Talk:Nathaniel Lee

Bedlam

'They called me mad, I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.--Nathaniel Lee, (1649-�May 1692), English playwright, on being committed to Bedlam' http://littlecalamity.tripod.com/Quotes/G.html

And I've seen it elsewhere. Genuine? --Gwern 02:16, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks to a Coleridge blog, we can nail this down further, beyond the useless 1987 source: as so often, the popular version is a misquotation which became wittier in the evolution. The original now seems to be two versions ~1799 given by Joseph Priestley, which are the much less quippy "I said the world was mad, and the world said I was mad, and they outvoted me." This also sheds a bit more light when it was supposed to happen: tours of Bedlam were still happening when Lee was in it, and the frame is one of the tourists asked him why he was there. (Some versions of this say that it was a 'missive' or 'account', which suggests he'd written a letter or book or something afterwards, but that would seem to be ruled out here.)

However, Priestley provides no source in either version, and he is writing over a century after Lee died (1692), and searching for this version in Google Books is not turning up any more proximate sources. So I hesitate to say that it is definitely genuine - a century is a long time for a real story to circulate without anyone attesting it, and vastly more than enough time for urban legends or fake quotes to evolve. So I will mark it as possibly apocryphal and definitely misquoted. Gwern (talk)