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Authors: Sarah Wise
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deposited here by his eldest brother, who was called Spencer, some seven months earlier, when the snow was deep, as he remembered. Spencer hadn’t said goodbye when he had driven off in the snowdrifts.
Mr Perceval asked for a pocketbook, so that he could begin to keep the date and to write memoranda. On paper, he found, he could collect, arrange and rearrange his ideas. He began regularly to disobey his spirit commands, and found that no punishment resulted from this; therefore, he
reasoned
, they had no real power at all. His quieter, more pensive demeanour meant that Mr Perceval was released from his niche for much of the day now; he was allowed to sit alone in a parlour upstairs in a wicker chair and to take walks out in the yard without Samuel Hobbs. In the doorway to the yard he passed the surgeon who had operated on his damaged ear and he told the doctor, ‘Oh! sir, I have been in a dream, a fearful dream, but it is gone now.’
One day, Dr Francis Ker Fox also met him going into the yardand asked him, ‘Pray, was it
your
father who was shot in the House of Commons?’ It was a heartless question, but it was a reminder of an actual biographical fact, and not one that the spirit voices were likely to have come up with. The insensitive question also prompted another train of renewed rational thought: that the Foxes were unable to understand that their patients had the full range of emotions and might be acutely sensitive to such a subject being brought up. Prime Minister Spencer Perceval had been shot dead by an embittered failed businessman, John Bellingham, on 11 May 1812 in the Commons lobby, and John Perceval, after recovering from his illness, would write, ‘I fear the death of my poor father was at the root of all my misfortunes . . . I do not YET understand his loss . . . a cruel blow [that] deprived my mother of a husband, and her family of a father.’ He began to piece together the order of events that had led to his brother Spencer, with their mother’s agreement, leaving him at Fox’s asylum one evening in the previous winter.
These three drawings were sent to the Home Office by Trophimus Fulljames. On the left Fulljames depicts the Brislington shower-bath, and in the centre is his experience of the isolation cell. The image on the right illustrates an incident that Fulljames was told of by another patient – a cruel prank played by attendants, when a coffin had been delivered to the asylum for a deceased patient. Fulljames, a surveyor, has adapted the image to show that the patient was shut into the coffin for the amusement of the keepers.
A fanciful depiction of the assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, on 11 May 1812. ‘I fear the death of my poor father was at the root of all my misfortunes,’ John Perceval would later write.
Spencer Perceval the elder and Jane Wilson, John’s parents, painted shortly after their marriage, which took place in 1790.
Their father, in private life at least, had been by all accounts a goodhearted man who strove to live by his Evangelical Anglican principles, and his death had shattered the family. He had not been wealthy, and his widow and twelve surviving children had been rescued from the threat of shabby gentility by a generous government grant. Mrs Perceval remarried in 1815, becoming Lady Jane Carr, but lost her second husband in 1821. Spencer the younger became an MP, ‘winning’ three rotten borough seats in succession, from 1818, and becoming an under-secretary at the Home Office.
John had been educated at Harrow and then joined the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards, The Grenadiers, with which he saw active service in Portugal in 1827. There, he had felt scared and bored in equal measure, greatly missing the studious life and the company of women. He was a withdrawn, bookish, analytical young man, much exercised by Evangelical questions, and had always found women more congenial than men. He was contemptuous of the heavy drinking,
Mr Perceval asked for a pocketbook, so that he could begin to keep the date and to write memoranda. On paper, he found, he could collect, arrange and rearrange his ideas. He began regularly to disobey his spirit commands, and found that no punishment resulted from this; therefore, he
reasoned
, they had no real power at all. His quieter, more pensive demeanour meant that Mr Perceval was released from his niche for much of the day now; he was allowed to sit alone in a parlour upstairs in a wicker chair and to take walks out in the yard without Samuel Hobbs. In the doorway to the yard he passed the surgeon who had operated on his damaged ear and he told the doctor, ‘Oh! sir, I have been in a dream, a fearful dream, but it is gone now.’
One day, Dr Francis Ker Fox also met him going into the yardand asked him, ‘Pray, was it
your
father who was shot in the House of Commons?’ It was a heartless question, but it was a reminder of an actual biographical fact, and not one that the spirit voices were likely to have come up with. The insensitive question also prompted another train of renewed rational thought: that the Foxes were unable to understand that their patients had the full range of emotions and might be acutely sensitive to such a subject being brought up. Prime Minister Spencer Perceval had been shot dead by an embittered failed businessman, John Bellingham, on 11 May 1812 in the Commons lobby, and John Perceval, after recovering from his illness, would write, ‘I fear the death of my poor father was at the root of all my misfortunes . . . I do not YET understand his loss . . . a cruel blow [that] deprived my mother of a husband, and her family of a father.’ He began to piece together the order of events that had led to his brother Spencer, with their mother’s agreement, leaving him at Fox’s asylum one evening in the previous winter.
These three drawings were sent to the Home Office by Trophimus Fulljames. On the left Fulljames depicts the Brislington shower-bath, and in the centre is his experience of the isolation cell. The image on the right illustrates an incident that Fulljames was told of by another patient – a cruel prank played by attendants, when a coffin had been delivered to the asylum for a deceased patient. Fulljames, a surveyor, has adapted the image to show that the patient was shut into the coffin for the amusement of the keepers.
A fanciful depiction of the assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, on 11 May 1812. ‘I fear the death of my poor father was at the root of all my misfortunes,’ John Perceval would later write.
Spencer Perceval the elder and Jane Wilson, John’s parents, painted shortly after their marriage, which took place in 1790.
Their father, in private life at least, had been by all accounts a goodhearted man who strove to live by his Evangelical Anglican principles, and his death had shattered the family. He had not been wealthy, and his widow and twelve surviving children had been rescued from the threat of shabby gentility by a generous government grant. Mrs Perceval remarried in 1815, becoming Lady Jane Carr, but lost her second husband in 1821. Spencer the younger became an MP, ‘winning’ three rotten borough seats in succession, from 1818, and becoming an under-secretary at the Home Office.
John had been educated at Harrow and then joined the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards, The Grenadiers, with which he saw active service in Portugal in 1827. There, he had felt scared and bored in equal measure, greatly missing the studious life and the company of women. He was a withdrawn, bookish, analytical young man, much exercised by Evangelical questions, and had always found women more congenial than men. He was contemptuous of the heavy drinking,
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