Genre:

Letter, Drollery

Subjects:

Hospitals, Mental Illness, Publishing

    Recounts a fictional tale of trying to track down 'Dr Slop'. A clerk is said to have reported that '[h]e had heard of a man called Doctor Slop in the Old Times; who escaped from Old Bethlem, and for some time raved about the streets, frightening everyone, and was thought to be incurably insane. The Clerk added, that the erection of the New Bethlem, had alarmed him a little for fear of being shut up again, and he had not been noticed much in the Day' (666). The allusion is to John Stoddart, for whom 'Dr Slop' became a scurrilous sobriquet. Formally leader writer for The Times, Stoddart left in February 1817 and started a rival daily entitled the New Times, which soon amalgamated with another newspaper, the Day, to become the Day and New Times.