A Terrible Temptation

A baronet needs an heir, a discarded mistress needs revenge, and the baronet himself is quietly locked away in a private asylum by a cousin who stands to inherit. Reade campaigned in fiction against the abuses of his day — mad-doctors, prisons, unions — and researched like a journalist; the asylum scenes here were built from real cases, and the novelist who takes up the baronet's cause is Reade himself, barely disguised. Fifty-four plates range from Frith's lovers' meeting at Haddon Hall to North's foreign views, a visual counterpoint to a novel of private scandal and public reform.