ABSTRACT
British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was shot dead on 11 May 1812. The improvement in the financial circumstances of the dead Prime Minister's family meant that when one of the 12 children, John Perceval, became by his own admission insane he was placed, against his will, in prestigious, expensive and purportedly humane asylums. For Perceval's family, to have one of its members deemed mad was likely to have been highly stigmatising given their high social status, and which therefore may well have been in itself a good enough excuse to seek incarceration for him. By early January of 1831, Perceval found himself in the Fox family's asylum and in the company of an interesting assortment of lunatics and their custodians, the keepers and attendants. Alongside the descriptions of staff and patients in Brislington there is detail in Perceval's Narrative of the sheer banality of everyday life in an asylum.
