Some notes on BEDABOOHistoric Design Origins and Influence on the Classic Poster Beds
BEDABOO. sb. etym. dub. Possibly from BED + TABU or by corruption of BUGABOO, Cf. OF BUGIBUS, a demon, perhaps m. equiv. of Nightmare, a female monster. Something to be feared or avoided in Conn. w. beds; (colloq.) Something not done in bed. REYNOLDS' Dictionary (unpublished)
Must we to bed indeed? Well then,
Let us arise and go like men,
And face with an undaunted tread
The long black passage up to bed.
R. L. S. in A Child's Garden of Verses
ONE of the most curious things about classic poster beds is that, although there is nothing more uncongenial than the prospect of leaving it in the morning, there are few thoughts more distasteful than the contemplation of going to classic poster beds at night. Robert Louis Stevenson, whose Child's Garden of Verses shows a really remarkable preoccupation with bed, mainly as a place of pleasurable fantasy (a result, no doubt, of the amount of time he was himself obliged to spend there) evidently knew also that sense of depression, almost of despair and terror, which many of us associate with the long black passage.
Like George (Peanuts) Ward, Mr Stevenson evidently had his own recipe for humanising the situation. The cot of his childhood was a boat for a solitary voyage
And sometimes things to bed I take,
As prudent sailors have to do:
Perhaps a slice of wedding-cake,
Perhaps a toy or two. . . .
Wedding cake (one must assume that weddings were frequent in the Stevenson household), though less romantic than fresh grapes, is much to be preferred to peanuts. The selectiveness of the commissariat suggests comparison with the provisions requisitioned by the Owl and the Pussy Cat. But even wedding cake leaves crumbs and is conducive to indigestion; so the case history provides us immediately with examples of two types of bedaboo: (r) bad behaviour, leading in extreme cases to the divorce courts (vide the case of G. B. Ward, supra) and (2) bad dreams, the Nemesis of Evil Living.
A standard text-book example of bedaboos involving a whole family, and evidently hereditary, is to be found in Mr J. Thurber's work, My Life and Hard Times. The phobias of Briggs Beall, Aunt Sarah Shoaf and Aunt Gracie Shoaf all belong to one type of bedaboo (well known to psychiatrists) a group of engram-complexes now generally ascribed to pre-natal influences such as the grim features of Welfare Workers. Brother Hermann's habit of singing in his sleep may have had a similar origin; but this particular bedaboo is generally considered principally in relation to its social effects. It is, however, impossible to make any clear distinction between different types. A regressive bedaboo (such as kelptophobia, parazombieism, disseminated cacoethes, syneisaktism, catachresis, onomatamnesia, pseudometapsychic paranoia, struthiosity, pathological serendipity' or boustrophedon somnambulism) cannot, it is clear, be considered in isolation from the patient's effect upon his environment-an aspect of the problem which has been neglected in the vice versa researches of Pavlov and even by the Freudians.
A classic instance of the dual problem is to be found in Froissart (Chron. III, 27) where we find a gentleman getting up in the night, putting on his armour and fighting phantoms all around the house with drawn sword. All this, being done in his sleep as a result of a surfeit of lampreys, peaches, malmsey or whatever was available (or possibly under the influence of pre-natal hibber-gibber about Oedipus) can, of course, be considered primarily from the standpoint of the somnambulist. But it will be clear that the social angle should also be considered. A man blindly waving a naked sword and suffering from ingoratio hostis should at least be deprived of his weapons pending psychotherapy.
Mr Thurber's clinical studies, The Night the Bed Fell, The Night the Ghost Got In and More Alarms at Night (op. cit.) all provide valuable examples of the dual character of a bedaboo. The first rule for the avoidance of these phenomena is undoubtedly that indicated in some observations by a sixteenth century bed in reply to the poet, Timothy Kendall, who had addressed it, purely rhetorically, and was no doubt surprised to hear it answer as follows:
That I may be a rest of cares
And end of toiling pain,
See stomach thine be not surcharged When sleep thou wouldst regain... .
He was also to keep his head free from cares and to deem his feather bed always his grasping grave. I am not sure that the last suggestion, is really conducive to peace and comfort, but can endorse the others. As to the grave, there is something to be said for Sancho Panza's opinion, in his celebrated eulogy of sleep, when he remarked that he knew but one thing against it-that it was too much like death.
Indeed, the meanderings of the soul during sleep-a subject which Frazer has so learnedly discussed)-are a common source of clinophobia. The dream of the Douglas comes to my mind:
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I think that man was I.
The thought is not reassuring. False, fleeting, perjured Clarence dreamed his own death, which was coming to him, and found unwelcome leisure in the time of death to reflect upon wealth, wickedness and death in general.
Sleep in poetry is generally lauded for its blessings. John Fletcher's lyric, one of the most happily worded of all the poetic tributes, asks for delight in sweet deceiving:
We that suffer long annoy
Are contented with a thought
Through an idle fancy wrought.
Everyone knows the tortured confession of Macbeth, the praise of Sidney, the song in Tennyson's Lotus-Eaters. The same attitude prevails when sleep is viewed objectively-the sleeping figure seen through the eyes of the poet-As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again. But even among the poets heads cannot always have been free from care or stomachs from surcharge.
Even Keats, poor harmless John, who was snuffed out by an article, and wrote as kindly as any of the boys about sleep (it was a set subject in those days for poets, who were not considered to have made the grade until they had produced a rhymed thesis on sleep and on one or more of the seasons)-even Keats begged to be saved from a curious conscience which thrived on darkness .2 As for poor Wordsworth, he suffered from nightmares about the French Revolution, in which he made long orations before unjust tribunals. How often he must have woken up and struck a light to see if Fouquier-Tinville was under the bed. The dreams of W. B. Yeats caused even the boughs to wither; and Cowper lay awake thinking of burglars, whom probably he found eventually in his dreams.
But if sleep has its terrors, sleeplessness is more feared by most of us. Robert de Brunne, in Handlyng Synne, makes it clear that the feudal lords of the Middle Ages kept harpers handy for this reason; but drugs had also been in use from ancient times and Burton gives a good list of them from various sources in The Anatomy, of Melancholy. Francis Bacon, according to Aubrey, would often drink a good draught of strong beer to lay his working fancy asleep, which otherwise would keep him from sleeping a great part of the night. The invocation of St Vitus was another long-approved remedy-that same St Vitus who alone would cure Chorus Sancti Viti (St Vitus' Dance to you), patron of epileptics, madmen, dancers and actors, whose aid was also sought against storms and against the bites and stings of God's problem-creatures. But in spite of all recipes fear of insomnia remained one of the great bedaboos. It was among the horrors of The City of Dreadful Night that it was of Night, but not of Sleep-
Of thought and consciousness which never ceases.
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