My nods to The Blue Castle are a little more straightforward. Like Julia, Montgomery’s heroine, Valancy Stirling, proposes marriage to a man with a bad reputation in order to escape her family. Barney Snaith agrees to marry her on the condition that she never enter the locked lean-to on his property. At the end of the novel, Valancy finally disobeys him, only to discover that Barney is the author of some of her favorite books.

I’d always intended to make Jasper a secret romance author, but the Bluebeard element—along with the Blue Castle connection—is what compelled me to give him a locked writing room in the tower of Goldfinch Hall. The vague rumors that Jasper is a forger are also an allusion to Montgomery’s novel.

Victorian Views on Novel Reading and Bloodletting

The views on novel reading espoused by Dr. Cordingley and Lady Wychwood aren’t as outlandish as they may sound. At the time, the effects of novel reading were often compared to that of drugs or strong spirits. For example, Books and Reading by Noah Porter (1871) refers to “excessive novel reading” as “intellectual opium eating,” while The Local Preachers’ Magazine and Christian Family Record (1875) calls it “mental gin drinking.”

Some of Dr. Cordingley’s quotes are paraphrased from an editorial in The Mother’s and Young Lady’s Annual (1853) that claimed reading novels tended to “inflame the passions, pollute the imagination, and corrupt the heart,” that morality was weakened by “the false sentiments” that novels provoked, and that “in young ladies, especially, do the sensibilities and imagination need to be repressed rather than stimulated.”

When blood was believed to be overstimulated or polluted, Victorian physicians often resorted to bleeding a patient to calm the inflammation and rebalance the humors. Bloodletting was considered a viable treatment in the 1860s, with physicians employing either leeches, a lancet, or the mechanized scarificator that Dr. Cordingley uses on Julia. As the century progressed and new scientific methods were introduced, the practice gradually began to fall from favor.

False Names, Marriage, and the Law

In the Victorian era, there were many cases of people marrying under false names. The courts generally found these marriages to be valid—providing the marriage was by license and not through the calling of the banns. Mr. Finchley’s explanation of this distinction was inspired by an article in Charles Dickens’s weekly journal All the Year Round (January 21, 1860), which states:

The very object to be gained by publication of the banns being publicity, this purpose, should the publication be made in false names, is utterly defeated. On the other hand, a license not being a matter of public notoriety, is granted by the ordinary upon such evidence as he may be content to receive.

As a result, if a marriage license was obtained under a false name, the subsequent marriage could still survive legal scrutiny. A Digest of the Law Relating to the Relief of the Poor by Henry Walter Parker, Esq. (1849), reports several cases of this variety, including: