The Craziest Deaths in Victorian Novels

Happy Halloween, everyone! Today’s festivities have put me in a macabre and morbid mood so for today’s blog post, I’m running through some of the best (or worst?) ways to die in a Victorian novel. If you like your fictional deaths as strange, memorable and zany as possible, you’re in for a treat. 

My Halloween costume this year

Spontaneous Combustion

Who could forget the strange demise of Mr. Krook in Charles Dickens’s masterpiece Bleak House (1852-1853)? His death is the most famous literary example of human spontaneous combustion i.e. when a person goes up in flames for no reason at all. 

Railway Accident

Victorians were terrified of newfangled train travel and, if we’re to believe the novels, for good reason! There are options here: die instantly in a crash or suffocate to death in a tunnel. Or, if you’re Isabel Vane in Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), become disfigured in a derailing before returning to your family in disguise to act as governess to the children you abandoned to run off with your dashing and dastardly love.

Baby Farm

Your odds of surviving infancy weren’t great in the nineteenth century. But they were even worse if you were divided from your mother and put in a “baby farm” i.e. cheap daycare where you were, at best, neglected and, at worst, given poisoned formula. Check out George Moore’s 1894 novel, Esther Waters, for more on this practice.

Switching Places with a Doppelgänger 

Finding someone who looks just like you = all fun and games, until they find themselves destined for the guillotine, and you take their place in a heroic act for the woman you love…according to Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), anyway.

Sibling Violence

Who hasn’t bickered with a sibling? But let’s just hope your brother isn’t Little Father Time from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), who commits a grisly murder/suicide. 

Fire!

If you’re a madwoman who lives in an attic (like Bertha in Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 Jane Eyre) or a crazy old maid who wears her wedding dress every day (like Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s 1860-1861 Great Expectations), step away from the candle! 

Consumption

Yes, you’ll still die. But you’ll look beautiful doing it, just like many Victorian heroines. “Consumption, I am aware, is a flattering malady,” Charlotte Bronte wrote in 1849. I’ll take her word for it.

What other literary deaths have I missed? Do you have a favorite strange nineteenth-century character ending? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

My nineteenth-century-set novel, Bronte’s Mistress, which includes one example from this list, is available in hardcover, paperback, audiobook, and e-book right now. For regular updates on my blog and writing, sign up to my monthly digital newsletter below.

Get updates on my writing

* indicates required

Email Address * 

A Victorian Alphabet: P is for Pregnancy

The 2008 BBC adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbevilles (1891) has gone down in my family folklore. Gemma Arterton as Tess appeared in shot cradling her child (Sorrow) and my then boyfriend looked around the room in confusion, uttering the immortal words ‘where did the baby come from?’.

Naturally we all (especially my younger sister) found the question hysterical, but he had a point - the adaptation, like the novel, had skimmed over nine months of pregnancy and the moment of the child’s conception, with its corresponding questions of consent, had been suggestive, rather than overt, in its dramatisation. While in the case of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, censorship had altered this portion of the novel, this anecdote is simply a reliving the experience of many inexperienced readers of Victorian novels for whom babies appear apparently unexpected, as if no one, even the mother, expected them beforehand.

So, for those new to picking up implied pregnancies, here are some top ‘clues’ that a child may be on its way:

1. The disappearing act: A major female character (usually recently married) seems to ‘disappear’ from the text for a while. During pregnancy, women who could afford to often led a relatively inactive lifestyle and stayed indoors. And not doing so was regarded as inappropriate, and potentially dangerous for the child (see the May family’s concern for Flora in Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1871) which I reviewed recently). This means characters who played a large role in a novel during their girlhood can drop dramatically out of view when pregnant, for instance Thomasin Yeobright in Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878).

2. Delicacy: A husband shows excessive concern for his wife’s wellbeing. If a husband expresses worry over his wife completing a seemingly innocuous task (like walking somewhere or riding in a carriage), odds on, she’s pregnant (although she could also be consumptive…).

3. Condition: Anyone reference’s a female character’s ‘condition’. They don’t mean she has a headache. She’s definitely pregnant.

4. Relationships: If a female character appears to have had sex before marriage, she’ll probably become pregnant – it’s the way her actions can have consequences in plot terms (think Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-3)). Likewise, using true novelistic logic, if a marriage is happy, there are likely to be children, whereas unhappy marriages will be fruitless or result in potentially morally vindictive infant death (think Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861)).

I recently finished reading George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894), which was a marked contrast to this. The novel was seen as shocking at the time because of its liberality and explicitness and Esther’s pregnancy (while unmarried) comprises a large part of this. We are aware of the pregnancy from the very moment that Esther is:

‘She did not think – her mind was lost in the vague sensation of William, and it was in this death of active memory that something awoke inside her, something that seemed to her like a flutter of wings; her heart seemed to drop from its socket, and she nearly fainted away, but recovering herself she stood by the kitchen table, her arms drawn back and pressed to her sides, a death-like pallor over her face, and drops of sweat on her forehead. The truth was borne in upon her.’

We are told:

‘There was still the hope that she might be mistaken; and this hope lasted for one week, for two, but at the end of the third week it perished, and she abandoned herself in prayer.’

It’s about as close as a nineteenth-century novel comes to actively discussing a woman’s menstrual cycle.

When Esther goes into labour we are similarly allowed access to her feelings and impressions, her fear at seeing ‘the basins on the floor, the lamp on the round table, and the glint of steel instruments’ while surrounded by the noise of other women’s screams in the hospital, and her sense of shame at realising how many people will see her unclothed. This is how Esther reacts to a young doctor – ‘Oh no, not him, not him Not him, not him, he is too young! Do not let him come near me!’. She is met by laughter but her response is an internalisation of the silence surrounding pregnancy which the other novels are part of – a dramatisation of the trauma pregnancy and labour entails for those to taught to cover up and hide.

What should be ‘Q’ in my Victorian Alphabet? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Mary Elizabeth Braddon - feminist? The Secret Victorianist blogs for FWSA

Illustration for Joshua Haggard's Daughter (1876)

I check out the feminist credentials of the sensational Mary Elizabeth Braddon over on the Feminist & Women's Studies Association blog!

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!

Misconceptions about Victorian Literature

In a previous post I took on the view that Victorian fiction is by default long and unwieldy by recommending some shorter works you might want to give a go. Today it’s time to debunk a few more myths about nineteenth-century writing which I've come across whenever I tell people what I like to read.

1. There’s no sex: Yes, yes – we all know those Victorians. They fainted at a glimpse of ankle, right, and covered up table legs. They were all so prudish it’s a miracle they had any children at all, regardless of the massive population increase in the UK in the period, and the example of the very fertile monarch herself. Victorian literature is crammed with sex, even if the novels are (thankfully) not quite Fifty Shades of Grey. Try George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893) for discussion of prostitution and bawdry, Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) deals with rape and John Sutherland even detects a reference to sodomy in Hardy’s earlier The Woodlanders (1886-7). Meanwhile, Ellen Wood’s bestselling sensation novel East Lynne (1861) centres on a heroine who commits adultery because she wants to, finds her lover attractive and is bored by her dependable husband, in a initial plotline which could easily be taken from a modern paperback (before a railway disaster, facial disfigurement and high levels of infant mortality situate it firmly in the 1860s!). If you want even more, you can always trust the French to turn things up a notch, but once you've glutted yourself on Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1851), I’d suggest turning to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s A Doctor’s Wife (1863). Laurie Garrison argues surprisingly convincingly that while here the heroine Isabel doesn't commit adultery like her model Emma Bovary, her novel-reading obsession is code for an addiction to masturbation. Erotic rewrites of Victorian novels are hot property for publishers right now, but often the sexual content is already there in the originals.

The Secret Victorianist spots Wuthering Heights erotica on sale at a European airport

2. It’s only for girls: First up, this is sexist. And I very much doubt Dickens, Trollope, Tennyson, Browning and the rest of the century’s celebrated male writers would agree. My guess is when people say this they mean that the literature is all about marriage and relationships, even if these (whisper it) obviously affect men too. But don’t despair, those who’d rather die than wear pink, there are battles (try Walter Scott and Alfred, Lord Tennyson), trade union disputes (Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855)), aliens (H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898)) – all sorts of things girls couldn't possibly understand.

3. It’s very romantic: The reality is that reading nineteenth-century novels has seen my romantic notions disposed of as brutally as Marianne Dashwood’s. Marriage is a mercantile business and the century’s novelists are much more likely to go into the details of household economy (cf. particularly Braddon’s Hostages to Fortune (1875)), than rhapsodise over weddings. Marriage ceremonies are, despite their ubiquitous concurrence with end credits in television adaptations, usually dispensed with in their entirety – to take three famous examples, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). When they are detailed, it is also for their legal irregularity (Wilkie Collins’s ‘Miss or Mrs?’ (1872) and The Law and the Lady (1875).

4. It’s all about the rich people: It doesn't get much grittier than Arthur Morrison’s tale of London slum life A Child of the Jago (1896), or Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), set the other side of the Atlantic. Inner city life in all its squalor and violence is rendered hyper-realistically, with Morrison’s attention to dialect particularly impressive. Both works are the products of research and firsthand experience – unapologetically un-sanitised and not for the faint-hearted.

Follow me on Twitter @SVictorianist and like the Facebook page for updates!