Inconvenient People (7 page)

Of the medical men of his day, Dr Burrows was perhaps the most adamant on the subject of the irrelevance of a layperson’s opinion. He had dedicated his early working life to the professionalisation of medicine, identifying and excluding charlatans and the unqualified. Burrows believed that anatomical and observational work by medical men alone would one day reveal the causes of insanity, and thereby enable its cure. He knew that brain dissection had so far failed to do this, and was minded to take more seriously French hypotheses that the seat of insanity might lie in the guts or the respiratory system. However, in his
Commentaries
, Burrows did not go along with the notion of the uterus having special bearing on female psychological states, quoting with approval French alienist Étienne-Jean Georget, who stated that the female reproductive system scarcely ever disturbs the cerebral functions. ‘The majority of the insane are men,’ wrote Burrows, presenting as evidence figures for lunatics in private asylums in England for the years 1812 to 1824, which put the male total at 4,461 and the female at 3,443. Burrows felt that fear of financial failure, and the resort to drink to alleviate such anxieties, were the factors that made male sanity more fragile; these outweighed the challenges to female sanity caused by the physical and emotional strains of pregnancy, childbirth and menstruation, although he thought that women’s traditional lack of education might make them prey to superstition and religious fanaticism. As a hereditarian, Burrows also believed that the very wealthy were disproportionately prone to insanity because of intermarriage within noble families, a habit he wished they would begin to check.

With regard to his procedure of ‘arresting’ an alleged lunatic by means of a note wielded by his attendants, Dr Burrows had chosen to interpret the lunacy law as permitting him to order a patient to be detained within his or her own home without a formal lunacy certificate, filling out the paperwork only when the patient was to be placed
in a for-profit institution. The legal grey area respecting the home-based family lunatic does just about make this defence plausible, and as
Chapter Six
will show, the failure of the legislature to protect sufficiently the rights of non-asylum-based lunatics had permitted Burrows to attempt to override habeas corpus. It was necessary, Burrows claimed, to get the alleged lunatic into a safe place where diagnosis could take place, but often ‘the mob’ would attempt to thwart this: ‘It frequently happens, in removing a lunatic from one place to another, that he is very violent, or endeavours, by making artful appeals to those near him, to attract their attention, and raise a feeling to rescue him. In such a case, the populace are almost always sure to side with the lunatic and sometimes liberate him.’ In Edward Davies’s case, ‘the coach was stopped as he was being conducted from Furnival’s Inn to his own house, and he was prevented being released by the production of it [the note].’ Burrows complained of the huge contrast between the stance of the London crowd and the capital’s newspaper editors, and foreign attitudes to doctors and scientific progress: ‘What a revolution! While a British public heap with obloquy those medical practitioners who devote themselves to the improvement of the means of a cure, and amelioration of the condition of the insane . . . France, Germany, Italy, and all the most civilised parts of Europe, nay, even Russia, vie with each other in encouraging them.’ Science was not at home in England so long as lunacy specialists found themselves under attack while going about their work.

After insisting that his mother leave Philpot Lane, Edward again took up the reins of Hodgson & Davies. At first, all went well, but his self-consciousness and prickliness meant that he resented being the object of stares and mutterings in the locality. A false report that he had suffered a relapse was placed in the
Standard
newspaper, in the very week that the Anderdon trial was about to begin, which seems to suggest some kind of muck-raking by a supporter of Burrows or an enemy of Henry Brougham, who was prosecuting the doctor in the Anderdon case. Eventually, a deal was thrashed out between mother and son, whereby he yielded to her and his brother-in-law the tea business in Philpot Lane, in return for all the land and property near Newtown. And so in the mid-1830s, Edward became a Welsh gentleman farmer, with 154 acres, although he remained a sleeping
partner of Hodgson & Davies until the final dissolution of the firm in 1843, four years after his mother’s death.

So it was a happy ending for Edward. He married a local woman, Mary, in 1838, had four children and died in his seventies, having built the now-listed Snowfield mansion for himself.

George Man Burrows continued to run the Clapham Retreat until 1843, but was no longer a wealthy man. He died three years later, aged seventy-six.

The Edward Davies case had been the first big test of the 1828 Madhouse Act, and the legislation had been found wanting. A doctor of Burrows’s eminence had believed the Act had given him the right to kidnap from the street a highly strung man, at the behest of a family member with everything to gain from his declaration as a lunatic. How else was he to undertake a diagnosis? he had asked. Edward had then been held against his will in his own home, before being tricked into custodial care – at Mrs Wardell’s – and then misdiagnosed by the two doctors who signed his lunacy certificate, nineteen days after his initial detention. The furore that erupted when Edward’s inquisition had belatedly got under way – four months after his abduction at Furnival’s Inn – reminded the doctors, lawyers and parliamentarians that the public were still prepared to express their anger at curbs to individual liberty through direct action and misbehaviour at public lunacy hearings. If oddness was to become medicalised, there was going to be a battle.

^fn1
A crude rule-of-thumb way to translate nineteenth-century sums into our own values is to multiply by 65. Edward was making about £200,000–£250,000.

^fn2
See
here
for a brief summary of the Acts concerning certification.

AT FIRST GLANCE,
it looked like any other very smart parlour in a country house – fine furniture, good-quality (if rather featureless) decoration and a view out across well-tended garden grounds to picturesque countryside beyond. But as the eye adjusted, certain oddities made themselves known: the venetian blinds were made of iron, the furniture was securely attached to the floor, and in the huge bay window at the far end of the room, twelve gentlemen sat strapped on to wooden seats, each in a separate niche. Each strait-waistcoated man was fastened in with a wide length of leather across the belly, attached to a padlock and to a ring in the wall, and his feet were secured by lower-leg manacles (‘socklets’), also made of leather, to a ring in the floor. Most were quiet, one or two wept, one had his head slumped on his chest, one may have fouled himself, and John Perceval will have been attempting to asphyxiate himself by pressing his neck against a small wooden projection on the wall of his niche, or to snap his neck by extreme jerks of the head.

Occasionally, Mr Perceval was unchained and allowed to walk to the fireplace, or to the large table in the middle of the room. Sometimes the iron fire grate had a hideous face moulded into it, grimacing out at him, but on other occasions, someone had cleverly refashioned the detail in the metal into an ornamental basket of flowers. Mr Perceval would, from time to time, decide to waltz around the parlour table, and once, as he spun round, he caught sight of a wild-looking creature in the mantel looking-glass and was horrified to realise that it was himself: the whiskers he had worn all his adult life had been removed, and his hair was close-cropped on the crown but flowing down at the back. On these journeys around the room, the spirits would usually
order him to wrestle with an attendant or servant, and these attempts at sport would lead to him being swiftly strait-waistcoated and returned to his niche. After the evening meal, Mr Perceval would be taken upstairs to his smart but bleak bedroom, and upon his bed would be secured to the wall by one foot and one arm. He would sleep badly, unlike his attendant, who spent the night on a bed on the other side of the room, its door locked and bolted and the iron venetians fastened.

Twice a day, the gentlemen were unstrapped and taken for walks through the glorious landscape, a greatcoat being placed over the strait-waistcoat so as not to arouse curiosity in passers-by. The route was often across a steep wooded bank alongside a river to ‘the battery’ – a precipice with a parapet, a terrace and a summerhouse, with views across Somerset and into Wales: an obvious suicide spot, Mr Perceval would later note. On these walks, he would ‘halloo!’ and sing and cry out to passing carriages, ‘I am the lost hope of a noble family – I am ruined! I am ruined! I am lost! I am undone! But I am the redeemed of the Lord!’ He would recognise Jesus in a farm labourer and fall to his knees before him; and to serve the Lord, he would throw himself headfirst over every stile and gate they came to, for which he was caned each time by his attendant. The injuries from the caning, stile-leaping and his own assaults upon his neck while strapped in soon mounted up. On bad-weather days, when there were no walks, Mr Perceval sat in his niche singing and noting a mucousy, painful sensation in his upper palate and throat; he sang all the louder in the parlour to try to relieve the pressure in his throat and mouth.

The other men in the niches included a young Devonshire clergyman, a sea captain, a Quaker banker, a noisy, red-faced solicitor who jabbered passages from Virgil, and an elderly Bristol merchant, whose mind and body deteriorated over the months that Mr Perceval spent in the parlour. Some of the men would be untied to play silent games of whist together or with the servants. If a particularly gifted bowls or billiards player was found among the inmates of the second-class or third-class male accommodation, such a man would be permitted to come among the gentlemen to enliven the sport.

Once a day, Dr Edward Long Fox, the aged Quaker who had established the house, would come into the parlour and address a few words to them. Short, grey-haired, wearing his blue frock coat,
broad-brimmed hat and carrying a walking cane, Dr Fox would totter in with his mad-doctor sons, Francis Ker, Charles Joseph and Henry. The Foxes would have a smoke with the gentlemen, and occasionally a game of cards too. Mr Perceval would ask the senior Fox to wrestle with him, but the doctor always declined.

Mr Perceval suspected that many epochs had passed since he had first been placed in his niche. God was punishing him by allowing him glimpses of the newspapers for 1831 only – left on the parlour table each morning, alongside the huge bible – so that Mr Perceval would remain in ignorance of the centuries that were rushing by. He often felt that he was in two or three places at the very same time – inhabiting separate planes all at once. Mr Perceval would skim the newspaper when he was allowed out of his niche. When he had read a sentence he looked away but when he looked again, the words had shifted themselves around. Faces and features changed too, as he peered at his fellow inmates, attendants and servants. Almost everyone around him had multiple personas, with various names and predominant attributes.

The most important person in his life was his attendant, Herminet Herbert (who was also ‘Zachary Gibbs’, ‘Jesus’ and ‘Samuel Hobbs’ – by which name the rest of the world knew him). Herminet Herbert was a divinity, and during supervised, strait-waistcoated visits to the privy, Mr Perceval would propel himself off the WC, through the unlocked closet door in order to fall upon his face and chest at Herminet Herbert’s feet, in worship. Herminet Herbert would then throw Mr Perceval back on the WC and rain blows down on his head and stomach.

Herminet Herbert would often attempt to humour Mr Perceval with childish or coarse jokes, or by jingling spoons in his face, but this levity swiftly turned to violence whenever Herminet Herbert had become bored with it or if Mr Perceval had not laughed sufficiently, or just whenever the attendant felt like it. One of Mr Perceval’s many terrors was that he would be dissected, since the Foxes were doctors and therefore interested in anatomy, and Herminet Herbert’s favourite threat was, ‘I’ll cut your guts out!’

Bath-time happened once a week, but was also kept in reserve as a punishment for refractory patients. The large pool used for this was
in a gloomy, freezing, top-lit outbuilding. Although Mr Perceval never resisted, Herminet Herbert and another attendant would always take the opportunity to throw him into the freezing water backwards, and his head would be forced under with an iron bar pressed on his neck. He would shake with cold for half an hour afterwards and experience toothache and headache. An alternative to the pool was the shower-bath, and for this he would be walked naked across a courtyard to a small outhouse. There, he would be seated, chained in and the attendant would stand astride him and pour two or three pails of cold water on to him, bringing on convulsive jerkings and more tooth and head pain.

Despite being chained all night, Mr Perceval only once wet his bed. For this, he was placed in an outhouse at the bottom of the first-class male airing-court, hard up against Dr Fox’s kitchen garden wall. There were three or four cells in this part of the complex, of bare stone and top-lit. A straw mattress and straw pillow that smelt of cows were placed on a wooden bed-frame, and Mr Perceval was strapped down and manacled to the wall. But he felt happier here; he was alone, for one thing, and in seclusion he was able to sing and ‘halloo!’ as often as the spirits directed him. He spent a fortnight in his cell.
^fn1

The beatings by Herminet Herbert, together with the regular self-inflicted head and neck injuries, caused a large swelling on the left side of his head near the ear. He believed the lump was filled with the tears of blood that he had not been able to shed. A surgeon came to bleed the left temporal artery, and Mr Perceval later said that this operation had caused permanent damage to his hearing.