So, after every affectionate care that a good wife could pay, I swallowed my narcotic pill—and slept, slept, slept—till, at eight in the morning, the sun was coming in, charmingly, through the windows. Nothing seemed to ail me. What weakness, what nonsense, said I. But I had promised to remain in bed till Mr. Smith came. But I sent down for my clerks, and at 11 a.m. I was in full activity, dictating to one man, listening to another, and giving orders to a third, in, as I thought, the fullest voice—when in came Mr. Smith. He looked round in doubt, and then went down stairs. I have only just forgiven him for that. For in a moment up came my wife. "Edward," she said, "Mr. Smith declares that if you do not give over at once, you will have brain fever." Oh! unwise Smith. The words were hardly out of my wife's mouth, when I felt I could do no more. Had the world been offered to me, I could have done no more.
Alas! my nerve was gone.
At that tune I was working for a livelihood. Fortunate that it was so, otherwise a lunatic asylum, or a permanent state of what the doctors call hypochondriasis, might have followed.
After some years of struggle with this nerve-demon, the child of overwork, I wrote, in 1850:—
"I am not fond of writing, and I know I must do it badly. Still I feel that the little narrative I am about to put together may do some good to some few people who may be suffering. I know that the roughest and dullest book ever written, had it contained a similar relation to this of mine, would have brought balm to my mind and hope to my heart not many years ago. And who knows but that other men (for the scenes of this world, and its good and evil, are very much alike), may be suffering as I did, and may therefore be influenced by my rude scribbling, as I might have been by some of theirs?
"There was a time, and not a very distant one either, when I was utterly ignorant of two things—first, the existence, in my particular case, of the thing called the human stomach; and secondly, the reality of those mysterious telegraphic wires—yclept NERVES. Often nave I sneered at 'bilious subjects,' 'dyspepsia,' and that long string of woes which one hears of, in such luxuriance of description, usually over breakfast, at Clifton, Tonbridge, or Harrogate. Like the old Duchess of Marlborough, too, I used 'to thank God I was born before nerves came into fashion.'
"But 'live and learn.' I have lived; and I have learnt the utter misery which a deranged digestion and jarring nerves, acting and reacting upon each other, can inflict upon their victims. To be laid up in bed for a month with a violent disease is nothing. You are killed or cured; made better, and your illness forgotten even by yourself; or quietly laid under the dust of your mother earth, to lie there in oblivion, the busy world moving on, unheeding, over your cold remains, till the great day of judgment. But to have, as it were, your whole 'mind, body, soul, and strength' turned, with a resistless fascination, into the frightened study of your own dreadful anatomy. To find your courage quail, not before real danger, but at phantoms and shadows—nay, actually at your own horrid self—to feel every act of life and every moment of business a task, an effort, a trial, and a pain. Sometimes to be unable to sleep for a week—sometimes to sleep, but, at the dead of night, to wake, your bed shaking under you from the violent palpitation of your heart, and your pillow drenched with cold sweat pouring from you in streams. But, worst of all, if you are of a stubborn, dogged, temper, and are blessed with a strong desire to 'get on'—to feel yourself unable to make some efforts at all, to find yourself breaking down before all the world in others, and to learn, at last, in consequence, almost to hate the half-dead and failing carcase tied to your still living will. This, not for months only, but for YEARS. Years, too, in what ought to be your prime of manhood. Ah! old age and incapacity at thirty is a bitter, bitter punishment. Better be dead than suffer it; for you must suffer it alone and in silence—you may not hope for sympathy—you dare not desire it—you see no prospect of relief—you wage a double warfare, with the world and with yourself. I do not, I dare not, exaggerate. Indeed, a lady of a certain age could hardly feel more abashed at the sudden production of her baptismal certificate than I—a man, a matter-of-fact man, a plain, hard-headed, unimaginative man of business—do, at this confession. Suffice it to say, that in the last four years I have lived the life of a soul in purgatory or an inhabitant of the 'Inferno,' and though I have worked like a horse, determined, if possible, to rout out my evil genii—the wave of health has gradually receded, till, at last, an internal voice has seemed solemnly to say, 'Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.'
"If any one, who has not suffered similarly, has patience to read thus far (which is doubtful), before now he has said, with Mr. Burchell in the 'Vicar of Wakefield'—'FUDGE.' No matter—I should have so exclaimed once; and I now envy him his healthy ignorance. The history of my derangements is told above in one word: that word is—OVERWORK.
"If any one who may not just like an actual dissection, will look at one of Quain's 'Plates of the Bones, Muscles, and Nerves of the Human Body,' he will see that, growing as it were out of the walls of the stomach, there are, in our wonderful human machine, great bunches of nerves, called, by the medicals, the 'great ganglionic system,' and he will observe that these nerves are in intimate and inseparable connection with the spinal cord, and the brain. Then, if he recollects that a perpetual series of conversations and signals goes on by those agents between the stomach and the brain—that, in fact, the two are talking together every moment (without even the delay of that inappreciable interval for which the electric current lingers on the wires in its wondrous progress of intelligence)—he will see that he cannot abuse either great organ without a 'combination of parties' against his administration.
"My unfortunate mistake, therefore, was this: I overworked my brain. It rebelled. Stomach joined the outbreak. Heart beat to the rescue; and all the other corporal powers sympathised in the attempt to put me down. They would not stand ten days' work a week, and no Sunday,—relieved though the labour might be by the amusement of speeches and leading articles.