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Authors: Sarah Wise

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In a vacuum, with no information from his family, Mr Perceval began to concoct his own explanations for why he had been dumped among strangers instead of being cared for at home. When Spencer did at last visit, he told John that one of the many good things about Brislington was that when he recovered, he could be certain that nobody he knew would ever have seen him in this distressing state. John thought, rather, that it was the shame of the Percevals that was being spared. Lady Carr still had several offspring to marry off and may have feared that, if madness in the family were suspected, important blood alliances would be threatened. Very few of the family’s letters and private papers have survived, and so we don’t know why it was that only two of the six Perceval daughters married, particularly as they would have been regarded as highly eligible. It may be that they themselves made the decision not to marry because of the fear
of hereditary insanity. Nevertheless, if there were fears about passing on a mental illness, such notions only went so far. Half of Chancery lunatics were discovered, in the 1830s, to have relations who were employed by government, often at very senior level. People continued to marry, mingle and employ regardless of any ancestral or parental insanity. John Perceval himself would later state that the notion of insanity passing down through families was seen by the 1830s as a mere ‘vulgar error’. While a folk belief in inherited insanity may have fluttered around the minds of many laypeople in these years, and various alienists would hold fast to the hereditarian theory, there was no sense of biological inevitability, yet.

Although we do not have Lady Carr or Spencer’s account of John’s asylum stay, there is nothing in the letters and documents that have survived to suggest that they were motivated by anything other than the wish for John to recover as quickly and fully as possible. The Percevals had been a notedly loving family, and Lady Carr, now sixty-three, was living happily with her four unmarried daughters. In their distress and terror in the face of John’s breakdown, the family had sought out the most highly reputed professional advice on how he could be recovered to himself. Lady Carr had also, it turned out, investigated whether John could be cared for as a single patient in a doctor’s house but had been informed that his violent language made him an unsuitable person to be placed in a private residence. John would never forgive his family for bringing between him and themselves a layer of outsiders who had financial and professional motives for keeping him in seclusion. His mother, he wrote, had always been of such a nervous and sensitive condition that she couldn’t even bear the sound of a newspaper being opened near to her. But she had willingly overridden her natural maternal feelings in favour of ‘this besotted and worse than papist trust’ in doctors. ‘Shallow-hearted swindlers’ and ‘ignorant empirics’ were just two of his epithets for alienists and asylum proprietors; they were men of ‘low origin’ and ‘little education’, unfit to mix with ‘a race of the highest antiquity’ (that is, the Percevals). ‘The revolutionary and infidel liberal principles of the present day,’ wrote John, ‘mock at high birth, and insolently sneer at long descent as a mere accident, a matter of chance endowing men with no distinction.’ It was to these liberals that lunatics had been handed over:

Gentlemen of England . . . that race of presuming upstarts who in various guises admitted by your condescension to terms of familiarity, sit at your tables, hiding their conceit in a false humility and in silky smiles; whilst they ape your manners and dupe your generosity. Be assured, whoever ye are, who have to deal with children or lunatics, if you are not looking after them yourselves you are not respecting them. The doctors know that, and take advantage of it.

When Dr Fox did at last permit correspondence, Lady Carr and other family members kept their messages bland and brief, in the hope that they would not upset John. But he interpreted this as evasion. His mother’s short, kind and commonplace letters – on the musk-scented writing paper that reminded him of his childhood – were seen by John as a failure to engage with the issues that concerned him. John’s childhood had been full of love, but now he pored over the past and wondered if the whole tribe of Perceval had been dissembling during all those years. When he became ill, his family ‘showed me no real desire to inquire, no delicacy, no beauty of feeling’. How could they not wish to understand a ‘mystery like that of insanity . . . most grand and most terrible, most important and most instructive’? We must do what the doctors say, was Lady Carr’s response to his complaints.

As Mr Perceval calmed still more, in the late summer and autumn of 1831, old Dr Fox would ask him to dine in his family quarters along with ‘young Dr Fox and his pretty little wife’. Henry Fox asked Mr Perceval to read Virgil with him, while Charles Joseph Fox suggested he take up woodwork. All the Foxes had a kindness of expression, Mr Perceval noted, which perplexed him all the more in his attempt to understand how they could permit such a coercive regime as Brislington’s. The old Bristol merchant opposite him in the bay window had seemed rational and calm in conversation, yet by the summer had been reduced to a creature who messed himself, gobbled at his food, and whose head was sunk on his chest for the rest of the time. ‘If I understand the system of Dr Fox’s house,’ thought Mr Perceval, ‘we are allowed to go on as pigs till we come to a right state of mind.’

Other members of the vast, extended Perceval family now also began to send him dull, pointless letters. When Mr Perceval complained to one of his sisters that he had been sat for months in a gloomy room with twelve others ‘of no rank, no birth, little education, no
manners, and thoroughly dead to all gentlemanly and moral feelings’, she replied that the first class at Brislington was never going to include solely the noble families but would contain lesser gentry too; and as in ordinary life, John would be expected to mix with those of less gentility and refinement than himself. Mr Perceval did not like this answer and felt that his family failed to understand the class antagonisms at Brislington. On 31 October 1831, the night the Bristol Riots got under way, Mr Perceval heard the servants and keepers speaking ‘very licentiously and seditiously’ of what ought to be done with the gentry and he became anxious about what revenge might be taken upon himself and the other captive first-class gents. Two attendants came into his bedroom since it offered the best spot in the house from which to view the flames as the city’s palace, custom house, gaols and hundreds of private houses went up. The next day, while botanising in the shrubbery, Mr Perceval heard two servants predicting a mass popular uprising, and he rushed into the thicket, crying out, ‘Oh! my country, oh! my country!’ Spontaneous riotous celebration had erupted in a number of towns when his father’s assassination was announced, and the Bristol Riots may well have felt to Mr Perceval like the resumption of an attack upon his father.

Mr Perceval thought that low pay led to the employment of such ruffians as Samuel Hobbs. In fact, Brislington was paying the going rate for attendants, and the staff-to-patient ratio was high. Low levels of staffing were often behind the use of mechanical restraint and attempts at chemical sedation in the nation’s asylums – as cheaper, easier options than one-on-one surveillance by an attendant – but this was not the case at Brislington. Mr Perceval believed that the use of force against a lunatic was wicked and preposterous, and should be applied only in extreme cases. Indeed, he thought, attendants at asylums should be recruited solely from the ranks of women, children and elderly men, whose gentle natures and inability to use force would assist in the recovery of the mentally troubled. It was kindness that had gone missing – from family life, lunacy care and from poor old England in general. As this barbarous century continued, the social pact was being shattered – the hierarchy, where each had a place and each had responsibilities as well as dues. Spencer the younger was doing his best in parliament to hold back the tide of Reform, but the country was becoming a place where sensibility, generosity, honour and civility had no role. Lunatics – like children, like women, like the honest poor – were being crushed by the profane new age: stamped on, exploited, overruled. The England of his father and his noble uncles had been taken over by the smugly ignorant (Dr Fox) and the brutal (Samuel Hobbs). All winter 1831–32 Mr Perceval turned these things over in his mind.

The gateposts and porter’s lodge of Brislington House. Mr Perceval left the asylum on 9 February 1832 after fourteen months of detention.

Early in the new year his family told him they were willing to give in to his demands that he leave Brislington. Spencer and one of his other brothers arrived on 9 February 1832 to remove John. On the asylum front steps, Mr Perceval bowed to each of the Foxes and shook hands with Henry and Charles Joseph, who had shown him kindness. However, Francis Ker’s final words were, ‘Goodbye Mr Perceval, I wish I could give you hopes of your recovery.’

If John had expected to return to the Perceval family home, he was disappointed. The brothers made a two-day journey by carriage to Sussex, to the equally exclusive Ticehurst Asylum. So furious was John at this continuance of his incarceration, he refused to shake hands with his brothers upon their departure. He was relieved, though, at what he found at Ticehurst. He had his own ground-floor parlour, with a bedroom above,
containing furniture that was not bolted to the floor. The rooms, to him, seemed cosy and cheerful, with a sofa, a mahogany table, a well-stocked bookcase, a lockable desk where he could keep his own papers, and an open fire roaring beneath a marble mantelpiece (the fire tongs were wooden, though, in case of assault). Later, Spencer and his mother sent him a piano. He was also allowed his own toilet items, but he was angry to see that his razor and other sharp implements had been removed from the set. Ticehurst prided itself on its views and ornamental grounds, though alas, Mr Perceval’s (barred) windows looked across to the asylum’s pigsty and cow yard, barely screened by a small fir plantation.

Although he had begun to recover mentally, Mr Perceval was in poor physical condition when he arrived from Brislington. His teeth had been neglected and were causing him pain, and his toenails had never been cut in his whole fourteen months with the Foxes. His hair still had the peculiar style applied to it by Samuel Hobbs – cropped on top and rats’ tails at the back. His nerves were so bad that even the ticking of a watch was painful to him. His new captor, Dr Charles Newington, however, was far easier to get on with – initially at least – and free of the religious cant of the Foxes. Mr Perceval’s recovery speeded up as his physical strength returned, in the comparative homeliness of his Ticehurst suite. By May 1832, as far as he was concerned, he was fully sane again.

And this presented his next problem. How could he possibly demonstrate his recovery and win back his freedom? He realised there was no ladder back up into the world from the pit of the asylum, so how was a sane person to clamber into the sunlight? He was to learn that such apparatus as did exist was rickety and treacherous. Mr Perceval came to believe that it might as well not exist at all. The 1828 Madhouse Act stated that before a patient in a provincial asylum could be discharged as sane on the orders of a visiting magistrate, three separate visits would have to be made, each twenty-one days apart. Given that JPs were not obliged to visit an asylum more than four times a year, this could in theory mean delays of at least four months before the discharge of a sane patient. In any case, such discharge could take place only if a magistrate were willing to go against the word of a proprietor and that of the signatory of the patient’s lunacy order. Former Brislington patient Trophimus Fulljames, for his part, had alleged cosiness between the magistrates and the Foxes. In fact, the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy had alerted the Home Office to the ongoing laxity in provincial
asylum visiting and the inadequacy of returns and other documentation, stating that furthermore, there were no funds set aside to prosecute provincial proprietors who evaded the lunacy laws. Everything depended on the honesty of the local magistrates, and the Metropolitan Commissioners requested that Whitehall send out a circular to the provincial visitors reminding them of their statutory duty to inspect and compile reports. Yet not until 1858 would the Home Office compile a comprehensive list of the provincial visitors – in response to a parliamentary question highlighting how very loose was the government hold on lunacy law implementation outside London. The great Benthamite project of inspection, improvement, efficiency, appeared to be – in lunacy care at least – a phantom: old networks, patronage and corruption clung on in the 1830s asylum world.

Ticehurst proprietor Charles Newington, son of the asylum’s founder and fifty years old when Mr Perceval arrived, denied him his wish to travel to London – firstly to consult his lawyer about suing the Foxes; secondly to have two surgeons who had known him since childhood examine him with a view to making affidavits on his physical and mental state; and thirdly to consult a dentist, to help with his decaying mouth. Dr Newington offered the use of his own lawyer instead, which Mr Perceval declined, sensing a trap; Newington recommended a dentist in nearby Tunbridge Wells; and he would hear no talk of London surgeons deciding upon the state of Mr Perceval’s mind. But Mr Perceval realised that if he did not swiftly allow a third party to see the physical and nervous trauma caused by the Foxes, his chance of mounting a successful lawsuit would be lost. As each day passed at Ticehurst, Mr Perceval was becoming stronger and calmer, and it was crucial that his lawyer and doctors interviewed him while he still exhibited the damage. As it was, it took many months before Mr Perceval could speak about Brislington without stuttering in broken sentences – a phenomenon that would be used as proof of his continuing unsoundness of mind.

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