<p>The amazing story of James Tilly Matthews and his visionary madness is a startling portrait of a society on the brink of the modern age.\nLondon, the 1790 Europe has been turned upside down by the French Revolution. Plots, counterplots and conspiracies seem to be edging England into a disastrous war with France. Operating undercover across the city is a gang of revolutionary “terrorists” armed with a machine unlike any the world has ever seen. They call it the Air Loom. It works by animal magnetism, sending invisible rays to control the minds of its victims. The gang has control of the minds of politicians and generals and is determined to plunge England further into the war with France. The only man who knows of this fiendish plot and believes he can stop it is a tea-merchant from Wales called James Tilly Matthews. But Matthews is a long-term resident of the Bethlem Royal Hospital -- “Bedlam.”\nThe Air Loom Gang tells the remarkable, true story of James Tilly Matthews whose delusions, while incarcerated in England’s most notorious madhouse, became celebrated as the most complex and bizarre ever recorded -- the first man to believe that his mind was controlled by a machine. But the truth of his case was even many of the incredible episodes in which he claimed to have been involved were entirely real. The Air Loom Gang shines a light into the darkest recesses of Georgian England and witnesses the convulsive birth-pangs of modern psychiatry.\nFrom the Hardcover edition.</p>

The Air Loom Gang

MIKE JAY

Biographies & Memoirs

Bantam Press, Limited

<p>Not many men emerged from Trafalgar without an ounce of credit to their names, but courtesy of an over-fondness for rum and his habitual bad luck, Lieutenant Martin Jerrold managed it. In February 1806, he is given one final chance to redeem his reputation and dispatched to Dover.Things don't augur well when, walking off the effects of a night in the tavern, Jerrold stumbles across a corpse lying on the beach. And they take a distinct turn for the worst when, to his horror and bemusement, he is suspected of murder. With a captain who despises him, and the local magistrate determined to see him hang, he knows clearing his name will require an imporbable reversal of his miserable fortunes. Somewhere in Dover's twisted streets, someone must know something. But Jerrold soon discovers that nothing is as it seems in a town where smuggling is a way of life, where everyone from the fishermen to the colonel of dragoons drinks only the finest French brandy...Distrusted by his superiors, set upon by suspiciously well-informed thugs and attacked by the French at sea, Jerrold does find some sympathy in the less-than-respectable arms of the comely Isobel, but he knows he has but two weeks to save his skin - or perish in the attempt.</p>

The Blighted Cliffs (Reluctant Adv/Martin Jerrold 1)

Literature & Fiction

Edwin Thomas

Genre Fiction

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