Inconvenient People by Sarah Wise Page B

very fact of his arguing that he was sane was proof that he was not; plus his hostility to his family; plus being so finicky about Tom Rolfe and the high jinks in the corridor. And then there was his appearance. After the ludicrous haircut he had been given at Brislington, and the removal of the whiskers he had cultivated since adolescence, Mr Perceval was determined to reassert his individuality by growing his hair and beard long; his hair he arranged in ringlets, partly to hide the disfigurement to his left ear andtemple. This was a more ‘natural’ and manly look, he believed. But one of his sisters wrote to him to say that the doctors had told the family that the wildness of his hair was proof of his ongoing mental infirmity.
    So his hair grew, the months passed, and Mr Perceval wrote his thoughts down in his peevish diary, the stupidities of Rolfe and the shifting direction of the gales blowing up the hill and into Ticehurst both featuring large. He busied himself in teaching one of the attendants to read and write, and in practising the piano (badly). Then, surprisingly, ten months after his arrival at Ticehurst, his family did yield to his requests. It was announced to him that he was to be released into the private care of Dr Robert Stedman of Sevenoaks in Kent, with whom he was to live, so that his readiness to be discharged from his lunacy certificates could be monitored. This was how the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy liked to proceed with patients who were becoming calmer and quieter – gradually to reintroduce them into outside life, with no sudden shock upon re-entry to society, which could trigger a relapse.
    Mr Perceval wrote very little about his time as a single patient. He was finally discharged from his certificates in October 1833, when, as Dr Stedman would later write, ‘Lady Carr thought proper to allow him to have his liberty, altho’ he could not then be said to be perfectly sane, and the family physician, Dr Tattersall of Ealing, stated to Lady Carr that if she did let him have his liberty he would very soon do some foolish act that she would repent of.’ The ‘foolish act’, in Stedman’s view, was Mr Perceval’s marriage, in March 1834, to Anna Gardiner, the daughter of a Sevenoaks cheesemonger, which Dr Stedman declared was a match ‘quite out of his station in life’. The marriage was to be a long and happy one, and once again reveals that odd clash within Mr Perceval of aristocratic hauteur and a genuine love for individuals whatever their social background.
    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 brotherreveals 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