A few years ago I caught the 1940 original film version of Gaslight at the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank – shown as part of the BFI’s “Gothic” season. It’s not as glossy or sophis as the much better-known 1944 George Cukor version, starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer and a very young Angela Lansbury; but nevertheless, it’s very good – with a fantastic set, some “interesting” B-movie faces, and a new take on the policeman hero – an overweight, ebullient older gent, who brings light relief to the very high tension. Its stars were Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard.

One of the reviews of the British version, directed by Thorold Dickinson, pointed out the fantastic way that the interiors of the house (Number 12 of the fictional Pimlico Square) are co-conspirators in the plot to make our heroine lose her wits: “She is stifled under bric-a-brac,” wrote the Eastern Daily Press reviewer on 14 June 1940. And it’s true – every shot in the movie has plenty for the eye to range over, in the over-stuffed Victorian room-sets and elaborate, constricting female clothing.

I got the idea for writing Inconvenient People while watching a stage performance of Patrick Hamilton’s original play Gaslight at the Old Vic Theatre in August 2007; in the darkened Dress Circle, it struck me – how often did that sort of lunacy conspiracy really happen in the 19th century? How would the machinery of the law assist or hinder your plans if you wanted to put your highly strung but sane wife into an asylum? Did wives ever attempt to “gaslight” their husbands?

Hamilton wrote his play in 1938 but set it in 1880. Watching the 1940 film today prompted me into some idle pondering on matters that can never be known – namely, to what extent, if any, was Hamilton thinking of some of the real-life malicious incarceration plots of the 19th century? In the movie versions, the heroine at one point calls and gesticulates from her bedroom window to somebody outside in the street who could help her, but then realises that if she shouts, her villainous husband will hear too. This was the dilemma of Rosalind Hammond, imprisoned in the family home, Laurel Cottage, Peckham Rye, in the early 1860s, by her husband, a doctor. Dr Hammond encouraged the female servants to make free use of Rosalind’s belongings, and he took one of them as his lover – the villainous husband and wicked maid are also lovers in Gaslight. Rosalind Hammond had tried repeatedly to signal from her barred window to passers-by but was badly beaten by her husband and the maids whenever she was caught doing so.

She eventually succeeded in raising the alarm from the window and the police came; in 1864, Dr Hammond was sentenced to 12 months’ hard labour, but the maids were scandalously acquitted for lack of evidence — a verdict that did not go down well with the public and the newspaper press.

Later, in 1869, vicar’s wife Louisa Lowe believed that her landlady and maids at her Exeter lodgings were in collusion with her husband, who wished to have her certified. Lowe wrote that the key to her rooms repeatedly went missing and then mysteriously turned up; that the bell by which she could summon the servants was muffled for no good reason.

It was never established whether Lowe was correct about these phenomena, but they are very similar to the heroine’s ordeal in Gaslight – where objects are made to disappear and reappear and she is blamed for doing these things during an insane, fugue-like state. (Lowe’s husband did get his wife certified into Brislington House Asylum, near Bristol, but she fought hard for her freedom and went on to found the campaign group the Lunacy Law Reform Association.)

Pimlico is an interesting choice for Hamilton to have selected for his setting: it had been shabby-genteel from its very creation – Belgravia’s poor neighbour. In the 19th century, newspaper reports featured a number of “single patients” (mentally ill people kept as sole patients with a nurse or a doctor) disturbing residents in Pimlico with their cries at all hours of the day. For example, Dr Thomas Blanchard of 79 Warwick Square was fined for failing to register his wealthy, and noisy, single patient Miss Kidston on the Commissioners in Lunacy’s “Private List” of single patients.

It’s a long shot, of course, but it is tempting to wonder whether Hamilton was recalling some of these once-notorious old cases when he sat down to write in the late 1930s.

DVDs of both versions of Gaslight are available to buy, now that the BFI has restored the British version. It is a myth, by the way, that Hollywood sought out and destroyed all copies of the British film. However, it was deliberately marginalised in order to smooth the path of Cukor’s remake; and screenings were rare before this restoration.