A Book Fit for Women? - Mrs Henry Wood's Verner's Pride (1863)

In Mrs Henry Wood's (1814-1887) Verner's Pride (1863), Sibylla Verner is reading a French novel given to her by her new French maid Benoite. Her husband Lionel Verner comes in with a milliner's bill. An argument ensues and ...

"Sibylla petulantly threw the French book from her lap upon the table, and it fell down with its page open.

            Lionel's eyes caught its title, and a flush, not less deep than the preceding flush, darkened his brow. He laid his open palm on the page with an involuntary movement, as if he would guard it from the eyes of his wife. That she should be reading that notorious work!"

            "Where did you get this?" he cried. "It is not a fit book for you."

"There's nothing the matter with the book as far as I have gone."

"Indeed, you must not read it! Pray don't, Sibylla! You will be sorry for it afterwards."

"How do you know that it is not a fit book?"

"Because I have read it."

"There! You have read it! And you would like to deny the pleasure to me! Don't say you are never selfish."

"Sibylla! What is fit for me to read may be most unfit for you. I read the book when I was a young man ..."

Lionel instructs Sibylla to send the book out of the house "or to keep it under lock and key while it remains within it." (Verner's Pride, Chapter 50).

This is another reference to the dangerous and corrupting influence of Madame Bovary; what else could "that notorious work" be? The French novel is used here to demonstrate the erosion of Sibylla's moral character, or rather the revealing of Sibylla's true character, after her marriage to wealthy Lionel. It functions as shorthand to indicate sensual and self-centred wantonness. The scene also calls attention to the different expectations for men and women. What is fit for Lionel to read, especially when he was "a young man" is highly unsuitable for a lady and a wife like Sibylla. Sibylla's complaint that Lionel would deny her a pleasure he has enjoyed himself sounds both reasonable and audacious (depending on the reader's view on gender equality). Sibylla is both a confident woman questioning her husband's patronizing attitude, and a subversive woman, asking to experience the immoral pleasure only men are entitled to.

In 1836, at the age of 22, Miss Ellen Price married Mr Henry Wood and the couple spent the next twenty years in France. As Flaubert was writing Madame Bovary, Mrs Henry Wood was publishing short stories in English periodicals the New Monthly Magazine and Bentley’s Miscellany. Around the time Madame Bovary was published in volume form in 1856 and Flaubert was taken to court over its immorality in 1857, Mr Henry Wood's finances suffered a collapse and the family returned to England.

Mrs Henry Wood by Reginald Easton. Source: http://www.mrshenrywood.co.uk/

After this turn in their fortunes, Mrs Henry Wood turned into another Victorian female literary powerhouse who supported her family by publishing up to three novels a year and editing the magazine  Argosy. (For more information on her life and work see http://www.mrshenrywood.co.uk, especially a brief biography compiled by Michael Flowers.) In 1860 she won a novel competition with Danesbury House. After this came East Lynne (1861), one of the most famous Victorian sensation novels. Mrs Henry Wood's career was now truly launched and she began to spin out massive three-deckers at a frightening speed. The Channings and Lady Hallibutron's Troubles were both published in 1862. That same year she published a controversial A Life’s Secret anonymously. A year later she had The Shadow of Ashlydyat appear in instalments in the New Monthly at the same time as Verner’s Pride was appearing in Once a Week. In 1864, too, she brought out a short children’s novel William Allair; or Running Away to Sea as well as two massive three-deckers Lord Oakburn’s Daughters and Oswald Cray. She wrote thirty novels and over a hundred short stories. Her narratives have an element of suspense. They are plot-driven stories of mystery and romance, often involving crime. She also wrote stories about the super-natural.

"Nothing strikes the reader of East Lynne more than the extraordinary manner in which the mystery of each part of the plot is preserved. As the reader feels that he is moving in the different parts of the drama, and unconsciously feels himself deeply interested in its several characters, he almost trembles as each dangerous turning-point of the story is passed. East Lynne, we may truly say, is no ordinary novel."

(The Conservative, quoted in Charles W. Wood, Memorials of Mrs Henry Wood, 1894. Source: http://www.mrshenrywood.co.uk /contemporary.html)

We can contrast this glowing review for East Lynne with the following for Verner's Pride two years later:

"This book is one of those which it is hard to describe positively. It is not a bad nor even a stupid novel. Style, characters, incidents, sentiments, are all of them up to the mark of respectability, and might, indeed, be thought promising in the first essay of an untried writer. Yet, it is not easy to see what can be said for the story except that it is readable ... The marks of haste are visible in every part of this her last work - in the often careless writing, the ill-connected episodes, the profusion of incidents our of which a good plot might have been elaborated with moderate diligence and thought ..." (The Saturday Review, Feb1863. Source: http://www.mrshenrywood.co.uk /contemporary.html)

Verner's Pride, then, is not a very good novel and not one of Mrs Henry Wood's best works. Despite this, I would suggest that there are features in this novel which make it quite fascinating reading. Aspects of the novel that perhaps made it unsatisfactory for Victorian readers, may add value to the narrative for today's audience.

The interesting key themes of Verner's Pride  are visible in the scene quoted above, with Sibylla and Lionel arguing about the milliner's bill and the French novel. Verner's Pride is about gender-relations. Like East Lynne, the novel's attention is very much on women's lives and tribulations. The relationships between men and women, husbands and wives are central to the narrative. Digressions into the lives of the rural labourers and other country folk, away from the main plot and characters, may have been "ill-connected episodes, the profusion of incidents" to the reviewer in The Saturday Review, but many of them provide additional depth to the picture that the novel paints of the relations between men and women.

Verner's Pride is also about money and wealth and the role they play in the community. The narrative encompasses all levels of society and their interconnectedness in a rural community. An important part of how this community functions is based on wealth. Verner's Pride is a social study. Like many sensation novels, it depicts and comments on (and questions perhaps) how society functions. In addition, there is sex, murder, bigamy, ghosts and Mormons.

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.

The Tart with a Heart: Mercy Merrick

The New Magdalen opens with a very masculine setting far removed from society and convention: it is night-time in a French cottage on the frontier of a Franco-German war in 1870. The French have taken possession of the village, but a German counter-offensive is expected. Captain Arnault is reading despatches "by the light of a solitary tallow candle." In the kitchen of the cottage wounded soldiers lie on straw beds "under the care of a French surgeon and the English nurse attached to the ambulance." The surgeon comes in and requests that 'the English lady' might use the room while the Captain goes out, and the English nurse might keep her company. But under no circumstances must the women open the shutters of the single window and betray their position to the Germans. The surgeon calls into the kitchen to invite the women in, and we get the first view of our heroine:

"The nurse led the way - tall, lithe, and graceful - ...Pale and sad, her expression and her manner both eloquently suggestive of suppressed suffering and sorrow, there was an innate nobility in the carriage of the woman's head, an innate grandeur in the gaze of her large, grey eyes, and in the lines of her finely-proportioned face, which made her irresistibly striking and beautiful ..." (The New Magdalen, Chapter 1).

The second woman is "unusually pretty," "darker in complexion and smaller in stature." (Ibid.). She is timid and hesitant, "suffering from fatigue." While by no means unattractive, the English lady is very much left in the shadow of the magnificent nurse. Grace Roseberry introduces herself and asks for the nurse's name. She replies "Call me 'Mercy Merrick'" and the narrator rushes to question: "Had she given an assumed name? Was there some unhappy celebrity attached to her own name?" (The New Magdalen, Chapter 1). It is clear that Mercy is a woman with a past, but it is also worth noting that 'Mercy Merrick' is probably not her real name. She is already impersonating someone else.

Grace is on her way to England from Italy. Her mother died while they were living in Canada. Now, after her father's death, she has been left alone in the world and without means. Lady Janet Roy, a connection of his father's through marriage, "has consented to receive [Grace] as a companion and a reader." Since Grace's "education has been neglected" she cannot even become a governess: "I am absolutely dependent on this stranger who receives me for my father's sake."

After telling her own story, Grace presses Mercy to tell hers. Mercy becomes reluctant, defensive and very mysterious: "We never can be friends." "Don't tempt me to speak out ... you will regret it."  But of course she does speak out.

Mercy introduces the topic of prostitutes gently and in a round-about way: "have you ever read of your unhappy fellow-creatures (the starving outcasts of the population) whom Want has betrayed to Sin? ... Have you heard - when those starving and sinning fellow-creatures happen to be women - of Refuges established to protect and reclaim them?" When Grace nervously asks "What do you mean?" Mercy repeats: "Have you heard of the Refuges? Have you heard of the Women?" And then she tells Grace: "I was once one of those women." (The New Magdalen, Chapter 2)

In her biography of Collins, Catherine Peters calls Mercy Merrick one of "the soiled doves of his later fiction" (Peters, p298). The 'soiled dove' or, as Donald Thomas puts it in The Victorian Underworld (1998), "the figure of a Magdalene ripe for redemption" was popular and much debated: a woman who has fallen from 'the grace of God', lost her virtue and her innocence for no fault of her own or, at the most, because of a momentary moral lapse. William Holman Hunt's (1827-1900) famous painting The Awakening Conscience (1853) depicts one fallen woman coming to a realization about the sate of her life.

(Image from http://paintingdb.com/art/xl/7/6108.jpg)

This image of the 'soiled dove' was very much a cultural construct. Prostitution existed at all levels of society from high-class courtisans to street-walkers. Some of these women were wealthy enough to keep their own private households, some boarded in brothels, others had to borrow their clothes from their bawds to attract customers. Prostitution was seldom seen as a permanent way of life. Some women used it to subsidize their meagre earnings or to help them get through a rough patch in life. Others, undoubtedly, welcomed the independence and freedom offered by this occupation. A few women may even have been promiscuous by nature and quite liked the opportunity to have lots of sex. Prostitution in Victorian times was a vague concept and covered everything from kept mistresses to married women who took lovers and met them in 'houses of assignation' kept for the purpose. For a few, prostitution even offered a channel of upward social mobility. Catherine Walters, 'Skittles' secured herself the 8th Duke of Devonshire, Kate Cook got to call herself the Countess of Euston. Working as a prostitute generally was not an obstacle to marrying at any level of society.

With the Victorian interest in the conditions of the poor in society, they also studied the state of prostitution among the poor. Edwin Chadwick's Report . . . on an Enquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), William Acton's Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspect (1858) and Henry Mayhew's extensive London Labour and London Poor (1861-2) are all contemporary surveys. Prostitution was not seen as a separate vice, and it was not a crime.

Prostitution was a trade visible all over town from the fashionably promenading women accosting men in The Haymarket and Regent Street, to the brothels at the Ratcliffe Highway and the "soldiers' women" near the barracks and "sailors' women" near the docks. Every industrial town and manufacturing centre had its prostitutes. How does Mercy Merrick appear against this background?

Two things are worth considering here. First, the fallen woman with her virtue destroyed for ever and with no road back from perdition into the folds of polite and respectable society may well be a cultural construct and exist primarily in fiction and art. Secondly, The New Magdalen sold copies, but it did not cause a scandal. Collins's topic does not seem to have received many complaints, except from theatre critics. And as Peters has noted: "What might be read in private could not be acted in public, ..." (Peters, 339). It may be that today we expect the story of The New Magdalen to have been more sensational and outrageous, than it actually was at the time of its publication.

The New Magdalen may have been both behind and ahead of its time. It's publication at the beginning of the 1870s is in a juncture when attitudes towards prostitution and vice were changing significantly. In The Victorian Underworld (1998), Donald Thomas writes that the 1860s were "a decade of release from years of sombre austerity. Prostitution and flamboyant sexuality were a source of scandal but also an emblem of the new nightlife of the West End with its lamplit pleasure-gardens, assembly rooms, parks and casinos. The rebellion of a younger and more Bohemian generation of Victorians against its elders found expression in pleasures and provocation, a subversion of propriety through pornography and bawdry. .. By the 1880s, mid-century hedonism was checked." (Thomas, p7)

It is no coincidence that Crenmore Gardens in Chelsea closed in 1877 and the Argyll Rooms were closed in 1878. There were calls for banning of immoral French novels by Zola and Maupassant. The National Vigilance Association was established in 1885, Mrs Mary Jeffries, a keeper of several brothels for the well-to-do, was brought to trial the same year. The age of consent was finally raised to 16 (from 12) in 1885, after previous tries in 1881 and 1884 and a furious campaign spearheaded by the Pall Mall Gazette and W. S. Stead with his expose The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon.

 

Peters has called The New Magdalen "increasingly old-fashioned at a time when feminism was entering a new and positive phase" (Peters, p340), women, she suggests, no longer had to rely on deception and concealment as their only weapons in a male dominated society. At the same time, The New Magdalen anticipates the reaction against the 'gay' 1860s and a move to the straight-laced 1880s. Despite all its possible literary shortfalls, the social context of The New Magdalen is interesting. Peters writes that "Wilkie's Magdalen belonged to the jaded Victorian tradition of the woman 'fallen' through no fault of her own." (Peters, 339). I think this is dismissing Mercy Merrick too easily. There was no single 'Victorian tradition,' covering the whole of the 19th century. Mercy appeared at a time when attitudes to prostitution were changing.

In the opening chapters of The New Magdalen, the narrative prepares the way in a somewhat laboured fashion for Mercy's crime. Grace Roseberry has never met Lady Janet, her letter of introduction to this benefactress is in a letter-case she has shown to Mercy. Grace's education has been so neglected that Mercy can take her place without causing raised eye-brows. Both women have spent time in Canada around Port Logan. When Grace Roseberry opens the fatal shutter revealing their position to the Germans, she is promptly struck down by a German mortar. With Grace lying apparently dead at her feet, the temptation is presented to Mercy Merrick: "She might be Grace Roseberry if she dared!" (The New Magdalen, Chapter 4). Mercy does not jump at the chance. Instead she agonizes over this chance to win respectability and a social position under an assumed name. In the end, her transformation into Grace Roseberry happens effortlessly, almost without thinking. Before the Germans enter the cottage, she picks up Grace's cloak to cover her own nurse's uniform. With the Germans, in comes Horace Holmcroft, a war correspondent, who can get Mercy a pass through the German lines. Horace fills in the form: "You know what German discipline is by this time. What is your name?" "Grace Roseberry," she said. The words were hardly out of her mouth before she would have given everything she possessed in the world to recall them."

The narrative has almost bent over backwards to impress upon us that Mercy Merrick is not a scheming fraudster, but a fundamentally good woman craving after respectability and simply unable to resist a temptation. As Mercy travels away with ever more distant calls of "Pass the English Lady" at German checkpoints, Doctor Wetzel brings Grace Roseberry back to life. The only indication of her identity is a handkerchief with the name 'Mercy Merrick' embroidered on it (The New Magdalen, Chapter 5). The story of The New Magdalen has been primed for sensation.

The Drama of the Fallen Woman - Wilkie Collins's The New Magdalen

The New Magdalen (1873) by Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) is a story of identity-theft and battle with a bad conscience, complicated by social etiquette and tremors of strong emotion. It has been criticized as Wilkie Collins's most polemical book with a mission and has remained one of his more obscure works. It belongs to the latter period of his career when, it is often argued, his creative genius had runs it course and been replaced by an enthusiasm to lecture on social ills - this time on the miserable lot of the 'fallen woman' and the hypocrisy of the polite society.

The novel was first published serialized in Temple Bar, running from October 1872 to July 1873, and then by Bentley in two volumes on 20 May 1873. Reports about its success are contradictory. It was a success when first serialized (Peter Ackroyd. Wilkie Collins, 2012, p149), but did not sell well in Bentley's first edition (Catherine Peters. The King of Inventors, 1991, p340). Sales in the US, however were "enormous" (Peters, 1991, p345). Mudie's Circulating Library demanded that 'Magdalen,' the name for a reformed prostitute should be removed from the title before the book's publication in two volumes. Collins refused. Mudie's complaint may have dampened the UK sales of the novel, or it may have increased them.

(Image 1889 Chatto & Windus yellowback from http://www.wilkie-collins.info/books_newmag.htm)

Collins wrote The New Magdalen as much for the stage as for the page. Bentley's two-volume publication came out the day after the theatrical version of The New Magdalen opened in the Olympic theatre on 19 May, 1873. It was one Collins's most successful plays and ran for nineteen weeks in the Olympic and toured the country for years. It was also staged on Broadway, opening 10 November 1873 (several pirated versions had preceded this) while Collins was on a reading tour in America. According to the Times, the audience was much affected and "The sobbing in different parts of the house was painfully audible." The play was sensational. But it was not universally applauded. "An outraged lady wrote in the Daily Graphic": "The author of the New Magdalen has opened a recruiting office for prostitutes, and has made a direct attack on virtue and honesty.  ... A play so utterly vicious, so shamefully profligate in its teaching, has never before been produced at a New York theatre." (Robert P. Ashley "Wilkie Collins and the American Theatre" in Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol. 8, Nr 4, March 1954, p250).

The theatrical quality of the novel is clear from the start: it is divided into two 'scenes,' both of them opening with 'preambles' listing the time, the place and the 'persons' involved in the action. The settings are very limited; the first five chapters making up 'Scene 1' all take place within the four walls of a cottage on the frontier of a Franco-German war in the autumn of 1870. 'Scene 2' is limited to the various rooms of Lady Janet Roy's Maplethorpe House. At the opening of this section, the dining room is described very much as a stage setting in the present tense:

"[It] is famous among artists and other persons of taste for the carved wood-work, of Italian origin, which covers the walls on three sides. On the fourth side, ... a conservatory, forming an entrance to the room, through a winter garden of rare plants and flowers. On your right hand, as you stand fronting the conservatory, the monotony of the panelled wall is relieved by a quaintly-patterned door of old inlaid wood, leading to the library, ... A corresponding door on the left hand gives access to the billiard-room, to the smoking-room next to it, and to a smaller hall commanding one of the secondary entrances to the building. On the left side also is the ample fire-place ..." (The New Magdalen, Scene 2, Chapter 6)

The many doors in this setting provide ample opportunities for making dramatic entrances and exits. The action is made up of dialogue between characters, usually as a series of meetings between pairs of characters in the various rooms. There is also a dramatic opportunity for characters to peer in through open doorways and then withdraw, indicating their presence as eavesdroppers. On stage this may be necessary, but on a page, this bobbing in and out of doorways comes across as unintentionally comical (The New Magdalen, chapters 15 and 17, where Grace Roseberry stalks around Maplethorpe House).

Collins's biographer Catherine Peters notes that both Miss or Mrs? (1871) and The New Magdalen "were written with dramatization in mind" and because of this "Both suffer from this literary economy. Wilkie's practiced ingenuity in handling a complicated story and his impersonations of differing points of view, his great strengths were jettisoned." (Peters, 1991, p337)

I would argue that the limited setting and abundance of dialogue are appropriate for the method Collins has chosen to deal with his topic: The New Magdalen is about the internal struggle of one woman, Mercy Merrick, to make a choice: to either hang on to her assumed identity and gain a social position or to resume her true identity and redeem her soul. The closed setting within Maplethorpe House reflects the protagonist's claustrophobic internal situation. As the plot develops she finds herself in one emotional cul-de-sac after another, trashing desperately within the confines of her own conscience. The numerous dialogues echo Mercy's inner debates about what she should do. In this way, the setting and the narrative approach serve the central theme of the novel.

In Mercy Merrick "Wilkie created a vehicle for a clever actress: several triumphed in the part on stage. In the novel the character seems hollow and platitudinous. The potentially interesting character of the elderly Lady Janet,  .... though plausible on stage , is unbelievable to a reader, who has time to think about her reactions." (Peters, 1991, p338).

Whoever took on the part of Mercy Merrick, would get a chance to act her socks off. The amount weeping, hand-wringing and dramatic poses in majestic glory offered by the narrative would satisfy the most demanding diva. But there is room for other characters to strut their stuff, too. They get to swear, rant, weep (both leading men burst into tears in their turn) and despair.

The common complaint about sensation fiction is that it is all plot and no character. And admittedly, melodramatic posturing and overwhelming emotion not a plausible character make. However, in The New Magdalen all the character have some degree of roundness. It may not be anything a la Gustave Flaubert (it is quite interesting to compare Mercy Merrick to Emma Bovary and see what contrasting approaches and skills Collins and Flaubert display in their depiction of two female protagonists), but there is some life stirring within the bosoms of all main characters.

Grace Roseberry is the wronged, suffering victim but turns out to be not a very nice person. Horace Holmcroft is the initial love-interest, handsome hero who gallantly rescues Mercy Merrick. He is also small-minded and dim-witted and yet very, very respectable and honourable. Julian Gray is the fire-brand preacher favoured by women, Mercy's spiritual saviour (where Horace is her physical saviour). His character is an odd combination of fervent Christian faith and school-boy light-heartedness; and it goes through some development in the narrative where he begins as an actor enjoying his success in the pulpit, until a trip to the north and a glimpse of the rural poor cause him to abandon his glittering career as a preacher for missionary work.

Lady Janet Roy, like Peters indicates, is potentially the most interesting character in her dogged determination to shut her ears to the truth about Mercy Merrick. Peters may be right when she says that Lady Janet is "unbelievable to a reader, who has time to think about her reactions." But I think Peters is missing a point. More blatantly than other characters Lady Janet's reactions to Mercy Merrick serve the purpose of the novel's 'mission'. Lady Janet does not need to be a convincing character in order to pose a question to the reader: what would you do in her place? How easily do you shut your eyes to an unpalatable truth? Just like society averts its gaze from the 'fallen woman,' Lady Janet refuses to look at Mercy Merrick, once she knows the truth about her (The New Magdalen, chapter 28).

"Once More the Cool and Crafty Female Detective" - Mrs Paschal

Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864) is attributed to William Stephens Hayward (1834-1870). His name did not appear on the original title page. Most cheap pot-boilers were published anonymously or 'by the authors of' earlier well-selling stories. Little is known of Hayward, but what is known indicates that he was a bit of a rogue (see Steve Holland's blog http://bearalley.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/william-stephens-hayward.html). Together with Samuel Bracebridge Hemyng, Hayward was associated with the popular "Anonyma" series of sexy and sensational stories. They all feature fearless heroines tackling compromising and dangerous situations.

 Revelations of a Lady Detective has ten cases told in a first-person narrative by Mrs Paschal, a female detective employed by the police. The title, promising revelations, is suggestive of naughty secrets and the cover image of the book (assuming that the 2013 reprint by the British Library retains the cover of the 1864 original) shows quite a saucy, pretty woman with a knowing expression, lifting the hem of her dress to show her petticoat and shapely ankles, with a lit cigarette in her other hand.

 

 Mrs Paschal's adventures are exciting, melodramatic and entertaining. The narratives flow well and there is plenty of action and violence. There are a few logical errors: in "Fifty Pounds Reward," Mrs Louisa Eskell is once called Laura, and later in the story one policeman mysteriously becomes "policemen." In "The Lost Diamonds" Karl Fulchöck's father is dead, but a couple of pages later he dutifully keeps sending him part of his salary. Each story wrings pretty much every last drop of suspense and emotion out of the scenes, sometimes to a ludicrous but amusing degree. It is not clear why the mysterious countess has to dress up as a man and wear "a hideous black mask" when she enters the basement in her own house.  It is also not clear why Mrs Paschal walks into the show at the gipsy fair only to see her suspect Lambrook perform with three rats. Hayward comes up with some terrific chapter titles, and often the action in the chapter is twisted suitably to provide substance to the title: "Eating Rats," "A Very Bad Woman," "Torture," and "Chained to the Wall" are my favourites.

There are many excellent scenes of melodrama; Mrs Paschal is several times spectacularly in danger of her life. In "The Mysterious Countess" she is lost in underground tunnels hiding from the countess: "What could I do? To attack her ladyship would, I thought, be the forerunner of instant death. It would be like running upon a sword, or firing a pistol in one's own mouth." In "The Secret Band," an evil mastermind Zini, the leader of an Italian secret society, amidst flashes of lightning and thunder, attempts to throw Mrs Paschal into the teeth of a gigantic water-mill: "If any one were by chance to fall within its compass, life would soon be extinct, and a mangled corpse would before long be floating down the river." And if her own life is not in danger, Mrs Paschal is witness to some sensational scenes. In "The Nun, the Will and the Abbess" she sees as young novice tortured by the evil abbess. In "Found Drowned" she chases a culprit trough a moonlit graveyard. In "Which is the Heir?" she watches a man kill a rat with his teeth and pretend to eat it: "the crunching of the bones was plainly audible." In "Mistaken Identity," she pretends "to be by no means shy" and plays the role of a wife of a French criminal turned detective in the company of a criminal gang in an ale house. And in "Stolen Letters" she takes a job as a letter-sorter at the General Post-Office ("For the sake of appearances two other women had been introduced at the same time." The men scowl at them "as if we intended to take the bread out of their mouths."), and she witnesses the culprit escape by means of "the tubes of the Pneumatic Company." In short, Mrs Pashcal is no shrinking violet and keeps getting herself into and out of tricky situations.

At the opening of the first story, Mrs Paschal arrives to see Colonel Warner "head of the Detective Department of the Metropolitan Police," he, according to Mrs Paschal, was the first police chief to employ female detectives following the example of "Fouchė, the great Frenchman" (Joseph Fouchė [1759-1820] was Minister of Police in France 1799-1810 and again in 1815).  Although most of her assignments are handed to her by the Colonel, Mrs Paschal is in the detective game to earn her living, and wherever she goes she keeps her ears open for potentially profitable cases. In "The Lost Diamonds" she is posting a letter at the General Post Office when she overhears two people mention that Duke of Rustenburgh has lost his diamonds: "I immediately began to think how I could turn the information to account." In "Found Drowned" she reads about the death of Laura Harwell in a newspaper: "I made up my mind to compete for the reward." Her eye is usually on the reward and almost all the stories mention where it will come from. Only some of the cases are official criminal cases, many of them are problems individuals bring to the Colonel, who then passes them to Mrs Paschal as matters of a private investigation. Many cases, like ""The Lost Diamonds" are "hushed up" and a deal negotiated ("The Nun, the Will and the Abbess", "Fifty Pound Reward") or the culprit is allowed to emigrate ("Who is the Heir?" and "Mistaken Identity"). Mrs Paschal is also aware that she that she is competing against other detectives. To recover Duke Rustenburgh's diamonds, "I was aware that in engaging in this matter I was undertaking a contest with the keenest wits and most fertile brains in the force." ("The Lost Diamonds"). She often takes a different course from her colleagues and solves the cases beating them in the detective game.

Mrs Paschal does not tell us much about herself. She is "verging on forty." She has worked as a barmaid ("Incognita"). Of her past, she says: "It is hardly necessary to refer to the circumstances which led me to embark on a career at once strange, exciting, and mysterious, but  I may say that my husband died suddenly, leaving me badly off." ("The Mysterious Countess") She enters households in the guise of a domestic servant, she "appeared of a mature age" ("The Nun, The Will, and the Abbess"), she talks of "old people like myself," and a young adventuress suggests she could be mistaken for her mother ("Incognita"). Mrs Paschal describes herself as "always happier in harness" ("Stolen Letters"), as "the cool and crafty female detective" ("Incognita") and says that "owing to frequent acquaintance with peril, I had become unusually hardened for a woman." ("The Secret Band"). She is smart, efficient, capable and unshaken by a corpse with a crushed head ("He could not bend down and kiss his wife's brow, for in its entire state it did not exist."), by an old woman falling down the stairs to her death or by seeing a man reduced by lightning to "a scathed mass of charred humanity" (all events in "The Secret Band"). Mrs Paschal is happy to bribe a housekeeper ("The Mysterious Countess"), steal paperwork from an abbess ("The Nun, The Will and the Abbess"), to enter the Pig and Whistle in the Seven Dials ("Mistaken Identity"), examine a drowned body ("Found Drowned")  and even abandon her "obnoxious" crinoline when chasing a criminal ("The Mysterious Countess"). There is nothing to stop this woman from pursuing her investigations.

Mrs Paschal is great fun, and a heroine of this calibre deserves equally formidable female adversaries. There is Lady Vervane, the eponymous "mysterous countess," who was once "on stage" and married "the notorious and imbecile nobleman" who soon died. Lady Vervane is beautiful, rich and resourceful, and "looked upon [Mrs Paschal] very much as a lady in the Southern States of America looks upon a slave." ("The Mysterious Countess"). There is also the evil and greedy abbess in "The Nun, the Will and the Abbess" and the pretty, avaricious Fanny Williams aka 'Incognita' who has Mrs Wareham's son in her clutches. Finally, we have the formidable Mrs Wilkinson, wife of the "keeper of a pork and butter shop" in "Fifty Pounds Reward." She corrupts poor, "muddled" Mrs Louisa Eskell into fraudulently spending her husband's money. This is an interesting story because it deals with a wayward and independent woman who speaks her mind. Mrs Wilkinson is large and loud, we get a long description of her gigantic body in most unflattering terms. It is worth quoting in full:

"She was enormously stout, and to such a size did her corpulence extend, that at the first glance the beholder imagined he was regarding a phenomenon who by some accident had escaped from the caravan in which she was carted from fair to fair, to be shown to the curious as a monstrous mass of humanity, whose adipose tissue had grown to a size altogether beyond reasonable or decent limits. In a house in which beetles abounded she would have been invaluable, for few of the poor insects could have effected their escape from the crushing tread of those huge feet, which more resembled the hoofs of an elephant or a gouty rhinoceros than the lower extremities of a woman. The bloated and swollen lumps of flesh which in her composition represented hands, were like patches of dough formed into half-quartern [sic] loaves before they were subjected to the heat of the oven. Her face might have been made by the amalgamation of two turnips and a pumpkin, with two pig's eyes deeply sunk in the fatty mass. Nature was to blame for having created such a montrosity, or if creation was unavoidable, for permitting it to cumber the earth, who surface groaned beneath the imposition." ("Fifty Pound Reward")

The narrative goes on to describe her voice and mannerisms with equal relish.                    

Mrs Wilkinson has been corrupted by her husband, who "was accustomed with gross indelicacy to speak before his wife as he would have done before his sporting friends, and the consequence was that her mind became vitiated, and her manners contaminated." Louisa Eskell falls under the spell of Mrs Wilkinson. John Eskell tries to control her: "I am the proper person to regulate such things, and to tell you who you shall know and who you shall not." When Louisa stamps her foot at her husband and protests: "a woman who submits to a man is little better than a fool," John Eskell threatens her: "If this sort of behaviour on your part continues, I shall send you home to your mother." And all this takes place under the chapter heading "A Very Bad Woman."

It is very difficult to know how to read "Fifty Pounds Reward." It is funny, quaint and just what we expect of the presumably horrendously prim and proper, misogynistic Victorians. When Mrs Paschal arrives to sort out the mess of the forged signature on Mr Eskell's cheque, she demonstrates her no-nonsense approach and marches to the Wilkinsons' shop and arrests Mrs Wilkinson in front of gaping customers as "an accomplice with one Louisa Eskell" for forgery. She is giving no consideration to poor Louisa's reputation informing the neighbourhood of her crime, even when she knows that Mr Eskell is quite happy to forgive his wife. Mrs Wilkinson "howled out her penitent prayers for forgiveness with a submission that was as servile as it was disgusting." The matter is resolved privately at the Eskells' house. Mrs Wilkinson pays John Eskell twenty pounds in compensation for making Louisa go on a shopping spree. Presumably Louisa also gets to keep her purchases. The Wilkinsons lose their reputation, have to sell their shop and end up "in a state of abject poverty." 

Mrs Paschal is a strong female character, but it would be misguided to read her adventures as in any way proto-feminist. They are, however, melodramatic in the best tradition of penny-dreadfuls. They are full of gruesome violence and Gothic scenes of mystery and terror. Their year of publication (1864) and the similar casebook format invite a comparison between Hayward's Mrs Paschal and Forrester's Miss Gladden. Mrs Paschal and her adventures are drawn with much stronger colours than Miss Gladden's. Miss Gladden's endeavours at detection are puny and pale when set alongside the thickly slapped-on melodrama and sensationalism of Mrs Paschal's investigative triumphs

"I Know Well That My Trade is Despised" - Miss Gladden, The Female Detective

Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective (1864) is a collection of seven separate cases with an introduction. All are told by a first person narrator (even if in the introduction she states that she will "tell the tales in what I believe is called the third person"). This case-book format follows a tradition of similar publications by male detectives both fictional and real. The Recollections of a Policeman by "Waters" appeared in 1852; Recollections of a Detective Police-Officer by William Russell (not a policeman) in 1856. The earliest of them all, Richmond, or, Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Officer was published in 1827. By the time Andrew Forrester hit on this formula in 1863/4 it was an old hat. He produced The Revelations of a Private Detective in 1863 and Secret Service, or, Recollections of a City Detective in 1864, both before The Female Detective, as well as The Private Detective in 1868.

Andrew Forrester was a pseudonym of James Redding Ware (1832-1909) [In Mike Ashley's introduction to The Female Detective this discovery is attributed to Kate Summerscale.). Ware wrote stories and possibly edited the weekly magazine Grave and Gay, where most of them appeared. It is evident that some the stories featured in The Female Detective were published before Miss Gladden was created, including "A Child Found Dead: Murder or No Murder," which appeared in 1862 under the name J. Ware (hence the connection between the man and his pseudonym) as a pamphlet and with no mention of Miss Gladden.

This story "A Child Found Dead" is little more than a re-telling of the known facts relating to the famous Road House murder case of June 1860. Similarly, "The Unraveled Mystery" outlines a hypothetical solution to the 1857 Waterloo Carpet-Bag Mystery, which was never solved by the police. There is no room in these stories for Miss Gladden and on both occasions the narrative is handed to her by 'Doctor Y-,' a medical man who remains anonymous (detectives do not reveal their sources).

At first glance, the stories in The Female Detective are rubbish. They are predictable and read like pot-boilers, spewed out carelessly without much forethought or effort. Only three of the stories follow the course of criminal investigations by Miss Gladden or 'G' as she is known among her detective colleagues. The remaining four are shorter, anecdotal tales of clever crimes, the two based on true crimes suggesting only their hypothetical solutions.

These tales are not entirely without merit and interest, however. There are a couple of pleasingly melodramatic scenes and mildly sensational turns of events. Perversely, the best scenes for getting the reader to grip the edge of the seat are wasted and their potential thrown away unused. In "The Unknown Weapon," just as they have discovered a crucial, incriminating piece of evidence, Miss Gladden and a female detective colleague find themselves locked up in a burning house. There is plenty of scope for heroic action as they fight to save their lives. The narrative resolves this tense situation: "This tale is the story of the 'Unknown Weapon,' and therefore I cannot logically here go into any full explanation of our escape."

"Tenant for Life" introduces a marvelously melodramatic villain in Sir Nathaniel Shirley. He is a selfish, profligate, sensualist. When, armed with his own police officers, Sir Nathaniel comes to take everything away from the pure-hearted, beautiful Miss Shedleigh, we are on the brink of a sensational scene. Unfortunately, at this moment Miss Gladden decides to leave the room: "Then I left the room. What was said I never learnt." She only returns to the room after Sir Nathaniel has dropped dead.

The Lady Detective is clearly not interested in offering traditional melodramatic scenes of horror, suffering or romance. The narrative sets them up before our eyes and then shuts us out. There is always the possibility that Forrester just is not a very good writer. There is also the possibility that he is making a conscious choice. Instead of sensational thrills and shivers based on spine-tingling scenes of danger and villainy á la The Woman in White (1860) or Lady Audley's Secret (1862), Forrester is grasping for a specific kind of a cerebral and moral thrill: the science of detection and the ethical dilemmas it brings.

In her Introduction, Miss Gladden asks three important questions. It is part of her 'logical' style to ask questions and follow them with answers. She also likes to present numbered lists of items. First she asks "Who am I?" And she answers that it matters little, as long as we accept "that whatever may be the results of the practice of my profession in others, in me that profession has not led me towards hardheartedness." We have detective with a heart - capable of compassion and sound moral judgment. Then she asks, "For what reason do I write this book?" She writes in order to show that the profession of a detective "is so useful it should not be despised." Throughout the book Miss Gladden is painfully aware of the general dislike and distrust for the detective police: "I am quite aware that society looks upon the companionship of a spy as repulsive; but, nevertheless, we detectives are necessary, as scavengers are called for, and I therefore write this book to help show, by my experience, that the detective has some demand upon the gratitude of society." The same argument is repeated in "Tenant for Life" and "The Unknown Weapon." The Female Detective presents itself as an apologia for the detective police. Finally, Miss Gladden asks what will be the value of the record of her experiences. She hopes that it will show how successful detective work can be in exposing evil-doing and, what is much more interesting and important, "that there is much good to be found, even amongst criminals, and that it does not follow because a man breaks the law that he is therefore heartless."

Detectives are sensational. They spend their time dealing with low-life criminals, homicidal maniacs, fraudsters and thieves. What is worse, entering the homes of respectable people they bring an unwelcome whiff of this societal pestilence with them. They are experts in pulling skeletons out of the family closet. Detectives are "family-spies." Miss Gladden observes that "It had appeared as though the English detectives were in the habit of prying into private life, and as though no citizen were free from a system of spydom."

Women detectives are doubly sensational. Miss Gladden's friends think she is a dressmaker, her enemies think she is a prostitute. She hides her true profession. Detection, for so many reasons, is not lady-like. Forrester seeks to present the female detective as a sexy, sensational figure who is a consummate professional in her highly questionable field of expertise. There is a tension between the admiration for the detective's skills and a discomfort with these same skills of spying, deception and ferreting out secrets.

"I am aware that the female detective may be regarded with even more aversion that her brother in profession. But still it cannot be disproved that if there is a demand for men detectives there must also be one for female detective police spies. Criminals are both masculine and feminine - indeed my experience tells me that when a woman becomes a criminal she is far worse than the average of her male companions, and therefore it follows that the necessary detectives should be of both sexes."

At best, this argument by Miss Gladden sounds like a strike for gender equality and feminism. At least, it sounds like a plausible justification for the existence of The Female Detective. There are things, according to Miss Gladden, that female detectives can do better than male detectives. They "are enabled to educate our five senses to a higher pitch than are our male competitors." They have an element of surprise, with people unable to believe a woman can be a detective. In "The Unknown Weapon" the mind of a slow-witted local policeman, "could not grasp the idea of a police officer in petticoats." They can assume an occupation of a dressmaker or a milliner which gains them access into a house for a suitable period of time. There are fewer such male occupations. Miss Gladden observes that "it is the peculiar advantage of women detectives, and one which in many cases gives them an immeasurable value beyond that of their male friends, that they can get into house outside which the ordinary men-detective could barely stand without being suspected."

In The Female Detective Miss Gladden uses the latest forensic technology ('fluff' is sent to a "microscopic chemist" for analysis) and lectures us on the importance of boot prints for identifying culprits. She finds out when the rain started on the night of the murder to estimate the time of the crime. She uses official registers for births and marriages to track down people. She showcases all these professional tricks of the trade of detection. She also lies, pretends and misleads. This is all in a day of detective work: "as evil-doing is a kind of lie levelled at society, if it is to be conquered it must be met on the side of society, through its employees, by similar false action." She condones theft: "we police officers have sometimes to turn thieves - for the good of society of course."

The professionalism, the scientific approach to the detection of crime and the slight bending of the social, even legal, rules to achieve ultimate justice are all features we today recognize as belonging to detective heroes. The most controversial characteristic of the female detective, however, is her sense of justice. The job of the detective police, as Miss Gladden repeats several times, is to uphold the law and bring criminals to justice. But justice according to law is not always in accord with our sense of fairness and just desserts. This is the point Miss Gladden makes at the end of her introduction.

The Female Detective aims to be sensational and thrilling by using a woman detective with specialized knowledge and expertise in the technicalities of crime detection. It can also be argued that a female protagonist and narrator gives the author more scope to explore the moral dilemmas detective work creates. Compassion is one more thing female detectives do better than their male colleagues. In this way, a woman detective opens up new ground for the author to explore and a powerful way to engage his readers. Miss Gladden is placed in situations where the law pulls one way, her moral compass points the other way. "Tenant for Life" labours this point almost to death. It is the main theme in "The Judgment of Conscience," and it resurfaces in different forms elsewhere in the stories.

It is possible, even likely, that Forrester is a lousy writer churning out cheap tales of detection to earn a quick buck. Nevertheless, he has created an intriguing and engaging character: a woman detective who is independent, professional, even mercenary in the pursuit of her trade and at the same time struggling to reconcile the gap between the law she is paid to uphold and her natural sense of justice. Miss Gladden is a sensational heroine, even if the plots of her adventures are not.