Inconvenient People (11 page)

Dr Newington informed him that he was ‘a nervous patient’, as distinct from a lunatic, and that his confinement would continue no longer than was necessary. To release a patient who was still in the stages of recuperation would be a terrible mistake, the doctor told him: nervous patients must be kept away from anything that would excite them. But Mr Perceval had by now discovered that the exact opposite
was true: that it was strange new situations and encounters with other points of view that had revealed his errors of thinking and strengthened his reason. Quiet and seclusion was simply not the answer. Here, thought Mr Perceval – pondering the sophistry of Dr Newington – was yet another man of ‘infallible dogmas’. And so a battle of wills began.

Those family members who replied to John’s increasingly furious letters stated that they were unwilling to go against Dr Newington’s expert medical advice. Thus, the rift between John and his family grew ever deeper. ‘You have all of you shown little sympathy with, and compassion for, my melancholy and, as I thought, desperate situation,’ he wrote. ‘I would not have left a dog in such circumstances.’ But this fury itself became another of Dr Newington’s excuses for continuing to recommend Mr Perceval’s detention at Ticehurst. For this, Newington was receiving possibly the highest fee for care of a lunatic in the whole country – six and a half guineas a week (half a guinea more than Brislington’s highest fee). What is more, the prestige of caring for a member of the Perceval clan added to the renown of the asylum; other wealthy families would want to place their relatives in
an institution that was good enough for the son of a prime minister. However, it is also true that Charles Newington used a significant proportion of his profits to reduce the fees of his poorer patients; until 1825 Ticehurst had accommodated a number of pauper patients from the parish, for whose care he had either remitted or reduced payments, as he continued to do for the one-third of his paying patients who were not middle or upper class. Much of his money was also ploughed back into the fabric of the place, in particular the ongoing programme of creating picturesque, therapeutic grounds.

The angrier Mr Perceval became, and the more details he accumulated with which to argue the injustice of his situation, the tighter the net he found himself in. In his diary, he wondered whether his mother was keeping him confined to suppress his involvement in the ‘Row Heresy’; but in fact, Spencer resigned his parliamentary seat and his role as a Metropolitan Commissioner in Lunacy in 1832, in order to become an Irvingite ‘Apostle’, and so John’s suspicion had no basis. The Irvingites, for their part, had repudiated John Perceval, saying that his ‘speaking in tongues’ had been inspired by the Devil, not the Almighty – no doubt fearing a link being made between their practices and lunacy.

John also wondered whether his mother feared that he would return to London to live a life of sensual excess; or that he might harm himself or others. On balance, he decided that it must be the latter: ‘My family have not much originality of idea, or independence of mind. They thought, with the world, that lunacy was an impenetrable mystery.’ When Lady Carr failed to back him in his plan to sue the Foxes, he ceased writing to her. ‘God blast their souls. God damn their eyes. God confound their judgments for ever and ever,’ he wrote in his diary. He realised that what was being demanded of him was hypocrisy. Paradoxically, doctors were more likely to view as becoming sane a patient who gave up his or her individuality and autonomy. The patient was required to become a simpleton, with childlike affections, without anger or analytical powers: manhood was replaced by childishness and a slavish adherence to common expectations of social and emotional normality. Mr Perceval said he was brutalised into concealing his true feelings – and that there was thus something profoundly immoral about ‘moral treatment’. ‘The glory of the old system was coercion by violence; the glory of the modern system is repression by mildness and coaxing, and by solitary confinement’, and
now the patient ‘must learn to kiss the fists that had brutally and unnecessarily cudgelled him’. Quietness in the expensive houses had to be achieved at any cost, Mr Perceval deduced, in order to show that the doctors were in full control.

It was at Ticehurst that the tears came at last. He missed his friends, the company of women and having his own belongings about him; he grieved for a lost childhood and lost family love. He wrote eighty-nine letters at Ticehurst, but, except for those addressed to his siblings, Dr Newington forwarded them all straight to Spencer. Unaware of this, John could not understand why no one – old friends, beloved aunts, uncles and cousins – would reply to him. He was dejected and scared that his confinement would never end. Pity for others had always come upon Mr Perceval. Leaving Brislington, he had promised to write to Captain W—, a seaman with a cork leg, withered arm, dark, expressive eyes and glossy dark hair, who stood all day gazing out of the parlour window, saying nothing except ‘Bruim!’ occasionally, or insulting the Duke of York. (It is to be feared that Captain W— did not receive the letters, as both Drs Newington and Fox dealt so tightly with patient correspondence.) The plight of some of the men at Ticehurst moved Mr Perceval, too, and it was through this concern for others that a sense of purpose began to take root in him. ‘Who shall speak for these if I do not?’ as he would later ask. ‘Who shall plead for them if I remain silent? How can I betray them and myself too by subscribing to the subtle villainy, cruelty and tyranny of the doctors?’ Later still, he would declare himself ‘the attorney-general of all Her Majesty’s madmen’, fighting for those who could not defend themselves. There was Charles Nunn, a wealthy old man who spent the final nine years of his life quietly in his rooms at Ticehurst; a huge proportion of his money had gone into the Newington pocket when all he wanted was to be lodged with a sympathetic carer as a single patient. Then there was Mr B— who believed that he was to be boiled alive at the Brunswick Theatre; when he was walking in the Ticehurst grounds, voices would call to him, ‘Look here, Harry!’ from the bushes, but when he went to look, there was never anybody there. His derangement was said to have been brought on by heavy drinking. Alexander Goldsmid was an elderly Jewish man who had converted to Christianity; stout, short, with white hair and a merry face, he spoke several languages and was developing new techniques in bridge construction. He and Mr
Perceval became good companions and John thought that his friend was probably not mad – or at least not mad enough to be in an asylum. During their long therapeutic walks in Ticehurst’s gardens together, Mr Perceval noted Goldsmid’s habit of saying funny things seriously and serious things as though they were a joke. All he missed about the outside world were his children, he admitted. Mr Goldsmid would often come in and play Mr Perceval’s piano at breakfast time, and could sometimes be seen crying over the Bible.

Such friendships helped to make up for what Mr Perceval saw as the shortcomings of his Ticehurst attendants. Hervey the butler infuriated Mr Perceval by pouring out his medicine one day with the words, ‘Pretty colour, isn’t it, sir?’, as though he was a child. After getting rid of two local lads in succession, for insubordination, Mr Perceval ended up with young Tom Rolfe as his servant, who quickly disappointed him by never having heard of the House of Lords and claiming that he only washed himself once a year. After Mr Perceval made a run for it one day, while out walking with Rolfe, he was condemned to have the servant sit with him all day, and to be manacled at night, with Rolfe and another male servant sleeping in his room. He was no longer allowed to be alone.

Ticehurst’s position on a hilltop was not appreciated by Mr Perceval, who noted angrily in his diary every time a cold northerly blew, and he would spend hours by the fire with his feet on the fender. Now that the spirit voices had departed, a thousand indignities intruded themselves upon his thoughts. He disliked the fact that he could be watched by so many people – the staff and patients, both indoors and in the grounds. He felt exposed and under surveillance. He was not able to lock anyone out, but the doors of his suite could be bolted from the outside and had a peephole. He was not even allowed a lock on his own privy, and many a time a servant would pull open the door and see him at stool. His excrement was to be left in the pan and not removed until a physician had been to examine it, as a marker of physical health.

Privacy and dignity were thus persistently denied to those shattered souls who probably had greatest need of them. In the corridors outside his rooms, the high jinks of the servants, attendants and patients – running, whistling, singing, fluting, fiddling, jig-dancing and wrestling – made him ever more irritable. Much more enraging, though, were his interactions with the local magistracy and the asylum’s visiting
physician, Dr Thomas Mayo. Three Sussex justices of the peace were the parties who were supposed to comprise the safeguard against the incarceration of the sane, or the prolonged detention in an asylum of a patient who had recovered. Mr Perceval was lying on his sofa one rainy Monday morning with his waistcoat unbuttoned, reading
Henry IV Part 2
, when his own Justices Silence and Shallow burst in, accompanied by Dr Newington and Dr Mayo. Asked if he had any complaints, Mr Perceval told them that it was clear that he was recovered and should be allowed to leave; his detention here was solely to allow Dr Newington to earn even more in fees and in repute. He complained that he was never allowed one moment alone, but he was interrupted and told that he was imagining these things; it became apparent to Mr Perceval that the JPs were not going to listen to him and try to understand his concerns. ‘The magistrates are little better than the mere executors of the laws that confine the liberty of the subject,’ Mr Perceval decided. For his part, Dr Mayo commented that his complaints were frivolous and that Lady Carr was doing her utmost to help her son. Couldn’t he see that? Mayo spent the rest of the interview gazing out of the window at the pigsty.

When the visitors had left, Mr Perceval realised that in his haste to fasten up his waistcoat, he had wrongly buttoned it and he feared that this dishevelment had undermined his claim that he was of sound mind. How unfair it was, he thought, that doctors and magistrates could expect an individual who had been through his terrible ordeal instantly to regain the demeanour and tone of voice of someone unscathed by mental torment. Mr Perceval began to keep a small looking-glass in his pocket, and after any interaction with another person he would whip it out to check whether his facial expressions might appear to be those of a madman.

Dr Newington seemed to find ever new grounds to prove that Mr Perceval was still not fit to be at large. Why, the very fact of his arguing that he was sane was proof that he was not; plus his hostility to his family; plus being so finicky about Tom Rolfe and the high jinks in the corridor. And then there was his appearance. After the ludicrous haircut he had been given at Brislington, and the removal of the whiskers he had cultivated since adolescence, Mr Perceval was determined to reassert his individuality by growing his hair and beard long; his hair he arranged in ringlets, partly to hide the disfigurement to his left ear and
temple. This was a more ‘natural’ and manly look, he believed. But one of his sisters wrote to him to say that the doctors had told the family that the wildness of his hair was proof of his ongoing mental infirmity.

So his hair grew, the months passed, and Mr Perceval wrote his thoughts down in his peevish diary, the stupidities of Rolfe and the shifting direction of the gales blowing up the hill and into Ticehurst both featuring large. He busied himself in teaching one of the attendants to read and write, and in practising the piano (badly). Then, surprisingly, ten months after his arrival at Ticehurst, his family did yield to his requests. It was announced to him that he was to be released into the private care of Dr Robert Stedman of Sevenoaks in Kent, with whom he was to live, so that his readiness to be discharged from his lunacy certificates could be monitored. This was how the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy liked to proceed with patients who were becoming calmer and quieter – gradually to reintroduce them into outside life, with no sudden shock upon re-entry to society, which could trigger a relapse.

Mr Perceval wrote very little about his time as a single patient. He was finally discharged from his certificates in October 1833, when, as Dr Stedman would later write, ‘Lady Carr thought proper to allow him to have his liberty, altho’ he could not then be said to be perfectly sane, and the family physician, Dr Tattersall of Ealing, stated to Lady Carr that if she did let him have his liberty he would very soon do some foolish act that she would repent of.’ The ‘foolish act’, in Stedman’s view, was Mr Perceval’s marriage, in March 1834, to Anna Gardiner, the daughter of a Sevenoaks cheesemonger, which Dr Stedman declared was a match ‘quite out of his station in life’. The marriage was to be a long and happy one, and once again reveals that odd clash within Mr Perceval of aristocratic hauteur and a genuine love for individuals whatever their social background.