Inside the Madhouse: And Around the World

Jun 2, 2023

In September 1887, long before she circled the globe alone, Nellie Bly stood before a mirror and practiced her lunatic look. She opened her eyes “as wide as possible and stared unblinkingly at my own reflection.” Determined to convince experts that she was out of her mind, she decided that “‘far-away’ expressions have a crazy air.”

The next day she checked into a New York City boarding house for working women and began to fulfill “my strange ambition, to become eventually an inmate of the halls inhabited by my mentally wrecked sisters.” Her strange behavior alarmed the other residents, the police were summoned, and the twenty-three-year-old woman was taken into custody. The Sun published a story headlined Who Is This Insane Girl? Another paper described the “wild, hunted look in her eyes.”

At Bellevue Hospital, doctors examined her and pronounced her “undoubtedly insane.” They gave her a diagnosis of “hysteria” and ordered her remitted to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in the East River.

The ease with which she convinced the doctors of her madness left Bly worried that, when the time came, she might not be able to make them understand that it was an act, that she had been employed by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World to report on conditions inside the notorious madhouse.

Nevertheless, she dutifully noted the nurses who “choked, beat and harassed their deluded patients.” She made a mental list of the fire hazards, the wretched food, the lack of warm clothing. She endured being stripped and forced into an ice-water bath. She recorded the case of a German-speaking immigrant who was confined in the asylum simply because she could not communicate with the doctors.

A sane woman, she concluded, might be driven crazy by the conditions on Blackwell’s Island. “What” she asked, “would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?”

After ten days, a lawyer from The World arrived at the mental institution and had Nellie released under the pretext that some friends would take responsibility for her. The city’s newspapers noted what the Times called the “gratifying results” of her treatment at the asylum. Two days later, The World broke the shocking real story on its front page.

Barely a month earlier, a desperate Nellie Bly had gotten in to see Colonel John Cockerill, the managing editor of The World, only through “a great deal of talking.” Now her name was prominently displayed in the headline of the lead story: INSIDE THE MADHOUSE: Nellie Bly’s Experience.

Her real name was Elizabeth Jane “Pink” Cochran—her byline was taken from an old Stephen Foster song. She had little education and no training in journalism. Lacking the money to finish the teachers college near her home in western Pennsylvania, Nellie and her widowed mother had traveled to New York, where she planned to pursue the newspaper career she had briefly worked at in Pittsburgh.

Her reporting contributed to some reforms of the Dickensian treatment of the mentally ill. It also cracked open new possibilities for female journalists, who had long been relegated to “women’s” topics, mainly fashion and advice columns.

And more. Bly’s “stunt journalism” initiated a new aggressiveness that evolved into what we know as “investigative” reporting. Nellie herself would go under cover to expose the employment agencies exploiting domestic workers, the illicit trade in newborn babies, and the brazen bribe-taking by state politicians in Albany.

Two years later, Bly proposed to Cockerill that she try to beat the fictional record that had been the subject of Jules Verne’s wildy popular novel Around the World in Eighty Days. The newspaper’s business manager thought sending a male reporter made more sense.

“Very well,” Bly told him. “Start the man and I’ll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.”

The powers at The World, having seen Bly’s reporting swell their circulation, agreed to back her. She packed a single seven-by-sixteen-inch bag and boarded a ship on November 11, 1889, with a ticket to London and a vague itinerary thereafter.

Nellie Bly on her round-the-world journey.

A contest to guess the date of her return kept interest in her journey at a fever pitch. Traveling by steamship and rail, she sprinted across Europe, the Middle East, Ceylon, Hong Kong and Japan, followed by a dash across the continental United States. She was back in New York on January 25, 1890—seventy-two days, six hours and eleven minutes after she left.

Bly went on to marry a millionaire, run his steel container company after he died, and return to journalism to report on World War I and the women’s suffrage movement. She herself died of pneumonia in 1922 at the age of fifty-seven. She left her money to care for homeless children, a favorite cause. A statue of her stands today on New York’s Roosevelt Island, the one-time site of the asylum.

In an obituary, Arthur Brisbane, the premier newspaper editor of the era, praised the “many good deeds never to be forgotten by those that had no friend but Nellie Bly.” He declared her simply “the best reporter in America.”