Neo-Victorian Voices: Fingersmith, Sarah Waters (2002)

Unwanted wives incarcerated in asylums, unwanted babies farmed out to criminals, a drawing master seducing his young lady student and a scholarly uncle sequestering his heiress ward from the rest of the world. If you’re well versed in the building blocks of Victorian sensation novels, there’s much about Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith that may seem familiar.

Yet this 2002 thriller manages to defy expectations in new and exciting ways – not just by introducing sensational plotlines and dialogue that would have been inadmissible to Collins, Braddon and Reade (a central female/female romance, a bibliographical study of pornography, plenty of ‘fucks’, ‘cunts’, and, my personal favourite, ‘fucksters’), but by forcing us to reassess who we can trust and the false security our previous literary knowledge might have given us.

The novel starts in the unforgiving world of Borough, where men and women eat by stealing purses and skinning dogs. A debonair trickster known as ‘Gentleman’ has a plan - petty thief Susan Trinder, daughter of a murderess, must leave London for Briar, a country house near Maidenhead, to become maid to Maud Lilly and help him steal her away along with her fortune.

Sarah Waters (1966-)

This is the point at which we expect Sue to enter the Victorian world we know from novels – a world of hierarchy, etiquette and morality – but soon it becomes clear that she is in much more danger here, and it is dirty, amoral Borough that is the novel’s pattern for love and domesticity.

What comes next is a few hundred pages of twists and turns, double crossing and, at times, brutality. Could it have done with a more extensive edit? Yes, but Waters keep you guessing to the very end and reading fast to the finish line. The title Fingersmith hints at thievery, midwifery and female masturbation, yet it also conjures up the idea of a wordsmith, playing with readers’ emotions and stirring up their imaginations – appropriate given the novel’s final moments, and the original conception of sensation fiction.

What would you like to see the Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Favourite Novel: The Cloister and the Hearth, Charles Reade (1861)

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)

In an article published in January 1898, in Munsey’s Magazine, Arthur Conan Doyle was the latest in a series of contemporary big names to write about his favourite writers and books. The novel he talks about as his particular favourite – containing more ‘accurate knowledge and ripe wisdom and passionate human emotion’ than any other – was Charles Reade’s 1861 historical romance The Cloister and the Hearth.

Over the last couple of weeks, I read Reade’s classic to discover why it garnered so much praise in the nineteenth century, from Doyle and others, and to spot any clues as to why, since then, it has fallen into relative obscurity.

The Cloister and the Hearth is a mediaeval drama, set around 1450. The story begins in Holland, not far from Rotterdam, but deals with a journey that takes its hero through France and eventually to Rome. Much of Doyle’s praise is given to the research that went into Reade’s writing of the novel and the vividness with which a far-flung period of history is made real to us. He writes: ‘it is a human medievalism, neither stiff nor conventional nor unnatural, but palpitating with rude life and with primitive emotions.’

The immediacy of the world Reade writes about certainly still holds true today. The novel is packed with excitement and incident (think bear attacks, sieges, prison escapes, bandits) and populated with characters so recognisable in their humanity that you can connect despite the archaic dialogue, and distinctly period vocabulary. Here, for instance, a mother-in-law forces advice and money on her daughter-in-law:

‘She then recapitulated her experiences of infants, and instructed Margaret what to do in each coming emergency, and pressed money upon her, Margaret declined it with thanks, Catherine insisted, and turned angry. Margaret made excuses all so reasonable that Catherine rejected them with calm contempt; to her mind they lacked femininity.’

Sometimes the characters, or at least their living conditions, do indeed seem ‘rude’ or ‘primitive’. This is how an inn that Gerard, our hero, must sleep in is described:

‘He had peeped into a large but low room, the middle of which was filled by a huge round stove, or clay oven, that reached to the ceiling; round this, wet clothes were drying-some on lines, and some more compendiously, on rustics. These latter habiliments, impregnated with the wet of the day, but the dirt of a life, and lined with what another foot traveller in these parts call "rammish clowns," evolved rank vapours and compound odours inexpressible, in steaming clouds. In one corner was a travelling family, a large one: thence flowed into the common stock the peculiar sickly smell of neglected brats. Garlic filled up the interstices of the air. And all this with closed window, and intense heat of the central furnace, and the breath of at least forty persons.’

But Reade is careful not to let his Victorian readers sit back too secure in their superiority:

‘When men drive a bargain, they strive to get the sunny side of it; it matters not one straw whether it is with man or Heaven they are bargaining. In this respect we are the same now, at bottom, as we were four hundred years ago: only in those days we did it a grain or two more naively, and that naivete shone out more palpably, because, in that rude age, body prevailing over mind, all sentiments took material forms.’

Less palatable to a modern reader than this mantra of shared humanity, however, is the moral assumptions that lead to the novel’s conclusion. Doyle writes of the novel that ‘such an indictment against celibacy of the clergy has never yet been penned’, yet, for a modern reader, Gerard’s prioritisation of the priesthood over his wedding vows is more difficult to understand – prompting not, as presumably intended, critical feelings towards the Catholic Church, but rather extreme irritation with the novel’s apparently admirable characters.

This in turn has a negative effect on the novel’s ability to evoke pathos. Doyle writes of one deathbed scene ‘the man who can read that chapter with dry eyes is a man whom I do not wish to know’, but a reader today might be inclined to dash his or her head at a brick wall, rather than to cry, so frustrating is the religiosity. It’s all a question of degree. A Victorian reader might sympathise with Margaret’s helpless and ambiguous position, and think she would be well suited to the role of clergyman’s wife. Yet a reader now might take exception to the very assumption of her inferiority (the phrase ‘I am but a woman’ appears in the novel 11 times).

Doyle writes about the particular appeal of this historical period for fictionalisation, explaining:

‘Printing was coming, the Reformation was coming, the revival of learning was just at hand, but the greater part of Europe still lay in that blackest night which precedes the dawn.’

What’s interesting in this is the parallels I find in how writers now approach the nineteenth century. In my Neo-Victorian Voices series, I’ve seen how twenty-first century writers respond to the late 1800s as a period just on the cusp, focusing on the advent of evolutionary theory, women’s education and suffrage movements, and questions of race and colonialism. Victorianism is a period of relative darkness for us – a dangerous world in which are own social concerns can be played out by novelists – just as the Middle Ages fulfils that role for Reade.

The Cloister and the Hearth is probably only a handful of people’s ‘favourite’ novel today, but it’s a well-written book, that reveals as much about the period in which it was conceived as it does about the time in which it was set.

What novel would you like to see the Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Review: John Marchmont’s Legacy, Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1863)

Cartoon of Braddon as a circus girl, The Mask (1868)

In case my previous blog posts haven’t quite given you the impression that I’m something of a Braddon-fanatic, this review of top sensation fiction specimen John Marchmont’s Legacy (1863) should do the trick. This novel has it all – inheritance plots, deaths, fires, madness, false imprisonment, bigamy and unrequited love, while being a rich source of material for students as well as those just looking to spice up their morning commute.

John Marchmont, a former schoolmaster turned stage supernumerary, unexpectedly comes into a large fortune, but, being consumptive, doesn’t last long to protect his daughter (and heir) Mary from the mercenary machinations of his cousin Paul. Throw in a poor choice of second wife to act as evil stepmother, and a dashing soldier beloved by both women, and the plot is soon set in motion.

For the general reader: This is Braddon at her best – exciting, original and dramatic, while situating her story in a world which is believable and rich in observational detail. The plot, at times, kept even a hardened sensation fan like me guessing, but this isn’t detective fiction – much of the joy of reading here comes from knowing more than the characters themselves, and I found myself simultaneously longing for resolution while not wanting the story to end. This is a novel which cries out for film of TV adaptation. It’s fast-paced and structured around incident rather than reflection. It’s not the sort of book you need to ‘get through’ or struggle on to the end with. Maybe the saccharine, childish Mary is a little hard to swallow as a heroine but Olivia (her stepmother) is a brilliantly drawn complex character and Braddon’s morality by no means clear cut. I’ll be writing for the FWSA blog in the next week about whether we can identify Braddon as in any way ‘feminist’. John Marchmont’s Legacy is the kind of novel (and Olivia the kind of character) which demonstrates that it is worth asking these questions, because, rather than in spite, of her incredible contemporary popularity.

For students: Like other sensation novels I've discussed, this is a text obsessed with the relationship between life and drama  – the performance of roles inherent to the everyday and the extraordinary. Nineteenth-century interpretations of Shakespearean tragedy in particular (on stage and off) are a key context throughout the novel and something I plan to return to in a later post. The ‘inheritance’ itself – Marchmont Towers – and the fire which happens there clearly links the novel with other Gothic (or semi-Gothic) treatments of the grand country house. Perhaps Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) or Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) could prove fruitful points of comparison. Paul Marchmont’s profession – as a painter – is also interesting. His violent reaction to a portrait – by Millais, not of his own making – is a fascinating moment, which could be tied into some of the ideas about gendering portraiture I’ve already raised. For those reading Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the multiple women in this novel linked to ‘madness’ of one form or another would be of interest, while a Charles Reade novel I reviewed a couple of months ago also deals with the threat of false detainment in the period on mental health grounds.

What would you like the Secret Victorianist to review next? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist. And, if you’ve read John Marchmont’s Legacy, let me know what you thought!

Review: A Terrible Temptation, Charles Reade (1871)

Cartoon of Charles Reade

Warring cousins, mistresses, missing children, changelings and lunatic asylums could be a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of Charles Reade’s A Terrible Temptation (1871), a sensation novel which makes Lady Audley’s Secret look uneventful and The Woman in White slow-moving. The novel opens with Sir Charles Bassett paying off his mistress, ‘the Somerset’, in order to marry Bella Bruce. His cousin Richard Bassett (who feels the family estates should by right be his and, moreover, also loves Bella) intervenes to make things awkward for Sir Charles, and the plot is set in motion. Yet readerly expectations about the swift exaction of revenge by the slighted beauty and villainous cousin are soon thwarted by a novel so full of twists and turns that it takes many more years, and a whole new generation of children to set things finally to rights.

For the general reader: Taken as a whole, the novel is a little baffling - unstable in terms of pacing and a little unclear in its focus. The revelation of the ‘terrible temptation’ won’t come as much of a surprise and is a little anticlimactic so it’s best not to read with a detective fiction mindset. That said, the novel is so fast-paced, that it is a quick and entertaining read. There’s no lengthy description – hardly any description at all – and the language is modern, the sentences short and the text very dialogue-heavy, which may suit those put off by the verbosity of much nineteenth-century literature. The importance of servant characters to the plot is also well-suited to modern tastes and the events of the novel still scandalous enough to resonate.

For students: This is a good text to put alongside novels which deal with female madness and incarceration (Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, Lady Audley’s Secret etc.), as here the sequestered ‘lunatic’ is male. There is also more discussion of the actual medical and legal workings of nineteenth-century madhouses than in these other novels which may interest social historians and literature students alike. The servant Mary Wells recalls Hortense in Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852-3), in her close alignment with her mistress and importance as a character, as well as the social-climbing Affy in Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861). Meanwhile Lady (Bella) Bassett herself can be read alongside Wood’s Isabel and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s eponymous Aurora Floyd (1863) – all three are wives who have sinned against their husbands and yet continue to entertain readers’ sympathy. Reade’s popularity also makes him a necessary read for those interested in sensation fiction as a genre – his style is very distinct from Collins, Wood and Braddon and definitely worthy of independent consideration and discussion.

Have you read A Terrible Temptation or any other Charles Reade? Let me know below, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!