'd come out of Newgate or Bedlam. And I shall always say it has been ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope

... cap-a-pie, and with them some semblance of order and quiet out of chaos and bedlam. First the sumpter beasts, all loaded now, were driven, with a strong escort, to the downs below the castle and there held to await the column. Then, one by one, the companies were formed and marched out beneath fluttering pennon and waving banner to the ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... and breakfasts!" He went out into the street with the violin under his cloak, and from Houston Street he turned into the Bowery. There was no elevated road at that time and the thundering, ear-splitting, overhead noises heard nowadays were not yet in existence. Still it was noisy, a perfect bedlam of jabbering foreigners, who crowded this busiest of busy streets as they crowded no other section of this cosmopolitan city. Von Barwig, usually so sensitive to noises, apparently did not notice this babel. Curiously enough his thoughts were miles away from New York, and the ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein

... I went into the corridor. Lines are forbidden in that school. At the stroke of the bell, the classroom doors burst open and bedlam was let loose. I had anticipated what was coming, and hurriedly betook myself to an alcove. I saw more spontaneity in two minutes than I had ever seen before in my life. Some boys tore through the ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley

... qu'il serait degradant de ne pas posseder: c'est une vertu negative. La condition du peuple etait pitoyable: entre le status des enfants des fabriques et l'esclavage, il etait difficile d'apercevoir une difference. A Bedlam, les alienes etaient enchaines a leurs lits de paille, en 1828, et du samedi au lundi ils etaient abandonnes a eux-memes, avec les aliments necessaires a portee, tandis que le geolier allait s'amuser au dehors. En 1770, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... crafty and knew his neighbors, succeeded in misleading the population of the town concerning the exact hour of his arrival with his somewhat apprehensive bride. There was a wild scurrying after tin pans and bells and other objects which were effective as producers of bedlam, but Joe sent a friend forth with a bill of high denomination and the suggestion that the "boys" break it at Bill Williams's saloon, which ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn

... Commander of the Faithful? Thou hast ensorcelled me!" When the folk heard his words, they said, "This man raveth," and doubted not of his madness. So they came in upon him, and seizing him, pinioned his elbows, and bore him to the Bedlam. Quoth the Superintendent, "What aileth this youth?" and quoth they, "This is a madman, afflicted of the Jinn." "By Allah, cried Abu al- Hasan, "they lie against me! I am no madman, but the Commander of the Faithful." And the Superintendent answered him, saying, "None lieth but thou, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... Castle, and Saint Peter's and the Vatican, are those connected with the Holy Office, the hospital and insane asylum of Santo Spirito, and with the Serristori barracks. In Rome, to go to Santo Spirito means to go mad. It is the Roman Bedlam. But there is another association with the name, and a still sadder one. There, by the gate of the long, low hospital, is still to be seen the Rota—the 'wheel'—the revolving wooden drum, with its small aperture, corresponding to an opening in the grating, through which many thousand ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... in Mt. Lebanon, a sort of Bedlam, where the exorcising monks beat the devil out of one's head with ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... cold! Bedlam in the next room, and he was lonely! His sensations were getting out of hand, beyond the remedial influences and friendly fraternal sounds of this world he had so long tenanted. By a score of years he had ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... breaking out of the civill warres, Tom Bedlam's did travell about the countrey. They had been poore distracted men that had been putt into Bedlam, where recovering to some sobernesse they were licentiated to goe a begging: e. g. they had on their left arm an armilla of tinn, printed in some workes, about four inches long; they could not gett ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey

... permanent resources of the colony were concerned these coureurs de bois might just as well have remained in France. Once in a while a horde of them descended to Quebec or Montreal, disposed of their furs to merchants, filled themselves with brandy and turned bedlam loose in the town. Then before the authorities could unwind the red tape of legal procedure they were ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro

... Princeton team went back to the middle of the field to take their places for the next kick-off, the Princeton side of the field was a perfect bedlam of enthusiasm. Old grads were hugging each other on the side lines, and every eye was strained for the next ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards

... sprawling as if he had been hit with a club. The jet leaped quickly from one to another, roaring on man and beast. There was a mighty scurry. Horses went headlong down the hill, some dragging their riders. In the silence of the night, bedlam had broken loose. The shouting men, the plunging horses, the stream of water roaring on rock and road, woke the village. Men came running from behind the house to see what had happened, then rushed after their horses. Some fell cursing as the water hit them. ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller

... but I guess you won't be that kind," she concluded, with an unctuous smile, displaying two rows of false teeth. Then, with a quick, nervous, jerky gait, she hopped up the flight of rough plank stairs, threw open a door, and ushered me into the bedlam noises of the "loft," where, amid the roar of machinery and the hum of innumerable voices, I was to meet my ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson

... brought with her and always wore. When winter came and the first snow, she was furious, perfectly mad. One might as well have had a ball of fire in the house, or chain-lightning; every nice old custom had been invaded, the ancient quiet broken into a Bedlam of outlandish sounds, and as Captain Willoughby was returning, his wife packed the sprite off with him,—to cut, rip, and tear in New Holland, if she liked, but not in New England,—and rejoiced herself that she would find that little brown skin cuddled up in her best down beds and among ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various

... the World-Bedlam roared: call it the World-Chimaera, blowing fire! The poor Invalides have sunk under their battlements, or rise only with reversed muskets: they have made a white flag of napkins; go beating the chamade, or seeming to beat, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... had been given by a feminine twelve-year-old, his sister. The mother immediately became furious beyond all control. She snatched a bamboo to belabor the girl, and in chasing her knocked over the pun of pots aforesaid. The place became a Bedlam. Men rose from their seats, and with their mouths full of rice expostulated in vainest mediation, waving their chopsticks in the air, and whilst the mother turned upon them in grossest abuse the daughter cleared ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... the crane, and had just turned away, when the baby crept up, and tipped over sick George's basin of pussy-willow and cider, which was steeping in one corner of the fireplace. There was no harm done, only Job lost his patience, and cried, and for five minutes there was a perfect Bedlam of baby-screams, chopping-knives, and mortar-pestles, and in the midst of it, the sound of the hired men winnowing grain ...
— Little Grandmother • Sophie May

... literature and his hallucinations separate from his business, and never did a thing which did not gibe with his reason. In this way he lived to be eighty, earnest, yet composed, serene, steering safely clear from Bedlam, by making his commonsense ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... "Man, if you dare to cross the Border you will be whipped at a cart-tail and clapped into Bedlam ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan

... door, good John! fatigued, I said, Tie up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead. The dog-star rages! nay 'tis past a doubt, All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out: Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand, They rave, recite, and madden round the land. What walls can guard me, or what shades can hide? They pierce my thickets, through my grot they glide; By land, by water, they renew the charge; They stop the chariot, and they ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope

... them? By no means. And yet need I suggest to your lordship, that those who find the means, and those who arrive at the end, are not at all the same persons? On considering the strange and unaccountable fancies and contrivances of artificial reason, I have somewhere called this earth the Bedlam of our system. Looking now upon the effects of some of those fancies, may we not with equal reason call it likewise the Newgate and the Bridewell of the universe? Indeed the blindness of one part of mankind co-operating ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... The bedlam that now broke loose exceeded all that had gone before. The uproar drowned the voice of the orator within, and even, for the time, called a halt upon the raging elements without. The speech was ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... morning she was up betimes, and stood at the window looking out over the sprawl of the south side of the river to the dome of Bedlam and the tower of Southwark Cathedral, the clustered chimneys, and the gray ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan

... it is," said the Englishman, "that I should give any credence to a faith which (craving your forgiveness) most men out of Bedlam concur, at this day, in condemning as wholly idle and absurd. For it may be presumed that men only incline to some unpopular theory in proportion as it flatters or favours them; and as for this theory of yours—of ours, if you will—it ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... uncle Sir Theophilus was very undecided, whether he should send him home to be locked up in a Lunatic Asylum, or bring him on in the service to the rank of post-captain. Upon mature consideration, however, as a man in Bedlam is a very useless member of society, and a tee-total non-productive, whereas a captain in the navy is a responsible agent, the Admiral came to the conclusion, that Littlebrain must follow up ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat

... quiet, Huff! If you mean to believe This dowser's stuff, and join him in his bedlam, By God, you'll have ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)

... you," said Doggie; and when the door was shut he went and threw himself, shaken, on the couch, hating Oliver and all his works more than ever. Go about barefoot and swab decks! It was Bedlam madness. Besides being dangerous to health, it would be excruciating discomfort. And to be insulted for not grasping at such ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke

... prominent features in their temples and revival meetings. In one sense it is the Salvation Army of Buddhism, being especially powerful in what strikes the eye and ear. The Nichirenites have been well called the Ranters of Buddhism. Their revival meetings make Bedlam seem silent, and reduce to gentle murmurs the camp-meeting excesses with which we are familiar in our own country. They are the most sectarian of all sects. Their vocabulary of Billingsgate and the ribaldry employed by them even against their Buddhist brethren, cast into the shade those ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... fallen into one of the areas of the new buildings at Waterloo-place, opposite Carlton-House, where I was found dead. A few days afterwards, it was declared that they were misinformed as to my death, but that I was taken in a melancholy state of insanity to Bedlam; and the writer gave an account of the incoherent conversation which I had held with Major Cartwright, Mr. Cobbett, and Sir Francis Burdett, who had been to visit me. These accounts were given in such a serious manner, the details were so minute, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt

... a possible mistake. A sage and a maniac each thinks the other mad. The decision is a matter of majorities. Should a whole community become insane, it would nevertheless vote itself wise; if the craze of Bedlam were uniform, its inmates could not distinguish it from a Pantheon; and though all human history seemed to the gods only as a continuous series of mediaeval processions des sots et des anes, yet the topsy-turvy intellect of the world would ever worship folly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... entertaining actual hopes of any thing, merely upon account of the possibility of it, or torment themselves with actual fears of all such evils as are possible? Is there any thing imaginable wore wild and extravagant amongst those in bedlam than this would be?" Thirdly, the impossibility would reasonably appear to be on the other side, so far from nothing being impossible, every thing that is erroneous would seem to be actually so; the Divinity could not possibly either love vice, cherish crime, be pleased ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach

... a Universe as that of this Dead-Sea Pamphleteer could consent to live in it at all? Who that believed in such a Universe, and did not design to live like a Papin's-Digester, or PORCUS EPICURI, in an extremely ugly manner in it, could avoid one of two things: Going rapidly into Bedlam, or else blowing his brains out? "It will not do for me at any rate, this infinite Dog-house; not for me, ye Dryasdusts, and omnipotent Dog-monsters and Mud-gods, whoever you are. One honorable thing I can do: take leave of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle

... it to insanity. Were I a man possessed of so much arrogance as to set up my own little head against the opinions of the nation, I should thank the friend who would say, 'Heed him not, he is insane!' Nay, if I were such a man, I would thank the friend who had sent me to Bedlam. If I knew one man who was 'easily roused and easily appeased,' I would not give his character as that of the whole nation. The right honorable gentleman says he never came here with written speeches. I never suspected him of it, and I believe there is not a gentleman in the house, ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous

... we went to a place where we heard a terrible noise, a medley of striking, jabbering, crying and laughing, shouting and singing. "Here's Bedlam, doubtless," said I. By the time we entered the den the brawling had ceased. Of the company, one was on the ground insensible; another was in a yet more deplorable condition; another was nodding over a hearthful of battered pots, pieces of pipes, and oozings of ale. And what was all this, ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne

... calling out, and what with the crackling of the hungry flames, the neighing of the horses that had drawn the fire-engine to the spot, the whooping of gangs of delighted boys, and a lot of other miscellaneous sounds, Bedlam seemed to have broken loose in Stanhope on this ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren

... longer the orderly conferences of savants over cut-and-dried maps. They were bedlam. Panic was in the marrow of every man, even the passionate Steller, who thought all the while they were on the coast of Kamchatka and made loud complaint that the expedition had been ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut

... arrival at Fort Platte was the signal for a grand jollification by all hands, with two or three exceptions, who soon got most gloriously drunk, and such an illustration of the beauties of harmony as was then presented would have rivalled Bedlam itself, or even the famous ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... already half a hundred people were striving to get through a doorway not much over two feet wide. The air was filled with screams and exclamations of protest, and for the time being in the theater it was as if bedlam had broken loose. ...
— The Rover Boys at Colby Hall - or The Struggles of the Young Cadets • Arthur M. Winfield

... or Bedlam Hospital, Founders' Hall, Armourers' Hall, the churches of St. Olave Jewry, St. Margaret, Lothbury, and ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales

... ears; and within the street was sounding the babel of a shrieking troop of men and women. Porters, peasants, lads, and children were clamoring about our cart-wheels like unto so many jackals. The bedlam did not cease as we stopped before a wide, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... pealed out the notes for the opening song which was given fairly well; but when I attempted to read the Master's beginning of the responsive ritual, a stalwart young giant hurled a book at my head, and bedlam broke loose. I jumped from the platform, seized the ringleader by the hair and collar, and with a strength hitherto undreamed of by me, dragged him before he could collect his thoughts to a closet door, hurled him headlong and turned the key. The boys said afterwards that fire ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss

... Then the bedlam of strange cries were heard again. These peculiar sounds came from the Dahomey warriors and amazons, black as night and stupid as pigs. In thin cloth and hair garments that concealed just a little of their bodies, ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')

... sadness in a fine spectrum of moods. The lighter motive dances harmlessly about the more serious, intimate second phrase. There is almost the sense of lullaby before the sudden plunge to wildest chaos, the only portent being a constant trembling of low strings. All Bedlam is let loose, where the rogue's shriek is heard through a confused cackling and a medley of voices here and there on the running phrase (that ever ends the second theme). The sound of a big rattle is added to the scene,—where ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... poet, on the subject of a new piece written by the latter, and presented for acceptance to the former by. Mr. Splitlungs, the intermediate friend of both. I discovered the title of this master-piece of dramatic literature to be no other than 'The Methodical Madman, or Bedlam besieged.' A little further on sat Dr. Staggerwit, who passes for a universal genius: he is a great chemist, and a still greater gourmand, moreover a musician, has a hand in the leading Reviews, a share ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... communicated with touching simplicity, and it produced lasting benefits to these institutions in Russia. In 1827, I informed your dear mother that I had presented to the Emperor Nicholas a statement of the defects of the Government Lunatic Asylum, which could only be compared to our own old Bedlam in London, fifty years since; and that the dowager Empress had sent for me to the Winter Palace, when she most kindly, and I may say, joyfully, informed me that she and her august son, the Emperor, had visited together this abode ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman

... demeanour of the hardened miscreants who are the refuse of Port Arthur and Cockatoo Island. The vilest crimes are perpetrated as jests. These are creatures who openly defy authority, whose language and conduct is such as was never before seen or heard out of Bedlam. There are men who are known to have murdered their companions, and who boast of it. With these the English farm labourer, the riotous and ignorant mechanic, the victim of perjury or mistake, are indiscriminately herded. With them are mixed Chinamen from ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... driven in and out. It was about a hundred feet wide, and two or three hundred in length. Daylight was visible through open doors at the end. As we approached them, the Rangers fanning out on either side and in front of us, I could hear a perfect bedlam of noise outside—shouting, singing, dance-band music, interspersed ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire

... for breakers," said Aunt Hildy, when she saw the child, "this house'll be a bedlam now, but then we were all as leetle as that once, I spos'e," and her duty evidently spoke at that moment, saying, "You must bear with it." But she was ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell

... here," said Cutler, above the bedlam that was now set up. "Only that man's wanted. The quieter I get him, the ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister

... his smooth ways and fine readin' if the fellow turns out a regular limb for mischief before he's been here a fortnight. I think Nathan Adams must have been out of his senses (if he ever had any to get out of) when he went and fetched a boy here to tear about and make a complete bedlam of the house. I had to work hard enough before, but with a boy of that age round the house to cut up capers and raise Cain generally, I don't know how we're to live at all." "Well, Lucinda," replied Grandma, "Nathan's been a good dutiful boy to me," (Uncle Nathan was past forty) "and if he ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell

... between it and the Zoo, made it a shining mark for the Hun bombers. But we stood our ground fearlessly through all these raids, listening to the din of this aerial warfare, awed not so much by the explosions as by the bedlam created in the Zoo, where, as soon as a raid was on, the lions roared, elephants madly trumpeted, monkeys chattered, parrots shrieked, and wolves ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson

... me! It might be so, if this were Italy; there, where the very peasant burns with passion, and breathes his feeblest and meanest thoughts and desires in song. But here, they already call me mad! They look on me as one doomed to Bedlam. They avoid me with sentiments and looks of distrust, if not of fear; and when I am looking into the cloud, striving to pierce, with dilating eye its wild yellow flashing centres, they draw their flaxen-headed infants to their ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms



Words linked to "Bedlam" :   topsy-turvydom, booby hatch, chaos, madhouse, snake pit, nuthouse, cuckoo's nest, pandemonium, psychiatric hospital, topsy-turvyness, funny farm, balagan, asylum, nut house, institution



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