Mantles

Gaslighting, to mean manipulating a vulnerable target to make them question their own memory, beliefs and perhaps sanity, comes from the play Gas Light, by British writer Patrick Hamilton, born in Hassocks in 1904.

His parents were writers, but hit hard times (alcohol may have been involved), and Patrick moved with his mother to boarding houses in Hove and Chiswick. He was taken from Westminster School age 15, and, after trying his hand at acting, started writing. His first novel, Monday Morning, was written at 19, and published two years later - it featured Comedic Capital Letters, which followed in most later works. Craven House (life in boarding houses) and Twopence Coloured (19-year-old leaves Hove for a try at the London stage) followed.

The 1929 play Rope (Rope's End in the USA) was later adapted for Alfred Hitchcock's film, starring James Stewart. Gas Light, 'A Victorian Thriller in Three Acts' was first performed at the Richmond Theatre in December 1938, before a West End transfer to the Apollo, where customers during the six-month run including George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Re-titled Angel Street for thre Americans, it ran on Broadway for four years - and afforded Patrick a whisky-based lifestyle which eventually killed him.

Gaslight has been filmed twice. George Cukor’s 1944 version for MGM starred Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. The 1940 British black-and-white film directed by Thorold Dickinson starred Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook.

The key bit of the plot for today's readers: Victorian villain Jack Manningham's hunt for hidden jewels in an adjacent flat causes the gas lights in his own apartment to dim; but he keeps assuring his paranoid wife Bella that she's just imagining it.