Inconvenient People by Sarah Wise

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’, andnow 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 MrPerceval 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