The forgotten English writer who invented 'gaslighting'

It's one of those achingly modern phrases that now populate our collective vocabularies. In fact the term, denoting a twisted psychological relationship, comes from a play (and subsequent film) first performed 85 years ago this month

- Leo McKinstry

AS has all but disappeared G long one from our lives as a method of lighting. Yet this outmoded technology, superseded by cleaner, safer electricity, has left remarkable legacy. For in recent years the term "gaslighting" has entered our language, deployed with ever greater frequency in psychological analysis and political debate.

It describes the process where individuals or even institutions - can be manipulated by their abusers so that they lose their resilience and slide towards breakdown, a form of psychological trickery in which the abuser SOWS self-doubt and confusion.

Prince Harry has been accused of trying to "gaslight" the Royal Family with his barrage of public criticisms, while north of the Border earlier this year the SNP was said to be "gaslighting" the Scottish public over its failed pro-trans legislation.

The growing influence of the phrase is a tribute to the vivid imagination of the English writer Patrick Hamilton, whose 1938 play Gas Light, first performed 85 years ago this month at the Richmond Theatre in London, had mental disintegration as its central theme.

Today Hamilton is an almost forgotten figure, with many of his books out of print. But at his peak in the 1930s, he was one of Britain's most successful authors, enjoying vast global sales and Hollywood acclaim.

"It is all a strange Byronic dream.

For it is not only the money - it is also the fame," he wrote to his brother Bruce in 1929 when he first began to soar in popularity. Several of his works were turned into lucrative movies, of which the 1944 version of Gas Light, renamed Gaslight, is probably the most famous.

Set in Victorian London, it stars.