Sensation Novel as a Model for Story-Telling

Driven Home: A Tale of Destiny (1886) is neatly packaged into a single volume of fourteen chapters. This reflects the emergence of a new, tighter novel format and a move away from the rambling three-deckers. Single volume novels were much more practical. When you borrowed a book from Mudie’s Circulating Library or purchased it from W. H Smith’s railway bookstall, you got the whole story in a single wrapping. There was no need to go hunting for further installments (as I will have to do with the second volume of The Queen Anne’s Gate Mystery).

There were also aesthetic and artistic influences at work in the changing format of the novel. By the 1880s, one can discern the idea of a novel as a coherent piece of literary art. Questions of narrative structure and narrative techniques had become matters of literary theory. Novel as an art form was developing its own methodology and critical vocabulary. More and more novels were published in book-form from the start and no longer as re-prints of serialized originals. Readers now had an appetite for entire novels, rather than reading by installment. This had as much to do with the changing taste (and education levels) of the public, as the developing market for literature. For a detailed analysis of the social history of the novel format, see Peter Keating’s The Haunted Study (1989).

Arkwright’s Driven Home, then, is a sensation novel in a ‘modern,’ single-volume format. Chapters one and two introduce the protagonist and set the scene. Chapters three to seven give us an exotic adventure in a foreign land which leads unexpectedly to the main mystery. Right in the middle of the novel, in chapter six, comes the critical crunch point, which propels the story to a new direction. The unravelling of the mystery takes place through chapters eight to fourteen. The novel has a clear plot arc. It follows to an almost ridiculous degree the ‘archetypal’ story structure put forward by John Yorke in Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (Penguin, 2013). In the first half of the novel, protagonist George journeys out to an alien world. A critical event takes place there, he is changed as a result. In the second half of the story, George journeys back home, he is ‘driven home,’ and finds resolution and closure only when he is able to reconcile and integrate the consequences of the critical event into his life and self. Into this simple and straightforward structural framework, Arkwright builds his sensation story.

George is brought up by his mirthless aunt in a gloomy, old house in Chiswick. From the start, George suspects that his origins are tragic: “I must have had in my veins the blood of some wild and reckless being, perhaps some cruel and pitiless criminal.” (Driven Home, Chapter 1) As expected in a sensation novel, these turn out to be not just romantic musings of a lonely child with too much energy and imagination. On her deathbed, George’s aunt makes the revelation: “You are George Wardour, the only child of Geroge Wardour, the poisoner.” (Driven Home, Chapter, 1) The family tragedy is dispensed with in a couple of sentences: “His wretched wife, who stole him from me, deserted him …” (Ibid.) This sounds promising, but nothing comes of it. The whole purpose of George’s sensational parentage is, it would seem, to establish his flawed nature: he is a fundamentally good man with a wild streak and a moral weakness. His failings are explained as hereditary traits. George has an internal demon, like all good tragic heroes. Arkwright is here creating a promising protagonist, even if with great haste and clumsiness.

George Wardour the elder’s “victims were two orphans, whom he had induced to insure their lives” (Ibid.). Life insurance featured as a motive in two infamous Victorian murder cases, those of William Palmer the Rugeley Poisoner in 1855 and of Mrs Mary Ann Cotton in 1873. Closer in time to Driven Home, were the trials of Catherine Flanagan and Margaret Higgins in Liverpool in 1884. They appear to have run a whole business of poisoning victims and cashing in their life insurances. The stories of Palmer and Cotton as summarized by Judith Flanders in The Invention of Murder (2011) and there is a book by Angela Brabin dedicated to Flanagan and Higgins: The Black Widows of Liverpool: A Chilling Account of Cold-Blooded Murder in Victorian Liverpool (2003). Many Victorian cases of poisoning remain suspect. Medicines of the period tended to be lethal, toxicological tests were inadequate and the verdicts were often based purely on circumstantial evidence. George Wardour may have been convicted as a poisoner, but his guilt is by no means certain if the reported real Victorian criminal cases are anything to go by. George the younger, however, accepts his father’s guilt without question and decides to leave England never to return (Driven Home, Chapter 1).

George boards a ship heading to San Francisco. He is going to join the gold rush. Gold was discovered in California in 1849. The gold rush peaked in 1852 although the hopeful miners and prospectors kept digging for the rest of the 1850s (the Klondike gold rush came along in the 1890s).

The first part of Driven Home tells of George’s adventures in the California gold fields. On board the ship on the way out there (Driven Home, Chapter 2), we learn more about George’s character. He excels in physical activities, whether it is climbing the rigging of the ship or “the pugilistic art.” He discovers his talent for entertainment by song and story-telling, and notes his “new and insatiable love for notice and appreciation.” (Ibid.). This is in contrast to his lonely and constrained childhood. The image of a young man let loose on the wider world and off on an adventure is believable. We can understand George’s enthusiasm. For him, “Every moment now seemed worth living.” (Ibid.) At the same time, Captain Maitland warns George: “you have three implacable enemies:” Don Carlos, drinking and gambling. (Ibid.)

In America, George teams up with the dubious gold digger and gambler Carlos he befriended on board the ship. They also invite along Mike O’Callaghan, a large Irishman with a sweetheart waiting at home (Driven Home, Chapter 3). After running out of money in San Francisco, they finally head to the Sierra Nevada mountains to look for gold. Here, George begins to experience a strange feeling of “a power other than my own” influencing his choices (Driven Home, Chapter 4).

This early  appearance of a vague supernatural force appears to break the logic of the novel. Later in the narrative, we know why George is haunted by an unknown power and it makes sense. There is no logical explanation for it here. This is significant, because for a reader who expects a narrative of sensational events that nevertheless remain within the limits of plausibility, this inexplicable meddling of supernatural forces in the narrative is dissatisfying. For a reader accustomed to premonitions, spiritual guidance and fingerprints of God all over traditional melodramatic narratives, this is perfectly acceptable. At this point, Arkwright's novel shows up a fault-line between the old and the new in Victorian story-telling. What would be completely out of place in a detective story, can just about be tolerated in a sensation novel, and would be considered quite ordinary in a traditional melodrama.

The first time the supernatural agent makes an appearance, it leads to George's benefit (Driven Home, Chapter 5). "But, for the second time, this same strange, inexplicable sensation that I had formerly experienced came upon me," (Driven Home, Chapter 6) it leads to tragedy.

George’s journey to California reaches a horrific climax at Longman’s Drift in Chapter 6. George is a recipient of a dying speech of a mysterious Englishman and a witness to a lynching. While the first scene is a satisfying development in a sensational plot and points to further drama, the latter scene is truly disturbing in its violence and would not be out of place in a penny dreadful. This is a well-placed, high-octane chapter which both propels the narrative forward and gives the reader a thrilling jolt of sensation. No wonder George says: “On the horror of these moments I dare not dwell” (Driven Home, Chapter 6) and develops an amnesia that is critical to the rest of the plot.

Richard Arkwright - Barrister, Conservative MP and a Dabbler in Sensation Fiction

Richard Arkwright (1835-1918) came from one of the most illustrious families of the industrial revolution. His great-grandfather was Sir Richard Arkwright (1732-1792), the self-made industrialist and inventor who manufactured a fortune out of spinning cotton yarn at his Cromford Mills in Derbyshire.

Sir Richard Arkwright (1732-1792)

Richard’s grandfather, Sir Richard’s only son, Richard Junior (1755-1843) was an even more capable a businessman and amassed a vast family fortune, which he then distributed to his eleven children.

Richard Junior, his wife  Mary Simpson
 and one of the eleven kids

The fifth child John (1785-1858), Richard’s father, took over the medieval house of Hampton Court near Leominster, Herefordshire, acquired by Richard Arkwright Junior in the early 19^th century. Richard Arkwright grew up there. He graduated from Cambridge in 1857 and was called to the bar in 1859. He practised as a barrister and served as a Conservative Member of Parliament for Leominster 1866-1875. His uncle, another Richard (1781-1832), Richard Junior and Mary’s second child, was the first member of Parliament in the family (1813-1818 and 1826-1830) and Richard's nephew, John Stanhope Arkwright was another Conservative MP (1900-1912). Richard Arkwright married Lady Mary Caroline Charlotte Byng (1838-1933), the second daughter of 2^nd Earl of Stratford in 1862. Richard Arkwright died in 1918 in Windsor.

At the age of fifty-one, in 1886, Arkwright published the first of his two sensation novels, Driven Home: A Tale of Destiny under the pseudonym Evelyn Owen. Three years later came the second one: The Queen Anne’s Gate Mystery (1889). No other published fiction has been attributed to him. Arkwright belongs to the curious category of ‘unexpected’ sensation novelists who seemingly wrote for fun, rather than to make a living or for political purposes. He is far removed from professional novelists like Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins.

Arkwright, if anyone, was an establishment figure. With his legal profession, Conservative politics, marriage to aristocracy and family fortune, you would not expect him to indulge in the dubious pleasures of penning sensation fiction. We cannot know what made Arkwright write and publish these two novels (the second one under his own name): for fun, for a bet, for literary ambition – to show he could do it - or simply to fill his spare hours in the quietude of provincial England.  Arkwright is part of an eclectic group of ‘semi-amateur’ writers, who only published one or two novels, often under pseudonyms and who were drawn to the genre of sensation fiction with all the freedom of expression and imagination it offered.

Richard Arkwright’s novels sit on either side of a divide we have in retrospect come to view as a watershed moment in the history of popular fiction: the arrival of Sherlock Holmes. Driven Home: a Story of Destiny came out in 1886, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet was published at Christmas 1887, and The Queen Anne’s Gate Mystery appeared in 1889.

I am interested to see what kind of sensational thrills a man with Arkwright’s background can offer – what flights of fancy his imagination can provide for my entertainment. I am also curious to see if I can discern any traces of Sherlockian influence in Arkwright’s writing.

Holmes was a product of its time and gives us a useful, even if artificial, marker to demarcate a change in the views and interests of the reading public. His 'Science of Deduction' and the values it reflects indicate a shift (not without its tensions pulling both ways) from Romanticism towards Realism, from Victorian towards Modern.

I am interested in the changes that took sensation fiction into detective fiction: what had to change in the way sensation fiction saw the world and its workings in order to reach the very different outlook expressed in detective fiction. This transition from traditional melodrama via sensation fiction towards a more realist detective novel can be observed in Arkwright’s two novels, written only three years apart.

The two novels are first person narratives by two men who are both called George. It is clear that they are not the same man, because both stories open with a description of each George’s childhood. Before establishing a solid backstory for the protagonist, Arkwright indicates that neither George may be entirely trusted as a narrator.

Driven Home opens with the narrator’s assurance:

“Those portions of them which deal with what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, and felt with unmistakable acuteness in my own person, I give as they actually occurred, without concealment and without exaggeration.” (Driven Home, “Introduction”)

In the very next sentence, Arkwright undermines the reliability of his narrator:

“It has been suggested that either my lonely childhood, or the morbid consciousness with which I dwelt on the painful circumstance connected with my parentage, or the brain-fever which attacked me in California, may have predisposed me to hallucinations. I am willing to leave the question to be settled by those who care to read my story.” (Ibid.)

There is much going on in these sentences. We will have a true-to-life (realist) narrative. We have a sincere and honest narrator who will conceal nothing. But this narrator is plagued with mental issues (he may even be mad). The events will be strange enough to resemble hallucinations. This is a promising start; we are dealing with a psychological thriller.

The Queen Anne’s Gate Mystery also opens with an authorial assurance and underwriting:

 

Richard Arkwright gives us his authorial signature in this official-sounding statement to guarantee that the narrative is true. But this certainty is fractured in chapter three when the first person narrator is addressed as “George” (The Queen Anne’s Gate Mystery, Chapter 3). The apparent transparency of the text is marred: if 'Richard Arkwright' is not the first person narrator after all, how can he possibly convince us that the events “actually occurred within my own experience”? How has 'Arkwright' come into the possession of private details of the narrator’s childhood?

The opening of Driven Home is clever, because references to “lonely childhood,” “painful … parentage” and “brain-fever ... in California” are hints at dramatic circumstances of which more will be revealed in later in the narrative. The customary authorial defence of “incidents … which will probably seem least credible” in The Queen Anne’s Gate Mystery comes across as a clumsy mistake. Nevertheless, already here, we can see a difference in attitude and approach.

The opening in Driven Home is full of promise of drama and tragedy. The “Preface” of The Queen Anne’s Gate Mystery is short and matter-of-fact. It promises  nothing more than some “probably” not so credible “incidents.” Still, there are both a promise of an exciting plot and a nice wobble in the narrative authority at the beginning of both novels.

I have to make a confession, not to cause disappointment later. While I have been able to examine the whole of Driven Home, which was published in one volume, only the first volume of The Queen Anne’s Gate Mystery was available from the British Library. The catalogues indicate, however, that a copy of the second volume exists at the National Library of Scotland. I will have to wait until November and a trip to Edinburgh before I will know how that mystery concludes.