And thanks to Cat Camacho, Miranda Jewess, Philippa Ward, Lydia Gittins, and all at Titan Books.
NOTE ON SOURCES
The characters are all fictional, apart from those that aren’t. Many of the events are adapted from reality: the blasts, bombs and fires (except Guernsey) are firmly based on 1860s events; for narrative purposes, I have shifted the dates of the Erith blast (October 1864), Camden derailment (August 1864), Princess’s Theatre fire (January 1863), the Mersey explosion (January 1864, in fact the Lottie Sleigh), and Clerkenwell Prison break (December 1867). Most of the electrical experiments are real, and all the advertisements, more or less. Details and links are on my website, on the Extras page for Lawless and the House of Electricity.
I stumbled across William Armstrong, engineer, in the writing of Lawless and the Devil of Euston Square, which begins with a burst hydraulic engine.
Before creating my own house of electricity, I had no idea that there was a country house genre. I wanted to recall the warmth I remembered from visits to Barraderry House, Kiltegan, and Schloss Achstetten, Baden-Württemberg; and the glow pervading novels such as JB Priestley’s Bright Day, Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, and countless Wodehouse novels. I recommend also Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Wilkie Collins’ Armadale, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, Bill Bryson’s delightful At Home: A Short History of Private Life, Judith Flanders’ seminal The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childhood to Deathbed, and poet Maggie Sawkins’ exploration of Charcot in The Zig Zag Woman, and Christine Lawrence’s Caught in the Web. I am grateful to Blake Morrison’s article in The Guardian on country house novels: theguardian.com/ books/2011/jun/11/country-house-novels-blake-morrison
Thanks to Victoria Leslie for guiding me towards Northanger Abbey, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Edith Wharton’s story “Afterward”; and to my dad for Kipling’s story “An Habitation Enforced”.
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What was Elodie’s disease? It may be diagnosable by modern criteria: post-partum depression, with epileptic absences or fugues. It has much in common with the encephalitis lethargica described in Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings. But I urge you to consider seriously the catalepsy-lethargy-somnambulism cycle of Charcot’s Saltpêtrière hysterics, dissected so brilliantly by Asti Hustvedt in Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris.
Perhaps, just as we laugh at Victorian diagnoses such as strolling congestion, drawing room anguish, dissipation of nerves and imaginary female trouble (contributory factors cited upon commitment to a Victorian asylum), we should think how today’s diagnoses will be laughed at in the future. Note Jon Ronson’s excellent The Psychopath Test for the alarmingly arbitrary origins of DSM diagnostic criteria (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).
Hustvedt notes striking similarities between Victorian hysteria diagnoses and today’s undifferentiated somatoform disorder, conversion disorder and psychogenic pain syndrome. As Hustvedt writes of her famous Saltpêtrière hysterics, “People have often asked me what I think these women were really suffering from… If only they had been born later, they could have been properly diagnosed and benefited from the latest treatments and pharmaceuticals.”
Hustvedt posits, convincingly, that paralysis was an expression of women’s disempowerment within society, just as our dysmorphia, eating disorders, depression and anxiety reflect today’s narcissistically judgemental obsession with image: “Diseases do not exist outside of diagnoses.”
As to Lady Elodie’s malady, judge for yourself.
For her treatment, Electro-Convulsive Therapy, as it is known today, may have begun in the 1930s, but “electrical brain stimulation has been used since the 1860s” (Encyclopedia of Behavioral Neuroscience).
William Fiennes in The Music Room details the early origins of therapeutic electrical stimulation. Duchenne’s Localized electrisation, and its applications to pathology and therapeutics (1855) was widely read and is republished as a Classic of Neurology edition. Electro-Physiology and Electro-Therapeutics by AC Garratt gives further details on Duchenne’s procedures, including shocks administered to the brain: “Life is electro-chemistry vitalized. This greatest force of nature, viz, Electricity, which also holds such varied and powerful influences over life, health, and disease, does assuredly command our more attentive study,” writes Garratt.
“The therapeutic effects of these apparatus are reputed, among French medical practitioners, to be beneficial in several classes of maladies, and especially in cases of paralysis,” reports Dionysius Lardner in his 1856 Handbook of Natural Philosophy: Electricity, Magnetism, and Acoustics.
In the 1860s, psychiatrist Gustav Fritsch and anatomist Eduard Hitzig were applying electricity directly to dogs’ brains, having removed sections of their skulls under anaesthesia, noting which areas stimulated which movements. Meanwhile, Hughlings Jackson was dissecting brains of deceased epileptic patients in London and York, matching the seizures he had detailed to the injuries, tumours, and lesions. In 1874, physician Roberts Bartholow in Cincinnati induced seizures in Mary Rafferty, whose skull was eroded by cancers. David Ferrier’s 1870s work in West Riding Lunatic Asylum, stimulating brains of anaesthetised animals, identified fifteen motor centres.
Sleeping Beauty’s awakening by a kiss seems magical, but so did Charcot’s revival of comatose hysterics.
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Thanks to Matt Wingett for lending me Portsmouth—A French Gibraltar? (The Portsmouth Papers No. 10), by A. Temple Patterson. Molly’s paint-mixing is inspired by Ali Smith’s How to Be Both and influenced by Ivan Morison’s series of cards, Colours in Ivan Morison’s garden.
I acknowledge debts to “The presentation of madness in the Victorian novel” by Allan Beveridge and Edward Renvoize; BBC Radio 4 Frontiers episode “Vagus Nerve”, 26 November 2014; “Handling a social threat: the fate of women beyond Victorian societal definition”, Alexandra Clifton.
See also: William Stephens Hayward’s Revelations of a Lady Detective; Lee Jackson’s Dictionary of Victorian London; Karl Bell’s extensive work on Spring-Heeled Jack; Wayward Women: Female Offending in Victorian England, by Lucy Williams; Electricity and Magnetism, Mike Clemmet; British Fortification in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries, Nick Dyer and the Palmerston Forts Society; Spit Bank and the Spithead Forts, Garry Mitchell; The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins; Lady Audley’s Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon; Edward Lear, Angus Davidson; Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, by Vivien Noakes; The Wayward Muse, by Elizabeth Hickey; Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation, by Andrew Lycett; William Armstrong: Magician of the North, by Henrietta Heald; Emperor of Industry: Lord Armstrong of Cragside, by Ken Smith; Tolstoy’s What Then Must We Do? and equally What Is To Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky; Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Sutton comes from Dunblane, Scotland. He has appeared at CrimeFest, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, CSI Portsmouth and High Down Prison. He co-produces Portsmouth’s DarkFest, in which he compères Day of the Dead at the Square Tower; and he helps to programme Portsmouth Bookfest, including Valentine’s Day Massacre at the Wave Maiden.
He teaches classics. He has written for radio, stage, The Times, The Author, and magazines around the world. He plays bass in the bands of songwriter Jamie West and chansonnier Philip Jeays. He played cricket for Brazil, and occasionally opens for The Authors Cricket Club. He lives in Southsea with his wife, Caroline.
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