Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 1890–1915: Rereading the fin de siècle 9781526124357

Citation preview

Born Richard Bernard Heldmann, he began his literary career penning boys’ stories under his real name but, following a prison sentence for fraud, reinvented himself as ‘Richard Marsh’ in 1888. A versatile contributor to the literary and journalistic culture of his time, Marsh produced middlebrow genre fiction including Gothic, crime, humour, romance and adventure. His stories of shape-shifting monsters, daring but morally dubious heroes, lip-reading female detectives and objects that come to life helped to shape the genres with which we are familiar today.

The essays explore how Marsh’s fictions reflect contemporary themes and anxieties while often providing unexpected, subversive and even counterhegemonic takes on dominant narratives of gender, criminality, race and class, unsettling our perceptions of the fin de siècle. Victoria Margree is Principal Lecturer in the Humanities at the University of Brighton Daniel Orrells is Reader in Ancient Literature and Its Reception at King’s College London Minna Vuohelainen is Lecturer in English at City, University of London

Cover image: Harold Piffard (1867–1938), ‘An omnibus pickpocket’, in George R. Sims (ed.), Living London, 3 vols (London: Cassell, 1906). Private collection

Rereading the fin de siècle

Margree, Orrells and Vuohelainen (eds)

Building on a burgeoning interest in Marsh’s writing, this volume makes a significant contribution to Victorian and Edwardian literary studies by examining a broad array of Marsh’s genre fictions through a variety of critical lenses, including print culture, New Historicism, disability studies, genre theory, New Economic Criticism, gender theory, postcolonial studies, thing theory, psychoanalysis and object relations theory, producing innovative readings not only of Marsh but of the fin-de-siècle period.

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 1890–1915

This collection of essays questions our assumptions about the fin de siècle by exploring the fiction of Richard Marsh (1857–1915), one of the most prolific and popular authors of the period, whose bestselling Gothic novel The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula for several decades.

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 1890–1915

ISBN 978-1-5261-2434-0

9 781526 124340 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Edited by

Victoria Margree • Daniel Orrells • Minna Vuohelainen

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 1890–1915



Series editors: Anna Barton, Andrew Smith Editorial board: David Amigoni, Isobel Armstrong, Philip Holden, Jerome McGann, Joanne Wilkes, Julia M. Wright Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century seeks to make a significant intervention into the critical narratives that dominate conventional and established understandings of nineteenth-century literature. Informed by the latest developments in criticism and theory, the series provides a focus for how texts from the long nineteenth century, and more recent adaptations of them, revitalise our knowledge of and engagement with the period. It explores the radical possibilities offered by new methods, unexplored contexts and neglected authors and texts to re-map the literary-cultural landscape of the period and rigorously re-imagine its geographical and historical parameters. The series includes monographs, edited collections, and scholarly sourcebooks.

Already published Creating character: Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction   Helena Ifill Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and afterlives   Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne (eds) The Great Exhibition, 1851: A sourcebook   Jonathon Shears (ed.) Interventions: Rethinking the nineteenth century   Andrew Smith and Anna Barton (eds)



Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 1890–1915 Rereading the fin de siècle

Edited by Victoria Margree, Daniel Orrells and Minna Vuohelainen

Manchester University Press

 Copyright © Manchester University Press 2018 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN  978 1 52612 434 0  hardback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10/12 Adobe Caslon Pro by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire



Contents

List of figures vii List of contributors viii Acknowledgements xii   1

Introduction Victoria Margree, Daniel Orrells and Minna Vuohelainen

1

Part I: Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime   2   3   4

Tall tales and true: Richard Marsh and late Victorian journalism 27 Nick Freeman Mrs Musgrave’s stain of madness: Marsh and the female offender 45 Johan Höglund ‘The most dangerous thing in England’? Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories Minna Vuohelainen

63

Part II: Richard Marsh, masculinity and money   5

Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller: The Datchet Diamonds 87 Victoria Margree

v

Contents   6

‘The crowd would have it that I was a hero’: populism, New Humour and the male clerk in Marsh’s Sam Briggs adventures 106 Mackenzie Bartlett

Part III: Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic   7   8

‘In that Egyptian den’: situating The Beetle within the finde-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt Ailise Bulfin

127

Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in Richard Marsh’s The Goddess  148 Neil Hultgren

Part IV: Richard Marsh and object relations   9 10 11

‘Something was going from me – the capacity, as it were, to be myself ’: ‘transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Richard Marsh Graeme Pedlingham

171

Decadent aesthetics and Richard Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death 190 Daniel Orrells ‘Something on which you may exercise your ingenuity’: diamonds and curious collectables in the fin-de-siècle fiction of Richard Marsh   208 Jessica Allsop

Index225

vi



Figures

1.1 A portrait of Richard Marsh, Strand, 50 (November 1915), 573 (private collection). 4.1 W. R. S. Stott, ‘ “He caught hold of my hair, and with that dreadful knife sawed the whole of it from my head.” ’ Illustration, ‘The man who cut off my hair’, Strand, 42 (August 1911), 217 (private collection). 4.2 J. R. Skelton, ‘ “I lifted the poker and struck him again and again.” ’ Illustration, ‘The Restaurant Napolitain’, Strand, 43 (June 1912), 689 (private collection). 7.1 J. Tenniel and J. Swain, ‘In the desert! Shade of General Gordon (to John Bull). “Remember!” ’, Punch, 110 (28 March 1896), [151] (reproduced with the permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin). 7.2 C. J. Turner, title illustration, ‘The secret of Horeb-RaMen’, Idler, 35 (May 1909), 213 (reproduced with the permission of Ken Bryant [copyright holder] and the Board of Trinity College Dublin [archive]). 7.3 J. Williamson, ‘For when it said, “Keep still!” I kept still.’ Frontispiece, The Beetle (London: Skeffington, 1897) (reproduced with the permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin). 8.1 Tipu’s [Tippoo’s] tiger, mechanical organ, c.1793. Victoria and Albert Museum 2545(IS) (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London).  

5

69 70

128

131

133 153

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions. vii

Contributors

Jessica Allsop is a Teaching Fellow in Victorian English Literature at the University of Sussex. She specialises in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature, material culture and pathological masculinities. She holds a BA (Hons) degree, an MA and a PhD from Exeter University. Her research draws on object-centred approaches to literature and culture, from the Early Modern cabinets of curiosities to the Victorian museum and beyond. Her PhD thesis explores the curious objects and Victorian collectors of Gothically inflected literature, arising in the aftermath of a moment of material cultural confidence at midcentury. Focusing on the ambiguity of objects, it brings together literary criticism and historically grounded scholarship in order to analyse images of negative relations of collectors to things in literature depicting fascinating but frightening objects and emasculated subjects. Her current collaborative research is concerned with the former Cornwall County Lunatic Asylum, St Lawrence’s, and the particular material, regional, linguistic and historic constructions of mental health stigma that impact on identity. Mackenzie Bartlett works for the English Faculty at Mount Saint Vincent University. She holds a BA (Hons) from Acadia University, a MSt from the University of Oxford and a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on Gothic fiction and film, Victorian literature, history of science, and humour theory and criticism, and she has published on fin-de-siècle Gothic and spiritualism. She is currently working on publishing a paper she presented at the 2015 International Gothic Association Conference on monstrous expressions of laughter from Frankenstein to The Evil Dead. Ailise Bulfin is a Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Her research and teaching interests lie primarily in viii

Contributors the cultural history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on representations of Empire, war and catastrophe. Her forthcoming monograph Gothic Invasions: Imperialism, War and Fin-deSiècle Popular Fiction, 1890–1914 investigates the prevalent concern with invasion and war in fin-de-siècle popular fiction, tracing its roots to fears concerning the downside of Britain’s continuing imperial expansion. It was produced with the support of an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship. She has published book chapters and articles on several aspects of fin-de-siècle popular culture, including invasion fiction, Gothic tales of Egypt, Sherlock Holmes and the fiction of natural catastrophe. Nick Freeman is Reader in Late Victorian Literature at Loughborough University. He has published widely on the literature and culture of the 1890s, writing on ghost stories, decadent poetry, the criminal career of the serial poisoner George Chapman and H. G. Wells’ fairy tales, among other topics. He is the author of two monographs, Conceiving the City: London, Literature and Art, 1870–1914 (2007) and 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late-Victorian Britain (2011). He has also edited Arthur Symons’ Spiritual Adventures for the Modern Humanities Research Association (2017). Johan Höglund is Associate Professor at Linnaeus University, Sweden, and director of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. He holds degrees from Brown University, Rhode Island, and Uppsala University, Sweden. His research focuses on the relationship between imperialism and culture as it manifests in late Victorian, Nordic and US popular literature, film and computer games. He has published extensively on these topics in Gothic Studies, Game Studies, English Literature in Transition, Continuum and the European Journal of American Studies. He is the author of The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (2014) and coeditor of B-Movie Gothic: International Perspectives (with Justin D. Edwards, 2018), Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism (with Katarina Gregersdotter and Nicklas Hållén, 2015) and Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires (with Tabish Khair, 2012). Neil Hultgren is Associate Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he teaches courses in Victorian studies, postcolonial studies and the novel. He is the author of Melodramatic ix

Contributors Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes (2014). He has published essays on H. Rider Haggard, Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde. He is currently working on a project titled Cosmic Romance: The Universe in British Fiction, 1885–1925, which examines works of British science fiction and fantasy fiction that attempt to make sense of the cosmos. Victoria Margree is Principal Lecturer in the Humanities at the University of Brighton. She is a specialist in the literary and popular culture of the Victorian fin de siècle, with a particular interest in Gothic and crime fiction, and in representations of gender. Her contributions to journals include articles on Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, on the meta­ narratives of authorship in fictions by Marsh and Guy Boothby, on the ghost stories of Charlotte Riddell and the Gothic tales of Edith Nesbit. She is the author of Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone (forthcoming). She is cofounder of the Short Story Network and has a monograph in development on supernatural short fiction by women writers in the period 1860–1930. Daniel Orrells is Reader in Ancient Literature and its Reception at King’s College London. His research focuses on the reception of classical antiquity in modern intellectual and literary culture. He has published on Classics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and art and the classical tradition in twentieth-century African intellectual history. His publications include: A V. Y. Mudimbe Reader, coedited with PierrePhilippe Fraiture (2016), Sex: Antiquity and its Legacy (2015), Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (2011) and African Athena: New Agendas, coedited with Gurminder Bhambra and Tessa Roynon (2011). Graeme Pedlingham is Senior Lecturer in English and Convenor of Foundation Years (Arts & Humanities; Psychology; Social Sciences; Business, Management & Economics) at the University of Sussex. He has taught Gothic literature at both the universities of Sussex and Brighton, and has particular interests in horror (visual and literary), the fin de siècle, medical humanities (mental health, anxiety and popular culture) and transitional pedagogies. In 2013 he led an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded cultural engagement project on Richard Marsh culminating in a three-month exhibition, as well as the discovery of Marsh’s house in Three Bridges, Crawley. His current projects include research on neglected British horror writers of the period 1886–1926, developing widening participation initiatives in the Arts and x

Contributors Humanities, and exploring methods for effectively supporting student transitions into Higher Education. Minna Vuohelainen is Lecturer in English at City, University of London. She studied International History at the London School of Economics and English Literature at King’s College London before completing a PhD on ‘The Popular Fiction of Richard Marsh: Literary Production, Genre, Audience’ at Birkbeck, University of London. Her current research focuses on fin-de-siècle print culture, the Gothic, literary representations of London, spatial theory and Thomas Hardy. Her publications include the monograph Richard Marsh (2015), the coedited essay collection Interpreting Primo Levi: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2015) and scholarly articles in Victorian Periodicals Review, English Studies, Journal of Literature and Science and Clues. She has also produced critical editions of Marsh’s The Complete Judith Lee Adventures, The Complete Adventures of Sam Briggs, The Goddess: A Demon and The Beetle: A Mystery.

xi

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank Andrew Smith and Anna Barton, series editors for Manchester University Press’ Rethinking the Nineteenth Century series, and Matthew Frost, Senior Commissioning Editor at Manchester University Press, for their guidance, support and efficiency at all stages of the publishing process. Paddy Maguire, Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton, supported the symposium ‘Richard Marsh: Re-Reading the Fin de Siècle’ in 2012, from which several of the collection’s chapters were developed. The editors would also like to thank their colleagues at their respective universities for numerous supportive conversations, and their students for often fascinating classroom discussions of Marsh’s work. We would like to express our gratitude to our contributors, without whose diligence and commitment this volume would not have been possible. Finally, though, we would like to give special thanks to Johan Höglund, who contributed his invaluable expertise on Marsh and Marsh scholarship at an early stage and was instrumental in getting the project off the ground.

xii

1

••

Introduction Victoria Margree, Daniel Orrells and Minna Vuohelainen

Rediscovering Richard Marsh

In the early twenty-first century, late Victorian and Edwardian culture has become a profitable commodity. Scenes of a foggy, dimly lit, Jack-the-Ripper London, a crowded metropolis inhabited by prostitutes, criminals, immigrants and detectives and cluttered with strange and remarkable objects and curiosities, now populate our c­ ontemporary imaginations, thanks to novels, films, television, radio and theatre. Academic studies ask us to look to the fin de siècle as a mirror upon our own society, a period in which were established many of the dominant facets of the culture we confront today. This volume focuses on one of the most popular and prolific writers of the fin de siècle who has, however, largely been written out of the literary history of the period. The ‘universal literary provider’ Richard Marsh (pseudonym of Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857–1915; see figure 1.1) was one of the motors behind the thriving, commoditised fiction industry of the fin de siècle, and is now increasingly recognised as an i­nfluential popular writer of the period.1 His best-known novel, The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula (also 1897) well into the twentieth century, but Marsh was more than just a one-hit wonder; his production comprises more than eighty volumes published under this pseudonym, his real name and anonymously, and spans a range of genres, including Gothic, crime, sensation, thriller, romance and humour. Until the First World War, Marsh was a high-profile popular author who was published and reviewed alongside such writers as Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle and compared to leading writers of sensation and Gothic fiction such as Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allan Poe. However, Marsh was a victim of his own success within the capitalist literary system he helped to fuel. His short stories and novels were produced to satisfy an 1

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture ever-increasing audience that throve upon topicality and continually demanded new pleasures and satisfactions. While Marsh’s work helped to create the familiar collection of leitmotifs recycled in today’s neoVictorian landscape, such middlebrow writing was not deemed valuable enough aesthetically by twentieth-­century literary critics to be read and examined in the decades after his death. This apparent conflict between economic and aesthetic value is central to Marsh’s career as a writer and to the literary culture of the period more broadly, and is a key theme of the present collection. Marsh belonged to a generation of professional authors born at the mid-century who benefited from a transformation of the literary market at the end of the century. Some of his popular contemporaries – Conan Doyle, Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard – have achieved canonical status, their most successful literary creations widely known among the general public. Others – Guy Boothby, Fergus Hume, Marie Corelli, Hall Caine – were successful at the time but have not transcended their period. By contrast, the ‘serious’ literature of the period tended to prioritise the realist mode favoured by Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, or anticipated modernist experimentation, as with the work of decadents and New Women such as Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee and George Egerton. The fin-de-siècle period entrenched a rhetorical distinction between serious and popular fiction, between art and mass culture, and the judgements of subsequent literary historians have often reinforced these dichotomies. This volume seeks to contribute to rectifying the neglect of important authors that canonisation produced, arguing that Marsh confronts us as a figure who is key to understanding the literary culture of the period. Marsh appears in many ways as an exemplary figure of the New Grub Street, and therefore as one whose career can tell us much about the development of the mass market and the challenges of professional authorship in the period. At the same time, however, as Peter McDonald has demonstrated, this was a period in which ‘avant-garde and “popular” culture’ were being ‘reciprocally defined’, albeit often through ‘antagonism’, and McDonald cautions against being ‘blind[ed] … in advance to the possibility of a significant relationship between’ them.2 An argument made in several chapters in this collection is that one can find in Marsh’s work elements that connect him with the ‘other side’ of this supposed division – with the tropes of aestheticism, for example, or with modernism’s preoccupation with city space – as well as a marked degree of self-consciousness about the aesthetic debates of the period. 2

Introduction Marsh’s centrality to the literary production of the era has to do with his popularity, influence and longevity. It is difficult to think of a contemporary author of similar stature who possessed his versatility and ­sustained prolificacy. For over twenty-five years, he entranced late Victorian and Edwardian readers with popular tales of horror, humour, romance and crime. He helped to shape the genres of fiction with which we are familiar today, displaying a willingness to borrow from both literary and non-literary modes of writing and combine their elements in new ways. Study of his work thus helps illuminate the fluid and shifting boundaries of genre in this period. However, a second reason for returning to his fiction has to do not so much with centrality but with peripherality; Marsh occupied, for reasons that will become clear when we consider his life, a delicately marginal placing with respect to hegemonic culture. As Johan Höglund argues, Marsh ‘speaks from a slightly unstable position with a voice that is never quite that of Anglo-Saxon, male authority’.3 A journalist as well as a novelist, Marsh engaged in his fictions with a host of fin-de-siècle debates, but in ways that were often resistant to the more solidified positions – either very conservative or very progressive – adopted in the fin-de-siècle fictions that have become canonical. His treatments of issues such as gender, race, degeneration, criminality and urban and imperial problems are often ideologically ambivalent, even counter-hegemonic. Marsh’s novels, Höglund concludes, ‘often interrogate and implode the pervading discourses of the time’ so that ‘dissonant voices’ are foregrounded in the ‘discursive discord’ of his fiction.4 A study of his work thus has the potential to challenge scholarly interpretations of the period’s dominant ideologies and politics. This volume therefore seeks to question the security of our assumptions about the fin de siècle through an exploration of Marsh’s fiction; to understand who Marsh was; and to examine what his success tells us about the culture of a turn-of-the-century Britain that seems at once so like and unlike our own. If we want a fuller understanding of the complexities of fin-de-siècle literary culture beyond the canon created in the twentieth century, it is high time to turn back to one of the most prolific authors of the period.

Richard Marsh’s life

While it is tempting to approach an author’s work through a consideration of his or her life, many facts of Richard Marsh’s life remain shrouded in uncertainty. Marsh himself guarded his privacy jealously, issuing only 3

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture one interview in this era of celebrity culture, and that posthumously in November 1915.5 What we do know of his life builds a contradictory picture of a man who began his career as an author of religious juvenile fiction but ended it as a producer of often cynical adult stories; who was known for his insouciance and love of sport, entertainment and travel but who also kept up a punishing writing schedule of a quarter of a million words a year; whose politics were supposedly Tory but whose writing often sides with misfits and the destitute; who appears fascinated with gender and social transgression and is yet often unable to grant his subversive characters a happy ending; who was in all likelihood half-Jewish and yet expressed xenophobic sentiments in his writing. Marsh had a love of double identities, having tried on, in the course of his life, the roles of a swindler, an impersonator and a pseudonymous author, and his fiction often thematises the blurring of identity. Marsh was born Richard Bernard Heldmann in St John’s Wood, a wealthy but slightly dubious area just north of central London, on 12 October 1857. He was the eldest child of the German and probably originally Jewish lace merchant Joseph Heldmann (c. 1827–96) and Emma Heldmann, née Marsh (c. 1830–1911), the daughter of the Nottinghamshire lace-manufacturer Richard Marsh. In 1857 the Heldmann household was in turmoil as Joseph Heldmann came to figure in significant and xenophobic bankruptcy proceedings against his inlaws, whom he had defrauded to the tune of £16,000 in the course of managing the London branch of the family business. Joseph Heldmann subsequently reinvented himself as a private tutor, eventually running Brunswick House School in Hammersmith in West London. Although Marsh would later claim to have been educated at Eton and Oxford, it is more likely that he was a pupil at the family establishment, an experience he may have made use of in the school stories he would subsequently produce as Bernard Heldmann. Bernard Heldmann’s earliest publications appeared in the juvenile papers Peep-Show, Young Folks, Quiver and Young England in 1879–80, but his big break came in 1880, when he established a connection with G. A. Henty’s boys’ weekly Union Jack (1880–83), for which he would pen a number of school and adventure tales before being promoted to coeditor in October 1882. The apprenticeship on the staff of the Union Jack served Heldmann well; he learnt to produce fiction to required specifications, deadlines and audience needs, broadened his generic range and gained commercial and editorial experience.6 Yet even this earliest literary production showed a certain ambivalence towards what are 4

Introduction

1.1  A portrait of Richard Marsh, Strand, 50 (November 1915), 573.

5

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture g­ enerally accepted as the guiding principles of boys’ fiction in this period. Heldmann’s boys’ stories frequently displayed emotion, regret and even homoeroticism in an imperialist climate that was supposed to promote boys’ masculine and ruthless characteristics, his final serial ‘A couple of scamps’ (1882–83), for example, veering precariously between a didactic boys’ story, a Newgate novel and a penny dreadful.7 Even this earliest work, therefore, suggests the limits of reading the period only through its canonical authors – Kipling, Haggard, Henty and Talbot Baines Reed. By spring 1883 Heldmann’s career was unravelling due to his precarious economic circumstances, and the author embarked on a double life as a swindler living off bad cheques under different gentlemanly guises. The press reports of Heldmann’s criminal adventures reveal his ability to play on the snobbery of late nineteenth-century society, his capacity to reinvent himself and his fascination with criminality and duality. Heldmann was caught in February 1884 and sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labour. After his release in October 1885, he returned to West London and started a family with a woman called Ada Kate Abbey, with whom he went on to have six children, five of whom survived. Heldmann, who had been practically disinherited by his family, returned to writing fiction, but now under a pseudonym: by summer 1888, he had become ‘Richard Marsh’.8 The pseudonym, a combination of Heldmann’s own first name and his mother’s maiden name, represents Heldmann’s latest attempt at reinventing himself under difficult monetary circumstances. It may also have been an attempt to distance himself from his paternal lineage; as Höglund observes in his chapter in this collection, according to the pseudo-scientific laws of heredity that informed the racial and criminal anthropology of the period, Heldmann’s crimino-Jewish lineage placed him on a sure path to criminality. Indeed, Marsh’s 1890s fiction manifests a disturbing strain of anti-Semitic prejudice, possibly indicative of a revulsion of feeling or even of self-loathing in the aftermath of his prison sentence for fraud, with its close semblance to his father’s earlier disgrace. He continued to write prolifically as ‘Richard Marsh’ until his death at the age of fifty-seven on 9 August 1915, having produced seventy-six volumes and at least 250 short stories since adopting the pen name in 1888.

Richard Marsh and the literary marketplace

Just as his financial position had a profound impact on Marsh’s life, so his novels and short stories reflected the specific economic context of 6

Introduction turn-of-the-century Britain. While Bernard Heldmann had benefited from a juvenile publishing boom in the 1880s, Richard Marsh’s professional success coincided with changes within the publishing industry that created unprecedented opportunities for professional authors of adult fiction. Following the 1870 Education Act, Britain achieved near universal literacy by the end of the century. Literate and numerate urban workers benefited from increases in real income and leisure time and also had time at their disposal during the commute on public transport. The publishing industry could meet this new market due to beneficial financial changes such as the removal of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’; technological innovations that made printing, distribution and advertising faster and cheaper; and a transformation in the forms in which fiction was consumed, resulting from the publication of an increasing number of weekly and monthly fiction papers, 6s. one-volume first editions and cheap reprints. The Society of Authors, of which Marsh was a member, was established in 1884 to offer writers legal and commercial advice in recognition of the increasing professionalisation of authorship. While for the popular author these developments signified opportunity, for conservative commentators they signalled the beginning of the end of ‘Culture’. Such concerns over cultural decay were most notoriously articulated by George Gissing in his novel New Grub Street (1891), which deplored the demise of the man of letters in the semi-literary universe of the ‘quartereducated’.9 Value was central to the period’s debates on leisure reading as readers and reading practices became loci of anxiety: should reading be purely for matters of instruction in knowledge and morality, or could one without harm read for pleasure? This dilemma is wittily visualised in the image by Harold Piffard (who illustrated some of Marsh’s fictions) that features on the front cover of this volume. ‘An Omnibus Pickpocket’ depicts a commuter so immersed in her reading that she is oblivious to the activity of the apparently respectable woman next to her.10 In posing questions about the dangers of reading popular fiction, monetary versus other kinds of value, gender, criminality and the performance of ­middle-class respectability, Piffard’s illustration brings together many of the themes that are central to Marsh’s fictions and highlights the importance of looking more closely at our perceptions of the fin de siècle. Popular authors such as Marsh faced hostility from the cultural elite for their willingness to cater for the ‘low’ tastes of the mainstream readership for financial reward. Marsh responded to critical attacks against his prolificacy by pointing out that authors had little control over the publication dates of their books and by emphasising the imaginative pleasures 7

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture of storytelling.11 Yet the presence in his work of numerous struggling authors, journalists and dramatists living precariously close to destitution demonstrates an ambivalence towards the profession from which he made his living. The 1900 novel Ada Vernham, Actress, for example, traces the failing fortunes of a struggling theatre company, commenting wryly that ‘[a]ll people who write seem poor’ and that ‘literary quality was not of great importance’ in a cultural climate in which ‘a fiasco is a play which doesn’t pay its expenses’.12 The short story ‘For debt’, published anonymously in the Windsor Magazine in 1902 and then reissued in Under One Flag in 1906, follows its protagonist, ‘a poor devil of an author’, into debtors’ prison, repeating the refrain that ‘circumstances have been too strong’ for the well-intentioned writer and his fellow prisoners.13 Deploying the unusual combination of second-person address and the present tense, this seemingly immediate, realist and personal account forces its reader to sympathise with the literary professional living on the breadline.14 Texts such as these could be read, as Victoria Margree argues, as ‘self-conscious reflections on … professional authorship’ and on ‘the competing values and pressures that must be negotiated by the professional author’ who would thrive in a competitive market.15 Marsh’s career was played out in the pages of popular fiction papers and one-volume first editions. All his seventy-six volumes, issued by sixteen different publishers, were brought out in the shorter, lighter and cheaper one-volume format that had by the mid-1890s replaced the extortionately priced three-decker novel. During the course of his career, he also contributed to a great number of weekly and monthly magazines, which were particularly suited to the leisure and consumption patterns of newly literate urban workers, being inexpensive, light to carry on public transport, generously illustrated and with a high short-story content. From the time that the first work attributed to ‘Richard Marsh’ appeared in Belgravia in 1888, Marsh published short and serial fiction in magazines including Household Words, the Cornhill, Home Chimes, the Gentleman’s Magazine, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Longman’s Magazine, All the Year Round, Answers, the Idler, the Harmsworth (London) Magazine, Pearson’s Weekly, Pearson’s Magazine, the Windsor, Cassell’s Magazine, and, most importantly, the Strand Magazine, which would emerge as his preferred magazine contact by the early years of the twentieth century. Marsh’s sustained success was due partly to his workmanlike attitude to his profession and partly to his ability to gauge the mood, tastes and reading needs of his audience. His career shows evidence of professional dedication, effective and established working practices and apprecia8

Introduction tion of the importance of networking.16 Marsh’s writing patterns show a remarkable uniformity that testifies to his ability to write fiction to agreed lengths and tight deadlines. In the twentieth century his production rates, which in the 1890s had fluctuated significantly, settled down to a steady three volumes a year, targeted at slightly different audiences, in an effort not to flood the market. At the same time, the critical reception of his work began to grow more appreciative, as reviewers came to recognise him as a reliable producer of well-written genre fiction.17 His continued success was connected to his ability to reach out to middlebrow readers, including women, and, as discussed below, to his talent in identifying and addressing topical concerns in his fiction. While Marsh worked effectively across genres, examination of his fiction also reveals that he was able to adapt and recombine narrative conventions in ways that illuminate the porousness of the boundary between generic forms. One excellent example is his 1901 novel The Joss: A Reversion, which, like many Marsh novels, commences in the realist mode but soon mutates towards Gothic and romance. The beginning of the novel’s multiple first-person narrative details from her own perspective the plights of impecunious shop-girl Pollie Blyth and her friend Emily Purvis, who find themselves unfairly dismissed from work. The timely news of an unexpected inheritance swiftly moves the novel generically from realism to romance, the romantically inclined but hard-pressed Emily’s comment that she had always ‘been looking … for a touch of romance to give existence a real live flavour’ marking Marsh’s awareness of his lower-middle-class target audience’s need for escapism.18 However, upon taking possession of Pollie’s deceased uncle Benjamin Batters’ derelict house, the girls soon come to suspect that they may not be the only inhabitants of a building that is also besieged by mysterious and hostile ‘Orientals’ (p. 183). The double motif of domestic entrapment and pursuit by bloodthirsty foreigners shifts the novel towards the subgenres of the female and the imperial Gothic, while the novel’s final section, narrated by seafaring adventurer Captain Max Lander, seems modelled upon the masculine quest romance genre associated with Haggard and Boothby. Lander’s recollective narrative shifts the action to southern China where Lander discovers Batters, who has allowed himself to be mutilated by a Chinese tribe into a ‘hideous’ and ‘obscene’ god, the ‘joss’ of the novel’s title (p. 211). Lander recounts assisting Batters to escape to England in return for a share of the treasure that this rather crooked deity has stolen, and the reader discovers that the mystery of the novel’s ‘haunted’ house is that the supposedly deceased Batters is in fact within 9

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture it, hiding from the Chinese priests who are trying to recover not only their treasure but also their god (p. 46). The novel’s collision of generic registers helps to produce an ideological indeterminacy about the text, its multiple narrative perspectives contributing to the overall impression of the ‘discursive discord’ characteristic of Marsh’s fiction.19 On the one hand, its depiction of barbarous ‘Orientals’ is in keeping with the period’s assumptions about British racial superiority. At the same time, however, the Englishman who would be king is a monstrous figure whose scheme of imperial plunder fails to deliver the hoped-for rewards. Finally, in a seeming ‘reversion’ at its end to its popular romance mode, the ‘Author’s postscript’ sympathetically rewards its female characters with romantic and financial fulfilment. While The Joss exemplifies Marsh’s willingness to recycle elements from earlier successful novels, Pollie’s remark that ‘writing novels ought to have been [Batters’] trade’ also testifies to the imaginative acrobatics required of the popular author who depended upon established generic conventions but had to generate endless novelty (p. 63). Indeed, some of Marsh’s fantasy fictions could even be interpreted as metanarratives that comment on the role of imagination in the writing process and establish a commonality between magicians and popular authors, both of whom are engaged in the task of making the audience suspend disbelief.20 While Marsh’s fiction continued to appeal to the reading public into the interwar years, when film and stage adaptations of The Beetle also appeared, his work was largely forgotten after the Second World War, perhaps because his bestselling novel lent itself less easily than Dracula to successful cinematic adaptation. It may also be the case, however, that the very qualities that secured Marsh’s commercial success during his lifetime militated against the endurance of his works; his prolific output produced work of varying quality and sometimes formulaic nature, while the very topicality of his fiction could hinder translation to subsequent periods at a time when formalist critics were attempting to establish a canon of English Literature by focusing on the ‘timeless’ qualities of a ‘Great Tradition’. Critical interest in Marsh’s oeuvre, primarily The Beetle, has slowly gathered pace since the University of Luton brought The Beetle  back into print in 1994, was accelerated by Julian Wolfreys’ Broadview edition of this novel in 2004, and has particularly benefited from the effort of Valancourt Books to reprint Marsh’s lesser-known works in reliable critical editions. However, most critical studies of Marsh’s fiction have tended to explore gender issues, the urban experience or racial identity, almost exclusively in The Beetle, overlooking the 10

Introduction diversity of his literary production.21 Very recent criticism has begun to acknowledge his generic hybridity and versatility and the potential offered by a consideration of what Marsh can tell us about the culture and the literary market of the fin de siècle.22

Rereading the fin de siècle through Richard Marsh

Scholarship describes the fin de siècle as a period ridden with anxiety. In Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst’s influential formulation, this anxiety proceeded from the ‘ambivalence of modernity’.23 In the closing years of a century that had witnessed unprecedented economic, social and technological transformations, it seemed to many that the very fabric of Britain was in the process of being unpicked, with growing contestation of mid-Victorian gender norms and the emergence of a newly literate, urbanised lower middle class with its distinctive cultural forms and preferences. The fin de siècle was, above all, a time of transition – from the old to the new, the Victorian to the modern. Late Victorian responses varied from despair at what seemed to be the dismantling of the very structures deemed integral to civilisation, to a hopeful belief in imminent deliverance from oppressive Victorianism. Unsurprisingly, this was also a time of aesthetic innovation. As the three-decker novel gave way to other fictional forms, writers were increasingly emancipated from the strictures of Grundyism. Naturalist writers and dramatists became increasingly frank in their representations of sexual relations. Aesthetes and decadents self-consciously styled themselves in opposition to the aesthetic, moral and philosophical norms of earlier Victorian writers and artists, favouring an experimentation that sowed the seeds of modernism.24 Perhaps the dynamism and instability of the fin de siècle can be best understood in relation to the enormous contestation of traditional values that was taking place. Issues of value recur repeatedly in Marsh’s fiction, often in the context of economic relations and objects that do not straightforwardly fit into the capitalist economic system. Jewels solicit but frustrate attempts at professional evaluation in the diamond fictions; characters ponder their own and others’ moral value in the crime fictions; and literary and aesthetic value become objects of reflection in many texts. The problem of art’s value is a central theme in Marsh’s 1898 ­collection Curios, for example, where the two bachelors Pugh and Tress vie for ownership of rare and beautiful collectables such as the valuable piece of furniture of ‘The adventure of the cabinet’. Pugh and Tress’ struggle for the possession of the cabinet reflects a growing middle-class 11

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture interest in valuable collectables and curios in the aftermath of the dispersal of British aristocratic collections of Ancien Régime art. The robbery of art in the tale is paralleled by the story’s exploration of the art of robbery, just as the collection’s title refers not only to the objects in the stories but also to Pugh and Tress and their adventures. The reader is invited to consider the relative aesthetic and monetary value of beautiful, collectable objects and quirky popular tales. The theme of literary value is explored in this volume in the contributions by Nick Freeman and Daniel Orrells. Freeman’s chapter considers Marsh’s connections with the late Victorian tabloid press typified by George Purkess’ Illustrated Police News. Arguing that the ‘trickster’ and ‘con-man’ Marsh drew on the language of popular journalism to confer plausibility to his ‘outlandish’ tales, Freeman reads several of Marsh’s short fictions to demonstrate how they drew upon salacious subject matter such as the infamous Whitechapel murders of 1888. Freeman nonetheless proposes that Marsh’s stories, which often end with narrative irresolution and uncertainty, raise many of the same questions about the nature, practice and limits of realism as do the very different approaches of more esteemed writers of the period such as Henry James. Orrells’ chapter on The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death (1892/1897), a novel that revolves around a deadly yet beautiful antique cabinet, argues that Marsh’s self-reflexive text engages with the ‘decadent culture of collecting bizarre curios and sensations’, posing questions about the pleasures and the dangers of its own consumption as cultural commodity. Marsh is not simply parodying aesthetic philosophies in the manner of much populist writing of the period but making ‘strategic and sensitive use of the tropes and structures of aestheticist writing’, emerging as a significant disseminator of ideas associated with Thomas De Quincey, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Consideration of Marsh’s work, Orrells argues, thereby calls into question any easy division of 1890s British literary culture into highbrow avant-garde literature and lowbrow entertainment. If transition and transformation were the keynotes of the fin de siècle, it is perhaps unsurprising that the possibility of a catastrophic mutation or disintegration should have been a dominant concern. The increasingly influential pseudo-science of degeneration theory announced the possibility of individuals, ‘races’ or nations reversing backwards along the evolutionary line, pointing as evidence to the supposed decline of the once great civilisations of Egypt, Greece and Rome; to poverty, crime and disease on the streets of ‘modern’ London; to Darwinian descriptions of evolutionary change; and to works of art and philosophy that, for 12

Introduction instance, the doctor-turned-journalist Max Nordau announced to be the morbid products of degenerating individuals.25 In the period’s canonical Gothic fictions, this notion of mutability and mutation is engaged through the register of horror. By the end of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), human scientific control over the deep laws of nature has been revealed as illusory, as Jekyll transitions uncontrollably into the bestial Mr Hyde. Wells’ Prendrick, in The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), effects his deliverance back to London only to be haunted by the perception that its human inhabitants are, like the beast men he has just escaped, on the brink of transitioning back into a state of animality. More typically in these fictions, however, it is women who appear as volatile, fluctuating, changeable. In Stoker’s Dracula, the femininity of young, virginal women is revealed to be untrustworthy, a gratifying but deceptive screen for a troubling, potentially monstrous, reality within, while the conclusions of texts by Haggard and Arthur Machen see dangerous and fascinating women metamorphose before horrified male eyes into organisms from the evolutionary past. In Marsh’s fiction, the fin-de-siècle preoccupation with instability is evinced through the many metamorphic entities that pervade his stories. The eponymous villain of The Beetle is a protean being par excellence; a shape-shifter by nature, none of its apparent qualities prove fixed, frustrating attempts by its pursuers to identify its age, gender or species. In a reading that brings together Bill Brown’s thing theory and British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas’ conception of ‘transformational objects’, Graeme Pedlingham in this volume argues for the Beetle as a ‘transformational thing’ – something that, in virtue of its own lack of internal structure, unlocks instability in those it comes into contact with. Pedlingham shows how the horror of the creature resides not just in its proclivity for torture and sexual depravity but also in this capacity to transform the self in the direction of an otherness that has always existed as potential, mutating the virile politician Paul Lessingham into the image of a ‘ “hysterical woman” ’ and the New Womanish Marjorie Lindon into a helpless ‘victim’. Pedlingham sees this as characteristic of Marsh’s Gothic output and analyses as similar transformational things the apparently material objects of the Indian idol in The Goddess: A Demon (1900) and the Chinese figurine of The Joss. As Jessica Allsop observes in her chapter, however, Marsh’s preoccupation with metamorphic entities is not limited to his Gothic fiction. In her discussion of Marsh’s jewel fictions, Allsop shows how diamonds feature as unstable, metamorphosing stones; changing colour, altering in size, 13

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture s­ uccumbing to inexplicable ­‘diseases’, they reveal the limits of putatively expert knowledge and frustrate attempts to render them exchange commodities on the market. Orrells observes that Marsh ‘was writing at a particular moment in the history of the commodity’ when, as Pedlingham notes, the world was ‘seemingly occupied by an ever-increasing quantity of objects’ – ­knick-knacks, curios, bric-a-brac, unleashed by Victorian capitalism with its improved manufacturing and consequent consumerism. The chapters by Pedlingham and Allsop testify, however, to the ways in which Marsh’s objects refuse to remain object-like or to satisfy desire, instead becoming active agents that destabilise subject–object relations and threaten those who would possess them with a radical dispossession of self. They show how this threat to the subject can be mined by Marsh for the purposes of horror, or comedy, or both. Taken together, the chapters suggest Marsh as a writer in whom the fin-de-siècle perception of instability is realised with particular vividness and remorselessness. The usually male and middle-class protagonists of fictions by Stoker, Wells or Machen may emerge more or less intact, even regenerated, from their encounters with usually feminine mutability; Marsh’s protagonists should not expect such good fortune. Late Victorian fears around impermanency also focused upon Empire. While the British Empire had expanded and consolidated over the course of the nineteenth century, it was also becoming increasingly subject to question, in relation both to its capacity and its right to endure. Anti-colonial rebellions in India, Egypt and Sudan had brought growing attention to the difficulty and the cost of maintaining colonial rule, while voices were emerging that questioned the justice of European domination at all, stimulated by popular revulsion at the estimated eight million deaths caused by Belgian colonial engagements in the Congo.26 Although not typically a writer of imperial adventure stories in the manner of a Haggard or a Boothby, Marsh nonetheless constantly referenced Britain’s imperial engagements in fictions that probed their significance for ‘home’. As Allsop’s chapter makes clear, the diamonds that prove so troublesome for British collectors, experts and merchants ­possess an exoticism in virtue of their foreign origins that elicits speculative frenzy, but it is also these origins that undermine their use or exchange value as the stones of ‘The diamonds’ are diagnosed as being compromised by ‘a sort of disease to which African diamonds are peculiarly liable’. The emphasis on African pathology seems in line with racist tropes of Africa, but another reference to the diamonds as looking as 14

Introduction though ‘a little spot of blood had got into the very centre of the stone’ serves, Allsop argues, as a ‘lingering reminder of violence done in the name of avarice and Empire’. It is ultimately unclear how far these stories can be read as critiques of Empire and colonial violence, and how far as self-interested warnings against exposing British markets to unreliable and impure foreign influences. A similar ambivalence is identified in Ailise Bulfin’s chapter on Marsh’s contribution to the subgenre of Egyptian Gothic fiction. Bulfin discusses how British quasi-colonial competition over Egyptian territories and the Suez Canal led from the 1860s to Egypt turning Gothic in the literary imagination, spawning numerous tales featuring ancient Egyptian curses and reanimated malevolent mummies. With its vengeful supernatural entity emerging ‘from an “Egyptian den” of “demons” to wreak havoc in London’, Bulfin notes that The Beetle ‘shares some of the key characteristics of these Egyptian-themed tales and was likely the best-selling of them’. Examining it alongside comparable tales by Conan Doyle, Stoker, Haggard and Boothby, Bulfin shows how The Beetle both conforms to many ‘Gothic Egyptian genre conventions’ and ‘dramatically exceeds’ them. Her reading reveals the political and ideological instability of the novel, showing how while it can be interpreted as a conservative text that paints a picture of a ‘monstrous Egypt’ in need of being ‘suppressed’, it also identifies British foreign policy on Egypt as a likely source of Egyptian nationalist and religious ‘grievance’. This suggestion of colonial critique in Marsh’s novels also emerges in Neil Hultgren’s contribution on Marsh’s slightly later Gothic novel The Goddess. A grisly murder in the aptly named ‘Imperial Mansions’ in central London sets off a murder mystery involving a malevolent, seemingly supernatural entity, the eponymous ‘Goddess’. The novel’s denouement, however, reveals the Goddess to be an Indian automaton, a clockwork machine, whose influence on the novel’s British characters reveals their imperial guilt and paranoia. As Hultgren shows, The Goddess looks back to a fear of exotic automata such as Tipu’s tiger, a late eighteenthcentury mechanical toy from India that enacts the brutal mauling of an Englishman by a tiger. In Marsh’s novel, the eventual dissection of the Goddess’ machinery functions as an aesthetic strategy that strips the imperial Gothic of its mysticism and, through a negotiation of the plot machinery of the fantastic, interrogates the formulaic genre conventions associated with imperial Gothic fiction. The novel therefore reveals a significant degree of authorial self-consciousness in the manipulation of Gothic genre conventions. 15

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture British fears about decline of Empire were strongly connected to a­ nxieties about changing gender roles. The demonic idol of The Goddess, for instance, points to the dangers of the female in Marsh’s fiction. As political speeches from the period show, it was feared that Empire would falter for a lack of strong men to defend it.27 Fictions including Dracula and, it must be said, The Beetle, revolve around scenarios of what Stephen Arata terms ‘reverse colonization’, in which its overseas engagements rebound upon Britain in the form of the arrival at the heart of Empire of foreign monsters intent on subordinating the Imperial master.28 In Dracula, it is women who are the weak links, proving susceptible to the foreign invader’s sexual fascination, and thereby putting to the test the strength of British male virility. One of the contexts for this preoccupation is a crisis in masculinity that scholars have identified as erupting at the fin de siècle.29 Earlier narratives of hegemonic masculinity became difficult to maintain in the face of a series of perceived threats that emerged from the women’s rights campaign and the New Women, but also, as Andrew Smith has contended, a troubling of traditional understandings of men’s nature and role that emerged from within masculine culture itself.30 Scientific and medical discourses such as sexology described male nature in disturbing ways, pointing to the multiple forms in which the supposedly normal masculine sexual drive could ‘go astray’ and emerge as ‘perversion’.31 This coincided with the increasing visibility of a male homosexual culture and with the emergence – related to decadence and aestheticism – of the figure of the dandy, whose emphasis on physical appearance, on artificiality and excessive refinement, contrasted with older ideas of manliness.32 Gender has been one of the key lenses through which The Beetle has been examined. One of the characteristic features of the creature is its indeterminate gender, its capacity to shift between seeming maleness and femaleness, as well as its ability to bring about regendering in its victims. Scholars have tended to read this as an anti-New Woman text, yet in this volume, several contributors suggest that Marsh’s most famous novel might not be best representative of his treatment of this phenomenon. Victoria Margree’s chapter on crime thriller The Datchet Diamonds (1898) notes how this text seems ultimately to make accommodation for its New Womanish character, Charlie Wentworth, crediting her with perspicacity and allowing her to emerge a likeable figure. Minna Vuohelainen’s contribution discusses one of Marsh’s most vivid female characters, the lip-reading, jiu-jitsu-practising female detective Judith Lee (1911–16), who embodies many of the liminal characteristics of Marsh’s earlier female monsters. Yet Lee’s radical alterity, fearless inde16

Introduction pendence and troubling of easy binaries represent an engaging model of early twentieth-century professional femininity. These chapters suggest new departures for scholarship on Marsh’s representations of women, and, perhaps, on fin-de-siècle fictions more generally, pointing to the presence even in the works of male popular fiction writers of representations more s­ ympathetic to the New Woman than the fearful, misogynistic responses of Stoker, Haggard or Machen. Several chapters in this volume take up the issue of Marsh’s representations of masculinity. An exhortation that recurs across Marsh’s fiction – almost compulsively in The Beetle – is to ‘play the man’, seemingly testifying to a sense of masculinity as something that is performed and as an ideal that is only perilously achieved.33 Two chapters address t­ hemselves particularly to the theme of imperilled masculinity, and they do so by linking this to questions of economics. Margree’s contribution on The Datchet Diamonds identifies how the financial impecuniousness of the novel’s protagonist is linked to the undermining of his masculine status, leading him to reject the clerking life in favour of financial speculation and then a dalliance with crime. While Margree’s chapter also addresses the questions of crime and criminality that are the focus of the first section of this volume, her emphasis on masculinity makes for a useful comparison with Mackenzie Bartlett’s chapter on Marsh’s comic stories about the lower-middle-class clerk Sam Briggs, which were published in the Strand Magazine between 1904 and 1915. Sam is, in the early tales, an unabashed figure of degeneracy, small of stature and physically timid, though with a tendency towards rather transparent bravado, taken from the suburban sprawl of London. When war breaks out in 1914, however, Marsh sends Sam to the Front, describing in monthly instalments how army discipline and consciousness of nationalistic purpose finally make of Sam a man. Bartlett reads the stories in relation to the ‘New Humour’ of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, associated with the writings of Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain and Israel Zangwill, thereby offering a new perspective both on the comic literature of the period and its transitions, and on Marsh’s own oeuvre, scholarly readings of which have tended to overlook the very significant place given to humour. Bartlett demonstrates how Sam’s transition from an ‘object of laughter’ to a ‘potent symbol of the instinctual heroism of every British soldier’ bears witness to changing configurations in the social and class fabric of Edwardian Britain. While dealing with different genres, Bartlett’s and Margree’s chapters both testify to Marsh’s persistent interest in revitalising masculine identities through exposure to risk and danger. 17

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture As Bartlett notes, Marsh’s fiction evinces ‘a keen awareness of the harsh economic position of the lower middle classes’, and precarity is frequently the backdrop and the motivating force of Marsh’s fictions. In The Beetle, out-of-work clerk Robert Holt is driven by hunger and homelessness burglariously to enter the suburban home of the monster into whose clutches he will fall. The Sam Briggs stories frequently revolve around pecuniary concerns – attempts by Sam and his fellow clerks to improve their financial positions or to avoid prospective financial disaster. As Bartlett notes, economic and social inequality can be the occasion in Marsh’s texts for horror or for humour. While Freeman sees Marsh as a writer unconcerned with issues of social justice, Bartlett and Margree suggest that his persistent foregrounding of fin-de-siècle society as one riven by inequalities opens up Marsh’s texts to the possibility of being read for covert political critique. Margree’s chapter argues that this is a foregrounding that prepares us to sympathise with the anti-hero protagonist, when, facing destitution, he is tempted to profit from the stolen diamonds that have accidentally fallen into his possession. While the text explicitly denounces both financial speculation and financial crime, at a deeper level it endorses the risk-taking behaviour and desire for self-betterment at the heart of each, even suggesting that crime may be a rational response to circumstances. Indeed, Marsh’s fascination with criminality forms the focus of several chapters, which together call for recognition of Marsh as a significant contributor to crime fiction. The fin de siècle is, of course, famous as the era of the detective, being most closely associated with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Recognising the potential of this market, Marsh created several detective characters of his own: the aristocratic private detective Augustus Champnell, who appears in The Beetle and in several other tales; the amateur sleuth Judith Lee, discussed here by Vuohelainen; and the elderly bachelor who investigates his friend’s death in The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death, discussed in this volume by Orrells. Vuohelainen’s chapter traces the ways in which Lee’s investigations make use of the latest medical, scientific and technological advances of the period in detecting, solving and preventing crime. Lee’s professional skill as a lip-reader and her ease in using modern telecommunications and transport render her in many ways an exemplary scientific detective. However, while Lee’s joint roles as a crime-fighter and a teacher of the deaf by the oral system may be designed to eradicate deviant elements in early twentieth-century society, seemingly in keeping with the aims of the eugenics movement, her troubled gender, sexual and ethnic identity 18

Introduction and frequent association with ‘psychic’ communications such as telepathy simultaneously disturb a reading of her as a representative of the period’s hegemonic culture. It is therefore difficult at times to differentiate between Marsh’s unconventional female detective and the very criminals she is engaged in apprehending. Indeed, as Margree and Höglund both argue in this volume, Marsh’s main interest seems often to lie not with those who investigate crime but with those who commit it or are punished for it. His fictions frequently feature protagonists who are tempted into crime through economic hardship, who fund lifestyles beyond their means through amoral or criminal activity, or who are burdened with the notoriety of a criminal parent – parallels with the author’s own life are, of course, suggestive. Höglund’s chapter explores particularly the last of these themes through its reading of Marsh’s 1895 novel Mrs Musgrave – and her Husband, in which the daughter of a murderer herself becomes a killer after she is blackmailed by a doctor who threatens to reveal the secret of her tainted biological inheritance. Höglund’s analysis teases out the manner in which this text both foregrounds Lombrosian and eugenicist accounts of criminality and destabilises them by pointing to the possibility that it is in fact the very medico-scientific announcement of preordained criminality that is the source of the evil. The theme of transgressive femininity is returned to in this chapter, Höglund noting that Mrs Musgrave can be illuminatingly read alongside Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–62). With Mrs Musgrave, however, to see the supposedly criminally insane woman’s actions as a rational response to a patriarchal society is not to produce an against-the-grain reading, since this possibility is in fact foregrounded by Marsh’s text and given equal weighting to the criminological paradigm. The novel oscillates between biological and social explanations of crime, therefore providing another instance of the ‘dissonant voices’ characteristic of so much of Marsh’s fiction. More generally, the crime-focused chapters of the volume suggest that scholarship may have given disproportionate attention to fictions of detection, as opposed to crime, leading to the dominant critical view of crime fiction as an ideologically conservative form. Marsh’s crime fiction, including his prison fiction, often solicits readerly sympathy for the transgressor, suggesting therefore that different motivations and pleasures may be provided by the genre: the pleasure, for instance, of seeing ‘social hierarchies questioned, rules contested and “improper” behaviours rewarded’, as Margree argues in her chapter. 19

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture

Canons and values

As the chapters in this volume suggest, Richard Marsh’s fiction contributes to, and frequently complicates, the established trajectories of reading the literature and culture of the fin de siècle. Marsh’s genre fiction fits uneasily into the conventional division of fin-de-siècle culture into either ‘low’ or ‘high’. While drawing on popular, sensationalist and journalistic modes and themes, Marsh frequently addressed more ‘serious’ or highbrow economic, moral, scientific and aesthetic concerns in his writing. His versatility suggests a greater range of cultural nuances than is allowed for by a rigid distinction between the popular and the elite. Marsh’s sustained popularity during his lifetime points to his ability to reach out to a broad, middlebrow audience, and his fiction thus provides us with access to what is perhaps the era’s most representative readerly mindset. Indeed, the period of Heldmann/Marsh’s literary activity (1879–1915) even has the power to destabilise our conventional definitions of literary or cultural periodicity: the author’s body of work spans the heyday of the New Imperialism; the excitement and anxiety of the 1890s; the Edwardian calm before the storm; and the descent to the catastrophic maelstrom of the First World War. Should we, then, regard his work as Victorian, Edwardian or modernist? The chapters collected here spotlight some of the ways in which reading Marsh forces us to reconsider our interpretation of the dominant discourses of the fin de siècle. The usual suspects of fin-de-siècle degeneration theory – objectionable New Women, ‘inferior’ colonial subjects, ingenious detectives, effeminate decadents, born criminals and the urban poor – do feature in Marsh’s oeuvre, but their predominance as the period’s sole representatives is complicated by the presence in his work of the lower-middle-class clerk, the successful professional woman, the admirable character of mixed ethnicity, the disabled person and the criminal who is constructed by society rather than cursed by heredity. To the themes of c­riminality, gender transgression, urban squalor and imperial adventure he adds discussions of value and profit, an acknowledgement of the instability of the material world, sympathy towards the criminal, a recognition of the woeful inadequacy of conventional gender roles and articulations of imperial guilt. The presence of these characters and themes in Marsh’s work and his significant popularity with a mainstream audience suggest that the discourses circulating at the time may have been more complex than the current literary canon would allow for. 20

Introduction A recurring theme in this collection is the multivocal nature of Marsh’s fiction. Its competing, discordant voices do not easily fit into established categories of the normative, the subversive or the hegemonic because of the texts’ frequent refusal to prioritise or decide between them. The undecidability and shifting focalisation of Marsh’s fictions make the reader work hard, and while Marsh remains a popular middlebrow author, the multiple perspectives of his fiction also point forward to the modernist aesthetic. We can also trace Marsh’s journalistic background in this discursive discord; if the newspaper consists of a patchwork of articles addressing topical issues, authored by multiple, often anonymous writers but always coexisting intertextually, Marsh’s fictions could be read as similarly multivocal, intertextual cultural products that allow diverse and conflicting ideas to exist side by side. Beyond our knowledge of Marsh’s fascination with multiple identities – inspired by his own assumption of different personas – we cannot trace Marsh’s own response to the themes he addressed in his fictions because of the lack of reliable information on his person and politics. This very biographical ambiguity helps his fictions to stand out independently of their author for the interpretation of readers, revealing in particularly vivid ways the contours of topical discourses and also the fault lines between them – the places where ideological frameworks come up against each other and come into conflict, thereby revealing their internal fractures, weaknesses and omissions. The scholarly understanding of the fin-de-siècle period must, therefore, remain incomplete unless we engage with Marsh’s fiction.

Notes

 1 R. Aickman, The Attempted Rescue (London: Victor Gollancz, 1966), p. 11.  2 P. D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880– 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 173.  3 J. Höglund, ‘Black Englishness and concurrent voices in Richard Marsh’s The Surprising Husband’, English Literature in Transition, 56:3 (2013), 275–91 (p. 277).  4 Höglund, ‘Black Englishness and concurrent voices’, p. 277.  5 R. Marsh, ‘How I “broke into print”, III: Richard Marsh’, Strand Magazine, 50 (November 1915), pp. 573–4.  6 M. Vuohelainen, ‘Bernard Heldmann and the Union Jack, 1880–83: the making of a professional author’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 47:1 (2014), 105–42 (pp. 117–18).  7 Vuohelainen, ‘Bernard Heldmann and the Union Jack’, pp. 118–19, 121–32.

21

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture  8 See also C. James, ‘Callum James’s literary detective agency, case #1: why was Richard Marsh?’, Front Free Endpaper, 30 November 2009, http:// callumjames.blogspot.com/2009/11/callum-jamess-literary-detective-ag​e ​ ncy.html; R. Kirkpatrick, The Three Lives of Bernard Heldmann (London: Children’s Books History Society, 2010); M. Vuohelainen, ‘Richard Marsh’, Victorian Fiction Research Guide, 35 (Canterbury: Canterbury Christchurch University, 2009, http://victorianfictionresearchguides.org/ richard-marsh/); M. Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, in R. Marsh, The Goddess: A Demon, ed. M. Vuohelainen (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2010), pp. vii–xxxiii (pp. xi–xvii).  9 G. Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. J. Goode (1891; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 460. 10 H. Piffard, ‘An omnibus pickpocket’, in G. R. Sims (ed.), Living London, 3 vols (1901; London: Cassell, 1906), iii, p. 18. 11 See, for example, ‘Mr Marsh explains’, Academy, 52 (30 October 1897), 35; Marsh, ‘How I “broke into print” ’. 12 R. Marsh, Ada Vernham, Actress (London: John Long, 1900), pp. 52, 107, 203. 13 [R. Marsh], ‘For debt’, Windsor Magazine, 15 (January 1902), 231–9 (pp. 231–2, 239). 14 On ‘For debt’, see M. Vuohelainen, ‘Distorting the genre, defining the audience, detecting the author: Richard Marsh’s “For debt” (1902)’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 25:4 (Summer 2007), 17–26. 15 V. Margree, ‘Metanarratives of authorship in fin de siècle popular fiction: “Is that all you do, write stories?” ’, English Literature in Transition, 59:3 (2016), 362–89 (pp. 363, 377). 16 M. Vuohelainen, ‘ “Contributing to most things”: Richard Marsh, literary production, and the fin de siècle periodicals market’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 46:3 (2013), 401–22 (pp. 405–9, 413–16). 17 M. Vuohelainen, ‘From “vulgar” and “impossible” to “pre-eminently readable”: Richard Marsh’s critical fortunes, 1893–1915’, English Studies, 95:3 (2014), 278–301 (pp. 287–98). 18 R. Marsh, The Joss: A Reversion (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2007), p. 65. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 19 Höglund, ‘Black Englishness and concurrent voices’, p. 277. 20 M. Vuohelainen, Richard Marsh (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), pp. 90, 107, 110, 113. 21 See, for example, R. Garnett, ‘Dracula and The Beetle: imperial and sexual guilt and fear in late Victorian fantasy’, in R. Garnett and R. J. Ellis (eds), Science Fiction Roots and Branches: Contemporary Critical Approaches (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 30–54; J. Halberstam, ‘Gothic nation: The Beetle by Richard Marsh’, in A. Smith, D. Mason and W. Hughes (eds), Fictions of Unease: The Gothic from Otranto to The X-Files (Bath: Sulis

22

Introduction

22

23

24 25

Press, 2002), pp. 100–18; W. C. Harris and D. Vernooy, ‘ “Orgies of nameless horrors”: gender, Orientalism, and the queering of violence in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle’, Papers in Language and Literature, 48:4 (2012), 1–43; K. Hurley, ‘ “The inner chambers of all nameless sin”: The Beetle, Gothic female sexuality, and Oriental barbarism’, in L. Davis (ed.), Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 193–213; A. M. Jones, ‘Conservation of energy, individual agency, and Gothic terror in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, or, What’s scarier than an ancient, evil, shape-shifting bug?’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 39:1 (2011), 65–85; S. Karschay, Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); R. Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); V. Margree, ‘ “Both in men’s clothing”: gender, sovereignty and insecurity in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle’, Critical Survey, 19:2 (2007), 63–81; M. Vuohelainen, ‘ “You know not of what you speak”: language, identity and xenophobia in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle: A Mystery (1897)’, in M. Tromp, M. Bachman and H. Kaufman (eds), Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), pp. 312–30; M. Vuohelainen, ‘ “Cribb’d, cabined, and confined”: claustrophobia in Richard Marsh’s urban Gothic fiction’, Journal of Literature and Science, 3:1 (2010), 23–36; M. Vuohelainen, ‘ “Oh to get out of that room!”: outcast London and the Gothic twist in the popular fiction of Richard Marsh’, in K. Sayer (ed.), Victorian Space(s): Leeds Centre Working Papers in Victorian Studies, 8 (2006), 115–26; J. Wolfreys, ‘The hieroglyphic Other: The Beetle, London, and the abyssal subject’, in L. Phillips (ed.), A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of London (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 169–92. Höglund, ‘Black Englishness and concurrent voices’; R. Luckhurst, ‘TranceGothic, 1882–1897’, in R. Robbins and J. Wolfreys (eds), Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 148–67; Margree, ‘Metanarratives of authorship’; Vuohelainen, Richard Marsh; Vuohelainen, ‘From “vulgar” and “impossible” ’; Vuohelainen, ‘ “Contributing to most things” ’; T. Youngs, Beastly Journeys: Travel and Transformation at the Fin de Siècle (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). S. Ledger and R. Luckhurst, ‘Introduction: reading the “fin de siècle” ’, in S.  Ledger and R. Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. xiii–xxiii (p. xiii). See, for example, A. Symons, ‘The decadent movement in literature’ (1893), in Ledger and Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Siècle, pp. 104–11. M. Nordau, Degeneration (1892; Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2014).

23

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture 26 Ledger and Luckhurst, ‘The New Imperialism’, in Ledger and Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Siècle, pp. 133–5. 27 C. Prior, Edwardian England and the Idea of Racial Decline: An Empire’s Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 12. 28 S. D. Arata, ‘The Occidental tourist: Dracula and the anxiety of reverse colonization’, Victorian Studies, 33:4 (1990), 621–45. 29 G. L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); J. E. Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); D. Orrells, ‘Greek love, Orientalism and race: intersections in classical reception’, Cambridge Classical Journal, 58 (2012), 194–230; E.  Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago, 2001). 30 A. Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Finde-Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 31 See R. von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886; New York: Arcade, 2011); H. Ellis and J. A. Symonds, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2: Sexual Inversion (1897; New York: Random House, 1984) [Kindle Edition]. On the fin-de-siècle ‘modernity’ of sexology, see H. Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000); L. Appignanesi and J. Forrester, Freud’s Women (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992); and D. Orrells, Sex: Antiquity and its Legacy (London: I.B.Tauris, 2015). 32 See R. Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism  (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints. 33 R. Marsh, The Beetle: A Mystery, ed. M. Vuohelainen (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2008), pp. 15, 151, 266, 268.

24

Part I

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime

2

••

Tall tales and true: Richard Marsh and late Victorian journalism Nick Freeman

Read all about it!: some introductory parallels

Richard Marsh was a direct beneficiary of the educational reforms that swept Victorian Britain from 1870 onwards. An insistence upon the practical benefits of literacy created an ever-expanding readership for engaging, accessible and diverting fiction, and armed with a no-frills prose style, a fertile imagination and an ability to meet the tightest deadline, Marsh answered this audience’s call for a quarter of a century, lodging in its consciousness as a recognisable and reliable brand. Working on several projects simultaneously, he never rested on his laurels, for his popularity was founded upon immediacy and topicality rather than enduring literary qualities. Marsh always appeared to regard his next novel or story collection as more important than its predecessor, even after his greatest success, 1897’s The Beetle. He might usefully be compared to Sigismund Smith, the cheerful hack who spins preposterous yarns in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864), and to pulp authors such as Guy N. Smith (b. 1939) who wrote three or four 40,000– 60,000-word paperback novels a year during the 1970s and established significant numbers of loyal fans without ever troubling the bestseller lists or the reviewers of the Times Literary Supplement. Astonished by the prolific output of Arthur Symons, who supplied the letterpress for an entire edition of the Savoy in December 1896, Oscar Wilde wondered if he was not an actual writer but a syndicate. Anyone noting the dates and word counts in Minna Vuohelainen’s invaluable guide to Marsh’s fiction could be forgiven similar astonishment.1 As this chapter will show, Marsh is a Janus-figure who looks back to the era of sensation fiction (and the penny dreadful) and forward to a variety of twentieth-century 27

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime popular reformulations of such material. Unfortunately for his reputation, the very qualities that allowed him a share of commercial success during the fin de siècle – ingenuity, adaptability, generic fluidity and ease of consumption – ensured that he would be swiftly forgotten afterwards by all but a few connoisseurs of supernatural and crime stories. They also never made him rich. When he died in 1915, his estate amounted to less than £500. Whether Marsh’s fate was a just one need not concern us here. The early twentieth century is littered with writers who enjoyed very sizeable audiences, but who fell from fashion or found themselves supplanted by those who offered much the same as they did but in newer and shinier guises. In Marsh’s case, however, this ephemerality was a direct consequence of the similarities between his fiction and the contemporary popular press, an environment in which novelty and diversion mattered more than mere truth, and where yesterday’s papers were only fit for curling hair or hanging in lavatories. The birth certificate of his first child gives Marsh’s occupation as ‘journalist’ and in language, style and ethics he remained one. As well as profiting from educational advances, Marsh’s working practices were also helped by wider developments in print culture that began around the time he was born in 1857. The 1850s saw a series of taxation reforms that had a direct effect on the Victorian newspaper industry, the most significant of which were the abolition of advertisement duty (1853), newspaper stamp duty (1855) and paper duty (1861). The impact of this legislation was far-reaching, particularly for the so-called ‘penny press’. Serious reviews such as the Edinburgh or the Nineteenth Century appealed to an educated readership with sufficient money and time to digest their contents; their circulation was founded upon long-standing intellectual (and political) communalities rather than a reasonable cover price. The same could not be said of less august journals, and visionary entrepreneurs soon spotted opportunities to court what Wilkie Collins memorably termed ‘the unknown public’, a corps of around three million readers who sought entertainment and diversion, and who esteemed quantity and value for money over notions of literary quality.2 Marsh would, in due course, connect with a subsequent incarnation of this audience, but their relationship would thrive in part because of the work of an earlier generation of innovative businessmen. George Purkess, the publisher who took over the Illustrated Police News (henceforth IPN) in the mid-1860s, was especially determined to harness the commercial potential of such readers. First published in February 28

Marsh and late Victorian journalism 1864, the IPN would be ideally placed to profit from the cheaper dissemination of current affairs and entertainment encouraged by taxation reforms, and to engage with a swiftly rising population George Gissing would later dismiss as ‘quarter-educated’.3 Over the next three decades, the paper enjoyed steadily rising circulation, combining sensational reportage with plentiful illustration, jokes, trivia, and sporting and theatrical gossip. It therefore succeeded in being at once informative and diverting, even if its startlingly graphic images, which included drawings of the mutilated victims of Jack the Ripper in 1888, horrified propriety.4 By 1890, it was selling 300,000 copies per week, making it one of the most widely read papers in the land.5 It was, in many ways, the journalistic equivalent of Richard Marsh’s fiction, and they drew water from similar wells. The 1860s was the decade in which R. H. Hutton told readers of the Spectator that novels would soon be supplanted by newspapers because of ‘a growing taste for realism’.6 News journals’ easily digestible narrative snippets represented a cheap and readily accessible alternative to fiction. Watching such publications growing in popularity, many novelists began to raid their contents, producing a ‘documentary realism’ that, in the eyes of Hutton, seemed to be ‘substituting appropriation for creativity’.7 Oscar Wilde would adopt a similar position in ‘The decay of lying’ (1889) as arguments about the essentially unimaginative basis of realism raged for the rest of the century. Marsh may not have played a public role in these controversies, but his fiction certainly fed off them, exploiting a tension between the newspapers’ stylistic bluntness and claims for objective record, and his own wildly inventive storytelling which clad bizarre tales in the trappings of believability. In that sense, Marsh was very much on a par with papers such as the IPN, which moved seamlessly between the verifiable details of court or sports reports and less easily corroborated essays in the fantastic. The late Victorian news industry grew ever more competitive, particularly in London where Marsh was based. Daily, weekly, fortnightly and monthly papers, magazines, journals and reviews thronged the bookstalls; there were so many in circulation that W. T. Stead and George Newnes, the founder of Tit-Bits, established the Review of Reviews in 1890 as ‘an index and a guide’, as Stead put it, to the ‘mighty maze of modern periodical literature’.8 This maze was indeed bewildering, encompassing almost every aspect of human interest and endeavour. Weekending at a country house, the narrator of Henry James’ ‘The figure in the carpet’ (1896) finds himself confronted by a ‘stiff garden of periodicals which 29

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime gave one of the ormolu tables the air of a stand at a station’.9 Further afield, one might find everything from the wretchedly produced street literature observed by Collins to the elite journals whose leather-bound volumes of back issues lined the walls of gentlemen’s clubs, but any attendant hierarchies were more complex than this polarisation may imply, and stratification was by no means linear. Simon Eliot has shown how chapbooks, broadsheets and penny weeklies disrupt any simple model of late Victorian publishing status, and it seems that privileged readers of the period were as omnivorous as their modern counterparts.10 There was nothing to prevent consumers with sufficient time and money from subscribing to ‘serious’ reviews, purchasing The Times from a newsagent or stationer and picking up the Star or the IPN from a street seller, the ghoulish hawkers whose shouts of ‘’orrible murder’ form the soundtrack to Amy Levy’s ‘Ballade of a special edition’ (1889). These itinerant sellers upset a correspondent of the Daily Telegraph who was moved to complain that during the time of the Whitechapel murders, women in the West End were being terrified by ‘hoarse ruffians … yelling at the tops of their hideous voices’ about murder and mutilation.11 Many readers climbed no higher up the cultural ladder than the IPN, but its readership transcended class barriers, with seemingly genteel consumers of the journal tucking its pink pages into copies of the Pall Mall Gazette, the paper that had denounced it as ‘the worst newspaper in England’ in 1886. Movement between ostensibly ‘respectable’ and ‘lowbrow’ or ‘gutter’ literature was also to be found in the book world. Even before the collapse of Mudie’s in 1894, there was a growing sense that consumer behaviour was changing as Britons became book buyers as well as borrowers. Mudie’s paternalistic censorship inspired a vehement diatribe by George Moore in Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals (1885), but while the Irish novelist railed at the ways in which the squeamishness of mid-Victorian etiquette left the library disinclined to proffer fiction  of ‘advanced’ views, publishers sidestepped its constraints through their growing enthusiasm for the cheap single-volume text. Some such works – Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), for example, whose truncated title imitated a news headline and which sold initially for a shilling – achieved critical as well as commercial success, while others trapped their luckless authors on a treadmill of derisory rights and minimal royalties. By the 1890s, it was clear that a novelist did not need Mudie’s support to reach a substantial audience. Interviewed in the Bookman in August 1895, Arthur Humphreys, the manager of Hatchard’s in Piccadilly, 30

Marsh and late Victorian journalism remarked that ‘the novel is the book of the future’ and that his shop was doing a roaring trade after encouraging Anthony Hope and other writers who scorned the ‘traditional’ three-decker.12 The popularity of Sherlock Holmes made the great detective a regular in the Strand as well as making his creator a very wealthy man. Jeremiahs such as Gissing warned that cultural standards were in probably terminal decline, but more optimistic commentators revelled in the sheer volume and range of fiction available to them, and unpretentious professional writers like Marsh saw boundless opportunities to sell their wares. Nigel Cross notes that there were 380 new novels published in 1880, a figure that grew to 896 in 1891 and 1,315 four years later, a proliferation which brought consumers hitherto unimagined levels of reading choice.13 The Athenaeum may have accorded more space to a review of the latest George Meredith than it did to the latest Stanley Weyman (or Richard Marsh), but it noted them all. Constrictive and exclusive notions of genre had not yet emerged, and while certain types of writing were more obviously gendered than others, the most important division for many critics was between realism and romance. To be realist was not to be unpopular or elitist – Thomas Hardy was neither – but it did imply seriousness and worth; novelists deemed ‘important’ set their novels in a world very familiar to their readers. Romancers by contrast offered alternatives to that world (as in the adventure stories of Rider Haggard) or, like H. G. Wells, a terrifying disruption of the familiar environment, as when Martian invaders devastate the Home Counties in The War of the Worlds (1898). This neat distinction is compromised a little by the issue of style, for the ease and directness of Wells’ writing had the effect of making his most outlandish notions plausible, while the mandarin opacities of Meredith or James risked making their more quotidian subjects far stranger than time travellers or invisible men. Writers such as Stevenson and, later, Kipling and Conrad were equally difficult to pigeonhole as style and content diverged in troubling texts such as Heart of Darkness (1899/1902). Even as Andrew Lang and George Saintsbury sought to draw a distinction between, on the one hand, fanciful adventure stories with morally uplifting messages and, on the other, ‘Zolaesque documentation’ and ‘Jamesian psychological analysis’, Marsh was plaiting together the violence of so-called ‘slum fiction’ and an almost parodic interest in the psychological, notably in The Seen and the Unseen’s preposterous ‘A psychological experiment’ (1900) which depicts a man being frightened to death by a wooden squid that pops out of a jack-in-the-box.14 His work eschewed moral instruction, and his deployment of Miss Prism’s formulation, ‘the good end happily and 31

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means’, could be tokenistic or merely cynical by turns.15 Many of Marsh’s Victorian (if not Edwardian) novels end with the death or suicide of the villain and the marriage of the hero and/or heroine, but such traditional and reassuring conclusions do not always divert the reader’s mind from the horrors that have preceded them, nor are they perhaps intended to do so. The world in which Marsh operated was therefore complex and contradictory, and saw him move between ‘cheap weeklies, illustrated monthlies, first editions of various prices, and a range of reprints’.16 Borders between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature, or between the respectable and the sensational, were difficult to negotiate, let alone police. At the same time, there was a fluid movement between journalism and other areas of literary production. This in itself was not new. Many earlier Victorian writers, notably Dickens and Thackeray, had worked as journalists, and commentators had periodically noted the ways in which newspapers and novelists fought over the same bones in the ‘Newgate novels’ controversy of the 1830s and the dubbing of sensation fiction as ‘newspaper novels’ three decades later. By the 1890s, however, there were significant differences in the ways in which journalism and literature overlapped. One was the growing latitude of permissible subject matter. As the press increasingly revealed the horrors of life in frank and non-euphemistic language, so fiction, especially when not monitored by Mudie, followed suit. In the final twenty years of the nineteenth century, the journalist was becoming increasingly visible in fiction by James, Kipling, and Arthur Machen. He surfaced in poetry such as John Davidson’s Fleet Street Eclogues (1893) and Edwin Arnold’s The Tenth Muse (1895). His more populist and sensational manifestations were mocked regularly in Punch. Journalism and authorship went hand in hand. George Bernard Shaw was more successful as a music and theatre reviewer than he had been as a novelist during the 1880s, and journalism did more than merely keep him afloat until he achieved success as a playwright. Wilde and Wells both worked as journalists before literary acclaim allowed them to write full-time. Symons gave the impression of being a decadent poet and man-about-town, but he also worked as ‘Silhouette’, the Star’s musichall and theatre correspondent, as well as contributing literary articles to papers such as the Saturday Review, the Academy and the Outlook. Writers drew subtle and often casuistical distinctions between news journalism and its more acceptable literary variants, particularly when, like Symons, they liked to think of themselves as operating in elite cultural 32

Marsh and late Victorian journalism terrain. Marsh’s environment was therefore reflexive, dynamic, morally ambivalent, even hypocritical. It suited him perfectly.

The unethical Marsh

When Marsh wrote under his original name Bernard Heldmann, the results tended to be didactic, hardly unexpected when he was writing serials for boys’ weeklies and coeditor of the Union Jack. However, in March 1883, ‘A couple of scamps’, his final serial in the paper, mutated almost without warning from a juvenile adventure into a Gothic penny dreadful. Whether or not this sudden change of tack reflects Heldmann’s increasing involvement in criminal activity prior to his arrest early the following year, his movement away from wholesome fare seems to have liberated his imagination and intensified the verve and ambition of his writing. To judge from the fiction published under his name from the late 1880s onwards, ‘Richard Marsh’ had few if any ethical scruples. He was by turns a plagiarist and self-plagiarist, and he had no qualms about using contemporary violent crime as the basis of entertainment. Marsh also savoured the press’ claims to be high-minded while at the same time stoking the baser appetites of its readers. ‘The words of a little child’ from Marvels and Mysteries (1900) depicts an innocent man being hanged for murder as a result of a plot by his wife and his seven-yearold daughter, who, after her parents’ deaths, ‘became quite a heroine. Her portrait was in all the illustrated papers; her name was on myriads of tongues.’17 The depths of the girl’s iniquity are irrelevant besides the newspapers’ requirement to amuse, and the story finishes with a comment from the narrator that might have come from Sherlock Holmes: ‘Her career, in the future, is likely to present features of particular interest. It had a beginning of such promise!’ (p. 275). Earlier in the century, Dickens and Collins claimed that they had dramatised the abuses of the day – the inequities of the Poor Law and London’s criminal children in Oliver Twist (1837–39), the unchecked powers of private asylums in The Woman in White (1859–60) – in order to bring them to wider attention. For them, fiction could be an instrument of social change, and if its agitation brought with it popularity and wealth, so much the better. There was therefore an ethical dimension to their headline-scanning, one claimed occasionally by Charles Reade, whose copious notebooks demonstrate the extent to which he pillaged the press for plots and incidents.18 Peter Keating suggests that such considerations also influenced Braddon or Mrs Henry Wood; they too ‘employed the 33

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime sensational to make larger claims of social portrayal and criticism’.19 The ‘brief one-volume “shocker” ’ in which Marsh specialised, however, ‘functioned purely at a sensational level’.20 This is not simply a modern assessment. The Graphic judged The Datchet Diamonds and The House of Mystery (both 1898) ‘as good stories of “sensation” and nothing else, as anybody can wish to enjoy’.21 For Marsh, newspapers were neither a means of attacking injustice nor an instrument of alerting readers to the misdeeds of those in authority. They acted instead as a source of inspiration, in both subject matter and formal expression, shaping the style, content, tone and ambition of his work. As ‘The words of a little child’ shows, Marsh was unconcerned by notions of ‘justice’. An obvious pragmatist, he offered mystery and excitement rather than Literature or didactic narrative resolution, scorning the lapidary phrasing of James or the circle of his imitators gathered around the Yellow Book’s Henry Harland, and relishing instead the potentially fruitful scenarios afforded by the penny papers in which his stories appeared. While there remains a dearth of evidence concerning the day-to-day minutiae of his existence – one wonders if he kept clippings files as Reade did – it is impossible to imagine that he did not read the IPN or the Illustrated Police Budget, and his reviewers certainly regarded him as being cut from the same cloth. Discussing Mrs Musgrave – and her Husband in July 1895, the Saturday Review callously remarked that ‘All this shedding of blood’ – the novel’s violence culminates in a double suicide and infanticide – ‘leaves the reader as unmoved as the evening papers’ sanguinary placards of tragedy at Tooting’.22 The plots of Marsh’s stories and novels, the tendency to prioritise events over reflection or ratiocination, and the short paragraphs and undemanding vocabulary that characterise his fiction all evidence a deep familiarity with the ‘yellow’ journalism of the day. His lack of concern with tying up loose ends is similarly suggestive of journalistic influence, and, just like the IPN, he had no qualms about purloining material from elsewhere. The Devil’s Diamond (1893) is one of many Victorian thrillers to borrow the ‘cursed gemstone’ motif from Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) and also loots A Christmas Carol (1843); The House of Mystery steals quite openly from George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) in the figure of the Svengalilike Aaron Lazarus, who, in a neat twist, denies rather than allows the gift of song, as well as pilfering the idea of an heiress with a doppelganger from The Woman in White. A Second Coming (1900) purloins an idea from W. T. Stead’s If Christ Came to Chicago (1894) in order to invert Marie Corelli’s wildly successful The Sorrows of Satan (1895) by bringing Christ, rather than the Devil, to Victorian London, while The Strange Wooing of 34

Marsh and late Victorian journalism Mary Bowler (1895) even has the audacity to loot Hamlet for the idea of staging a play to flush out a criminal. Marsh was clearly very well read where sensation fiction was concerned, and borrowings from Collins (Mary Bowler is partly inspired by his Armadale, 1864), Braddon, Ouida and others can be found throughout his work. His 1906 collection Under One Flag explicitly adapts the title of Ouida’s hugely popular Under Two Flags (1867), and John Sutherland’s estimation of the latter could apply just as easily to either novelist. ‘The story is preposterous,’ he writes, ‘but is carried through with the author’s usual reckless verve.’23 Patrick Brantlinger, Richard Altick and Thomas Boyle, among others, have detailed the symbiotic relationship between the sensation novel and sensational journalism, noting their similarities of form as well as content. Dramatic criminal investigations such as the exposure of the daring burglar Charles Peace in 1877 loomed large in ‘respectable’ newspapers and the popular press, but it was the IPN which led the field in featuring the horrific, the bizarre and the outré. Linda Stratmann remarks that it was ‘the only illustrated paper of its day to concentrate on crime and the sensational’, adding that it might be seen as ‘a hybrid of the penny paper and the penny blood’, albeit one given ‘a sheen of respectability’ by its relatively high production values and its proprietors’ insistence on its educational worth.24 The paper occupied an ambiguous position between providing its readers with information about current affairs (albeit often through reliance on pirated copy from poorly verified sources), and the salacious and bloodcurdling entertainment offered by penny dreadfuls, a class of literature the paper itself liked to castigate.25 Such an outlook parallels Marsh’s use of various forms of realist practice. A reader of the IPN did not necessarily believe everything in the paper, but because tall tales were presented alongside daily occurrences in the London courts which were easy to confirm, it was notionally reliable. By using everyday plain language and familiar settings, Marsh was similarly able to blur the boundaries between the possible and the preposterous. The trappings of the story required little suspension of disbelief because readers were already familiar with the way that the popular press operated. In a sophisticated study of the dialogue between Victorian fiction and contemporaneous journalism, Matthew Rubery argues that novelists such as James (in The Reverberator, 1888) or Hardy (in Jude the Obscure, 1895) ‘call into question the credibility of news by situating it [in the form of imitations of newspaper reports] amid the fictional narrative’, something which ‘retells the story with a degree of psychological depth and ­narrative amplitude unavailable to the limited resources of the inves35

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime tigative reporter’.26 Marsh, however, moved in the opposite direction from his determinedly literary peers, disdaining ‘psychological depth’ and nuances of character in order to produce fiction whose effect relied to some extent on its similarity with actual reportage. This is not to suggest that Marsh’s readers mistook his stories for news reports, but to argue instead that by hybridising the language of fiction and journalism in what one reviewer characterised as his ‘clear, but journalistic style’, he was able to imbue his most successful work with a superficial element of veracity that made his readers more indulgent towards it than may otherwise have been the case.27 For sociologically inclined novelists such as Gissing, Arthur Morrison or Margaret Harkness, the accumulation of quotidian detail served to verify, or at least to make nominally convincing, the events they depicted. An emphasis on exteriority would in time be attacked by modernists such as W. B. Yeats, who felt that it concentrated on surfaces at the expense of the more meaningful symbolic depths beneath them, and Virginia Woolf, who in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1923) criticised the tendency she identified in Wells, Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett to privilege the description of a homestead over the consciousness of its inhabitant. For Marsh, however, as for many other late Victorian writers of adventure and supernatural fiction, realism was a vital technical resource precisely because of its concern with outward appearances. Establishing these anchored his fictions in the believable and the possible, giving his readers the hopefully pleasurable thrill that they too could encounter the excitement (indeed, the horrors) that confronted his characters. Much as it deplored the subject matter of Mrs Musgrave, the Athenaeum admitted to finding it ‘an extremely plausible modern tragedy’.28 Having served a prison sentence for fraud, Marsh knew how important a believable ‘front’ is to white-collar criminal enterprise, and applying the same outlook to fiction, he was able to manipulate his stock of readerly credit to enduring advantage. His energetic and direct style was one with which readers had grown familiar through their exposure to news journalism. His exploitation of realist tropes similarly grounded his unlikely inventions in a milieu where various subdivisions of realism were the dominant art form. Marsh also intertwined news with fiction in his gleeful recycling of actual crimes. One of the most striking examples is ‘A member of the Anti-Tobacco League’ from Under One Flag, a startling vignette which might be described as a fusion of the conte cruel and the IPN. A violent murderer nicknamed ‘Tom the Tiger’ is terrorising the East End. The 36

Marsh and late Victorian journalism story begins with the discovery of his seventh victim, a woman who has been found ‘lying up agin the wall, with ’er clothes over ’er ’ead, and ’er inside, wot ’e’d cut out, lyin’ alongside’.29 This is a clear allusion to the murder of one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, Catherine Eddowes, whose body was discovered in Whitechapel’s Mitre Square on 30 September 1888, ‘ripped up like a pig in the market’ according to PC Edward Watkins, one of the policemen who found her. Watkins told the coroner that she was ‘lying there on her back’ with ‘her clothes up above her waist’; ‘I saw her throat was cut and her bowels protruding’, he told the coroner’s inquest in what reads like a grammatically normalised report.30 Marsh rewrote the constable’s words in the style used both in the IPN’s court reports and, increasingly, in ‘slum fiction’, but the similarity between the two accounts is obvious. At the time of the Whitechapel killings, it was widely rumoured that the killer was a ‘toff’, and Marsh follows this up by making ‘Tom’ a hypocritical priest, the Reverend Simon Chasuble, who describes his victims as ‘harlots’ and ‘inhabitants of Sodom’.31 This willingness to refashion criminal events in fiction was very marked throughout Marsh’s career, typical examples being The Crime and the Criminal’s indebtedness to the notorious murder of Isaac Gold, who was killed on the London-to-Brighton express train in June 1881, and the reworking of the Sidney Street Siege or ‘Battle of Stepney’ of January 1911 within a year of the incident in ‘ “Auld Lang Syne” ’ (Strand Magazine, January 1912). Marsh’s ability to pass off one thing as another may have been a legacy of his ill-fated career as a fraudster. Publishing so much material, moving so frequently between publishers, and switching the criminal’s alias for the author’s more acceptable pseudonym, ‘Richard Marsh’ the writer was able to succeed where Bernard Heldmann’s deceptions had failed, offering a series of tall tales that appeared plausible at first but whose true nature only became apparent after more thorough examination. The fraudster has to be convincing while he commits his offence, and remain so for long enough afterwards to deter or confound pursuit – in Guernsey, Heldmann’s ‘speciousness’ was the key to his initial social success.32 The reader of a magazine or a shilling volume, however, felt cheated only if the tale was not diverting or amusing. Whether or not it was wholly convincing was a far less important concern. Journalist, trickster, fraudster and con-man are hardly the usual terms of approbation where literary criticism is concerned, but it is hard to ignore the parallels between the criminal, the sensational press of the 1890s that reported his or her crimes, and the favoured techniques of a 37

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime popular novelist who drew upon these differing personae so effectively. That said, Marsh would not have enjoyed such a lengthy and relatively successful career if he had not been able to construct engaging narratives and provide value for money. To point out that he self-plagiarised and plagiarised, or to be more polite, recycled ideas and motifs from his immediate predecessors and contemporary rivals alike is not to undermine his achievement. Rather, it is to comment on the ways in which hastily written popular fiction, rarely composed with an eye to posterity, almost inevitably feeds off and cashes in on contemporary fascinations, crazes and alarms, one reason why it interests literary historians and sociologists in ways that more determinedly ‘literary’ texts do not. The chapters in this volume demonstrate the extent to which Marsh’s work, just like the late Victorian popular press, presents a cornucopia of fin-desiècle fears, fantasies and obsessions. To treat Marsh merely as a barometer of such late nineteenth-century concerns is, though, to do him a misservice. Marsh may have borrowed from Collins and Du Maurier, but his thrillers, and his skill in negotiating a complex literary marketplace, also look ahead to authors whose careers overlap his – Edgar Wallace, for example – and to the script writers who created television adventure series during the 1960s. It is not difficult to transplant Marsh to the world of exploitation cinema and B-movies, and with his far-sighted awareness of how the implications of new technology might be exploited in fiction (in, for instance, 1911’s A Drama of the Telephone) he would surely have excelled at creating the outlandish and baffling scenarios that preface the opening credits of The Avengers (1961–69) or Department S (1969–70). In this reading then, Marsh looks back to the sensation novels of the 1860s, particularly Collins and Braddon, sideways at the commercial behemoths of the 1890s, such as Du Maurier and Corelli, and then forwards to mass-market paperback fiction and ‘telefantasy’ from the 1960s onwards. Such connections can be substantiated by a closer examination of a couple of his short stories.

Phonographs, photographs and loose ends

One of the highlights of Marsh’s Curios (1898) is ‘The adventure of the phonograph’, in which Mr Pugh and Mr Tress, rival connoisseurs of antiques and oddities, attempt to deal with the uncanny consequences of new technology. The phonograph had been invented by Thomas Edison in 1877, but twenty years later, Tress admits that he has never previ38

Marsh and late Victorian journalism ously seen one and is mystified when he encounters his friend (and sometime enemy) sitting with the machine’s listening tubes in his ears. Like many headphone wearers since, Pugh is so engrossed in sound that he fails to hear Tress arrive and is discomfited when spoken to. He has bought the phonograph from a pawnbroker in the Fulham Road and is listening to the dozen cylinders included in the sale. The machine’s previous owner used it for ‘exhibition purposes’, its stock of cylinders, which includes popular tunes such as ‘Home, sweet home’ and Albert Chevalier’s ‘coster’ song ‘My old Dutch’, suggesting that it was an expensive rival to the barrel organs that were ubiquitous on London’s streets during the 1890s.33 Tress is unimpressed by the machine’s poor-quality sonic reproduction, but his attitude changes when he is made brutally aware of its suitability for Grand Guignol. One of the cylinders contains a hysterical commentary on what seem to be a woman’s final moments, a commentary which, like a court reporter, Pugh has transcribed. It makes for grim reading, bringing the crimes of Jack the Ripper, designated ‘the Theatre of Horrors, Whitechapel’, into the home (p. 28). Jane Clinch shrieks in terror at the arrival of her drunken husband, the ominously named Jack, who has murder on his mind. ‘He’s sharpening his knife. He’s got a hammer’, she screams, before further cries of ‘Not the knife, Jack! Not the knife!’ and ‘He’s killing me’ over background noise that seems to be ‘hideously suggestive of blows struck with insensate violence’ (p. 30). The recording ends with ‘an ear-splitting yell, immediately followed by a husky roar from the man: “Damn you, take that!” ’ (p. 30). There is a ‘heavy thud’, then silence (p. 30). Pugh is certain that a terrible crime has been committed, and contacts Scotland Yard. His suspicions seem confirmed when he sees a newspaper report headed ‘Shocking Discovery in South Lambeth’. A woman’s body has been found ‘stowed away in an egg-box’ beneath a railway arch, clad in linen marked ‘J. C.’ (p. 33). It is surely Jane Clinch, he decides, and resolves to track down her murderer. Marsh’s familiarity with the IPN is obvious. The headline might have been taken from almost any issue of the newspaper during the 1890s, something Marsh admits when adding that ‘To a public surfeited with horrors, its purport was sufficiently commonplace’ (p. 33). Of course, the public is not surfeited with horror; if it were, there would be no market for either the IPN or the fiction of Richard Marsh. What the story offers instead is a bifurcated narrative. One path leads to the ingenious resolution of the mystery, as Pugh and Tress discover that Jane Clinch and her husband deliberately recorded the ‘murder’ as ‘A Drama in Real Life’, a 39

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime ghoulish entertainment aimed at ‘fetch[ing] the pennies from the gals as liked to shiver’ (p. 46). The other path, however, leads to a more troubling nowhere. The murder victim is known only by the initials of the clothes she wears (which may not even be hers) and her murderer is never found. Such unfinished stories made frequent appearances in the IPN, chiefly because a weekly newspaper with often no reporters of its own tended to be erratic in following up earlier reports, but also because a death which had little to offer in terms of shock value or accompanying hue-and-cry made for poor copy and limited interest. The unknown ‘J. C.’ would seem to fall into both categories, with Scotland Yard answering the summons of a perplexed middle-class antiques collector but seemingly uninterested in an anonymous woman stuffed into a box in Lambeth. ‘The adventure of the phonograph’ is perhaps the first murder mystery to make a recorded voice central to its plot. When it was published, however, it was more notable for its grisly topicality in blurring the line between street entertainment and criminal misdeeds. In 1898, the Whitechapel murderer was still much feared, and though the police believed his final victim to have been Mary Kelly, brutally slaughtered in November 1888, journalists were wont to treat any murder with similarities to the Ripper’s killings as signifying his return. Here, Marsh’s point that a female audience may exist for bloodthirsty accounts of atrocity, and that a female performer may actively encourage its hysteria, is particularly disturbing. The ‘gals as like to shiver’ are quite different from the demure female readers of the West End so alarmed by the bloodthirsty cries of newsboys. They are instead inclined to treat reports and even reenactments of the crimes as grimly thrilling despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that they themselves could easily be at risk on the Lambeth streets. The Seen and the Unseen, Marsh’s next collection, was published by Methuen in autumn 1900 and contains such memorable stories as ‘The photographs’ and ‘A psychological experiment’. ‘The photographs’ combines a mysterious technological anomaly with what might be a ghost story. George Solly is found guilty of embezzlement and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. When the prison photographer takes a picture of Solly, however, it reveals not only him but also the curious figure of a woman. The prison governor suspects trickery and the notorious ‘double exposure’ of spiritualist photography, though there is no evidence of either. Subsequent pictures taken with both the official plate camera and a more easily concealed ‘detective camera’ show the woman bare-headed and staring defiantly into the lens while Solly holds a slate on which is 40

Marsh and late Victorian journalism written not his own name but that of Evan Bradell, the man who, it transpires, is Compeyson to his Magwitch. Solly seems oblivious to the woman’s presence, and has no idea that the slate has been tampered with. The mystery deepens when warders hear a woman in Solly’s cell, kissing him goodnight and whispering endearments. It transpires that the figure in the photographs and the secret visitor is Solly’s wife, who, convinced of her husband’s innocence, has repeatedly appeared in Bradell’s dreams, eventually hounding him to confess his crime. The injustice exposed, Solly is pardoned by the Queen, and the couple reunited. Just as the nightmare was an essential ingredient of many Gothic narratives, so dreams were woven into the tapestry of Victorian crime, from the famous ‘Red Barn murder’ of Maria Marten in 1827 to the IPN’s illustrations of criminals’ dreams before their execution.34 They were, in many respects, a folkloric device, especially when, as in the Red Barn case, the ghost of the victim revealed the location of her remains, but they also provided writers and journalists with an excellent way of stepping outside the constraints of ‘believable’ realism. Seemingly predictive dreams were a mainstay of the popular press; there are many examples in the voluminous cuttings scrapbooks of Wilde’s friend, George Ives.35 At his most profligately inventive, Marsh somehow manages to combine three different mysteries in one tale, splicing Mrs Solly’s intimidating dream intrusions with the legend of a haunted jail and the enigma of the camera that captures the unseen. ‘The photographs’ thus exemplifies the collection’s title (itself pilfered from Margaret Oliphant’s ghost stories), but also offers further demonstrations of Marsh’s journalistic method. As in ‘The adventure of the phonograph’, the narrative forks in order to provide both closure (Solly’s pardon and release) and enduring mystery (how does Mrs Solly manage to travel astrally, impress her image upon photographic plates and film, invade a man’s dreams and manifest behind prison walls ‘six feet thick’?)36 Her fidelity and her determination to see her husband declared innocent seem to be the familiar conventions of melodrama, but the bewildering images on the plates, and the apparent ability to appear and disappear at will belong to another order of fiction altogether.

Stop press: an afterword

Marsh’s fiction abounds in situations and incidents that might be drawn from newspapers such as the IPN, and it frequently mimics such organs’ bluntly direct style. Like any good journalist, Marsh knew what his 41

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime readers wanted, and he proved consistently adroit at moving between different registers, mixing mystery and horror with romantic intrigue. He frequently reworked his favourite plotlines and devices, offering a succession of mercenary fiancées, demented aristocrats, cowardly poisoners and resourceful young women who escape perils ‘worse than death’. He could titillate his readers with the spectacle of a beautiful girl stripped and whipped by a black man and a Jew in The Death Whistle (1903), or shamelessly append the most predictable of happy endings to an unpredictable and disturbing tale such as The Joss: A Reversion (1901). Unfailingly topical, he excelled in updating the ingredients of earlier sensation novels (such as stolen identities and impersonation) for the new era, deploying where necessary a factitious exoticism in setting stories in parts of the world neither he nor the majority of his readers had seen for themselves. He was also able to combine the macabre with the comic, as in Curios, and even managed to compile collections of humorous material such as Frivolities (1899), a title that recalls the comic features of the penny press, the IPN’s ‘Funny wheezes’, for example. Figuratively speaking, however, he seems never to have been more than one step ahead of his creditors. He never succeeded in establishing a stable relationship with a supportive (or better still, indulgent) publisher, his bibliography demonstrating how he rarely published successive books under the same imprint.37 Worse still, although The Beetle in particular sold very well during the late 1890s, and would indeed remain in print for much of the following six decades, it failed to bring him lasting prosperity. Instead, like many denizens of Fleet Street, he had no option but to continue to offer new stories to the public, distracting, amusing and entertaining, but never quite managing to become respectable.

Notes

 1 M. Vuohelainen, ‘Richard Marsh’, Victorian Fiction Research Guide, 35 (Canterbury: Canterbury Christchurch University, 2009, http://victorianfictionresearchguides.org/richard-marsh/).  2 W. Collins, ‘The unknown public’, Household Words, 18 (21 August 1858), 217–22.  3 G. Gissing, New Grub Street, 3 vols (London: Smith and Elder, 1891), iii, p. 233.  4 In Cruel Deeds and Dreadful Calamities (London: British Library, 2011), Linda Stratmann detects a radical political agenda in the IPN’s coverage of poverty, crime and the evils of alcohol, but while that may have been the

42

Marsh and late Victorian journalism case in its early days, by the 1890s the paper was as hypocritical and conservative as any modern-day British tabloid.  5 Stratmann takes these circulation figures from the forty-nine listed in an advertiser’s handbook quoted by the Pall Mall Gazette (29 September 1889). Lloyd’s Weekly News led the field with a circulation of 612,000, but the IPN was closing in on other rivals such as Tit-Bits (401,000), the People, the Weekly Budget and Reynolds’s Newspaper (350,000 each) (Cruel Deeds and Dreadful Calamities, p. 18).  6 R. H. Hutton, ‘The empire of novels’, Spectator (9 January 1869), pp. 43–4.  7 R. MacFarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in NineteenthCentury Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 130.  8 W. T. Stead, ‘Editorial’, Review of Reviews, 1 (January 1890), 14.  9 H. James, ‘The figure in the carpet’, in Collected Stories Volume Two (London: Dent, 1999), pp. 303–40 (p. 303). 10 S. Eliot, ‘The business of Victorian publishing’, in D. David (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 37–60. 11 Daily Telegraph (16 November 1888), p. 4. 12 ‘Book sales in the West End’, Bookman, 8 (August 1895), p. 141. 13 N. Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 206. 14 P. Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875– 1914 (1989; London: Fontana, 1991), p. 345. 15 O. Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), in Complete Works (London: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 357–419 (p. 377). 16 M. Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Marsh, The Beetle: A Mystery, ed. M. Vuohelainen (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2008), pp. vii–xxx (p. xi). 17 Marsh, ‘The words of a little child’, in Marvels and Mysteries (London: Methuen, 1900), pp. 256–75 (p. 275). All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 18 See MacFarlane, Original Copy, pp. 135–57. 19 Keating, Haunted Study, p. 342. 20 Keating, Haunted Study, p. 342. 21 ‘New Novels’, Graphic (4 June 1898), p. 736. 22 ‘Fiction’, Saturday Review, 80 (20 July 1895), 86–8 (p. 87). The reviewer may have been H. G. Wells. The ‘Tooting Tragedy’ was the sensation of March 1895. Frank Taylor, a plasterer, murdered his wife and six children with a razor before killing himself. See my 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 83–5. 23 J. Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 2009), p. 654. 24 Stratmann, Cruel Deeds and Dreadful Calamities, p. 8.

43

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime 25 When Robert and Nathaniel Coombes, boys of thirteen and twelve years of age, murdered their mother in 1895, the IPN enlivened its front page with an image of one of them kneeling on the woman’s chest and stabbing her through the heart. ‘Boys murder their mother. Revolting crime at Plaistow. Shocking details’, the headline blared. The inside pages regaled readers not only with the morbid minutiae of the crime, but also with accounts of the boys’ reading prior to it. The IPN saw ‘penny dreadfuls’ such as ‘The last shot’ as a terrible influence on the impressionable young. See IPN, 27 July 1895. 26 M. Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 165. 27 ‘New novels’, Athenaeum, 3934 (6 June 1903), 715–17 (p. 716). 28 ‘New novels’, Athenaeum, 3535 (27 July 1895), 124–5 (p. 124). 29 All quotations from Under One Flag are taken from the unpaginated e-text on Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40451/40451-h/40451h.htm. 30 For Watkins’ statement at Eddowes’ inquest, see S. P. Evans and Keith Skinner, The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook (London: Robinson, 2000), pp. 224–5. Watkins made his ‘pig in the market’ remark to the Star, and gave a still more detailed account of Eddowes’ mutilation to the Daily News. See P. Sugden, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper (London: Robinson, 1994), pp. 176–7. 31 In what may be an ironic in-joke, the priest shares his name with Canon Chasuble in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest; that the chasuble is an item of ecclesiastical attire, rather than a genuine surname, only strengthens this connection. The association between Wilde and Sodom was a commonplace of newspaper reports of his trials, but Marsh seems to be subverting rather than endorsing such attitudes. 32 ‘A swindler caught’, Star (St Peter Port) (20 May 1884), p. 2. 33 Marsh, Curios: Some Strange Adventures of Two Bachelors (1898; Kansas City, MO: Valancourt Press, 2007), p. 28. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 34 See, for example, ‘Mrs Pearseys [sic] dream’ (3 January 1891). 35 P. Sieveking (ed.), Man Bites Man: The Scrapbook of an Edwardian Eccentric, George Ives (London: Jay Landesman, 1980). 36 Marsh, ‘The photographs’, The Seen and the Unseen (1900; Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2007), pp. 14–44 (p. 41). 37 Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, p. xi.

44

3

••

Mrs Musgrave’s stain of madness: Marsh and the female offender Johan Höglund

Mrs Musgrave – and her Husband is arguably the first truly topical, readable and provoking novel Richard Marsh wrote. Published in June 1895, it entered a fierce debate caused by the publication of the English translations of Max Nordau’s Degeneration, in February, and Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero’s The Female Offender, in April, of the same year. Informed by post-Darwinian speculation on the possibility of racial deterioration and its connection to social erosion, Nordau influentially suggested that the increasingly urban and decadent cultures and citizens of fin-de-siècle Europe showed evidence of a counter-evolutionary process. Nordau dedicated his book to the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, whose main contention was that crime was often hereditary, the irresistible impulse of an atavistic mind housed in a similarly primitive body, and that the ‘born criminal’ could be identified by physical ‘stigmata’ that indicated the person’s criminal propensities. These ideas connected with Francis Galton’s eugenics movement and its desire to discipline the British Isles racially. In Mrs Musgrave, Marsh explores precisely this epistemological and ontological landscape. In many ways, Marsh’s early success as a writer depended on his ability to turn topical discussions into viable and sensational stories (see Freeman’s chapter in this volume). While the success of The Beetle in 1897 turned Marsh into something of a household name and prompted the republication of many of his early novels, Marsh was in 1895 still a writer who struggled to get his work published. In 1894, the year preceding the publication of Mrs Musgrave, Marsh published no novels and appears to have found few periodical outlets. To attract an audience and make a name for himself, Marsh had to strive for topicality, and in the 45

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime wake of the translation of Nordau and Lombroso’s work, few issues were of greater interest than degeneration and hereditary (female) criminality. Marsh may have been especially sensitive to this debate due to his earlier criminal career and prison sentence. While this history was embarrassing to Marsh, the crucial issue was perhaps the combination of an actual crime with what contemporary racial theory assumed was a ­troubling ethnic and racial heritage in his Jewish ancestry and his father’s criminality.1 According to contemporary racial theory, Marsh’s personal history up until the mid-1880s could be cast as an inevitable descent into crime.2 It is not surprising if, released from prison in 1885, Bernard Heldmann wanted to conceal both his criminal history and his GermanJewish heritage. His transformation into Richard Marsh in 1888 successfully accomplished these related conversions. Mrs Musgrave was the fourth novel that Marsh published under his new name. Preceded by the comic-Gothic novels The Devil’s Diamond and The Mahatma’s Pupil (both published by Henry in 1893), as well as the illustrated melodrama The Strange Wooing of Mary Bowler, published in early 1895 by Pearson’s Library, Mrs Musgrave is a surprisingly grim text that lacks the comical elements and happy endings that saturate much of his other writing. While the novel deserves critical attention for the intensity of its austere prose, its odd mixture of biblical and decadent discursive frameworks, and its provocative and largely successful attempt at challenging the conventions of the crime genre as it appeared at the time, this chapter will discuss it primarily in view of its engagement with Lombroso’s and Galton’s theories. As research has shown, a host of late nineteenth-century novels were preoccupied with the widespread notion of degeneration. This chapter argues that Mrs Musgrave approaches the anxiety over degeneration in a manner that sheds light both on the ways in which literature became a battleground where this anxiety was acted out, and on this battleground as such. Marsh’s novel provides a unique contribution to the debate surrounding hereditary criminality by simultaneously and deliberately validating and critiquing the racist and sexist matrix that informed late nineteenth-century British culture and society. Unlike most other late nineteenth-century fiction, but quite like some other Marsh texts, the novel employs a pattern where racial and sexual discourses are repeatedly set on course only to be derailed, and derailed only to be brought back on track again.3

46

Marsh and the female offender

The born criminal

When Nordau’s Degeneration and Lombroso and Ferrero’s The Female Offender were published, they fuelled an already racialised and sexualised understanding of criminality and deviance. Lombroso’s type of criminology was referred to as anthropological because it purported to detect connections between the physiognomy of a person – facial features, the size and appearance of the brain and the skull, even the presence of tattoos – and the criminal predisposition of the person carrying such ‘stigmata’. In the words of W. Douglas Morrison, who wrote the introduction to the 1895 translation of The Female Offender, ‘Dr. Lombroso proceeds from the principle that there is an intimate co-relation between bodily and mental conditions and processes.’4 A deformed physiognomy signalled, according to Lombroso, a similarly deformed and therefore poorly evolved atavistic mind inclined to criminal acts. These physical and mental deformities were hereditary, transmitted from generation to generation. Again in the words of Morrison: ‘the habitual criminal is a product, according to Dr. Lombroso, of pathological and atavistic anomalies; he stands midway between the lunatic and the savage; and he represents a special type of the human race.’5 Lombroso’s anthropological criminology became known as the ‘Italian school’, but the notion that deviance was hereditary was already rooted in Britain. The most important figure was Francis Galton, father of the eugenics movement. Galton was Charles Darwin’s cousin and deeply inspired and influenced by his ideas. In Hereditary Genius (1869), Galton argued that human procreation should be organised like that of certain animals. Galton’s initial observation was that ‘genius’ appeared to run in families and that society therefore had an interest in encouraging especially intelligent and useful people to procreate. In 1883 Galton termed this programme of attempted prioritisation of desirable genetic features ‘eugenics’. By then, the focus of this programme had begun to shift away from the preservation of genius towards the suppression of what were deemed undesirable human traits. In an atmosphere of increasing concern over the unchecked procreation of the lower classes, a social stratum assumed to produce few geniuses, eugenics developed into a nascent programme of population control informed by class and racial prejudice. Galton’s central ideas and eugenic programme rested comfortably alongside Lombroso’s anthropological criminology. From this perspective, it is not strange, as Neil Davie has argued, that British criminology ‘accepted, despite frequent protestations to the contrary, that hereditary 47

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime defects condemned certain offenders to a life of crime, and moreover that those defects were identifiable by means of standardised anatomical and physiological stigmata’.6 Indeed, Havelock Ellis’ The Criminal (1890) and Morrison’s Crime and its Causes (1891) hesitate to embrace Lombroso’s ideas completely but remain essentially supportive of Lombroso’s thesis. The Pall Mall Gazette, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal also voiced support for Lombroso.7 At the same time, Lombroso’s ideas, and their implications for the British penal system, also provoked controversy. One of the most vocal opponents of criminal anthropology was David Nicolson, president of the Medico-Psychological Association and superintendent of the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. In his address to the Medico-Psychological Association’s annual meeting in July 1895, Nicolson argued that The anthropological method of estimating the criminal must fail, just as its application to the insane would fail, because it does not include circumstance and motive in the computation, and because without these no standard of capacity, or of conduct, or of responsibility can be regarded as trustworthy or even possible. Again, if the [anthropological] criminalist tells us no more and no less than the truth, and if the criminal is what he would have us believe, our hopes for the betterment of the class by education and for the reformation of the individual by punitory measures, prison discipline, and other available means, are crushed.8

Nicolson’s critique of the practical usefulness and scientific nature of criminal anthropology represents the far end of a scale that records a number of possible relationships to Lombroso’s Italian school and to the understanding of criminal behaviour as hereditary. This scale enables a number of different positions vis-à-vis criminal anthropology and eugenics, from the thoroughly negative to the resoundingly positive. What makes Marsh’s novel stand out is that it repeatedly, and perhaps disturbingly, changes its position in relation to this scale. As other scholars have observed, late Victorian literature responded to notions of hereditary criminality and degeneration partly through the creation of a host of deviant, deformed and atavistic villains, but also by texts that critically interrogated the paradigm of criminal anthropology and eugenics.9 In particular, Dracula has been discussed as a work deeply informed by the notion of hereditary criminality.10 As the vampiric contagion spreads in London, Van Helsing explains to the ­gathering of brave white men and to Mina Harker that Dracula is ‘predestinate 48

Marsh and the female offender [sic] to crime’. Mina, apparently no novice to racial theory, takes his drift, agreeing that the count is ‘a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him.’11 In the Egyptian sorceress who invades London in The Beetle (1897), Marsh produced a criminal deviant quite similar to Dracula.12 Just as Dracula’s ability to transform into a wolf testifies to his primitive nature, the sorceress’ uncertain sexuality and her capacity to change into a gigantic beetle reveal her atavistic essence. In addition to this, her supernaturally ugly face with its small and chinless skull, ‘abnormally large’ nose and ‘blubber lips’ – initially mistaken for a man’s – is a map of the features Lombroso deemed connected to hereditary criminality.13 When the villains of late Victorian fiction were imagined as degenerate, deformed and atavistic monsters, the protagonist detective or adventurer sometimes transformed into a heroic eugenicist. The mission of this character was not simply to apprehend the criminal but to make sure that he or she is prevented from producing a new generation of criminals. Dracula serves as a useful fictional example since the vampire is involved precisely in a project of procreation. The white male adventurers who set out to destroy him are interested not only in saving the unfortunate Mina, but in preventing Dracula from spreading his contagion. The destruction of the criminal in late Victorian Gothic is thus imagined as not simply the operation of a system of crime and punishment, but as a project of racial hygiene where the deviant is prevented from transmitting his atavistic genes.

Mrs Musgrave – and her Husband

Mrs Musgrave was published two years before The Beetle and Dracula. Included in Heinemann’s Pioneer series, the novel was poised to stir up reviewers. In 1893 Heinemann had caused a sensation with the publication of Sarah Grand’s novel The Heavenly Twins, which launched Grand’s career as a New Woman writer and social reformer. At the same time, as discussed by Angelique Richardson, Grand was a ‘committed exponent of biological determinism and eugenic feminism’.14 The Heavenly Twins tells the story of three women, two of whom find themselves married to degenerate men infected with syphilis. The forceful Evadne Frayling realises that intercourse with her husband will ruin her and she abandons him while the less decisive Edith Beale instead naively believes she can convert her husband. As a result, Edith dies insane shortly after giving birth to a syphilitic, toad-like baby who also expires. 49

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime Even Evadne c­ ontemplates euthanising the baby she has with her second husband, fearing it faces a useless life of mental illness. In Mrs Musgrave, Marsh explores a very similar discursive landscape. Mrs Musgrave also followed in the wake of the Pioneer series’ The Green Carnation, first published anonymously in 1894 but later attributed to Robert Hitchens. This novel caused an immediate scandal by its thinly veiled fictionalised depiction of the relationship between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. Although Hitchens had told the story using other names, the connection between the fictional and the actual characters remained so strong that the novel was used in the trial against Wilde in 1895. Mrs Musgrave followed only a month after Wilde had been found guilty of ‘gross indecency’ and sentenced to two years of hard labour (on Marsh’s response to Wilde, see Orrells in this volume). Thus, Marsh’s novel was part of an already notorious Heinemann list. In addition to this, the novel certainly benefited from the previously mentioned publications of Degeneration and The Female Offender. However, despite its topicality, Mrs Musgrave did not cause the profitable scandal that The Green Carnation did. It was reprinted in 1901 by John Long, but this may have been prompted by the success of The Beetle rather than the 1895 sales figures. As Minna Vuohelainen has observed, the press largely disapproved of Mrs Musgrave.15 The Saturday Review observed that ‘[h]eredity is the stock-in-trade’ of the novel and that anything ‘which can be labelled a study in heredity is certain to be called “powerful” ’.16 The review then dismissed the story as something ‘calculated rather to repel than attract’.17 The Speaker recommended the novel only to those ‘who delight in the details of murder trials’18 and the Athenaeum termed it a book ‘better left unwritten’.19 At the same time, the journal could not help but confess to experiencing a compelling interest in the ‘curious fascination’ of this ‘closely knit and … extremely plausible modern tragedy’.20 The Academy did not deem it ‘nice’ but recognised that it was ‘grimy’ and ‘ “crimy” ’ enough for readers who enjoyed such books.21 The Times seems similarly taken by the story. Although the reviewer observes that the morality is ‘perverse’, he or she also declares that the novel is an ‘extremely sensational romance of a double crime’ and a ‘decidedly original psychological study to boot’.22 In Mrs Musgrave’s opening pages, the newly married Hereward Musgrave overhears a conversation between the noted psychiatrist Dr Byam and some friends. Byam describes his conduct as an expert witness at the trial of a Mr Gardner, accused of having murdered his wife with 50

Marsh and the female offender a stiletto. Byam admits to having realised that Mr Gardner is criminally insane and that, rather than hanging for his crime, he should be committed to Broadmoor. Thinking this an inappropriate course of action, Byam has instead falsely testified to Gardner’s mental health so that he can be sentenced to death. In other words, Byam has engaged in a form of eugenic practice clearly inspired by Lombroso and Galton: ‘a murderer ought to be hung although proved insane, – and that for the same reason for which you destroy a rabid dog, to prevent his transmitting the taint.’23 Like many other late Victorian criminologists, Byam has shouldered the burden of the heroic eugenicist. However, Dr Byam’s audience do not applaud his actions. Rather, like the aforementioned Nicolson, they protest: ‘You are attacking Broadmoor – the whole humanitarian treatment of crime’ (p. 8). Byam pays no attention to such objections. Rather, he regrets that his attempt at practical eugenics has failed: Gardner had already had a daughter, and as Byam laments her existence, she fortuitously appears in the window. The group is startled, and so is Hereward Musgrave. The woman is his newly acquired and much beloved wife, Ethel. Although troubled and confused, Hereward does not immediately confront his wife. They are on their honeymoon, and he does not want to pry into her past. Certainly, he sees no reason to worry about a criminal taint having been transmitted to Ethel. Her physical manifestation is very different from that which Lombroso imagined typical of the criminal lunatic. Looking at her, her husband sees ‘the face of a beautiful child – a child with character – exquisitely delicate. It was sweet and tender – a loving face, a trustful and a faithful face. A sensitive face, ultra refined’ (p. 30). If deviance is written on the body as Lombroso suggests, Ethel appears to have escaped her father’s criminal taint. Even so, Ethel’s past will not leave her alone. As the pair stroll down the Worthing beach promenade, they encounter Byam who forces his company upon the newlyweds. Ethel attempts to dismiss him, but Byam insists upon being introduced. He is, he says, ‘so old a friend’ (p. 15). Ethel eventually acknowledges Byam but does not explain their relationship to her husband, nor does she elaborate on her tragic family history. Hereward’s concerns grow as Byam continues to force his company on Ethel. Apparently, their shared history involves more than the eugenic intervention Byam performed during Ethel’s father’s trial. Ethel eventually admits that Byam was once ‘the most pertinacious of suitors. He would not take no for an answer. But I never liked him, – never! And at that time, I had made up my mind to marry no one’ (p. 18). Later on 51

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime in the novel, the reader will have reason to question Ethel’s account of her relationship to Byam. It is clear throughout the novel that Byam has pursued Ethel’s affections and, as will be discussed below, it is possible that Ethel did succumb to Byam’s invitations even as she refused his hand in marriage. This situation begs the question of what Byam actually meant when he openly regretted having failed to prevent Ethel entering the world as Gardner’s offspring. Given Byam’s position on degeneracy – his belief that the hereditary criminal must be euthanised for the good of society – how can he consider forming an alliance with Gardner’s daughter? Does he think that her physical perfection, her ultra-refined face, is a sign that her father’s madness has passed her by, or is she simply a forbidden temptation that he cannot resist pursuing? The reader never finds out. Before Byam’s interest in Ethel causes Hereward to interfere, the situation is dramatically resolved. After a breakfast during which Ethel appears especially charming, pleasant and loving, Hereward learns that Byam has been murdered with a thin stiletto, and that the doctor slept in the bedroom next to his own. At this stage of the novel, Hereward and the reader both suspect that although Ethel’s angelic face and behaviour signal innocence, she has in fact murdered Byam. Thus, Byam’s misgivings regarding the taint of Ethel’s father appear justified. When Hereward accidentally opens his wife’s handbag and discovers ‘a long, slender instrument of fine steel, scarcely coarser than a knitting-needle, but with a point of marvellous keenness’, little doubt remains (p. 33). Hereward is deeply disturbed by this discovery, but never seems to assume that it is his duty to bring his wife to justice. Not even when discovering what must surely be the murder instrument does he bring the matter up. Instead, the couple travel across the Channel to the continent where they spend a strangely idyllic time in the village of Dinant in Belgium, producing, eventually, an exquisite baby girl who, if eugenic theory holds, may have inherited the criminal insanity exhibited by both Ethel’s father and Ethel herself. The illusion of a happy nuclear family crumbles following a number of newspaper articles that inform Hereward that the Byam case is being investigated by the formidable, globetrotting, amateur detective Charlecote who reveals Ethel’s identity to the public. When she comes across a £200 reward advertised in the paper, Ethel’s stoic façade crumbles and she admits both to her tainted past and to her criminal deed. Despite resolving, in the wake of the death of her mother, to live a good and useful life as ‘an atonement for my father’s sin’, she has killed Byam 52

Marsh and the female offender to keep her past a secret from Hereward (p. 78). Killing is in her blood, she proclaims: ‘He [Byam] said that my father was a homicidal lunatic; that the stain of his madness had probably descended to me. He was right; I knew all along that he was right – though he himself did not know how right until too late’ (p. 81). At this stage, the novel seems awkwardly to endorse the eugenic and Lombrosian discourse that saturated the late 1890s. The murder committed by Ethel demonstrates not only to the reader but to herself and to Hereward that she has indeed inherited her father’s criminal tendencies. When she understands that Hereward has known this all along, her initial reaction is to ask him to perform the eugenic intervention that Byam undertook during the trial of her father: ‘Kill me! Kill me now!’ (p. 72). It should be observed that the plot so far, and this confession scene in particular, have much in common with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–62). Like Lady Audley, Ethel is a creature of doll-like beauty capable of murdering the people who threaten her, and the actions of both women could be construed as rational (see also Margree’s chapter in this volume, on crime as a rational response to circumstances in Marsh’s fiction). Furthermore, Lady Audley’s mother died in an asylum, meaning that Lady Audley’s mental illness runs in the family. Even though Braddon’s novel was published several years before Galton’s Hereditary Genius and more than two decades before the translation of Lombroso’s work on hereditary criminality, Lady Audley is diagnosed by the physician Dr Mosgrave as suffering from a ‘latent insanity’ that has been transmitted to her from her mother: ‘she has the hereditary taint in her blood.’24 Critics of Lady Audley’s Secret are divided on the novel’s relationship to the conservative and radical discourses of the period. Since the rediscovery of Lady Audley’s Secret in the 1970s, many critics have represented Braddon as a ‘subversive female sensation writer’.25 It is certainly possible to see Lady Audley playing the role of what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have termed the ‘madwoman in the attic’ in their influential study of nineteenth-century gender relations in fiction. As argued by Elaine Showalter and Chiara Briganti, the violence that Lady Audley performs and her madness as such can be understood as metaphorical – the displaced struggle of a feminist insurrection that cannot yet be properly represented in fiction. From this perspective, it can be argued, as Showalter does, that Lady Audley’s secret is that she is sane, and that her actions are perfectly rational.26 The other critical position understands the novel as an essentially conservative, even anti-feminist text. Heather 53

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime Braun has convincingly argued that ‘Lady Audley’s fate suggests a need to ­re-establish once again the aristocratic class structures of birth and death’.27 Kate Mattacks has even claimed that Braddon’s ‘radicalised image was a marketing strategy which successfully lured the middleclass Victorian reader and the modern feminist scholar alike’.28 Indeed, Braddon’s novel ends with Lady Audley’s exposure, confinement and death while it rewards those who have championed the values and causes of patriarchy. These two incompatible positions struggle against each other in Lady Audley’s Secret, disturbing the reader by first empowering a woman driven to desperation and then by forcefully fortifying patriarchal structures. Mrs Musgrave takes its cue from Lady Audley’s Secret not only because it revolves around a mentally disturbed and criminal young woman with a troubled family history but also because it explores a similar ideological rupture. Moreover, it accentuates this rupture by making both extremes more visible and by further highlighting the discordance of the two positions. While insanity inhabits a young female in both novels, it moves much more readily across sexual and gender boundaries in Marsh’s novel than in Braddon’s. Thus, criminal insanity is patrilineal rather than matrilineal in Mrs Musgrave. Also, the deviance of a mysterious heroine/ villain does not play out against quite the same homogeneous patriarchy in Marsh’s novel. The men of Lady Audley’s Secret may be fools and cowards, but they are arguably not afflicted by the murderous madness that directs the actions of Lady Audley. Even more importantly, the authority of the male physician who diagnoses Lady Audley’s mental illness is never called into question. In Marsh’s text, Byam’s expertise and motives seem increasingly dubious. Mrs Musgrave is certainly a murderer, perhaps even a hereditary criminal, but the criminologist exhibits a criminal impulse of his own. He has, in fact, sent Ethel’s father to the gallows on false grounds, and his interest in Ethel is not that of the professional eugenicist. Rather, Byam looks to take advantage of Ethel: He said he would tell you nothing, and keep silence for ever, if I would come to him in his bed one night … I said I would, if I could, that very night … I still had the stiletto with which my father killed my mother. That night, when you were asleep, I rose from your side. I took the stiletto from the bag. I went to Dr. Byam’s bedroom. He was kneeling on his bed. When he saw me he said, ‘Come here, you little witch. I believe I am as mad as you are.’ I went to him. He held up his arms. I stabbed him in the side. He fell upon his back. I saw that I had killed him. So I went back to you in bed. (p. 80)

54

Marsh and the female offender Byam’s blackmail attempt sheds doubt on the eugenic discourse which has informed the novel so far. In Ethel’s description, Byam appears less and less as an early Van Helsing, chasing the atavistic Dracula through the streets of London, and more as a Gothic predator, a Mr Hyde in Dr Jekyll’s body. Rather than representing the logic and power of ­nineteenth-century eugenics, Byam may himself be a degenerate criminal set to prey upon women. Byam’s immoral behaviour, degenerate or not, allows Hereward to remain loyal to his wife even when she confesses to murder. Hereward declares that Byam ‘seems to me to have been a greater scoundrel than your father ever was – I have no hesitation in saying that he deserved all that you gave him. I believe that any jury of men of the world would admit that you had justification’ (p. 82). In any case, Hereward argues ‘[my] love for you has nothing to do with your moral qualities; I care nothing for moral qualities, or for the want of them, not one snap of the fingers. I love you, your body, your flesh and blood, yourself, that of you which I can hold between my arms’ (p. 75).29 However, despite his declaration of both spiritual and bodily love, Hereward cannot completely shake off the eugenic paradigm that again reasserts itself in the story. Listening to Ethel’s striking and notably laconic account of the murder disturbs him. Strangely, Ethel has kept the stiletto her father used to kill her mother, apparently in an effort to hide the weapon from the police (p. 78). The weapon can be understood as not only a tool for murder but also a symbol of her inheritance. Has she kept it as a reminder of the guilt she harbours, or as a means of self-defence, or both? These possibilities gnaw on Hereward who asks ‘himself if there might not have been something in Byam’s theory, of the taint descending from the parent to the child, and if she was quite sane’ (p. 76). Again, Ethel’s murderous disposition and apparent lack of remorse clash with her innocent appearance and her sweet and pleasing manner. Like Lady Audley, she combines the innocence of a young girl with the immorality of an egocentric child. Interestingly, this agrees well with Lombroso and Ferrero’s contention in The Female Offender that women have ‘many traits in common with children’, which means that ‘their moral sense is deficient’.30 If Ethel seems to have experienced little remorse after killing Byam, she is desperate now that Hereward has discovered the truth. Despite Hereward’s protestations that she was justified in the murder of Byam, Ethel is deeply afraid for the future of their relationship: 55

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime The stain of blood-guiltiness will never leave me – never! I believe it will grow deeper with the years. And, more – hear me, Hereward! – I believe that if you will associate yourself with me, to cover up my sin, to carry it on, that you will be stained with my stain, that we shall both of us have blood upon our souls. (p. 92)

To Ethel, expressing herself in strangely biblical terms, hereditary criminality appears not to be simply a bond between parent and child, although it is surely this too, but something that can be transmitted from individual to individual. This seems to go against the notion of heredity, yet Lombroso did in fact argue that the born criminal could inspire crime in others. The Female Offender describes a case where a ‘ferocious born criminal’ by the name of Rondest who had murdered her own mother inspired ‘a friend’ to nurture the same kind of hatred for a woman in whose service she was.31 This, Lombroso remarks, ‘is a form of contagious hatred and crime analogous to what experts in mental affections describe as contagious delirium (Sighele)’.32 In this way, even inherent criminality is able to travel along routes other than parental bloodlines, across the bond of marriage as it does via sexually transmitted disease in Grand’s aforementioned The Heavenly Twins. Again, the narrative has the opportunity to collapse the eugenic model but instead seems to confirm the Lombrosian paradigm by turning Hereward into a killer. In a sequence that is arguably the novel’s narrative centre, questions about hereditary criminality, about degeneracy and about the debate as such are brought to the fore. In the sequence, Byam’s detective friend Charlecote catches up with Hereward as the latter has begun planning a sudden escape from Europe to the United States. Although obviously immensely competent – a dogged and determined Sherlock Holmes character – he is also an unlikeable person, ‘slight, malicious’ and ‘cruel’, driven not only by a thirst for justice but by the ‘blood-lust’ evoked by the pursuit of the criminal (p. 118). While his morals seem less compromised than those of his friend, he is a poor specimen of the eugenic champion who appears in many other novels of the period. Hereward eventually ends up in a train compartment alone with the detective and engages in a conversation in which eugenic theory again surfaces when Charlecote explains that his purpose is to find and apprehend Mrs Musgrave. Hereward defends her by using, to the reader’s surprise perhaps, the same eugenic rhetoric employed by Byam at the beginning of the novel: Byam, Hereward argues, ‘was a loathsome brute; one of those creatures who bring shame upon our common 56

Marsh and the female offender manhood; an animal quite as dangerous as a mad dog, one whom it was quite as advisable to destroy’ (p. 121). Charlecote counters by accusing Ethel – the ‘spawn of what a brood’ – of having been Byam’s mistress before Hereward appeared on the scene (p. 129). The tense conversation deteriorates until Hereward and the slight Charlecote come to blows, and Hereward accidentally kills Charlecote. Crucially, while Charlecote has the law on his side, the reader is never encouraged to sympathise with the amateur detective or to be cheered by his pursuit of justice and racial discipline. Hereward’s attempt to seize the eugenic paradigm, to call Byam the mad dog that must be put down, further undermines the power of this paradigm. If Byam himself is indeed no more than a mad dog, the eugenic perspective that he represents seems to crumble with him. However, Ethel does not perceive Hereward’s confrontation with Charlecote as evidence that the Lombrosian paradigm can be successfully challenged. Instead, she understands the killing of Charlecote as confirmation of the misgivings she has recently voiced. When she realises what has happened, her analysis is an attempt at reinvesting in the Lombrosian logic that structures much of the narrative: ‘Don’t you understand that the shadow of blood-guiltiness has been with me all my days; that it has come nearer and nearer until I have myself become blood-guilty? Don’t you understand that, when I went into your life, with me went the shadow too, so that, now, you too have stained yourself with blood?’ (p. 168). Hereward seeks to calm her, but for Ethel, there is no escape from either history or biological destiny: In that room there our baby’s sleeping – our little girl – ten days old, don’t you understand with what a dower she has come into the world? Her grandfather, a murderer! her mother, a murderess! her father, again, a murderer! Is the heritage, the obligation to murder, to descend to her? I have never dared to name my father’s name. It will be worse with her; she will not dare to speak of one of her progenitors – she, the last of such a line! As for us – her father and her mother – we shall be accursed in her eyes! – things of horror! – nightmares! – devils damned! And you suggest – for I know it is that you are suggesting, although you cover it with other words – a little more dalliance with the thing that you call love. God is not mocked; the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children – ay, and of the mothers too! (p. 169)

Rather than burden their child with this historical and biological h ­ eritage – the story of murder and the weight of a quite possibly murderous temperament – the Musgraves resort to collective euthanasia. When the police catch up with the couple, they commit suicide with the help of a 57

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime vial of poison gas and by taking the baby with them, they add infanticide to their list of crimes.

The making and unmaking of the born criminal

This conclusion leaves two discordant narrative trajectories open. From one perspective, the ending seems to confirm the Lombrosian logic that informs much of the plot. Ethel indeed appears to have inherited her father’s murderous temperament. While Ethel claims only to have been pursued by Byam, Charlecote maintains that Ethel had been Byam’s mistress for an extended period of time before she met Hereward. The novel never debunks this accusation, and Byam’s behaviour during the beginning of the story makes more sense if Ethel was indeed once his mistress. When Ethel is perceived by the reader as a fallen woman, criminal anthropology is again brought into play. Fallen women, Lombroso argues in The Female Offender, ‘have the smallest cranial capacity of all’.33 Even more important is Ethel’s apparent lack of remorse. Her own description of the murder of Byam suggests not a woman acting out of panic or self-defence, but someone programmed to perform her (biological) destiny. When the deed is done, all concern has left her and she is no longer afraid. Lombroso saw the lack of remorse as an important sign of hereditary criminality; by contrast, ‘normal’ criminals would display the fear and remorse that Ethel lacks.34 What disturbs Ethel is the fact that her husband has discovered her criminal heritage and the fact that she has committed a crime; never does she seem to regret the fact that she has murdered Byam. Her choice of murder weapon – her father’s stiletto – further suggests a form of genetically coded behaviour transmitted from the father to the daughter. Thus, from the eugenic perspective, the ending of Ethel’s story in a heap of dead bodies may even be considered happy. As in Stoker’s Dracula, the text’s eponymous and reproductive villain is stripped of her hereditary criminal agency in the closing pages of the book. Her child dies with her, poisoned to stop her potentially criminal genes from infecting the body of society. Read as a Gothic crime story, the closure of Mrs Musgrave is sad but also satisfying: the born criminal is made – discovered – and then unmade. However, this reading is disturbed by the fact that the reader’s sympathies remain with the couple and not with Charlecote and the law. Mrs Musgrave is not only a detective story or a Gothic thriller but also a modern tragedy. Charlecote and Byam remain unlikeable; the justice they seek to mete out is not a justice the reader is made to desire, 58

Marsh and the female offender whereas the criminals’ motives and plight are relatable. Importantly, Ethel seems initially driven to crime not by hereditary criminality but by Byam’s criminal machinations and paradoxical and insistent attraction to a woman he clearly considers tainted, and by her own naivety in believing his theories. It is quite possible that Ethel murders Byam not because this is something she is genetically destined to do but because Byam has told her that she is predestined to kill and because he attempts to blackmail her. Just as Hereward kills Charlecote in a desperate struggle, Ethel murders Byam in an effort to defend herself and her marriage. In this light, Mrs Musgrave appears to question the Lombrosian paradigm. Thus, it is possible to understand the novel as one of a set of fin-de-siècle narratives in which the real culprit is not the ‘degenerate’ criminal but the oppressive, sexist and racist Victorian society. Again, as in Gilbert and Gubar’s aforementioned reading of the Victorian novel, the novel can thus be read as a furtive yet determined critique of patriarchy. Similarly, Stephen D. Arata claims that writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde employed an aesthetic and personal style of writing ‘that carried within it an implicit critique of conventional middle-class mores’.35 What sets Mrs Musgrave apart from other Gothic and crime narratives is that the two trajectories that the novel explores – one in which the Musgraves are the hapless victims of an oppressive society, and one in which Mrs Musgrave is a degenerate criminal predestined to murder – are never resolved. Neither of these two discourses receives prominence in the story and both are, in fact, needed to unlock the text. This produces a novel that speaks in, at least, two concurrent voices that both emanate from the same attempt at trying to understand post-Darwinian (criminal) agency. In this way, Mrs Musgrave’s killing of Byam is, at the same time, a perfectly sane reaction to an attempted rape and the automatic reaction of a criminally insane woman. Certainly, other novels such as Lady Audley’s Secret also accommodate subversive readings. However, unlike with Braddon’s text, this subversion does not need to be teased out against the grain of Marsh’s narrative. Rather than harbouring the counter-hegemonic discourse underneath a predominantly conservative narrative, Marsh openly juxtaposes two divergent discourses. The subversive discourse is readily available to the reader, but it exists alongside, and contends with, a conservative discourse that is as dominant and powerful. With this in mind, it can be argued that Mrs Musgrave sheds light on the competing discourses of the 1890s by identifying the rift that separates them. Marsh does not resolve the questions that the novel asks – and this is true for much of Marsh’s fiction. The sense of societal s­ tability 59

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime that Arthur Conan Doyle’s narratives produce, where the degenerate murderer is routinely apprehended at the end of the story, rarely saturates Marsh’s fiction. In many of Marsh’s more provocative texts, the offender is not brought before the law. Instead, he or she commits suicide or escapes justice. One of Marsh’s most important contributions to late Victorian and Edwardian fiction is the way in which he opens up his narratives to multiple readings without closing these down. Mrs Musgrave’s exploration of the border between deviance and sanity, between morality and immorality and between crime and justified self-defence not only constitutes a vantage point from which Marsh’s oeuvre can be examined; it encourages a focus on the ideological rifts that divided late Victorian society. The novel openly promotes an understanding of its narrative, and of the society this narrative seeks to describe, as divided and unresolved. Thus, the novel charts the discordance of the ideologies and discourses that structured late Victorian society, revealing that these ideologies and discourses were at the same time constructive in the sense that both social and domestic policy relied on them, and destructive since they helped generate the very deviance that threatened these same policies.

Notes

 1 See M. Vuohelainen, ‘The Popular Fiction of Richard Marsh: Literary Production, Genre, Audience’ (PhD dissertation, Birkbeck, University of London, 2007), p. 68.  2 See P. Knepper, ‘Lombroso and Jewish social science’, in P. Knepper and P. Ystehede (eds), The Cesare Lombroso Handbook (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 171–86.  3 See also J. Höglund, ‘Black Englishness and concurrent voices in Richard Marsh’s The Surprising Husband’, English Literature in Transition, 56:3 (2013), 275–91.  4 W. D. Morrison, ‘Introduction’, in C. Lombroso and W. Ferrero, The Female Offender (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), pp. v–xx (p. xv).  5 Morrison, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi.  6 N. Davie, ‘Lombroso and the “men of real science”: British reactions, 1886–1918’, in Knepper and Ystehede (eds), Cesare Lombroso Handbook, pp. 342–60 (p. 344).  7 Davie, ‘Lombroso and the “men of real science” ’, pp. 345–6.  8 D. Nicolson, ‘Presidential address’, Journal of Mental Science, 41 (October 1895), 567–91 (p. 581). See also Davie, ‘Lombroso and the “men of real science” ’.

60

Marsh and the female offender  9 D. Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); S. Karschay, Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); P. Brantlinger, The Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); W. M. Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); G. Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction (London: Routledge, 1983); C. Pittard, Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 10 See also E. Fontana, ‘Lombroso’s criminal man and Stoker’s Dracula’, in M.  L. Carter (ed.), Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988), pp. 159–65; Karschay, Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic. 11 B. Stoker, Dracula (1897; London: Penguin, 1993), p. 493. 12 See J. Wolfreys, ‘Introduction’, in The Beetle, ed. J. Wolfreys (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004), pp. 9–34; Karschay, Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic. 13 R. Marsh, The Beetle: A Mystery (London: Skeffington, 1897), p. 18. 14 A. Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 95. 15 M. Vuohelainen, ‘From “vulgar” and “impossible” to “pre-eminently readable”: Richard Marsh’s critical fortunes, 1893–1915’, English Studies, 95:3 (2014), 278–301 (p. 282). 16 ‘Fiction’, Saturday Review, 80 (20 July 1895), 86–8 (p. 87). 17 ‘Fiction’, Saturday Review, p. 88. 18 ‘Fiction’, Speaker (13 July 1895), p. 55. 19 ‘New novels’, Athenaeum, 3535 (27 July 1895), 124–5 (p. 124). 20 ‘New novels’, p. 124. 21 Vuohelainen, ‘From “vulgar” and “impossible” ’, p. 282. 22 ‘Recent novels’, The Times (20 August 1895), p. 3. 23 R. Marsh, Mrs Musgrave – and her Husband (London: William Heinemann, 1895), p. 8. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 24 M. E. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, 3 volumes (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1862), iii, p. 144. It is not inconceivable that Marsh got the name for his protagonists by supplanting the ‘o’ with a ‘u’. 25 J. Cox, ‘Introduction: blurring boundaries: the fiction of M. E. Braddon’, in J. Cox (ed.), New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 1–15 (p. 7). 26 See E. Showalter, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977; London: Virago, 1991), p. 167; C. Briganti, ‘Gothic

61

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime

27

28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35

maidens and sensational women: Lady Audley’s journey from the ruined mansion to the madhouse’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 19 (1992), 189– 211. H. L. Braun, ‘Idle vampires and decadent maidens: sensation, the supernatural, and Mary E. Braddon’s disappointing femme fatales’, in T. S. Wagner (ed.), Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2009), pp. 235–54 (p. 243). K. Mattacks, ‘Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s secret: an antifeminist amongst the New Women’, in Wagner (ed.), Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel, pp. 217–33 (p. 220). Hereward’s dismissal of moral qualities in this passage can be read as an avowal of general decadent principles. However, Hereward never seems eager to take up a non-conventional life with his murderous wife. The life the couple lead is structured around conservative and conventional notions of middle-class domesticity. From this perspective, Hereward’s sudden outburst is partly testimony to a profound and physical love, but also a desperate attempt to salvage a relationship and a family that are inexorably breaking apart. Lombroso and Ferrero, Female Offender, p. 151. Lombroso and Ferrero, Female Offender, p. 203. Lombroso and Ferrero, Female Offender, p. 203. Lombroso and Ferrero, Female Offender, p. 21. Lombroso discusses the born criminal’s inability to experience true remorse in Criminal Man: ‘The savage man … feels no remorse whatever. In fact, he is proud of his misdeeds; justice is for him synonymous with revenge and the use of force.’ C. Lombroso, Criminal Man (1876; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 110. S. D. Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Identity and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1996), p. 47.

62

4

••

‘The most dangerous thing in England’? Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories Minna Vuohelainen

In August 1911, the Strand Magazine introduced its readers to Richard Marsh’s latest fictional female, a sexually and ethnically ambiguous, highly strung and startlingly independent boundary-crosser with seemingly telepathic ability. Her first name, rather ominously, was Judith, aligning her with a murderous Jewish femme fatale, while her surname, Lee, suggested Gypsy heritage. Described by her enemies as a ‘black-faced devil’s spawn’ and ‘the most dangerous thing in England’, the globe-trotting, lip-reading, multilingual martial arts expert Judith Lee has much in common with Marsh’s fictional monsters.1 Yet she is instead a detective who uses her skills as a teacher of lip-reading to solve criminal cases ranging from property crime to murder and espionage. Between 1911 and 1916, Lee featured in twenty-two stories, twenty of them narrated by herself and fourteen of them appearing in George Newnes’ Strand Magazine, with illustrations by W. R. S. Stott and J. R. Skelton.2 The period’s foremost fiction paper, the Strand enjoyed a ‘symbiotic relationship’ with detective fiction, which ‘far outweighed any other genre in the magazine’, and Sherlock Holmes’ serial adventures had appeared in it since 1891.3 Lee’s association with the monthly is therefore significant not only because it establishes her place within the detective canon but also because it points to changing generic boundaries and readerly values in the early years of the ­twentieth century. 63

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime As Nick Freeman’s chapter in this volume also notes, Marsh’s work evinces a thorough familiarity with sensation fiction, a genre that issued in multiple directions by the late nineteenth century, including supposedly conservative detective fiction, potentially subversive Gothic and provocatively transgressive New Woman writing. Lee’s adventures bridge these genres through Marsh’s ambivalent construction of his protagonist as a potentially progenerate offspring of his earlier Gothic monsters, while also gesturing towards medico-scientific romance in their fascination with science and communication technology. The series is thus indicative of genre instability and hybridity in the popular fictions of the period. Lee is a new liminal heroine attractive not only to Marsh who, as Johan Höglund and Victoria Margree posit in their chapters in this volume, struggled to side fully with the judicial system, but also to the supposedly conventional mainstream readership of magazines such as the Strand who eagerly consumed her adventures in the 1910s. Lee’s popularity points to a middlebrow fascination with transgression and a growing acceptance of the independent woman in an era often seen as conservative in its approbation of Holmes’ quest for normativity and its condemnation of suffragette campaigns. Yet Lee can be seen as both resistant to and complicit with the taxonomies commonly associated with detection; while the stories’ conformist position as scientifically minded detective fiction is complicated by their apparent tolerance of transgressive identities and Lee’s seemingly semi-supernatural communication skills, their very premise – Lee’s expertise as a teacher of the deaf – undermines such counter-hegemonic readings because her profession aims to conceal or ‘cure’ a form of otherness, deafness.

A ‘new detective method’: Judith Lee and fin-de-siècle detective fiction

After ‘Holmes-mania’ gripped the reading public, Carla T. Kungl observes, ‘detective-anything was guaranteed to sell’, and professional writers created competing detective characters distinguished by some novelty, from detective method to the detective’s gender.4 Many of these rival detectives, such as Jacques Futrelle’s Professor Van Dusen (the ‘Thinking Machine’) and R. Austin Freeman’s Dr John Thorndyke, appear to share the reassuringly conservative ideology and superior intellectual or professional ability of their famous predecessor. Some, however, such as Guy Boothby’s Simon Carne/Klimo and Arthur Morrison’s Horace Dorrington, are themselves criminals, while others are constructed as 64

Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories curiosities: Baroness Orczy’s grotesque Old Man solves crimes from the corner of a teashop, William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki hunts ghosts, Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados is blind, while Sax Rohmer’s Moris Klaw investigates dreams. In spite of this variety, feminist critics have tended to see the period’s female detectives, including Catherine Louisa Pirkis’ thirty-something spinster Loveday Brooke, Baroness Orczy’s Lady Molly of the Scotland Yard, Grant Allen’s New Woman misfit Lois Cayley and Fergus Hume’s Gypsy pawnshop-keeper Hagar, as reactionary creations designed to ‘reinforc[e] a conservative ideology’ by exposing the ineptitude of professional women who refuse to stay put within the domestic sphere.5 Kathleen Gregory Klein, for example, argues that the female detective is either ‘an incompetent detective or an inadequate woman’, while Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan see fin-de-siècle female investigators as either hyper-feminine creatures whose detective success is due to their feminine intuition and knowledge of the domestic sphere, or as defeminised honorary men.6 Marsh was one of the writers who benefited from this detective fever. He had first ventured into the detective genre in the 1890s with his youthful aristocratic detective Augustus Champnell, but his greatest success would come with Judith Lee in the 1910s. Lee’s skill set as a lip-reading female detective rendered her unusual even in the congested market for detective fiction; as the editor of the Strand explained, Lee’s ‘new detective method’, the ‘fortunate … gift of reading words as they issue from people’s lips’, was sure to earn ‘her a place apart in fiction’.7 In some respects, her representation confirms the accepted gender politics of the female detective genre: not only is she not a professional ­investigator – ‘I have very seldom set out’, she tells us, ‘from the very beginning, with the deliberate intention of conducting an investigation’ – but she frequently acts on impulse, relying on a ‘sense of intuition’ ‘so keen’ as ‘to be the verge of the supernatural’.8 She even likens herself to an ‘eavesdropper’ who is ‘constantly being made an unintentional confidante of what were meant to be secrets’.9 Thus, like the ‘simultaneously non-female, unfeminine and ultra-feminine’ New Woman, Lee could be seen as both too feminine (intuitive, impulsive) and not feminine enough (independent, unromantic); too joylessly professional (as a lip-reader) but not professional enough (as a detective).10 The stories’ conservative underbelly is further exposed when they are placed alongside Holmes’ investigations. The detective genre emerged out of an anxious age that witnessed the rise of the scientific profession, of statistics and the ‘idea of “the norm” ’, and of various branches 65

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime of anthropology, including cultural and racial anthropology, which ­facilitated imperial administration, and criminal anthropology, degeneration theory and sexology, which sought to define a desirable national stock through the classification of deviant physiques and psychologies.11 In its investment in discourses of normativity, detective fiction is often seen as a conservative genre focused on identifying and apprehending the criminal through the detective’s command of ‘technologies of vision that could see further and deeper than the untrained eye’.12 Holmes’ ‘deductions’, while reflective of Arthur Conan Doyle’s desire to inject scientific vigour into the genre, are also attempts to read physical signs left on bodies by acts of crime, neglect, work or habit. Rosemary Jann notes Holmes’ reliance on ‘indexical codes of body and behavior’, which Stephen Knight equates with ‘racist and gendered’ stereotyping.13 While, then, as Catherine Belsey observes, detective fiction attempts ‘to make everything explicit, accountable, subject to scientific analysis’, its ‘project’ is not only rationative but also eugenicist.14 Like Holmes, Lee uses her eyes to apprehend criminals who exhibit visible stigmata of degeneration. In ‘Conscience’, for example, Lee’s adversary is John Tung, ‘an odd-looking man, tall, slender, with something almost Mongolian in his clean-shaven, round face’, and unsurprisingly this ‘unusual-looking stranger’ turns out to be a serial killer (p. 449), while in ‘The Restaurant Napolitain’ she feels repulsed by ‘a short, broad, stout man, with a round, bald head and no neck’, who is discovered to be a murderous mafioso (p. 680). Lee’s ability to thwart the plans of these apparent degenerates is unusually dependent on her ocular power, even for detective fiction, as she first notes the stigmata of degeneration and then reads the suspects’ lips. Unlike Holmes, who ‘reads’ human bodies for clues, Lee, in anticipation of emergent spy fiction and later phonetapping technologies, gets her information straight from the criminals’ lips. Indeed, one enemy characterises her as ‘a spy on all the world’.15 However, Lee’s adventures reveal an ambivalence at the heart of detective fiction. As Margree observes in this volume, some subgenres of crime fiction display criminal sympathies, and the reign of the detective was perhaps not as uncontested as Holmes’ popularity suggests. Indeed, Holmes owes some of his success to his eccentric personality, and many of his rivals were similarly flawed misfits whose own departures from the norm were key to their ability to fathom the mind of the criminal transgressor. Female detectives’ often unconventional behaviour and qualities, and their public positioning and professional earning potential, signal a subversiveness that aligns them with their close contemporary, the New 66

Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories Woman, whom Sally Ledger describes as ‘a fictional construct’ with ‘a multiple identity’ as ‘a feminist activist, a social reformer, a popular novelist, a suffragette playwright, a woman poet’.16 The female detective shares not only the New Woman’s social status as a young, urban, educated, financially independent middle-class woman but also her textuality, her liminality, her challenge to conventional gender roles and her appropriation of previously male territory. Despite its interest in apprehending the criminal, therefore, detective fiction is an ambivalent genre in which the detective’s affinity with the deviant is a condition of his or her success. Whereas in many detective stories this troubling affinity is seemingly erased by the detective’s assured diagnosis of criminality, Lee’s adventures articulate a sustained unease with notions of stable identity and visible criminality, suggesting instead that all identity is unstable and performed (see also Höglund’s chapter in this volume). Linden Peach argues that criminality is often ‘associated with performance, trickery and a kind of “theatre” ’, and Martin A. Kayman notes the ‘presence’ of the ‘actress’ in the female detective genre.17 Many of Lee’s adventures feature characters who are able to alter their appearance, most commonly for purposes of financial gain or romantic deceit, revealing a troubling slippage between respectability and criminality. In ‘The miracle’, an objectionable but non-criminal spinster is described as ‘tak[ing] all to pieces’, the props that improve her appearance acquired through magazine advertisements and thus readily available to the Strand’s readers, as her mercenary fiancé explains: ‘she gets her hair from one of the persons advertised on the back pages; her complexion from some wretched harridan whose advertisement is to be found a page or two in front; her figure from a person the editor specially ­recommends … and her teeth from the Lord knows who.’18 Marianne Tracy, the polygamous identity-switcher of ‘Matched’ who is to Lee what Irene Adler is to Sherlock Holmes, marries and deserts wealthy men in various guises, her toolkit of clothing, wigs and padding serving her as a ‘ “transformation” ’ that allows her to assume various identities while remaining elusively untraceable herself.19 Such challenges to accepted notions of stable identity open up what Peach terms ‘a cultural space in which passive femininity may be reconfigured’.20 The criminals’ transgressive and mutable bodies signal an unease with degeneration theory’s quest for recognisable, unalterable physical stigmata, positing instead a notion of identity as performance. This performativity is extended to Lee herself. As Peach notes, the detective is often so closely aligned with the criminal that ‘the detective’s 67

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime body is itself “criminalised” ’.21 In ‘ “Uncle Jack” ’, Lee dons a d ­ isguise while tracking a group of swindlers. ‘It is simply amazing what an alteration is produced in a woman’s appearance by a change of hair’, she remarks.22 In addition to her red wig she ‘touche[s] [her] countenance here and there’ and ‘attire[s] [her]self in [her] most gorgeous robe’, only to attract the criminals’ attention as ‘rather a fine girl’ (pp. 557, 560). At the story’s climax, Lee ‘remove[s] the scarlet transformation’ and announces her true identity to the hitherto ‘unobservant eyes’ of the criminals (pp. 565–6). This adeptness at disguise aligns Lee with the criminal underworld she is engaged in challenging and destabilises any notion of an unalterable, always-detectable identity, subverting the very principles of detective fiction and instead recalling the alterity of Marsh’s most famous female character, the Beetle.

A ‘black-faced beauty’: Lee’s otherness

Judith Halberstam reads the Gothic monster as ‘an aggregate of race, class, and gender’, a conglomeration of threatening traits ‘condense[d] … into one body’.23 Lee, though a detective, is also such an aggregate, a liminal figure dwelling on the borderlines of the proper and the subversive, but one in whom the phobic taxonomies of Marsh’s earlier Gothic writing take an essentially positive turn. Such doubling of the detective and the monster reveals the shared roots of detective fiction and the Gothic in the sensation novel of the 1860s, which itself drew on earlier Gothic, Newgate and penny fiction. Lee’s adventures witness her development from a prepubescent girl to a young professional. From the beginning of the series, she is a curiously independent and restless character whose first-person voice affords her narrative control. While Lee’s class position appears relatively privileged, her gender identity is ambiguous. ‘The man who cut off my hair’, the first story in the series, situates the origins of Lee’s detective career in the ‘rage’ and ‘fury’ she feels towards two burglars who brutally cut off her hair, the Strand’s illustration of this ‘outrage’ (figure 4.1) emphasising her anger rather than fear at this ‘symbolic rape’ that, as Joseph Kestner notes, bears a close resemblance to Marjorie Lindon’s experience in The Beetle.24 Unlike the permanently traumatised would-be investigator Marjorie, the thirteen-year-old Lee overcomes her ordeal swiftly enough to rush to London to apprehend the criminals. As she puts it herself, she has ‘seldom been afraid of anything’, and later stories confirm her ability to recover, indeed to defend herself (p. 218). In ‘The Restaurant 68

Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories

4.1  W. R. S. Stott, ‘ “He caught hold of my hair, and with that dreadful knife sawed the whole of it from my head.” ’ Illustration, ‘The man who cut off my hair’, Strand, 42 (August 1911), 217.

Napolitain’, Lee traces Sicilian mafiosi to a Soho restaurant, where she teams up with an Italian girl to confront the killers (figure 4.2). In ‘Isolda’ and ‘Mandragora’, she shows her attackers ‘what an extremely ugly customer a woman can be’ by displaying her skills in ‘jiu-jitsu – the Japanese art of self-defence’.25 ‘I am a woman’, she declares in ‘Mandragora’, ‘but no weakling. I have always felt it my duty to keep my body in proper condition, trying to learn all that physical culture can teach me’ (p. 186). In a reversal of the stock Gothic plot, Lee refuses victimhood, assuming instead the persona of the crime-busting urban detective. The stories set Lee’s unconventional behaviour against the seemingly ladylike decorum of criminal women, prising open a discursive space for a reassessment of acceptable femininity. Lee’s professional dedication, fearlessness, vitality, skill in self-defence and public positioning align her with the period’s masculine rather than its feminine ideals, and she conspicu69

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime

4.2  J. R. Skelton, ‘ “I lifted the poker and struck him again and again.” ’ Illustration, ‘The Restaurant Napolitain’, Strand, 43 (June 1912), 689.

70

Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories ously avoids romance, vowing ‘[n]ever, never, never’ to marry and at one point d ­ eploring a suitor’s ‘preposterous notion’ that she was in love with him.26 Yet her winning first-person voice secures readers’ approval for her unconventional behaviour. Instead of heterosexual romance, Lee is repeatedly attracted to young women. In ‘The miracle’, she falls ‘in love … at sight’ with Margery Stainer, ‘quite the prettiest girl [she] had seen for ages, with a face … which had character and strength, as well as being good to look at’ (p. 742); the eponymous Lady Beatrice strikes her as ‘one of the most beautiful girls [she] had ever seen’ (p. 74); and in ‘The Restaurant Napolitain’ she describes her Italian companion as ‘an extremely pretty, fair-haired girl’, noting that ‘[w]hen an Italian girl has fair hair she is nearly always worth looking at – this one was lovely’ (p. 680). While short of expressing overt same-sex desire, these raptures at feminine beauty, coupled with Lee’s rejection of masculine attentions, hint at lesbianism, by then pathologised as deviant and, indeed, represented as monstrous in The Beetle. In the Lee stories, the question of sexual orientation is left unresolved despite the detective genre’s supposed hostility to uncertainty. Instead, Lee’s ambiguous sexuality, negative response to matrimony and dedication to her career align her with the New Woman, who similarly refuted the ideal of marriage as woman’s true profession. Indeed, Lee’s self-reliance, her dedication to her work and the international recognition of her abilities make her a fitting role model for an aspiring female readership. Residing in affluent Chelsea and making frequent use of the West End’s cultural facilities, Lee is inextricably connected to London. Her forays into London’s public spaces are, of course, opportunities for her to see things. This privileged urban spectatorship from a distance characterises not only the detective but also the flâneur, a male spectator of the sights of the city who in fin-de-siècle Gothic fictions such as Dracula, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray assumes a predatory form. Lee combines the flâneur’s voyeurism with what Ana Parejo Vadillo characterises as the New Woman’s use of ‘mass transport to enter, enjoy, and critically observe the public sphere’.27 Women, Vadillo posits, used public transport, available to both sexes and all classes and thus ‘connected with democracy and transgression’, ‘as an optical apparatus’ that enabled them to study London’s geographical and social strata so that public transport became a veritable ‘female school of the visual … the place where women learned how to look’.28 However, in many New Woman fictions, Patricia Murphy argues, the 71

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime ‘disturbingly illegible’ ‘labyrinth of London’ represents ‘sexual menace’ to the New Woman who is forbidden by rules of gendered conduct from ‘wielding the gaze’.29 Far from displaying the profound anxiety of such fictions, Lee is admirably poised to negotiate the ‘babel’ of London because of her linguistic ability (Italian, French, German and Sign are mentioned) and her cosmopolitan sympathies.30 Her most characteristic setting is the railway, a transitory space ‘crowded with that miscellaneous assemblage which is the peculiarity of such places’, and the liminal, semi-private space of the first-class compartment features repeatedly as the site of her detective encounters.31 Significantly, Lee shares this association with London and its transport network with the Beetle, whom Julian Wolfreys terms ‘the most typical London inhabitant’ because of its hybrid identity.32 Indeed, the small and dark Lee is not only multilingual and cosmopolitan; she is also nomadic. In her reading of the poetry of Amy Levy, Vadillo argues that urban mobility could evoke not only ‘cultural modernity’ but also diasporic ‘racial identity’.33 Lee’s ethnicity is ambiguous but her rootlessness spotlights her affinity with the diasporic communities of Jews and Gypsies, both subject to xenophobic prejudice in the nineteenth century as itinerant agents of reverse colonisation.34 In ‘Curare’, she lays claim to Gypsy roots by informing her audience that ‘the Lees are the greatest family of gipsies in England, perhaps in the world – the purest Romanies still surviving are Lees’.35 Where ‘Curare’ plays on Gypsies’ romantic associations with performance, palmistry and spiritualism, in ‘Eavesdropping at Interlaken’ Lee is, seemingly inexplicably, accused of theft, a charge that only makes sense in the context of the common perception of Gypsies as thieves.36 Nonetheless, Lee’s Gypsy heritage is never securely established, and her first name ‘Judith’ in fact aligns her with the similarly diasporic but urban and professional Jewish community.37 The biblical Judith, a common figure in fin-de-siècle art, is simultaneously a seductress, freedom-fighter and murderer, embodying the ‘incoherence’ and ‘doubleness’ that Bryan Cheyette associates with discursive constructions of Jews, who ‘were at the centre of European metropolitan society and, at the same time, banished from its privileged sphere by a semitic discourse’.38 Like her biblical namesake, Lee is just such ‘an internal other’, an alien dwelling amid English culture, simultaneously integral to its functioning and a foreign presence.39 Lee’s darkness and possible ethnic otherness render her liable to derogatory remarks and xenophobic encounters. In Marsh’s earlier Gothic fictions, the sticky ends of ethnically ambiguous and sexually 72

Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories transgressive women had been narrated by eugenicist heroes and traumatised victims. By contrast, while Lee may be described derogatively as a ‘half-bred gipsy-looking creature’ and a ‘black-faced beauty’, she is the likeable narrator of her own adventures, and we thus experience xenophobic prejudice from her perspective.40 As a number of chapters in this volume note, Marsh’s fictions often implode dominant discourses, confronting readers with an unsettling ‘discursive discord’.41 Ironically, given the period’s eugenicist prejudices against undesirable aliens and non-reproductive urban sexualities, Marsh’s crime-fighter embodies the very devious, degenerate or monstrous elements that supposedly threatened the national stock in the years preceding the First World War. A consideration of the ethics of her primary profession, lip-reading, further confirms the series’ troubling of boundaries and identities.

‘[A] professional detective …? I am a teacher of the deaf and dumb’: lip-reading and disability

Beginning with ‘The man who cut off my hair’, Lee repeatedly reminds her audience that her primary business is the teaching of lip-reading: I am a teacher of the deaf and dumb. I teach them by what is called the oral system – that is, the lip-reading system. When people pronounce a word correctly they all make exactly the same movements with their lips, so that, without hearing a sound, you only have to watch them very closely to know what they are saying. (p. 215)

Lee is one of the period’s many ‘scientific detectives’ who relies on ‘specialised knowledge, technology and method’.42 As an activity that demands the piecing together of partial visual evidence – for Oliver Sacks a ‘complex art of observation, inference, and inspired guesswork’ – lip-reading bears some similarities to detective work.43 Lee, however, emphatically denies being a ‘professional detective’: I am a teacher of the deaf and dumb; I take the profoundest interest in my profession. My interests in it are so wide that they occupy all my time. I pass not only from city to city, but from country to country, engaged … in a perpetual propaganda. Last month I was in Madeira, last week in Paris; next month I go to New York, then to Chicago – instructing people how to teach the dumb to speak.44

Her professional standing as an expert educator is established in the series by references to her teaching, desk work and conference attendance. In ‘Two words’, she is invited to attend an ‘exciting’ international 73

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime conference in Berlin, while in ‘ “Auld Lang Syne” ’ and ‘The Restaurant Napolitain’ we hear about her assistance in setting up ‘institution[s] for the education of deaf-mutes’ in Prussia and Italy.45 Lee could, then, be seen as an admirable model of twentieth-century professional femininity, a woman whose hard work has provided her with financial independence, a comfortable lifestyle and professional recognition. As Lennard J. Davis notes, finding one’s voice carries notably positive connotations of personal and political agency and full subjecthood, whereas ‘silence’ suggests a lack of ‘humanity’ and ‘a form of political repression’.46 Lee’s role as a restorer or provider of speech to the previously mute could, therefore, be linked to her potential New Woman status, while enabling the deaf to ‘pass as hearing’ again spotlights the performativity of identity central to the series.47 However, this positive assessment of Lee’s professionalism is somewhat undermined by her employment as ‘some governess kind of creature’, as one commentator derogatively puts it in ‘ “Uncle Jack” ’ (p. 558). Lee’s at times residential role questions her apparent independence, associating her with the class limbo and poor pay of governessing, one of the few ­employments traditionally available to middle-class women. Marsh’s fictions frequently evince an awareness of women’s difficult economic position, and deaf education, particularly the time-consuming one-to-one tutoring involved in teaching the oral system, was largely a task passed on to women, who were supposedly more patient and certainly more costeffective than male teachers.48 Lee’s professional success could also be seen to be undermined by her passing references to nervous strain caused by overwork, with many of her seaside holidays necessitated by nearexhaustion. ‘Conscience’ is one of many stories in which she tells us that she has been so thoroughly ‘occupied’ with her work that she has ‘nearly broken down’ (p. 451). In ‘Lady Beatrice’, she reluctantly assists a friend while ‘nearly overwhelmed by the work which had come crowding in on [her], demanding [her] immediate attention’ (p. 84). While, then, Lee’s narrative emphasises her professional authority and comfortable lifestyle, this nervous fragility questions her ability to shoulder her responsibilities. Such doubts over women’s capacity for brainwork were used at the time to attempt to stall the tide of women’s higher education, with medical men claiming that the delicate balance of energies within the female body would be disturbed by over-exercise of the brain.49 Ironically, then, Lee’s nervous strain could be used to argue against the education of girls. The patriarchal dynamics of Lee’s profession are further emphasised by the ‘hereditary’ and patrilineal nature of her lip-reading ability, as 74

Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories revealed in ‘The man who cut off my hair’: My father was a teacher of the deaf and dumb – a very successful one. His father was … one of the originators of the oral system. My mother, when she was first married, had an impediment in her speech which practically made her dumb; though she was stone deaf, she became so expert at lipreading that she could not only tell what others were saying, but she could speak herself. (p. 215)

As Carol Thomas notes, ‘disability is always gendered’.50 In Lee’s account, speech therapy passes down the male line (with Lee herself a potentially defeminised figure), while deafness and voicelessness are associated with femininity. While, then, Lee teaches silent women to speak, she uses a method associated with a dominant social group, men. Lee’s expertise in teaching the ‘oral system’ should be situated within a wider debate on deaf education. The eighteenth century had witnessed the establishment of schools for the deaf, using Sign, but in the midnineteenth century the very success of these schools led to a radical rethinking of deaf education, as a distinct Deaf community began to emerge.51 In a ‘Darwinist and eugenicist’ climate, scientists argued that the creation of Deaf linguistic communities could lead to the development of a Deaf variety of humankind.52 This could be avoided by the abolition of Sign as a method of instruction and the enforcement of orality in deaf education. As a gestural means of expression, Sign was seen as i­nferior to ‘highly-evolved’ spoken languages, and educators argued that the ‘ “deaf-and-dumb” ’ person using Sign was not only mute but also unintelligent, an ‘ “oral failure” ’ who could not integrate into ‘normal’ (hearing) communities.53 Following the International Congress of Educators of the Deaf in Milan in 1880, deaf education increasingly enforced ‘pure oralism’, a system that is unnatural to the congenitally deaf.54 These ‘normalizing strategies’, Jan Branson and Donald Miller observe, ‘ensured … the ongoing cultural construction of deaf people … as “disabled” ’.55 The system in which Lee is an expert is therefore complicit in ‘linguistic imperialism’ – or, as Davis chillingly argues, in ‘a political attempt to erase an ethnic group’, the Deaf, ‘defined by language difference’.56 Intriguingly, given Lee’s contested ethnicity, the Deaf community could be seen as another distinct ‘ethnic group in the midst of the nation’ that was increasingly construed as alien and degenerate.57 While, then, Lee’s character has the potential to unsettle conventional binaries, her professional activities as lip-reader and detective reinforce them, investing the series with a profound ideological ambivalence. 75

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime For Davis, disability, like other forms of socially constructed deviance, is a means of ‘regulation of the body’ in keeping with the ‘concept of normalcy’.58 The deviant, abnormal, disabled body is feared as the ‘unknown’ and ‘rarely centrally represented’ in literature.59 Indeed, one of the few literary genres to give disabled bodies visibility is Gothic, which abounds with deformed monsters – one could think of the powerfully liminal, grotesque bodies of the Beetle or The Joss’ Benjamin Batters, for example. The Lee stories, while confirming Jennifer Esmail’s assessment of ‘the relative absence’ or even ‘effacement’ of deaf characters in the fiction of the period, do provide at least one positive depiction of a deaf pupil, Netta Hastings, in ‘ “Uncle Jack” ’: ‘extremely intelligent … and by no means ill-looking’, the congenitally deaf Netta ‘could speak quite well when she chose – although she had never heard a sound in her life’ – but uses Sign ‘for convenience’ sake’ to communicate secrets (p. 554).60 Although this brief mention hardly puts the deaf character in a narrative driving seat, it nonetheless represents deafness as enabling in giving Netta an additional means of communication rather than focusing on her impairment. The series could thus be seen as creating a discursive opening for the discussion of disability in popular fiction; indeed, the Strand ran a feature on lip-reading in conjunction with Lee’s adventures.61 This assessment is supported by the fact that reading is, for most, a silent activity – as Davis puts it, ‘readers are deaf’ – and reading thus temporarily places the reader in the silent world of the deaf.62

‘Unexpected messages’: science and the supernatural

The advocates of the oral system saw themselves as progressives bestowing the gift of communication on the deaf.63 Lee’s ability as a lip-reader and speech therapist is intricately connected to her use of the latest communication technologies, and the stories arguably owed some of their success to the multiple ways in which Marsh harnessed his readers’ i­nterest in science and modes of sound and communication technology. The criminals Lee encounters use noticeably innovative methods, attempting murder by bombs concealed in chocolates, disposing of corpses through medical dissection, distributing photographs of Lee worldwide, hypnotising victims to commit daring thefts and compressing time and distance by aerial flight. Indeed, Lee’s primary identity as a lip-reader provides her investigations with a scientific rigour that would have appealed to the Strand’s technologically minded readership. However, this fascination with science also enables a reading of the 76

Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories series as an early type of science fiction, understood not so much in keeping with Darko Suvin’s influential notion of cognitive estrangement but as ‘a popular genre’ exploring the possibilities of modern science and with a ‘grounding … in the material rather than the supernatural’.64 Science fiction, Roger Luckhurst explains, ‘is a literature of technologically saturated societies’ that explores ‘the impact of Mechanism … on cultural life and human subjectivity’ and ‘shades into horror or Gothic’.65 The conditions for the genre’s development, Luckhurst argues, only emerged in the late nineteenth century and are also partly the conditions that enabled Marsh’s success: ‘mass literacy; new print vectors; a coherent ideology and emergent profession of science; everyday experience transformed by machines and mechanical processes’.66 Among the inventions of the period were various types of sound technology and electric innovation: the telephone, the phonograph, the microphone, electric lighting, electric trams, steam-driven omnibuses, the X-ray and wireless telegraphy (see also the chapters by Freeman and Hultgren).67 These ‘technologies of action at a distance’, Robert MacDougall observes, inspired both ‘enthusiasm and unease’ by appearing to ‘alter spatial categories and boundaries’, challenging social boundaries of gender and class.68 Lee makes frequent use of these teletechnologies during her adventures, her ability to ‘hear’ or ‘see’ speech across distance matched by her use of the telephone and the telegram to communicate ‘unexpected message[s]’ to the police, the intended victims of crime or unsuspecting criminals.69 These technologies function as extensions of her ability to hear remotely, enabling her to reach a listener without revealing her person. In relying on what April Middlejans terms ‘an imbalance of power between caller and answerer’, her use of teletechnologies is subversive; since ‘caller hegemony’ typically rests with the male caller, Lee’s confidence with teletechnologies troubles what MacDougall describes as the period’s ­‘equation of technological mastery and masculinity’.70 As Luckhurst notes, turn-of-the-century culture was not only ‘anxious’ but characterised by excitement about the possibilities technological advance provided for ‘a utopian future in technology, science, and human sensitivity’.71 Communication technologies, Mara Mills observes, were seen as ‘prosthetics that augment human sensory capabilities’ in ways that seemed bordering on the supernatural.72 With their ability to bridge distances, sound technologies appeared ‘uncanny, otherworldly’, even ‘haunted’, overlapping with the psychic phenomena investigated by the scientists who in 1882 founded the Society for Psychical Research (SPR).73 The SPR, too, took an interest in otherworldly communications, 77

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime coining the word ‘telepathy’ to suggest ‘an oxymoronic distant (tele-) intimacy or touch (pathos)’.74 While the links between science, speech therapy, telecommunications, psychical research and pseudo-scientific degeneration theory may now seem far-fetched, turn-of-the-century scientists were preoccupied by the ‘proleptic promise’ of ‘an electrical future’ and of ‘previously inconceivable forms of interpersonal connection’.75 A particularly striking example is provided by Alexander Graham Bell, one of the period’s leading scientists, who began his career as a speech therapist, lectured against the intermarriage of the deaf, invented the telephone, dabbled in spiritualism and had a deaf mother and wife who both denied their condition.76 Women were seen as particularly sensitive conduits for the reception of psychic messages.77 Lee’s nervous fragility points to this supposed feminine psychic hypersensitivity. While Lee may put her lip-reading down to practice, she also describes her ‘curious gift’ or ‘power’ as ‘equivalent to another sense’, ‘border[ing] on the marvellous’ or the ‘supernatural’.78 Her friends and adversaries see her as ‘some strange and amazing thing’, ‘a miracle-worker’ who wields ‘a very uncanny power’ and practises ‘strange magic’.79 In ‘The Barnes mystery’, she teasingly describes herself as ‘a thought-reader’ who is able to know people’s minds ‘without hearing’ (p. 410). If her lip-reading equates to telepathy, then her eerie telephonic voice appears disembodied. In ‘Curare’, Lee takes advantage of this perception of her as ‘a witch, a magician, a kind of hereditary dealer in magic and spells’ and ‘a repository of Romany wisdom’ by staging a hoax spiritualist séance to stall attempted murder, ‘produc[ing] some very singular results’ during a table-turning session at which she calls on ‘spirits’ to answer her questions (pp. 60–1). Indeed, Lee’s fake séance but real ability to read people’s ‘thoughts’ are contrasted with the ‘tawdry’ and ‘silly’ tricks of bogus palmists such as the eponymous ‘fortune-telling Johnny, chiromancer, palmist’ Isolda, ‘a tall, narrow-chested, thin-faced, large-lipped, big-eyed, long-haired, dandified individual’ whom Lee suspects of ‘freely us[ing] perfume’, and the ‘disreputable’ and ‘fool-snaring’ palmist Clarice in ‘Lady Beatrice’.80 While Lee exposes dubious practitioners in the uncanny as hoaxers, her ocular power again aligns her with Marsh’s previous mesmerist figures including the Beetle and The House of Mystery’s Svengali-like Aaron Lazarus, with Gypsies, who were traditionally associated with palmistry and fortune-telling, and with Jews, who were seen as ‘odious alien fixer[s]’ capable of unsettling stable identities with their ‘piercing’, ‘intense’ and ‘hypnotic’ gaze.81 As Daniel Pick notes, the ‘evil eye had 78

Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories long been associated with the Jews’, although the doubled perception of the Jew as ‘healer and killer’ led to uncertainty over whether Jews were ‘benign or malign’.82 Despite her ambivalence, Lee is undoubtedly a benign figure. Indeed, the association of psychic phenomena and hypersensitivity as ‘markers of evolutionary advance, rather than symptoms of reversion’, enables us to read Lee as a progenerate woman of the future.83 Science and the supernatural, teletechnologies and psychic communications, degeneracy and progeneracy are two sides of the same coin in the Lee stories, which repeatedly trouble accepted binaries and boundaries.

Conclusion: ‘the most dangerous thing in England’?

The Judith Lee stories’ persistent troubling of accepted binary oppositions of identity and of genre speaks powerfully to the ‘discursive discord’ that characterises Marsh’s oeuvre, and which he articulated with growing confidence towards the end of his life.84 Lee’s adventures show how early twentieth-century popular fiction made use of, and synthesised, seemingly disparate discursive frameworks drawing on criminology, eugenics, science, communications technology and psychical research. However, the voice of the independent, multilingual jiu-jitsu expert Lee, a cosmopolitan flâneuse equally at home in high society and the slum, disturbs accepted notions of gender, class, ethnicity, criminality and disability. The series repeatedly introduces binary oppositions between acceptable and transgressive femininity, Englishness and otherness, able-­bodiedness and disability, degeneracy and progeneracy, science and the supernatural, only to challenge and unsettle them. Lee’s first-person narrative creates a positive perception of her not as the ‘most dangerous thing in England’ but as an internal other crucial to the success of Britain’s domestic and international project. The stories could therefore be read as indicative of an urban readership’s gradual acceptance of the socially unconventional individual or the professional woman – even one as singular as Judith Lee. That the hybrid, the non-normative, even the subversive should have found favour with the readers of a middlebrow magazine such as the Strand suggests that an ideological shift was in process among the consumers of early twentieth-century popular fiction. While they at first sight appear to be examples of the female detective genre, Lee’s adventures in fact persistently undermine genre boundaries. Lee’s insistence on her primary occupation as a teacher of the deaf-mute spotlights the s­ tories’ medico-scientific credentials; her liminality and alterity borrow from the Gothic mode; and her gender politics could be read as representative of 79

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime New Woman fiction. The series thus offers a powerful e­ xample of the cross-fertilisation of seemingly mutually contradictory popular genres, which nonetheless had shared roots in 1860s sensation fiction, in the early twentieth century. Not only should such generic hybridity caution against the attribution of a simple ideological agenda to any particular genre, but it also indicates the inadequacy of approaching the period’s fictions through the conventional high–popular cultural divide.

Notes

 1 R. Marsh, ‘The Restaurant Napolitain’, Strand, 42 (October 1911), 680–90 (p. 687); subsequent references to this story are given in the text. ‘The Finchley puzzle’, in The Adventures of Judith Lee (London: Methuen, 1916), pp. 108–43 (p. 113).  2 Of Lee’s twenty-two cases, eleven deal with property crime and eleven with violent crime. Of the property-crime cases, five are to do with theft and burglary and the remaining six with fraud and swindling. Three murder cases are centred on Lee’s scrapes with international crime – anarchism, spies and mafia – and the remaining eight stories feature various types of murder or attempted murder. Lee also featured in two short story collections published by Methuen: Judith Lee: Some Pages from her Life (1912) and The Adventures of Judith Lee (1916). Two recent omnibus editions bring together all of Lee’s adventures: The Complete Adventures of Judith Lee, ed. J.-D. Brèque (Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2012) and The Complete Judith Lee Adventures, ed. M. Vuohelainen (Richmond, VA: Valancourt, 2016).  3 C. Pittard, ‘ “Cheap, healthful literature”: The Strand Magazine, fictions of crime, and purified reading communities’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 40:1 (2007), 1–23 (pp. 4–5).  4 C. T. Kungl, Creating the Fictional Female Detective: The Sleuth Heroines of British Women Writers, 1890–1940 (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2006), p. 2.  5 K. G. Klein, The Woman Detective: Gender & Genre, 2nd edn (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 72.  6 Klein, Woman Detective, p. 5; P. Craig and M. Cadogan, The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 12.  7 Editorial comments, Strand, 42 (August 1911), 215; Strand, 42 (October 1911), 449.  8 Marsh, ‘Lady Beatrice’, in Adventures of Judith Lee, pp. 74–107 (p. 77); subsequent references to this story are given in the text. ‘On two trains’, in Adventures of Judith Lee, pp. 271–314 (p. 283).  9 Marsh, ‘Eavesdropping at Interlaken’, Strand, 42 (September 1911), 292–

80

Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories 304 (p. 292); ‘Conscience’, Strand, 42 (October 1911), 449–60 (p. 449); subsequent references to this story are given in the text. 10 L. Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 140. Emphasis in the original. 11 L. J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body (London and New York: Verso, 1995), p. 24. 12 Pittard, ‘ “Cheap, healthful literature” ’, p. 10. 13 R. Jann, ‘Sherlock Holmes codes the social body’, English Literary History, 57:3 (1990), 685–708 (p. 686); S. Knight, Crime Fiction 1800–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 61. 14 C. Belsey, Critical Practice (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), p. 111. 15 Marsh, ‘My partner for a waltz’, in Adventures of Judith Lee, pp. 1–38 (p. 2). 16 S. Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 1. 17 L. Peach, Masquerade, Crime and Fiction: Criminal Deceptions (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), p. 2; M. A. Kayman, ‘The short story from Poe to Chesterton’, in M. Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 41–58 (p. 52). 18 Marsh, ‘The miracle’, Strand, 42 (December 1911), 735–48 (p. 737); subsequent references to this story are given in the text. 19 Marsh, ‘Matched’, Strand, 42 (November 1911), 482–94 (p. 490). 20 Peach, Masquerade, p. 29. 21 Peach, Masquerade, pp. 2, 10. 22 Marsh, ‘ “Uncle Jack” ’, Strand, 43 (May 1912), 554–66 (p. 557); subsequent references to this story are given in the text. 23 J. Halberstam, ‘Technologies of monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Victorian Studies, 36:3 (1993), 333–52 (p. 334). 24 Marsh, ‘The man who cut off my hair’, Strand, 42 (August 1911), 215–24 (pp. 218, 220); subsequent references to this story are given in the text. J. A. Kestner, Sherlock’s Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864–1913 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 199, 210–11. 25 Marsh, ‘Isolda’, Strand, 43 (March 1912), 242–54 (p. 252); ‘Mandragora’, Strand, 44 (August 1912), 176–86 (p. 186); subsequent references to this story are given in the text. 26 Marsh, ‘Miracle’, p. 748; ‘ “Uncle Jack” ’, p. 566. 27 A. P. Vadillo, ‘Phenomena in flux: the aesthetics and politics of traveling in modernity’, in A. L. Ardis and L. W. Lewis (eds), Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 205–20 (p. 210). 28 Vadillo, ‘Phenomena in flux’, pp. 209–11. 29 P. Murphy, The New Woman Gothic: Reconfigurations of Distress (Columbia,

81

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2015), pp. 105–28 (pp. 112, 110, 114). 30 Marsh, ‘ “Auld Lang Syne” ’, Strand, 43 (January 1912), 3–13 (p. 5). 31 Marsh, ‘Mandragora’, p. 176. 32 J. Wolfreys, ‘The hieroglyphic other: The Beetle, London, and the abyssal subject’, in L. Phillips (ed.), A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of London (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 169–92 (p. 181). 33 A. P. Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), p. 43. 34 A. R. Bardi, ‘The Gypsy as Trope in Victorian and Modern British Literature’ (PhD thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 2007), pp. 4–5, 10; D. E. Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 5–6. On xenophobia, see M. Tromp, M. K. Bachman and H. Kaufman (eds), Fear, Loathing and Victorian Xenophobia (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013). 35 Marsh, ‘Curare’, in Adventures of Judith Lee, pp. 39–73 (p. 60); subsequent references to this story are given in the text. 36 Bardi, ‘Gypsy as Trope’, p. 15. 37 Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, p. 6. 38 B. Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 9, 12. 39 Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, p. 3. 40 Marsh, ‘Conscience’, p. 460; ‘Restaurant Napolitain’, p. 687. 41 J. Höglund, ‘Black Englishness and concurrent voices in Richard Marsh’s The Surprising Husband’, English Literature in Transition, 56:3 (2013), 275–91 (p. 277). 42 Kayman, ‘Short story’, pp. 46–7. 43 O. Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (1989; London: Picador, 1991), p. 2, n. 4; E. Godfrey, Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger Fans to Suffragettes (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), p. 138; Kungl, Fictional Female Detective, p. 3. 44 Marsh, ‘Two words’, in Adventures of Judith Lee, pp. 144–79 (p. 146). 45 Marsh, ‘Two words’, p. 151; ‘ “Auld Lang Syne” ’, p. 8. 46 Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, p. 109. 47 R. A. R. Edwards, Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012), p. 184. 48 Edwards, Words Made Flesh, p. 195. 49 Murphy, New Woman Gothic, p. 174.

82

Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories 50 C. Thomas, Female Forms: Experiencing and Understanding Disability (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999), p. 84. 51 ‘Deafness’ has been capitalised here to indicate a distinct community, as opposed to ‘deafness’, a sensory impairment. 52 B. Hughes, ‘Disability and the body’, in C. Barnes, M. Oliver and L. Barton (eds), Disability Studies Today (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), pp. 58–76 (p. 61). Alexander Graham Bell’s Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race (1883) warned about the ‘tendency among deaf-mutes to select deaf-mutes as their partners in marriage’ (quoted in Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, p. 32). 53 Sacks, Seeing Voices, p. 9; Edwards, Words Made Flesh, p. 168. 54 J. Branson and D. Miller, Damned for their Difference: The Cultural Construction of Deaf People as ‘Disabled’: A Sociological History (Washington, D. C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2002), p. 145; Sacks, Seeing Voices, pp. 27, 30. 55 Branson and Miller, Damned for their Difference, p. 122. 56 Branson and Miller, Damned for their Difference, p. 124; Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, pp. 84, 78. 57 Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, p. 83. 58 Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, pp. 2–3. 59 C. Barnes, ‘A legacy of oppression: a history of disability in western culture’, in L. Barton and M. Oliver (eds), Disability Studies: Past, Present and Future (Leeds: Disability Press, 1997), pp. 3–24 (p. 4); Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, p. 41. 60 J. Esmail, ‘ “I listened with my eyes”: writing speech and reading deafness in the fiction of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins’, English Literary History, 78:4 (2011), 991–1020 (p. 992). 61 C. Sibley Haycock, ‘Lip-reading: the art of Judith Lee’, Strand, 43 (January 1912), 14–19. 62 Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, p. 4. 63 Sacks, Seeing Voices, p. 26. 64 D. Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 8–9; A.  Roberts, Science Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 11, 5. Emphasis in the original. 65 R. Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), pp. 3, 5. 66 Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 29. 67 Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 25. 68 R. MacDougall, ‘The wire devils: pulp thrillers, the telephone, and action at a distance in the wiring of a nation’, American Quarterly, 58:3 (2006), 715–41 (pp. 716, 718). 69 Marsh, ‘Conscience’, p. 457. 70 A. Middlejans, ‘On the wire with death and desire: the telephone and

83

Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime lovers’ discourse in the short stories of Dorothy Parker’, Arizona Quarterly, 62:4 (2006), 47–70 (pp. 48, 55); MacDougall, ‘Wire devils’, p. 722. 71 R. Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 5. 72 M. Mills, ‘Media and prosthesis: the vocoder, the artificial larynx, and the history of signal processing’, Qui Parle, 21:1 (2012), 107–49 (p. 124). 73 N. Yablon, ‘Echoes of the city: spacing sound, sounding space, 1888–1916’, American Literary History, 19:3 (2007), 629–60 (p. 641); Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 27. 74 Luckhurst, Invention of Telepathy, p. 1. 75 Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 26; emphasis in the original. J. N. Galvan, Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channelling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 2. 76 Sacks, Seeing Voices, pp. 26–7. 77 Luckhurst, Invention of Telepathy, pp. 131, 214; Galvan, Sympathetic Medium. 78 Marsh, ‘Man who cut off my hair’, pp. 215, 218; ‘Eavesdropping at Interlaken’, p. 302; ‘Was it by chance only?’, Strand, 43 (April 1912), 433–44 (p. 442). 79 Marsh, ‘Man who cut off my hair’, p. 222; ‘Isolda’, p. 253; ‘The Barnes mystery’, Strand, 52 (October 1916), 407–17 (p. 415); subsequent references to this story are given in the text; ‘Matched’, p. 494. 80 Marsh, ‘Isolda’, pp. 252, 243; ‘Lady Beatrice’, pp. 93, 101. 81 D. Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 3, 182. 82 Pick, Svengali’s Web, pp. 172, 177, 129. 83 Luckhurst, Invention of Telepathy, p. 184; emphasis in the original. 84 Höglund, ‘Black Englishness’, p. 277.

84

Part II

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money

5

••

Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller: The Datchet Diamonds Victoria Margree

In Richard Marsh’s The Datchet Diamonds (1898), luckless stock market speculator Cyril Paxton becomes entwined in the world of gentlemancriminal Arthur Lawrence. When a chance encounter puts Paxton in possession of the Duchess of Datchet’s diamond collection, which Lawrence has procured in a daring heist, he must decide whether to push his scruples aside and risk all on one final speculation. Marsh’s decision to build a crime thriller around a plot of financial speculation reveals much about both the culture of the late Victorian period and the forms of popular fiction that were there taking shape. By the 1890s stock market speculation had assumed an evocative presence in the popular imagination as ‘a marker of modernity’ and an ‘embodiment … of lateVictorian capitalism itself’, and it signalled both the dynamism and the perilousness of fin-de-siècle life.1 The figurative associations of speculation extended to make of it ‘a synecdoche for an unstable financial system propelled by chance and, by extension, for speculative society at large’.2 It is of little surprise, then, that Marsh, with his journalist’s sense of topicality, should have intuited the capacity of speculation as a trope to capture certain associated structures of feeling.3 In The Datchet Diamonds, speculation becomes a multivalent metaphor that operates across and forms connections between the novel’s finance, romance and crime plots. Most of the major characters become, or are suspected of being, speculators of a sort: on the money markets, the black market, the literary or the marriage markets. It is also a narrative driven by chance events, and in which an imagery of gambling is omnipresent. In this way, the novel explores the fears and aspirations of its young and somewhat precariously middle-class characters as they seek to establish for themselves a place 87

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money in an uncertain world. It also poses questions about value: about what is valuable and about how value is to be measured in a society in which market forces threaten ceaselessly to transform people, objects and relationships into mere instances of economic rationality. This chapter will argue that on the issue of speculation The Datchet Diamonds is significantly double-voiced. On the one hand, it utilises a prevalent discourse of moral denunciation to establish speculation as culpably reckless and as morally equivalent to crime. Cyril Paxton will have to reject financial speculation and demonstrate his difference from the criminal Mr Lawrence in order to establish his personal value and worth. On the other hand, that the novel will ultimately reward its protagonist for behaviour that is in a wider sense ‘speculative’ suggests that this denunciation may be less than entirely ingenuous. I will ultimately propose that the novel’s ambivalence about speculation is in part conditioned by its belonging to the developing genre of the crime thriller – a form that cannot help but affirm the pleasures of vicarious exposure to risk. As crime thriller, The Datchet Diamonds is therefore importantly different from the detection-centred fictions that have dominated scholarly discussions of crime writing in this period. As a representative text from Marsh’s wider crime oeuvre, it therefore promises productively to unsettle certain scholarly notions about crime writing and crime readers in the period.

Marsh and crime writing: villains, transgressors and readers

Marsh’s crime fiction evinces a perhaps greater interest in the commission of crime than in its detection. As Johan Höglund has noted, ‘Marsh likes his villains’ and is usually more interested in them than in the detective’s pursuit of the criminal.4 Although Marsh’s oeuvre does contain instances in which it is detection that drives the narrative (for example, the Judith Lee stories, or The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death; see chapters by Vuohelainen and Orrells in this volume), these are outnumbered by narratives in which the centre of consciousness is the transgressor and narrative interest lies with his felonious schemes. In A Master of Deception (1913), for example, young Rodney Elmore commits various financial crimes before murdering the uncle who has detected his misdoings. The Crime and the Criminal (1897) tells the story of the dashing and gentlemanly Reginald Townsend, a member of a Murder Club, who despatches his pregnant girlfriend. Marsh allows these perpetrators to be attractive 88

Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller and charismatic, and in making them protagonists, elicits a degree of readerly identification with their desires and ambitions. More significant still is that he often allows even his most villainous of villains to escape the clutches of the law. Elmore apparently takes his own life as the forces of justice close in on him, yet the novel hints strongly that his suicide note is fraudulent and that he has actually absconded with his illicit money and one of his several girlfriends. Townsend’s murder of his innocent if somewhat deluded lover is perhaps more than can go unpunished, but that he considers his suicide by cyanide a kind of triumph is evident from his final words to the lawmen who are his pursuers: ‘ “Done you!” he cried. “Hurrah!” … “Yes,” said Mr Townsend, “I have taken leave.” ’5 These elements make Marsh a figure of significance for crime fiction scholarship, where critical discussion has perhaps focused disproportionately on detective-centred fiction.6 The enduring popularity of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and the multitude of literary detectives who appeared in imitation at the fin de siècle have led to a scholarly emphasis on detection and its pleasures, and to the idea of detective fiction as an ideologically conservative form. Detective fiction, so the argument goes, simplifies reality, presenting society as an ultimately readable text whose meanings can be deciphered through the application of rational and scientific techniques.7 It reassures its readers that unknown forces can be made knowable, that the law will ­triumph and social order be restored. While this interpretation has recently been contested, with scholars noting how the narrative interest of even ­detective-centred stories pertains in their representation of disturbance of the law as much as in its restitution, I would like to suggest how much more true this is of those narratives that take the crime itself as their primary focus.8 Here, the enormous popularity of Marsh’s crime narratives is particularly apposite. Pointing strongly to the existence of a different set of impulses in readers than the wish to see social order affirmed, they reveal a more transgressive desire at work: to see social hierarchies questioned, rules contested and ‘improper’ behaviours rewarded. Marsh’s work can thus profitably be read alongside other popular but critically neglected fictions from the period that feature transgressor-protagonists, such as Guy Boothby’s Klimo/Simon Carne stories, in which the detective is in fact the criminal, or E. W. Hornung’s Raffles tales, where a gentleman-­cricketer by day is a mastermind cracksman by night. Conan Doyle admired his brother-in-law Hornung’s stories but cautioned that ‘they are rather dangerous in their suggestion … You must not make the criminal a hero.’9 His warning would apply equally to Marsh. 89

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money One key to understanding this more transgressive readerly desire lies in a certain kind of Marshian anti-hero of whom The Datchet Diamonds’ Cyril Paxton is a prime example – this is the essentially decent man who is tempted away from conventional morality and into crime, and who must consequently prove his underlying moral worth. This character-type differs from other of Marsh’s transgressor-protagonists such as Elmore and Townsend, and from Boothby’s Carne and Hornung’s Raffles, in that he is precisely not an exceptional individual; not fundamentally dishonest, and being without any criminal genius, he is instead an everyman figure, whose very ordinariness testifies to the potential appeal of criminality to a non-criminal public. The Marsh novels in which this kind of transgressor appears usually close with their protagonists’ return to the straight and narrow, and while to this extent they work ultimately to affirm dominant morality, they are politically significant in the ways in which they testify to the social and economic pressures that render crime a powerful temptation and even a rational choice. In Violet Forster’s Lover (1912), for example, Marsh’s depiction of a line of starving ‘sandwichmen’, trudging on a freezing January day with advertising boards for the luxury goods they could never afford, reaches almost Gothic proportions in its representation of the dehumanising effects of poverty. The shuffling men have become like zombies; robbed of their willpower, they have become mere ‘torsos’, in whom ‘only scanty, broken fragments’ of life remain, and the reader is consequently ready to sympathise when one of them turns to jewel robbery as the only means to avoid this agony of destitution.10 As is also demonstrated in The Beetle (1897), where an unemployed clerk turns housebreaker in his desperation for shelter, Marsh rarely shies from depicting the precarity of existence faced by his largely urban, often only insecurely middle-class characters, for whom poverty is a very real and present danger. Crucially, too, this poverty is rarely the fault of the individuals themselves, but instead is presented as the consequence of economic conditions such as low wages and chronic job insecurity. Marsh was of course no writer of social realism but the producer of popular fiction whose foremost interest lay in the creation of exciting and suspenseful narratives that rely upon often highly improbable plots to deliver their wish-fulfilling endings. But it is also the case that these plots frequently take place within a social world depicted as an unjustly unequal, and, for many, inhospitable place, and from this vision emerges an interest in the individual who seeks to better his position by illicit means. This in turn generates an equivocal, even sympathetic treatment 90

Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller of crime, which establishes a continuity with older forms of crime writing such as the Newgate novel and sensation fiction, which saw criminals romanticised and socially respectable protagonists forced into crime.11 Marsh’s fiction sits squarely within this tradition, bringing its radical or subversive elements much more to the fore than is the case in the detection-centred narratives prioritised by scholars of crime writing at the fin de siècle. This is not to say that a conception of criminality as socially acquired is the only attitude in evidence in Marsh’s work. One finds also the more hegemonic fin-de-siècle understanding of criminality as biological and innate that was underpinned by degeneration theory, and in particular by the ideas of early criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who held there to be a hereditary disposition toward criminality that was often visible on the bodies and physiognomies of individuals. Marsh does at times draw upon this understanding, sometimes even within the same texts that point so powerfully towards social explanations of crime (see the chapter by Höglund in this volume). In The Datchet Diamonds, as we shall see, both conceptions are present. Marsh’s own life involved a period of transgression in which he, rather like Paxton, lived for a time as a member of the leisured classes, paying his way with the bad cheques that led to criminal conviction and to imprisonment (see Chapter 1). The need to establish a distinction between the criminal-proper and the decent-man-tempted must have been a pressing personal as well as literary concern. However, that Marsh creates attractive protagonists from both classes of transgressor indicates an interest in transgression itself, irrespective of its sources or motivations. His placing of the criminal centre stage suggests on the part of readers a willingness to find lawbreakers sympathetic, to see normality disrupted and crime sometimes go unpunished. To read Marsh is often to be enjoined into an identification with the transgressor: to share, regardless of their moral propriety, his desires and ambitions, his hopes for reward and his apprehensions of loss; to share in the pleasures of risk.

The Datchet Diamonds: Mr Paxton as speculator

Cyril Paxton is a young man enjoying a moneyed lifestyle. He is fashionably attired, stays in upmarket hotels and travels first-class to the City when business calls. The affluence thus implied is, however, largely illusory. Paxton has invested his modest savings in the Stock Exchange and his ‘wealth’ consists in the possession not of actual money or land, but of certificates denoting shares whose value can soar or evaporate within days. 91

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money He has a history of failed speculations, and, despairing of the uncertainty of his situation, has resolved to ‘ “know either the best or the worst” ’ and gambled all his money on a single stock rising in price.12 He trades on the Stock Exchange to avoid the life of a clerk, toiling ‘at a salary of a pound a week’ (p. 6). Alternatively, he contemplates emigration to America and ‘a life which I hate; a continual struggling and striving for the barest daily bread’ (p. 12). It is not therefore penury that he seeks to escape but the drudgery and precarity of the urban lower middle classes. Paxton desires to live as the other half do. And holding out the promise of escape into a life of comfort and ease is the practice of speculation. In making his character a speculator Marsh was responding to a topic of much contemporary debate. By the 1890s investment on the Stock Exchange, previously restricted to only the very well-off, had become available to the lower middle classes and held out the promise of an otherwise unimaginable transformation of modest savings into fortune.13 And yet speculation had always, throughout the nineteenth century, attracted controversy. ‘Speculation’ has traditionally been defined through its distinction from ‘investment’, and in terms of acceptance of risk. The investor makes a long-term commitment of funds with the intention of benefitting modestly from dividends; where the speculator buys and sells quickly to exploit dramatic changes in market value. The speculator, in this account, takes huge risks on a gamble upon the future in the hope of achieving outrageous reward. In reality, speculation cannot be so categorically distinguished from other forms of investment – all of which involve the taking of some risk in anticipation of profit – and the distinction seems therefore to have been an ideologically freighted one; ‘speculation’ designating a realm of illegitimate activity whose existence confers legitimacy upon other forms of (still risky) financial activity.14 It seems as if ‘speculation’ focalised popular anxieties about the seemingly unfathomable activities of a burgeoning financial sector that, while central to Britain’s economic dominance, had brought in its train a series of financial crises that rocked the country.15 Its definition in terms of risk led speculation increasingly to be associated with gambling. To its detractors, speculation, like gambling, risked personal ruin for individuals and their families. Still more, it violated Victorian moral systems that held that wealth must be achieved through industry and ‘productive toil’.16 The speculator was a producer of nothing, but instead – and again like the gambler – sought scavenger-like to exploit the labour of others and to produce money from money itself.17 Criticism of speculative practice was often couched in such strongly 92

Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller moralistic terms that the Stock Exchange itself became constructed as a place of corrupting influence. The Datchet Diamonds participates heavily in this rhetoric of moral denunciation, depicting speculation as an activity that engenders loss of moral vision and alienation of self in its young protagonist. But there is one aspect to the contemporary condemnation of speculation that Marsh does not subscribe to. According to Andrew Smith, much of the late Victorian protest against the Stock Exchange represented ‘the insider’s anxiety that economic power could become democratically redistributed’ to previously marginalised social groups.18 Smith has in mind ‘the “other”, the foreigner, the Jew, the British “loafer” ’ – whom the transition from a land-based to a finance-based economy potentially empowered – but we might also add the woman and the lower-class man.19 As the preceding discussion suggests, it does not seem likely that Marsh objected to the economic enfranchisement of those lower in the social hierarchy. Indeed, a constant of his fiction is his apparent endorsement of his characters’ desires for embourgeoisement.20 Speculation functions in The Datchet Diamonds as a motif capable of registering several aspects of fin-de-siècle experience: uncertainty, insecurity and precarity; a marketisation of life according to which things and people are valued in monetary terms; and the importance of commodities as signifiers of identity and worth. Of course, Marsh was far from alone in recognising the potential that resided for fiction in the dynamism of the money markets. As writers including Mary Poovey, Tamara S. Wagner, Ranald C. Michie and Paul Delaney have examined, literature throughout the nineteenth century drew inspiration from the speculative bubbles, financial frauds, bank failures and stock market crashes that were being reported in the financial press; nor was the influence oneway, with the press borrowing heavily in turn from fiction in its attempt to render imaginable for the public the seemingly ungraspable activities of the financial sector.21 Fiction often explored what Poovey describes as the ‘implications for subjectivity’ of a culture of finance.22 Financial plots, she argues, allowed writers to explore matters involving ‘personal agency and individual will, like financial temptation and fiscal responsibility’.23 In doing so, they spoke to questions about ‘ “what I am” and “what I am worth” raised in a society permeated by forces that threatened to convert subjectivity into sheer enactments (or failures) of economic rationality’.24 That Cyril Paxton is so threatened is clear from the narrative’s outset, when an exchange with his fiancée Daisy Strong establishes that his financial impecuniosity renders him a commodity of low value on the 93

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money marriage market. He accuses Daisy in a spirit of wounded pride: ‘ “you don’t care for me the value of a brass-headed pin … I observe that you take the commercial, up-to-date view of marriage” ’ (p. 8). What is being negotiated here is the complex ground of marriage as not only an emotional and sexual but also a financial transaction. Near-contemporary novels such as Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875) and George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) similarly explored questions as to whether to marry for money or love; and whether it is prudent to marry for love in money’s absence.25 Daisy is in fact very far from being the kind of speculator on the marriage market familiar from Trollope – the narrative will affirm that she loves Paxton for himself and not in anticipation of a rise in his monetary value – but the exchange emphasises that insolvency nonetheless threatens Paxton’s hopes for romantic fulfilment and also his own estimation of his worth as a man. The issue of masculinity is important, both here and elsewhere in Marsh’s fiction (see Bartlett’s chapter in this volume for more on Marsh’s preoccupation with ‘loss of manhood’). Much scholarship on the fin de siècle discusses the notion of masculinity in crisis and yet the role of economic issues in its generation has perhaps been insufficiently acknowledged. For Marsh’s Paxton, the questions ‘what am I?’ and ‘what am I worth?’ are inextricably pecuniary as well as emotional and moral. This becomes particularly clear when Paxton’s final gamble on the stock market ends in disaster, and he misconstrues Daisy’s sympathy as ‘contempt for him as for a luckless, helpless creature who was an utter and entire failure’ (p. 25). That this failure is conceived of as a failure of masculinity is evident when he, and the reader, encounter Daisy’s room-mate and sometime chaperone, Miss Charlie Wentworth. It is clear that Miss Wentworth is modelled on the New Woman of the period. She is ‘a young woman of the day’ who does ‘whatsoever it pleas[es] her to do’ (p. 29). Thirty years old, unmarried and intellectual, she supports herself by writing for the periodicals, and is described in the narrative voice as ‘dress[ing] well, with a suggestion of masculinity’ (p. 29). This masculinity is significant precisely because it throws a spotlight upon Paxton’s masculine crisis. She greets Daisy’s excited announcement of her engagement with a satirical sally. Asked for her congratulations, she replies: ‘ “Also if you want, I will give you ­eighteenpence – or even half a crown” ’ (p. 30). It is a throwaway remark, but it speaks to the novel’s deeper concern with the monetisation of human relationships, and it anticipates a later moment when a friend of Paxton’s (Mr Franklyn) values his innocence at one hundred pounds in 94

Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller a bet with a police detective. Her objection to the marriage is based on Paxton’s impecunious condition and his refusal to engage in the productive labour associated with masculinity: he has, she remarks, not even the trade of a ‘ “crossing-sweep … at his finger ends” ’ (p. 31). Miss Wentworth’s own trade is significant in several ways. Firstly, we learn that through it she achieves a regular income of ‘something over five-hundred a year’ – ten times the amount that Paxton imagines earning as a clerk (p. 29). She is financially supporting Daisy through their shared living arrangement, and is consequently doing precisely what Paxton cannot – providing a home for his fiancée. Paxton is able only to ‘attemp[t] to wear, an air of masculine superiority’ in her presence (p. 33). Secondly, her adoption of literature and journalism as a trade means that she is one of the novel’s characters to whom speculative activity has spread. She ‘wrote for her daily bread’, we are told, ‘wrote anything, from “Fashions” to “Poetry,” from “Fiction” to “Our Family Column” ’ (p. 30). The ‘anything’ that precedes this eclectic list suggests something of the promiscuity required of the writing professional at the fin de siècle. Miss Wentworth, like the men and women of Gissing’s New Grub Street, appears in the guise of speculator upon the literary marketplace. Yet her concern for Daisy is sincere, and her suspicion of Paxton is far from being unwarranted. Ultimately, this ‘clear-sighted lady’ emerges as rather likeable, supplying us with one of several instances in Marsh’s fiction in which characters with New Woman traits can be accommodated by the gender politics of the text (p. 33). A far more problematic model of masculinity is presented by Mr Lawrence, who in several ways acts as Paxton’s double. He is also a suitor of Daisy, and he will propose to her towards the end of the narrative. He is, like Paxton, physically attractive and of gentlemanly appearance. The suggestion of resemblance is made most forcefully when Paxton unwittingly reproduces ‘exactly the same trick’ that Lawrence has used to purloin the Datchet diamonds (p. 21). On a train to Brighton from the City, Paxton overhears a conversation of Lawrence’s (whom he has previously encountered in Daisy’s company) and discovers that it is he who has committed the daring heist of the Duchess of Datchet’s diamonds that all the country is talking about. Lawrence, he learns, had accomplished the theft by accosting the Duchess’ man-servant as he travelled by train with the jewels, leading the man to mistake as the despatch box containing the diamonds an identical substitute that he had prepared. On arrival in Brighton, a rather dazed Paxton has a brief exchange with Lawrence and his co-conspirator in the refreshment room; he leaves, and 95

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money upon reaching his hotel room, discovers that he has accidentally switched his own Gladstone bag for Lawrence’s, and that the stolen diamonds are inside. Both appropriations of the diamonds have been achieved through a trick of misdirection involving identical containers (box or bag), with Paxton playing Lawrence’s role in the second switch. While Paxton has not consciously effected the swap, it is significant that moments prior to his eavesdropping on the train, he has been ruminating on the enormous losses incurred to his brokers by the failure of his latest speculation. This thought segues into a reflection on the diamond heist that ‘ “After all that is the sort of line which I ought to have made my own – robbing pure and simple. It’s more profitable than what Daisy says that I call ‘punting’” ’ (p. 10). Stock market speculation is thus figured here as theft, albeit in outwardly reputable guise. Given Paxton’s association of his own financial activities with robbery, and this fantasy of being the heist’s architect, one does not perhaps need to be a committed Freudian to see this ‘simplest accident’ as possessing unconscious motivation (p. 21). The correspondence between Paxton and Lawrence is further ­emphasised in the scene where Paxton unpacks ‘his’ Gladstone bag. It is some time before he discovers it not to be his own, since both the bag itself and its contents are ‘brand new’ and ‘freshly purchased’ (pp. 19–20). ‘New brown Gladstone bags, thirty inches in length, are apt to be as like each other as peas’, remarks the narrator (p. 20). The passage suggests that while these mass-produced commodities (clothes and accessories) fail to individualise their owners, they nonetheless succeed in creating the gentlemanly appearance of both men. Although both are identified as ‘Toffs’ by Lawrence’s (lower-class) gang members, in fact, Lawrence’s origins and social position are quite as opaque and liminal as are Paxton’s. It seems that both men’s gentlemanly semblance is a function of their patterns of consumption. There is about both men the hint of the ersatz – of an identity created and maintained through sartorial mode and purchasing power. Since Paxton is one of Marsh’s decent-man-tempted protagonists, this troubling similarity to the criminal Lawrence will need to be resolved through the establishment of difference. This task will be complicated, however, by the fact of both men being speculators of a sort, in a society fuelled by speculative enterprise. As Paxton contemplates the jewels, Marsh emphasises the temptation of the prospect they reveal to him. Paxton imagines the transformative power of the twenty-five thousand pounds he might obtain by selling them: ‘It would mean the difference between hope and helplessness, between opportunity and despair … [It] 96

Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller would mean happiness – Daisy’s and his own’ (p. 22). The meaning of the diamonds to the luckless young man is implicitly contrasted to their value for the Duchess, whose heart is merely ‘gladdened’ upon their eventual return (p. 137). While he does not actively decide to keep the jewels, nor can he resolve to return them. If Paxton therefore ‘drift[s]’ along a path he has not positively chosen, he is, however, helped along this by his speculative instincts, figured as the gambler’s hunger for one last spin of the wheel: ‘ “why shouldn’t I go in for the biggest thing of all, and with one bold stroke more than win back all I’ve lost?” ’ (p. 23). As the fog of speculative frenzy descends, Paxton can see himself only unclearly in the hotel room’s mirror, as if through ‘a film before his eyes’ (p. 23). Having figured speculation as crime, Marsh now presents it as addiction. Paxton begins to contemplate the diamonds as capital for further stock market speculation, conjecturing that he could transform their value into a ‘monstrous fortune’; moments previously he had considered twenty-five thousand pounds as life-transforming, but now, ‘compared with what he would make it, it was but a trifle, after all’ (p. 22). The logic of speculation, the text suggests, is one that renders all value unstable. Initially the passage fetishises the diamonds as the material embodiments of wealth – Paxton touches them and turns them in the light, reflecting that he holds ‘a hundred thousand pounds … literally, in the hollow of his hand’ – implicitly contrasting their solidity with the fragility of the ‘bits of paper’ that are share certificates, with their unstable, even fictive, denotations of wealth (pp. 21–2). Once the speculative compulsion sets in, however, even diamonds are rendered spectral.

Crime as speculation

As the final act opens, it is Paxton’s moral creditworthiness that is in question. He is pursued by a police detective who believes him to have the stolen jewels, although Daisy angrily asserts his innocence. He has, meanwhile, been abducted by Lawrence’s gang, who seek to make him reveal the diamonds’ whereabouts. Paxton first encounters not Lawrence himself but one of his goons, and the ‘German-American’ who is Lawrence’s co-conspirator (p. 111). Each of these is constructed upon the model of the Lombrosian degenerate: the goon (‘Skittles’) possesses an ‘evil face’ with a prominent ‘animalism’ about the mouth and jaw, protruding ears and a receding forehead; while the German-American (‘the Baron’) resembles a bird of prey, with his ‘small’, ‘black’, ‘beady’ eyes, his absent chin, his talon-like fingers, and his ‘aquiline’ nose suggestive of a 97

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money vulture (pp. 105, 37).26 In relation to these men Paxton experiences an ‘unconquerable repulsion’, a ‘sense of loathing’ as if he had been ‘brought into involuntary contact with an unclean animal’ (pp. 105, 111). This reaction of disgust establishes, for Paxton and the reader, his difference from these men of the criminal underworld; it might even be considered a movement of abjection by which he ‘give[s] birth’ to himself in newly purified form.27 But this will not be so easily achieved with the gentlemanly Mr Lawrence. The equivalence of the two men is explicitly asserted by Lawrence himself in their final encounter. Lawrence demands that Paxton return the jewels to him, ‘ “their rightful owner … by right of conquest” ’ (p. 117). Paxton replies that if conquest confers right then it is now he himself who has become their rightful owner. It is a witty piece of cut-andthrust, but it also speaks to a theme in evidence elsewhere in the text, and indeed, in Marsh’s wider oeuvre: that possession typically involves the dispossession of someone else who has a prior claim, and that avowals of rightful ownership therefore depend upon obscuring the provenance of the object.28 Indeed, the jewels are described as having made their way into the Datchet family itself through ‘a good deal of trickery and fraud and crime’, and many of the diamonds’ names are suggestive of colonial plunder (a common theme in diamond narratives; see the chapter by Allsop in this volume) (p. 58). Paxton is nevertheless desperate to assert his superiority to Lawrence and avers, ‘ “The difference between you and myself is, shortly, this – you are a thief, and I am an honest man” ’ (p. 117). Lawrence, however, retorts that ‘ “It has never been made sufficiently plain to me that the difference between theft and speculation is such a vital one as to clearly establish the superiority of the one over the other” ’ (p. 118). ‘ “Suppose you planned some big haul upon the Stock Exchange” ’ he asks, and ‘ “brought off your coup” ’ only to find that ‘ “some perfect stranger were to carry off … the spoils for which you had risked so much” ’ (p. 118; my emphases). Lawrence’s language figures the calculated dispossession of others on the Stock Exchange as audacious heist and larceny, and tellingly, Paxton is able to offer no refutation – it is a charge that the text itself appears to endorse. But if speculation is criminal, the criminal is also a speculator. This becomes clear as the action intensifies and Lawrence demonstrates the same willingness to take risks as does Paxton. At one point Paxton breaks free from his bonds and mounts a frenzied assault upon Skittles and the Baron. Mr Lawrence, however, ‘never for an instant los[es] his presence of mind’ (p. 123). Defying Paxton’s threat to shoot him with the Baron’s 98

Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller revolver, Lawrence raises his fingers to his lips and whistles for reinforcements. Paxton fires, but the gun’s barrel is empty. Lawrence calmly explains that the gun is a six-barrel revolver, that he knew the Baron to have discharged two barrels earlier, that he had heard him fire either two or three shots at Paxton, and had seen him shoot another. He continues: ‘ “If, therefore, he had not recharged in my absence the barrels I had seen empty, and had taken, before I interrupted him, three little pops at you, the revolver must be empty. I thought the risk worth taking, and I took it” ’ (p. 29; my emphasis). Lawrence’s impromptu game of Russian Roulette echoes the many high-stakes gambles taken by Paxton throughout the narrative as, refusing to surrender the diamonds, he exposes himself to danger from the direction of both the criminals and the police (on one such occasion Paxton has remarked that ‘ “the odds were against me, and – well – the stakes are high – very high!” ’) (p. 41). It reminds us that both men are gamblers by profession, who calculate odds and expose themselves to risk in the hope of extravagant reward. The coolness under pressure that both men demonstrate is essential to a normative notion of masculinity being developed within the text. George Mosse has argued for the existence of a hegemonic ­understanding of masculinity that maintained its dominance throughout the modern period in Europe, despite periods of crisis such as that of the Victorian fin de siècle.29Although Paxton lacks decisiveness and willpower in the earlier part of the novel, when he is unable to resolve what to do about the diamonds, he recovers these characteristics in the final section when he must fight for his life and his honour. Here the novel takes a distinctly darker turn, graphically imagining pain, torture and injury in a manner that recalls Marsh’s Gothic fiction. Paxton is bound (with cords that bite into his flesh so strongly that he faints momentarily with pain), shot at (around his face, as the Baron plays a sadistic game), burned (with a branding-iron bearing the legend ‘thief’) and threatened with dousing by a pail of boiling water. He meets these horrors with stoical selfcontrol, refusing to reveal the whereabouts of the diamonds (which he has stashed in a safe in Chancery Lane) and keeping up the tough-guy repartee. And he proves capable himself of exercising extreme aggression, swinging out at his captors with fists, revolver and branding iron, and succeeding in driving these weapons through the skulls of Skittles, the Baron and Lawrence. Paxton’s violence is ferocious, but it conforms to what Jerry Palmer has suggested is the pattern for thrillers, in that it is offered to the reader as exhilarating rather than revolting since it is presented as justified as self-defence, in contrast to that of Lawrence 99

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money and his conspirators who use violence instrumentally against people they perceive as obstacles.30 With his ready embracing of risk and his coolness in the face of danger, Paxton here embodies the crucial components of hegemonic masculinity, and the earlier suggestion of a crisis around his masculine identity is resolved.

Conclusions

The novel appears to end with a resounding condemnation of speculation. In the action’s denouement, Paxton must call upon all his reserves of masculine self-control as he faces being burnt alive in the blazing building in which he has been trapped. Salvation arrives, however, in the form of Daisy, Miss Wentworth, Mr Franklyn and the police. Following a long period of convalescence, Paxton recovers and is reprieved for his part in the diamonds’ disappearance in return for his testimony against Lawrence, the Baron and the surviving members of the gang. In the meantime, some stocks in gold mines that he had given up upon as worthless have seen a wholly unexpected rise in value. The narrative closes with Paxton and Daisy’s marriage, the two looking forward to living upon the interest from this fortune, which he has invested in steady British Consols (implicitly contrasted with unreliable foreign commodities). Paxton has, we are told, had his ‘final speculation’ and ‘nothing again will ever induce him to gamble in stocks and shares’ (p. 139). All the conventional objections to speculation as a financial practice are present in the novel, and to this extent it seems exemplary of the deep vein of popular hostility to Britain’s financial sector that Michie tells us peaked in the late 1890s, following a boom and bust in gold mining shares reminiscent of the Railway Mania of the 1840s.31 The Datchet Diamonds if anything exceeds the terms of contemporary denunciation of speculation, figuring it as a morally corrupting addiction and associating it not only with gambling but also with outright crime. It is hard, however, not to suspect the novel’s denunciation of speculation of a degree of disingenuousness. First of all, it is surely significant that the text allows its protagonist to prosper from the very activity it has all along condemned. The narrative might have ended with Paxton resolving to assume productive labour as a member of the lower-middleclass workforce. Instead, it fulfils his desire for a life of ease and leisure. Furthermore, the scene in which it is revealed that the forgotten shares have boomed in market value is one alive with the language of excitement. An astonished Paxton reflects that ‘a movement had been taking 100

Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller place in the market which was making his fortune for him all the time and he had not noticed it. The thing seemed to him to be almost miraculous’ (p. 64). The description expresses a fascination with ‘the market’ as something dynamic, impersonal, unpredictable and transformative. It is a moment in the text that exceeds the language of moral condemnation, and that recognises the singular allure of speculation in its vibrancy and promissory power. The key to this equivocation lies in an aspect of the crime thriller as genre that The Datchet Diamonds brilliantly illuminates: in identifying both its hero and its villain as speculators, the novel points to the central importance within crime thrillers of exposure to risk. This is an exposure undergone, and even embraced, by the protagonist (hero or anti-hero), and experienced vicariously by readers. I am drawing here upon scholarship that emphasises the priority placed by particular popular genres upon narrative excitement generated by trespass into forbidden territory. Lee Horsley, for example (citing Dennis Porter), characterises the activity of reading crime fiction as being to do with ‘the subversive pleasure of stepping outside the law’ and vicariously ‘experiencing loss and recovery, danger and return from danger’.32 David Glover employs a particularly pertinent metaphor in describing the (crime) thriller as being ‘to a large extent marked by the way in which it persistently seeks to raise the stakes of the narrative, heightening or exaggerating the experience of events by transforming them into a rising curve of danger, violence or shock’.33 Francis O’Gorman, in an essay on H. Rider Haggard, articulates this readerly pleasure explicitly in terms of speculation, arguing that Haggard’s adventure stories recognise something difficult to express in the context of Victorian suspicion of speculation: the ‘hidden appeals of profiting from a willingness to take risks’.34 At the heart of Haggard’s literary mode, he suggests, is ‘risk’s pleasurable transformation into reward’.35 Marsh was of course not writing imperial adventure narratives in the mode of Haggard, or, we might add, Guy Boothby, whose Dr Nikola stories also support O’Gorman’s thesis.36 And yet, as Glover again observes, the world of popular fiction at the fin de siècle was one essentially ‘fluid and disordered … where genre categories were far from fixed and where terms like “mystery”, “thriller”, “detective story” and “adventure” were used freely and interchangeably’.37 Marsh, like many writers of the period, was exploring narrative possibilities that would only subsequently coalesce into distinct genre categories. Much of his crime writing has less in common with the detective stories with 101

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money which the period has become associated, and more with the turn-of-thecentury adventure/romance and the twentieth-century thriller. He offers his readers narratives in which they too may experience the high-stakes excitement of stepping into the forbidden and the unknown. That this experience is vicarious and imagined is of course vital, since it enables excitement within a context of actual safety. It suggests that the crime thriller (as opposed to the detective story) might function in a similar fashion to late nineteenth-century memoirs of ballooning and mountainclimbing, which Elaine Freedgood argues not only provided readers with the excitement of second-hand danger but also worked to neutralise their anxieties about an uncertain world, by showing how risk could be survived.38 Perhaps the crime thriller is an exemplary genre for speculative society, proposing that uncertainty can be not only endured but actually transformed into pleasure. It is for this reason that speculation cannot but function ambivalently in The Datchet Diamonds. The novel’s two transgressor figures both appear as speculators in this wider sense of their willingness to raise the stakes, stare down danger and coolly play the odds in a world governed by chance – and the text asks its readers to find such a quality attractive. For Marsh, as for Haggard and Boothby, coming by one’s fortune through adventure is laudable, and reading about this kind of risk-taking perhaps promises to reinstate a masculinity that has been lost in modern urban life. Marsh’s narrative requires us to enjoy (vicarious) risk – to experience it as excitement rather than as anxiety. The form of his novel therefore produces a covert affirmation of risk that exists in tension with the narrative surface’s explicit condemnation of speculation. This in turn complicates the endeavour to confirm Paxton’s essential decency by establishing his difference from Lawrence. The problem is that Lawrence remains an attractive figure, and for much the same reason that Paxton is. There is ultimately little that places Lawrence definitively beyond the pale – perhaps only his motivations for violence and his association with the degenerate underworld. And while Marsh has his protagonist finally renounce the evils of gambling, speculation and crime, and step back over the boundary into the permitted, this is not really why we welcome his happy ending. John Cawelti suggests that the presentation of crime in fiction allows readers to give vent to their ‘latent hostility and frustration’ towards social institutions that fail in their task of supplying social justice and individual security; that they do this even while ‘maintaining an overt stance … of conventional morality’.39 Marsh presents us with a world in which wealth does not follow desert; in which City financiers become rich on immoral 102

Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller earnings and aristocrats are wealthy beyond reason. His readers prove willing to find sympathetic his protagonist’s desire for a portion of happiness in this world, and to enjoy his attempt to procure it through illicit means. In Marsh’s The Twickenham Peerage (1902), good-natured adventurer James Merrett reflects on his fraudulent impersonation of a Marquis, thus: ‘I was well aware that, use whatever precautions I might, I was still taking on a pretty considerable risk. But then I’d got to be a kind of a dealer in hazards. Been gambling in them my whole long life.’40 The protagonists of Marsh’s transgressor-centred crime fictions are prototypically dealers in hazards. Their popularity with readers points to the presence of attitudes contrary to sanctioned Victorian narratives about crime, risk and reward.

Notes

 1 F. O’Gorman, ‘Speculative fictions and the fortunes of H. Rider Haggard’, in F. O’Gorman (ed.), Victorian Literature and Finance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 157–72 (p. 165).  2 Tamara S. Wagner, Financial Speculation in Victorian Britain: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815–1901 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), p. 8.  3 The financial City was a world with which Marsh had some familiarity. Marsh’s brother Harry Heldmann worked on the Stock Exchange, and Marsh himself contributed a story to their Christmas annual in 1902: ‘Their reasons: two hitherto unreported conversations’, House Annual 1902, 65–8.  4 J. Höglund, ‘Introduction’, in R. Marsh, A Spoiler of Men, ed. J. Höglund (1905; Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2010), pp. vii–xviii (p. xii).  5 R. Marsh, The Crime and the Criminal (London: Ward, Lock, [1897]), pp. 342–3.  6 See also C. Clarke, Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), esp. pp. 1–12.  7 See L. Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. pp. 18–20.  8 Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, pp. 18–20.  9 Conan Doyle quoted from his 1924 autobiography in R. Bleiler, ‘Raffles: the gentleman thief’, in Strand Magazine, at https://www.strandmag.com/ the-magazine/articles/raffles-the-gentleman-thief/ [accessed 26 July 2015]. 10 R. Marsh, Violet Forster’s Lover (London: Cassell, 1912) [Project Gutenberg Ebook, 2012], ch. viii. 11 L. Pykett, ‘The Newgate novel and sensation fiction, 1830–1868’, in M. Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 19–39.

103

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money 12 R. Marsh, The Datchet Diamonds (1898; Kansas City, MO: Valancourt Books, 2007), p. 6. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 13 See M. Poovey, ‘Introduction’, in M. Poovey (ed.), The Financial System in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 1–33. 14 See A. Jaffe, ‘Trollope in the stock market: irrational exuberance and The Prime Minister’, Victorian Studies, 45:1 (2002), 43–64. 15 See Poovey, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–33. See also R. C. Michie, Guilty Money: The City of London in Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 1815–1914 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009). 16 Michie, Guilty Money, p. 1. 17 See also D. C. Itzkowitz, ‘Fair enterprise or extravagant speculation: investment, speculation, and gambling in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 45:1 (2002), 121–47. 18 A. Smith, The Ghost Story, 1840–1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 22. 19 Smith, The Ghost Story, p. 22. 20 See, for example, R. Marsh, The Joss: A Reversion (1901; Kansas City, MO: Valancourt Books, 2007). 21 M. Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Wagner, Financial Speculation; Michie, Guilty Money; P. Delaney, Literature, Money and Market (London: Palgrave, 2002). 22 M. Poovey, ‘Writing about finance in Victorian England: disclosure and secrecy in the culture of investment’, Victorian Studies, 45:1 (2002), 17–41 (p. 36). 23 Poovey, ‘Writing about finance’, p. 33. 24 Poovey, ‘Writing about finance’, p. 36. 25 A. Trollope, The Way We Live Now, ed. F. Kermode (1875; London: Penguin Classics, 1994); G. Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. J. Goode (1891; Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008). 26 The ‘German-American’ at once hybridises the two national economies poised to challenge Britain’s economic supremacy; it is also deeply suggestive of anti-Semitic stereotyping. 27 See J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University, 1982), p. 3. 28 See the stories collected in R. Marsh, Curios: Some Strange Adventures of Two Bachelors (1898; Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2007). 29 G. L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 30 J. Palmer, Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (London: Edward Arnold, 1978).

104

Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller 31 Michie, Guilty Money, p. 133. 32 Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p. 20. 33 D. Glover, ‘The thriller’, in Priestman (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, pp. 135–54 (p. 137); my emphasis. 34 O’Gorman, ‘Speculative fictions’, p. 169. 35 O’Gorman, ‘Speculative fictions’, p. 169. 36 For example, G. Boothby, ‘Doctor Nikola’ (1896), in Doctor Nikola, Master Criminal, ed. D. Stuart Davies (Ware: Wordsworth, 2009). 37 Glover, ‘Thriller’, p. 139. 38 E. Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 8–9. 39 J. G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 79. 40 R. Marsh, The Twickenham Peerage (London: Methuen, 1902) [Project Gutenberg Ebook, 2012].

105

6

••

‘The crowd would have it that I was a hero’: populism, New Humour and the male clerk in Marsh’s Sam Briggs adventures Mackenzie Bartlett

Since the 1990s, critical studies of Richard Marsh have tended to adopt Richard Dalby’s characterisation of the author as ‘one of the fin de siècle’s most “demon-haunted” and obsessed masters of the macabre’.1 However, Marsh was also a well-regarded author of comic fiction. The Scotsman called Marsh ‘an extraordinarily clever and amusing story-teller, with a kind of inventiveness and a vein of humour which are original and peculiar’, while an obituary in the Athenaeum commended the late author’s ‘sense of social comedy’.2 Even his Gothic tales were admired for their use of humour, with many critics acknowledging Marsh’s flair for genre bending.3 Marsh frequently used slapstick, satire, parody and farce to interrogate some of the most pressing issues of his day, including the ‘Woman Question’ and the changing conceptions of manhood and masculinity, the expansion of London and the effects of suburban sprawl, the contentious debates about evolution and degeneration, the rise of lowermiddle-class professions such as the clerk and the rapid advancements in industry and technology. This chapter will examine overlapping thematic concerns with populism, masculinity and the clerking class in Marsh’s Sam Briggs adventures (1904–15) in an effort to contextualise these tales as important literary offshoots of the ‘New Humour’ movement of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.

106

Populism, New Humour and the male clerk

‘Damned by the critics’: origins and reception of the New Humour

In a speech to the New Vagabonds’ Club in 1904, Hall Caine predicted that ‘in the time to come, when people want to arrive at a picture of our own generation, to know how we lived and amused ourselves, and what sort of folks we were … I daresay they will go to … whatever is left of the poor despised light literature of the present moment’.4 Although research on late Victorian and Edwardian humour has been overshadowed by inquiries into more ‘serious’ forms of literature, comic fiction is pivotal to understanding popular culture and changes in publishing at the fin de siècle.5 Comic novels, collections of humorous sketches, parodies and an array of amusing periodicals catered for an increasingly literate population, while crowds of people flocked to music halls and theatres to watch comic acts and plays. In the midst of this medley of comedy and populism emerged a group of writers dubbed the ‘New Humourists’, the most notable of whom were Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain, W. W. Jacobs, Israel Zangwill and Robert Barr. Jerome’s The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), which the author famously dedicated to his pipe, announced the arrival of New Humour and paved the way for Jerome’s more popular Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog! (1889). This tale of three clerks’ holiday boat trip down the Thames tapped into a newly flourishing market of lower-­ middle-class white-collar consumers who connected personally with Jerome’s protagonists. As Jonathan Wild suggests, ‘[t]he idyll he defines offers the impression of middle-class ease, in a setting and form of transport familiar to, and within reach of, the majority of young clerks in London.’6 Pioneering the New Humourists’ clerk-as-hero motif, Three Men in a Boat depicts clerks as resilient and jovial, with a wry wit coloured by slang and irreverent observations. J., George and Harris, with their longing to be ‘free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of the nineteenthcentury life’, were imminently relatable to many clerks of the era.7 In an early essay on the ‘new’ brand of humour heralded by Jerome, Andrew Lang noted that a new kind of humour may have arisen, and may demand in its consumers a new kind of intellectual palate … these new jokes vanquish me; they make me feel more than commonly suicidal … it seems pretty certain that the same mind cannot appreciate both the New Humour and the old.8

107

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money Many contemporary critics adopted this view of the New Humourists as philistines whose ‘lower-middle class, slapdash, and spontaneous’9 comic sketches paled in comparison to earlier masters like Dickens and Thackeray. Punch Magazine labelled New Humour ‘a pleasure killer’10 and the British Medical Journal concluded that the New Humourist ‘too often seasons his inventions not with Attic salt, but with a coarser home product better adapted to the somewhat dull intellectual palate of the public for which he caters’.11 ‘Of course it was damned by the critics’, Jerome writes of the harsh critical reception of Three Men in a Boat: ‘One might have imagined – to read some of them – that the British Empire was in danger.’12 In the enthusiasm for ‘newness’ that characterised the 1890s, writers often exaggerated the New Humour’s novelty; even Barry Pain remarked with some exasperation that ‘[t]he distinction between the old and the new humour is ridiculous and perfectly arbitrary’.13 Nevertheless, in his examination of the 1890s, Holbrook Jackson observes that the New Humour marked ‘a departure from tradition’.14 Indeed, the acerbic nature of the critical response points to the movement’s subversive ability to communicate egalitarian values by making social mores and class structures into targets of laughter. This conversation about the purpose – or lack thereof – of ‘new’ forms of humour also coincided with broader philosophical discussions about the social function of humour at the fin de siècle. George Meredith argued in 1877 that the ‘comic spirit’ has the power to provoke social anxieties and undermine hegemonic ideologies. The upper classes fear comedy, he explains, because ‘[c]omedy enfolds them with the wretched host of the world … to be an exalted variety is to come under the calm curious eye of the Comic spirit, and be probed for what you are’.15 In his celebrated essay Le rire (1900), Henri Bergson declared that ‘[o]ur laughter is always the laughter of a group’,16 and two years later James Sully, in An Essay on Laughter, hypothesised that ‘the habit of laughing together will tend to consolidate the group’.17 This shared comic sensibility can bond individuals within similar social sets, often through the alienation of others; yet it also has the ability to expose the absurdities of these hierarchies. Therefore, humour’s purpose is twofold, as it both confirms and challenges the status quo. In The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Sigmund Freud expanded on these ideas to suggest that laughter functions as socially approved liberation from repressed anxieties.18 This ‘relief theory’ of laughter highlights the dual nature of humour: while it provides a culturally licenced outlet for expression, it 108

Populism, New Humour and the male clerk also implicitly threatens to expose the fractures in both the social fabric and the individual psyche. Although New Humourists generally avoided didacticism in favour of entertainment, their brand of humour came to be seen as part of an ever-modernising (and potentially threatening) cultural and social landscape. Influenced by popular movements such as the New Journalism epitomised by the Pall Mall Gazette and the Strand, New Humourists ‘were the first generation of writers who benefited from W. E. Forster’s Education Act of 1870, which spawned a multitude of new readers’.19 New Humour tales appealed directly to this increasingly literate mass readership by using common, contemporary dialogue and promoting a light, accessible form of entertainment that often featured lower-middleclass clerks. John Carey explains that at the turn of the twentieth century an ‘alternative culture was created’ for clerks, centred on their interests in cycling, travelling, fashion and suburban life.20 New Humourists, many of whom came from lower-middle-class backgrounds, capitalised on this ‘clerk culture’ by penning stories featuring clerk-protagonists, including J., George and Harris in Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, Mr Pooter in George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody, and Eliza’s unnamed husband in Barry Pain’s Eliza stories.21 In contrast to the degenerate clerks in George Gissing and E. M. Forster’s fiction, New Humour stories feature amusing clerks prone to humorous mishaps and personal shortcomings. Using the light, whimsical touch popularised by Jerome, New Humourists were able to engage in some of the most contentious debates of the 1890s and 1900s, a period shaped by contradiction and uncertainty over the nation’s global, economic and cultural position. In his essay ‘The realistic novel’, Israel Zangwill defines humour as ‘the simultaneous revelation of the dual aspects of life; the synthetical fusion of opposites; the gift of writing with a double pen, of saying two things in one, of showing shine and shadow together’.22 This duality makes the New Humour a pivotal cultural touchstone for understanding Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. In Three Men in a Boat, for example, Jerome reveals his misgivings about the world floating by his characters when he interrupts his clerks’ happy journey with the sight of a woman’s corpse floating down the river. In her analysis of this scene, Carolyn Oulton highlights the dichotomy inherent in most New Humour fiction: ‘As a picture of his generation Jerome’s comedy is both revealing and deceptive; the idyllic bachelor world inhabited by J., George and Harris, as its early readers would have understood, is under perpetual threat’ from the forces 109

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money of modernity’.23 This undercurrent of social questioning, tempered by laughter, was also a key feature of Richard Marsh’s comic fiction. Although previous scholarship on the New Humour has not connected Marsh to the movement, it is worth considering how his comic fiction might be read within the context of the New Humour and what these links can tell us about the intersections between populism, comedy and mass readership in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. In his comic stories, Marsh participates in a dual process of social cohesion and alienation by using humour to poke fun at contemporary institutions, fashions and manners, even as he reinforces these conventions. These contradictory yet parallel impulses are typical of what Johan Höglund calls the ‘discursive discord’ that characterises much of Marsh’s popular fiction; as he explains, ‘the fiction of Richard Marsh often disturbs the very discourses it relies on, allowing dissonant voices to surface’.24 Laughter, itself a highly disruptive phenomenon, helps to facilitate these ‘dissonant voices’ in Marsh’s comic fiction. While the jokes in his stories often hinge on common stereotypes about gender, class and Englishness, Marsh also deploys humour slyly to undercut those dominant ideologies. Particularly in his Sam Briggs tales, Marsh uses comedy to speak with two voices: one that conforms to the prevailing ideals of his society and another that subtly interrogates those same tenets.

Sam Briggs: adventures in social mobility

Marsh dabbled in nearly every popular genre of his day, including tales of terror and the supernatural, detective and crime mysteries, realist narratives, New Woman stories and romance adventures; therefore, it is not surprising that his style of comic populism often dovetailed with the New Humour. Indeed, Jerome’s Idler noted of his collection Frivolities that ‘[t]he humourist is not dead, so long as Archibald Marshall and Richard Marsh are able to give one so many good laughs’.25 An unabashedly populist writer with a background in journalism, Marsh showed a remarkable talent for keeping his finger on the pulse of contemporary British culture, producing eight books in 1900 alone. His works, like those of other New Humourists, appealed to the ever-expanding ranks of lower-middle-class readers, or what Kate Macdonald has dubbed the ‘masculine middlebrow’.26 He contributed to a considerable number of periodicals in the 1890s and 1900s, including the magazines that were marketed to the lower-middle-class audience of the New Humourists. Between 1893 and 1896, Marsh published three short stories in the Idler, 110

Populism, New Humour and the male clerk and his Sam Briggs adventures were featured in the Strand from 1904 to 1915. Sam’s tales are quintessentially New Humour texts in that they celebrate a suburban clerk who embarks on amusing adventures that frequently revolve around ordeals associated with money and materialism. Much of Marsh’s popular fiction shows a keen awareness of the harsh economic position of the lower middle classes, a reality with which the author was all too familiar in his own life (see also Margree’s chapter in this volume). The Devil’s Diamond, for example, criticises the London landlords’ monopoly over property while The Beetle begins with Robert Holt, an out-of-work clerk, being turned away from lodging. Marsh’s comic tales display a similar recognition of class inequality, except that he uses these divisions to provoke laughter rather than horror. Most of the stories in Frivolities, for instance, revolve around money – found, stolen or earned. A representative example is ‘For one night only’, a story about a working-class man hired to work in a cloakroom at an upperclass party. Over the course of the evening, he destroys a number of top hats after he mistakenly believes they should all be flattened like opera hats. As is typical of Marsh’s comic fiction, this tale is written using a spontaneous style of first-person narration; the unnamed speaker’s accent is faithfully transcribed and the audience is placed in the position of the amused listener to whom the story is told: ’Alf them gents hadn’t squashed in their ’igh ’ats, like the other gents ’ad done, and I sees at once as how they were takin’ up more than their fair share of space. So I makes up my mind to squash ’em for ’em, and I sets about a-doin’ it. I takes up a ’igh ’at what a old gent had just a-give me – a beautiful shiny one it was – and I sets it against my stomach and I starts a-’eavin’.27

Although the protagonist’s ignorance of upper-class fashion is the primary source of the story’s humour, Marsh also encourages his readers to sympathise with his narrator’s predicament. While wealthy gentlemen angrily swear at him for destroying their property, readers are never permitted to forget that the narrator could not afford to wear those hats himself. Marsh uses widely known class stereotypes to generate laughter, even as he points to the underlying struggles of his working-class protagonist. The early Sam Briggs tales similarly offer valuable insights into the social and economic conditions of a male clerk living in the suburb of Walham Green, London, in the early twentieth century. Due to their ambiguous social position, clerks were well suited as protagonists of tales 111

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money about social manners, fashions and institutions. In 1896, Charles Booth declared, ‘the profession of a clerk does seem to lead to a genuine rise in the social standard of living which is a worthy object of ambition’; however, the rising literacy and numeracy rates stemming from the education laws passed in the late nineteenth century also resulted in intensified competition from young, female and foreign clerks.28 Gregory Anderson has traced the expansion of the clerking profession to the changes in British society in the second half of the nineteenth century, including ‘the spread of basic skills for clerking, literacy and numeracy, the growth of foreign trade, the position of London as the world’s international financial centre and the structural changes in the economy as a whole’.29 In his study of the salaries and working conditions of clerks between 1880 and 1914, Michael Heller argues that ‘while there is evidence of some economic pressure at the turn of the twentieth century, there are few signs of economic or status decline amongst clerical workers for the period as a whole’.30 Marsh’s depiction of Sam Briggs in the early tales seems to support Heller’s thesis: although money and materialism are consistent themes in Sam’s narratives, on the whole he appears to enjoy a relatively comfortable lower-middle-class existence and rarely experiences extreme financial hardship. Regardless of their economic circumstances, male clerks were viewed with suspicion and even disdain by intellectual elites. The clerk’s lower educational background, association with the suburban landscape and involvement in an increasingly feminised profession meant that he existed outside of traditional social hierarchies.31 In his seminal study of the ‘blackcoated worker’, David Lockwood writes that ‘the frequent accusation of “snobbishness” levelled at the clerk was founded in his exaggerated assertion of his middle-classness which in turn was a product of his marginality’.32 These negative associations meant that clerks were often portrayed as comically degenerate, with their diminutive stature and effeminacy acting as physiological signifiers of the declining educational standards and masculinity of the lower middle classes in Britain. Even the way clerks spoke invited criticism; as Carey explains, ‘[c]lerk’s slang annoyed intellectuals partly because it was flippant and philistine and trivialised “serious” subjects. It was also resented on class grounds as being over-familiar.’33 Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat was criticised for its unrefined clerical humour, as Wild points out: ‘[t]he brash confidence suggested by this esoteric use of language implied the emergence of a generation who had little regard for a rigid social order.’34 Marsh adheres to a similarly faithful version of clerk slang; for example, Sam 112

Populism, New Humour and the male clerk refers to his employers as ‘governors’, to money as ‘pieces’ and ‘bobs’ and to himself as a ‘gaby’. Sam’s distinctive style of communication marks him as a member of the clerking class, even as it also suggests a desire to differentiate or push beyond traditional uses of language and modes of expression. In this sense, Marsh, like other New Humourists, uses clerk vernacular to present a light-hearted yet subversive representation of lower-middle-class life. On the surface, Marsh’s characterisation of Sam Briggs appears to adhere to the stereotypical conceptions of the male clerk; Sam even self-consciously calls himself ‘one of the degenerate young Englishmen of to-day’.35 As if to emphasise the point, he repeatedly calls the reader’s attention to his relatively short stature. In ‘A dip in the briny’, he describes his efforts to don the clothes of a man ‘a good many sizes larger’ than him after his own clothes are stolen by a mischievous love rival: It was not easy to find a man of my figure, but he really was almost beyond anything … When I was inside that pair [of trousers] I was absolutely lost … Then his shirt, it would have made three of mine … His socks, and boots! I take a small seven – I should say he took a large fourteen … His waistcoat almost came down to my knees, and his coat to my heels; after I had turned the sleeves up eight or nine inches I still could not find my hands.36

In other stories, Sam is described in effeminate terms as a ‘soft’ ‘little boy’ and a ‘[p]oor little man’ with ‘pretty little hands’.37 In ‘Her fourth’, he complains to the reader about being ‘squashed’ and treated like a ‘rag doll’ by two domineering women.38 At times, he seems keenly aware of his educational deficiencies, calling himself ‘a gaby’ (clerk slang for fool) even as he earnestly protests that he is not a simple ‘office-boy’; at other times, however, Marsh uses Sam’s intellectual shortcomings as a source of humour.39 In ‘A dip in the briny’, for instance, readers are treated to an extended passage detailing Sam’s musings about why his clothes are no longer on the beach where he left them: My towel was there all right, folded up on the bottom rail of the breakwater, where I had put it, and that made it queerer than ever. Because, if my towel was there–– Suddenly it struck me that there was something queer; because, as I was about to remark, if that was the breakwater by which I had left my towel, why was it not the one by which I had left my clothes? It appeared to me that was a nut which wanted cracking. It was no use telling me that I had put my towel by one breakwater, and my clothes by another. It was not likely that I should go wandering about those rocks

113

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money with nothing on so that my towel could have a breakwater all to itself. I knew better. I am not that sort. Therefore if my towel was there my clothes ought to have been there; and if they were not there, where were they? That was what I wanted to know. (p. 160)

Similar descriptions of Sam’s agonisingly slow, circuitous thought processes can be found in many of the early adventures. Much of the humour of these digressions is undoubtedly driven by popular conceptions of the clerk’s inferior intellect, yet readers are simultaneously prompted to identify with Sam’s predicaments through such first-hand insights. Most of Sam’s early adventures occur in a distinctly technological society that is deeply aware of its own modernity, and his social mobility (whether upward or downward) is often facilitated by various means of transportation. In ‘The girl on the sands’, he is taken on a high-speed motorcar ride to have dinner with a duke and a duchess, and in ‘Her fourth’ he encounters a wealthy widow (who turns out to be his employer’s aunt) after a rollicking trip in a cab. In ‘That hansom’, he adopts the role of a cab driver for a day, descending the social ladder as he takes orders (badly) from his wealthy customers, while in ‘The gift horse’, he transforms from a respectable holiday seeker to a falsely accused thief to a victim of a crime, all while travelling on a boat on the Thames. Later, in ‘Looping the loop’, he becomes an unwilling hero when he participates in a daring aeroplane stunt. And, like many of the clerks who read his stories, he takes the train and the omnibus from his suburban home in Walham Green to his job in the city. Throughout these tales, Sam’s escapades are attached to, and therefore dependent upon, the mechanisms of modernity and the changing urban landscape. As Sam is transported from one adventure to another, the city of London is depicted as an anxious space in which money controls every aspect of life and class structures are both reinforced and dismantled. Like many other young men of the Edwardian period, Sam constantly chases a lifestyle that is beyond his means; most of his adventures before he goes off to war are fundamentally concerned with money. He spends more than he should in ‘The girl on the sands’, engages in hair-brained schemes to make money in ‘That hansom’, is erroneously accused of stealing in ‘The gift horse’, and gambles away his earnings in ‘A modest half-crown’. He also frequently enters into minute details about his expenditures; his pride in his fashion sense is unfailingly communicated alongside the cost for each item of clothing, as in this passage from ‘The gift horse’: 114

Populism, New Humour and the male clerk I spent a good bit of coin in rigging myself out. I always do hold that a gentleman ought to attire himself in accordance with the occasion. It is not my wish to enter into private details, but I may mention that I bought a pair of new brown shoes at five-and-eleven, a straw hat at one-and-nine, a tie which was just the thing, one of those new-fashioned collars which are all the rage – they had not got my size, so they let me have it cheap because it was a trifle smaller than I usually take.40

Marsh aims his readers’ laughter at another common stereotype about clerks by casting Sam as an excessively fashion-conscious man who feels compelled to display what little wealth he has through his attire. Sam nearly always pays the price for his middle-class ambitions, but Marsh, like other New Humourists, is careful to avoid descending into the drama of poverty seen in New Grub Street or Howards End. While Sam’s most common complaint is that he is feeling ‘a bit short’, he rarely experiences true hardship.41 Even as he gently mocks the very same clerk culture his stories reinforce, Marsh stops short of outright insult or condemnation of the clerk lifestyle; ever conscious of his audience, he consistently chooses amusement over moralism. Although Sam often wastes his money on seemingly frivolous items, occasionally he gives readers a glimpse of the more traditional middleclass life he longs to have. In ‘A modest half-crown’, he is tempted to continue gambling away his money for the chance to purchase ‘a home – a tip-top home. I could marry.’42 The pathos of this statement is further emphasised at the end of the tale, when Sam drunkenly loses his small fortune. Such moments suggest that, as much as readers might snicker at Sam’s money-wasting ways, he is ultimately a sympathetic figure trapped within the economic and social confines of the lower middle class. In this sense, despite the provocative social commentary lurking under the surface of Sam’s adventures, these tales can be read as a validation of Edwardian class structures. Marsh thoroughly mines the comedy in Sam’s narratives of social mobility (and social degeneration), but he consistently returns Sam to his position as a clerk at the end of each story. Even his name reaffirms his social position: Sam was a common, unremarkable first name in the Victorian period, while Briggs is described by another character in ‘Her fourth’ as essentially ‘plebeian’ (p. 70). Ultimately, Marsh’s first-person, journalistic style of narration does not allow readers to dismiss Sam as an object of mockery or disdain; rather, it works to make Sam into a consistently sympathetic, if relentlessly hapless, character. This narrative strategy differs from Marsh’s usual method of using multiple, conflicting voices to tell his comic ­stories 115

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money in Frivolities, Curios and For Amusement Only. Although Sam is often an object of ridicule in the early adventures – for example, when his colleagues laugh at his drunken antics in ‘The limerick’ or when a group of sailors mocks his outfit in ‘The skipper’s daughter’ – his straightforward, self-deprecating way of dealing with these situations keeps readers firmly on his side. As Minna Vuohelainen notes in her introduction to The Complete Adventures of Sam Briggs, ‘while we smile at Sam’s mishaps we also always know that he is essentially a decent and, eventually, likeable figure in his reaffirmation of lower-middle-class values and his validation of those values as quintessentially English’.43 Like other New Humourists, Marsh had no interest in painting Sam as a gin-soaked degenerate. Instead, he uses moderate humour to underscore the lighter side of the lower-middle-class experience, and in the process he draws his readers’ attention to the realities of the life of a typical clerk residing in the London suburbs. As Sam speaks directly to the reader, calls for our compassion, makes jokes about himself and shares intimate details of his daily life, he soon emerges as a relatable and eminently worthy character.

‘I have never set up to be a fighting man’: Sam Briggs’ comic masculinity

Along with the disruption of class structures in the Edwardian period, the Sam Briggs tales reflect another common concern in New Humour fiction: the destabilisation of gender roles at the turn of the twentieth century. Although women including Florence Marryat, Annie Besant and Eliza Lynn Linton contributed to the Idlers’ Club, an irreverent ‘conversation’ that appeared in each issue of the Idler, most New Humourists were men and the overriding tone of the group was masculinist.44 This attitude is epitomised by Eden Phillpotts’ declaration in the Idler that ‘the feminine standard of humour is in some measure a low one … women fail to grasp the significance of subtle jesting, and, in short, rarely know a good joke when they see it.’45 Offering a similar opinion in a speech to the Pioneer Club in 1897, Barry Pain argued that ‘the humour of women … is of necessity inferior to the humour of men’ because ‘women [want] originality, an essential of humour in its highest literary form’.46 Accordingly, female characters in New Humour are commonly treated as one-note figures who provide sharp foils for the narratives’ male protagonists. This is certainly the case in many of Marsh’s comic stories. The adventures in Curios, for instance, revolve around the competitive relationship between two male collectors, and the few women 116

Populism, New Humour and the male clerk they meet are usually treated as plot devices or inconsequential sources of comic relief. Similarly, the women Sam Briggs encounters are invariably cold, loud and demanding or largely absent, as with Sam’s fiancée Dora Wilkinson in the later war tales. This strategy places the narrative focus on the masculine roles occupied by Sam, his coworkers and his friends. The pervasiveness of characters who experience a loss of manhood in Marsh’s texts suggests that he was preoccupied with this theme (see also chapters by Allsop, Hultgren, Pedlingham, Margree and Orrells in this volume). A select list of male characters from his popular fiction who either lose or are fearful of relinquishing their masculinity includes Samuel Hookham in The Devil’s Diamond (1893), who becomes a slave to the Indian diamond; Mr Musgrave in Mrs Musgrave – and her Husband (1895), whose manhood is challenged by his discovery of his wife’s immorality; Paul Lessingham and Robert Holt in The Beetle (1897), whose confrontations with the Egyptian priestess cause them to become psychologically and physically feeble; Guy Holland in The Chase of the Ruby (1900), who becomes emasculated and silenced when he is bullied by three strong New Women; John Ferguson and Edwin Lawrence in The Goddess: A Demon (1900), who are powerless under the influence of the Hindu goddess; Mr Howitt in ‘A psychological experiment’ (1900), whose cowardly reaction to being attacked by his former partner’s tricks of the imagination causes the narrator to lament that ‘all the manhood had gone from him’; and George Vanderhorn in The Surprising Husband (1908), whose role as patriarch and Member of Parliament is undermined when he learns of his mixed-race heritage after his wife gives birth to a black baby.47 Marsh was, thus, not interested in presenting masculinity as a universal and secure constant; instead, his works show that the idealised concept of ‘manhood’ was relentlessly under siege from the forces of modernity, including the colonial ‘other’, the New Woman, technological advancements and the expansion of the industrial city. As Andrew Smith and others have shown, masculinity was inextricably linked to patriotism, imperialism and nationhood in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.48 R. W. Connell suggests that ‘[w]ith masculinity defined as a character structure marked by rationality, and Western civilisation defined as the bearer of reason to a benighted world, a ­cultural link between the legitimation of patriarchy and the legitimation of empire was forged’.49 Men’s failure to live up to the qualities of duty, strength and stoicism encoded as ‘muscular Christianity’ earlier in the nineteenth century was often read as confirmation of British degeneration and a failure of Empire. In his Sam Briggs stories, Marsh both promotes and 117

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money challenges these gendered ideals, exposing the problem of defining and maintaining masculine codes of conduct in the tumult of modernity. In the early adventures, Sam’s inability to fulfil the masculine ideal is a crucial source of humour. He is frequently described as short, plump, child-like and weak, yet his lack of physical prowess also has the effect of making him a more civilised, peacekeeping character than many of the men and women he encounters. Although he regularly experiences flashes of temper, he rarely resorts to actual violence, which contrasts sharply with the brutish inclinations of other characters, as in the following scene from ‘A social evening’: ‘What have you done with my Augustus?’ she demanded; and she shook me so that I could almost feel my teeth rattling. ‘If you don’t put me down,’ I said, ‘I shall hit you!’ Hit her! I might as well have hit the Monument; I was like an infant in her hands. That is the worst of being a neat figure. Oh, dear, there were some lively doings! Talk about Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday! – it was a wonder they did not bring the house down. What happened to me I can’t exactly say; seemed as if I was like the ball at a Rugby football match; everyone had a grab at me. All I know is that at last I was thrown down the front door-steps into the street, and my hat and stick thrown after me.50

Sam is clearly sensitive to his physical deficiencies; despite his bluster, he feels like an ‘infant’ who is powerless to control his own fate or dominate the women who bully him. Nevertheless, his role as a feminised victim in this scene is almost entirely played for laughs, largely due to Sam’s self-deprecating asides to the reader. Constructed through a blend of imagination and reality, masculinity in these early tales appears to be something that men like Sam covet and fetishise but can never fully attain – yet masculinity also, conversely, tends to be equated with boorishness and violence. As with most of Marsh’s popular fiction, Sam Briggs’ seemingly simplistic, entertaining stories communicate multiple and conflicting meanings by exposing the artifice of accepted gender codes even as they rely on those same codes to provoke laughter. Marsh adds such moments of narrative discord to disrupt the readers’ expectations about not only these characters but also the types of masculinity that they embody. In contrast with the first series, which appeared intermittently in the Strand and elsewhere between 1904 and 1914, Sam’s twelve wartime adventures were published in regular monthly instalments in the Strand from January to December 1915. These tales were accompanied by illus118

Populism, New Humour and the male clerk trations by Charles Pears, the official War Artist to the Admiralty, in which Sam is portrayed far more heroically than in the previous comedic sketches. Early in the war series, Sam confesses that ‘I have never set up to be a fighting man … I am too short, and, so to speak, too plump.’51 However, after leading a clandestine mission to slaughter a group of German soldiers in ‘In the trenches’, he rapidly matures into a strong, disciplined and patriotic soldier. Although he often bumbles into acts of heroism on the battlefield, his willingness to engage in explicit, methodical violence is a startling departure from his comparatively petulant, temperamental outbursts in the earlier stories, and he is eventually awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery, a sharp contrast to his previous, ­fruitless efforts to succeed financially and personally. Sam’s transformation seems designed to validate George Shee’s ­recommendation in The Briton’s First Duty (1901) that the degeneration caused by city life could be overcome with hard military service: Year by year the population of England is being more and more swallowed up by our big cities. The healthy agricultural pursuits that made the sturdy English yeomen of days gone by have given way to the manufacturing and industrial life which crowds men in cities, where light, air, trees, and open spaces – all that is needed for the healthy physical development of a nation’s men and women – are wanting.52

Shee goes on to argue that ‘[t]he training of the whole manhood of the nation in discipline, duty, obedience to authority, manliness and selfmastery would prove a moral and intellectual factor of untold value in the life of the people’.53 This view was adopted by many Britons who saw the ‘Great War’ as an opportunity to re-establish the moral and masculine supremacy of the nation. Sam celebrates this association of manhood and patriotism in ‘A man in the making’: We knew that the fate, the safety, of our native land lay in our hands, that we were the heritors of a great birthright – England’s glory, which had come down the ages, increasing in splendour as it went, until, in the progress of time, it had become entrusted to our keeping. It was our ­business – it ought to be our pride – to keep it safely, to pass it on to those who are coming after us not only unsmirched, but shining brighter than when it reached us.54

This pointed, nationalistic rhetoric stands in sharp contrast to Sam’s meandering style of narration in the earlier tales, as well as his selfidentification as one of the many ‘degenerate young Englishmen’ of the Edwardian period. Marsh’s propagandistic purposes are most evident in 119

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money Sam’s development from a stout city-dwelling clerk to a hearty soldier, a process that corroborates the notion that participating in the war would strengthen the physical and moral fortitude of British men. Marsh’s decision to use an established character for this series indicates that he intended Sam’s narrative arc to parallel the experience of many other young men in Britain who left their relatively comfortable lives to become embroiled in the war effort. Sam’s journey from clerk to soldier suggests Marsh wrote these tales with a subversive purpose in mind: to show that the lower middle classes possessed just as much patriotism, duty, discipline and stoicism as the middle and upper classes. As Vuohelainen notes, by the end of the tales Sam has transformed from an object of laughter to a powerful representation of British resilience as he ‘comes to epitomize Englishness itself’.55 In this sense, the stories achieve a more potent form of social commentary than that reached by many other New Humourists. While Sam remains a sardonic figure throughout the stories, he eventually challenges the notion of class stagnation. His unremarkable background and diminutive stature also make him a potent symbol of the instinctual heroism of every British soldier. Sam begins his adventures as a quintessentially lower-middle-class Englishman, and yet he also inhabits a space that illustrates the upheaval in the social fabric of Edwardian Britain. His job as a clerk reflects the shifting economic, social and political landscape of early twentieth-century Britain, while his later occupation as a soldier emphasises the patriarchy and jingoism that characterised Britain during the early years of the First World War. Ultimately, Sam Briggs is extraordinary for his sheer ordinariness, even as Marsh uses his character to communicate contradictory messages about masculinity, class and Englishness. In this sense, the stories speak with dual, sometimes clashing, voices: one that seeks to entertain and one that presents a sober social commentary, one that challenges Edwardian class hierarchies and one that reaffirms those social structures, one that questions traditional masculine codes of conduct and one that valorises those same ideals. This multivalent use of comedy could be read alongside Zangwill’s description of humour as ‘that subtle flashing from one aspect to another, that turning the coin so rapidly that one seems to see simultaneously the face and the reverse, the pity and the humour of life, and knows not whether to laugh or weep’.56 By producing amusing stories that appealed to the tastes of the lower middle classes, Marsh and the New Humourists not only acknowledged the power of this emergent mass readership but also functioned as instrumental figures in the democratisation of literature during this period. 120

Populism, New Humour and the male clerk

Notes

 1 R. Dalby, ‘Introduction’, in R. Marsh, The Haunted Chair and Other Stories, ed. R. Dalby (British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press, 1997), pp. ix–xxi (p. xxi).  2 Obituary, Athenaeum, 4581 (14 August 1915), p. 115.  3 See, for example, review of Marsh’s The Seen and the Unseen, ‘Novels’, Saturday Review, 90 (22 September 1900), 368–9 (p. 368).  4 ‘Blessings of fiction: Mr. Hall Caine on the uses of the novel’, Wanganui Chronicle, 49 (17 February 1905), 8, Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand, at http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d =WC19050217.2.61 [accessed 24 February 2014].  5 See C. Oulton, Below the Fairy City: A Life of Jerome K. Jerome (Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2012); J. Wild, The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); J. A. Wagner-Lawlor (ed.), The Victorian Comic Spirit: New Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); and J. D. Cloy, Pensive Jester: The Literary Career of W. W. Jacobs (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996).  6 Wild, Rise of the Office Clerk, p. 70.  7 J. K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog!, ed. J. Lewis (1889; London: Penguin, 2004), p. 137.  8 A. Lang, ‘Mr Andrew Lang on the New Humour: Longman’s Magazine’, Press, 48 (8 December 1891), 2, Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand, at http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d= CHP18911208.2.3 [accessed 19 December 2013].  9 P. Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870– 1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 77. 10 ‘New Year’, Punch, 108 (5 January 1895), 4. 11 ‘A specimen of the “New Humour” ’, British Medical Journal, 1 (9 February 1895), 328. 12 J. K. Jerome, My Life and Times (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1926). 13 S. Rankin, ‘People I have never met: Barry Pain’, Idler, 5 (July 1894), 548. 14 H. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927), p. 227. 15 G. Meredith, An Essay on Comedy: and the Uses of the Comic Spirit, 3rd edn (London: Archibald, Constable, and Co., 1903), p. 27. 16 H. Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1935), p. 6. 17 J. Sully, An Essay on Laughter: Its Forms, its Causes, its Development and its Value (London: Longmans, Green, 1902), p. 255. 18 S. Freud, The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. J. Crick (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 118. 19 J. D. Cloy, ‘New Humor novel’, Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed. Paul Schellinger, 2 vols (New York: Routledge, 1998), ii, pp. 926–7 (p. 926).

121

Richard Marsh, masculinity and money 20 J. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 61. 21 Consider also Hall Pycroft in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The adventure of the stockbroker’s clerk’ (1893) and Arthur Kipps in H. G. Wells’ Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905). 22 I. Zangwill, ‘The realistic novel’, in Without Prejudice (New York: Century, 1896), pp. 83–5 (p. 84). 23 Oulton, Below the Fairy City, p. 13. 24 J. Höglund, ‘Black Englishness and concurrent voices in Richard Marsh’s The Surprising Husband’, English Literature in Transition, 56:3 (2013), 275–91 (p. 277). 25 ‘Books and other things’, Idler, 16 (October 1899), 276–8 (p. 278). 26 K. Macdonald, ‘Introduction: identifying the middlebrow, the masculine and Mr Miniver’, in K. Macdonald (ed.), The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880– 1950: What Mr Miniver Read (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 1–23. 27 R. Marsh, ‘For one night only’, in Frivolities: Especially Addressed to Those Who Are Tired of Being Serious (London: James Bowden, 1899), pp. 39–56 (pp. 43–4). 28 C. Booth (ed.), Life and Labour of the People in London, VII: Population Classified by Trades (Continued) (London: Macmillan, 1896), p. 278. 29 G. Anderson, Victorian Clerks (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), p. 52. 30 M. Heller, ‘Work, income and stability: the late Victorian and Edwardian London male clerk revisited’, Business History, 50 (2008), 253–71 (p. 255). 31 See M. Savage, ‘Career mobility and class formation: British banking workers and the lower middle classes’, in A. Miles and D. Vincent (eds), Building European Society: Occupational Change and Social Mobility in Europe, 1840– 1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 196–216 (p. 201). On the influx of women to clerical positions, see P. Attewell, ‘The clerk deskilled: a study in false nostalgia’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 4:2 (1989), 357–87. 32 D. Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker: A Study in Class Consciousness, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 100. 33 Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses, p. 61. 34 Wild, Rise of the Office Clerk, p. 72. 35 Marsh, ‘Sam Briggs becomes a soldier’, in The Complete Adventures of Sam Briggs, ed. M. Vuohelainen (1904–15; Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2013), pp. 194–210 (p. 199). 36 Marsh, ‘A dip in the briny’, in Complete Adventures, pp. 158–73 (p. 163); subsequent references to this story are given in the text. 37 Marsh, ‘The skipper’s daughter’, in Complete Adventures, pp. 143–57 (p. 148).

122

Populism, New Humour and the male clerk 38 Marsh, ‘Her fourth’, in Complete Adventures, pp. 65–84 (p. 76); subsequent references to this story are given in the text. 39 Marsh, ‘Her fourth’, p. 78. 40 Marsh, ‘The gift horse’, in Complete Adventures, pp. 25–43 (p. 27). 41 Marsh, ‘Her fourth’, p. 72. 42 Marsh, ‘A modest half-crown’, in Complete Adventures, pp. 44–64 (p. 59). 43 M. Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, in Complete Adventures, pp. vii–xxvii (p. xxv). 44 On the representation of women in the Idler, see A. Humpherys, ‘Putting women in the boat in The Idler (1892–1898) and TO-DAY (1893–1897)’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1 (2005), at www.19.bbk.ac.uk [accessed 12 December 2013]. 45 E. Phillpotts, ‘Phillpotts introduces the ladies’, Idler, 2 (October 1892), 348–9 (p. 348). 46 ‘The Humour of Women’, Supplement to the Western Mail (9 January 1897), p. 7. 47 Marsh, ‘A psychological experiment’, in Hugh Lamb (ed.), Gaslit Nightmares: Stories by Robert W. Chambers, Charles Dickens, Richard Marsh, and Others (1900; New York: Dover, 2006), pp. 163–75 (p. 172). 48 See A. Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin-de-Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); A. Dowling, Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); and H. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 49 R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 186–7. 50 Marsh, ‘A social evening’, in Complete Adventures, pp. 99–114 (pp. 110–12). 51 Marsh, ‘Sam Briggs becomes a soldier’, p. 197. 52 G. F. Shee, The Briton’s First Duty: The Case for Conscription (London: Grant Richards, 1901), p. 190. 53 Shee, Briton’s First Duty, pp. 194–5. 54 Marsh, ‘A man in the making’, in Complete Adventures, pp. 211–28 (p. 228). 55 Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, p. xxvii. 56 Zangwill, ‘Realistic novel’, p. 84.

123

Part III

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic

125

7

••

‘In that Egyptian den’: situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt Ailise Bulfin

Among many events, literary and political, that took place in 1895 are two that may seem at first glance unrelated: Richard Marsh began writing his bestselling novel about a demonic Egyptian entity, The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), and General Herbert Kitchener launched his famous and ultimately successful campaign to quell Islamic-nationalist rebellion in Sudan. As this chapter argues, Marsh’s novel can be placed within a popular subgenre of Egyptian-themed fin-de-siècle Gothic fiction that developed partially in response to contentious Anglo-Egyptian political relations. Kitchener’s campaign also had its origins in these politics, as the northern part of Sudan that he aimed to subdue was then nominally ruled by Egypt; while Britain, in turn, unofficially controlled Egypt and, since the infamous death of General Charles Gordon at the hands of Sudanese rebels in 1885, had perceived Sudanese nationalism as threatening its hold on Egypt. Thus, tentative connections begin to emerge between the writing of The Beetle and the military campaign. In 1896 Punch magazine commented upon Kitchener’s endeavour with a cartoon depicting the shade of General Gordon warning a martial John Bull to ‘Remember!’ (presumably, to remember Gordon’s disastrous fate in Khartoum; see figure 7.1), and this further illuminates the relationship between Marsh’s text and contemporary politics – the use of the Gothic to suggest the threat of resistance to the British imperial project. This chapter, then, endeavours to elucidate in detail the submerged but significant connections between these disparate events in order to provide a fuller picture of both the remarkable revival of the Gothic literary mode at the fin de 127

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic

7.1  J. Tenniel and J. Swain, ‘In the desert! Shade of General Gordon (to John Bull). “Remember!” ’, Punch, 110 (28 March 1896), [151].

siècle and the society in which this literary phenomenon occurred. It aims to present a sustained analysis of the relationship between The Beetle and the subgenre of Gothic Egyptian fiction and in doing so to place The Beetle precisely within the context of Anglo-Egyptian and Sudanese politics, rather than broadly reading it against general imperial concerns.1 Among the many critical interpretations of the fin-de-siècle Gothic as a popular genre has been its repeated characterisation as an ideal medium for the exploration of societal anxiety. As Kelly Hurley summarises: ‘Gothic … has been theorised as an instrumental genre, re-emerging cyclically, at periods of cultural stress, to negotiate the anxieties that accompany social and epistemological transformations and crises.’2 One critical facet of late Victorian society that the Gothic played a key role in negotiating was the ambivalence towards Empire that existed at what was ostensibly the high point of Britain’s imperial success. On the one hand, the continuing expansion of the British Empire brought wealth, power, prestige and a sense of purposeful superiority to the colonising nation; on the other hand, the deepening rivalries with the other European imperial 128

Situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt powers and mounting counter-colonial dissent provoked by this expansion threatened not only to reverse all these gains, but even to overturn the existing imperial order. Responding to these opposing currents, as Roger Luckhurst explains, fin-de-siècle Gothic fiction pulses in sympathy with the rhythms of expansion and crisis in the British Empire. With its typical ability to invert meaning, it is often unclear whether the Gothic imagination is working in the service of the Empire … or whether it is sapping imperial confidence by conjuring elaborate fantasies of … ‘reverse colonisation’.3

Within the fin-de-siècle Gothic was a body of texts that insistently Gothicised the country of Egypt and portrayed aspects of its society and culture, ancient and modern, as the locus of grave threat. It includes texts by major popular authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker and H. Rider Haggard and by less well-known contemporaries such as H.  D. Everett and Guy Boothby, not to mention scores of ephemeral periodical tales by entirely forgotten authors. The key image to emerge was that of the vengeful Egyptian mummy which, like Stoker’s Dracula and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, has persisted into modern popular culture. Though the current treatment of the mummy has largely devolved to the level of pastiche, in its original deployment it served as the sinister incarnation of a topical complex of imperial concerns about Egypt and aptly demonstrates the imbrication of the Gothic genre and imperial politics.4 Over the course of the late nineteenth century, Britain’s colonial engagement in what was nominally the Ottoman vassal-state of Egypt deepened. After the Suez Canal opened in 1869, Egypt became of major strategic importance to the British imperial project and by 1882 Britain had invaded and unofficially occupied Egypt to secure access to the vital canal route.5 The controversial and precarious nature of Britain’s subsequent relationship with Egypt, summed up as the ‘Egyptian Question’, caused major diplomatic problems for Britain throughout the fin-desiècle period and beyond. Threats to Britain’s hold on Egypt jeopardised the smooth operation of the entire Empire and emanated from both domestic Egyptian hostility and international opposition to the occupation.6 Concurrently in the Gothic imaginary Egypt turned malevolent, and from the late 1860s scores of stories featuring a threat to imperial Britain from hostile supernatural entities of Egyptian origin began to make their appearance in British publications.7 In plot, they tended to follow a very similar sequence – an ill-fated trip to Egypt, the pillage of 129

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic an ancient tomb, the unleashing of a curse and the enactment of revenge in England, typically via the agency of a vengeful mummy. This cursedriven plot structure mirrors the political sequence of Britain’s incursion into Egypt, misappropriation of its sovereignty and corollary fear of damage to the heart of the Empire arising from Egyptian resistance to the occupation. Given that the antagonist of The Beetle is some form of vengeance-crazed supernatural entity emanating from an ‘Egyptian den’ of ‘demons’ to wreak havoc in London, the text shares some of the key characteristics of these Egyptian-themed tales and was likely the bestselling of them.8 However, situating The Beetle within the fiction of Gothic Egypt not only elucidates its engagement with British colonial policy in North Africa but also reveals how the text dramatically exceeds Gothic Egyptian genre conventions, making Marsh’s idiosyncratic contribution, like Gordon’s fate, worth remembering and interrogating.

‘The avenger follows after’: The Beetle and the Gothic Egyptian curse plot

The characteristic curse structure of the Gothic Egyptian plot largely took shape in short periodical tales from the 1860s on. Highly representative are Eva M. Henry’s ‘The curse of Vasartas’ (1889) and Edwin Wooton’s ‘The secret of Horeb-Ra-Men’ (1909) – their publication dates demonstrating the continual recycling of the curse plot – while Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) exemplifies it at novel-length. ‘The curse of Vasartas’ opens with an English Egyptologist surreptitiously unearthing a royal tomb at Cairo and despatching its mummified occupant to the British Museum.9 Queen Vasartas’ curse, entailing ‘death with violence’, swiftly claims the Egyptologist on location and penetrates an English boarding school to threaten his daughter’s life.10 ‘The secret of Horeb-Ra-Men’ similarly emplots carnage following a mummy from Egypt to England, the striking illustration in figure 7.2 depicting a sinister slip of the mummy-case lid setting the Egyptologist’s study ablaze. In like manner, The Jewel of Seven Stars turns upon the fatal attempts of an English Egyptologist to revivify the Sorceress-Queen Tera, whose mummy was unearthed on yet another fateful dig in Egypt and whose relocation to England incurs the deaths not only of those ‘who have robbed the grave!’, but also of the Egyptologist’s daughter.11 In all of these tales, the political metaphor is easy to decipher: underhand British appropriation of Egyptian property threatens the very fabric of domestic English society. 130

Situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt

7.2  C. J. Turner, title illustration, ‘The secret of Horeb-Ra-Men’, Idler, 35 (May 1909), 213.

As in the aforementioned tales, the catalyst for the horrific chain of events in The Beetle is an ill-fated trip to Egypt, undertaken in his youth by a leading Radical politician, Paul Lessingham. Unlike the Egyptologist protagonists, Lessingham’s ordeal commences not with an acquisitive visit to ancient Egypt’s famous sites, but with an inappropriate excursion to a dubious café in Cairo’s so-called native quarter, an attempted act of sexual rather than archaeological exploitation. It concludes not with him lost in a dark, empty tomb, but prostrated in a fully populated temple of Isis that continues to function in the nineteenth century. In this ‘Egyptian den’, Lessingham is mesmerically enslaved and repeatedly assaulted sexually by the Beetle creature (in the form of an Isis priestess).12 He is also forced to witness ‘orgies of nameless horrors’, including human sacrifice: ‘in each case the sacrificial object was a woman, stripped to the skin, as white as you or I, – and before they burned her they subjected her to every variety of outrage of which even the minds of demons could conceive’ (p. 253).13 The account of the Isis cult’s rituals 131

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic is shocking not only for its brutality but also because Marsh repeats it insistently, each time explicitly mentioning white women being sexually violated and then murdered. At first glance, the ostensible reason for the Beetle’s vendetta against Lessingham, the latter’s violent rejection of its rituals and its ‘loathed caresses’, seems to differ from that of vengeance for tomb-robbery in the other stories (p. 254). However, given the plot’s premise in the exploitative behaviour of an English politician and its subsequent insistence on Egyptian violence aimed at ‘white Christian [and especially] English women’, it is not difficult to read The Beetle as a novel that obliquely raises questions of British imperial guilt and Egyptian retaliation (see also chapters by Hultgren and Allsop in this volume) (p. 320). In this The Beetle displays a markedly similar plot logic to that underpinning the more overtly Egyptological tales. Conforming to the key gesture of the Gothic Egyptian plot, the horror in The Beetle is not confined to the events which transpired in Egypt but is intensified by relocation from the colonial territory to the imperial capital; as the Beetle melodramatically warns, ‘the avenger follows after, lurking in the shadows … waiting, watching, till his time shall come’ (p. 32). The merest hints that the creature is present in London reduce Lessingham, the ‘greatest living force in practical politics’, to a shivering wreck, cowering in the corner of his own study (p. 31). Robert Holt, the down-and-out clerk who is its first victim, likewise recounts of his unequal encounter with the Beetle: ‘For the time I was no longer a man; my manhood was merged in his. I was in the extremest sense, an example of passive obedience’ (p. 19). This encounter is depicted in figure 7.3, the only contemporary illustration of the Beetle, showing Holt under the complete thrall of its ‘dreadful eyes’, its abnormal physiognomy further emphasising the horror of English subjection to the foreign other (p. 23).14 As well as demonstrating the Beetle’s ease in infiltrating London, these passages highlight what Victoria Margree characterises as its dangerous, emasculating effect on its male victims, through which the novel articulates ‘the fear that the politician’s virility, authority and masculinity … may in fact be a sham’.15 Though Margree concludes that Lessingham’s masculinity, which stands in for British authority, is ultimately restored at the conclusion, it is nonetheless the case that throughout its greater portion the text affords more agency to the invasive Egyptian creature than to the English statesman. In the logic of the emanating, overpowering curse are marked similarities with the plot of another noteworthy novel-length Gothic Egyptian tale, Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1899), in which the ancient priest 132

Situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt

7.3  J. Williamson, ‘For when it said, “Keep still!” I kept still.’ Frontispiece, The Beetle (London: Skeffington, 1897).

133

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic Pharos is revived to avenge England’s despoliation of Egypt’s h ­ istoric sites. Having enticed the susceptible English protagonist, Cyril Forrester, to make the usual misguided trip to Egypt, Pharos hypnotises him, infects him with a virulent plague, and uses him to spread it systematically across Europe to England, leaving millions dead. Forrester’s experience of subordination is strikingly similar to Holt’s in The Beetle: ‘It seemed to me I was bound hand and foot, powerless to help myself, and incapable of aught save to carry out the will of the remorseless being into whose power I had fallen so completely.’16 The extreme passivity of Holt and Forrester in the face of hostile Egyptian agency clearly plays on imperial fears inspired by Victorian racial theory that Britain’s degenerating domestic manhood would prove incapable of defending insular Britain against potential foreign threats.17 As Leslie Allin observes, the novel problematises the agency ‘of male characters typically understood as manly men … underscor[ing] the leakiness of male bodies in order to pull apart traditional narratives of British manliness and male narratives about empire’.18 Though operating on a smaller scale to that in Pharos the Egyptian, Egyptian ‘terrorism’ in The Beetle poses a threat to the heart of the British establishment via the emasculation of the politician Lessingham (p. 263). Despite the confident assertion of Lessingham’s associate, the ‘levelheaded scientist’ Sydney Atherton, that ‘this is London, not a dog-hole in the desert’, neither Lessingham, Atherton nor Lessingham’s private detective Augustus Champnell are able to arrest the Beetle’s rampage through the Empire’s capital (pp. 139, 83). Their relative powerlessness is emphasised by the Beetle’s abduction and abuse of Lessingham’s fiancée Marjorie Lindon, who is doubly ensconced in the political class as the child of a well-known Conservative politician and as ‘the wife-elect of [the] coming statesman’ (p. 310). At the thought that Marjorie may be subjected to the cult’s practices even the detached Champnell is bodily affected: The notion of a gently-nurtured girl being at the mercy of that fiend ­incarnate … was one which caused me tangible shrinkings of the body … shut up in that rattling, jolting box on wheels [a London cab], alone with that diabolical Asiatic ... what might she not, while being borne through the heart of civilised London, have been made to suffer. (pp. 315–16)

A classic moment of Gothic Egyptian anxiety, the horror is amplified by its relocation to the presumed safety of the imperial capital and by the willingness of the detective to imagine the violent sexual abuse of ‘the 134

Situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt lovely daughter of a famous house’ (p. 310). The failure of the team of professional Victorian gentlemen in The Beetle to contain the destructive power of the Egyptian intruder is reiterated in the horrific climax of The Jewel of Seven Stars. Though Marjorie escapes the ultimate fate of the daughter in Stoker’s tale, her encounter with the Beetle shatters her sanity for years to come and echoes the threat to the young girl in ‘The curse of Vasartas’. This gendered logic points relentlessly to the fatal consequences of British appropriation of Egyptian sovereignty, with the offended Egyptian entities attempting in turn to dispossess the male trespassers of the women who are their most precious belongings. The theme of rightful and contested property ownership permeates the Gothic Egyptian genre, threat and damage to British colonial property being symbolised by attacks on British women. It is further worked out in the contestation over the rightful ownership of mummies and their artefacts that drives so many of the plots. This resonates with Nicholas Daly’s interpretation of the fin-de-siècle mummy tale as a ‘narrativized commodity theory’ which helped to articulate the development of an imperially driven consumer culture for its largely middle-class readership and in which the significance of alluring but deadly mummies like Vasartas and Tera lies in their role as commodity objects.19 In ‘The curse of Vasartas’, the Egyptologist conceals his excavation site ‘lest the Arabs should come on his treasure’, until enough Englishmen can be gathered to stealthily remove it.20 Likewise, Pharos seeks to retrieve his mummy-case from its decorative position in a London studio and restore it to its rightful resting place in Egypt. Parallels with the underhand British seizure of that most important item of imperial property, the Suez Canal, can be drawn. The concern with legitimate property ownership is nowhere more evident than in Everett’s now little-known Iras: A Mystery (1896), in which an English Egyptologist, Ralph Lavenham, illegally smuggles the mummy-case of an Egyptian princess out of Egypt to London, thus unleashing the curse of her former lover Savak. Like the Beetle, this malevolent entity manifests itself first in a domestic London setting and may well have served as a prototype for Marsh’s creature. Preoccupation with legitimate possession permeates the narrative, in Lavenham’s fears of being ‘caught red-handed in the possession of an unlawful mummy’ and of losing it to others, especially Savak.21 It seems no coincidence that Lavenham’s illegal acquisition was made ‘in the early spring of 1882’, the very year of Britain’s unofficial and contested occupation of Egypt.22 The instant the princess Iras mysteriously reawakens, Lavenham’s thought is 135

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic to legitimise her irregular civil status via marriage, but, as Bradley Deane observes about the strand of mummy tales that deploys the marriage plot, the union is untenable: Savak’s curse follows the ill-fated lovers across England, reducing Iras once more to desiccated mummy form.23 It also reduces the tale’s representative of imperial manhood Lavenham to a wreck of a man who longs for death, a state that recalls the Beetle’s effect on Lessingham. As Daly points out, the mummies of these tales are dangerous as well as desirable objects, moving from their original Egyptian locations to take up residence within the borders of British domesticity and threatening the potential ‘dissolution of the consuming subject’.24 Hazardous colonial objects of dubious provenance feature frequently in Marsh’s oeuvre, for example in The Goddess: A Demon (1900), and in the Curios collection (see also chapters by Hultgren, Allsop and Orrells in this volume). While there are no smuggled Egyptian artefacts in The Beetle, the theme of contested ownership is nonetheless obliquely present in Lessingham and Atherton’s rivalry for Marjorie. When she is wrongfully seized by the Beetle they join forces to retrieve her, but are haunted by the question of whether she will remain suitable marriage material: ‘in what condition would she be when we had succeeded in snatching her from her captor’s grip? … untouched, unchanged, unstained’, or, like her discarded clothing, ‘all soiled and creased and torn and tumbled’ (pp. 317, 279)? Ultimately, the Beetle’s ‘savage, frantic longing’ to physically repossess Lessingham may express fear of an Egyptian desire not merely to throw off the British presence in Egypt but to invert the colonial relations of domination altogether (p. 32). As Homi Bhabha observes, colonial relations turn upon an inherently paranoid obsession with the inversion of the roles; for the coloniser the ‘fantasy of boundless possession’ is tempered always by the dread of its ‘reversal’, the knowledge that, in Frantz Fanon’s succinct phrase, ‘ “They want to take our place.” ’25

The ‘mysterious Egypto-Arabian’: Anglo-Egyptian politics intrude

As well as structurally, via the endlessly recycled curse plots, the Gothic Egyptian genre’s proximity to Anglo-Egyptian relations is evident in recurrent references to key events in modern Egyptian and North African politics and to the imputed characteristics of the region’s Islamic population. While Luckhurst holds that ‘Marsh only ever exploits Egypt as a superficial locus of phobic racism’, pursuing The Beetle’s recurrent references to Egypt and Sudan reveals the text’s precise awareness of 136

Situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt Britain’s troubled relationship with these regions.26 Though the identity of Marsh’s creature is notoriously unstable, it is consistently associated with both Egypt and Sudan. Its generically monstrous alterity, evident initially to Holt (and visible in the illustration in figure 7.3), is quickly narrowed down by the scientist Atherton, who variously deems it an ‘unbaptised Mohammedan’, an ‘Arabian’ and, more tellingly, an ‘Egypto-Arabian’, which descriptions bring to mind the Islamic population of modern Egypt, or, in other words, those with a potential grudge against the British occupation (pp. 85, 95, 121). Perhaps arising out of the Victorian typological drive to subdivide and classify the natural world, Atherton muses obsessively on the Beetle’s ethnicity. While he cannot ultimately decide whether it was ‘an Arab’, ‘a fellah’ or ‘a Mohammedan’, the result of this reiterated speculation is the closer association of the Beetle with the different ethnic groups of North Africa than with the ancient rites of Isis worship (p. 125).27 Champnell views the Beetle similarly, and the many Londoners who encounter it briefly all unthinkingly perceive it as Arab, or, as the aspirating residents of the East End designate it: ‘a Harab’ (p. 323). A landlady gives a particularly disgusted account of ‘Mr Arab’ attired in ‘one of them dirty-coloured bed-cover sort of things … wrapped all over his head and round his body, like … them there Arabs wear’, and produces a letter from the creature signed ‘Mohamed el Kheir’ – obviously intended to sound like a Muslim name (pp. 290–1, 289). In similar fashion, the ostensibly ancient Egyptian villain Pharos is always portrayed in modern Egyptian dress and frequently depicted conversing in Arabic with various members of modern Egypt’s ethnic groups.28 Even in the tales that do not conflate the supernatural marauders with the citizens of modern Egypt, such as ‘The curse of Vasartas’ and The Jewel of Seven Stars, there are supporting casts of hostile modern Egyptians who intensify or embody the threat of the curse for the English protagonists. Given their close association with modern Egypt and their blatant hostility to English interests, it is possible to see in the Beetle and the other Gothic Egyptian villains an embodiment of the nationalist and anti-British sentiment then developing in Egypt. The original reason for Britain’s 1882 invasion of Egypt had been to restore order to the vital area surrounding the Suez Canal after the outbreak in 1881 of a proto-nationalist military rebellion led by the charismatic Egyptian colonel Ahmed Urabi against the Ottoman Egyptian ruling class.29 While the course of Egyptian nationalism had been set back drastically by the British occupation and the quelling of Urabi’s revolt, the 137

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic ­ id-1890s had seen some resurgence.30 This was cause for concern when m considered against the fraught backdrop of wider Anglo-Egyptian and European ‘great power’ relations.31 Any threat to the so-called ‘nerve centre’ of the British Empire, even the remote threat posed by nascent Egyptian nationalism, could potentially cut off the vital trade route and paralyse the Empire.32 In this context, the Beetle’s defiant challenge to Atherton when threatened with the English authorities – ‘What has the Englishman’s law to do with me?’ – takes on a telling significance (p. 133). Also significant from this perspective is the timing of the events in The Beetle: it is ostensibly set at the time Marsh wrote it, which he notes was 1895, putting the date of Lessingham’s twenty-years previous excursion into Cairo sometime in 1875 – the year Britain purchased a controlling interest in the Suez Canal.33 In the destruction that the Beetle and its fictional counterparts wreak on their rampages through England may be an intimation of the ‘whirlwind’ that some anti-imperialists predicted the Empire would eventually reap for the 1882 invasion of Egypt. Prominent among these was Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a British writer, diplomat and neighbour of Marsh’s, who had represented Urabi during the failed negotiations preceding the British occupation and remained a firm supporter of Egyptian nationalism.34 Reminiscing about his grandfather’s neighbour, Marsh’s grandson Robert Aickman notes that ‘home rule for everywhere’ was very much part of the culture in Blunt’s circle.35 In an admonitory poem, ‘The wind and the whirlwind’ (1883), Blunt warned of the threat posed to England by its presence in Egypt and hinted at the future reversal of the relationship: Thou [England] wentest to this Egypt for thy pleasure. Thou shalt remain with her for thy sore pain ... Thy deeds of violence men count and reckon. Who takes the sword shall perish by the sword … The nations of the East have left their childhood. Thou art grown old. Their manhood is to come; And they shall carry on Earth’s high tradition Through the long ages when thy lips are dumb.36

Blunt’s archaic stylings, which draw strongly on the rhetoric of biblical retribution and of imperial decline, are additionally reminiscent of the Beetle’s vengeful language (as quoted above). Blunt continued in admonitory mode in the prefaces to his anti-imperialist exposé A Secret 138

Situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt History of the English Occupation of Egypt, including that preceding a 1922 edition which appeared in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 1919.37 Of this event, which seriously disrupted British control of Egypt, Blunt lamented, ‘Alas! that I should have lived to see those words come true of England’s punishment, more than true.’38 Beyond the immediate context of contentious Anglo-Egyptian relations, the Gothic Egyptian genre is also suffused by references to the even more volatile situation in Sudan, a connection implied early in The Beetle when Atherton likens the creature to an ‘Arab of the Soudan’ (p. 80). Sudanese affairs were crucial to Anglo-Egyptian relations because vast tracts of Sudanese territory were then nominally under Ottoman-Egyptian control and because there had been ongoing rebellion against foreign interference, both British and Ottoman-Egyptian, in Sudan since 1881.39 Since the notorious siege of Khartoum and the death of Gordon in 1885, the militant Sudanese Islamic-nationalist movement known as Mahdism had regularly threatened to spill over into Egypt, ‘the Mahdist threat from the south’ fuelling imperial paranoia about the precariousness of Britain’s hold on Egypt.40 In contemporary accounts the rebellion’s religious leader and Gordon’s nemesis, the Mahdi, was painted as sexually ‘debauched and dissolute’ and Mahdism as barbaric and violent towards prisoners. This view was sustained into the 1890s in works such as the influential Ten Years’ Captivity in the Mahdi’s Camp (1892), and may well have resonated with Marsh’s depictions of violence for contemporary readers of The Beetle.41 On his death in 1885, the Mahdi was succeeded by another inspirational leader, the Khalifa Abdullahi, who made two attempts to invade Egypt from Sudan in 1885 and 1889.42 Evoking Blunt’s rhetorical whirlwind, the Khalifa was quoted in British periodicals exhorting the Egyptian government to ­‘recognise … Mahdism … banish … infidels and … kill … all those who will not be converted to Islamism all over the Egyptan [sic] territory’.43 In addition to the launch of Kitchener’s campaign against the Khalifa in early 1895, was the sensationally reported escape of ‘Slatin Bey’, member of Gordon’s Sudanese administration team and long-term prisoner of the rebels.44 It is not surprising, then, to find that aspects of the minefield of Sudanese affairs pushed themselves into the writing of The Beetle that year and into the wider Gothic Egyptian genre. One of the first things the hapless Forrester of Pharos the Egyptian mentions on arriving at Port Said, gateway to the Suez Canal, is the sight of ‘Soudanese soldiers at the barriers’;45 these would have been Britishled colonial troops, but they evoke the Sudanese context and Kitchener’s 139

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic campaign nonetheless. And it is into ‘the Soudan’ that the Egyptianised villain of Conan Doyle’s forerunning Gothic Egyptian tale ‘Lot no. 249’ (1892) disappears ‘in the spring of ’84’ after his schemes involving a revivified mummy have been thwarted, the date and location implicating him in Mahdist rebellion and, like the Punch cartoon, evoking the fate of Gordon.46 A major contributor to the Gothic Egyptian genre, Haggard wrote his first explicitly Egyptian tale Cleopatra in 1889 after a trip to Egypt while the 1880s border wars with the Mahdists were ongoing, and the novel’s serialisation ran concurrently with reportage of these wars.47 Though a historical romance, Haggard’s text has a vengeful mummy subplot in that Cleopatra is cursed for defiling a royal mummy by plundering it of hidden jewels vital to the welfare of Egypt.48 As Richard Pearson observes, Cleopatra can be considered ‘a narrative dealing with the rise of Egyptian nationalism, since … the central figure, intends to rid Egypt of the Greek yoke, represented by Cleopatra’.49 Haggard’s introductory note refers to this figure – the agent of Cleopatra’s destruction – as ‘an Egyptian patriot’.50 Reading the mummy’s curse as a ‘displaced account’ of some of Britain’s shocking setbacks in its African campaigns, especially in Sudan, Luckhurst plausibly suggests that ‘the vengeance of the mummy might have had less to do with powers imputed to the Ancient Egyptians and much more with the contemporary geopolitics of North African resistance to British imperialism’.51 The conclusion of The Beetle reveals a web of associations between significant Sudanese locations and the demonic Isis cult: an adherent is described as ‘a member of a tribe which had its habitat on the banks of the White Nile’, evoking the tribal followers of Mahdism who inhabited that region; a captive of the cult is found ‘in a state of indescribable mutilation’ ‘in some remote spot in the Wady Halfa desert’; and British troops discover the seeming remains of a recently destroyed underground temple of the cult ‘[d]uring the recent expeditionary advance towards Dongola’ (pp. 320, 319, 349). Though they are obscure locations today, Wadi Halfa and Dongola then held British garrisons in the northern Sudanese province that bordered directly upon Egypt and would have leapt off the page in connection with British military activity there. Wadi Halfa, better known as ‘Bloody Halfway’, was on the very border between Egypt and Sudan, a buffer against invading Mahdist forces, and the starting point of the British expeditions against both the Mahdi and the Khalifa.52 Not only was Dongola the region of the Mahdi’s birthplace, but the expedition to Dongola referred to in The Beetle was the first operation in Kitchener’s campaign to retake Sudan, making the connec140

Situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt tion between the two disparate 1895 events referred to at the opening of this chapter explicit.53 A comparable tale with a more explicitly martial theme is Hester White’s ‘The dead hand’ (1904), set in a regiment of the British army of occupation quartered at Assouan (Aswan) – another strategic outpost near the volatile Sudanese border. Here the malevolent entity, who manifests when the army-officer narrator fraudulently obtains a mummy hand, is again presented as a modern Egyptian. He causes a series of mishaps emanating from Egypt to England – even luring the officer to his near death in the contentious Suez Canal – until the hand is rightfully restored to its mummy. Pondering the cause of the Egyptian’s malevolence, the officer wonders ‘whether political enmity could have anything to do with the matter’.54 Like Marsh’s Atherton who speculates as to whether Lessingham’s politics may be behind the Beetle’s vengeance mission, White’s officer proffers the suggestion that ‘political v­ engeance … [and] hatred of the dominant race’ could ‘form … the motive’ for Egyptian ‘revenge’.55 Given Lessingham’s particular ­political stance – emphasised as Radical throughout the text – the Beetle’s vendetta may even be related to Radical policies on Egypt. As these were largely anti-imperial and typified, for instance, by the prominent Liberal John Morley who advocated withdrawal from Egypt, it is fitting that Atherton concedes they were unlikely to have offended Egyptian sensibilities.56 It is possible Marsh was instead obliquely criticising this political view, suggesting that shirking foreign-policy responsibilities and taking a soft stance on the Egyptian Question could have devastating consequences for Britain.57 The ambivalence in Marsh’s text towards the politics of Egypt allows for both subversive, anti-imperial readings which see it covertly expressing Egyptian grievance against British policy as per Blunt and conservative interpretations which see it painting a picture of a monstrous Egypt that needs to be suppressed. Hence it resonated with the wider ambivalence towards imperialism symptomatic of the fin de siècle and presented its readers with an alternative popular cultural lens through which to view the quandary. Owing in part to the popularity it achieved, The Beetle was an influential text, its impact discernible on many subsequent tales, even as late as Sax Rohmer’s The Brood of the Witch Queen (1918), in which a mummified queen, the ‘last high priestess of a … sinister creed’, also threatens English interests.58 Together The Beetle and the other Gothic Egyptian tales can be read as forming an alternative account of Anglo-Egyptian relations, a kind of popular fictional version of Blunt’s secret history. 141

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic

‘My truly versatile oriental friend’: Marsh and the monstrous pagan

In one of the defining moments of The Beetle, Atherton witnesses the ‘apotheosis’ of the creature into its beetle incarnation; when its subsequent return to human form reveals that it is female rather than male, Atherton wryly dubs it ‘my truly versatile oriental friend’ (pp. 125, 139). This signals a mobility in the representation of the Beetle that is not similarly evident in the other Gothic Egyptian entities, highlighting that while The Beetle adheres to many aspects of the Gothic Egyptian plot structure, it also diverges widely from it. On the one hand, as we have seen, the Beetle can be read as an embodiment of popular fears of the resurgence of Islamic nationalism in Egypt and Sudan in much the same way that the reanimated mummies of the other texts can. On the other hand, Marsh’s monster is not a mummy but a vaguely defined demonic priestess-scarab entity, the votary of a barbaric cult of Isis worshippers that persists in the modern world. The graphic depictions of the sexual abuse and human sacrifice that make up the cult’s ‘debased, unclean, mystic, and bloody rites’ further set The Beetle apart from the other texts (p. 320). This added dimension makes the Beetle an especially versatile conduit for a host of well-known fin-de-siècle concerns, from homosexual panic to the ascendancy of the ‘New Woman’, Luckhurst observing that the multivalent quality of the creature ‘makes it difficult to determine final meanings’.59 However, there is an emphasis on the Beetle’s religious alterity that points to a further possible set of influences on the way it is presented. In the reiterated accounts of the Isis cult’s horrific practices Marsh seems to be evincing a concern with ancient religion, a fear of pagan as well as colonial monstrosity, that is lacking in the other texts but recurs in two of Marsh’s subsequent Gothic extravaganzas that similarly bring exemplars of colonial but also pagan monstrosity to England in the form of horrific Indian and Chinese idols – The Goddess and The Joss: A Reversion (1901). In these representations Marsh is exceeding the imperial framework that defines the other Gothic Egyptian texts to grapple with deeper, though not entirely unrelated, Victorian concerns about religion arising from a century of scientific challenge to religious orthodoxies. As John Kucich observes, ‘religious concerns saturate[d] the fiction’ of the Victorian period, producing both a body of works that sets out to affirm the majority Protestant faith and a counter-impulse that contests it or worries over its validity, often via indirect means.60 In this context Egypt takes on another layer of significance, because, as David 142

Situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt Gange points out, ‘the most powerful and persistent image of ancient Egypt that Britain ha[d] ever known’ was the biblical view of Egypt as the enemy of Christianity, ‘the civilisation that brutalized the Old Testament Israelites’.61 Marsh’s text certainly demonstrates recurrent worries over the efficacy of Christianity, as well as imperialism, in the face of the pagan Egyptian threat, nowhere more markedly than in Marjorie’s inability to pray in the Beetle’s presence. ‘Flinging myself on my knees’, she laments, ‘I tried to pray. But … words would not come’; and this striking failure directly precedes her implied rape by the creature (pp. 206–7). Furthermore, Atherton’s poignant recitation of the Protestant version of the Christian Lord’s Prayer on Marjorie’s behalf fails to prevent her subsequent abduction and abuse. In The Beetle’s presentation of a monstrous pagan threat, then, can be read an oblique expression of Victorian doubt, of the loss of faith in a just God, the problematisation of Christianity perhaps having particular resonance for Marsh given his unacknowledged Jewish heritage (see Chapter 1 in this volume). Finally, Victorian debates about imperialism were inevitably debates about Christianity also, the spreading of ‘the peaceful gospel – with the Maxim gun’.62 The casually related fate in The Beetle of the idealised missionary couple who rescue Lessingham in Egypt signals this problematic connection aptly: one drowning ‘during an excursion on the Nile’, the other lost on a ‘missionary expedition into Central Africa’ (p. 256). Expanding on Kucich’s general observation on the prominence of religion in Victorian fiction, it should be noted that religious themes were especially prevalent in 1890s popular fiction, as evidenced by the enormous sales of works such as Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895), Hall Caine’s The Christian (1897) and the sentimental fiction of the Scottish Kailyard school. The Beetle’s cynical, open-ended account of the inefficacy of Christian prayer and the agency of an invasive pagan cult stands in marked contrast to their more inspirational stances. Its cynicism is echoed in Marsh’s own subsequent contribution to fin-desiècle Christian fiction, A Second Coming (1900), in which Christ makes his return in decadent contemporary London, but, as Aickman puts it, is ‘rejected once more’.63 Regardless of its possible position on religion, however, the emphasis in The Beetle on the monstrous paganism of the Isis cult effectively provides Marsh’s masterwork with an additional exorbitant dimension that imbues it with much of its horrifying force and makes it stand out from the other more formulaic rehashes of the Gothic Egyptian curse plot. 143

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic

Notes

 1 See Chapter 1 in this volume for an overview of Marsh scholarship and of imperial themes in Marsh’s work.  2 K. Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 5.  3 R. Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’, in R. Luckhurst (ed.), Late Victorian Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2005), pp. ix–xxxi (pp. xiv–xv). See also S. Arata’s Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and P. Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1988).  4 Recent scholarship foregrounding the relationship between imperialism and the figure of the mummy includes K. MacFarlane, ‘Mummy knows best: knowledge and the unknowable in turn of the century mummy fiction’, Horror Studies, 1:1 (2010), 5–24; R. Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and B. Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), ch. 6.  5 Within five years of its opening, three-quarters of the shipping passing through the Suez Canal was British as it greatly reduced the distance to India and the East. C. Magniac, ‘The Suez Canal’, The Times (14 December 1875), p. 4.  6 A. A. Mondal, Nationalism and Post-Colonial Identity: Culture and Ideology in India and Egypt (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), p. 141.  7 For more on the impact of the Suez Canal on Egyptian-themed Gothic fiction, see A. Bulfin, ‘The fiction of Gothic Egypt and British imperial paranoia: the curse of the Suez Canal’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 54:4 (2011), 411–43.  8 R. Marsh, The Beetle: A Mystery (London: Skeffington, 1897), pp. 317, 321. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. For The Beetle’s publication history, see M. Vuohelainen, ‘Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897): a late-Victorian popular novel’, Working With English, 2:1 (2006), 89–100.  9 After 1835, the unauthorised export of antiquities from Egypt was banned and mummies were often smuggled out as souvenirs. 10 E. M. Henry, ‘The curse of Vasartas’, Belgravia, 69 (October 1889), 1–13 (p. 11). 11 B. Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903; London: Penguin, 2008), p. 135. 12 In Haggard’s influential She (1887), Ayesha was also a devotee of Isis, her vengeance quest deriving from a perceived slight to the goddess. 13 ‘Outrage’ was a well-known Victorian euphemism for sexual assault. See

144

Situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt A.  Bingham, L. Delap, L. Jackson and L. Settle, ‘Historical child sexual abuse in England and Wales: the role of historians’, History of Education, 45:4 (2016), 411–29. 14 As has often been noted, the Beetle’s appearance links it to contemporary pseudo-scientific discourses on race, degeneration and criminality. See Julian Wolfreys’ ‘Introduction’ in R. Marsh, The Beetle, ed. J. Wolfreys (1897; Ontario: Broadview, 2004), pp. 9–34 (p. 17). 15 V. Margree, ‘ “Both in men’s clothing”: gender, sovereignty and insecurity in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle’, Critical Survey, 19:2 (2007), 63–81 (p. 69). 16 G. Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian (London: Ward, Lock, 1899), pp. 67–8. 17 For a contemporary expression of these fears see Lord Curzon, The Romanes Lecture 1907: Frontiers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), p. 57. 18 L. Allin, ‘Leaky bodies: masculinity, narrative and imperial decay in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle’, Victorian Network, 6:1 (2015), 113–35 (p. 116). 19 N. Daly, Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 86, 102, 109–10. 20 Henry, ‘Curse of Vasartas’, pp. 3–4; my emphasis. 21 H. D. Everett [pseud. as T. Douglas], Iras: A Mystery (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), p. 47. 22 Everett, Iras, p. 3. 23 Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism, p. 174. 24 Daly, Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle, p. 113. 25 H. K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 62–3; the inner quotation is from F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961; London: Penguin, 2001), p. 30. 26 Luckhurst, Mummy’s Curse, p. 173. 27 ‘Fellah’ was an Ottoman term for a member of the Egyptian peasantry. See W. S. Blunt’s description in A Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt (1907; New York: Alfred Knopf, 1922), p. 10; online at archive.org [accessed 12 March 2014]. 28 See Bulfin, ‘Fiction of Gothic Egypt’, pp. 16–20. 29 D. R. Reid, ‘The ’Urabi revolution and the British conquest, 1879–1882’, in The Cambridge History of Egypt II: Modern Egypt, from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. M. W. Daly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 217–38 (p. 218). 30 A. Goldschmidt, Jr., ‘The Egyptian Nationalist Party: 1892–1919’, in P. M. Holt (ed.), Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 308–33. 31 Mondal, Nationalism and Post-Colonial Identity, p. 141. 32 Cited in P. Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), p. 143. See also Z. Karabell, Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal (London: John Murray, 2004), pp. 266–7.

145

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic 33 ‘Mr Marsh explains’, letter to the Academy, 1330 (30 October 1897), 358; A. N. Wilson, The Victorians (London: Arrow, 2002), p. 390. 34 Reid, ‘’Urabi revolution’, p. 236. 35 R. Aickman, The Attempted Rescue (1966; Leyburn: Tartarus Press, 2001), p. 10. 36 W. S. Blunt, ‘The wind and the whirlwind’ (1883), reprinted in A Secret History, pp. 404–16 (p. 414). 37 See the 1895 and 1907 prefaces and 1922 publisher’s note to the edition of A Secret History listed above. 38 Blunt, Secret History, p. v. 39 E. Dicey, ‘The future of Egypt’, Nineteenth Century, 44 (December 1898), 881–96 (p. 881). 40 Henry Keown-Boyd, The Lion and the Sphinx: The Rise and Fall of the British in Egypt, 1882–1956 (Durham, Spennymoor: Memoir Club, 2002), pp. 19–20, 41–2. 41 Major F. R. Wingate, Ten Years’ Captivity in the Mahdi’s Camp, 1882– 1892; From the Original Manuscripts of Father Joseph Ohrwalder (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co, 1892), p. 160; online at https://archive.org/ details/tenyearscaptivit00ohrwuoft [accessed 31 October 2014]. 42 Peter Mansfield, The British in Egypt (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), pp. 75–6. 43 ‘Egypt and the Khalifa’, African Review, 6 (24 August 1895), 305. See also ‘Egypt and the Sudan’, The Times (13 August 1895), p. 3. 44 ‘Escape of Slatin Bey’, The Times (18 March 1895), p. 5. 45 Boothby, Pharos, p. 159. 46 A. Conan Doyle, ‘Lot no. 249’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 85 (September 1892), 525–44 (p. 544). 47 M. Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and Works (London: Hutchinson, 1960), p. 120. For Haggard’s literary engagement with Egypt, see Luckhurst, Mummy’s Curse, ch. 7. 48 H. Rider Haggard, Cleopatra (1889; London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1894), p. 320; online at http://www.archive.org/details/cleopatrabeingac00hagg [accessed 16 May 2013]. 49 R. Pearson, ‘Archaeology and Gothic desire: vitality beyond the grave in H. Rider Haggard’s ancient Egypt’, in R. Robbins and J. Wolfreys (eds), Victorian Gothic (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 218–44 (p. 221). 50 Haggard, Cleopatra, p. vii. 51 Luckhurst, Mummy’s Curse, pp. 80–1. 52 See Mansfield, British in Egypt, pp. 76, 137 and Brendon, Decline and Fall of the British Empire, pp. 172, 202. 53 Mansfield, British in Egypt, pp. 66, 77. 54 H. White, ‘The dead hand’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 297 (December 1904), 521–34 (p. 530).

146

Situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt 55 White, ‘Dead hand’, p. 530. 56 G. Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 44. 57 This view is supported by Aickman’s claim that Marsh was a Conservative who argued fiercely with his Liberal-supporter brother Harry (Attempted Rescue, p. 81). 58 S. Rohmer, The Brood of the Witch Queen (1918; London: Sphere Books, 1976), p. 172. 59 Luckhurst, Mummy’s Curse, p. 173. 60 J. Kucich, ‘Intellectual debate in the Victorian novel: religion, science, and the professional’, in D. Davis (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 212–33 (p. 213). 61 D. Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 55, 63. 62 Parody of the popular Protestant martial hymn ‘Onward! Christian soldiers’, cited in Brendon, Decline and Fall of the British Empire, p. 140. 63 Aickman, Attempted Rescue, p. 9.

147

8

••

Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in Richard Marsh’s The Goddess Neil Hultgren

The title of Richard Marsh’s 1900 novel The Goddess: A Demon confronts readers with a juxtaposition of two very different nouns balanced by a colon: one designating a potentially beneficent female deity and another a harmful supernatural entity. Yet the title’s shift from a definite to an indefinite article implies that the goddess in question is, in fact, an example of a larger category, that of the demonic. The potential goodness of the title seeps away as readers’ eyes cross the colon to the subtitle, a qualifying term that confirms that Richard Marsh has, as in his Egyptian Gothic tale The Beetle (1897), again named his work after an evil creature of indeterminate identity. The bipartite title intrigues, and its indeterminacy structures the text: the Goddess in question is seen only through vague impressions until she is literally dissected at the end of the novel, when the narrator reveals that she is, despite her seemingly supernatural characteristics, an automaton. This chapter explores the significance of the Goddess in Marsh’s novel, highlighting her ties to earlier writings about automata as well as to one of the most famous Indian automata on display in nineteenthcentury England, Tipu’s tiger. I highlight the connection between these mechanical toys and images of colonial violence and resistance. I conclude, however, by shifting from an examination of the mechanics of the automaton to an examination of plot ‘mechanics’ in The Goddess. Via its intriguing exposé of an automaton at the heart of its plot, Marsh’s text offers critical insight into its own generic composition and questions the authenticity of the idea of an intrusive supernatural colonial threat 148

Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in The Goddess that is central to the subgenre of the imperial Gothic. The Goddess asks whether the real threat of the imperial Gothic might be a delusional and unstable English populace rather than a premodern, otherworldly Indian invader. To remind late Victorian readers of the fictionality of the imperial Gothic’s marvellous foreign threats, The Goddess resolves its mystery via an object that represents modern machinery, Indian material culture and English paranoia.

The Goddess appears

The creature that will come to be known as the Goddess first makes an appearance in the alleged dream of the novel’s narrator, John Ferguson, who encounters a frightening entity in motion in the rooms of his fellow tenant at Imperial Mansions, Edwin Lawrence. Approaching Lawrence’s rooms, Ferguson describes the sounds he hears as like those of a ‘beast’: ‘Yelling, snarling, screeching – a horrid, gasping noise – these sounds seemed to follow hard upon each other.’1 The entity Ferguson sees upon opening the door appears to be attacking Lawrence: ‘Lawrence was struggling frantically with some strange creature whose character I was not able to distinguish. From this creature proceeded those hideous sounds. It was a mass of whirling movement. I had never seen a being so instinct with frenzied action’ (p. 8). In a subsequent paragraph, Ferguson concludes his description, ‘I had been conscious all the time that there was something about the creature which was terribly human. It appeared to be covered with a flowing robe of some shining, silken stuff, whose voluminous skirts whirled hither and thither as it writhed and twisted. Now that it became motionless there broke on my ears the sound of a woman’s laughter’ (p. 8). The term creature stands in for disparate impressions – laughter, gasping, silken skirts and movement – that coalesce into something human via the terror they create but resist comprehension because of their strangeness and Ferguson’s dream-like state. Near the novel’s conclusion, Ferguson again observes the Goddess, this time as an inanimate entity, an idol. His observations take place during waking hours, as he stands in Edwin Lawrence’s new lodgings, surrounded by fellow observers. Now familiar with Lawrence’s references to this entity as a goddess and a demon, Ferguson also calls it a goddess: The downfall of the screen had revealed an idol; apparently a Hindoo goddess. She was squatted on what looked like an ebony pedestal, perhaps a foot or eighteen inches from the floor. The figure was nearly four feet high. It represented a woman squatting on her haunches. Her arms were

149

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic crossed upon her breast, her fingers interlaced. Two things struck me as peculiar. One, that the whole figure was of a brilliant scarlet; the other, that its maker had managed to impart to it a curious suggestion of life. (p. 163)

Edwin reveals that the murdered person from Ferguson’s ‘dream’ was in fact Edwin’s brother, Philip, who had recently quarrelled with Edwin over forged bills; Edwin then commits suicide using the violent figure that has been central to the mystery of The Goddess. After knives emerge from the idol’s arms, mouth, fingers, eyes and nostrils, Edwin is violently stabbed to death. Only a few paragraphs later, Ferguson gives readers a sense of the Goddess’ inner workings: Later, the thing was torn to pieces; its anatomy laid bare. Examination showed that its construction had been diabolically ingenious. It was simply a light steel frame, shaped to resemble a human body, to which was attached a number of strong springs, which were set in motion by clockwork machinery. The whole had been encased in scarlet leather, so that, when completed, it resembled nothing so much as an artist’s lay figure. In the leather were innumerable eyelet-holes. Through each of these holes the point of a blade was always peeping. So soon as the clockwork was set in motion each of these blades leaped from its appointed place, and continued leaping, ceaselessly, to and fro, till the machinery ran down. In the head was an arrangement somewhat on the lines of a phonograph; it was from this proceeded the sound resembling a woman’s gentle laughter, which was not the least eerie part of its horrible performance. (p. 165)

Completing its arc of suspense and mystery, The Goddess brings its frightening and murderous phenomenon into focus. The Goddess is not a woman, a beast or a supernatural being but an idol, and, in this final account, a specific kind of machine: an automaton. While Ferguson’s terms suggest the medical ‘examination’ of the ‘anatomy’ of a once living being, the conclusion implies the Goddess never lived. The beast-like whirling of the Goddess is the product of a steel frame, springs, clockwork machinery and knives, encased in red leather. The Goddess relies on human action to set it in motion, and Ferguson’s description shows that its only demonic aspects are found in its ‘diabolically ingenious’ construction.

‘A most curious piece of mechanism’: uncanny and foreign automata

Beyond the recent publication of a critical edition of The Goddess that details multiple contexts for understanding the novel’s monster, little 150

Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in The Goddess has been said about the significance of the Goddess as an automaton.2 Tracing the usage of the term automaton back to 1616, the Oxford English Dictionary describes an automaton as ‘a moving device having a concealed mechanism, so it appears to operate spontaneously’ and indicates that the term could apply to clocks, devices constructed to imitate humans, as well as sundry mechanical objects.3 The understanding of automata as ‘toys or curiosities, as clockwork statues or animals’, dates from the early nineteenth century, and the automaton in The Goddess certainly hearkens back to the ‘toys or curiosities’ of that period (see also Orrells’ chapter in this volume).4 The sinister aspects of the automaton, certainly evidenced in The Goddess, can also be traced to this period. Minsoo Kang pinpoints the Romantic period as a time when automata were depicted as frightening and uncanny after having served as a ‘symbol of rational order’ during the Enlightenment.5 He contends that automata were used by fiction writers to suggest the possible emergence of life within seemingly inanimate, mechanical objects: the automaton is ‘something that is the very opposite of the natural but at the same time embodying the potential to come alive as the ultimate instrument of the supernatural’.6 The best known example of the uncanny automaton from this period is Olimpia, the lifelike female automaton who attracts the amorous attention of the young Nathaniel, from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 tale ‘The Sandman’ (published as ‘Der Sandmann’). ‘The Sandman’ is not only a potential source for The Goddess but also the main example of the uncanny in Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, ‘The “uncanny” ’. Though Freud’s essay acknowledges that previous critics of ‘The Sandman’, most notably Ernst Jentsch, located the uncanny nature of Hoffmann’s story in the reader’s ‘uncertainty’ about whether or not Olimpia is an automaton, Freud’s formulations about the uncanny largely de-emphasise the automaton.7 Freud focuses instead on the frightening figure of the Sandman himself, a constructor and destroyer of automata who threatens to steal one’s eyes, as indicative of ‘the dread of being castrated’ (p. 231). Freud does, however, include a discussion of Hoffmann’s automaton in his theory of the uncanny as the return of repressed infantile complexes (p. 249). Olimpia appears again in a footnote to Freud’s essay, where Nathaniel’s obsession with Olimpia is indicative of ‘[t]he psychological truth of the situation in which the young man, fixated upon his father by his castration complex, becomes incapable of loving a woman’ (p. 232, n. 1). Though Freud’s understanding of Olimpia goes far afield from Kang’s discussion of the Romantic automaton, Freud does set the stage for later critics who have seen Marsh’s Goddess 151

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic as ­ suggestive of anxieties around sexual intercourse and the female body.8 Yet the uncertainty discussed by Jentsch is just as crucial to Marsh’s narrative as the material related to sexuality. The uncanny and supernatural aspects of Romantic automata and, by extension, Marsh’s automaton in The Goddess, originate in earlier depictions of automata as related to magic and, simultaneously, ‘unchristian’ and foreign forces. Kang explains that the ‘sinister nature of people associated with automata’, such as Coppola/Coppelius, the ‘Sandman’ of Hoffmann’s tale, recalls ‘the premodern image of the magician who dwells on the margins of society and possesses the power to bring life to the lifeless’.9 By depicting the increasingly deranged and marginalised Edwin Lawrence as potentially controlled by or controlling a supernatural force aligned with the Goddess, the novel plays with the notion that individuals associated with automata hold magical powers. Marsh also mines a history of automata associated with civilisations from far outside Western Europe. Though machines later termed automata were known in Greece during the medieval period, writers from medieval France were unfamiliar with the devices: ‘Latin Christians associated automata with the Arab, Greek, and Mongol courts and saw them … as the products of foreign knowledge and exotic materials not easily available to themselves.’10 As Latin Christians came into contact with ‘Byzantium and the Islamicate world’, they had ‘to recognize and grapple with their own economic and technological inferiority’ as indicated by their unfamiliarity with automata.11 Though historically distant, the convergence of exoticism, foreignness, non-Christian religions and suggestions of ‘demons’ around automata in the medieval period prefigures the ‘Hindoo’ automaton in Marsh’s fiction, especially since E. R. Truitt notes that medieval Sanskrit texts discuss automata found in India: ‘The elaborate fountains and mechanical contrivances that flourished in courtly settings in India appear in Sanskrit literature in the tenth century and in Sanskrit technical handbooks in the eleventh, and include artificial animals, female attendants (fembots!), and musical automata.’12 The juxtaposition of Hindu religious ritual, potential supernatural powers and the automaton in The Goddess draws on a cultural history in which the automaton was seen as a foreign object coming from territories of the world that were, by the late nineteenth century, colonised spaces or spaces perceived as open to colonisation. One potential model for Marsh’s Goddess was Tipu’s tiger, a mechanical toy that had been on display in London for most of the nineteenth century (see figure 8.1). This device hailed from Mysore, the kingdom 152

Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in The Goddess

8.1  Tipu’s [Tippoo’s] tiger, mechanical organ, c.1793.

in South India whose leader, Tipu Sultan, the East India Company defeated in the 1799 Siege of Seringapatam. A Muslim leader with connections to Persia, Tipu prided himself on the technological and artistic innovations of his court.13 While the artisans who created Tipu’s tiger are unknown, the object itself, like Marsh’s Goddess, combined mechanism and sound effects, in this case to depict a tiger attacking a European man. The Victoria and Albert Museum, where Tipu’s tiger is currently on display, describes the object as a ‘[p]ainted wooden semi-automaton consisting of a tiger mauling a prostrate figure’ with a ‘concealed’ organ and suggests 1793 for its probable date of manufacture.14 The ‘concealed’ organ indicates that the automaton could also serve as a musical instrument, a characteristic that explains its discovery within the music room of Tipu’s palace.15 An example of how the British initially understood this automaton, an article from the St James’s Chronicle of April 1800 provides a sensational description of the tiger as ‘[a] most curious piece of mechanism, as large as life, representing a royal tyger in the act of devouring a prostrate European officer’:16 The sounds produced by the organ are intended to resemble the cries of a person in distress, intermixed with the horrid roar of the tyger. The machinery is so contrived that while the organ is playing, the hand of the

153

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic European is often lifted up to express the agony of his helpless and deplorable condition.17

Tipu’s automaton prefigures the visual and auditory display of cross-­ cultural violence that Ferguson witnesses in The Goddess. The word ‘Tipu’ is Canarese for ‘tiger’, so that Tipu was aligned with the image of the tiger from his birth and acknowledged it as an ‘emblem of state’.18 Mildred Archer notes that the ‘character’ of Tipu’s automaton ‘will be clear when we recall two dominant aspects of Tipu Sultan’s life – his deep and superstitious reverence for tigers as such, and his equally deep loathing of the infidel’.19 Tipu’s tiger is thus a marker of a decades-long conflict between the sultan and the English that extended back to the time of Tipu’s father and that concluded with Tipu’s death and the British acquisition of many of his belongings, including Tipu’s tiger, in 1799. The tiger also suggested vengeance, as Susan Stronge has noted that ‘[t]he tiger was a powerful emblem within Hinduism, where its awesome strength was often linked to the vengeful aspects of the goddess Kali’.20 Researchers have even suspected that the confrontation enacted by Tipu’s tiger might have its origins in a real-life mauling of an Englishman by a tiger, as the son of British General Hector Munro was killed by a tiger in Saugor Island in 1792.21 Tipu may have noted the death, given that Munro was a commander during the East India Company’s punishing defeat of Tipu and his father in 1781.22 Thus, the imagery of Tipu’s tiger suggests multiple ways in which the object may be read as an emblem of Anglo-Indian conflict in the late eighteenth century. The material history of Tipu’s tiger, however, belies a simple English and Indian binary. Discussions of the object from the late twentieth century onwards have indicated a potentially international provenance for its components. The East India Company targeted Tipu in part because of his French military ties, and Stronge notes that Tipu’s embassies to both Istanbul and France resulted in the arrival in Mysore of French goods, engineers and artisans.23 It is therefore possible that craftsmanship on certain parts of the tiger is French, with the organ keyboard having ‘certain characteristics reminiscent of the contemporary small organ scene in France’ in the late eighteenth century.24 A Parisian artisan designated by the name ‘Leze’ ‘made [an] astronomical and automaton clock for Tippoo Sahib’ and may have worked on the tiger.25 By studying the tiger’s likely original manufacture and nineteenth-century British repairs, Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume concludes that the organ chest of the tiger ‘gives the impression of having been the handiwork of several people’, 154

Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in The Goddess and other scholars have highlighted Dutch influences.26 An object of potentially mixed provenance, the tiger was not simply a creation of Mysore but one that could draw attention to modern exchanges of goods and ideas between Europe and India. After 1880, Stronge notes, Tipu’s tiger was on display with the India Museum collections in South Kensington, ‘at the end of the 1100 foot long gallery’ that had been redecorated, and was also mentioned in the Baedeker travel guide to London.27 This was still true during the year that The Goddess was published, as the Baedeker of 1900 describes the tiger in the tenth subsection of the Indian Section of the South Kensington Museum, within the category of ‘Wood and Ivory Carvings, Mosaics, Lacquer Work, Musical Instruments, Carvings in Marble and Stone’.28 The tiger is in the ‘centre’ and is described as a ‘Tiger devouring an English officer, a barbaric mechanical toy that belonged to Tippoo Sahib’.29 The man is now represented as English, and the device, perhaps due to its violence rather than its craftsmanship, is ‘barbaric’ and a ‘toy’ rather than an automaton.30 Marsh might have seen this display, given that he mentions collections at South Kensington in his story ‘A set of chessmen’ (1890), and some of his stories ‘display a marked ambivalence towards the nineteenth-century fascination with collections and museums, particularly those containing haunted, gruesome or anatomical exhibits’.31 Just as the tiger was on display for museumgoers in South Kensington, so the Siege of Seringapatam was available to readers of the period’s fiction. In 1896, G. A. Henty, famed writer of boys’ romances, published The Tiger of Mysore: A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib.32 Equally relevant to Marsh was an earlier novel, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868), which opens with a prologue, ‘The storming of Seringapatam: extracted from a family paper’, describing the theft of the novel’s famed gemstone by an English soldier. The novel describes the theft of the stone as part of the ‘deplorable excesses’ by ‘camp-followers’ and looting by East India Company soldiers that took place in Tipu’s palace after the company’s victory.33 Marsh was familiar with Collins’ fiction, as The Beetle and The Joss: A Reversion (1901) follow Collins’ narrative template from The Moonstone, which combines reports from multiple narrators to unravel a possibly supernatural mystery of non-European origins. Marsh’s critics were aware of the narrative connection, as the Daily Graphic’s October 1897 review of The Beetle noted that the ‘story is told by means of a series of narratives after the Wilkie Collins fashion’ (see also Freeman’s chapter on Marsh and sensation).34 Both Tipu’s tiger and The Moonstone serve as probable sources for the action of The Goddess, which adopts the idea of a 155

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic threatening foreign object found in Collins’ novel and centres its attention on a violent and unsettling Indian automaton.

The Goddess and colonial threat

Marsh does not, however, directly copy Tipu’s tiger in his imagining of the Goddess, and the differences between the two objects heighten the colonial threat suggested by Marsh’s creation. Unlike Tipu’s tiger, which appears to attack a wooden representation of a European, Marsh’s Goddess attacks two flesh-and-blood ones, violently stabbing Philip and Edwin Lawrence to death. The tiger and the Goddess make noise: the real device generates human ‘cries’ and a tiger’s ‘roar’ while the fictional one ‘a woman’s gentle laughter’. Yet the Goddess incorporates late nineteenth-century technology: its head contains an ‘arrangement somewhat on the lines of a phonograph’. The Goddess’ parallels with a phonograph reinforce the alignment among femininity, the phonograph and violence that Marsh had established in the story ‘The adventure of the phonograph’ from his collection Curios (1898), also discussed by Freeman in this volume. In that story, a phonograph cylinder seems to record a woman’s brutal murder, although the protagonists discover that the recording is a sensational representation rather than a real murder. Through the Goddess, Marsh recasts Tipu’s tiger and his earlier phonograph from Curios as objects that do not simply imitate murder; he imagines an object that can be used to commit real murder, and perhaps, since readers are led to believe at points in the Goddess, drive humans to commit murder. Like Tipu’s art object, The Goddess depicts the death of a European at the hands of an Indian entity; the Goddess herself, when compared to Tipu’s tiger, transforms the representation of murder into actual murder. The bloody and murderous actions of the Goddess have proven fertile ground for critics, who have connected them to sexual intercourse, anxieties about the female body and to a gendered inversion of the Ripper murders.35 Most relevant for my discussion, however, is the Goddess’ Indian provenance. Just after Ferguson describes the dissection of the Goddess, he provides an account of ‘[i]nquiries’ that ‘seemed to show that the creature had originally been intended for sacrificial purposes’ (p. 165). He continues, relaying that Lawrence had apparently purchased it at Allahabad; probably from the workshop of a native who was suspected of the manufacture of contriv-

156

Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in The Goddess ances, whose ingenuity was almost too conspicuous, which were used in the temples. On certain days such a puppet would be produced by the priests, with a flourish of trumpets. One could easily believe that miraculous power would be claimed for it. (p. 165; my emphasis)

Though the Goddess is still a ‘creature’ in this description, its supernatural powers seem to be stripped away as Ferguson describes it with passive voice and qualification, its miraculous power becoming real only through conditional beliefs and claims. The Goddess’ religious and ritual significance is negated almost as soon as it is presented. Marsh provides only the minimal amount of provenance and context for the fictional idol, and this lack of information motivates Roger Luckhurst, while examining The Goddess in line with The Beetle, to claim that its Indian context is merely interchangeable with an Egyptian one that is a ‘superficial locus of phobic racism’.36 This minimal information, however, is enough to highlight The Goddess’ connections with earlier Victorian representations of India and suggest that Marsh’s manipulation of the supernatural is more unique than it first may seem (see also chapters by Bulfin and Allsop on Marsh and Empire). The Goddess and the terror she causes resonate with Britain’s imperial history in India. After identifying the various references to the British Empire in the London locations of the novel, Minna Vuohelainen notes, ‘These references bring the Empire and its twin legacies of imperial guilt and threat of colonial rebellion or revenge into the very heart of London.’37 She continues by stating, ‘The Indian backdrop, associated with the traumatic Uprising of 1857, would still have provoked unease at the end of the century.’38 This unease, in Marsh’s novel, stems from a seemingly supernatural female Indian religious object. While the 1857 Rebellion is not necessarily associated with violence by Indian women, it was in part caused by British ignorance of Hindu and Muslim religious practice. It also generated multiple narratives about Sepoy violence towards British women or, alternatively, fears that the Rebellion would force British women into violent acts uncharacteristic of dominant Victorian ideologies of gender. The advent of the sensation novel, a genre in which Marsh wrote, has been described by Christopher Herbert as a ‘marker’ of the trauma caused by the Sepoy Rebellion.39 Herbert, in his reading of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–62), claims that Braddon had ‘perceived that the Mutiny … had provoked a traumatic crisis in Victorian gender ideology, and that the heart of the crisis lay precisely at the point of linkage of idealized 157

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic femininity to cruelty and violence’ (see also Höglund’s chapter in this volume).40 The linkage between the cruel woman and the ideal woman is still apparent in The Goddess’ juxtaposition of the Goddess and Bessie, the idealised music-hall performer who witnesses the mutilation of Philip Lawrence. Vuohelainen notes that both Bessie and the Goddess are termed idols by Ferguson and indicates that they are both described as performing, though the Goddess’ performances result in death.41 Thus, The Goddess continues to depict gender anxieties that Herbert sees as surfacing during the Sepoy Rebellion, when accounts of women victimised and violated by Indian rebels circulated alongside works by Charles Dickens and Dion Boucicault that described British women traumatised by colonial bloodshed to the point of firing guns and wielding knives. Marsh’s work departs from these post-Rebellion fictions, however, in making the source of bloodshed neither an angry Sepoy nor a traumatised white woman, but an Indian female entity. Thus, colonial violence is deflected onto a fantasy of sinister religious femininity reminiscent of the Hindu Goddess Kali. Tipu’s tiger suggests a version of colonial violence that simultaneously supplements and predates the events of 1857. Museumgoers encountering Tipu’s tiger might have connected Tipu’s representation of himself and his people as tigers and the frequent parallels made between Sepoys and tigers in post-1857 British writings, but Tipu himself was also associated with specifically gendered violence against British men. British male prisoners of the sultan were forced to undergo penile circumcision; news of this procedure, when it reached Britain, ‘contributed to the increasing British perception of Tipu Sultan as a fanatical tyrant’.42 The Goddess, with her violent mutilation of two Englishmen in an act that resembles sexual intercourse, certainly brings to mind the castration fears that would have been associated with Tipu. Yet given that, by 1900, a century had passed since these fears had been made public, and more than forty years had elapsed since the events of 1857, Marsh’s violent female automaton might be said to revivify fears that had gone dormant, or been encased safely behind the glass of a museum display case. The Goddess also draws on European conceptions of Indian cruelty and violence that persisted from the medieval period into the nineteenth century. In medieval Europe, scholars and travellers showed an ‘indiscriminate and eclectic interest in monsters’ from classical and biblical sources that led to ‘the consistent use of the stereotypes of demons and monsters to represent Indian gods’.43 While these views had since been complicated, Hinduism remained associated with violence, cruelty and 158

Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in The Goddess human sacrifice. For example, William Henry Sleeman, in his Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official (1844), juxtaposed Christ’s affection for ‘little children’ with what Sleeman saw as the Hindu attitude towards children: ‘[i]n nothing do the Hindoo deities appear more horrible than in the delight they are supposed to take in their sacrifice – it is everywhere the helpless, the female, and the infant, that they seek to devour.’44 Practices such as sati and deities such as Kali amplified the perception of violence that Sleeman chronicles, Victorian travelogues and medieval fantasies serving as rich archives from which writers could draw for imperial Gothic tales. Designated as a demon by Edwin Lawrence, Marsh’s goddess echoes medieval writings, while its sacrificial purpose seems to confirm Sleeman’s observations about Hinduism. Given Marsh’s other fiction and trends within late nineteenth-century Gothic, it is not a stretch to consider The Goddess an attempt, through an oblique reference to a famous Indian automaton, to allow readers to contend with the violent histories of seemingly docile objects from the colonial past.45 Looking more closely, however, at the conclusion of the novel in relation to other imperial Gothic texts suggests that The Goddess complicates this picture, locating colonial fears not in the objects or individuals from the colonised cultures but in the British citizens who encounter the ‘foreign’.

Recalibrating the imperial Gothic

The British characters of The Goddess are a psychologically unstable bunch; it is difficult to locate a reliable observer of the story’s events. Dr Hume, the ‘pathologist’ who is ‘an authority on the obscure diseases of the brain’, is described by Ferguson as ‘seek[ing] to show that we are, all of us, more or less mad’ (pp. 40, 167–8). Marsh’s novel largely validates this claim, given that Ferguson wonders ‘whether the doctor himself might not be going mad’ (p. 77). Ferguson and Bessie, the music-hall actress with whom he is enamoured, both question their own mental stability and exhibit a paranoid sense of their own capacity for violence. When Hume tells Ferguson that Ferguson is capable of killing someone and promptly forgetting the fact, Ferguson does not immediately contest the diagnosis but observes, ‘[f]or some cause his words seemed to penetrate to the very marrow of my bones, as if they had been daggers of ice’ (p. 40). Ferguson reacts to Hume’s acknowledgement of his homicidal tendencies with violent language: metaphorical daggers recall the Goddess’ real ones. The novel also links Ferguson’s violence to his experiences on the imperial frontier, which is portrayed as a place of v­ iolence. His ‘fight for fortune’ 159

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic has taken place ‘in odd corners of the world’, ‘places where human life is not held of much account’ (pp. 82–3). Though English, Ferguson serves as a violent force from the colonies. Similarly, Bessie, stricken by amnesia after witnessing Philip Lawrence’s murder, seems capable of violence. She hallucinates that she herself stabbed Lawrence and confuses her own actions with those of the Goddess, unable to separate her own identity from that of the perceived foreign threat (pp. 71–2). Bessie and Ferguson’s paranoid sense of their own violent capabilities also shapes the reader’s understanding of the nature of the Goddess. Ferguson signals early on that he is a reader of Edgar Allan Poe and connects the ‘creature’ in his vision with the ‘huge ape’ of Poe’s ‘The murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), although he immediately undercuts the comparison by observing that the creature he witnessed ‘had nothing in common with any member of the ape family’ (p. 36). Though withdrawn, this reference indicates that Ferguson’s paranoid observations may be informed by his reading of Poe’s grisly and macabre writings, while it also positions the Goddess in relation to the exotic threat of Poe’s orangutan, a creature of ‘intractable ferocity’ brought to Paris from Borneo.46 Marsh’s characters, then, live in fear of their own violent proclivities, and, in the case of Ferguson, associate these proclivities with the bestial ferocity of the imperial frontier. The violence and paranoia of The Goddess also draw on later developments in what we have come to identify as examples of the ‘imperial Gothic’. The imperial Gothic’s ‘blend of adventure story with Gothic elements’ has been described by Patrick Brantlinger: the imperial Gothic ‘expresses anxieties about the ease with which civilization can revert to barbarism or savagery and thus about the weakening of Britain’s imperial hegemony’.47 The Goddess certainly appears to express these anxieties, as it features the invasion of London by a murderous Hindu idol that brings destruction and misfortune to the imperial centre, while it also highlights the mental instability of all of its characters as ‘a text obsessed with nervous maladies connected with modernity’.48 Brantlinger’s initial example in his chapter on the imperial Gothic in Rule of Darkness is B. M. Croker’s 1905 story ‘The little brass god’ in which a statue of the Indian Goddess Kali leads to multiple misfortunes among Anglo-Indians; Brantlinger observes that the statue ‘suggests that Western rationality may be subverted by the very superstitions it rejects. The destructive magic of the Orient takes its revenge.’49 This model, in which a foreign object or entity illustrates the power of non-English and non-European spirituality, creating terror, clearly resonated with Marsh. Other sto160

Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in The Goddess ries, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The ring of Thoth’ (1890) and ‘The brown hand’ (1899), probably attracted Marsh’s attention through their exploration of foreign terror and spirituality (see also Bulfin’s chapter). ‘The ring of Thoth’ features Sosra, a 4,000-year-old son of a chief priest of Osiris, who lurks in the Louvre in hopes of recovering an ancient ring that allows him to die; in ‘The brown hand’ the ghost of an Afghan man haunts the English doctor who amputated his hand, visiting him nightly to recover the hand that the doctor kept for his collection of medical specimens. Despite these connections between Conan Doyle’s stories and Marsh’s fiction, however, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and Marsh’s own The Beetle seem the most likely examples of the imperial Gothic that influenced The Goddess. The Moonstone, The Beetle and many of the stories that Brantlinger outlines as examples of the imperial Gothic present characters and readers with possibly supernatural circumstances and invite interpretation and speculation about their truth. Are the events described taking place according to new rules of nature, or are they hallucinations, delusions or dreams of characters who occupy a world in which the laws of nature remain consistent with those of the reader? Kelly Hurley notes that the genre of the fantastic, as outlined by Tzvetan Todorov, is important to the understanding of the late Victorian Gothic, and the fantastic genre is applicable to much of The Goddess.50 Like the uncertainty related to Hoffmann’s automaton, Olimpia, Todorov’s fantastic manifests itself as hesitation, here between two generic categories, the uncanny and the marvellous: The fantastic … lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from ‘reality’ as it exists in the common opinion. At the story’s end, the reader makes a decision even if the character does not; he opts for one solution or the other, and thereby emerges from the fantastic. If he decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to … the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous.51

When considered in light of Brantlinger’s imperial Gothic and Todorov’s fantastic, The Moonstone and The Beetle provide an interesting counterpoint to The Goddess. Though The Moonstone predates Brantlinger’s time frame for the imperial Gothic, its presentation of a famed gemstone with potentially sacred powers certainly reflects the generic hesitation described by 161

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic Todorov. Collins’ Moonstone, based on the Koh-i-noor, does not appear at first to have demonstrable occult powers, though a curse suggests that the thieves who have stolen the stone will be the victims of vengeance. Collins’ narrators debate the stone’s possible occult powers, and the book concludes with one of its most sceptical characters, the traveller Murthwaite, witnessing the stone’s restoration to its original location in Somnauth. Murthwaite observes that ‘the Moonstone looks forth once more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began’ (p. 542). Though the conclusion of The Moonstone hints towards the marvellous by implying that the Moonstone may be sentient, the novel ‘rejects any notion of a singular or unitary providence’ that drives its events and asks its readers to examine multiple explanations, supernatural or otherwise, for the mysteries that surround the diamond.52 It may be read as a striking example of the fantastic or, for more sceptical readers, of the uncanny. The Beetle is more definitive than The Moonstone in its supernatural elements, with a plot that inhabits the category of the fantastic only to conclude, it seems, as part of the marvellous. Though The Beetle depicts more unexplainable events than are found in The Moonstone, most notably the transformations of the Beetle in its opening section, the novel is comprised, in line with The Moonstone, of multiple narrations that imply the possibility of disagreement about whether or not the Beetle is a supernatural creature. The Egyptian woman who appears to transform into the Beetle could simply be influencing multiple characters through m ­ esmerism, though eventually a consensus emerges that the Beetle is indeed a phenomenon not explained by existing natural laws. This consensus suggests that the narrative is an example of the marvellous. The final report describing the Beetle in Marsh’s novel, delivered by ‘confidential agent’ Augustus Champnell, highlights how only detritus is left behind by the Egyptian entity after a train accident. The detritus, however, is of such an indeterminate and diverse variety that, to make sense of it, one must imagine a new species of animal (p. 292). A few paragraphs later, Champnell comments that the Beetle was or is ‘a creature born neither of God nor man’ (p. 295). Marsh concludes his novel by implying that its fantastic events can be explained neither by current laws of nature nor by the characters’ delusions. While the fantastic’s hesitation and uncertainty persist, Marsh is more willing than Collins to imagine the presence of supernatural forces. The conclusion endorses the viewpoint that The Beetle is an example of the marvellous. The Goddess seems less an example of the fantastic than The Moonstone and differs from The Beetle and Conan Doyle’s stories in its conclusion, 162

Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in The Goddess which favours the interpretation that the events of the novel can be explained away by the accepted laws of nature. Thus, the work appears to be an example of Todorov’s uncanny, forsaking both the fantastic and the marvellous. The Goddess’ conclusion almost entirely explains away the Goddess’ sound and violent power as caused not by mysterious supernatural Hindu forces but by machinery. As a machine, the Goddess is not an entirely predictable example of the feared foreign and supernatural powers that Brantlinger notes are central to the imperial Gothic. Instead, one can read the conclusion of The Goddess as in line with Gothic fiction that predates the Victorian period, most notably the works of Ann Radcliffe, works that Todorov associates with the tendency ‘of the supernatural explained’.53 Marsh’s use of the ‘supernatural explained’, however, is rather specific, in that the automaton is referenced only in the final pages of the novel and, with no small degree of abruptness and finality, emerges to oppose an earlier sense that the Goddess may have been a supernatural or living being. The revelation that the Goddess is a mechanical idol does not answer all the questions that the novel poses about her nature. For example, it does not explain who is responsible for the ‘sound of a woman’s laughter’ that Ferguson and Bessie hear on Fulham Road, laughter that Ferguson identifies with the laughter from Edwin Lawrence’s rooms, having ‘a quality which was pregnant with horrible suggestion’ (p. 131). The novel’s conclusion may therefore seem contrived, as if Marsh wanted to tie off loose ends and eliminate the mysteries of the Goddess as abruptly as possible, perhaps curtailing the reader’s satisfaction in the process. The conclusion does, however, suggest a reinterpretation of earlier events that radically shifts the reader’s assumptions about the novel. Given that so many of the characters, including Edwin Lawrence, Ferguson, Bessie and Hume, show evidence of mental illness, the revelation of the Goddess’ mechanical nature implies that the features that make the Goddess seem alive, whether her laughter, her movement or her seeming control of Edwin Lawrence, are the results of a convincing automaton and a mass delusion (see also Pedlingham’s chapter in this volume). Thus, The Goddess asks readers to rethink the supernatural conventions and xenophobic fears that Brantlinger aligns with the imperial Gothic. Marsh’s narrative is suggestive in making its jarring and unsatisfactory plot twist turn on the revelation of a machine itself, a device that suggests artifice, deception, and, importantly, Western European fears about inferiority to Eastern countries. To an extent, the novel works as a self-conscious commentary on narrative and genre. Shortly 163

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic after the publication of The Goddess, Marsh showed an awareness of the mechanical metaphors that were used to discuss writing and plotting. An article in the Academy criticised the brazen simplicity of his plots, noting that, after Marsh has introduced a story, ‘the rest is mechanics’.54 Marsh responded by debunking the notion that his books were ‘turned out by machinery’.55 Marsh’s exchange with the Academy highlights how machine metaphors circulated in disparaging accounts of composition of mass-market fiction, but it also suggests the possibility that Marsh was aware of the way that his fiction might be imagined as mechanical. The end of The Goddess can be read not as a flimsy mass-market contrivance but as a metafictional excursion into popular narratology through which Marsh explores the parodic and critical potential of what is often dismissed as ‘plot machinery’. The dissection of the Goddess is a shocking aesthetic strategy that exposes actual machinery (the mechanical puppet) through plot machinery (a potentially contrived revelation). In keeping with the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of machinery as ‘[c]ontrivances employed for effect in a literary work; supernatural personages and incidents, or other devices of plot, etc., in a narrative’, Marsh transforms the supernatural plot devices familiar to readers of the imperial Gothic into an actual device.56 Through the imagery of the novel’s central monster, Marsh returns readers to the etymological origin of the term deus ex machina, in which a stage device was used to aid in the representation of a deity on the Greek stage.57 The denouement of The Goddess does not use a deity as a plot device, as does The Beetle, but reveals a deity to be an actual machine, literalising the term deus ex machina and parodying the anticipated supernatural happenings of the imperial Gothic. Though it may be read as hearkening back to the fantastic early nineteenth-century narratives of automata, the conclusion of The Goddess also works as a moment when the imperial Gothic reveals its own artifice. Unlike an automaton’s ‘concealed mechanism’, The Goddess’ plot dynamics hide and then reveal the fictional contrivance behind its creature’s foreign, threatening and otherworldly presence. In a moment simultaneously deflationary and humorous, Marsh suggests that the English characters are themselves reacting, with terror and mental instability, to a modern machine. Though the tone of the novel continues to emphasise the terror and violence of the Goddess, the revelation of the Goddess’ machinery almost comes across as a joke at the reader’s expense; Marsh echoes earlier deflationary parodies of the Gothic, such as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818). A complicated historical and mechanical reality checks 164

Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in The Goddess the novel’s supernatural flights of fancy. Given the Goddess’ parallels with Tipu’s tiger, a machine that was potentially the product of cultural exchange, the Goddess emerges as a cross-cultural construct, an Indian object made supernatural and lifelike by the psychological projections of English characters. The revelation of the Goddess’ machinery throws into relief the artificial components of the imperial Gothic. Marsh’s novel serves therefore as a metacommentary on a firmly established subgenre, in effect asking its readers to consider whether the fears, racial anxieties and mental distortions that emerge in the imperial Gothic are no more than elaborate fantasies of the English in the face of a colonial modernity they helped to create.

Notes

 1 R. Marsh, The Goddess: A Demon, ed. M. Vuohelainen (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2010), p. 8. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text.  2 M. Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, in R. Marsh, The Goddess, ed. M. Vuohelainen (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2010), pp. vii–xxxiii.  3 ‘automaton, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online, www.oed.com.ezproxy. library.csulb.edu/view/Entry/13474 [accessed 25 May 2016].  4 ‘automaton’.  5 M. Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 187.  6 Kang, Sublime Dreams, pp. 210–11.  7 Jentsch quoted in S. Freud, ‘The “uncanny” ’, in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 217–52 (p. 227). All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text.  8 K. Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 185, n. 2; Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxv–xxvi.  9 Kang, Sublime Dreams, p. 214. 10 E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), p. 19. 11 Truitt, Medieval Robots, p. 19. 12 Truitt, Medieval Robots, p. 18. 13 S. Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers (London: V&A, 2009), pp. 20–1. 14 ‘Tippoo’s tiger (mechanical organ)’, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/ O61949/tippoos-tiger-mechanical-organ-unknown/ [accessed 26 May 2016]. 15 Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers, p. 58.

165

Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic 16 Quoted in Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers, p. 62. 17 Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers, p. 62. 18 M. Archer, Tippoo’s Tiger (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1959), p. 4. 19 Archer, Tippoo’s Tiger, p. 4. 20 Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers, p. 40. Though Tipu was Muslim, Stronge notes that his weapons ‘draw heavily on the artistic legacy of Hindu empires in the region’. 21 Archer, Tippoo’s Tiger, pp. 12, 14; Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers, pp. 85–6. 22 Archer, Tippoo’s Tiger, p. 14. 23 Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers, p. 20. 24 A. W. J. G. Ord-Hume, ‘Tipu’s tiger – its history and description part II’, Music & Automata, 3:10 (1987), 64–80 (p. 75). 25 Ord-Hume, ‘Tipu’s tiger’, p. 75. 26 Ord-Hume, ‘Tipu’s tiger’, p. 75; H. de Almeida and G. H. Gilpin, Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 36. 27 Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers, p. 70. 28 K. Baedeker, London and its Environs: Handbook for Travellers (Leipsig: Karl Baedeker, 1900), p. 366. 29 Baedeker, London and its Environs, pp. 366–7. 30 De Almeida and Gilpin make a convincing case for identifying the sculpted man as an Englishman (pp. 35–6). Specialists at the Victoria and Albert Museum hesitate about the nationality, period or uniform that the garments represent, concluding that they are partly ‘European’ (‘Tippoo’s tiger [mechanical organ]’). 31 M. Vuohelainen, Richard Marsh (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), pp. 95, 98. 32 Writing under his real name (Bernard Heldmann) during the early 1880s, Marsh contributed to and coedited the boys’ periodical Union Jack, which Henty edited (Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, pp. xi–xii). 33 W. Collins, The Moonstone, ed. S. Farmer (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999), p. 56. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 34 Quoted in R. Marsh, The Beetle: A Mystery, ed. M. Vuohelainen (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2008), p. 310. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 35 See note 8. For the parallels between the Goddess’ actions and the Ripper murders, see Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, p. xxvi. 36 R. Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 173. 37 Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, p. xxi. 38 Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, p. xxi.

166

Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in The Goddess 39 C. Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 242. 40 Herbert, War of No Pity, p. 263. 41 Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxxi–xxxii. 42 Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers, p. 75. 43 P. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 10. 44 W. H. Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, 2 vols (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1844), i, p. 130. 45 See Luckhurst, Mummy’s Curse, pp. 153–83 and R. Hoberman, ‘In quest of a museal aura: turn of the century narratives about museum-displayed objects’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 31:2 (2003), 467–82. 46 E. A. Poe, ‘The murders in the Rue Morgue’, in Selected Tales, ed. D. Van Leer (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), pp. 92–122 (p. 120). 47 P. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830– 1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 227, 229. 48 Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, p. xxviii. 49 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, p. 227. 50 Hurley, Gothic Body, pp. 14–16. 51 T. Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. R. Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 41. 52 N. Hultgren, Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014), p. 61. 53 Todorov, Fantastic, p. 41. 54 ‘The Yarning School’, Academy, 59 (3 November 1900), 423–4 (p. 423). 55 ‘Mr. Richard Marsh’s stories’, Academy, 60 (9 February 1901), 131. 56 ‘machinery, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online, www.oed.com.ezproxy. library.csulb.edu/view/Entry/111856 [accessed 25 May 2016]. 57 ‘deus ex machina, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://www.oed. com/view/Entry/51373 [accessed 12 September 2016]. Note that chapter 24 of The Joss: A Reversion is entitled ‘The god out of the machine’.

167

Part IV

Richard Marsh and object relations

169

9

••

‘Something was going from me – the capacity, as it were, to be myself’: ‘transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Richard Marsh Graeme Pedlingham

Over a four-year period, from 1897 to 1901, Richard Marsh published a series of novels that together represent his most emphatic contribution to the fin-de-siècle Gothic resurgence. The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), The Goddess: A Demon (1900) and The Joss: A Reversion (1901) exploit an array of late nineteenth-century cultural anxieties, but especially emphasise the fraught relationships between individuals and a rapidly filling world of objects, things. These novels present us with a world of instability, of flux, in which seemingly concrete objects can endanger identity and boundaries between self and not-self become disturbingly permeable. Such permeability aligns closely with anxieties surrounding mesmerism and its apparent capacity for, as Julian Wolfreys notes, ‘the psychic erasure of the boundaries which one imposes on oneself as the necessary limits of selfdefinition’.1 The place of mesmerism within The Beetle has received relatively substantial critical attention.2 However, while mesmerism clearly influenced Marsh, the treatment of objects in his Gothic fiction makes such a comparison less satisfactory. Drawing upon recent psychoanalytic theories of the object and ‘thing theory’, I read Marsh instead through a model of dual agency in which human and object inform one another in a mutually transformative relationship that potentially fractures the identities of both. The world of the late nineteenth century was one seemingly occupied by an ever-increasing quantity of objects, knick-knacks, c­ommodities, 171

Richard Marsh and object relations curios, disposables, consumables and ever more waste ‘mountains’ of ‘coal-dust, vegetable-dust, bone-dust, crockery-dust, rough dust and sifted dust – all manner of Dust’, over which control was not always assured (see also chapters by Allsop and Orrells in this volume).3 The rise of mass consumerism meant that ‘nineteenth-century society as a whole suddenly found itself confronting a style of consumption radically different from any previously known’.4 Consumer goods could, worryingly, ‘inculcate desire’, producing an ‘irresistible cult of consumption’.5 In ‘a world … of proliferating sales and selling activity, and swelling angst-ridden commentaries on that activity’, fears of a reversal of agency between human and object were commonplace.6 Bill Brown identifies a new relationship between ‘the consumer and the merchandise’ in which ‘objects assume lives of their own, captivating humans with the mesmeric power of their aesthetic value’.7 This ‘captivation’ is experienced as a property of the external object and an aspect of the consumer’s self invested in the object. These objects define and shape the consumer’s selfhood while they express it, fracturing boundaries between self and object.8 In this, consumerism shares close similarities with another nineteenth-century phenomenon: collecting. As Susan M. Pearce argues: ‘Collections are endowed with a life of their own, which bears the most intimate relationship to that of their collector, so that the collector sees them, in the most literal sense, as parts of himself.’9 The object acquires life through a state of undecidability, becoming both ‘me’ and ‘not-me’; the collector invests part of him/herself in the object and incorporates it as part of his/her identity (one that can be displayed, preserved). In this anxiety-provoking imbrication, it becomes uncertain who holds agency: ‘sometimes the collector shapes the collection and sometimes it shapes him.’10 Collecting and consumption were clearly sources of fascination for Marsh (cf. Curios, 1898), and it is within this context of burgeoning, unruly objects that Marsh’s Gothic novels are situated.

(Non-)mesmerism and The Beetle

‘[A]mong other things,’ reflects the unfortunate Robert Holt in The Beetle, ‘I realised what a ridiculous figure I must be cutting.’11 At this early stage in the narrative, Holt has been imprisoned, verbally humiliated, denuded, implicitly subjected to sexual assault, mesmerised, and is now ‘remotecontrolled’ by the Beetle-creature into committing an act of burglary upon ‘the greatest living force in practical politics’, Paul Lessingham MP 172

‘Transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Marsh (p. 30).12 Disturbingly, Holt finds himself precisely among ‘things’ that are ‘other’. Indeed, following the Beetle-creature’s traumatic objectification of him and his implicitly commodified ‘white skin’, he has become ‘other’ to himself (p. 21). His disembodied self-observation reflects this. The ‘other things’ that Holt ‘realises’ about himself are also, despite his claims to ‘freedom on my mental side’, unnameable (p. 35). They will not bear admittance, in part, because Holt has become other to himself: he can reflect upon himself at a surface level, imagining how he must look to others, but struggles to engage with a selfhood that has been made alien through his encounter with the Beetle-creature. Encountering the Beetle-creature is in many ways the least straightforward place to start thinking about Marsh’s treatment of objects as it does not initially appear to be an object at all. However, the Beetlecreature is explicitly bound to the discourse of objects within Marsh’s work. Firstly, it is not confinable to its anthropic or coleopteral appearances but manifests as various objects throughout the novel: Marjorie Lindon’s ‘uncomfortable carpet’ covered in lifelike beetle motifs, Sydney Atherton’s ‘photogravure’, the drawing that Paul Lessingham repeatedly finds at his desk and even the tangible utterance ‘THE BEETLE’ (pp. 198, 80, 218, 42). All of these can be considered facets and ­extensions of the Beetle-creature itself; they are constituent parts of the ­polymorphous entity that permeates The Beetle. The Beetle-creature, which ‘resolutely resists any final commentary aimed at a firm identification’, cannot be said to be only an object, but also cannot be said not to be an object.13 At one level, the Beetle-creature is a mesmerist. However, in keeping with its protean nature, such a delimitation is overwhelmed by the creature’s persistent quality of excess – an overt materiality with which mesmerism as a theoretical framework does not fit precisely. Among the stereotypical hand gestures and ‘penetrating’ gaze that accompany Holt’s initial confrontation with the Beetle-creature, stock mesmeric techniques, we find a peculiarly tangible moment: ‘His sentences, in some strange, indescribable way, seemed, as they came from his lips, to warp my limbs; to enwrap themselves about me; to confine me, tighter and tighter, within, as it were, swaddling clothes’ (p. 32). The Beetlecreature’s words become things, imbued with a materiality that seems capable of causing bodily harm: ‘he would have lashed me across the face with them’ (p. 31). Their object status complicates a mesmeric framework, and in this they foreshadow the role of objects as extensions of the Beetle-creature’s selfhood. 173

Richard Marsh and object relations Objects at the end of the nineteenth century were generally ­understood not to have a mesmeric capacity. Alison Winter distinguishes between fin-de-siècle mesmerism and eighteenth-century French theories of ‘animal magnetism’, which had posited the existence of a physical force (or ‘fluid’) carrying mesmeric power. This idea had resurfaced in Britain in the 1830s but waned after Thomas Wakley’s ‘trials’ of 1838, with mesmerism becoming ‘the dominant term of reference’.14 This change, Winter notes, served ‘to deny that physical forces were involved’, and ‘mesmerism’s very name, marking a dismissal of “animal magnetism,” was a negation’.15 A mesmeric explanation of the Beetle-creature’s powers is therefore complicated by its externalisation as a range of non-mesmeric objects. In a familiar logic of undecidability, the Beetle-creature both is and is not a mesmerist. We find another example of the Beetle-creature’s powers manifesting as a tangible language, words-made-flesh, in Holt’s confrontation with Lessingham who, despite discovering Holt with pistol in hand burglariously rummaging through his desk, presents a figure of ­‘adroitness … born of his invulnerable presence of mind’ (pp. 41–2). Yet, when Holt utters the words ‘THE BEETLE’, Lessingham is changed (p. 42). These words have a physical effect upon the environment, inspiring a ‘nauseous consciousness of the presence of something evil in the room’, and upon Lessingham, who appears to have ‘received a staggering blow’ (pp. 42–3; my emphasis). Such is the ‘extraordinary change’ that Holt has difficulty recognising ‘the god of [his] political idolatry’ (p. 43). This effect is not produced by mesmeric domination, but rather the amalgamation between Lessingham and an objectified extension of the Beetle-creature. One of Lessingham’s distinguishing features is his oratorical skill. Atherton, for instance, names him ‘the Apostle’, claiming that ‘[w]hen a man speaks with an Apostle’s tongue, he can witch any woman in the land’, and Lessingham’s crowning achievement is ‘that most difficult of all feats … a practical, statesmanlike speech, and yet one which left his hearers in an excellent humour’ (pp. 99, 93). This skill becomes his undoing. Holt, in fashioning the maleficent words, speaks in ‘a low, hissing voice, which I vow was never mine’ (p. 42). Moments later Lessingham undergoes a correspondingly self-alienating transformation as his ‘very voice seemed changed; his frenzied, choking accents would hardly have been recognised by friend or foe’ (p. 43). His political authority and, simultaneously, his masculinity are extinguished as he collapses into a state ‘rapidly approximating to the condition of a hysterical woman’ (p. 265).16 Lessingham’s defining characteristic as an 174

‘Transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Marsh orator sponsors the form of the object used against him, while the object itself (our thing-phrase, ‘THE BEETLE’) simultaneously violates and reshapes Lessingham’s identity.

Transformative encounters

The mesmeric framework fails to accommodate this mutual interaction between subject and object, informing one another, in Marsh’s fiction. In these transformative encounters, the subject is changed and restructured through merger with an object experienced as both other and ‘alwaysalready’ an aspect of the self. Such encounters, which occur repeatedly throughout Marsh’s Gothic oeuvre, are key to his depiction of an anxious existence within a world of proliferating, potentially unruly, objects. In one such scene, the would-be New Woman Marjorie Lindon, left alone in the Beetle-creature’s house, is initially far from disconcerted: ‘Only let me find myself face to face with the fantastic author of Mr Holt’s weird tribulations, and I, a woman, single-handed, would do my best to show him that whoever played pranks with Paul Lessingham trifled with edged tools’ (p. 198). Almost directly following this self-assured statement of steely singularity, Marjorie’s attention alights upon the room’s ‘marvellous carpet’ covered in beetle-images (p. 198). This object firstly inaugurates a dissociation: ‘When I discovered what it actually was covered with, I was conscious of a disagreeable sense of surprise’ (p. 198). This peculiar phrasing suggests a distancing within Marjorie’s sense of self. In a striking volte-face, Marjorie expresses a new-found self-doubt: ‘If I had discovered that you were there before Sydney went, I think it just possible that I should have hesitated before I let him go’ (p. 199). Her previous independence is shaken, resulting in a ‘revulsion of feeling’ directed not so much at the beetle-images as at herself: ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Marjorie Lindon, to even think such nonsense … you who have prided yourself on being so strong-minded!’ (p. 199). This feeling is externalised onto the beetle-images, as Marjorie ‘half involuntarily’ draws her ‘foot over one of the creatures’ and ‘seemed to feel it squelch beneath [her] shoe. It was disgusting’ (p. 199). This seeming-squelch onomatopoeically conveys a softness and viscosity associated with Marjorie’s feelings of disgust – a self-disgust provoked by her own failure to embody her ‘strong’, hard-‘edged’ ideal. The carpet of beetle-images destabilises Marjorie’s (self-defined) ‘New Womanhood’, undecidably situating her between self-reliance and victimhood.17 Marjorie’s self-doubt announces an incipient recognition of 175

Richard Marsh and object relations her transformation into victim (which she then remains) following her encounter with beetle-abounding objects. Her attention moves from the squelching, ‘pliant’, ‘disgusting’ carpet to a ‘heap of rugs’ – a continuation of the carpet, forming a single textile and tactile object (pp. 198–200). Upon the uppermost rug, ‘of huge size’, yet also capable of being ‘passed through the proverbial wedding ring’, Marjorie discovers a picture illustrating a ‘human sacrifice’ undecidably embroidered onto the material or woven into it (p. 200). The object’s boundaries are uncertain, reinforcing Marjorie’s uncertain self-definition. This ‘horribly suggestive’ image, of a ‘naked white woman being burned alive’, serves as a prognostication of Marjorie’s possible fate but also functions not as a doubling but as an interweaving of Marjorie’s identity with the object (p. 200). For Marjorie is not only threatened with becoming a victim physically (i.e. immolated upon an Egyptian altar), but has already assumed the status of victim narratively: this object encounter has left her a voiceless and passive figure in need of rescue. The trajectory of self-doubt and emerging dissociative duality in relation to Marjorie’s New Woman status is completed with her transformation into a victim. The Goddess makes these mutually informing mergers, if anything, more explicit. This is partly because these encounters are with a single object, the eponymous Goddess, rather than the series of object-­extensions that act as delegates for the diffuse Beetle-creature. The Goddess’ object-hood is of a different nature: rather than a paradigm of extension, we find one of proliferation through doubling. The Goddess opens with the murder of Edwin Lawrence. It steadily unfolds the mystery of his killer’s identity until climactically revealing that the murder has been perpetrated, bizarrely, by its apparent victim. Lawrence has, in fact, slain his brother through means of a deadly Indian religious automaton: the ‘Goddess’. This remarkable clockwork artefact conceals innumerable mechanical knives that perform a vicious stabbing dance when activated. However, throughout much of the novel the Goddess remains only a haunting presence that may or may not be alive; that may or may not exist. The Goddess’ first ‘victim’, Bessie Moore, enters the narrative via Marsh’s favoured method for transitioning into Otherness: a window. Windows, for Marsh (and in the theories of Bollas and Brown discussed in the next section), function as thresholds to the world of the Other that are also part of the Other.18 The novel’s protagonist John Ferguson has just witnessed, either in reality or dream, the apparent death of his gambling partner Edwin Lawrence at the hands of ‘some strange creature’, beskirted and with a ‘woman’s laugh’.19 He wakes to find a mysteri176

‘Transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Marsh ous woman, seemingly amnesiac, stepping into his room smeared with blood and carrying Lawrence’s picture. The reader is clearly encouraged to suspect that Bessie is Lawrence’s murderer, entangling her with the Goddess from the start: she figures as a conjunction of two mysteries, her own and the Goddess’. Precisely what the Goddess is remains unclear until the novel’s conclusion, when it is dramatically revealed to be ‘an idol; apparently a Hindoo goddess’, and ‘originally … intended for sacrificial purposes’ (pp. 163, 165). However, the idol’s most remarkable peculiarity is its ‘curious suggestion of life … The figure needed only some little thing to give it at least the semblance of actual life’ (p. 163). This ‘little thing’ is the transformational encounter with a subject. The Goddess demands sacrifice, and the merger of subject and object in these transformational encounters involves a sacrifice of selfhood. Bessie Moore’s meeting with the Goddess, unrepresented except through her own recollections, instigates a convergence of their identities in which the Goddess expresses and exploits Bessie’s defining characteristic: her theatricality. Bessie Moore is a star of the London stage. In a description that directly conflates her with the Goddess, she is deemed ‘the idol of the town’ whose ‘acting was drawing all London to the Pandora Theatre’ (pp. 83, 52). This ability is mirrored by the Goddess’ own associations with theatricality. For instance, in Edwin Lawrence’s ‘climactic’ revelation of the Goddess he pauses with ‘an eye to what would be the proper dramatic effect’ before ‘[striking] the crimson screen, so that it came clattering forward on to the floor’ – a description that constructs the Goddess’ ‘daïs’ as a stage (p. 162). Indeed, the entry of Ferguson’s party into the Goddess’ warehouse-residence is presented as a (denied) theatrical spectacle: ‘I rebolted the door, boos and groans coming from the crowd as they perceived themselves being shut out from the sight of anything which there might be to see’ (p. 148). This shared theatricality then sponsors Bessie’s transformation: the Goddess expresses this aspect of Bessie’s selfhood, while simultaneously disturbing that very selfhood through subverting their shared characteristic. Their entwined relationship originates in Bessie’s initial encounter with the Goddess, which she witnessed killing ‘Edwin’ (actually his brother Philip). As she recalls this moment, before an audience of friends, policemen and Lawrence’s body, she enacts the persona of the Goddess, seemingly unconsciously. Her uncharacteristically bold entrance into Lawrence’s rooms, waving a policeman ‘aside with an imperious gesture, as if she were a sovereign queen’, immediately suggests that her behaviour 177

Richard Marsh and object relations is not entirely her own (p. 66). This performance then continues, as one of the policemen relates: ‘she’s been acting it all over to herself again as it were … she acted how she struck him’ (p. 75). This suggests performance of a role but it is unclear whether the ‘role’ belongs to Bessie or someone/ something else. We are only told that ‘she’ has been acting ‘it’. However, Bessie has recently associated the designation ‘it’ with the Goddess: ‘Then – then it came in. It! It!’ (p. 69). While, at this point in the narrative, the reader may not yet associate ‘it’ with the Goddess, it is associated with the mysterious and unnamed ‘Other’ in Lawrence’s rooms. However, the shared theatricality of this relationship, with Bessie performing the Goddess and the Goddess’ spectacular, insistent performability, makes possible a more threatening merger of Bessie and the Goddess, encapsulated by Bessie’s striking confusion of pronouns: ‘ “I killed him; it hacked, hacked, hacked; his blood is on my cloak and hands” ’ (p. 72). Each semi-colon denotes a shift between Bessie watching the Goddess and defining herself as the Goddess. But these shifts also form a single sense of identity, hence a single sentence. The policeman’s statement preserves this ambiguity of pronouns; it is undecidable whether ‘she’ refers to Bessie or the Goddess. Bessie’s selfhood here becomes fractured and doubled through her encounter with the Goddess. This undecidability between the performed and the performer is far from unusual in theatre. Indeed, for Bert O. States, it is necessary: ‘in theatre there is no ontological difference between the image and the object.’20 The actor/actress is simultaneously the theatrical image (e.g. character), and a ‘real’ human being standing on stage. The horror of this scene derives partly from Bessie not being able to determine which she is: the performer or performed. But, further, this theatrical mode-of-being is not confined to Bessie’s explicitly performative moments. Rather it becomes a condition of her everyday life: ‘It is as if I were two persons, and each keeps losing the other. Can there be two persons in one body? My brain seems blurred – as if it were in two parts’ (p. 70). The answer to Bessie’s question is self-evidently ‘yes’; theatrical performance is, in a sense, the existence of ‘two persons in one body’. The disturbing, maddening, element here is that her existence ‘in two parts’ has become her general mode-of-being as she finds herself in a state of persistent performance. The Goddess doubles itself by compelling a continuous o­ ntological coincidence of the performer and performed: characters serve as vehicles for the Goddess’ doubling throughout the novel. Lawrence, for instance, claims that it is ‘an inseparable c­ ompanion … grown into the very web of my being’, even writ178

‘Transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Marsh ing a letter signed as ‘THE GODDESS’ (pp. 158, 91). For Lawrence, however, the Goddess reflects and uses his characteristics as a gambler, adventurer and epicurean. Unlike the Beetle-creature’s various objectextensions, the Goddess is a single delimitable object, ‘squatt[ing] … on an ebony pedestal’ (p. 163). The disturbing potential of this object lies, however, in its seemingly uncontrollable capacity for proliferating itself through those who encounter it. Marsh’s slightly later work The Joss: A Reversion (1901) similarly positions a single object as the source of its transformational encounters: a ‘tiny representation of some preposterous heathen god’ known as the ‘God of Fortune’.21 This object combines qualities of both extension and doubling. The God of Fortune is a small humanoid figurine belonging to the seemingly deceased Benjamin Batters, uncle of the novel’s early protagonist Pollie Blyth. Upon the verge of destitution, Pollie is rescued by discovering that she is the beneficiary of Batters’ will. However, she is soon plagued by mysterious and threatening agents, hunting for someone or something known as ‘the Great Joss’. The Great Joss, it transpires, is Batters himself, who has been held captive in a remote part of south-west China and worshipped/tortured as an unwilling god. After escaping with the assistance of Captain Max Lander, upon promise of sharing a hoard of stolen treasure, Batters has faked his own death and returned to London. Following him there are not only the victims and ­co-conspirators in this theft but also the God of Fortune, with which Batters shares an enigmatic and intimate bond. From the beginning the God of Fortune seems to have the uncanny ability to appear without warning. Pollie is the first to encounter the object, which leaves her ‘brain … all in a whirl’ (p. 25). Indeed, this encounter effects a radical alteration in Pollie’s identity, leading her friend Emily Purvis to claim that ‘this was a new Pollie’ (p. 126). This ‘new Pollie’ acquires ‘an expression on her face, a smile on her lips, a light in her eyes, which made me [Emily] think of her Uncle Benjamin … and wonder if not only his blood, but something of his spirit too, was in her veins’ (p. 97). While Emily suggests that Pollie has become a double of Batters, the situation is in fact more ambiguous. Pollie, and indeed Emily, have not met Batters at this point, but Pollie’s encounter with the God of Fortune is described as having an insidiously transformative effect upon her: ‘That night I dreamt while I was wide awake. I was overcome by a sort of nightmare horror … It was as if the thing which Miss Ashton had thrown on the floor … had communicated its suffering to me’ (p. 25). This object infiltrates Pollie’s consciousness to create 179

Richard Marsh and object relations a shared ‘dream’, taken to be her own, raising the question: who or what is being doubled? The relationship between the God of Fortune and Batters serves as a means of self-expression for Batters, not least through their shared deification. As Batters describes: ‘It’s my very own god’ (p. 232). However, deification is predicated upon the loss of humanity for an objectified and symbolic role. The God of Fortune is imbued with an apparent ‘life’ and ‘will’ of its own (from Pollie’s repeated assertion that ‘I believe it’s alive’ to Batters’ nonchalant intimation that if it does not want to be found, ‘I don’t think you’ll find it’) (pp. 24, 233). Conversely, Batters is in the process of becoming an object, a joss, in a particularly literal way. Lander describes Batters as ‘something’ seemingly ‘immobile’, a ‘mockery of a man’, for Batters is slowly being fashioned into a version of the God of Fortune by his worshippers: ‘They made of me the thing you see; cut me to pieces; boiled, burned, and baked me; skinned me alive. Then they dipped me in a paint-pot and made of me a god’ (pp. 211, 217). The God of Fortune is, similarly, a ‘painted little horror’, and we find consistent echoes between the two (p. 58). Batters’ peculiar affinity with snakes, which ‘seemed to regard him as akin’, is mirrored by the God of Fortune’s appearance on a bangle that ‘wound round the wearer’s arm, like a sort of serpent’ (pp. 239, 57). Such examples emphasise their amalgamation, to the point that Batters’ identity becomes indistinguishable from the God of Fortune. Lander, for instance, attempts to ‘take hold of’ the God of Fortune, only to be ‘so overpowered … by most unusual sensations’ that he surrenders to Batters a £50,000 gold artefact (p. 233). Lander asks himself ‘had Batters been practising a little hocus pocus?’ (p. 233). However, determining whether this ‘strange’ effect was produced by Batters or the God of Fortune is no easy task: they embody a single entity. This undecidability is captured by the oft-repeated description of Batters as ‘uncanny’. As Ernst Jentsch identified, the uncanny is particularly produced when the reader experiences ‘uncertainty as to whether he has a human person or rather an automaton before him’.22 The uncertainty over Batters’ humanity is ultimately confirmed when upon his demise the ‘doll was broken to atoms. The Great Joss [Batters] and the God of Fortune seemed to have come to an end together’ (p. 262). The emphasis upon their ‘togetherness’ is then fully realised in the final remarks of the novel: ‘In [Batters’] coffin were placed the broken pieces of the curiosity which he called the God of Fortune. So they are still together … [B]elow are but the mangled fragments of what was once 180

‘Transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Marsh a human body’ (p. 266). Despite the God of Fortune’s remains being buried with Batters, we are told that there are only the ‘fragments’ of ‘a human body’; in this slippage from togetherness to singularity, the God of Fortune and Batters are shown to be a single body – one that is both human and, as an assemblage of ‘fragments’, object. We can, then, consider Pollie’s encounter with the God of Fortune as operating through both extension and doubling: her transformation is an echo of this composite object-person and the ‘suffering’ implicit within their processual becoming, facilitated by her familial connection.

‘Transformational objects’ and ‘transformational things’

These three texts articulate relationships that align with those between the consumer/collector and the consumed/collected object in which, as Susan M. Pearce identifies, ‘sometimes the collector shapes the collection and sometimes it shapes him’.23 This dialogic condition highlights the inability of the unidirectional language of mesmerism to describe the ‘power’24 of these objects. That collectors appear frequently throughout Marsh’s work emphasises his fascination with the paradigm of mutually informing human–object relationships. However, his Gothic fiction takes these relationships to an extreme, revealing their threatening potential. While the metaphor of the ‘mesmeric object’ aptly denotes a sense of captivation that imperils self-determination, it fails to encapsulate that the nature of this threat lies in the reciprocal restructuring of self through a process of imbrication rather than domination. However, it is just such an understanding of the relationships between human and object as mutually informing interactions that British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas’ theory of the ‘transformational object’ addresses. For Bollas, the original transformational object is the mother– child relation: the ‘mother transforms [the] baby’s internal and external environment’, structuring the infant’s selfhood through her ‘idiom of gesture, gaze and intersubjective utterance’.25 The infant does not experience the mother as a discrete object, rather ‘the mother is less significant and identifiable as an object than as a process … A transformational object [the mother being the first] is experientially identified by the infant with processes that alter self experience.’26 We seek, in our adult lives, other transformational objects that will similarly ‘promise to transform the self’.27 These can take many forms (literature, music, a good conversation), but all are defined in terms of ‘losing oneself’. These ‘longed-for’ experiences involve not ‘possess[ing] 181

Richard Marsh and object relations the object; rather the object is pursued in order to surrender to it as a medium that alters the self, where the subject-as-supplicant now feels himself to be the recipient of enviro-somatic caring, identified with metamorphoses of the self’.28 These encounters re-enact our initial object experience, which is ‘remember[ed] not cognitively but existentially’.29 Replicating the mother–infant relationship, the subject undergoes regression to a state of ‘unintegration’ involving the ‘experiential synthesis’ of subject and object. The integrity of both is temporarily ‘destroyed’ but a new and richer selfhood will be formed through this experience: a selfhood that is ‘inhabited by inner structures’30 derived from the desired object. This is very much a dialogic process recalling the experience of the collector/consumer: objects have a transformational effect in structuring the inner self but are also selected as a means of self-expression to communicate an (often unconscious) ‘idiom of the self’.31 It is for this reason that the transformational object seems to act, in some way, with a life of its own: ‘we experience this uncanny moment as an event that is partially sponsored by the object.’32 Bollas associates such experiences in the ‘object world’ with dreaming, which is ‘rather like slipping through a window’.33 It is appropriate, therefore, that our introduction to the world of The Beetle is similarly through ‘the inviting window, the tempting window, the convenient window!’ (p. 13). It is with this, in Marsh’s novel, that the threat of transformation begins. We will notice that a sense of threat is absent from Bollas’ conception of the transformational object. However, in Marsh’s fiction such mutually informing relationships disconcertingly threaten the loss, merger and resultant restructuring of selfhood. If we consider the individual as being ‘inhabited by inner structures’ in his/her encounters with transformational objects, as being ‘reshaped’ by them, then it is useful to consider the structure of these objects. The Beetle-creature is variously designated as ‘he, she or it’, but most often ‘it’ (at one point we get: ‘what’s that? ‘It’s it’), or ‘something’, until the inconclusive final ‘resolution’ that it is ‘a creature born neither of God nor man’ (pp. 193, 295). ‘It’ seems a particularly appropriate description, capturing the Beetle-creature’s shifting shapelessness, its ambivalent ambiguity. As Jessica Davies notes: ‘the ontological status of the creature remains incoherent.’34 This ‘it-ness’ then becomes a key characteristic of its object-extensions throughout the novel: a structural uncertainty that is fundamental to their disturbing transformational power. This takes us back to windows. 182

‘Transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Marsh Bill Brown, in his seminal 2001 essay ‘Thing theory’, uses A. S. Byatt’s image of the ‘real, very dirty window’ in The Biographer’s Tale to distinguish objects from things: ‘we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture – above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things.’35 Objects can be made ‘meaningful’, and the ‘object-extensions’ in The Beetle evidence this: they reflect the selfhood of the subject while informing it; they can be situated within critical discourses, for instance addressing the shifting status of characters in terms of the New Woman, masculinity, or hysteria.36 However, these beetle-appendages are also things. Things for Brown are not ‘apprehend[ed] … except partially or obliquely (as what’s beyond our apprehension)’.37 This sense of obliquity is a condition of the thing’s ‘audacious ambiguity’: ‘the word things … denotes a massive generality as well as particularities … The word designates the concrete yet ambiguous.’38 Given its ontological instability, the Beetle-creature can be seen to exemplify this condition of thing-hood. Luckhurst’s telling description of it as a ‘liminal man-woman-goddess-beetle-Thing’ captures this sense of the creature as an assortment of particularities, which ultimately collapse into generality.39 Paradoxically, if the Beetlecreature is definable at all, it is only through a word that denotes a lack of definition, that marks ‘the threshold between the nameable and unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and unidentifiable’.40 Indeed, Marsh’s ‘it-ness’ and Brown’s ‘thing-ness’ function synonymously. As for the Beetle-creature, so for its object-extensions. This leads us to a broader question: what happens when the structure of a transformational object is ambiguous, undefinable and ontologically unstable? Holt’s word-thing ‘THE BEETLE’ not only produces ‘a most extraordinary change’ in Lessingham but also makes ‘all the muscles in his face and all the limbs in his body [seem] to be in motion at once’ (p. 43). Lessingham becomes a protean being in flux. His body speaks the breakdown of his identity through the disturbingly total motion of its constituent parts. Even the organisation of these parts becomes confused with the bizarre notion that his ‘limbs’ are ‘in his body’, making boundaries between what is external and internal nonsensical. The ‘disgusting’, self-reflexive ‘squelch’ of the viscous carpet-bound beetle-extensions beneath Marjorie’s shoe is similarly resistant to definition (p. 199). It is far from coincidental that Marsh implicitly associates such moments with a return to childhood. Lessingham exhibits ‘what was very like a burst of childish fury’ (p. 44); the Beetle-creature’s words ‘confine [Holt], tighter and tighter, within, as it were, swaddling clothes’ 183

Richard Marsh and object relations (p. 32); Bessie Moore ‘cried like a child’ when recollecting her encounter with the Goddess (p. 73). While childhood often serves as Marsh’s frame of reference for transformational encounters, these objects are not experienced as ‘enviro-somatic caring, identified with metamorphoses of the self’ (the infant’s ideal experience of the mother) but rather as ambiguity and non-structure; as things.41 The experience, of what I would term the transformational thing, is one of horror. The subject is threatened by a transformational ‘restructuring’ (or, more aptly, de-structuring) into uncertainty. In The Beetle this ­de-structuring occurs simultaneously, insinuatingly, alongside the redefinition of each character’s identity, making any sense of identity precarious. While particular identities can be recognised (New Woman, victim, leader, hysterical madman), they are intrinsically subverted by a general changeability that resists definition: multiple identities are at work at the same time (‘man-woman-goddess-beetle-Thing’), making each only a transient and partial fragment of selfhood. Identity becomes knowable only fleetingly, provisionally: ‘it’s it’, ‘that’, you know what I mean. But do I? It’s always something else as well. And in this lies the existential horror that the Beetle-creature confronts us with.

Transforming the concept: The Goddess and The Joss

Marsh went on to explore these processes from different perspectives in his subsequent Gothic novels. In The Goddess he again designates the eponymous object ambiguously as ‘It! It!’, ‘the dreadful thing’, and ‘That which did it’ (pp. 69, 80, 131). However, whereas the Beetle-creature’s indefinition is maintained even unto its apparent destruction, leaving only ‘stains of some sort’, the demise of the Goddess works to the opposite effect (p. 292). ‘Later’, we are told, ‘the thing was torn to pieces; its anatomy laid bare’ (p. 165). The secrets of the Goddess – its laugh, ‘low, soft, musical … pregnant with horrible suggestion’; its performativity; its ‘curious suggestion of life’; its ‘meaning’ that cannot ‘be clarified by words’ – are resolved (pp. 131, 163, 139). This resolution, however, is anti-climactic: the Goddess was ‘simply a light steel frame … set in motion by clockwork machinery’, its laugh the product of ‘an arrangement somewhat on the lines of a phonograph’, and the whole being ‘probably from the workshop of a native’ (p. 165). Any sense of mystery or ambiguity is punctured by the obdurate reality of its manufacture (see also Hultgren’s chapter). If questions linger at the end of this explanation, they are finally dismissed with the off-hand observation that ‘some 184

‘Transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Marsh queer things still take place in India’ (p. 165). At its end, then, the Goddess is no longer a thing (‘it’) but a collection of identifiable parts – ‘springs’, ‘scarlet leather’, ‘eyelet-holes’, ‘blades’ – defined and made meaningful by its ‘sacrificial’ function (p. 165). The Goddess no longer threatens the de-structuring ambiguity of the ‘transformational thing’. Yet the transformational encounters experienced by Bessie and Edwin are clearly unsettling ones. The anti-climactic shift, from beetle-like uncertainty and irresolution to banal reality, emphasises that the threat to identity comes not so much from the object (denuded of its terrifying indefinability) as from the fact that the identity of the character expressed through the object is in the process of breaking down anyway. Bessie’s encounter results in her life as a performer – the mad double existence that acting is predicated upon – becoming all-consuming, but this is an expansion of a pre-existing stateof-being. Bessie’s escape from the Goddess is then compromised because she will ‘never ac[t] again’ (p. 168). The price and means of ‘freedom’ from the Goddess, of securing identity, are a total negation or repression of that which previously defined her. With Lawrence the banality of the Goddess is mirrored by the brute realism of insanity; as Minna Vuohelainen notes, ‘Lawrence is … predisposed to nervous ailments’, which he ‘exacerbates’ through his ‘life of dissipation’.42 Lawrence’s identity is presented as tending towards instability, a tendency that then finds expression through the Goddess. These experiences give a sense of fin-de-siècle identities (particularly decadent ones) as precariously fragile: the object becomes a site of threatening uncertainty through its use by an already disturbed and disintegrating self. This raises the anxiety that such disturbances could potentially be a general condition, either through a ‘contagious’ insanity (‘We had been following … the progress of disorder in [Lawrence’s] brain, until our own minds had become unbalanced too’) or through the possibility that, as Dr Hume claims, ‘we are, all of us, more or less mad’ (pp. 159, 168). The seemingly self-replicative proliferation of the Goddess, linked to individual disintegration, testifies to the unpredictability and potential generality of madness (see also Hultgren’s chapter). The Joss constitutes the concluding part of a Gothic triptych that began with The Beetle. The God of Fortune, described in Marsh’s now familiar idiom as ‘that thing’, ‘it’ and ‘That?’, functions as a veritable amalgam of Beetle-creature and Goddess (pp. 58, 106, 232). Like the Goddess, it is characterised by an obdurate materiality: upon its destruction it leaves behind the ‘broken pieces’ of a doll (p. 266). Yet like the Beetle-creature, 185

Richard Marsh and object relations it is extended throughout the text. Its seeming capacity to appear at any moment, and in any place, insinuates that its presence permeates the novel’s world. However, unlike the Beetle-creature, the God of Fortune is not extended through other objects but appears as itself each time. The image that this creates is one of extreme mobility. While the God of Fortune is a resolutely physical object, its definability and ontological structure are made uncertain by its apparent freedom from physicality, its inexplicable locomotive power. As Pollie examines a parcel containing the God of Fortune, she finds, to her astonishment, that ‘[s]omething moved inside, and tore the paper open’ (p. 22). Batters replicates this mobility. Lander awakes on-ship one night to find him ‘going through an acrobatic performance’: although he has no legs, Batters can move with astounding alacrity, coming ‘down that rigging like ten mad monkeys’ (p. 239). However, the God of Fortune’s mobility is also transformational at a metatextual level. This object’s itinerancy transforms the text itself, puncturing it with its presence at moments of narrative change, revelation or crisis. For instance, during the reading of Batters’ will Frank Paine opens a ‘little wooden box’ to find that the God of Fortune has impossibly ‘passed into that wooden box, which had, until that moment, remained inviolate within that sealed enclosure’ (p. 159). The ‘painted little horror’ is there when Emily and Pollie take possession of Batters’ London house (p. 58). It is there at Susan’s unsettling introduction, adorning her hair as ‘the very double of that queer little thing’, which to Emily ‘seemed alive’ (p. 106). The God of Fortune’s inexplicable manifestations work to disrupt the narrative coherence of this predominantly realist text. These appearances are predictable only through a certain affectivity (an increase in tension, an anticipation of change). They represent an element of chaotic uncertainty that seems to have always-already transformed the text in the direction of the Gothic through a disorientating sense of elusiveness that leaves it feeling strangely provisional. While the ‘Great Joss’ (Batters) and the ‘Lesser Joss’ (God of Fortune) inform one another, so we have a third ‘joss’, Marsh’s novel itself, that is also shaped by this mutually transformational encounter. The ‘thing-ness’ of the God of Fortune marks a site of de-structuring in the text by calling its generic conventions and internal logic into doubt. The text becomes as slippery and difficult to apprehend as the God of Fortune itself.

186

‘Transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Marsh

Conclusion

Marsh’s three novels belong to a Gothic tradition stretching back to Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto that identifies objects as sites of insecurity and threat. However, Marsh’s work differs from this tradition not only in his depiction of mutual transformation between individuals and objects, in which the form of the object is sponsored by an aspect of the individual as much as his/her selfhood is transformed by the object, but also and more profoundly in the de-structuring capacities of his objects. While mutual transformation is, I would suggest, a recurring presence in late nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, the ‘it-ness’ of Marsh’s objects and consequent de-structuring instigated by these ‘transformational things’ represent a source of disturbance particularly exploited by Marsh. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, for instance, the transformational encounter is between a relatively definable object and subject in a relatively definable relationship. It is, however, no coincidence that such works within the decadent movement often come closest to Marsh’s model, revelling as they do in processes of mutual transformation to reflect the instability of identity. This attention in fin-de-siècle Gothic fiction to the transformational potential of objects influenced later Gothic writers. Many of the arcane objects that populate M. R. James’ tales, for example, are characterised by a similar dynamic of obsessive desire and restructuring of identity. Similarly, Marsh’s distinctive evocation of ‘it-ness’ and the ­de-structuring of selfhood foreshadows many later so-called ‘weird’ texts such as Lovecraft’s ‘The call of Cthulhu’, which present interactions between individuals and ‘unrepresentable’ or ‘unthinkable’ objects. While encounters with unsettling and exotic objects in Marsh are rooted in late nineteenth-century anxieties, the threatening capacities of objects to question the integrity of individual selfhood persist. If the potential for the self to be redefined, or even undefined, finds one of its clearest and most disquieting articulations in Marsh’s Gothic fiction, it remains an abiding cultural fear variously expressed in Gothic works of the twentieth century and beyond: an abiding fear of becoming ‘it’.

Notes

 1 J. Wolfreys, ‘Introduction’, in R. Marsh, The Beetle: A Mystery, ed. J. Wolfreys (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004), pp. 9–34 (p. 13).

187

Richard Marsh and object relations  2 See, for example, R. Luckhurst, ‘Trance-Gothic, 1882–1897’, in R. Robbins and J. Wolfreys (eds), Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 148–67.  3 C. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. M. Cotsell (1865; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 13.  4 R. Williams, Dream Worlds, Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1982), p. 2.  5 B. Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 31; M. B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 178.  6 D. Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 91.  7 Brown, Sense of Things, pp. 31, 33.  8 Brown, Sense of Things, p. 33.  9 S. M. Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections: A Cultural Study (1992; Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), p. 66. 10 Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections, p. 66. 11 R. Marsh, The Beetle: A Mystery, ed. M. Vuohelainen (1897; Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2008), p. 35. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 12 Luckhurst, ‘Trance-Gothic’, p. 164. 13 Wolfreys, ‘Introduction’, p. 34. 14 A. Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 100. 15 Winter, Mesmerized, pp. 2, 345. 16 See also V. Margree, ‘ “Both in men’s clothing”: gender, sovereignty and insecurity in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle’, Critical Survey, 19 (2007), 63–81. 17 See Margree, ‘ “Both in men’s clothing” ’ for a wider-ranging discussion of Marjorie’s New Woman status. 18 M. Aguirre, ‘Geometries of terror: numinous spaces in Gothic, horror and science fiction’, Gothic Studies, 10:2 (2008), 1–17 (p. 5). 19 R. Marsh, The Goddess: A Demon, ed. M. Vuohelainen (1900; Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2010), p. 8. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 20 B. O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On The Phenomenology of Theatre (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1985), p. 35. 21 R. Marsh, The Joss: A Reversion (1901; Chicago: Valancourt, 2007), p. 26. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 22 E. Jentsch, ‘On the psychology of the uncanny’ (1906), Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2:1 (1997), 7–16 (p. 13).

188

‘Transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Marsh 23 Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections, p. 66. 24 See, for example, Brown, Sense of Things, p. 33. 25 C. Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (London: Free Association, 1987), p. 13. 26 Bollas, Shadow of the Object, p. 14. 27 Bollas, Shadow of the Object, p. 14. 28 Bollas, Shadow of the Object, p. 14. 29 Bollas, Shadow of the Object, p. 17. 30 C. Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience (1992; London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 59; my emphasis. 31 Bollas, Being a Character, p. 29. 32 Bollas, Shadow of the Object, p. 31. 33 Bollas, Being a Character, p. 14. 34 J. Davies, ‘Life Expectancies: Late Victorian Literature and the Biopolitics of Empire’ (PhD dissertation, UC Berkeley, 2010), p. 54. 35 Brown, ‘Thing theory’, Critical Enquiry, 28:1 (2001), 1–22 (pp. 2, 4). 36 Brown, ‘Thing theory’, p. 4. 37 Brown, ‘Thing theory’, p. 4, n. 11. 38 Brown, ‘Thing theory’, p. 4. 39 Luckhurst, ‘Trance-Gothic’, p. 160. 40 Brown, ‘Thing theory’, p. 5. 41 Bollas, Shadow of the Object, p. 14; my emphasis. 42 M. Vuohelainen, ‘  “Cribb’d, cabined, and confined”: fear, claustrophobia and modernity in Richard Marsh’s urban Gothic fiction’, Journal of Literature and Science, 3:1 (2010), 23–36 (p. 29).

189

10

••

Decadent aesthetics and Richard Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death Daniel Orrells

Richard Marsh was writing at a particular moment in the history of the commodity and mass consumption.1 The fin de siècle witnessed a specific interest in objects – curios – the subject of much of Marsh’s writing. The fascination with the curio reflected changes in habits and cultures of collecting. In France in post-revolutionary fervour, as Janell Watson outlines, ‘many precious decorative art objects, luxurious household goods, and religious cult objects f[ound] themselves on the market at very low prices’.2 This fuelled ‘the heyday of collecting’, as an affluent British aristocracy took advantage of an unsettled political and economic situation.3 Even as aristocratic collections were being embellished with ‘Titians, Raphaels, Correggios, Rubenses and Guidos [that] joined the odd family portrait or hunting scene’, the power and influence of the landed elite were being undermined by an ascendant middle class of industrialists and merchants who were developing novel interests in contemporary art, the decorative and applied arts, and medieval artefacts.4 The professionalisation of sciences such as geology and anthropology also fostered other sorts of collections. It is hardly surprising, then, that a particular vocabulary to describe objects developed at this time in French that then found its way into English. ‘Bibelot’ entered the English language in the early 1870s, as did ‘bric-abrac’ (also from the French), and words like ‘curio’ in the 1840s and 1850s, when the market of collectors was opening up. By the 1880s, the difference between ‘the museum-worthy heirloom’ and ‘the mass-produced trinket’ was becoming blurred, as a category of goods emerged that ‘unite[d] valuable art objects, industrial reproductions, and worthless junk’.5 190

Decadent aesthetics and Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death Late nineteenth-century writers and intellectuals encouraged their readers to think about their daily existence as a collection of sensations and experiences. Denis Denisoff provides a summary of the decadent aestheticism of the last decade of the nineteenth century: Decadent authors and artists … sought escape from the banality and redundancy of the productivist culture in the creation of new experiences through artifice and experimentation. A large number of the bourgeoisie itself was looking to be surprised, shocked – entertained, basically – and the cultivation of the unnatural promised them fresh, exciting sensations and realms of being. Thus despite their common association with elitism and exclusiveness, decadence and aestheticism developed in part as products reflecting the escapist wishes of the dominant middle class.6

The aggressively capitalist economy of the 1890s fuelled this escapism, despite the decadent critique and suspicion of the useful and the industrial.7 Inspired by the fatalist and romantic idea that nothing will last forever, decadent artists sought to capture something fleeting, making their passions seem unbridled. The culture of collecting at the fin de siècle summed up the decadent style, with fictional collectors such as Joris Karl Huysmans’ Des Esseintes and Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray looking for new impressions and experiences in contravention of conventional tastes and values. Decadence blurred the boundaries between good and bad taste, the beautiful and the obscene, the sophisticated and the kitsch, the serious and the parodic, the real and the artificial, the original and the fake. While Marsh wrote for a market whose standards of taste and value could fluctuate unpredictably, he was also very self-aware about the status of his writing, and his oeuvre repeatedly engages with the aesthetic debates of the 1890s. Denisoff has examined how aestheticism circulated through nineteenth-century culture as writers parodied aesthetic philosophies, which in turn elicited further self-parody from aesthetes in witty defiance of their critics.8 While Marsh’s fiction expresses a critique of the decadent culture of collecting bizarre curios and sensations, instead of simply mocking and parodying it, it also makes strategic and sensitive use of the tropes and structures of aestheticist writing. Fin-de-siècle British literary culture is too often described in terms of a schism between highbrow avant-garde literature and popular entertainment. Attending to Marsh’s middlebrow popular writing reveals a more complex landscape of late Victorian decadent culture.9 This chapter therefore seeks to contribute to the reformation of the canon of 1890s decadent writers by 191

Richard Marsh and object relations arguing that the middlebrow Richard Marsh was very much a product of the aesthetics and decadence espoused by Thomas De Quincey, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, and a significant transmitter of aesthetic discourse into the popular fiction of the period. Marsh had engaged with the debate over the value of art in his earliest writings, including his final novel as Bernard Heldmann, Daintree (1883), his very first as ‘Richard Marsh’, The Devil’s Diamond (1893), the 1897 sensation novel The Crime and the Criminal and the 1898 collection of short stories, Curios. Daintree follows the fortune of the knowingly named Oliver Freeman in pursuit of an artist’s life, contravening the wishes of his father to take on the family farm. Oliver’s destiny remains open at the end of the novel, posing a question about the economic and moral worth of art for the reader. In The Devil’s Diamond, Marsh explores the minatory, disturbing and downright harmful effects that popular arts and entertainment can have on the consuming public (see also Allsop’s chapter in this volume). The eponymous precious stone, which cannot be sold despite its enormous value, kills members of a show in which its magical powers are demonstrated to the public. Curios features several objects which have a dangerously seductive influence over their collectors, while The Crime and the Criminal stars an aesthete-dandy murderer, who is as morally repellent as he is alluringly attractive. The dangerous yet irresistible attraction of art is a central theme in The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death (1892/1897), which focuses on the impact of the curious object on the fin-de-siècle consumer. The story opens with Bennion and his friend, the narrator J. Franklyn Otway, in conversation in their shared apartment, as they consider De Quincey’s idea of murder as a fine art. The following morning Bennion is found dead. The search for the cause of his death revolves around a Renaissance cabinet, whose key ejects a poison. The murderer is eventually revealed to be Ralph Hardwicke, the fiancé of Bennion’s ward Nina Macrae, who has killed Bennion with a curious poisoned pipe to conceal his previous marriage. The novel closes with Hardwicke’s suicide by means of the murder weapon. While Marsh appears to tell a cautionary tale about addiction to curio-collecting, this suspenseful novel is predicated on the readers’ enjoyment of sensationalist fiction. The novel was originally serialised in 1892 in Household Words, a modest unillustrated 2d. weekly that mimicked the appearance of lowbrow publications while being primarily read by the middle classes: an acceptable cheap thrill. The novel was published in book form in 1897 as a shilling shocker by Ward, Lock, the firm that had brought out The 192

Decadent aesthetics and Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891. Marsh’s tale sought a similarly middleclass readership, which would have both detested and delighted in Wilde’s decadent, ‘poisonous’ novel whose protagonist falls under the corrupting influences of decadent fiction and obsessive collecting. The poisoned Renaissance cabinet around which the plot of Philip Bennion’s Death turns is Marsh’s response to these heated contemporary debates. In order to understand how Marsh’s book fits into a longer history of aesthetics, let us turn back to De Quincey, Pater and Wilde.

Nineteenth-century aesthetics from De Quincey to Wilde

That a work of art could kill its owner was an idea that emerged out of a long history of nineteenth-century writings on aesthetics, violence and criminality. The Laocoon, the Graeco-Roman statue representing the Trojan priest and his sons being killed by a serpent, had provoked much discussion in German writing about the relationship between aesthetics and pain, beauty and violence.10 Immanuel Kant had argued that representations of murder, rape, sickness and death might be beautiful when they seek to elicit a disinterested response from the viewer. In The Critique of Judgement, Kant was to define the sublime as that which ‘does violence to our imagination’: ‘Volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind’ might conjure up the sublime, ‘as long as we find ourselves in safety’.11 Thomas De Quincey’s series of essays on whether murder could be considered a fine art engaged with this notion of disinterest and inverted it by concentrating on the reader’s/spectator’s empathy with the victim of murder as represented in literature and art, by turning back to Aristotle’s notion of catharsis: ‘The final purpose of murder, considered as a fine art, is precisely the same as that of tragedy in Aristotle’s account of it; viz. “to cleanse the heart by means of pity and terror.” ’12 De Quincey was, of course, substituting for Aristotelian ‘fear’ his own more Gothic-inflected ‘terror’. Just as the victim is killed by the murderer, so De Quincey’s reader is seen to re-experience the pain of the victim, whose fate has an analogously violent impact on the reader. De Quincey’s ideas about the violent impact of art and the impressionability of the mind were profoundly influential on Walter Pater, a later nineteenth-century theorist of receptivity.13 Whereas John Ruskin had before and William Morris would later emphasise the usefulness and morality of beauty, Pater underlined the amorality of art. In 1873, in the ‘Preface’ to his Studies in the History of the Renaissance, he deliberately 193

Richard Marsh and object relations misquotes another Victorian intellectual, Matthew Arnold, to make his point: ‘To see the object as in itself it really is,’ has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is … What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? … How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?14

Arnold had famously argued that the task of the critic was to understand his object of analysis as it really is, that is, to come to a truthful account about what it is and what it means. What was most important to Pater, however, was to think not about the object’s actual, intrinsic meaning or status, as if it had one, but rather its impact and impression on the aesthete contemplating it. Oscar Wilde would most famously develop Pater’s thesis in The Picture of Dorian Gray, a novel about a rich young man under the dangerous spell of a beautiful yellow ‘poisonous’ tome, a gift from Lord Henry Wotton: ‘For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book.’15 However, Wilde’s Dorian Gray cannot simply be read as a witty celebration of the corrupting influences of art. As Wotton remarks to Dorian, All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder … Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations. (p. 349)

While crime and art might be two sides of the same coin, two ways of ‘procuring extraordinary sensations’, Lord Henry also warns Dorian about glamorising crime, voicing a ‘powerful critique of the tendency to flatten out the differences between crime and culture’.16 Wilde’s novel triggered, then, a debate among its readers about the dangerous influences of art, a debate to which Richard Marsh responded.

‘That ingenious contrivance’?

The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death begins with the discovery of Bennion’s dead body. Bennion’s flat-mate and fellow bachelor J. Franklyn Otway, the story’s narrator, recalls: 194

Decadent aesthetics and Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death We had been discussing, the night before, De Quincey’s essay ‘On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’ Bennion, in that self-opinionated way which was a characteristic of his, and to which I always object, maintained that the essayist had not been true to his subject. He had it that the particular case of murder on which De Quincey had founded his paper, was a work of butchery and not a work of art.17

Marsh positions his own writing within a tradition of aesthetics which resulted in the fin-de-siècle taste for violent tales and reports of crime (see also Freeman’s chapter in this volume). Marsh, however, offers an overt challenge to De Quincey’s aesthetics of violence as Otway recounts Bennion’s theory of ‘the artist in murder’ in contrast to De Quincey’s argument that murderous violence should be considered an art because of the emotions it arouses in subsequent readers: Bennion had expounded that the truly artistic murder would appear to be no murder at all; that if murder were suspected, there should be no evidence to prove those suspicions correct; and that should any evidence that ‘looked like the evidence of guilt’ be placed in the hands of those who suspect murder, it should be impossible to prove who the murderer was. (pp. 1–2)

The structure of the novel adopts this theory and puts it into practice. As opposed to the whodunit popular with late Victorian readers, Marsh’s novel begins with the discovery of Bennion’s dead body and then postpones revealing whether a murder had in fact been committed until the story’s denouement. Marsh experiments with the crime genre, maintaining the attention of the reader through artful suspense rather than violent sensationalism: ‘There were no signs of bloodshed. There was nothing which obviously went to prove that he had met his death by sudden violence’ (p. 4). Otway wonders whether the theorist of murder might have become an example of his theory: it is the very absence of violence that suggests this could be murder. Marsh adverts his readers’ attention to his own writerly artfulness while suggesting that Bennion’s theory might have been put into practice – life alarmingly mimicking art in keeping with aestheticist principles. A tension, then, emerges between Marsh’s artful and enjoyable writing and the concern that art might be a corrupting, dangerous influence. Bennion’s mysterious death appears to have something to do with a suspicious Renaissance-period cabinet, an objet d’art he has recently purchased. Otway, along with Bennion’s nephew Raymond Clinton, discovers that the key to the cabinet expels a poison into the hand of the 195

Richard Marsh and object relations person turning the key in the lock. They also notice that the panels of the doors of the cabinet were ‘inlaid with porcelain plaques and these plaques were exquisitely painted’: In the one on the left was the figure of a woman, clad in all the magnificence of sixteenth-century costume – probably an Italian fine lady of the period. She was a young and a lovely woman, and, with a smile upon her face, she was holding out, in one hand, what seemed to be a golden key, to a young and handsome cavalier, while with the other she was pointing to a cabinet which was at her side. In the plaque upon the right, cavalier and cabinet both had disappeared, and the woman was alone. She was regarding, this time, with a very curious smile upon her face, her golden key. Although the subject of the picture was enigmatic, if not meaningless, the execution was marvellous. The woman’s face, particularly in the second painting, in which she was alone, exercised a singular fascination upon you as you gazed. (p. 26)

Clinton offers an interpretation of the artwork: ‘You see, Otway, she has a key in her hand. George! it is the very spit of the key which you found … and which I was fool enough to try to turn. She offers it to the man – poor beggar! What’s he done to her? She points to the cabinet; upon my soul, it’s the double of this.’ … He pointed to the second picture, in which the woman was alone. ‘Now, you see, she’s done the trick – the man’s rubbed out. But she’s still got the key in her hand; it was with that she did it!’ (p. 36)

Otway thinks ‘of the strange tales which are told of the Italian poisoners of the Renaissance, of the days when art was a power in the lands, the days when murder was indeed considered as one of the fine arts’ (p. 35). He communicates his suspicions to the toxicologist at Bennion’s inquest, Lewis Cowan, ‘a little, active, wiry-looking man, with that sphinx-like expression of features which is seen in a certain type of Jew’ (p. 94). The anti-Semitic and Orientalist description reflects the fin-de-siècle association of poisons and narcotics with the Orient, and Cowan believes the poison to have come from India. Cowan, however, is no mad scientist. Instead it is Cowan who identifies the cabinet with the one he has seen in Rome at the ‘Fiezza Palace’, where it was believed to have ‘belonged to Lucrezia Borgia’, the Italian Renaissance noblewoman and alleged poisoner and murderess. ‘They say’, Cowan concludes, ‘that that is her portrait in the two upper panels’ (pp. 95–6). Lucrezia’s cabinet, whose key seems to have injected a poisonous substance into the body of the collector, brings together two fin-de-siècle 196

Decadent aesthetics and Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death concerns, the value of culture and anxiety about addiction to foreign substances. Arnold’s concerns about the commodification and mass consumption of art and beauty were repeated by Ruskin and Morris who would argue for a bourgeois democratisation of the arts. All three were concerned over artistic production inspired by pecuniary gain. By 1895, in Degeneration, Max Nordau could lament that art had lost all intrinsic value due to ‘the present rage for collecting, the piling up, in dwellings, of aimless bric-à-brac’, an illness he called ‘oniomania’ or ‘buying craze’.18 Bennion is described as a decadent addict to collecting: ‘A new curiosity shop was to old Ben what the smell of a fox is to a hound’ (p. 145). Otway reflects: ‘I have known men who, as ordinary individuals, have been the soul of honesty, as collectors do the most amazing things. I have heard of collectors – men of the highest standing – stealing coveted specimens from other collectors, and that without a twinge of conscience or the suspicion of a blush’ (p. 96). The collector resembles a drug addict willing to thieve in order to maintain his habit – and Bennion appears to have been killed by ingesting a little too much of his favourite tipple. Victorian medical writers and practitioners were highly concerned about the ingestion of harmful intoxicants and narcotics which could lead to dependency problems and their sorry effects.19 Indeed substance dependency features heavily in the novel. Otway wonders whether he might have killed Bennion himself while sleepwalking. Otway’s somnambulism would have reminded readers of the tobacco-addicted, laudanumpoisoned Franklin Blake in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. It is as if J.Franklyn Otway has read Collins’ novel and is prepped to discover, like his near-namesake, that the detective is indeed the culprit. And Clinton, Bennion’s nephew, is heavily addicted to alcohol, as is Louisa Pratt, the secret actress wife of Ralph Hardwicke, Bennion’s ward and friend. The collector found poisoned in a room in his house ‘full of Indian curiosities’ is also the subject of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, which had appeared in 1890.20 The murder victim is not the only collector of perilous pleasures in the story: Sherlock Holmes himself is described as ‘a connoisseur of crime’ (p. 125). Holmes presents himself as someone indifferent to love (‘I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgement’) and objects to the ‘romanticism’ with which Dr Watson had ‘tinge[d]’ their previous adventure, A Study in Scarlet (pp. 126, 3). Despite these attempts to distance himself from readers’ craving for sensational fictional experiences, Holmes is nonetheless a habitual cocaine user who is struck with fin-de-siècle ennui when idle: ‘I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave mental exaltation’ (p. 2). While being s­omeone 197

Richard Marsh and object relations who seeks to find justice for those who have been wronged, Holmes thus comes to resemble the decadent collector of sensations, impressions and experiences, addicted to the intellectual – even aesthetic – ­pleasure of understanding the ingeniously crafted crime. The Sign of Four was famously written after Conan Doyle and Wilde had met at dinner, when Joseph Marshall Stoddart, editor of Lippincott’s Magazine, commissioned both men to write for his publication, and was subsequently also issued in volume form by Ward, Lock. Marsh’s novella, serialised two years after the magazine publication of both The Sign of Four and The Picture of Dorian Gray, develops the aesthetic strategies of these novels. Marsh’s literary oeuvre, in general, closely engages with late Victorian debates about the toxic influences of art. ‘Curious’, previously a favourite word of Pater and Wilde, is a key term in Marsh’s own vocabulary. The word had entered the discourse of British aesthetics in Pater’s Renaissance, in chapters about the ‘curious’ ‘Florentine intellect’, a time of ‘curious thing[s]’, ‘curious secrets’, ‘curious grace’, writers ‘curious in observation, curious in invention’, and the ‘curious beauty’ of Leonardo’s drawings.21 The connection between Pater’s own curious book and its potentially noxious influence was made by George Eliot, who termed The Renaissance ‘quite poisonous’.22 Pater’s book was part of a growing interest in the transgressive aesthetics of the Renaissance in the late Victorian period.23 The word ‘curious’, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes, is ubiquitous in Chapter 11 of Dorian Gray, which surveys Dorian’s art collections. As Sedgwick notes, ‘curious’ can refer to the ‘subjective quality of persons’, someone ‘careful, attentive, anxious, cautious, inquisitive, prying, subtle’; and it can describe the ‘delicate, recherché, elaborate, unduly minute, abstruse, subtle, exquisite’ object being looked at.24 ‘Curious’ records, ‘on the one hand, the hungrily inventive raptness of the curious or subtle perceiving eye or brain; and on the other, the more than answering intricacy of the curious or subtle objects perceived’.25 In Dorian Gray, a ‘curious’ person is one who is unhealthily dependent on mostly foreign ‘curious’ objects.26 In Philip Bennion’s Death, the words ‘curious’ and ‘curiosity’ appear some twenty times. ‘A very curious thing’ happens to Otway after Bennion’s death, when Bennion’s sole heir and nephew Clinton lets Otway choose anything from Bennion’s collection as a keepsake. Not himself interested in such a ‘heterogeneous assortment of articles of curiosity’, Otway nevertheless selects the sumptuous cabinet with its portrait of Lucrezia Borgia with ‘a very curious smile upon her face’; the key to the cabinet contains a poisoned needle, a ‘curious gleaming 198

Decadent aesthetics and Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death little instrument’ (p. 37). Indeed the whole situation ‘looks curious’ to Otway (p. 40). The poison’s ‘method of action’ appears ‘curious’, leading to ‘a sort of paralysis’ (p. 100). When Nina first sees the cabinet, Otway notices ‘a curious change’ in her bearing, as she looks ‘as if she were staring at a ghost’ (pp. 106–7). It transpires that Nina has already seen the cabinet on a visit to the palazzo in Rome. However, the cabinet turns out to be one long red herring when eventually Hardwicke is revealed as the murderer. Hardwicke’s countenance comes over with a ‘curious intensity of passion’ as he relates the whole ‘curious story’ to Otway (pp. 147–8). When it transpires that Bennion was not killed by the poisoned key to the cabinet (Bennion’s possession of which had indeed been set up by Hardwicke as a deadly trap) because Bennion had misplaced it, Hardwicke explains ‘with a curious smile on his face’ that he instead poisoned Bennion’s ‘finely coloured, curiously carved’ pipe, the like of which Hardwicke doubts there is another ‘in all this curious world’ (pp. 155–6). In the novel, ‘curious’ and ‘curiosity’ are associated with the fascinating objects that seduce the gaze, objects that drug and poison the connoisseur. They are also words connected with the persons intoxicated by curious passions and things. Ultimately, however, the plot of Philip Bennion’s Death is itself, as Hardwicke says, ‘a curious story’, an alluring, addictive tale. Hardwicke attempts to see his murderous plot as a work of art: Detection of crime by scientific methods had become the standard topic, for instance, of the newspaper leader writer, and of the sensational novelist. The Italian poisoners, one might say, were not detected because, in their days, science was in its infancy. In these days of exact, unerring, scientific analysis, their deeds would have been made plain as the sun at noon. (p. 142)

While Hardwicke tries to impersonate one of those Italian poisoners with the assistance of modern scientific means and distinguish himself from those murderers who populate modern newspapers and sensational fiction, he is forced to admit at the end of the story that he could not execute his artistic, homicidal plot.27 Seemingly the perfect English ­gentleman, the ‘handsome, tall, and strong’ Hardwicke, ‘an athlete, and a scholar’, is ultimately revealed to be a decadent addict to sensory pleasures (p. 20). Denisoff has shown how the manly athlete and the effete aesthete were contrasted in the Victorian popular and satirical press.28 Marsh’s fiction, however, suggests that the differences between the ideal Englishman and his aberrant other are rather harder to tell.29 Philip 199

Richard Marsh and object relations Bennion’s Death closes in a highly sombre and melancholic tone as Otway and Hardwicke’s broken-hearted fiancée Nina meditate upon what has happened. Otway burns the ‘hideous pipe’ and disposes of the poisoned key, ‘that “ingenious contrivance” ’, painfully reminding the reader how Cowan had described the object (pp. 159, 98). Just as Bennion had described De Quincey’s example of an artistic murder as ‘butchery’ at the opening of the novel, so there is no celebration of De Quincey’s artistic criminal at its conclusion; at least, Hardwicke has failed to live up to being one. Indeed the Renaissance cabinet is comparable to a cheap piece of modern sensationalist, noxious writing. The relationship between the author’s pen and his poisonous art is a metaphor, of course, very famously explored in Wilde’s 1889 essay ‘Pen, pencil and poison’ about the art critic and murderer Thomas Griffiths Wainwright, in which Wilde warns his readers about admiring Wainwright’s prose simply because he was a criminal.30 It is likely that Marsh had Wilde’s article in mind when he wrote about Cowan’s explanation of the cabinet’s poisonous mechanism: On being released, this spring projects upwards a small stiletto – projects it upwards with considerable force. This stiletto is hollow throughout its entire length, and open at the point – like, for instance, a stylographic pen. At the extremity it has a movable cap – again like some varieties of stylographic pen. The spring not only projects the stiletto upwards, but, after it has attained a certain elevation, it presses against the cap. If, there, the stiletto – which, you will remember, is hollow – is filled with liquid matter, the pressure upon the cap drives a few drops of this liquid through the opening at the point. (pp. 97–8)

The instrument by which the poison is ejected into the hand holding the cabinet key is described as a ‘stiletto’, a knife or a dagger with a long slender blade first developed in Italy in the late 1400s. The word itself comes from the Latin ‘stilus’, the Roman writing instrument used to engrave wax or clay tablets in antiquity. Cowan compares the stiletto to the ‘stylographic pen’, that is, the fountain pen, which had become a mass-produced object in the 1880s. The comparison of a unique and ingenious Renaissance artefact with a high-street product nicely reflects not only contemporary anxieties about the value of art and the value of writing but also Marsh’s critique of De Quincey’s aesthetic argument that murder could be a work of art. The Renaissance cabinet reveals its secret to be nothing more than a needle resembling a modern, cheap pen, and Hardwicke, who aspires to be one of those famous poisoners, is in reality nothing like what he might have read in the stories and 200

Decadent aesthetics and Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death legends about those ‘great criminals of the Italian Renaissance from the pens of Mr John Addington Symonds, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss Vernon Lee and other distinguished writers’ (see also Hultgren’s chapter in this volume on Marsh’s juxtaposition of the marvellous and the mechanical).31

Marsh’s penmanship

In contrast to De Quincey and Hardwicke who think that murder can be considered one of the fine arts, Marsh, then, attempts to offer a different aesthetic experience. For Bennion, De Quincey’s example of the artistic murder ‘was a work of butchery, and not a work of art’, just as Hardwicke’s attempt to commit an artistic murder was in the end improvisation (p. 1). Yet if Marsh should seem to have condemned contemporary writing and fiction that had turned murder into art or entertainment, it should not be forgotten that the very structure of Marsh’s story exemplifies Bennion’s own theorisation of the artistic murder, in which there is no violent act (unlike for De Quincey) and that the death cannot be proven to have been due to murder even if suspicions do exist. This is precisely how Philip Bennion’s Death unfolds, as it is not until the end of the story that we learn that Bennion was actually murdered. This is not a typical story of crime fiction where we follow a detective’s search for who committed the murder but a tale about the bumbling attempts of Bennion’s old friend Otway to prove that murder had actually taken place. Just as Marsh’s novel seems critical of contemporary attempts to turn murder into entertaining fiction, so Marsh is at the same time invested in seducing and alluring his reader with a sensational, suspenseful, episodic narrative in which the truth is repeatedly deferred. We can identify certain traits in Marsh’s writing, by which Marsh attempted to distinguish his work from others who merely sought to sensationalise and intoxicate the mass reading public. Indeed we might emphasise Marsh’s attempts to produce his own ingenious aesthetic in competition with the ‘ingenious contrivance’, which merely resembled a modern, mass-produced pen. Marsh wittily turns his readers’ attention to his own penmanship repeatedly through the story in that the word ‘pen’ is visible numerous times in this text that repeatedly foregrounds the act of opening – of the cabinet door, of doors of Bennion’s rooms, of Bennion’s writing table and of Bennion’s secret diary – in a novel about a harmful ‘open market’ in curiosities.32 Marsh focuses insistently on the drama of revelation while deferring the exposure of the truth of the mystery of Bennion’s death. 201

Richard Marsh and object relations The significance of opening the cabinet for the story is also dramatised visually in the image on the front cover of the second edition, which portrays Clinton and Otway trying to open the painted antique and the emission of a luminescent substance from the key. Just as Wilde and others enticed readers with attractive book covers, so Marsh’s cover also knowingly acts as an advertisement to its potential buyer. While the story will go on to critique the notion of the artistic and entertaining murder, the front cover nevertheless encourages its reader to open the book, while also advertising the potential dangers of so doing: this book, like the object imaged on the front cover, could do some (pleasurable) harm to you, dear reader. The front cover, then, also acts as a mise en abyme in that the reader is encouraged to open a possibly harmful object just like the two gentlemen on the book’s cover. Mise en abyme is an important literary device in the story itself, in that Philip Bennion’s Death is organised around the theory that the painting on the cabinet’s front panel is a representation of – a mise en abyme for – what has actually happened. Marsh seduces his reader into thinking that this is the case, that a representation-within-a-representation offers a key to the rest of the representation, that art does have a baleful influence over life, that one can haze the difference between art and reality (as De Quincey had suggested), that what happens in art can also happen in life (as Hardwicke attempts to effect). The novel here clearly acknowledges the theme of life imitating art central to The Picture of Dorian Gray. The mise-en-abyme effect is particularly strong in the chapter depicted on the front cover. Clinton attempts to unlock the cabinet door, is poisoned and rendered unconscious. The poison does not kill him because, as we find out, its potency has diminished. After coming to, Clinton and Otway examine the painting on the cabinet’s door. We have already seen that Clinton then interprets the image, and Otway then resolves to find out more about the mysterious key. The chapter closes with Clinton’s concerns that Ryan, Bennion’s servant, might have ‘a weakness for the keyhole’ and be ‘listening’ to proceedings (pp. 40–1). The Renaissance cabinet stands within Bennion’s own cabinet of curiosities, a room into which another might be spying through the keyhole, just as Otway and Clinton are negotiating the poisonous key in order to get into the cabinet. Marsh’s reader is encouraged to peer into Bennion’s room, just as Otway and Clinton peer at the antique.33 Marsh’s ability to revise De Quincey’s aesthetic, in order to stretch out the story as much as possible to entertain his reader via this red herring, can, however, only go so far. Later in the narrative, Bennion’s diary is 202

Decadent aesthetics and Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death discovered, in which he records information about the purchases he has made for his collection of curiosities. The diary also contains, however, cruel and vindictive statements about his ward Nina. ‘The actual brutality of some of the entries was’, in Otway’s gentle eyes, ‘absolutely painful’, as we ourselves get to read: ‘Jan 11th. – N[ina] M[acrae] has been at her tricks again. She seems bent on keeping up her little game. Damn her! Ralph will go stark mad if he does not take care. The girl is dangerous – there are moments when I should like to strangle her’ (p. 70). The episode is clearly made part of the narrative in order to cast suspicion over ‘that flower of English maidenhood’, Nina, getting the reader to distrust even the most innocent-seeming character in the book, a device any crime novel worth its salt must use to create tension and suspense (p. 70). Moreover, it encourages the reader to invest in the mise-en-abyme effect that it was a woman who killed Bennion just as the painting on the cabinet shows. The dangerous and deadly woman is a leitmotif frequently explored in decadent texts, and the female criminal was a common theme in contemporary writing, as well as in Marsh’s own fiction (see also Höglund’s chapter on Mrs Musgrave – and her Husband).34 In his diary, Bennion calls Nina ‘that jade’ who ‘will work Ralph some mischief yet’ (p. 69). Since Bennion’s diary itemises the various antiques and curios he has purchased, Nina appears as another curious, precious but dangerous object of beauty. Yet Bennion’s diary turns out to be another red h ­ erring – without any subsequent reasonable explanation. The denouement of the story reveals that Hardwicke killed Bennion because Bennion had found out that Hardwicke had secretly married Louisa, making Bennion think that the seemingly ideal Hardwicke was no longer perfect for Nina. There is, however, no mention of Bennion’s diary. It does indeed seem that Bennion wrote cruel things about Nina. As Otway says, ‘If I had not seen it there, in black and white, in Philip Bennion’s own penmanship, I should have judged him incapable of writing such a paragraph as that, referring to my gentle Nina!’ (p. 70). While with the diary episode Marsh self-consciously encourages his readers to think about the untrustworthy nature of writing, his own penmanship ultimately seems to fail him as he omits to tie up this loose end. This chapter’s close reading of Philip Bennion’s Death shows how Marsh’s writing was both ingeniously artful and entertainingly sensationalist. Marsh emerges as a writer fully engaged in the late Victorian debates about the commodification of art, debates preoccupied with the relationship between true, tasteful, artistic values and artificial, addictive, decadent aestheticism. As Kate Macdonald and Christoph Singer 203

Richard Marsh and object relations have recently argued, British popular and avant-garde literatures from the 1880s onwards were often produced in reaction to one another. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a concerted effort on behalf of literary critics and the academic establishment to canonise and cordon off certain works as highbrow and modernist.35 The figure of the addicted collector in Marsh’s novel offers a way to examine the status of (literary) culture at the fin de siècle, as writers competed to define and question the boundaries between the insubstantial and the profound, the parodic and the serious, the entertaining and the questioning, the real and the artificial. By including Marsh in the canon of decadent aesthetic writers of the 1890s, we afford a more intricate picture of a contested literary field, and in doing so, we correct the often reductive analyses of twentieth-century critics who wrote Marsh’s middlebrow fiction out of literary history in an attempt to found a canon suitable for the academy. If we want to have a fuller appreciation of the debates around the aesthetic and economic value of the literary product at the end of the nineteenth century, we cannot ignore Marsh’s writing.

Notes

 1 See J. Watson, Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).  2 Watson, Literature and Material Culture, p. 10.  3 F. Herrmann, The English as Collectors: A Documentary Sourcebook (London: John Murray, 1999), pp. 6–8.  4 A. MacGregor, ‘Collectors, connoisseurs and curators in the Victorian age’, in M. Caygill and J. Cherry (eds), A. W. Franks: Nineteenth-Century Collecting and the British Museum (London: British Museum Press, 1997), pp. 6–33 (pp. 9, 15–16).  5 Watson, Literature and Material Culture, p. 6. For a general history of Victorian collecting, see also M. W. Hancock, ‘Boffin’s Books and Darwin’s Finches: Victorian Cultures of Collecting’ (PhD Dissertation, University of Kansas, 1995).  6 D. Denisoff, ‘Decadence and aestheticism’, in G. Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 31–54 (pp. 36–7).  7 See J. Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).  8 See D. Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On 1890s decadence, see also

204

Decadent aesthetics and Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death

 9 10 11 12

13 14

15

16 17 18 19

20

L.  Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); L. Constable, D. Denisoff and M.  Potolsky (eds), Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). See K. Macdonald and C. Singer (eds), Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). S. Richter, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Less, Herder, Moritz and Goethe (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1992). I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, ed. P. Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 129, 144. T. De Quincey, ‘On murder considered as one of the fine arts’, in On Murder, ed. R. Morrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 8–34 (p. 32). See also Aristotle, Poetics, in P. Murray (ed.), Classical Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 57–97 (6:2–4); on De Quincey’s Gothicism, see E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Language as live burial: Thomas De Quincey’, in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Arno Press, 1980), pp. 37–96. See L. Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 291–2, where De Quincey is described as a ‘favourite author’ of Pater’s. W. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 3. Arnold used this formulation in ‘On translating Homer’ (1862) and then again in ‘The function of criticism at the present time’ (1864). O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. J. Bristow and I. Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 103, 276. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. S. Joyce, ‘Sexual politics and the aesthetics of crime: Oscar Wilde in the nineties’, English Literary History, 69:2 (2002), 501–23 (p. 507). R. Marsh, The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2007), p. 1. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), p. 27. On Victorian and nineteenth-century addiction, see E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 171–8, 245–6; W. Hughes, ‘Victorian medicine and the Gothic’, in A. Smith and W. Hughes (eds), The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 186–201. A. Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (London: Penguin, 2014), p. 47. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text.

205

Richard Marsh and object relations 21 Pater, Renaissance, pp. 40, 61, 62, 63, 59, 65. 22 G. Eliot, ‘Eliot on Pater’, in Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. M. Seiler (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 92. 23 See H. Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); J. B. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); J. E. Law and L. ØstermarkJohansen, Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Y. Ivory, The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style, 1850–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 24 Sedgwick, Epistemology, p. 175. 25 Sedgwick, Epistemology, p. 175. 26 Sedgwick, Epistemology, p. 175. 27 The poisoned pipe or cigar is another stock feature in Marsh. See, for example, ‘The pipe’, Cornhill Magazine, 16 (March 1891), 264–81; ‘The adventure of the pipe’, in Curios (1898; Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2007), pp. 7–25; ‘The Clarke case’, in The Adventures of Judith Lee (London: Methuen, 1916), pp. 216–47; ‘A member of the Anti-Tobacco League’, in Under One Flag (London: John Long, 1906), pp. 179–95; ‘The Finchley puzzle’, in The Adventures of Judith Lee (London: Methuen, 1916), pp. 108– 43; ‘An illustration of modern science’, Pall Mall Magazine, 10 (November 1896), pp. 378–87. 28 See Denisoff, Aestheticism. 29 On the complexities of fin-de-siècle literary masculinities, see J. E. Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); K. Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 142–52; D. Orrells, ‘Greek love, Orientalism and race: intersections in classical reception’, Cambridge Classical Journal, 58 (2012), 194–230. 30 See L. Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 86–101; Joyce, ‘Sexual politics’. 31 O. Wilde, ‘Pen, pencil and poison: a study in green’, in The Decay of Lying and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 299. 32 See, for instance: ‘These cupboards opened in the centre, so that each had two doors’ (p. 26); ‘I [Otway] did not see the cabinet opened, and, as it chanced, I never had seen it opened since’ … ‘ “[Clinton:] Ryan [Bennion’s servant] says that it has never been opened since the day it came home” … [Otway:] ‘So that the cabinet has never been opened?” ’ (pp. 27–8); ‘Supposing he [Clinton] had tried to open that mysterious cabinet? … If Philip Bennion had endeavoured to open the cabinet’ (p. 38); ‘ “Mr Gent used to throw the doors open with his hands that I might look at the interior” ’ (p. 61). On the ‘open market’, see Philip Bennion’s Death, p. 61. 33 On Marsh’s interest in the representation of space, place and boundaries

206

Decadent aesthetics and Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death in his fiction, see M. Vuohelainen, Richard Marsh (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015). Front covers were an important aspect of the literary industry in the 1890s. Pater, Wilde and Stèphane Mallarmé were closely involved with their publishers in the aesthetics of their books’ designs: see Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater, pp. 317–23; S. Calloway and L. Federle Orr, The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1990 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2011); F. D. King, ‘The Book Beautiful: Aestheticism, Materiality and Queer Books’ (PhD thesis, University of Western Ontario, 2014). On the front cover design of Dorian Gray by Charles Ricketts, see S. Calloway, Charles Ricketts (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979); J. Darracott, The World of Charles Ricketts (New York and Toronto: Methuen, 1980). Ricketts himself also wrote about his designs for Wilde: J. P. Raymond and C. Ricketts, Recollections of Oscar Wilde (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1932). 34 See also Hurley, Gothic Body, pp. 124–41 on femininity in Marsh’s The Beetle. 35 See Macdonald and Singer (eds), Transitions in Middlebrow Writing.

207

11

••

‘Something on which you may exercise your ingenuity’: diamonds and curious collectables in the finde-siècle fiction of Richard Marsh Jessica Allsop

An enormous variety of objects appear throughout Richard Marsh’s extensive oeuvre: furniture, gems, jewellery, goddess statues, figurines, icons, severed hands, phonograph cylinders, photographs, playing cards, pipes. These things are differentiated from the mass of everyday objects by the central part they play as active agents in both his novels and his short fiction. Enlivened by confrontational characteristics, they ask questions of those who encounter them, revealing and interrogating the frames of reference by which objects are identified, understood and addressed at the fin de siècle. Writers of the period, including Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen and Henry James, have been acknowledged for their engagements with a complex and resonant material cultural landscape, through which they have articulated contemporary concerns and entered into ongoing debates.1 Despite the interest in fin-de-siècle objects following the material turn in literary and cultural criticism, however, Marsh’s significant and complex depictions of material things have been largely overlooked.2 Throughout his popular fiction Marsh repeatedly deploys unusually unstable, metamorphosing material items in narratives that explore fin-de-siècle anxieties, particularly the decline of Empire and the negative effects of global trade. This chapter will discuss Marsh’s interest in curious objects in his fin-desiècle diamond fictions, in which these fashionable symbols of wealth and imperial speculation take on a degree of problematic and even 208

Diamonds and curious collectables in the fin-de-siècle fiction of Marsh malevolent agency when investors and purchasers look to realise their value (see also Orrells’ chapter in this volume). Writing on the cultural history of curiosity, Barbara M. Benedict explains that ‘curious things or people have a great but hazardous value’, confusing the ‘distinctions between the abstract and material’, being both valuable and valueless, and possessing ‘the potential to usurp common culture with idiosyncratic concerns’.3 Bill Brown has analysed the perceived agency that these qualities might grant material things, and the implications for the subject–object relations of which they are a part (see also Pedlingham’s chapter).4 While Brown’s thing theory may be placed at the extreme end of the spectrum of material cultural work on the perceived agency of objects, it can shed light on the confrontational actions of Marsh’s ‘curious’ metamorphic diamonds, which trouble the boundaries between abstract and material and, in a way that is particular to Marsh, imperil both their material stability and their common cultural encoding as valuable products of masculine global dominance. While fears of the decline of Empire and the vulnerability of its centre to the periphery are commonplaces of fin-de-siècle scholarship, Marsh’s fiction demonstrates a particular interest in generating these anxieties through material culture. The titular item of Marsh’s novel The Devil’s Diamond (1893) and the stones of his short stories ‘The adventure of the puzzle’ (1892/1898) and ‘The diamonds’ (1900) all challenge the status of diamonds as the products of imperial speculation, demonstrating the ability of curious things to draw attention to uneasy subject–object relations, the terms of which are dictated by the objects.

Diamonds, Empire and mythology

Experts and collectors discoursing on diamonds in the 1860s and 1870s wrote from a position of confidence in the commercial and symbolic value of these precious stones.5 Without engraving, cut and uncut, diamonds were valued above other stones for their hardness, clarity and homogeneity.6 In the fin-de-siècle consciousness, however, diamonds were subject to variations in physical characteristics and provenance, which altered their perception and value and questioned their presumed stability. Over the course of the nineteenth century, diamonds were sourced from around the globe. Their growing presence on the market resulted in their increased visibility in Victorian fiction.7 As Marsh’s diamond fictions testify, this cultural interest was expressed in relation to colonial 209

Richard Marsh and object relations commerce. India, Brazil and South Africa provided the backdrop to the mining, dealing and consumption of diamonds, activities bound up with imperialist ideologies and trade. As Peter J. Cain describes, ‘the area of the world under European imperial control increased dramatically’ in the late nineteenth century, ushering in a phase of ‘competition for empire’, the effect of which on Britain as ‘the leading imperial power’ was significant as considerable sections of Africa and South Asia were added to the British Empire; this expansion yielded new materials and new markets and helped defend older ones.8 Alongside this expansion, however, a series of events combined to question the security and stability of Britain’s Empire, including ‘[t]he Berlin Conference of 1885, the failure of British Troops at the Siege of Khartoum, the so-called scramble for Africa, the undermining of Britain’s steel manufacturing superiority by German and American competition, and the decline of the Royal Navy relative to the navies of France, Germany, Russia, and Italy’.9 The 1870s and 1880s were decades troubled by ‘economic depression’ and a ‘growing sense of u ­ ncertainty’ regarding the nation’s ‘social, political, and economic future’.10 In response to this crisis, the British government projected a vision of ‘the British empire as a self-interested, global network of territories … allied by common cultural, political, and defensive bonds’, whose products became indicators of the health and prosperity of Britain’s overseas exploits.11 As such, diamonds were not just valuable commodities but symbols of Empire and masculinity. In national and individual narratives, they both registered optimism and revealed anxieties over Britain’s global position. By the fin de siècle, diamonds were the product of an increasingly professionalised trade, which inculcated them into a successful commercial mythology in which artisanal and arcane associations were exchanged for a masculine narrative of rational production. The processes of sourcing, selling, transporting, cutting, polishing and setting stones became progressively more organised, even mechanised, over the course of the century, with the construction of large-scale mills, in what Robert Vicat Turrell describes as ‘a long-drawn-out industrial revolution’.12 As Turrell notes, ‘[b]y the 1890s the diamond trade was largely in the hands of five major London importers, known as the Diamond Syndicate’.13 A ‘hierarchy’ of merchants, ‘accredited agents’, ‘clerks in large firms’ and ‘commercial travellers or shopmen’ operated as a masculine network sourcing and supplying diamonds for the market.14 By the fin de siècle, then, a mythology surrounding diamonds of occult and celestial power was matched by a new set of significations related to 210

Diamonds and curious collectables in the fin-de-siècle fiction of Marsh Empire and gendered identity. Diamonds, which had ‘at various times stood for wealth, power, love, and magical powers’, came to stand for Empire and industry.15 This new mythology did not, however, entirely efface the stones’ imperial origins. In the Victorian popular imagination, Michael O’Donoghue states, diamonds retained their associations with India, ‘particularly south India, which, until diamonds were discovered in Brazil and Borneo around 1725, was Europe’s sole source’.16 As Marsh’s fiction testifies, the range of diamonds’ exotic associations expanded with the Empire. While the desire for diamond ornaments themselves was presented as feminine, the stones’ origins in the ‘colonial treasure trove’ aligned them with a masculine desire for ‘wealth, power, and status for which the jewls [sic] may be traded’.17 The mystic powers traditionally understood to emanate from these stones thus coexisted in a popular consciousness with manifestations of masculine investment in a feminised Empire.18 As Marsh’s diamond narratives indicate, however, a literary imaginary reacted to imperial ideologies with nightmares of frustrated desire and thwarted commodification. Theft, fraud, elaborate double dealing, open competition and covert subterfuge, risky speculation and inheritance scandals haunt diamond fictions, where the stones appear as ‘boundary-troublers’ and ‘limit cases’ that simultaneously resist classification and ‘concretize’ monetary value.19 The resistance of Marsh’s boundary-troubling diamonds emerges from within the stones themselves, as a result of their exotic origins. While Marsh’s gem fictions exclude adventurous acts of acquisition in the far reaches of the Empire, the objects themselves bring exotic and archaic challenges to a modern market, turning the bounty of the Empire against its commercial heart and voicing anxieties about masculine mastery.

‘The adventure of the puzzle’: fakes and flaws

While it is not unusual to encounter diamonds in Victorian fiction, Marsh’s use of these precious stones is often surprising. ‘The adventure of the puzzle’ does not at first appear to be a diamond narrative at all, yet it develops into a critique of these stones as a reliable overseas commodity, expressing anxieties over masculine mastery of these imperial objects. Pugh and Tress, two discordant collectors who recur in a number of Marsh’s short stories, acquire a curiously animate puzzle box made of interlocking pieces of ‘strange’ wood and constructed without a discernible lid or seal.20 The box is just the sort of well-made but peculiar object that will tempt Marsh’s particular variety of collector to ‘exercise [his] 211

Richard Marsh and object relations ingenuity’: it ticks, knocks, jumps around and expands (p. 94). When it resolves itself into its component pieces without the intervention or expertise of the collectors, however, a true challenge to their knowledge is revealed in the form of a Brazil diamond. The second half of the story follows the collectors’ attempts to determine whether the crystal is authentic. Pugh and Tress are inspired by the stone’s commercial potential and troubled by their unexpected acquisition. Tress, who professes himself ‘a pretty good judge of precious stones’, testifies to the apparent authenticity of the rough diamond, ‘as big as a walnut’, which promises to make the fortunes of its possessor (pp. 103–4). Beyond the obvious implausibility of finding such an object in this way, however, Tress cannot d ­ etermine whether it is an ‘uncut diamond’ or the most successful imitation in glass that he has ever seen (pp. 103–4). As Marsh’s collector is well aware, diamonds, as ‘first rank’ items historically granted ‘an excessive value’, have long been the subject of ingenious experiments in falsification and creation.21 ‘It is natural’, F. M. Endlich wrote in his 1878 analysis ‘Diamonds’, ‘that a stone so valuable as the diamond should frequently be imitated.’22 Pastes, as the Rev. C. W. King’s analysis describes, were understood by nineteenth-century consumers to be ‘imitations of precious stones … in coloured glass’; they might be layered, backed, coloured as required, even employing thin layers of the genuine stone to perfect the illusion.23 Pugh and Tress’ uncertainty over the diamond’s authenticity betrays a contemporary anxiety concerning expert ability. While technology was improving the lives of modern British citizens, it was also facilitating ingenious fraud. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, pastes were being manufactured which, as Endlich observes, could only be detected with effort by ‘a very experienced eye’, produced, as they were, with ‘[a]dmixtures of lead, and recently, thallium’ that granted ‘a high angle of refraction’ to mimic the diamond.24 Marsh would return to this anxiety in ‘Exchange is robbery’ (1894), in which authentic jewels are fraudulently replaced with pastes.25 ‘The adventure of the puzzle’, however, evidences a concern with the very integrity of diamonds. Writing in 1871, Augusto Castellani posited that while ‘[m]aking the diamond, either by imitating Nature’s plan or by using means partly or wholly different in order to obtain the same end, is not yet an accomplished fact’, he believed that ‘in these days, it may be said nothing is impossible’.26 It was entirely plausible that ‘perhaps, soon, the chemist in his laboratory may produce this gem which now is sought for with 212

Diamonds and curious collectables in the fin-de-siècle fiction of Marsh so much anxiety on mountain precipices, in rivers, in the centre of Asia, of Africa and America’.27 The fin-de-siècle popular consciousness was haunted by the idea of such ingenious fakes infiltrating the marketplace. H. G. Wells would embrace the possibilities of scientific methods in ‘The diamond maker’ (1895), which follows its protagonist’s pursuit of the secret to creating diamonds and subsequent failure to sell stones assumed to be stolen or false. The 1908 ‘Lemoine Affair’, which saw ‘a con artist’ who ‘claimed to have invented a method of manufacturing diamonds’ defraud ‘the De Beers diamond company out of nearly 1.6 million francs’, would reinforce the commercial threat of such a breakthrough.28 When Tress’ expert gaze tells him that what he has discovered in the ruins of the puzzle box is a ‘Brazil diamond’ of remarkable size, circulating narratives of fraud, falsity and invention continue to trouble his expert eye and his sense of surety (p. 108). A firm divide was established between the diamond as the object of Empire and the diamond as the product of Western experimentation. Diamonds in narratives such as H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Justin McCarthy’s Red Diamonds (1893) and even Wilkie Collins’ earlier text The Moonstone (1868) carry overtly exotic and masculine associations of exploration and Empire. By contrast, false diamonds were instead associated with a different sort of exploration, premised on scientific advancement and the unknown composition of this rare substance. Marsh’s stone hangs between the two states: it may be a Brazil diamond, or it may be an imitation. This ambiguity has an obvious impact on the commercial value of the stone. Marsh’s collectors are unable to provide ‘references’ ‘in any way as to the bonafides’ of the potential diamond as necessitated by the trade; nor can they use their expert knowledge to determine the state of the stone (p. 112). The threat that synthetic stones might be present in the market compromises the collectors, while the threat of forgery undermines the value of the stone. Marsh’s diamond destabilises even the fundamental assumptions about this material as Pugh and Tress consult a jeweller, who confirms that there is ‘no doubt whatever’ that this ‘fine stone’ – ‘the finest stone’ either of the collectors has ever seen – is indeed real (pp. 113, 112, 109). However, the ‘intrinsic exploitable qualities’ of ‘hardness and homogeneity’ that would make it commodifiable are fundamentally lacking in Marsh’s curious diamond, since it is found to be ‘as brittle as glass’ (p. 113).29 Atomising before it can be cut or set, it resists the jeweller’s wheel and refuses to be faceted or polished in order to realise its potential value. With the climactic shattering of the diamond, Marsh’s narrative 213

Richard Marsh and object relations may be placed within a tradition of modern jewel fictions that Enda Duffy describes as being characterised by the absence or loss of stones, such illusive objects being considered more interesting than those whose position and condition is stable.30 While for Duffy this ‘aesthetics of disappearance’ is a result of the ‘phantom’ nature of value and commodification, the curiously unstable nature of the diamond in Marsh’s narrative is related to an anxiety as to the origins of diamonds.31 The catastrophic shattering of the stone is not predicted by the jeweller, who explains it as a result of an event in its history during which it ‘had been subjected to intense and continuing heat’ (p. 113). While it holds great potential, Marsh’s Brazil diamond brings with it an unknown history that cannot be predicted or cleansed by market processes. This curious diamond questions the security of diamonds as an investment in the context of a slumping economy and articulates a broader concern over investment in imperial endeavours and speculation in foreign options on the stock market (see also Margree’s chapter in this volume). In a climate of boom and bust, reckless and unsafe investments were rife, advice on positive investments rare, and those discouraging ‘wild speculation’ praised.32 Unstable regions, the threat of war, boundary disputes and political unrest made international investments an unknown quantity.33 In Marsh’s Brazilian diamond narrative, speculating in the essentially unknown leads to loss. As the material of a professionalised and specialised trade, as a commodity, and as an imperial product, the diamond focuses a range of anxieties related by its origins and acquisition to masculinity, as explored again in ‘The diamonds’.

‘The diamonds’: distinctive characteristics and diseases

‘The diamonds’ is from the outset an overt jewel narrative, which explores directly the ways in which diamonds might thwart dealers, jewellers and consumers. The story follows a series of attempts to purchase and then pass on a stone perceived successively as enormously valuable, devastatingly flawed and strikingly individual. This stone, one of a pair purchased as an investment and then split up, is cut and set as a personal ornament for the Duchess of Datchet, a recurring character in Marsh’s fiction. Both stones then change colour and shiver into fragments as a result of a disease with which they are infected. While ‘The adventure of the puzzle’ addresses anxieties related to falsification and experimentation, ‘The diamonds’ questions the credibility of investing in precious stones through the dual threads of unpredictable materiality and exotic disease. 214

Diamonds and curious collectables in the fin-de-siècle fiction of Marsh As Charlotte Gere and Judy Rudoe note, in a ‘culture where the longlasting and durable were highly prized qualities’, diamonds appealed to both a practical and an aesthetic sensibility and provided a means of investing in a global industry.34 In a gesture of colonial authority, the jeweller Mr Fungst has ‘captured’ a pair of ‘the finest’ white diamonds that ‘Africa had ever produced’ and transferred them from their native environment to the heart of the Empire, in the sure and certain knowledge they will make his fortune.35 The alien and exotic stones, however, resist the attempts to realise their potential value. At the commencement of the narrative the jeweller Harold Brooke exclaims that the stone before him has ‘gone wrong’ as a ‘speck’ or a ‘spot’ of light appears at its heart, suggesting a diseased diamond and a failed investment (pp. 143, 151). Marsh’s narrative turns on this idea that diamonds may suddenly and unexpectedly go ‘wrong’, offering a pointed commentary on imperial exploitation (p. 143). In 1897 a feature in the London Journal summarised the fickle nature of diamonds as laid out in a recent publication, The Diseases of Precious Stones. Diamonds, imbued with reactivity and subjectivity, were understood to be ‘capable of feeling well or ill’, to be ‘dissatisfied with their wearers’ or ‘stimulated to do their best’, and to ‘lose much of their brightness’ as a result of ‘temporary illness’.36 While it might be, as it is for Marsh’s jewellers, ‘a decided novelty’ to encounter agency in a stone, these ‘valuable articles’ supposedly remained subject to ‘vicissitudes which may lessen or entirely destroy their value’.37 This fanciful wilfulness of diamonds and their vulnerability to discontent and disease could, at its most extreme, result in the complete destruction of the jewel, the very outcome of Marsh’s narrative. Recorded in the proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (1869) was an incident in which ‘a black agate sleeve button’ with a rose diamond mounted upon it ‘exploded audibly, and with sufficient force to drive’ fragments into the hand and forehead of the wearer.38 It was speculated that this strange behaviour was the effect of direct sunlight on a ‘volatile liquid contained in the cavity’ of the stone, the ‘sudden expansion’ of which proved catastrophic to its integrity.39 While exceptionally hard, diamonds appeared susceptible to ‘violence’ and apparently undiagnosable ills that might allow them to resist their commodification.40 They could, thus, appear as unknown quantities whose whims and peculiarities dictated their value and their relation to dealers and consumers. More than the Brazil diamond of ‘The adventure of the puzzle’, which arrives in England by unknown and circuitous routes, the stones of ‘The diamonds’ retain their very clear links to Empire having taken a direct 215

Richard Marsh and object relations path from Africa in the hands of Fungst. Far from the familiarised and domesticated objects of desire found in feminine diamond narratives, Marsh’s diamonds remain strange, apparently haunted by their origins, which infect them and imperil their physical characteristics and their value. The strange exotic quality of the gems is confirmed when the spark of light in them becomes a spot of colour. From a worthless tainted specimen, the stone metamorphoses into ‘such a rose brilliant as the world has never seen!’ (p. 152). Such ‘chameleon diamonds’ ‘change colour depending on their environment and/or temperature’.41 Coloured diamonds were familiar features of the diamond trade by the end of the nineteenth century. Each country offered variations in size, quality and colouration. In Venezuela, for instance, ‘[f]ancy colours’ are encountered ‘such as yellowgreen, brown, reddish brown, pink, light blue and black’, while Guyana yields stones that are ‘white with a slight yellow tinge’.42 The reception of these variations in stones fluctuated as much as their colouration, as revealed in an 1892 article in Bow Bells. ‘A lemon diamond’, it is observed, is more valuable than a blue diamond at the time of writing, despite the fact that ‘[t]hirty years ago a blue or lemon diamond was rejected as “off colour” by diamond merchants and disposed of as inferior stock’.43 In 1860 C. W. King dismissed the ‘yellow stones’ that Brazil supplied as ‘the most unpleasing of all the tints the Diamond assumes’, favouring instead ‘the pink and blue varieties’ as objects of ‘superior … beauty to the colourless’. 44 In 1871 Augusto Castellani observed that the ‘purest diamonds … are quite devoid of colour; in other words, when facetted, they reflect all, the prismatic colours’.45 While a coloured diamond may bring a taste of the exotic, a colour-changing stone speaks of alien influences, disease and even monstrous metamorphosis (see also Pedlingham’s chapter).46 Rather than familiar coloured specimens, Marsh describes the more extraordinary and unpredictable chameleon diamond. By the 1870s, variations in ‘colouring principles’ were understood in scientific terms as being due to ‘foreign matter’ such as ‘oxides and matallio vapours’ in the stones.47 In Marsh’s narrative, this ‘foreign matter’ is directly related to the stones’ African origins and described in biological terms. The colour-changing capacity of Marsh’s two African stones is introduced by Mr Fungst, as he recalls the shock appearance of a ‘little spot of white light’ that ‘turned into a little spot of colour’, much as though ‘a little spot of blood had got into the very centre of the stone’ (p. 151). Blood on the jewels as a lingering reminder of violence done in the name of avarice and Empire is central to the introduction of the titular Danvers jewels of Mary Cholmondeley’s 1887 novel.48 The nature of 216

Diamonds and curious collectables in the fin-de-siècle fiction of Marsh this anomaly in Marsh’s stone, however, is described rather in terms of pathology as the infiltrated body of the stone is slowly overtaken with the spreading infection. The mystery is presented in terms allied to scientific racism and medical geography, which remained concerned with the aetiology  and expression of disorders particular to different regions of the Empire and different races. While the professional men encountering the ‘speck’ or ‘spot’ within the stone assume that they know ‘what it meant’, the surprising colouration indicates that ‘[a]s a matter of fact’ they ‘knew nothing at all about it’ (pp. 151, 144, 152). Rather than a response to exterior changes, the transformation of Marsh’s diamonds comes to be recognised as a symptom of ‘a sort of disease to which African diamonds are peculiarly liable, especially the finest stones’ (p. 149). Mr Golden, another jeweller, claims to have encountered diseases of diamonds before. The sudden ‘speck of light’ is, he believes, ‘a crack in the grain of the stone’ that will ‘increase in size, ramifying in all directions, until, at a certain point, the stone will shiver – blow up, in fact’ (p. 149). This threat is devastating to the dealers and jewellers who face professional embarrassment and significant financial loss as the evaluation of the diamonds oscillates between the finest of rose-tinted stones and the most disappointing of false investments. At the peak of their desirability, the diamonds cruelly betray the ephemerality of commodities and concepts of value. The particular African disease runs through a series of symptoms that can neither be detected nor halted in their progress. Their slow evolution allows the stones to be passed from hand to hand before they eventually go ‘off bang’ (p. 162). The stone itself is able to engender ‘a sort of fascination’ for its beauty, for its curious qualities and finally for its apparent activity, as something appears to be ‘moving within’ so that the Duchess of Datchet exclaims the stone is ‘alive!’ (p. 163). Fundamentally, Marsh’s stones express concerns with subject–object relations engendered by unknowable things. ‘There is no man living’, Fungst proclaims, ‘who understands all the inns [sic] and outs of diamonds – no chemist, no scientist, I care not who it is’ (p. 152). ‘There are’, he states simply and emphatically, ‘mysteries about diamonds which never yet have been explained’ (p. 152). The final destruction of the pair of diamonds blends various aspects of a modern diamond mythology to mount a complex critique of the commoditisation of diamonds and a reflection of concern over imperial guilt (see also chapters by Bulfin and Hultgren in this volume). The disease, whose effects are registered in bodily imagery, suggests something of the pathological nature of Africa and indicates the dangers and even the 217

Richard Marsh and object relations futility of speculating on imperial objects. The objects resist those who would profit from imperial plunder, repeatedly building up and crushing their expectations and threatening them with significant financial losses. Marsh draws on a range of debates surrounding this relatively scarce and highly prized material and accentuates the curious characteristics that continued to trouble commercial and scientific minds. The inexplicably curious qualities of diamonds are explored further in The Devil’s Diamond.

The Devil’s Diamond: diamonds as historical and cultural objects

While ‘The adventure of the puzzle’ and ‘The diamonds’ hint that diamonds might exercise active agency, the titular stone of The Devil’s Diamond is animated with a devilish consciousness dedicated to preventing its entering the market. The novel begins with the brotherly bequest of a valuable diamond to the miserly and cruel Samuel Hookham. Accompanying the Indian stone, however, is a curse that means that it cannot be sold but only gifted to another. Over the course of the narrative the stone physically alters in a variety of ways, threatening and damaging those who encounter it in a commercial setting. Its antics briefly bring it to the stage as a supernatural object in a ‘Marvels and Mysteries’ show, until it causes the apparent death of a spectator.49 The Devil’s Diamond possesses the very best attributes of these desirable stones. This ‘lump of light’, which fascinates and bewitches those who behold it, is described by Mr Schwabe, ‘a gentleman … who was in the diamond trade’, as ‘the finest stone I ever saw!’ (pp. 60–1, 10). It conveys to its possessor a clear message: ‘sell me … [t]urn me into gold … [t]here is a fortune in my smile! I am worth the ransom of a king!’ (p. 32). Hookham describes a stone that has apparently ‘grown in splendour’ until it ‘positively blazed with light’ and ‘dazzled his eyes’, exerting a very ‘curious effect on him’ (pp. 31–2). Almost beyond valuation, it is of a size associated with the conspicuous consumption of ‘former days’, in which ‘[t]here would not have been a crowned head in Europe who would not have endeavoured to grind out of his subjects wherewithal to purchase it’ (p. 14). Like the stone of ‘The adventure of the puzzle’, the Devil’s Diamond offers to make the fortune of its possessor, and its authenticity, too, must be established in ‘an age of scientific progress’ in which ‘scientific “fakes” ’ are produced fit to ‘deceive Old Nick’ (p. 58). However, the authenticity of the diamond again poses a significant problem. Attached to it is a history told by the natives of Simla ‘concerning a diamond … 218

Diamonds and curious collectables in the fin-de-siècle fiction of Marsh to which were attributed supernatural powers’ (p. 208). The diamond’s owners are said to have welcomed this stone ‘with effusion’ and then ‘passed it from them in despair’, tormented by the ‘attendant devil’ that might bring ‘ruin, even death, upon its owner’ (p. 208). Such a mythologising of diamonds was not without precedent. Deeply associated with India, the Koh-i-noor was famously believed to have ‘brought misfortune to whoever possessed it’.50 C. W. King described the ‘all but total loss of India to the British crown’ within ten years of the diamond’s presentation to Queen Victoria in 1849 as the most recent chapter in this mythology.51 The Arabian Nights passed into the common consciousness curious narratives about the odd behaviours of diamonds, with Marsh explicitly comparing the Devil’s Diamond to ‘the diamond which was found in the fish’s stomach and which lighted the house at night’ (p. 9). In addition, ‘the mountain-man mythology’ of Brazil’s ­diamond-mining culture held that ‘[d]iamonds were beings made of energy … glowing brightly and calling out to their chosen discoverers’, being able to take ‘the form of women – white ones for white diamonds, black ones for carbonados – driving men mad with longing’.52 As fetishised objects, diamonds were understood to stimulate and satisfy fundamental masculine desires, offering, as Jean Arnold relates, culturally specific ‘talismanic power, political power, and divine power’.53 For an eminently practical and mercenary individual such as Hookham, such associations are spurious. Yet the energy of the Devil’s Diamond ‘fire[s] his breast with an unwonted passion’, exercising on him ‘some magic spell’ that makes it ‘difficult to remove his glance’ (p. 32). In very physical terms he is said to have ‘feasted on its beauty’ and ‘gloated on it as a sensualist might be supposed to gloat on some fair woman’ (p. 32). The diamond is responsive to him, and through ‘a singular delusion … seemed to speak to him’ so that ‘he seemed to hear its voice’ (pp. 31–2). It promises to empower its possessor, to satisfy his very masculine desires to conquer, master and realise the value of a commodity that is presented as feminine and representative of the spoils of Empire, but it delivers the opposite of this masculine imperial dream. The curse of the Devil’s Diamond is embodied in the great ape that haunts it, and expressed in a wealth of emasculating supernatural activities. Over the course of the narrative, the Devil’s Diamond laughs, barks like a dog, roars, moves, increases and decreases in size and lustre, and changes colour ‘assuming a dozen different hues in rapid succession’ (p. 105). It speaks to its possessor, mesmerises and hypnotises, sticks to the hands of those who touch it, burns, generates explosions, projects its 219

Richard Marsh and object relations sentiments on to the wall and releases both a small serpent and a great ape from its interior. It causes terrible abdominal pain to Hookham as he attempts to sell it and a seizure in the man he seeks to sell it to, and in a terrible series of events, it takes the life of a young man, granting him an out-of-body experience, only eventually to restore him. As Marsh’s most imaginative response to the historic, cultural, economic and scientific symbolism of the diamond, the Devil’s Diamond is utterly beyond comprehension or mastery, and subjects Hookham to such extreme assaults that he finally relinquishes it. When viewed alongside Marsh’s other diamond narratives, The Devil’s Diamond can be read as a pointed critique of a modern consumer society. The novel illustrates the folly of the consumer’s willingness to submit to excessive levels of suffering in the name of illusory financial gain. The stone is fundamentally worthless, in that it cannot remain in the possession of one individual, be displayed as a curiosity or converted into capital. The diamond is the ultimate mockery of the commercial arm of the imperial mission – a product closely associated with India, the great promise of which compels its possessor to realise its true value, but which proves worthless when animated with a fiendish intelligence. In evoking a sense of the diamond as haunted and even malevolently possessed, Marsh breaks down the distinction between the two increasingly defined states of Indian stones, as both exotic objects and products of British industry. As a commercial product of the Empire, the Devil’s Diamond is both a strongly mythological object and a desirable modern commodity. As an object that can only be gifted, it stands in contrast to the colonial commodity and an acquisitive fin-de-siècle consumer culture.

Conclusion

Marsh’s diamond narratives, and indeed many of his object fictions more generally, generate anxiety over a fin-de-siècle market economy, notions of value, the consequences of investing in and exploiting the Empire, and the manner in which masculine identity may be undermined. If, as Marsh’s narratives suggest, India might yield devilish stones, Brazil specimens as brittle as glass that mock the hardness of diamonds, and Africa gems infected with disease, then speculation in even such a recognisable product might be fraught with peril as products of an expanding market turn against an imperial centre that would reap the benefits of an extensive commercial endeavour. 220

Diamonds and curious collectables in the fin-de-siècle fiction of Marsh Marsh’s narratives operate on the basis that his readers will register diamonds as desirable commodities associated with Empire, but this recognition is undermined through nightmares of unpredictable, irrational, diseased or downright malevolent stones. We begin to ‘confront the thingness of objects’, Bill Brown states, ‘when they stop working for us’.54 Marsh’s diamonds invite their possessors to speculate on their value and realise their financial and aesthetic potential before refusing to ‘work’ for them. In this way the texts contribute to the fin-de-siècle imaginary an impression of beleaguered masculinity and problematic imperial objects, of speculation as futile, and even the age’s commercial spirit as vulnerable and diseased.

Notes

 1 See, for instance, G. Buelens, ‘Henry James’s oblique possession: plottings of desire and mastery in The American Scene’, PMLA, 116:2 (2001), 300–13; S. Culver, ‘Objects and images: Henry James and the new media’, in E. L. Haralson and J. C. Rowe (eds), A Historical Guide to Henry James (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 94–120; T. Pikula, ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula and late-Victorian advertising tactics: earnest men, virtuous ladies, and porn’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 55:3 (2012), 283– 302; D. Seed, ‘Eruptions of the primitive into the present: The Jewel of Seven Stars and The Lair of the White Worm’, in W. Hughes and A. Smith (eds), Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 188–204; A. Worth, ‘Arthur Machen and the horrors of deep history’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 40 (2012), 215–27; S. Forlini, ‘Modern narratives and decadent things in Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 55:4 (2012), 479–98.  2 A notable exception is Aviva Briefel’s ‘Hands of beauty, hands of horror: fear and Egyptian art at the fin de siècle’, Victorian Studies, 50:2 (2008), 263–71, which analyses hand imagery in Marsh’s The Beetle and Gothic responses to manual production in a mechanised age.  3 B. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2001), p. 3.  4 B. Brown, ‘Thing theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28:1 (2001), 1–22.  5 A. Castellani, Gems, Notes and Extracts, trans. Mrs John Brogden (London: Bell and Daldy, 1871), p. 41.  6 Rev. C. W. King, Antique Gems: Their Origin, Uses, and Value as Interpreters of Ancient History; and as Illustrative of Ancient Art With Hints to Gem Collectors (London: John Murray, 1860), p. 104.  7 S. Markovits, ‘Form things: looking at genre through Victorian diamonds’, Victorian Studies, 52:4 (2010), 591–619 (p. 594).

221

Richard Marsh and object relations  8 P. J. Cain, ‘Empire and the languages of character and virtue in later Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Modern Intellectual History, 4:2 (2007), 249–73 (pp. 249–50, 265).  9 C. Clarke, ‘Imperial rogues: reverse colonization fears in Guy Boothby’s A Prince of Swindlers and late-Victorian detective fiction’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 41 (2013), 527–45 (p. 527). 10 G. A. Bremner, ‘ “Some Imperial Institute”: architecture, symbolism, and the ideal of Empire in late Victorian Britain, 1887–93’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 62:1 (2003), 50–73 (p. 51). 11 Bremner, ‘Some Imperial Institute’, p. 51. 12 R. V. Turrell, Capital and Labour on the Kimberley Diamond Fields, 1871– 1890 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 77. 13 Turrell, Capital and Labour, p. 76. 14 Turrell, Capital and Labour, p. 74. 15 M. Donohoe, ‘Flowers, diamonds, and gold: the destructive public health, human rights, and environmental consequences of symbols of love’, Human Rights Quarterly, 30:1 (2008), 164–82 (p. 169). 16 M. O’Donoghue, Gems, 6th edn (Oxford and Burlington, VT: ButterworthHeinemann, 2006), p. 61. 17 S. Daly, The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), p. 68. 18 Daly, Empire Inside, pp. 61, 66. 19 J. Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 25–31. 20 R. Marsh, ‘The adventure of the puzzle’ (1892), in Curios: Some Strange Adventures of Two Bachelors (1898; Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2007), pp. 94–114 (p. 95). All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 21 F. M. Endlich, ‘Diamonds’, American Naturalist, 12:7 (1878), 419–30 (p. 429). 22 Endlich, ‘Diamonds’, p. 429. 23 King, Antique Gems, p. 72. 24 Endlich, ‘Diamonds’, p. 429. 25 R. Marsh, ‘Exchange is robbery’ (1894), in Between the Dark and the Daylight (1902; Kansas City, MO: Valancourt, 2011), pp. 58–73. 26 Castellani, Gems, Notes and Extracts, p. 57. 27 Castellani, Gems, Notes and Extracts, p. 57. 28 H. Freed-Thall, ‘  “Prestige of a momentary diamond”: economics of distinction in Proust’, New Literary History, 43:1 (2012), 159–78 (p. 159). 29 R. N. Proctor, ‘Anti-agate: the great diamond hoax and the semiprecious stone scam’, Configurations, 9:3 (2001), 381–412 (pp. 382, 394).

222

Diamonds and curious collectables in the fin-de-siècle fiction of Marsh 30 E. Duffy, ‘Selling jewels: modernist commodification and disappearance as style’, Modernism/Modernity, 14:2 (2007), 189–207 (pp. 189–90). 31 Duffy, ‘Selling jewels’, p. 190. 32 ‘Money matters’, Saturday Review, 81 (13 June 1896), 600–2 (p. 600). 33 F. R. Statham, ‘The chartered company: the other side’, The National Review, 27 (March 1896), 33–50; ‘The rise in foreign bonds’, Saturday Review, 65 (30 June 1888), 793–4; ‘The state of the Stock Exchange’, Saturday Review, 59 (21 March 1885), 379–80. 34 C. Gere and J. Rudoe, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World (London: British Museum, 2010), p. 112. 35 Marsh, ‘The diamonds’, in The Seen and the Unseen (1900; Chicago: Valancourt, 2007), pp. 143–63 (p. 143). All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 36 ‘Diseases of diamonds’, London Journal, 27 (6 February 1897), 130. 37 ‘Diseases of diamonds’, p. 130. 38 ‘The explosion of a diamond’, Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 31:2 (April–October 1879), 195–6. 39 ‘Explosion of a diamond’, pp. 195–6. 40 King, Antique Gems, p. 104. 41 O’Donoghue, Gems, p. 98. 42 O’Donoghue, Gems, pp. 83, 88. 43 ‘Diamonds’, Bow Bells, 19 (16 September 1892), 282. 44 King, Antique Gems, p. 107. 45 Castellani, Gems, Notes and Extracts, p. 43. 46 For examples of monstrous metamorphosis in Marsh’s fiction, see, for example, The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), The Goddess: A Demon (1900) and The Joss: A Reversion (1901). 47 Castellani, Gems, Notes and Extracts, p. 43. 48 M. Cholmondeley, The Danvers Jewels (London: R. Bentley, 1887). 49 R. Marsh, The Devil’s Diamond (London: Henry, 1893), p. 61. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 50 Castellani, Gems, Notes and Extracts, p. 53. 51 King, Antique Gems, p. 106. 52 S. S. Patel, ‘Diamond rush’, Archaeology, 60:2 (March–April 2007), 53–8 (p. 55). 53 J. Arnold, Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel: Prisms of Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), p. 54. 54 Brown, ‘Thing theory’, p. 4.

223

Index

Note: literary works and characters can be found under authors’ names. Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abbey, Ada Kate 6 Abdullahi, Khalifa 139–40 Academy 32, 50, 164 addiction 97, 100, 192, 197–9, 203–4 aestheticism 2, 11–12, 16, 59, 190–5, 198, 200–4 Africa 14, 130, 136–7, 140, 143, 210, 213, 215–18, 220 Aickman, Robert 138, 143 All the Year Round 8 Allen, Grant 65 Lois Cayley 65 alterity 12–14, 16, 20, 49, 68, 79, 137, 142, 162, 182, 184, 208–9, 216 animal magnetism 174 Answers 8 anti-Semitism 6, 72, 104n.26, 196 Arabian Nights 219 Aristotle 193 Arnold, Edwin 32 Tenth Muse, The 32 Arnold, Matthew 194, 197 Athenaeum 31, 36, 50, 106 Austen, Jane 164 Northanger Abbey 164 automata 15, 148, 150–6, 158–9, 161, 163–5, 176, 180, 184–5 Avengers, The 38 Barr, Robert 107 Belgravia 8

Bell, Alexander Graham 78, 83n.52 Bennett, Arnold 36 Bergson, Henri 108 Rire, Le 108 Besant, Annie 116 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 8 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen 138–9, 141 Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt, A 138–9 ‘Wind and the whirlwind, The’ 138 Bollas, Christopher 13, 176, 181–2 Bookman 30 Booth, Charles 112 Boothby, Guy 2, 9, 14–15, 64, 89–90, 101–2, 129, 132 Dr Nikola 101 Klimo/ Simon Carne 64, 89 Pharos the Egyptian 132, 134–5, 137, 139 Borgia, Lucrezia 196, 198 Boucicault, Dion 158 Bow Bells 216 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 19, 27, 33, 35, 38, 53–4, 59, 157 Doctor’s Wife, The 27 Lady Audley’s Secret 19, 53–5, 59, 157 Bramah, Ernest 65 Max Carrados 65 Brazil 210–16, 219–20 British Medical Journal 48, 108

225

Index Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane 48, 51 Brown, Bill 13, 172, 176, 183, 209, 221 Byatt, A. S. 183 Biographer’s Tale, The 183 Caine, Hall 2, 107, 143 Christian, The 143 canon 2–3, 6, 10, 13, 20, 63, 191, 204 Cassell’s Magazine 8 China 9–10, 13, 142, 179 Cholmondeley, Mary 217 Danvers Jewels, The 217 class lower class 47, 93, 96, 111 lower middle class 9, 11, 17–18, 20, 92, 100, 106–16, 120 middle class 7, 11, 14, 40, 59, 62n.29, 67–8, 74, 87, 90, 92, 107, 112, 115, 120, 135, 190–3 social hierarchy 19, 30, 79, 89, 93, 96, 108, 112, 120 social mobility 93, 114–15, 120 upper class 108, 111, 120, 190 clerks 17–18, 20, 90, 92, 95, 106–7, 109, 111–16, 120, 132, 210 collecting 11–12, 14, 38, 40, 116, 155, 161, 172, 181–2, 190–3, 195–8, 203–4, 211–13 Collins, Wilkie 1, 28, 30, 33–5, 38, 155–6, 161–2, 197, 213 Armadale 35 Moonstone, The 34, 155, 161–2, 197, 213 Woman in White, The 33–4 colonial resistance 14, 127, 130, 136–42, 148, 154, 156–9 commodities 1, 12, 14, 93, 96, 100, 135, 171, 173, 190, 197, 203, 210–11, 213–14, 217, 219–21 communication technology 18–19, 64, 76–9 Conan Doyle, Arthur 1–2, 15, 18, 60, 66, 89, 129, 140, 161, 163, 197–8

‘Adventure of the stockbroker’s clerk, The’ 122n.21 ‘Brown hand, The’ 161 ‘Lot no. 249’ 140 ‘Ring of Thoth, The’ 161 Sherlock Holmes 18, 31, 33, 56, 63–7, 89, 197–8 Sign of Four, The 197–8 Study in Scarlet, A 197 Congo 14 Conrad, Joseph 31 Heart of Darkness 31 consumer culture 8, 12, 14, 30–1, 96, 107, 111–12, 114–15, 135, 172, 181–2, 190–2, 197, 210, 212, 214–15, 218, 220 Corelli, Marie 2, 34, 38, 143 Sorrows of Satan, The 34, 143 Cornhill Magazine 8 crime 3, 12, 17–19, 33, 35–6, 38–41, 45–60, 63, 66–7, 88–91, 102–3, 192–5, 197 crime fiction 1, 3, 16–19, 27–42, 45–60, 63–80, 87–103, 110, 190–204 criminal anthropology 6, 45–60, 65–6, 91, 97–8, 145n.14 criminal insanity 19, 48–9, 51–4, 59 Croker, B. M. 160 ‘Little brass god, The’ 160 cultural divide 2, 12, 20, 30, 32, 80, 191, 204 curiosity 198–9, 208–9 Daily Graphic 155 Daily Telegraph 30 Darwin, Charles 47 Darwinism 12, 45, 59, 75 Davidson, John 32 Fleet Street Eclogues 32 De Quincey, Thomas 12, 192–3, 195, 200–2 ‘On murder considered as one of the fine arts’ 193, 195 deaf education 73–9 decadence 2, 11–12, 16, 20, 32, 45–6,

226

Index 62n.29, 185, 187, 190–4, 197–9, 203–4 degeneration 3, 12–13, 17, 20, 45–60, 66–7, 73, 75, 78–9, 91, 97, 102, 106, 109, 112–13, 115–17, 119, 134, 145n.14 Department S 38 detective fiction 1, 16, 18–20, 31, 49, 52, 56–8, 63–80, 88–9, 91, 101–2, 110, 134, 197, 199, 201 deus ex machina 164, 167n.57 diamonds 11, 13–14, 18, 87, 95–100, 117, 155, 162, 208–21 Dickens, Charles 32–3, 108, 158 Christmas Carol, A 34 Oliver Twist 33 disability 20, 75–6, 79 discursive discord 3, 10, 21, 46, 48, 54, 58–60, 73, 79, 88, 102–3, 109–10, 118, 120 Douglas, Lord Alfred 50 dreams 41, 65, 149–50, 161, 176, 179–80, 182, 197 Du Maurier, George 34, 38 Trilby 34 duality 4, 6, 68, 72, 78, 95–6, 176–81, 185–6, 196 East India Company 153–5 economic hardship 6, 8, 12, 17–20, 87, 90, 92–3, 111–12, 115 Edinburgh Review 28 Edison, Thomas 38 educational reform 7, 27–8, 74–5, 109, 112 Egerton, George 2 Egypt 12, 14–15, 49, 117, 127–43, 148, 157, 162, 176 Eliot, George 198 Ellis, Havelock 48 Criminal, The 48 Empire 6, 14–16, 20, 108, 117, 127–30, 132, 134–43, 149, 152, 157–65, 208–11, 213–21

eugenics 18–19, 45–60, 66, 73, 75, 79 Everett, H. D. 129, 135 Iras: A Mystery 135–6 fantastic 15, 161–4 female detective 16, 19, 63–80 Ferrero, Guglielmo 45, 47, 55 First World War 1, 17, 20, 73, 118–20 flâneurie 71, 79 Forster, E. M. 109 Howards End 115 Forster, W. E. 109 Freeman, R. Austin 64 Dr John Thorndyke 64 Freud, Sigmund 108, 151 Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, The 108 ‘“Uncanny”, The’ 151 Futrelle, Jacques 64 Professor Van Dusen 64 Galsworthy, John 36 Galton, Francis 45–7, 51, 53 Hereditary Genius 47, 53 gaze 66, 71–2, 78, 132, 173, 196, 199 gender 10–11, 16, 53–5, 64–8, 74–5, 77, 79, 95, 110, 116–18, 135, 156–8, 211 femininity 13–14, 17, 19, 63–75, 78–9, 116, 156–8, 211, 216, 219 masculinity 6, 9, 16–17, 69, 77, 94–5, 99–100, 102, 106, 112, 116–20, 132, 174, 183, 209–11, 213–14, 219–21 generic hybridity 3, 9–11, 28, 31–2, 35–6, 41, 63–4, 79–80, 101, 106, 186 Gentleman’s Magazine 8 Gissing, George 2, 7, 29, 31, 36, 94–5, 109 New Grub Street 7, 94–5, 115 Gold, Isaac 37 Gordon, Charles 127, 128, 130, 139–40

227

Index Gothic 1, 9, 13, 15, 33, 41, 46, 49, 55, 58–9, 64, 68–9, 71–2, 76–7, 79, 90, 99, 106, 110, 127–43, 148–9, 159–65, 171–2, 175, 181, 184–7, 193 comic Gothic 46, 164 Egyptian Gothic 15, 127–43, 148 female Gothic 9 imperial Gothic 9, 15, 148–9, 159–65 Grand, Sarah 49, 56 Heavenly Twins, The 49–50, 56 Graphic 34 Grossmith, George and Weedon 109 Diary of a Nobody, The 109 Gypsies 63, 65, 72–3, 78

Hoffmann, E. T. A. 151–2, 161 ‘Sandman, The’ 151–2, 161 Home Chimes 8 Hope, Anthony 31 Hope Hodgson, William 65 Carnacki 65 Hornung, E. W. 89–90 Raffles 89–90 Household Words 8, 192 Hume, Fergus 2, 65 Hagar of the Pawnshop 65 humour 1, 3, 14, 17–18, 42, 46, 106–20 Humphreys, Arthur 30 Hutton, R. H. 29 Huysmans, Joris Karl 191 Against Nature 191

Haggard, H. Rider 2, 6, 9, 13–15, 17, 31, 101–2, 129, 140, 213 Cleopatra 140 King Solomon’s Mines 213 She 144n.12 Hardy, Thomas 2, 31, 35 Jude the Obscure 35 Harkness, Margaret 36 Harland, Henry 34 Harmsworth (London) Magazine 8 Heinemann 49–50 Heldmann, Bernard 1, 4, 6–7, 20, 33, 37, 46, 166n.32, 192 ‘Couple of scamps, A’ 6, 33 Daintree 192 Union Jack 4, 33, 166n.32 Heldmann, Emma (née Marsh) 4 Heldmann, Harry 103n.3 Heldmann, Joseph 4, 6, 46 Henry, Eva M. 130 ‘Curse of Vasartas, The’ 130, 135, 137 Henty, G. A. 4, 6, 155, 166n.32 Tiger of Mysore: A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib, The 155 heredity 6, 19–20, 45–60, 62n.34, 74, 78, 91 Hitchens, Robert 50 Green Carnation, The 50

Idler Magazine 8, 110, 116, 131 Illustrated Police Budget 34 Illustrated Police News 12, 28–30, 34–7, 39–42, 42n.4, 43n.5, 44n.25 India 13–15, 117, 142, 144n.5, 148–9, 152–60, 165, 176, 184, 196–7, 210–11, 218–20 Isis 131, 137, 140, 142–3, 144n.12 Ives, George 41 Jack the Ripper 1, 12, 29–30, 37, 39–40, 44n.30, 156 Jacobs, W. W. 107 James, Henry 12, 29, 31–2, 34–5, 208 ‘Figure in the carpet, The’ 29–30 Reverberator, The 35 James, M. R. 187 Jentsch, Ernst 151–2, 180 Jerome, Jerome K. 17, 107–10, 112 Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, The 107 Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog! 107–9, 112 Jews 4, 6, 42, 46, 63, 72, 78–9, 93, 143, 196 journalism 3, 8, 12, 20–1, 28–42, 87, 95, 109–10, 115 juvenile fiction 4, 6–7, 33

228

Index Kailyard School 143 Kali 154, 158–60 Kant, Immanuel 193 Critique of Judgement, The 193 Khartoum 127, 139, 210 Kipling, Rudyard 2, 6, 31–2 Kitchener, Herbert 127, 139–40 Koh-i-noor 162, 219 Lancet 48 Lang, Andrew 31, 107 Laocoon 193 Lee, Vernon 2, 201 leisure reading 7–8, 27–32, 37, 63–5, 107 Lemoine Affair 213 Levy, Amy 30, 72 ‘Ballade of a special edition’ 30 Linton, Eliza Lynn 116 Lippincott’s Magazine 198 lip-reading 16, 18, 63–6, 73–8 literacy 7, 11, 27, 77, 112 Lombroso, Cesare 19, 45–9, 51, 53, 55–9, 91, 97 Female Offender, The 45, 47, 50, 55–6, 58 London 1, 4, 6, 12–13, 15, 17, 29, 33, 35, 39, 48–9, 55, 68, 71–2, 106–7, 111–12, 114, 116, 130, 132, 134–5, 137, 143, 152, 155, 157, 160, 177, 186, 210 London Journal 215 Longman’s Magazine 8 Lovecraft, H. P. 187 ‘Call of Cthulhu, The’ 187 McCarthy, Justin 213 Red Diamonds 213 Machen, Arthur 13–14, 17, 32, 208 magazine market 7–8, 28–30, 32, 43n.5, 63–4, 79, 110 Mahdism 139–40 Marryat, Florence 116 Marsh, Richard 5 criminal career 4, 6, 33, 36–7, 46, 91

critical reception 1, 9, 34, 36, 49–50, 155, 164 life 3–4, 6, 20, 28 literary career 1–9, 27–43, 45, 95 pseudonym 1, 4, 6, 37, 46 style 27–8, 31, 34–7, 42, 110–11, 115 works Ada Vernham, Actress 8 ‘Adventure of the cabinet, The’ 11–12 ‘Adventure of the phonograph, The’ 38–41, 156 ‘Adventure of the puzzle, The’ 209, 211–15, 218 Augustus Champnell 18, 65, 134, 137, 162 ‘“Auld Lang Syne”’ 37, 74 ‘Barnes mystery, The’ 78 Beetle: A Mystery, The 1, 10, 13, 15–18, 27, 42, 45, 49–50, 68, 71–2, 76, 78, 90, 111, 117, 127–8, 130–2, 133, 134–43, 148, 155, 157, 161–4, 171–6, 179, 182–6 Chase of the Ruby, The 117 ‘Conscience’ 66, 74 Crime and the Criminal, The 37, 88–90, 192 ‘Curare’ 72, 78 Curios 11, 38, 42, 116, 136, 156, 172, 192 Datchet Diamonds, The 16–17, 34, 87–103 Death Whistle, The 42 Devil’s Diamond, The 34, 46, 111, 117, 192, 209, 218–20 ‘Diamonds, The’ 14, 209, 214–18 ‘Dip in the briny, A’ 113–14 Drama of the Telephone, A 38 ‘Eavesdropping at Interlaken’ 72 ‘Exchange is robbery’ 212 For Amusement Only 116 ‘For debt’ 8 ‘For one night only’ 111 Frivolities 42, 110–11, 116 ‘Gift horse, The’ 114–15

229

Index ‘Girl on the sands, The’ 114 Goddess: A Demon, The 13, 15–16, 117, 136, 142, 148–65, 171, 176–9, 184–5 ‘Her fourth’ 113–15 House of Mystery, The 34, 78 ‘In the trenches’ 119 ‘Isolda’ 69, 78 Joss: A Reversion, The 9–10, 13, 42, 76, 142, 155, 167n.57, 171, 179–81, 185–6 Judith Lee 16, 18, 63–80, 88 ‘Lady Beatrice’ 71, 74, 78 ‘Limerick, The’ 116 ‘Looping the loop’ 114 Mahatma’s Pupil, The 46 ‘Man in the making, A’ 119 ‘Man who cut off my hair, The’ 68, 69, 73, 75 ‘Mandragora’ 69 Marvels and Mysteries 33 Master of Deception, A 88–90 ‘Matched’ 67 ‘Member of the Anti-Tobacco League, A’ 36–7 ‘Miracle, The’ 67, 71 ‘Modest half-crown, A’ 114–15 Mrs Musgrave – and her Husband 19, 34, 36, 45–6, 49–60, 117, 203 Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death, The 12, 18, 88, 192–203 ‘Photographs, The’ 40–1 ‘Psychological experiment, A’ 31, 40, 117 ‘Restaurant Napolitain, The’ 66, 68–9, 70, 71, 74 Sam Briggs 17–18, 106, 110–20 Second Coming, A 34, 143 Seen and the Unseen, The 31, 40 ‘Set of chessmen, A’ 155 ‘Skipper’s daughter, The’ 116 ‘Social evening, A’ 118 Strange Wooing of Mary Bowler, The 34–5, 46 Surprising Husband, The 117 ‘That hansom’ 114

‘Their reasons: two hitherto unreported conversations’ 103n.3 Twickenham Peerage, The 103 ‘Two words’ 73 ‘“Uncle Jack”’ 68, 74, 76 Under One Flag 8, 35–6 Violet Forster’s Lover 90 ‘Words of a little child, The’ 33–4 Marshall, Archibald 110 martial arts 16, 63, 69, 79 marvellous 161–3 mass readership 2, 7, 28–32, 38, 77, 109–10, 120, 164, 172, 201 mental instability 74, 78–9, 149, 159–60, 163–5, 185 Meredith, George 31, 108 mesmerism 76, 78, 131, 134, 162, 171–5, 181, 219 metafiction 10, 163–5, 200–1 middlebrow 2, 9, 20–1, 64, 79, 110, 191–2, 204 mise en abyme 202–3 modernism 2, 11, 20–1, 36, 204 monstrosity 9–10, 13, 15–16, 18, 49, 63–4, 68, 71, 73, 76, 137, 141–3, 150, 158, 164, 216 Moore, George 30 Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals 30 Morley, John 141 Morris, William 193, 197 Morrison, Arthur 36, 64 Horace Dorrington 64 Morrison, W. Douglas 47–8 Crime and its Causes 48 Mudie’s Select Circulating Library 30, 32 mummies 15, 129–30, 135–6, 140–2, 144n.9 Munro, Hector 154 narcotics 196–7 New Humour 17, 106–11, 113, 115–16, 120

230

Index New Woman 2, 13, 16–17, 20, 49, 64–7, 71–2, 74, 80, 94–5, 110, 117, 142, 175–6, 183–4 Newgate novel 6, 32, 68, 91 Newnes, George 29, 63 Nicolson, David 48, 51 Nineteenth Century 28 Nordau, Max 13, 45–7, 49, 197 Degeneration 45, 47, 50, 197 normativity 64–6, 75–6, 79 objects 1, 11–14, 88, 98, 135–6, 151–7, 159–60, 165, 171–87, 190, 192, 194, 197–200, 202–3, 208–21 Oliphant, Margaret 41 Orczy, Baroness Emma 65 Lady Molly of the Scotland Yard 65 Old Man in the Corner 65 Ouida 35 Under Two Flags 35 Outlook 32 Pain, Barry 17, 107–9, 116 Eliza stories 109 Pall Mall Gazette 30, 48, 109 Pater, Walter 12, 192–4, 198 Studies in the History of the Renaissance 193–4, 198 patriotism 117–20 Peace, Charles 35 Pears, Charles 119 Pearson’s Magazine 8 Pearson’s Weekly 8 Peep-Show 4 penny dreadful 6, 27, 33, 35, 44n.25, 68 performativity 7, 17, 67–8, 72, 74, 158, 176–8, 184–5 Phillpotts, Eden 116 phonograph 38–40, 77, 150, 156, 184, 208 photography 40–1, 76, 208 physiognomy 47–9, 51, 66–8, 91, 97–8, 132 Piffard, Harold 7

Pirkis, Catherine Louisa 65 Loveday Brooke 65 Poe, Edgar Allan 1, 160 ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue, The’ 160 poison 42, 58, 192–200, 202 publishing industry 1, 6–11, 27–38 Punch 32, 108, 127, 128, 140 Purkess, George 12, 28 Quiver 4 race 6, 10, 14, 18, 20, 45–7, 49, 57, 59, 63, 65–6, 68, 72–3, 75, 79, 134, 136–7, 145n.14, 157, 165, 217 Radcliffe, Ann 163 Reade, Charles 33–4 realism 2, 8–9, 11–12, 29, 31, 35–6, 41, 90, 110, 186 Red Barn Murder 41 Reed, Talbot Baines 6 religion 15, 139, 142–3, 152, 154, 157–8, 176, 190 reverse colonisation 16, 72, 129, 132, 135–6, 148, 157, 160 Review of Reviews 29 risk 17–18, 87–8, 91–2, 98–103, 211 Robinson, A. Mary F. 201 Rohmer, Sax 65, 141 Brood of the Witch Queen, The 141 Moris Klaw 65 romance 1, 3, 9–10, 31, 64, 87, 101–2, 110, 140, 155 Ruskin, John 193, 197 Saintsbury, George 31 sati 159 Saturday Review 32, 34, 50 Savoy 27 science 18–19, 64–6, 73, 75–9, 89, 134, 137, 142, 190, 196, 199, 213 science fiction 64, 76–7, 79 Scotsman 106 selfhood 171–87 sensation fiction 1, 19–20, 27, 32–5, 38, 42, 45, 50, 53, 64, 68, 80,

231

Index 91, 155–7, 192, 197, 199–201, 203 Seringapatam 153, 155 sexuality 11, 16, 46–7, 54, 94, 152, 156, 158 sexology 16, 66 sexual assault 13, 54–5, 59, 68, 131–2, 134, 139, 142–3, 157–8 sexual identity 16, 18, 49, 63, 71, 142 sexual transgression 58, 72–3, 131 sexually transmitted disease 49, 56 Shakespeare, William 35 Hamlet 35 Shaw, George Bernard 32 Shee, George 119 Briton’s First Duty, The 119 Sidney Street Siege 37 Sign language 72, 75–6 Skelton, J. R. 63, 70 Sleeman, William Henry 159 Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official 159 Smith, Guy N. 27 Society for Psychical Research 77 Society of Authors 7 South Kensington Museum 153, 155 Speaker 50 Spectator 29 speculation 14, 17–18, 87–103, 208–9, 211, 214, 218, 220–1 St James’s Chronicle 153 Star 30, 32, 44n.30 Stead, W. T. 29, 34 If Christ Came to Chicago 34 Stevenson, Robert Louis 2, 13, 30–1, 59, 129 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 13, 30, 55, 71, 129 Stock Exchange 91–3, 98, 103n.3 Stoddart, Joseph Marshall 198 Stoker, Bram 1–2, 13–15, 17, 58, 129–30, 135, 208 Dracula 1, 10, 13, 16, 48–9, 55, 58, 71, 129

Jewel of Seven Stars, The 130, 135, 137 Stott, W. R. S. 63, 69 Strand Magazine 5, 8, 17, 31, 37, 63–5, 67–8, 69–70, 76, 79, 109, 111, 118 sublime 193 suburbia 17–18, 106, 109, 111–12, 114, 116 Sudan 14, 127–8, 136–7, 139–42 Suez Canal 15, 129, 135, 137–9, 141, 144n.5 Sully, James 108 An Essay on Laughter 108 supernatural 15, 19, 28, 36, 40–1, 49, 64–5, 72, 77–9, 110, 129–30, 137, 148, 150–2, 155, 157, 161–5, 218–19 Symonds, John Addington 201 Symons, Arthur 27, 32 Taxes on Knowledge 7, 28–9 technology 7, 11, 18, 38–41, 56, 64, 66, 75–7, 79, 106, 114, 117, 152–3, 212 telepathy 19, 63, 78 Thackeray, William Makepeace 32, 108 things 13, 171, 183–7, 209 thriller 1, 16, 34, 38, 58, 87–8, 99–102 Times, The 30, 50 Times Literary Supplement, The 27 Tipu’s tiger 15, 148, 152–6, 153, 158, 165 Tipu Sultan 153–5, 158 Tit-Bits 29, 43n.5 Tooting Tragedy 34, 43n.22 topicality 2, 9–10, 21, 27–8, 37–8, 40, 42, 45, 50, 87 transformational objects 13, 181–3 transport 7–8, 18, 56, 71–2, 95, 107, 114 Trollope, Anthony 94 Way We Live Now, The 94

232

Index uncanny 38, 77–8, 151–2, 161–3, 179–80, 182 Union Jack 4, 33, 166n.32 Urabi, Ahmed 137–8 value 2, 7, 11–12, 14, 20, 31, 35, 38, 40, 88, 90–4, 97, 100, 119, 172, 190–2, 197, 200, 203–4, 209, 211–21 Wainwright, Thomas Griffiths 200 Wakley, Thomas 174 Wallace, Edgar 38 Walpole, Horace 187 Castle of Otranto, The 186 Ward, Lock 192, 198 Wells, H. G. 13–14, 31–2, 36, 43n.22, 213 ‘Diamond maker, The’ 213 Island of Dr Moreau, The 13 Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul 122n.21 War of the Worlds, The 31 Weyman, Stanley 31 White, Hester 141 ‘Dead hand, The’ 141 Wilde, Oscar 2, 12, 27, 29, 32, 41,

44n.31, 50, 59, 187, 191–4, 198, 200, 202 ‘Decay of lying, The’ 29 Importance of Being Earnest, The 44n.31 ‘Pen, pencil and poison’ 200 Picture of Dorian Gray, The 71, 187, 191, 191–4, 198, 202 Windsor Magazine 8 Wingate, F. R. 139 Ten Years’ Captivity in the Mahdi’s Camp 139 Wood, Ellen (Mrs Henry) 33 Woolf, Virginia 36 ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ 36 Wooton, Edwin 130 ‘Secret of Horeb-Ra-Men, The’ 130, 131 xenophobia 4, 72–3, 163 Yeats, W. B. 36 Yellow Book 34 Young England 4 Young Folks 4 Zangwill, Israel 17, 107, 109, 120 ‘Realistic novel, The’ 109

233