Preface

"Hard Cash," like "The Cloister and the Hearth," is a matter-of-fact Romance--that is, a fiction built on truths； and these truths have been gathered by long, severe, systematic labour, from a multitude of volumes, pamphlets, journals, reports, blue-books, manuscript narratives, letters, and living people, whom I have sought out, examined, and cross-examined, to get at the truth on each main topic I have striven to handle.

The madhouse scenes have been picked out by certain disinterested gentlemen, who keep private asylums, and periodicals to puff them； and have been met with bold denials of public facts, and with timid personalities, and a little easy cant about Sensation* Novelists； but in reality those passages have been written on the same system as the nautical, legal, and other scenes: the best evidence has been ransacked； and a large portion of this evidence I shall be happy to show at my house to any brother writer who is disinterested

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