He was considered by almost everyone who knew him-family, friends and even many of his keepers-as perfectly sane in all other respects. This, though, doesn't even begin to tell you about his remarkable life. But Matthews wasn't a fiction writer, he believed his Air Loom Machine was real-and, as a result, spent the greater part of his life in Bedlam, the notorious lunatic asylum. He described his Air Loom in meticulous detail-and if he had written all this as fiction, a century before Butler, Verne, Wells or Kafka, his creation would have become as much a classic as Erewhon or The Trial-and, like them, would today be seen as a prescient satire, a glimpse of the future and many of our modern obsessions: conspiracy theories, mind control, paranoia, technophobia. Today this idea would be rejected by publishing houses as unoriginal but this was the 1780s with the industrial revolution barely under way and the cutting-edge technology and science from which he wove his machine were things like textile looms and early steam engines, magnetism and the new chemistry of gases. More than two centuries ago, James Tilly Matthews imagined this: a sinister device, the Air Loom Machine, built into a basement beneath London's streets and designed to manipulate world events by controlling, from a distance, the minds of politicians.
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