Priscilla Wakefield diary entry 1810
My health is in a very enfeebled state but with thankfulness I add that as far as I can judge my intellectual powers are unimpaired. I have published Instinct Displayed and begun Travels in Africa. The employment of writing is profitable, not only with a view to what it yields but also an amusement, affording considerable relief from the cares of life.

Figure 28 Whitmore House, Hoxton

Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England, written by Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, 2001

The two publications illustrated on this page show that in her later years Priscilla Wakefield, was an inmate of Whitmore House in neighbouring Hackney, one of the notorious madhouses of the nineteenth century. With the trials Priscilla faced with her family throughout her life, the need to earn the family income and her tremendous energy and commitment to social justice, it is perhaps unsurprising that she should suffer a breakdown, but the conditions she endured at Whitmore House must have exacerbated any frailties.

A description of the crimes and horrors in the interior of Warburton's private mad-house at Hoxton, commonly called Whitmore House
by John Mitford, 1825

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My love of young persons continues but a slight defect in my
hearing deprives me in some degree of the pleasures of conversation
27 December 1814

A year in Europe John Griscom 1823

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The New Suffolk Garland on 'The originator of the Savings' Banks' -
After her settlement at Ipswich, she had an interview with Henry Alexander, Esq., respecting the formation of a
public bank in that town; and she wrote the rules for a bank that was founded at Witliam.
The new Suffolk garland; a miscellany of anecdotes... relating to the county of Suffolk

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Priscilla Wakefield died on the 12 September 1832
at the home of her beloved daughter, Bell, in Ipswich.
She was buried on 20 December in the Friends' burial-ground at the New Meeting House, Ipswich.