The ballroom / Anna Hope

In the main I found this a miserably depressing read although in the final epilogue there is glimmer of hope. Set in a old "Mental Asylum" not currently PC but in 1911 that's what they were. Institutions where a young mill girl can be sent for breaking a window, a young widower who lost his wife & child can be sent for being "melancholic" & a young girl who refuses to eat, self harms is also locked away. The young doctor considered a failure by his family and wannabe musician at first seems pleasant wants to improve things for the inmates by music & weekly dances which he thinks will improve the well being of all patients, pretty obvious now, but then? He becomes interested in eugenics & the forced sterilisation of the lower classes to the point of forcibly performing a vasectomy on an unknowing patient. Slow at times & definitely dark & depressing epilogue excepted.