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sarcasms, and pathetic appeals of the voices round me’. The voices ‘flocked’ about him ‘like bees’, issuing contradictory orders. When HerminetHerbert brought him his breakfast of a basin of tea and small squares of bread and butter, one spirit would say, ‘Eat a piece for my sake’; another would say, ‘Refuse it for my sake’; and yet another would demand, ‘Don’t eat that piece, eat that one, for my sake.’ His hesitation as he tried, in anguish, to work out which spirit to appease would look to Herminet Herbert like rebelliousness and he would often be struck.
    It felt to Mr Perceval as though the voices were mostly speaking inside his own skull, but sometimes they would sound as though they were emanating from another part of the room, or just hovering somewhere in the air. He counted over fourteen of them. Every voice was different and each was ‘beautiful, and, generally, speaking or singing in a different tone or measure, and resembling those of relations or friends’, as he put it. The voices of ‘contrition’ inhabited his left temple and forehead; those of ‘joy and honour’ were coming from the right. Over his eyebrows were two who were quicker and more ‘flaunty’ than the others: over the right eyebrow was the spirit of Mr Perceval’s eldest sister, and over the left, the spirit of Herminet Herbert.
    Voices would sometimes address him in verse; once, a hurdy-gurdy appeared to circle his bed, playing a tune that made him weep to know that he had lost a father’s love. The music conjured up visions of him living in Portugal as a child and then as a young monk, who repaid the kindness shown to him by robbing the church and partaking of ‘unnatural’ lusts with other young monks; he then killed a pig for sheer enjoyment, plunging it alive into boiling water. During this episode the spirits told him that all his problems arose from an act of ingratitude in his childhood. Another voice told him that he was responsible for the drowning of an old woman on the City side of Blackfriars Bridge. Faces appeared on walls or furnishing fabrics – those of God, his family and his father, who began to weep: Mr Perceval felt the tears drop on to his own skin. ‘Thus my delusions, or the meshes in which my reasoning faculties were entangled, became perfected; and it was next to impossible thoroughly to remove them,’ he later wrote. Despite his confusion about time and place, Mr Perceval knew that he had a mother as well as brothers and sisters. His eldest brother came to visit him six months after he had been admitted, and stayed two days. He examined the niches in the parlour, saw the isolation cell, heard about the cold-water treatments, and on thesecond night, he shook Mr Perceval’s hand and simply left. Just before leaving, he asked Mr Perceval why he insisted on talking with his mouth shut. When Mr Perceval raised his hand to his mouth as he spoke in reply, he was horrified to realise that this was so.
    One day, when the buttercups and daisies were blowing in the meadows outside, something peculiar happened as Mr Perceval sat in his niche. When a command was being issued to him by one of the voices, he hesitated to obey it, suddenly realising that it was a ‘ridiculous’ request. In fact, it occurred to him that much of what the spirits were saying was quite ‘absurd’. From this point, he thought very deeply about every command he was given and began to compare what the voices said with what he heard and saw going on around him. He realised, for example, that other people would speak of Herminet Herbert as ‘Samuel Hobbs’, and so Mr Perceval deduced that this was probably his real name. He began to understand that he was in a madhouse – that it was in England, that it was near Bristol, that it was, in fact, Brislington House Asylum. It was June, and thenewspapers had not been a divine deceit: it really was 1831, and so Mr Perceval must be twenty-eight years old; and he had been