I’ve just tonight run across the term “disappointment room”, in a short story. In the story, it was a small room, seemingly purpose built, or modified, in which a family might hide a physically or mentally handicapped child, back in the days when such a thing was felt to be shameful. Was such a thing actually common, or widespread, does anyone know? Wiki has no entry, and the few hits I get on Google seem to be lacking in authority.
I’ve heard many stories about hiding such children. But I never heard this term before. The room was always described as an attic or basement or bedroom, never a specifically modified sort of room.
Anyone else thinking of Born Of Man And Woman by Richard Matheson?
IIRC, Professor Farnsworth had an accusing parlour, but I don’t think they caught on.
People tend to use euphemisms to hide unpleasant truths, so I can’t see “disappointment room” ever becoming common usage. I’ve never come across it before.
The Secret Garden had one, but I don’t recall there being any special modifications to the room or anything indicating the room was purpose-built as anything other than a regular bedroom.
“Is this the disappointment room?”
“No.”
“…oh 
… Hey, hang on!”</python>
The disappointment room is where you go after you’ve been in the diswaiting room.
Nobody ever spends any time the diswaiting room, though.
Does the basement apartment Patrick Henry kept his wife incount?
I’d love to read a book about this, BTW.
FWIW, the Lemp Mansion in Saint Louis probably housed a child with Down Syndrome at one time, hidden away in an attic. Contemporary reports speak of passerby sometimes catching glimpses of a mysterious “monkey boy,” who (according to some believers in the paranormal) continues to haunt the place.
http://www.ghost-investigators.com/Stories/view_story.php?story_num=25
TVTropes calls this one Madwoman in the Attic; that page links to this Fortean Times message board thread which casts doubt on the real-world practice of “disappointment rooms”.
So no real evidence in favor of their existence and, given that this is Victorian America and Britain we’re talking about as opposed to Mycenaean Greece, that seems like a fairly good sign they never really existed.
I’m disappointed. I think I’ll go to the room.
I actually was reminded of Hugo, Bart’s deformed twin brother who lived in the attic, and his steady diet of fish heads.
It saved Homer and Marge’s marriage!
It made me think of The Lost Prince, a younger son of George V and Queen Mary who had epilepsy and some sort of learning disorder. He wasn’t shut up in a room, but they did try to keep him out of public sight and, as he grew older, he was sent to live in a remote cottage with a nanny to look after him.
I read that when I was very young. I had no idea that it was written by Matheson.
I was going to post about the Monster of Glamis, who was allegedly locked up in a secret room of Glamis Castle for about 100 years, but then found out that the story is probably not true at all, the invention of the sort of people who enjoy telling creepy stories. The Monster’s name was supposed to have been Thomas Bowes-Lyon, who was recorded as dying on the same day he was born in 1821. From this, some storyteller spun a tale of the concealment of his survival in secret.
Ironically, two direct descendants of his parents, Katherine Bowes-Lyon and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon (first cousins to Queen Elizabeth II, to whom they bore a distinct family resemblance) actually were locked up in an institution for their whole lives and their existence was concealed. There were even fake death reports for them in Burke’s Peerage. But because they lived in the 20th century, they were quietly confined to a mental hospital instead of a secret room.
If such a practice did exist, the family was doing their crazy relative a kindness; asylums were far, far worse.
Very true. Asylums in those days were little more than prisons for crazy people. Most didn’t even make a pretense of trying to help or cure their inmates.
If the relatives were actually mentally ill, then yes, I agree with you. As mentioned above, Patrick Henry was quite obviously dedicated to giving his wife the best life possible, given her ailment. However, in the story I read, and in supposedly real historic incidents, the children hidden away were mentally, or even just physically, handicapped, like the story of the Down’s child in the Lemp mansion.
I suppose whether it was actually a widespread practice is a whole seperate question, but I was really just curious about the existence of purpose-built or modified rooms, and if the term was really something a person from that era would have recognized.