“Treatment at the Retreat was based on a family-like atmosphere of kindness and patience… Fixed daily routines promoted self-discipline, with importance placed on a liberal, nourishing diet, fresh air and exercise. … Unsurprisingly, when no longer treated like wild beasts, patients responded to the same incentives, emotions and changes to their environment as people of sound mind.”
writes Jill Giese in The Maddest Place on Earth (2018). (The “maddest place” refers to Victoria, Australia, which during the late 19th century had the highest rate of insanity in the world.)
A series of UK Parliamentary inquiries in the first half of the 19th century exposed the horrendous conditions in lunatic asylums, leading to legislative change. Unfortunately, some of the new treatments introduced proved to be as barbaric as those before reforms, and stigmas around mental illness persist to this day.
The euphemisms for sex used by the “actors” in the tavern theatre scene (Chapter 5) were taken from Jonathon Green’s Timelines of Slang. See http://jonathongreen.co.uk for more.
I could go on, but I won’t. I am not an historian, and my research is limited to the needs of the story and the resources available to me. For further reading, I have compiled a selection of research books, available on my website.
MV
2019
Acknowledgments
If not for my agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, this novel would still be a 300,000-word mess on my computer. Emily’s feedback on a very early version was invaluable in helping me find the story and dragging me out of the quagmire.
The final version also benefited immeasurably from feedback from Mikaila Rushing, and feedback and editing by May Peterson.