Free Inconvenient People by Sarah Wise Page B

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.

The entire complex was divided up by walls so that the social classes and genders did not mix and the ‘excitable’ were kept apart from the non-violent.
    Charging its first-class patients £300 per annum, Brislington