Inconvenient People (12 page)

Dr Stedman was additionally infuriated by Mr Perceval’s zealous campaigning on behalf of the labouring classes. The Poor Law Amendment Act (‘New Poor Law’) was passed in 1834 but Mr Perceval had led a vigorous campaign in Kent against the introduction of the new workhouse system and its buildings – the ‘bastilles’ in which families would be split up, wife torn from husband and children from parents. The romantic High Toryism of his father and eldest brother
reveals itself in the series of pamphlets and handbills that John wrote, printed and distributed around Kent and Sussex and which Dr Stedman bundled up and posted to Whitehall, informing the Home Secretary that they were ‘calculated to inflame the lower orders’. (‘Please do not let on I have written this,’ the craven doctor added at the end of his letter.) The enclosed literature comprised cogent attacks on the New Poor Law, the appalling conditions prevailing in workhouses and the assault upon a working man’s self-respect by this brutal new regime. The link between these ‘modern’ attitudes to the poor and the treatment of lunatics was clear in Mr Perceval’s mind: ‘The author feels assured that some lunatic doctor, or some patron or intimate ally of lunatic doctors, has devised and concocted the New Poor Law and its machinery,’ he wrote. Once again, ‘the infidel spirit of modern “liberality”’ was wreaking social havoc.

Mr and Mrs Perceval headed for Paris in 1835, and here the first two of their four daughters were born. Here, Mr Perceval set about the painful task of recalling and writing down in detail all that had happened to him.
A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman during a State of Mental Derangement; Designed to Explain the Causes and the Nature of Insanity and to Expose the Injudicious Conduct Pursued towards many Unfortunate Sufferers under that Calamity
is an extraordinarily insightful account of mental disintegration, but also shows how a mind can return itself to health. In its indictment of the prevailing medical attitudes to mental illness, and the sheer cruelty practised at Brislington, the book foreshadowed by 130 years arguments that would be put forward by the anti-psychiatry movement. Its recommendations and analyses proved remarkably prescient. Mr Perceval believed that patients were best placed to inform their carers of the nature of their problem, and instead of ridiculing the seeming nonsense of the patient’s speech, what was required was a sympathetic attempt to unravel the source of distress. This task was best undertaken by those who knew the patient well – family, old friends or general physicians of long acquaintance. It was no task to be given to a money-minded, vainglorious stranger. A lunatic was an individual, with an individual cause of his or her illness, and required an individually tailored attempt at cure. ‘Many persons confined as lunatics are only so because they are not understood, and continue so because they do not understand themselves,’ Mr Perceval wrote. Instead, lunatics had to surrender their
bodies and minds to the doctors, who were permitted to work their mischief or test their misguided and unproven theories upon them.

The mad-doctors made the mistake of thinking that lunatics had no feeling; but in fact it was the flight from their extreme sensitivity that could lead patients to behave with either boisterousness and impudence or the very opposite, apathy and passivity. That is not an absence of feeling, but the inability to cope with strong emotion. More metaphysically, Mr Perceval believed that the phenomena of lunacy were common to all humankind, which was evident in such things as a slip of the tongue or a misread sentence. In both lunacy and these ‘sane slips’, ‘the phenomenon is the same – the organs of speech are made use of without the volition, or rather intention, of the person speaking’. The 1840s were a time when theorising about what we now call the subconscious was making significant advances, and Mr Perceval stated that he thought the mind always ran in terms of opposites, which he believed proved the residence within the brain ‘of two distinct powers, or agents, or wills’.

Mr Perceval’s reflections were pearls before swine. The first (anonymous) volume of
A Narrative
was largely ignored in 1838; and when Mr Perceval published an enlarged second volume under his own name two years later, the influential
Examiner
was sniffy: ‘The chief branch of his complaint, urged through some hundreds of most vituperative pages, is that sufficient distinction was not made between himself and lunatics of inferior rank. He does not seem to think even that dreadful disease a leveller in the least.’ But the reviewer admitted that while ‘much regretting the publication of this book, we should by no means despair of its redeeming many evil tendencies by some good if the grievances to which it refers in such a melancholy spirit of exaggeration attract the attention of some moderate or well-informed person’. The
Dublin University Magazine
’s brief mention of the work praised Mr Perceval’s courage in revealing himself to have been a madman, as well the acuteness of his criticism: ‘Details such as he has given are rarely communicated to the public.’

But far more significant than any reviews of his book was something he spotted in the autumn of 1838, by which time he was living with his wife and baby daughters in Notting Hill Square, West London. On 8 October, ‘by a singular and providential occurrence’, he picked up a copy of
The Times
, and saw this:

MR. PATERNOSTER.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES.

Sir,—It is due to Mr. Richard Paternoster, whose seizure and confinement as an insane person have excited so much interest, that the public should be informed, that after a full investigation of the circumstances by the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy (set on foot immediately upon their being made acquainted with the fact), and after a detention of six weeks in Mr. Finch’s Lunatic Asylum, at Kensington, he has been released. We are, Sir, your most obedient servants,     LAKE AND CURTIS

Solicitors to Mr. Richard Paternoster

11 Basinghall-street, October 5, 1838

^fn1
Mr Perceval’s experience of the cold-bath and shower treatment, and his seclusion in the bare cell, are very similar to complaints that had been made in 1822 by Trophimus Fulljames (1779–1864), who had been placed in Dr Fox’s asylum by his brother. Fulljames’s letters to Robert Peel, then Home Secretary, and to other parliamentarians contained three illustrations to back up his claims of ‘unauthorised human misery’ and ‘unparalleled cruelties’ at the asylum. These are reproduced
here
. The local visiting magistrates were directed to investigate and they cleared Dr Fox of the charges.

RICHARD PATERNOSTER HAD
been certified into Kensington House Asylum in London by his father, surgeon John Paternoster, following a row about money. Thirty-five-year-old Richard had been found a position as a clerk to the East India Company by his father and had worked in Madras before ill health forced his return to England after just three years. The Company had agreed a pension of £150 per annum, which it paid to Paternoster’s father, on the understanding that it would be disbursed to Richard. This failed to happen, and Richard found himself living from hand to mouth, finding sporadic employment as a freelance journalist in London, contributing articles to various Radical publications. He wrote his father a series of increasingly threatening-sounding letters (he had intended them to be satirical and scornful, he later said; ‘very saucy’ was his term for the language he had used).

At around eight o’clock on the morning of Friday 24 August 1838 Richard was getting dressed at his lodgings at 49 Haymarket when two men burst in and attempted to pinion him. A long and violent struggle followed, and his landlady, Mrs Scott, called in a policeman from the street, who established that the assailants, Launcelot Sharpe and George Hillier, were asylum attendants, who had an order for the apprehension of Paternoster. The policeman had no idea how to proceed and insisted that all three men come with him to Marlborough Street magistrates’ court. Here, a number of newspaper reporters were milling around, waiting to hear if any of the night charges would turn out to be interesting snippets for the news columns, and this is how Richard Paternoster’s plight drew immediate press interest. He was of ‘very gentlemanly’ appearance and had clearly been badly beaten, yet was putting up
an articulate verbal struggle. He certainly didn’t seem mad. Despite this, Magistrate Dyer refused to offer Paternoster any protection, after having read through the two lunacy certificates and the lunacy order – signed by Richard’s father – testifying to his insanity. The reporters heard Paternoster arguing every point incisively with Dyer, and the
Times
representative reported the next day: ‘The answers to the questions put to Mr Paternoster indicated quite as large a portion of rationality, and infinitely more cleverness, than possessed by the querist [Dyer].’ It is also tempting to conclude that the gentlemen of the press had spotted one of their own in a dreadful situation, and that this contributed to their desire to champion him. Nevertheless, when the asylum owner, William Finch, arrived, Paternoster was thrust into a hackney coach and carried west, to Kensington House.

Richard Paternoster got himself officially discharged from confinement and certification in a record forty-one days and had no hesitation in attributing this not to those alleged safeguards of liberty, the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy, but ‘to the blessings of a free press’. His trusty landlady had kept the newspapers fed with the background to the story. ‘You have behaved like a mother to me,’ wrote Paternoster to Mrs Scott in a letter dated 27 August, in which he gave her detailed instructions on which bills of his would soon fall due and whom she should contact about this. ‘I sink rapidly with pining,’ he continued, and went on to tell of filth, degradation and violent assaults made upon some of the patients. The female nurse made repeated, aggressive sexual approaches to him. There had even been a murder, he claimed – the man in the next room, John Milroy, was beaten to death by the attendant, three weeks after Paternoster’s arrival. Mrs Scott copied the 27 August letter for each of the national newspapers, and thus Paternoster’s case achieved in a matter of hours the type of furore that John Perceval’s
Narrative
had failed to bring about in the same year. A London magistrate who had for many months regularly witnessed and co-signed financial and legal paperwork for Paternoster visited him at Kensington House, found him as sane as he had ever been, and personally agitated for the Metropolitan Commissioners to visit and investigate the case in full. The Commissioners spent an unprecedented three days of
five-hour sittings deciding the Paternoster case, with the chairman declaring (without substantiation):