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READE, Charles.
Hard Cash.
A Matter-of-Fact Romance.
Publisher: London, Sampson, Low, Son, & Marston, 1853
Stock code: 39735
Price: £750 Currency Conversion
First edition of this highly successful and immensely scurrilous best-seller exposing the abuses of the "trade in lunacy", the hero, Alfred Hardie, being improperly confined in a series of private mad-houses. In the fairly transparent guise of Dr. Wycherley, Reade savagely burlesques Dr. John Conolly, whose conduct had been exposed in several court cases as questionable at the very least: "his transparent rationalizations, and the convenient congruence between his beliefs and his self-interest… [his] pretensions to gentlemanly status are mocked, and his vaunted psychological acumen exposed as a pious fraud" (Scull, "A Victorian Alienist: John Conolly" in Bynum, Porter & Shepherd, The Anatomy of Madness, I).
3 volumes, octavo (195 × 123 mm). Later blue-green crushed morocco by Worsfold, double gilt fillet panel to the boards, raised bands to the spine, compartments gilt with foliate tools and onlay red tulips, inner gilt dentelles, top edges gilt. Lightly browned, spines a touch sunned, but a very handsome set
