Ever
since my debut novel The Eighth Circle of
Hell was published in October 2012, I’ve been continually asked how I came
to write about such a grim subject matter as 19th Century child
sexual abuse. It’s an interesting story so I thought I’d write a blog post
about it.
Around
six years or so ago, there were a number of difficult elements in my personal
life; severe illness of close family members, hardship and death. I began
creative writing purely as a catharsis to these and as a form of escapism.
One
day, I was visiting my father in the care home where he lived when one of the
other residents, an elderly lady who was also in the end-stages of Alzheimer’s
Disease, suddenly cried out, begging some uncle to stop, screaming that he was
hurting her. This particular lady was in her early eighties and it made me
begin to imagine what sort of horrors she must be reliving. That very soon sparked
the idea behind The Eighth Circle of Hell.
Another
conversation which fed into the storyline was one I had with the senior nurse
at the time. He explained that my father (who was by then incontinent) was violently
resisting intervention by the nurses to bath him. That was hardly surprising,
he told me, since my father couldn’t remember who the nurses were from one hour
to the next. To his mind, several burly men were suddenly grabbing him and
forcibly removing his clothes. No wonder he fought back!
The
plot for the novel that began to form in my mind needed to predate dementia drugs
or even modern mental health services, and living in Harrogate – essentially a
Victorian town – I decided to set it in the 19th Century.
Which
is when I happened to stumble across the Defloration Mania.
The
Defloration Mania was a period during the Victorian age when adolescent, mainly
virgin girls were bought, duped, kidnapped, or otherwise procured for rich,
so-called gentlemen to rape. It was a time of soundproofed rooms, illicit sedatives
and straps and the rape was carried out on an almost industrial scale. The
pioneering journalist WT Stead eventually exposed it in 1885 in a series of
shocking articles entitled The Maiden
Tribute of Modern Babylon.
The
articles outraged a Victorian public and it outraged me, especially as I
remembered the terror in the old lady’s screams. It was this anger that seemed
to crystallise onto my laptop screen as the manuscript for The Eighth Circle of Hell.
Everything I describe in the
plot, from the horrific baby farming to the Annexe, from the procuresses to the
Gentlemen’s entertainment was real and typical to the Mania.
The most amazing thing about the
period was that despite the 1885 scandal and the riots that Stead’s articles
ignited, virtually no one these days, even in England, has heard of it. The government
of the day hurriedly raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16 years
and the whole thing died away – in the public’s consciousness at least.
The ongoing scandal over
celebrity child abuse in Britain today demonstrates clearly that outside that
consciousness, it continues even today.
