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.

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Review: Esther Waters, George Moore (1894)

George Moore

Esther Waters is a novel which has a kitchen maid as its heroine, morality as its subject, and a distaste for hypocrisy at its core. It is a novel which discusses what other nineteenth-century texts only hint at and appears strikingly modern, while still being embedded in its time (the slang of the race track, the conversation in the public house, journeying through London streets at night). Working class orphan Esther raises her illegitimate child alone in a world which is deeply hostile to her – but she is no Tess Durbeyfield. She faces poverty and homelessness, while never becoming a tragic figure, and exposes the faults of those around her through her forthright honesty and pragmatic approach to leading a moral life. 

For general readers: Esther Waters has an immediacy which is appealing to modern readers and its focus on working class characters is also attractive, given our interest in servants and worker characters, from TV shows like The Mill and Downton Abbey, to our tastes in Victorian stage comedy. Don’t expect pages of lengthy description or narrative exposition – this feels raw and real.

Yet the reading experience is a little uneven. Long sections of dialogue about racehorses can be hard work, even if our confusion is meant to mirror that of the initially naïve and unworldly Esther, brought up by the Plymouth Brethren, and so entirely ignorant of gambling. And there are leaps in time which can be a little unsettling, especially given it still seems something of a surprise for little Jackie, an illegitimate child in a novel, to survive his infancy.

The passages I found most affecting were those which dealt with the physical and emotional consequences of Esther’s pregnancy (dealt with in a previous post), the terrible position of wet nurses, divided from their own children to nourish richer women’s, and Jackie’s confusion when caught between his two parents. Esther’s response to the unexpected return of an absentee father rings very true, alternating between her possessive and protective feelings towards her child. 

For students: Esther Waters naturally complements the study of ‘fallen woman’ literature, nineteenth-century censorship, the influence of French novelists, especially Zola, and the move in the 1890s towards writing we may consider ‘modern’ in bent. But there are other topics worthy of critical attention.

The treatment of Esther’s fellow servant Sarah in the courtroom, tried for stealing from her employers to fuel her partner’s gambling addiction, is an interesting point of contrast to the treatment of more aristocratic and middle-class women in my earlier series looking at women in the dock and witness box.

The kind of healing companionship between women which the novel deals with, in Esther’s partnerships with Miss Rice and Mrs Barfield, could also prove fruitful for study. These pairings are unequal (with Esther always definitively in the role of servant) but offer an alternative to the suffering incurred by male/female sexual relationships, and reminded me of the conclusion to a later novel which similarly deals with illegitimacy (yet here where sexual relations cross class lines) – E.M. Forster’s 1910 Howards End.

Which lesser known nineteenth-century novel would you like the Secret Victorianist to review next? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

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!