num_pages: 272
description: Herbert Powyss lives in an estate in the Welsh Marches with enough time and income to pursue a gentleman's fashionable investigations and experiments in botany. But he longs to make his mark in the field of science--something consequential enough to present to the Royal Society in London. He hits on a radical experiment in isolation: For seven years a subject will inhabit three rooms in the basement of the manor house fitted out with rugs books paintings and even a chamber organ. Meals will arrive thrice daily via a dumbwaiter. The solitude will be totally unrelieved by any social contact whatsoever; the subject will keep a diary of his daily thoughts and actions. The pay: fifty pounds per annum for life. Only one man is desperate to apply for the job: John Warlow a semi-literate laborer with a wife and six children to provide for. The experiment a classic Enlightenment exercise gone more than a little mad will have unforeseen consequences for all included.
language: English
title: The Warlow Experiment
publisher: Doubleday