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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



... little bits of ones, but 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 let loose! ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various

... 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 ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood

... add a beard to her charms, as already a moustache was like those coming events that cast a well-defined shadow before. For an instant I half thought that Mr. Dane would try and stop, her tone was so furious, but he drove on as steadily as if he had not a passenger more fit for Bedlam than for a motor-car. ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... story of the madhouse. It is certain that Solomon de Caus, a French engineer, architect, and author, died about 1635, that he was born probably at Dieppe, and devoted himself to mathematics. The marquis might have met him in a better place than a bedlam, since in 1612 De Caus went to London, where he was attached to the Prince of Wales, and afterward to Charles I. From 1614 to 1620 he lived in Heidelberg at the court of the Elector Frederic V, and returned to France in 1624, where ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... in this incomprehensible farrago, the argot of the true alchemist. Ripley, Flamel, and others have supplied the world, in their works, with the melancholy spectacle of a scientific bedlam. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... is desirable in discussion, flat contradiction is contemptible. Dean Swift affirms that a person given to contradiction is more fit for Bedlam than for conversation. In discussion, far more than in lighter talk, decency as well as honor commands that each partner to the conversational game conform to the niceties and fairness of it. "I don't think so," "It isn't so," "I don't agree with you at all," ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin

... sea, one has so much 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 ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper

... for Ned Forrest!" which were given with a will. Then came another chair, narrowly missing Macready's head, who, now alarmed for his personal safety, fled from the stage, and the curtain fell. But the bedlam that had been let loose did not stop. Hoots, curses, threats of vengeance, and the confused sounds of a mob given wholly over to passion, struck terror into all hearts; and Macready, fearing a rush would be made for him ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley

... 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. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... John [it should be William] Dowsing and by Virtue of a pretended Commission, goes about y^{e} country like a Bedlam, breaking glasse windows, having battered and beaten downe all our painted glasses, not only in our Chappels, but (contrary to order) in our Publique Schools, Colledge Halls, Libraries, and Chambers, mistaking, perhaps, y^{e} liberall Artes for Saints (which they intend in time ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield

... breathed the senior member of the firm of Hawkins & Hawkins, muttering as he turned away, "Then they have got some system in this infernal bedlam!" ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter

... remembered the fate of every boy {p.027} at his school during the fifty years he had superintended it, and always traced their success or misfortunes entirely to their attention or negligence when under his care. His "noisy mansion," which to others would have been a melancholy bedlam, was the pride of his heart; and the only fatigues he felt, amidst din and tumult, and the necessity of reading themes, hearing lessons, and maintaining some degree of order at the same time, were relieved by comparing himself to Caesar, who could dictate to three secretaries at once;—so ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... now managed to articulate, and certainly he meant it, "I don't know what to say; I don't know how to thank you. But I know what I'll do; I'll turn away the last one of those quarrelsome blacks; root and branch they shall go. I'm tired of living in bedlam. I shall go down at once and start them; then I'll telegraph to New York and take the first train out. Rest assured I shall be back to your relief ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... Tammany, the next delegation called, followed suit, Kelly might have 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 Tammany's ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... easily renewed, nor easily done without, seeing that Hodge's garments stand in need of instant repair. Gib, the cat, is strongly suspected of having swallowed it. Into this confusion steps Diccon, a bedlam beggar, whose quick eye promptly detects opportunities for mischief. After scaring Hodge with offers of magic art, he goes to Dame Chat, an honest but somewhat jealous neighbour, unaware of what has happened, with a tale that Gammer Gurton accuses ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... is of the simplest, turning merely on the losing of her needle by Gammer Gurton as she was mending her man Hodge's breeches, on the search for it by the household, on the tricks by which Diccon the Bedlam (the clown or "vice" of the piece) induces a quarrel between Gammer and her neighbours, and on the final finding of the needle in the exact place on which Gammer Gurton's industry had been employed. The action is even better sustained and livelier than ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... that it's running over with the rag-tag and bob-tail of all Europe! If you think I'll butt into that Bedlam, my dear child, you're badly mistaken. I'd rather live with ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson

... That touched off 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 ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire

... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... supernatural Mather relates, what a juxtaposition of saints and demons! Of course, there was a foundation to build upon,—had not Mather himself in his family for more than a year a possessed girl, whose familiar haunted the house and made it ring at times like a bedlam? It was a peculiar characteristic in this chapter of diablerie, that when the Scriptures were being read, or prayers attended, the spasms became terrific; but when any ungodly book was substituted in place of the Bible, there was an ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... fighting in 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 the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... remark helped to clear the atmosphere for the Allies at least, and then our attention was once more directed toward the river, for around us there had sprung up a perfect bedlam of screams and hisses and a seething caldron of hideous reptiles, devoid of fear and filled only with hunger and with rage. They clambered, squirmed and wriggled to the deck, forcing us steadily backward, though ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... waterman, be you taking that chap to Bedlam?" cried a shrill female voice close to us. The speech was stopped; we looked up, and perceived a wherry with two females passing close to us. A shout of laughter followed the observation, and my fare looked ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat

... closed window the noise of the mill penetrated. The yard-engine whistled shrilly. The clatter of motor-trucks, the far away roar of the furnaces, the immediate vicinity of many typewriters, made a very bedlam of sound. Mr. Dunbar drew his chair closer, and laid a card ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... a nearby counter. A pink dinner plate came skimming up from the crowd, narrowly missing the wired TV pickup. A moment later, a blue-and-white sugar bowl, thrown with better aim, came curving at them in the screen. It scored a hit, and brought darkness, though the bedlam ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire

... your withdrawing from that bedlam in the Woman's Building. I did not suspect that you were really ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris

... Purgatories? All through life I've kept aloof From the other world's affairs, Shunning much superfluous cares; But, my courage put to proof, Bid me face a thousand men, And if I don't cut and run From the thousand, nay, from one, Never trust to me again. For I think it quite a case Fit for Bedlam, if so high, That a man would rather die, Than just take a little race. Such a trifle! Sir, to me Life is precious; leave me here, Where you'd find ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... that sight for a spirit so shaken,— Down dropt the poor Tory in fits and grimaces, Then off to the Bedlam in Charles Street was taken, And is now one of Halford's most ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... 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

... midshipmen, whose vociferations and laughter created such a din as to drown the voice of his conductor, who cried out, "Mr Seymour, gentlemen, to join the mess," and then quitted the noisy abode, which gave our hero the idea of bedlam broke loose. ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat

... Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms Pins, wooden ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... scarcely believed that a man, With his senses about him could form such a plan, And thought that as Bedlam was so very nigh, You had better been there than turned loose ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 50. Saturday, October 12, 1850 • Various

... thou bedlam? doest thou thirst, base Troian, to haue me fold vp Parcas fatall Web? Hence; I am qualmish at ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... most as applied to others, unconsciously 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, or the Old Bailey, would pass the building without bestowing a hasty ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... and master—supple as the slave, and superb as the minister—I was sent to Eton. At this great school of the aristocracy, would-be and real—barons and dukes in esse, and the herald's office alone, or bedlam, knows what in posse, I remained for the customary number of years. If whoever does me the honour to read these pages, hates the history of schooldays as much as I do their memory, he will easily pardon my passing by the topic altogether. If the first ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... of the agreeable things supplied by constitutional government. The French have to be judged by their peers! Of what use is it to pay for judges if we, land-owners, are obliged to do their work. The old parliaments, against which so much has been said, were a thousand times better than all this bedlam let loose in ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard

... steps in their path, and they of course modestly give way to him. The magic worlds of Shakespeare and Calderon are already suffocated in their birth by the head-shaking of the stage-manager who must keep his machinery together for Raimund's bedlam hocus-pocus. Let us be just, however, let us remember that our theatre, in spite of the great talents which have been dedicated to it, was not what it should have been, even in its most brilliant period, and this perhaps not quite through its own fault. We have never had a real comedy; farces ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various

... permitting it and having gotten the body on their shoulders, they carried it away without further ceremony, and the whole company conducted it into Moorfields, and thence into the new churchyard adjoining to Bedlam, where it lieth interred." Lilburne at his death was but thirty-nine years of age. He was popular to the last with the Londoners, and there were notices of him, comic and serio-comic, long after his death. By order ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... persuaded him to enter a little wretched hovel which stood upon the heath, where the fool first entering, suddenly ran back terrified, saying that he had seen a spirit. But upon examination this spirit proved to be nothing more than a poor Bedlam beggar, who had crept into this deserted hovel for shelter, and with his talk about devils frighted the fool, one of those poor lunatics who are either mad, or feign to be so, the better to extort charity from the compassionate country people, who go about the country, calling themselves ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb

... about half an hour into his high favor; and he begins to run about to show her this and that, and calls out every now and then, "Let Lady Barbara see this, and go to look at that." She can do any thing with him, except get him to London. "London!" he exclaims; "no; get me to Bedlam at once! What has a rusty old fellow, like me, to do at London? If I could find again the jolly set that used to meet, thirty years ago, at the Star and Garter, Pall Mall, it might do; but London ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... Prophet 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

... 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 ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... hedge 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 jingling of bells and ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... I'll sing a song that was lately made, at my request, by Mr. William Basse; one that hath made the choice songs of the " Hunter in his Career," and of " Tom of Bedlam," and many others of note; and this, that I will sing, is in praise ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton

... and large patient 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 ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle

... 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. ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse

... on deck was now terrific. They could hear, above the general outcry, an occasional sharply gasped command in Job's voice, or a snarling oath from one of the buccaneers, but for the most part it was a bedlam of unintelligible shouts with a constant undertone of ringing steel and the thud of shifting feet. Most of the firearms, apparently, had been discharged, and in the melee no ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader

... all 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

... Bedlam broke out suddenly. Shanlee, who had been standing passively, his right arm loosely grasped by Tom Brangwyn, came down on Brangwyn's instep with the heel of his left foot and hit Brangwyn under the chin with the heel of his left palm. Wrenching his arm free, he started for the door. Sylvie Jacquemont ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper

... storm, made 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

... Melancholy, 1893, i. 64) denies that this was spoken like a prince, but, as wise Seneca censures him [on another occasion, however], 'twas vox iniquissima et stultissima, "'twas spoken like a bedlam fool."] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... 'housewife' and 'hussey'; 'hanaper' and 'hamper'; 'puisne' and '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 'dauphin'; ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench

... gasping, staring, at our feet. And when, at 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 to question ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... there were could protect us better there than at different homes. This old building was three stories high. Some women were sick, some screaming. It was a scene of trouble and distress. It was the worst bedlam I ever got into. ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various

... accepted or rejected communications as they appealed to his reason: he kept his 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 the court ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... us in our tender years to what we are fit or unfit; therefore on Tuesday last, with a design to sound their inclinations, I took three lads, who are under my guardianship, a-rambling, in a hackney-coach, to show them the town; as the lions, the tombs, Bedlam, and the other places which are entertainments to raw minds because they strike forcibly on the fancy. The boys are brothers, one of sixteen, the other of fourteen, the other of twelve. The first was his father's darling, the ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele

... some fine theories, highly eulogistic of the women of my native land. A few days after the publication of this article, my pride was seriously shocked by the receipt of a letter which told me in almost so many words that I was a conceited fool, with opinions worthy of a bedlam. The writer, who professed to be better informed, added his name and address, and invited me to call upon him at a specified hour, promising to furnish me with valuable material for future treatises on the same subject. My curiosity naturally piqued, and, swallowing ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... roof-tops tumbling about our 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 ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... 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 broken loose. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes

... Antony in the likeness of a lean friar! Between mad monks and mad women, bedlam's ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley

... will I with Cerberus exchange My office (and his is no sinecure) Than see this royal Bedlam-bigot range[gv] The azure fields of Heaven, of that be sure!" "Saint!" replied Satan, "you do well to avenge The wrongs he made your satellites endure; And if to this exchange you should be given, I'll try to coax our Cerberus up ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... 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 promote cheerfulness ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... in much vigorous profanity, but the most of the retreating mass reached Bloody Run, Pennsylvania, marching via Sir John's Run, Hancock, and Bath. Citizens on Apple-Pie Ridge who witnessed the wild scene describe it as a veritable bedlam.(14) ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer

... prince, potentate, or commander of ancient or modern unfortunate memory ever got a more shameful or more total defeat. How I bore this can only be conceived. All powers of recital labour far, far behind. There is a pretty large portion of Bedlam in the composition of a poet at any time; but on this occasion I was nine parts and nine tenths, out of ten, stark staring mad. At first I was fixed in stuporific insensibility, silent, sullen, staring like Lot's wife besaltified in the plains of Gomorrha. But my second paroxysm chiefly beggars ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... you that once in Cornwall, I—the most unlikely person in the world—was caught up by it. I've never laughed at morbidity, or nerves, or insanity since. There's such a jolly thin wall between the sanest, most level-headed beef-eating Squire in the country and the maddest poet in Bedlam. I know—I've been both in the same day. It's better to be both, I believe, if you can keep one under the other, but ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... the most sacred and pure as coming immediately from heaven. The two miracle-mongers had not been above a minute in the Holy Sepulchre when the glimmering of the holy fire was seen, or imagined to appear, through some chinks in the door; and, certainly, Bedlam itself never saw such an unruly transport as was produced in the ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell

... A sudden bedlam could be heard in the corridor outside the stone door. This Ianito had gone the Zara one better. He had located them; probably saw the capture of the guard and the rescue of Ulana on the very spot where his minions now ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent

... up a cackling and crowing, and there was a perfect Bedlam of sounds along the main street. Down this came that wonderful vehicle with sundry creaks and dismal groanings, as though threatening to break down at any minute. Ahead strode a boy in running costume, tempting the tired old horse to walk along by holding a peck measure under his nose, ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman

... me 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 straight away. ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin

... everybody in the room, Robertson included, was startled by the announcement of the chairman that Mr. Hanbury was most anxious to address the assemblage. A moment of astonished silence and then Bedlam broke loose. "What, Mr. Hanbury wants to speak?" "Not the old one, the young one!" "He must be mad. What does he want here?" "Three cheers for Mr. Hanbury!" "Down with him! We don't want him here, we can manage our own affairs!" "Let him speak!" ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff

... classroom a perfect bedlam reigned. Dozens of voices shouted, "Shag's the man for us! Hurrah for Shag!" and dozens replied, "Who will join the anti-Indians? Who will vote for a white man to represent white men? This ain't an Indian school—get out with ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... not informed. I was taken down stairs, put into a wagon, the men followed, and the horses started in the direction of Easton. By Scheimer's on the way, and I could see a light in Sarah's window. I remembered how in, all the Bedlam in the house that morning she still cried out: "I will go with him." I remembered how, only a few months before, she had been brutally flogged in that very chamber, to "get the devil out of her." I remembered, too, the many happy, happy hours we had passed together. ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott

... think anything," he 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

... every man was alertly at his station. It was a silent ship excepting when an officer passed an order along. Joe Hawkridge began to feel more sanguine of winning against odds. He had never seen such iron discipline as this in the bedlam aboard the Revenge. Stede Bonnet knew how to slacken the reins and when to apply the curb. His men were loyal because he dealt out justice as well ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... 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 ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens

... in London, which every stranger is supposed desirous to see, Bedlam is one. To that place, therefore, an acquaintance of Harley's, after having accompanied him to several other shows, proposed a visit. Harley objected to it, "because," said he, "I think it an inhuman practice to expose the greatest misery with which our nature is afflicted to every ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie

... ye 'twas in vain? Why, I looked to see the pardon sticking out of your waistcoat pocket! Why went ye again to Boston? Know ye not that this whole land is now a bedlam, and the Governors and the magistrates swell the ravings? Seek ye in bedlam for justice of madmen? It is not now pardon or justice that we have to think on, but death, and the best that can be made out on't. Know ye that my trial ...
— Giles Corey, Yeoman - A Play • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... said Beatrice, "I shall end in Bedlam, if you're so very tedious. What in the world I shall do when ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various

... her fine countenance, and which she presently conquered as she replied to his question with that shade of frankness which, in the well-bred, can never be mistaken for anything else: "It requires about a year's residence in this bedlam to replace the genuine with the artificial; I see no evidence of such an ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder

... There is no sort of fortification whatever: a large parade-ground, nearly destitute of grass and planted with half-dead trees, is surrounded by the barracks and quarters, neat, low buildings, and beyond, at one end, are the ordnance and sutler's stores. A hospital and a large old barrack called Bedlam tower above the rest: more buildings straggle away toward the Laramie River, where there is a bridge. The position commands the river and bluffs. No grass, no gardens, no irrigation, no vegetables nor anything green is here. One good-sized cottonwood, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... No serious person any longer thought that taxation could be enforced upon America or that the colonies should be anything but free in regulating their own affairs. George III himself said that he who declared the taxing of America to be worth what it cost was "more fit for Bedlam than a seat in the Senate." The one concession Britain was not yet prepared to make was Independence. But Burke and many other Whigs were ready now for this, though Chatham still believed it would be the ruin of ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong

... one "Lear": his madness was never imitated outside of Bedlam; but one Lady Macbeth, and we have seen her walking in her awful dream. Beaumont and Fletcher in six romances delineate "love-lorn maidens," "conventionalized types," who differ little from each other, except that three of them "masquerade ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith

... 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 ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous

... 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, and ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt

... wretch in Bedlam knows How to distinguish friends from foes; And though perhaps among the rout He wildly flings his filth about, He still has gratitude and sap'ence, To spare the folks that give him ha'pence; Nor in their eyes at random pisses, But turns aside, like mad Ulysses; While Traulus all his ordure ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... are gone—so much the better: Stonehenge is not—but what the devil is it?—But Bedlam still exists with its sage fetter, That madmen may not bite you on a visit; The Bench too seats or suits full many a debtor; The Mansion House,[575] too (though some people quiz it), To me appears a stiff yet grand erection; But then the Abbey's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... how 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

... points, but also its strong points. England in the present season and spirit fails in satire for the same simple reason that it fails in war: it despises the enemy. In matters of battle and conquest we have got firmly rooted in our minds the idea (an idea fit for the philosophers of Bedlam) that we can best trample on a people by ignoring all the particular merits which give them a chance of trampling upon us. It has become a breach of etiquette to praise the enemy; whereas, when the enemy is strong, every honest scout ought to praise the enemy. It is ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton

... and so the raving character raves, and the scolding character scolds—and what else? Does not the Prior act? Does he not send for a posse of constables or thief-takers to handcuff the villain, or take him either to Bedlam or Newgate? Nothing of the kind; the author preserves the unity of character, and the scolding Prior from first to last does nothing but scold, with the exception indeed of the last scene of the last act, in which, with a most surprising revolution, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... 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"?), to the latter of whom a knee is ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... his promise, until his 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 ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat

... have no experience by which to try the question. The doctrines of free trade are of very recent growth; the data on which its laws are founded are few, and also uncertain. And does any one out of Bedlam imagine, that any Minister of this country would consent to run such tremendous risks—to try such experiments upon an article of such immense importance to its well-being? Let us never lose sight of Lord Melbourne's memorable words:—"Whether ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various

... attributed to John Still, afterwards bishop of Bath; but the authorship is now definitely assigned to William Stevenson.[132] Our earliest edition of the play was printed in 1575; but a similar play called "Dyccon of Bedlam" was licensed in 1552, twelve ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... stirred. A mile away you may see dust flying; storm and tempest savage the Pyrenees: upon the gentlest day fidgety puffs fret Biarritz, as puppies plague an old hound. But Pau is sanctuary. Once in a long, long while some errant blast blunders into the town. Then, for a second of time, the place is Bedlam. The uncaught shutters are slammed, the unpegged laundry is sent whirling, and, if the time is evening, the naked flames of lamps are blown out. But before a match can be lighted, the air is still again. And nobody cares. It was an accident, and Pau knows it. Probably the gust had lost its ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates

... 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 ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer

... grove, with unaccountable bits of looking-glass sticking in among the branches of the trees. There is a gleam of reason in the drawing-room. But it is approached through a series of small chambers, like the joints in a telescope, which are hung with inscrutable drapery. The maddest man in Bedlam, having the materials given him, would be likely to devise such a suite, supposing his case to be hopeless and ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens

... your past to be laid out absolutely naked and bare, with all the utter nakedness of your inward life this day; were all your secret thoughts, and all your stealthy schemes, and all your mad imaginations, and all your detestable motives, and all your hatreds like hell, and all your follies like Bedlam to be laid naked—I suppose the horror of it would make you cry to the rocks and the mountains to cover you this Sabbath night, or the weeds of the nearest sea to wrap you down into its depths. It would be hell before the time to you if your soul were suddenly to be stripped absolutely ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte

... with provisions, munitions, and transport, and that this could not have been 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 should give all their time to their business ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... found 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 ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer

... mankind to calculate the importance of events in their elementary 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 of ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... 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 ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... column 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

... Then began 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

... 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 the joke of ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald

... a bed in a paltry apartment, where I was attended by an old woman, who asked a thousand impertinent questions relating to my condition, and informed me that my behaviour had thrown the whole family into confusion; that Lothario affirmed I was mad, and proposed to have me sent to Bedlam; but my lady persuaded herself there was more in my conduct than he cared should be known, and had taken to her bed on bare suspicion, having first ordered that I should be narrowly looked to. I heard all she said without making any other reply than desiring she would do me the favour to call ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... supreme merit. For the hypothesis Lockhart "at heart had a dislike to Scott, had done his best in an underhand, treacherous manner to dis-hero him," he expressed, as he well might, unbounded contempt. It seems incredible now that such a theory should ever, in or out of Bedlam, have been held. Perhaps it will be equally incredible some day that a similar view should have been taken of the relations ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... 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 This feud, but keep the peace between ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... in the dotage of grief. Alas, I feel how much even of incipient madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices and furniture, in the Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold! I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams. But these absurdities must not pause to detail. Let me speak ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... 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 the unhappy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... therefore on Tuesday last (with a design to sound their inclinations) I took three lads who are under my guardianship a rambling, in a hackney-coach, to show them the town, as the lions,[307] the tombs,[308] Bedlam,[309] and the other places which are entertainments to raw minds, because they strike forcibly on the fancy. The boys are brothers, one of sixteen, the other of fourteen, the other of twelve. The first was his father's darling, the second his mother's, and the third is mine, who am their uncle. ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken

... In a wild bedlam of oaths and shouts we fought and struggled. The "tivo" dancers had followed upon our track through the long afternoon, and the time that we had lost in locating Leith had given them an opportunity to come up with us. In the gloom we threshed backward ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer

... Bedlam began again. Like the fool who shouts "Fire!" in a throng, this brainless individual revived all the fears ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... apple, and he strolled up afterwards and demanded to have his name inserted. More delay; then "the gentleman from Somewhere-else" informs the Speaker that there is not a quorum. "The gentleman from Bedlam" demands a division taken by tellers, and the Speaker agrees, and is just appointing the tellers, when "the gentleman from Obstructianna" calls for "Yeas and Nays," which means, gentle reader, that the whole of the House ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... with these, because it also begins with the letter b, is bedlam. We describe a scene of great noise and confusion, as when a number of children insist on talking all together, as a "perfect bedlam." The word bedlam comes from Bethlehem. In the Middle Ages there was a hospital in London kept by monks of the Order of St. Mary of Bethlehem. In time this house came to be known as "Bedlam," and as after a while the hospital came to be an asylum for mad people, this name came ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill

... contain some of the gloomiest bursts of discontent with himself and with the world, which he ever gave vent to either in prose or verse. He describes himself as the "sport, the miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagination, agonizing sensibility, and Bedlam passions. I wish I were dead, but I'm no like to (p. 082) die.... I fear I am something like undone; but I hope for the best. Come, stubborn Pride and unshrinking Resolution; accompany me through this to me ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... Outside, upon "the field," bedlam was let loose. The seething mass of humanity was now soaked to the skin. The men walked up and down, their teeth chattering madly, in a desperate effort to keep warm. Indeed it was necessary for many of them to persist in unwilling exercise since this was the only way to keep alive: ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney

... ought to be, and must be. To lose sight of that consideration is to be irrational, unjust, and cruel. All other punishments are especially devised, with a reference to the rooted habits, propensities, and antipathies of criminals. And shall it be said, out of Bedlam, that this last punishment of all is alone to be made an exception from the rule, even where it is shown to be a means of ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens

... apart from the 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 ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... brief moment bedlam broke loose. The Mongol chief sprang from behind his curtain. Other Mongols, deserting all night games of chance, came swarming in on all sides. Their jargon was unintelligible. Johnny could not tell them what had happened, ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell

... of a destructive intent, which the older reader will appreciate; while on the whole he will wonder whether the author has, in these last four chapters, any other than the whimsical aim of producing bedlam in the minds of his ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10



Words linked to "Bedlam" :   confusion, mental hospital, booby hatch, topsy-turvydom, nut house, madhouse, mental institution, topsy-turvyness, crazy house, institution, chaos, insane asylum, asylum, funny farm, pandemonium, psychiatric hospital, funny house, nuthouse, loony bin, balagan, snake pit



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