Detective fiction of the 1860s - 1880s needs smart reading and careful handling

(This is a version of a paper I delivered at the VPFA 10th Anniversary Conference in July 2018)

It is almost universally acknowledged that detective fiction is a conservative genre: “detective fiction offered, and indeed still offers, the illusion of security and safety and continuity in what was becoming a disordered, insecure and disturbing world.” (Heather Worthington.  Key Concepts in Crime Fiction, 2011, p xvii). By solving crimes and making the culprit face justice time after time, the genre formula reconfirms the social status quo and prevailing ideas of law and order. Yet the pleasure of reading detective fiction is in the thrill of the chase, the experience of uncertainty, the slow reveal of criminal cunning and coming face to face with homicidal maniacs.

How do we reconcile the moral value of these two halves of the genre formula: the crime and the resolution? We read detective stories because we like the threat to the social order that crime brings, but really we read them because we like the reconfirmation of that social order that comes in the end. Is detective fiction for timid fuddy-duddies who like the mild frisson of dark mysteries and cunning plots by dastardly villains, only to see a crossword-like puzzle neatly solved and their cosy middle-class world order maintained by heroic detectives?

The usual method of academics is to apply the recognised, unquestioned genre formula to a story and see how it fits, i.e. look for signs of Sherlock Holmes-like detection leading to resolutions with public justice in Victorian popular novels (like The Moonstone) and then label them as detective stories. I want to challenge this approach and the view of all detective fiction as an exclusively re-assuring and conservative genre.

We should first recognize that the 1860s, the  high-Victorian decade when detective fiction emerged in the form we recognize it, was a very different time from the 1890s and the lead-up to the First World War, when the modern genre formula solidified into its present shape. We must be much more sensitive to the aspirations and interests of Victorian authors who dabbled with crime and detection in their novels. They may not have been very interested in the puzzle aspect of a detective story at all; they may not have felt the need to bolster the prevailing social order by meeting out justice at the end. Instead, for them, detective story may have served a different purpose.

As Worthington recognizes: “A significant turning point in the evolution of crime fiction was World War I” (xvii) and “Detective fiction with its implicit promise of the preservation of the social status quo, was ideal for this audience.” (Ibid.) I argue that it is inappropriate and misleading to assume that the genre formula of detective fiction and the ideas and ideals embedded in it leading up to and after the Great War can be unquestioningly applied to stories with detection written and published between the 1860s and 1880s. The world changed radically while detective fiction developed. And we must not shoehorn early detective stories into the straitjacket of a later genre formula and assign the same interests, aims and values to stories separated by half a century and a devastating world war.

James Payn was one of the early authors whose stories often included crime, mystery and detection. His Found Dead is a murder mystery and a detective story, published in 1869, the year that separated The Moonstone from Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, two seminal novels for detective fiction. In many ways, Found Dead is a missing link between them.

Payn’s novel opens with a bucolic country scene in Breakneckshire: It is early morning at Mordan Hall in the village of Allgrove. Squire Frank Blissett is “booted and spurred … [he] sniffs the misty air almost like the hounds he burns to follow.” (2). Frank Blisset is a thoroughly good man, “the more you get to know him, the better you like him.” (3) It is quickly established that Squire Blissett has a devoted, invalid wife Lotty and a fairy-like, charming, 16-year-old daughter Christie, and that should anything happen to the Squire, Mordan Hall will go to his debt-laden, morally dubious, artist brother Fred who recently retired from the army in India. Then Squire Blissett rides off to join the local hunt and to meet his death on a lonely stretch of a country track.

Squire Blissett is found by his groom Robert, lying face down with the back of his head bashed in. The second person on the scene is Doctor Fungus, an eccentric doctor with antiquarian interests and Sherlock Holmes’s methods. Doctor Fungus examines the body and the scene and concludes: “Good God! It is as I suspected – there has been some foul play.” (32) The local magistrate tells Dr Fungus: “For God’s sake, don’t pursue this discussion.” (34) Dr Fungus is told to keep quiet about his findings, for the sake of the Squire’s family and for the peace of the community.

At “the close of that same day” (39) the scene moves to London, where a tall, gaunt, “coffee-coloured” (44), “anxious and nervous” (41) man with a comb-over (44) rings the bell of a night refuge. Artist Fred Blissett has come in search of picturesque poverty to model for his painting. Instead he finds Charlie Steen, a handsome young man of 17, “his limbs were shapely and well-grown, exhibiting no sign of protracted want and hardship” (54). Charlie is an orphaned son of an army officer who served in India. Fred offers him a job as an artist’s assistant (57). “Be docile, be obedient, that’s all I ask.” (83) Fred tells Charlie and takes him to his bachelor apartments (62), where in the morning “in a gorgeous dressing-gown … [Charlie] … looked as handsome and delicate a young gentleman as ever captivated a landlady.” (65) When the news of Squire Blissett’s death arrives, Fred sends Charlie to Mordan Hall as his representative (96).

At the inquest for Squire Blissett’s death, the community and particularly its leading member Mr Mellish expect the verdict of accidental death, “unless that little Fungus, who has certainly a maggot in his brain, should make himself obnoxious.” (135) Dr Fungus duly does and, following his evidence for murder, the open verdict of “found dead” is returned (141).

By now Charlie has fallen in love with Christie Blissett and finds himself at home at Mordan Hall. Mrs Blissett does not accept the open verdict: “He was murdered, Sir.”(148) She declares to Charlie “His blood calls from the earth to you, Charlie Steen, and you must see justice done upon his slayer.” (Ibid.) The reward, Mrs Blissett hints, might be Christie’s hand in marriage (154).

There are various, quite clumsy clues of red stains on a suit (73), Fred’s sketch of the location of the murder (158) that he then quickly erases (166), railway timetables (172, 180) and, this is the clincher, an ancient coin known to have been carried by the Squire at the time of his death (14, 213). Through his detective work Charlie discovers that Fred murdered Squire Blissett. We are only halfway through the story.

In the second half of the novel, narrative interest centres on the relationship between Fred and Charlie, the murderer and the detective. The nature of these individual characters, with their past experiences shaping their present reaction, now guides the events. The choices they make shape the story.

Charlie Steen has found a welcoming and supportive community in Allgrove: “For the first time in his life, he was living among friends.” (193). He is offered support to go to Oxford (185-6). Mr Mellish helps him to retrieve a small inheritance (200). He is in love with Christie and buys her a piano (202). Charlie, with his colonial background and orphan status is an outsider longing for a home, but with a debt of gratitude towards Fred who first rescued him from destitution. Charlie pursues Fred as the amateur detective but he also provides an alibi for Fred (222) and later lies to protect him (297).

Fred, who shares Charlie’s Indian connection, is also an outsider exiled from the Allgrove idyll. With his financial worries and artistic lifestyle he is a lonely and restless creature haunting the edges of the Blissett family circle. Fred’s feelings towards Charlie are ambivalent throughout; he offers to support the young man, but also desires to exploit him and his good looks.

Fred’s sanity keeps being questioned (98, 104, 172, 182, 227): “he is touched in upper decks,” (104) “there was always a screw loose in Master Frederick” (128). When his guilt becomes apparent, it becomes the source of his madness: “He has something on his mind which is wearing him to thread, which is hurrying him into the grave.” (227). In Fred Blissett’s, as in Lady Audley’s case, middle-class criminality must be linked to mental illness.

Charlie holds Fred’s fate in his hands. The detective has solved the case, but only the detective and the reader know this. How do you think the tale will end? Charlie and Christie will obviously marry. Fred Blissett clearly has to vanish and remain childless in order for Christie and Charlie to take over Mordan Hall in a happy ending. If this is a sensation novel, Charlie will call Mr Mellish and Doctor Fungus and together they will bundle Fred off to a lunatic asylum (possibly in Belgium). If this is a detective story, Charlie will call in the law and bring Fred to justice. What happens in Found Dead is more disturbing and more radical than either of these scenarios.

Charlie does two things: first he forces a confession from Fred and demands he stays away from Allgrove (309). He also demands that Fred remains single (Ibid.). The impact of this ‘punishment’ are significant for both Charlie and Fred. Secondly, Charlie does what Dr Fungus refused to do: he keeps quiet: “that dread secret … was left a secret to the end.” (323) Charlie marries Christie and becomes the ideal country Squire (324). Charlie keeps the ancient coin that Squire Blissett was carrying when he was murdered. He locks it in a cabinet. Sometimes when he is alone he takes it out to remind himself of the past and, the novel ends, “in that coin lies the secret of his own success in life.” (326) The implications of these understated final words of the novel are jaw-dropping: the detective reaps the reward for murder. For personal gain (to get the girl and the estate) and to avoid scandal, Charlie keeps the murder a secret and forces the reader into complicity. The murder is kept under lock and key in the country house library, to be taken out and contemplated at leisure, just like this novel might be. The social order is not restored to robust health after disruption by crime, instead social order is revealed to be a fiction maintained by the detective and the reader sharing a criminal secret.

It has been suggested that Dickens, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was following Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone in writing a detective story, further developing Collins’s character-based approach, as Collins wrote in his Preface, “to trace the influence of character on circumstances.” But Edwin Drood is much closer in some aspects to Found Dead: John Jasper is a man battling with his own demons, just like Fred Blissett. The narrative interest is not only centred on solving the crime, but on the psychological impact of the crime on the individual. Where Found Dead is much more radical than The Moonstone (we do not know this about Edwin Drood) is in the way it leaves the fictional detective and reader as the only ones who know the truth, and who must keep it a secret to maintain respectability and prosperity.

At the start we asked the question: how can detective fiction be morally subversive and ultra-conservative at the same time? Found Dead suggests that the question is false: the detective genre format did not come about as a short thrill of crime ending in the triumphant re-confirmation of the existing social order. Detective fiction developed as a natural extension of sensation fiction as a genre that questioned the moral foundations of society and explored the moral character of individuals. There is no conservative respectable status quo without a subversive underside of crime. Each is required to define and give substance to the other. They are two sides of the same coin (an ancient coin locked up in a country house cabinet, in this case). James Payn’s 1869 detective story Found Dead shows us, how crime is an essential part of the social order and cannot be excluded from it, and how our heroes, even detective heroes, are driven by selfish impulses as well as noble ones, like all of us.

The Importance of an Impressionable Hero

After the dramatic scene at the end of chapter six in Driven Home, George succumbs to brain-fever. He recovers, but although he can remember everything up to the moment when he and Carlos set of for Longman’s Drift, he cannot recall the events that took place there:

“Then utter forgetfulness, and not only forgetfulness; for with it came that painful sensation that I have experienced when endeavouring to grasp the idea of Eternity— a conception of vast space that has no beginning and no end. Superadded to this was a persuasion that some horror lurked underneath the partial and temporary veil which had clouded my memory, and which it would be folly to uplift.” (Driven Home, Chapter 7)

For the sake of the plot as much as for his own peace of mind, George does not seek to find out what happened that fateful night. Instead, “I became an enthusiastic farmer. … drinking and high play were completely abandoned.” (Ibid.). Time passes, but one day George again feels the irresistible power of some supernatural agent in his life: “it was absolutely necessary for me to return to London. … ” (Ibid.):

“Day and night, waking or sleeping, this irresistible power drove me on. No occupation, however absorbing, could at last, even for a moment, enable me to withdraw my mind from this one subject. The pressure on my brain became intolerable; and at last, perforce, I was obliged to subordinate my own volition to that of the unseen power, and I determined to start for England as soon as I could make the necessary arrangements.” (Ibid.)

An attentive reader will have an idea what might be driving George home. George might have an idea too, if he did not suffer from amnesia. Because he has already experienced the force of the supernatural agency in his life twice before (Driven Home, Chapters 4 and 6), he does not question the reason for experiencing it once more or link it to the events at Longman’s Drift (Driven Home, Chapter 7). The two earlier occasions are a pair of red herrings to mask the significance of the third experience, which now has some kind of a logical explanation.

George’s amnesia is a good example of the awkward tricks Victorian authors had to use in order to deal with the gradual unravelling of a mystery. In order for the following events to appear mysterious and frightening to George, in order for him to slowly make sense of them and piece the solution together, George has to start in a state of cluelessness. George’s amnesia is a distant (poor?) relative to Franklin Blake’s somnambulism in The Moonstone or John Jasper’s opium dream in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Once back in England, George continues to be haunted by strange spirits and the plot advances through a series of fortuitous coincidences. George meets Mrs Blythswood on the train. When he then suffers from nightmares, the doctor diagnoses “over-excited nerves” and sends him to the seaside town of Shelterbourne to recover (Driven Home, Chapter 8). This town is by coincidence where Mrs Blythswood resides, as well as the villain of the story, and the villain’s victim and her son. It is handy that Shelterbourne should be so popular.

Mrs Blythswood is a young widow; she was an abused wife: “the malignity and ingenuity of the persecution to which she had been subjected at the hands of her husband were almost incredible.” (Driven Home, Chapter 9) This abominable abuse took the somewhat suspect form of forbidding her to dress in mourning when her mother died on her way to America, or “to receive any newspapers which could have given her any details of the event.” (Ibid.)

In Shelterbourne, George joins a pleasant “whist coterie” at a club (Ibid.). Here, one afternoon, Doctor Erbach, the villain of the piece makes his appearance:

“Arriving at the club one afternoon, I observed among the intending players a stranger, whose appearance exercised at once an extraordinary effect over me. ... There was nothing really repulsive or alarming in the tall and active figure, and dark and somewhat handsome face, to account for the horror and repugnance which his presence caused me. It was the expression of his dark and deep-set eyes that so instantly and peremptorily commanded attention. There was a look of power, of unscrupulousness, in them,— a look which seemed to say, "No pity can restrain me in the pursuit of any object I may have in view,"— a look such as a successful necromancer might have worn, who, by the sacrifice of human victims, had acquired a familiarity with the secrets and powers of an unseen and supernatural world ; and yet, with this expression there seemed mingled a look of terror and anxiety, such as a commonplace murderer might have worn in the interval between the deed of blood and apprehended moment of discovery." (Driven Home, Chapter 9)

George assigns Dr Erbach typical qualities of a sensational villain. The first quality is the stranger’s immediate “extraordinary effect.” He does not impress with his physique or bodily strength; there is “nothing really repulsive or alarming” in his figure. Instead, his uncanny power is psychological and it is concentrated in his “dark and deep-set eyes.” The portrait of the villain is built up from the impression he makes on George. George imagines him to be an evil master of supernatural forces like “a successful necromancer.” He is also like “a commonplace murderer” on the run. The first image is magnificent and frightening, the second is despicable and doomed. This villain, by first impressions, is both a formidable opponent and one that can, and will, be vanquished.

At the whist table, partnered with Dr Erbach, George has the most horrifying experiences yet of the ghosts that haunt him. There are now two of them: a man and a child; and they are pointing a finger at the doctor. George is overwhelmed with terror:

“A sudden unreasoning horror of the doctor, who seemed to be the centre of such mysterious revelations, took possession of me, and I resolved that I would not lose consciousness in his presence, if by any effort I could retain it.” (Ibid.)

But as soon as the doctor leaves the club, George’s nerves get the better of him: “I heard his footsteps on the pavement outside, I fell fainting to the floor.” (Ibid.)

George Wardour is no Bruce Willis. Much could be said about the masculinity of sensational heroes. They are young, professional or at least educated men (like Robert Audley, Franklin Blake, Walter Hartright or even John Jasper) well in touch with their feminine sides. They may be athletic and fond of field sports, but they are not strangers to tingling nerves, palpitations and fainting. Much has been written about heroines of sensation fiction, but so far less of heroes. In “Sensation Fiction, Gender, Identity,” Tara McDonald first identifies flamboyant villains and easily duped husbands as typical men featured in sensation novels, but she goes on to suggest “Yet perhaps the most significant development in male characterization in the sensation genre is a third type: the amateur detective.” (in The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, Ed . by Andrew Mangham. [2013], p136).

MacDonald argues that “Playing detective, then, offers these characters tools that are vital for personal and professional fulfilment.” (Ibid.). Men who take on the role of detective in sensational narratives, do not just get the girl and, often, the country house, but they come of age through the process of detection. Sensation novels, then, can be seen as a kind of Bildungsroman for their young male protagonists.

It is essential that George faints. Throughout Driven Home, it is imperative that the hero goes through states of emotional turmoil: brain-fever, fainting, incapacitating fear, hallucinations or hauntings (depending on whether you believe in ghosts). George, like a good sensational hero, is teetering on the verge of madness. First, it is essential for the narrative that its protagonist experiences all the horror and excitement of the events vividly in order to transmit the same sensations to the reader more effectively through sympathetic osmosis. Secondly, it is also essential for the plot, so that information can be withheld (here through selective amnesia) or given (here through ghostly visitation); or to enable events to take place (here George can be moved unconscious to the mysterious doctor’s house in order to wake up to experience new horrors there).

 Once awake, the unknown power leads George to open the doctor’s notebook and discover a whole career of evil in them. He comes across a series of hideous images of medical experimentation on animals. It concludes with a picture of a child, hinting at a possible continuation of the series (Driven Home, Chapter 9). In a state of terror, George flees from Doctor Erbach’s house, which “now seemed to me a den of murder and mystery.” (Driven Home, Chapter 10). At this point in the narrative, the mystery it at its most entangled: George is labouring under some supernatural curse, Doctor Erbach is clearly evil and up to no good, the identity of Mrs Blythswood’s abusive husband is still in question, and there is a child in danger somewhere. How will George resolve all these questions? He listens to an old wife’s tale. Mrs Trewalney, whom George meets by coincidence in the woods after his mad flight (Driven Home, Chapter 10), has all the answers, it seems. In chapters eleven and twelve, we hear Mrs Trelawney’s story. Now George is certain that Doctor Erbach is evil and must be stopped. When George finds unidentified (possibly human) remains near the doctor’s house, he is convinced a crime has taken place.

The police are of no assistance to George. They laugh at him. George has no other way but to try to catch the villain himself and he sets off in pursuit. On a train he encounters an agitated young man, who tells him a story that could have come from “one of the sensational periodicals of the day” (Driven Home, Chapter 14): Doctor Erbach has had a most abrupt and brutal end. It is unexpected but, in a way, quite modern.  George experiences a great sense of relief, his ghosts depart and leave him to marry Mrs Blythswood. The remains of Doctor Erbach’s (assumed) victim disappear when a building site is cleared for a new housing estate. Sensational crimes by monstrous villains are hidden beneath modern domestic life.

Despite the clumsy supernatural elements and the bundle coincidences that provide the plot, Arkwright’s novel is clever. It remains true to its initial proclamation: in the end, there is no actual evidence to support George’s story. He cannot prove that the ghosts ever existed. Neither is there any evidence of Dr Erbach’s crime – the remains George discovers are never examined by anyone else than George. This is the metafictional twist at the end of the tale: Arkwright, the barrister, has constructed his novel in a way that all the sensational events, except for the incident at Longman’s Drift, which does have witnesses, may be wild, mad imaginings resulting from brain fever brought on by a traumatic experience. The sensational story of Driven Home may have taken place only in the narrator’s fevered imagination.

A Narrative Contraption

It is generally maintained that the intention of The New Magdalen was to win sympathy for the fallen woman and argue that not all women considered sinful and lost deserve the opprobrium meted out to them by the respectable society. If this is what Collins hoped to achieve, The New Magdalen is not very successful. Collins has broken the cardinal rule of fiction 'show not tell.' Mercy Merrick's backstory - her years of sin  - are glossed over in a couple of explanatory scenes where Mercy tells her story - first guardedly to Grace Roseberry (The New Magdalen, Chapter 2), and, towards the end, to Julian Grey and Horace Holmcroft (The New Magdalen, Chapter 27). At no stage of the narrative do we learn any details of Mercy's past degradation. This shameful past is a stated fact and does not provide any dramatic revelations in the plot. There are only continuing and increasingly tedious statements by Mercy that she has lost her virtue for ever.

Mercy Merrick has internalized her own immorality and unworthiness, and it is her feeling of shame that provides the proof of her fallen state. This, we can argue, is of course also the necessary proof of her innate morality and goodness. Only good people can feel such intensity of guilt. But it makes boring reading. Mercy can keep wringing her hands and bang on about her own shame until the cows come home, we would much rather read of the events that caused that shame in the first place. The New Magdalen is reluctant to be specific and is far from explicit as far the fall of woman is concerned.

Even if The New Magdalen does not quite engage the reader's sympathies in the manner possibly intended by Collins, it does demonstrate his masterful skill as an author who can hook his reader and keep her reading. The narrative sequences and individual scenes are dovetailed and designed very meticulously to try to ensure that the reader remains in a constant state of anticipation and mild excitement - this is the aim of any sensation novel. It is also a requirement of serial fiction: to make the reader desperate to know what happens next. It is quite astonishing how The New Magdalen can keep the reader's interest despite being so very contrived. It manages to stretch our suspension of disbelief to the very edge of snapping.

As Catherine Peters observes in The King of Inventors (1991), "The narrative leans heavily on the reader, never presenting alternative points of view." (Peters (1991), p338). There is no mystery for the reader to solve; the heroine's secret is out in the open. The tension that is created by the other characters not knowing the truth about Mercy Merrick is not sufficient, argues Peters: "there is no suspense and no mystery (Ibid.). I agree: the suspense in the novel does not come from the other characters slowly unmasking Mercy as an impostor. This was never intended to be a detective story. The suspense, it would appear, is expected to come from Mercy's inner struggle to confess her crime and the obstacles that the plot incidents and the conditions of the respectable society throw in her way. This is not really achieved in the narrative. Instead, the suspense comes almost entirely from the reader's cat-and-mouse game with the author: waiting in a state of amused excitement to see what kind of a melodramatic trick the author can think of next to stop Mercy's secret from being revealed. This is where Collins comes up with some surprises and red herrings.

From the moment the German doctor revives the real Grace Roseberry at the end of Scene 1 (The New Magdalen, Chapter 5), the game is on. When Julian Grey informs Lady Janet that he wishes to introduce a lady he has taken an interest in, Lady Janet may suspect Julian has finally decided to marry, but the reader conversed in conventions of melodrama can be in no doubt that this mysterious lady will turn out to be the real Grace. This is more or less immediately confirmed with heavy-handed foreshadowing when Mercy is introduced to Julian as 'Grace:'

"The instant she pronounced the name, Julian started as if it was a surprise to him. ...A complete change had come over him; and it dated from the moment when his aunt has pronounced the name that was not her name - the name she had stolen!" (The New Magdalen, Chapter 8.)

The reader is led to anticipate that the plot will consist of the slow reveal of Mercy's deception - Grace will appear at some stage. The very next chapter confirms that with a "vindictive look" the recovering Grace Roseberry has asked the authorities to "Find Mercy Merrick!" (The New Magdalen, Chapter 9). The narrative has shifted our expectations to anticipate Grace's developing battle to win back her name and expose Mercy.

However, only a few pages later Grace Roseberry arrives at Maplethorpe House and confronts Lady Janet. Mercy Merrick walks into the room; sees the real Grace and drops "senseless on the floor." (The New Magdalen, Chapter 11). This is the first of quite brilliant plot twists. Surely, this is the end of the road for Mercy. How is it possible that the deception can go on? It does.

Grace Roseberry sneaks into Maplethorpe House. When she discovers Mercy alone, she approaches with her "eyes brightened with vindictive pleasure." We believe that Mercy has been saved by a whisker, when men's voices make Grace withdraw behind the billiard-room door at the end of Chapter 15. In Chapter 16, Mercy decides to do a deal with Grace and "was now eager to devise a means of finding her way privately to an interview with Grace." (The New Magdalen, Chapter 16).  Unfortunately, Grace escapes from the house unseen and Julian and Mercy just catch a glimpse of the closing billiard-room door. The plot twists on tortuously to prolong Mercy's moral agony.

 When Grace Roseberry is threatened with madness, Mercy Merrick's conscience forces her towards a confession. But she cannot bring herself to utter the words. Instead she decides to confess in a letter. (The New Magdalen, Chapter 20). After trying her best, for the length of a chapter, to get the words on the paper she suddenly realizes that writing is wrong, her fiance Horace has a right to hear the truth from her: "Cost her what it might to avow the truth to him with her own lips, the cruel sacrifice must be made." (The New Magdalen, Chapter 21). This is another example how the narrative turns, with people entering and exiting, changing their minds and having minor emotional break-downs, always postponing the anticipated moment of truth. There is even a moment where the arrival of unseen visitors at the gates of Maplethorpe House conveniently (to the plot) makes it difficult for Lady Janet to keep Julian and Mercy from meeting in the library: "Would there be time enough to get rid of the visitors, and to establish her adopted daughter in the empty drawing room, before Julian appeared?" (The New Magdalen, Chapter 15). It would be spoiling the plot to reveal whether she succeeded.

The narrative contrives to prolong the suspense by a series of these slightly comical stratagems. It is not successful; it does not grip in the sense of transporting the reader to the world of its characters. But the narrative is not tedious or boring either: it grips in the same way we are amused, even fascinated by the intricate operations of a clever contraption. The New Magdalen fails in its didactic mission, and it fails as a sensation novel. It succeeds as a delicately manufactured machine of melodrama.

"You Are as False as Hell!"

The second scene of The New Magdalen takes place in Lady Janet's Maplethorpe House where Mercy Merrick is now installed as a companion as 'Grace Roseberry'. Because Mercy's impersonation of Grace is the one single plot line in this tightly constructed novel, Collins has two challenges: he has to manage our sympathies and he has to keep us in suspense. Mercy must be in constant danger of being revealed as a fake and readers must be sufficiently emotionally engaged in the story to care about her or about the victims of her deception. These sources of narrative tension must be stretched across the whole length of the novel.

Mercy's 'goodness' is established from the start. After four months of living in the luxury of Maplethorpe House, she "pines under the slow torment of constant self-reproach." She "sits in the grim shadow of her own terrible secret." (The New Magdalen, Chapter 6). When Lady Janet expresses her pleasure of having 'Grace' (as she of course calls Mercy) with her, Mercy

"was seized with a sudden horror of her own successful fraud. The sense of her degradation had never been so bitterly present to her as at that moment. If she could only confess the truth - if she could innocently enjoy her harmless life at Maplethorpe House - what a grateful happy woman she could be!" (The New Magdalen, Chapter 7).

In thick, melodramatic strokes Mercy is painted as a tragic heroine in a terrible moral dilemma. She is appreciated, loved and admired. Horace Holmcroft has asked her to marry him. She has accepted him, but refuses to name the wedding date. Instead of enjoying all this comfort and financial safety offered to her, Mercy agonizes and suffers, she wages a constant battle with her dark, hidden secret of assumed identity. It is clear that much of the tension in the narrative is not going to come from others' attempts to detect Mercy's fraud, but from her own internal struggle with her conscience. Will she crack under pressure and 'fess up?

This approach centering on Mercy's internal struggles is essential if Collins wants to present Mercy as a sympathetic character and win the reader to her side. It is important for the narrative (you may call it Wilkie Collins's 'mission' here) to show Mercy Merrick as an inherently good woman despite her somewhat sordid past. It also gives a potentially interesting angle to the whole story: Although it is not his main focus in this plot-driven novel, Collins is depicting the effects of an immoral act on the mind of the main character. If we really go out on a limb, we might even suggest that with Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866), The New Magdalen is an early novel about the psychology of crime. Instead of a detective novel, this is what Peter Messent calls in The Crime Fiction Handbook (2013) "a transgressor narrative."

The events in the novel are presented as trials and tribulations for Mercy. Each step that brings closer her ultimate revelation as a fraud is a test for her. The first comes with the arrival of Julian Gray, Lady Roy's nephew, a preacher "immensely popular with women." (The New Magdalen, Chapter 7). Back in the women's refuge, a sermon by Julian made a strong impression on Mercy and she says that "From that time I have accepted my hard lot." (The New Magdalen, Chapter 2). Now just hearing that Julian's arrival is imminent Mercy is so confused that she agrees to marry Horace in a fortnight. "She was trembling from head to foot. ... There was a daze sensation in her; her mind felt stunned. She wondered vacantly whether she was awake or dreaming." She imagined Julian Grey in the room, listening to her and Horace. "Something in her shuddered and shrank at the bare idea of finding herself in the same room with him. ... She found herself crying silently without knowing why. A weight was on her head, a weariness was in all her limbs." (The New Magdalen, Chapter 7). And when he finally arrives, his effect on Mercy is equally cataclysmic: his voice "instantly set her trembling in every limb. She started up, and listened in breathless terror. ... She recovered herself sufficiently to hurry to the library door. Her hand shook so that she failed at first to open it." (The New Magdalen, Chapter 8). 

("Lady Janet! Lady Janet! don't leave me without a word!" by Charles S. Reinhart [?]. 1889. From http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/reinhart/nm7.html Scanned image by Philip V. Allingham)

Mercy's body trembles, pants and convulses her way through the narrative. Each moment of tension is accompanied by physical symptoms. The internal battle in her conscience is reflected in her bodily sensations. She faints (The New Magdalen, Chapter 12), becomes ill with nervous tension (The New Magdalen, Chapter 13). Later, in climactic scene suffocatingly thick with melodrama, Mercy contemplates suicide (The New Magdalen, Chapter 21). Her senses become obscured and unreliable making the world reflect her state of mind. Her body, it seems, is no longer under her control:

"Little by little she felt the enervating influences let loose on her, in her lonely position, by her new train of thought. Little by little, her heart began to sink under the stealthy chill of superstitious dread. Vaguely horrible presentiments throbbed in her with her pulses, flowed through with her blood. Mystic oppressions of hidden disaster hovered over her in the atmosphere of the room. The cheerful candlelight turned traitor to her and grew dim. Supernatural murmurs trembled round the house in the moaning of the winter wind. She was afraid to look behind her. On a sudden, she felt her own cold hands covering her face, without knowing when she had lifted them to it, or why." (The New Magdalen, Chapter 21).

As the story progresses Mercy's nervousness spreads to other characters. They too, begin to have odd feelings. When the real Grace Roseberry walks into the room, Julian, Horace and Lady Janet have their sympathies frozen, they feel a sudden petrifying embarrassment; they feel repelled (The New Magdalen, Chapter 11). Grace Roseberry's sanity is questioned, it is assumed she is trying to usurp Mercy's place and Mercy is the genuine Grace. (The New Magdalen, Chapter 20). As an aside, The New Magdalen has an excellent cameo appearance by a police-officer at the moment when Grace Roseberry is almost bundled off to a lunatic asylum:

"A man appeared in the open doorway.

He was not a gentleman; he was not a workman; he was not a servant. He was vilely dressed, in glossy black broadcloth. His frockcoat hung on him instead of fitting him. His waistcoat was too short and too tight over the chest. His trousers were a pair of shapeless black bags. His gloves were too large for him. His highly-polished boots creaked detestably whenever he moved. He had odiously watchful eyes - eyes that looked skilled in peeping through keyholes. His large ears, set forward like he ears of a monkey, pleaded guilty to meanly listening behind other people's doors. His manner was quietly confidential, when he spoke: inpenetrably self-possessed when he was silent. A lurking air of secret-service enveloped the fellow, like an atmosphere of his own, from head to foot. He looked all around the magnificent room, without betraying either surprise or admiration. He closely investigated every person in it with one glance of his cunningly-watchful eyes. Making his bow to Lady Janet, he silently showed her, as his introduction, the card that had summoned him. And then se stood at ease, self-revealed in his own sinister identity - a police-officer in plain clothes.

Nobody spoke to him. Everybody shrank inwardly, as if a reptile had crawled into the room." (The New Magdalen, Chapter 20).

This is a nice twist on the Victorian convention of declaring difficult and/or criminal middle-class women as mad. Grace haunts Maplethorpe House eavesdropping on others. In a brilliantly vehement scene she lets Mercy have it in a verbal tirade (The New Magdalen, Chapter 19), she shakes "her clenched hand with hysterical frenzy" calling for Justice! in front of Lady Janet (The New Magdalen, Chapter 11). But she is Mercy's victim. It would be monstrous for the narrative to allow her to be locked up. We are skirting very close to a truly terrifying scandal here. Mercy is a little slow on the uptake, but eventually she realizes that unless she confesses to her fraud, she will be responsible for the real Grace Roseberry being locked up as a mad woman. (The New Magdalen, Chapter 20). This is another one of her trials.

Horace Holmcroft, conservative and traditional English gentleman with a somewhat narrow mind, great fondness for gambling and respect for his mother and sisters, is the last person to realize what is going on - that Mercy Merrick is not who she says she is. When he finally catches on, he doubts his own sanity:

"My temper has been a good deal tried in this house; I have never been used to the sort of thing that goes on here - secrets and mysteries, and hateful, low-lived quarrels. We have no secrets and mysteries at home. ... I am not harassed at home by doubts of who people are, and confusion about names, and so on. I suspect the contrast weighs a little on my mind, and upsets it. They make me over-suspicious among them here - and it ends in my feeling doubts and fears that I can't get over; doubts about you, and fears about myself. I have got a fear about myself now. .... Does it strike you that I am at all wrong in my mind?" (The New Magdalen, Chapter 26). 

The reader, who hopefully has an equally harmonious home lacking in mysteries and secrets as Horace, has perhaps had her "nerves a little shaken" (Ibid.) just like him. However, hoping that the effects of the narrative on the reader were as strong as the effect of the same events on Horace is too optimistic. The abundance of emotions adds sensational colour to the narrative, but Collins is over-egging the pudding here, even for Victorian tastes. There is only so much wringing of hands we can take without either giggling or abandoning the novel altogether. The descriptions of the inner agonies and battles of the heroine fail to engage the sympathies of the reader. Collins is not Gustave Flaubert. Collins lacks economy and piles on the emotion and sensation so thickly that the reader is hardly left air to breathe. The portrait of Mercy Merrick as a good woman tragically fallen into a path of deception is not convincing. She should either enjoy what she has obtained by fraud and defend her position (and be a wicked Victorian beauty), or she should confess and move on (put the reader out of her misery). As a reader you no longer care, you just want it to end. But it does not, it just goes on and on. Despite teetering on the edge of frustration you keep reading, because Collins is doing something clever with his plot. He may not have won your sympathies for his somewhat shallow characters, but he does have you hooked by the narrative.