Inconvenient People (9 page)

Back in Oxford, he assumed that the Holy Spirit would now keep him safe from sin and the ‘whirlpool of dissipation’ around him. As he returned to his college after dinner with friends one evening, he was accosted by a woman of the town, to whose solicitation he replied by quoting Scripture. Five minutes later, another such woman walked towards him. This time, she ‘led me away to my destruction’.

Terrified that he might have contracted venereal disease during the encounter, he dosed himself with mercury. To cleanse himself, he would scrub his entire body with cold water in his draughty room. Still fasting, waking in the night to pray and to scrutinise his soul, by the third week of November 1830 he was unable to speak even on trivial subjects without ‘internal rebuke and misgivings’ and was ‘exhausted, weary and broken-hearted’.

He fled to Dublin in December, to its more devout atmosphere and the company of old friends. But his disintegration continued:

His friends became so alarmed by his behaviour that they summoned a local physician, Dr Piel, to visit him in his room. Mr Perceval was tied to the bed by his hands and feet for a fortnight, as his brain and his body became the battleground for good and evil.

He imagined the Almighty was examining him with a view to casting him into the third degree of hell, with worms, bats and moles. He was to be eternally damned, alone, in multiplied bodies and in infinite solitude and darkness. It was made known to him that the Almighty in His three persons had descended upon earth, had entered London and had revealed all these things to the King, who was also preparing on earth the most cruel torments for Mr Perceval. A spirit came on to the pillow by his right ear and made him raise himself up on his feet and the back of his neck and, thus arched, to swing and rock from side to side. Voices that appeared to be both outside and inside his head were becoming louder, along with the sound of a bellows fanning flames and the clanking of iron. Only by obeying Jesus and maintaining the arched-back position would Mr Perceval avoid waking in hell in the morning. When dawn came, he realised he was saved, but then discovered that because Jesus had descended to help him fight the fires of hell, any sin of his would now be doubly heinous. A voice obliged him on pain of dreadful torments to admit his ingratitude; but when he did so, he was rebuked for doing this all wrong. When he pleaded that he did not know what to do, he was rebuked for looking for a way of not obeying the commands.

Dr Piel and John’s friends had sent for Spencer, and in the meantime engaged the help of a Dublin lunacy specialist; together they attempted to feed, medicate and calm the patient. Mr Perceval would later point out that such enforced idleness only gave the delusions greater power, as his mind was unoccupied and the lack of exercise further debilitated his physical self. At the same time, however, he noted and remembered
the mundanities of the fortnight: his belief that Dr Piel, as a Unitarian, would not be able to understand Mr Perceval’s spiritual torments; the fact that the broth they fed him was not sufficient nourishment; that the medicine tasted of iron; and that giving him an enema was an indecent, indelicate action upon the body of a gentleman. He was mad and sane at the same time, he later wrote: ‘[I had] so much sense and reflection left to me . . . [but] no one who has not been deranged can understand how dreadfully true a lunatic’s insane imagination appears to him, how slight his sane doubts.’

When Spencer arrived, the spirits instructed John to say, ‘I am desired to tell you that you are a hypocrite.’ Spencer and the doctors dressed him and took him by hackney coach to the quayside where they boarded a steam packet for Bristol. John had thought he was being taken home, but the carriage in England took him instead to Brislington.

Spencer had been appointed a Metropolitan Commissioner in Lunacy in 1830 – an entirely coincidental appointment, but in keeping with the Perceval sense of Evangelical civic duty. He had proved the most diligent and thorough Commissioner, and took his huge workload very seriously. Yet you would know none of this from John’s writings: Spencer’s commitment to asylum regulation and the implementation of national standards of care do not rate one mention by his younger brother. Spencer himself had been called ‘mad’ in the House of Commons, no less, because of the piety of his speeches there. Others would jeeringly call him ‘Saint Perceval’, for he twice called on the government to back a national day of fasting and ‘humiliation’ as a response to the cholera epidemic of 1831–32. And it was Spencer, as the senior male blood relative, who had signed John’s lunacy order.

At the end of the previous century Edward Long Fox had run a small asylum at Downend, near Bristol, in an ordinary private house. In 1799 he purchased part of the recently enclosed Brislington Common for £4,000 and constructed his large new asylum, which opened in 1806. The building may have been the first purpose-built large private asylum in England, and was designed to segregate patients by gender and according to social class. Two identical wings housed the two sexes, with a dividing wall that ran right through the middle of the complex. On each side of the house, further partition ensured that the aristocracy did not have to come across the tradesman class, and that neither would be forced to mix with those of still shallower pocket. Within each social class, the violent and the non-violent were segregated: the parlour with the niches where Mr Perceval spent most of his days was set aside for the violent, or potentially violent, first-class gentlemen; the cold cells with straw bedding were for the most refractory or for the ‘dirty’ patients, who were either doubly or singly incontinent. Mr Perceval noted the building’s cold, hard, echoing surfaces: Dr Fox Snr had insisted on iron and stone, rather than wood, in order to minimise the risk from fire. No hooks or nails were allowed in the walls, in case anyone should attempt to hang themselves; fire utensils were chained to grates so they could not become weapons. A number of small villas in the grounds housed the super-exclusive patients who did not need to enter the main building and could bring their own domestic staff, horses and vehicles. According to the prospectus that the Fox sons published five years after Mr Perceval had fetched up at Brislington, the establishment was ‘A hospital for the curable, and a comfortable retreat for the incurable.’ Set in a wooded estate nine miles from Bath and three from Bristol, Brislington was secluded enough to protect patients from the curious, and to cause minimal anxiety to its neighbours.

Charging its first-class patients £300 per annum, Brislington was the joint most expensive and prestigious asylum in the country and, along
with Ticehurst in Sussex and Laverstock House near Salisbury in Wiltshire, was the venue selected by those of the aristocracy who chose not to care for their insane family members either at home or lodged at someone else’s home as a ‘single patient’. Families could feel relieved to know that their troubled relative was in luxurious surroundings, and in the care of one of the most renowned and well-liked lunatic doctors in England. Spencer had witnessed day after day the privations and poor conditions in some of London’s private and pauper asylums, and is likely to have viewed Brislington’s cold baths, stone cells and bay-window imprisonment in a very different light to John. Even at its worst, Brislington was better than the majority of institutions in which an agitated person could be deposited.

It wasn’t only Spencer who failed to see anything the matter at Brislington; the visiting magistrates, too, could discern no problems. Outside the London area, local JPs had the duty of asylum inspection and licensing. Mr Perceval encountered them on three occasions but thought them ‘absurd-looking old gentlemen’ and burst out laughing when they entered the parlour. He said they spent just ten minutes in a room that was filled with lunatics, most of whom probably took the magistrates to be creatures from another world. Patients’ grievances were expected to be aired in front of the Foxes. One of the visitors looked kind, and was the only official Mr Perceval came across who appeared able to sympathise with a lunatic, to any degree. However, his promise to help Mr Perceval came to nothing.

Dr Fox admonished Mr Perceval when he complained of Samuel Hobbs’s coarseness: ‘I must own that it not a little surprised me that you, as a humble follower of Christ, would think of him or any other as your inferior. Do we not know that God is no respecter of persons?’ Yet as Mr Perceval observed, ‘I never saw Mr Hobbs sitting at Dr Fox’s dinner table.’ The hypocrisy went far deeper: the great levelling philosophy of the Quakers did not prevent Dr Fox making a very good living from running an asylum that stratified humanity according to accident of birth or level of wealth. The Quakers had been a major force behind the English revolution in lunacy care, with the opening in 1792 of the York Retreat by Quaker tea and coffee merchant William Tuke, in which humane, therapeutic ‘moral [i.e. psychological] treatment’ would replace physical and mechanical restraint and such barbarities as bleeding, purging and narcotics. Edward Long Fox no doubt took advantage of the famous Quaker humanitarianism of the York Retreat: the wealthy would have less anxiety in handing over their relatives to a place where restraint had been abolished. So how to explain the niches, the manacles and socklets, the cold-water treatment, the stone cells at the end of the yard, and the beatings? The last of these was a sackable offence, according to the Foxes; but the doctor and his sons would, of course, need to be made aware of a violent incident in order for an attendant to be dismissed. And who was going to believe a lunatic’s tale? As for the restraints and cold water, they were regrettable extreme measures imposed only during episodes of unmanageable physical excitability. The kind and clever doctors said so, and that was good enough for most observers. In fact, the kind and clever Foxes indulged in the very type of casual attitude towards incarceration that the 1828 Madhouse Act had sought to stamp out, by touting for patients and making certification appear to be a fast, simple, straightforward procedure. Their 1836 prospectus contains
an invitation to obtain blank lunacy certificates from Brislington – giving the impression that taking away a person’s liberty was little different to writing out a prescription for gout.

The Foxes claimed that the quickest and longest-lasting cures came about by the removal of the patient from the family home. Associating with strangers and being cared for by skilled staff in the beautiful countryside offered a far better chance of recovering one’s wits. Or, for those who were never going to get well, the best environment in which to remain mad. Well-intentioned relatives, according to the Fox ethos, unwittingly worsened the patient’s condition; and the excitements of the town could make maniacal paroxysms more likely. But this approach to patient care brought havoc to the Perceval clan, as John mistakenly believed that he had been abandoned by his family, in an isolated spot, so that he would not embarrass them. Dr Fox retained many letters written by Mr Perceval, which he considered likely to distress Lady Carr, and he later told Mr Perceval that he should have been grateful for this, as they had been written when he had been in ‘a degraded condition of mind’. Mr Perceval’s early letters also contained complaints about his treatment at Brislington, but when Lady Carr eventually received one of them, she found it so full of confusion that she assumed the allegations were groundless. She did not reply, because Dr Fox had advised that this would be bad for the patient. Terrified of making her son more ill, Lady Carr communicated instead with the Foxes.