Mary Elizabeth Braddon Archives

The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders

January 24, 2011 By Catherine Pope

Cover of The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders Feeling bereft after finishing Barchester Towers, I was saved from despair by the timely arrival of the postman clutching a copy of Judith Flanders’ The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. Although squeamish by nature, I am intrigued by the Victorian fascination with murder and how it was represented through newsprint and popular culture, particularly sensation fiction. Flanders achieves a panoramic sweep through journalism, novels, broadsides, ballads, and theatre, engaging with both well-known and relatively obscure sources, and in the process unearthing a few hitherto unknown facts or connections.

The Victorian period was both metaphorically and literally dark. As Flanders observes, the lack of street-lighting for much of the nineteenth century meant that many neighbourhoods were plunged into complete darkness at night, thereby creating the perfect environment for those with murderous intent. Although fear was widespread, murder had become reassuringly rare, allowing people to indulge in the thrill of the crime without risk of being faced with its gruesome reality. The proliferation of newsprint fed this appetite for vicarious terror, with even the Times indulging in melodrama and in one case offering its readers the opportunity to buy the court model of a murder reconstruction. Such three-dimensional representations abounded – after the infamous Red Barn murder of 1827, Staffordshire pottery figures were produced of the perpetrator, Corder, and the victim, Maria Marten. The high cost of such items showed that the rich were just as obsessed with murder as the poor. Those unable to afford expensive knick-knacks could instead watch a dramatisation of the case. An early 1860s performance even featured the Bow Street runner who apprehended Corder recreating his arrest live on stage.

Endless press coverage provided rich fodder for sensation novelists, whose recycling of cases was no less exploitative than that of the potters and impresarios. Flanders surveys an impressively wide range of fiction, from the household name of Wilkie Collins to forgotten writers such as Matilda Charlotte Hostoun, who fictionalised the Road Hill House murder in Such Things Are, and Caroline Clive, who in Paul Ferroll created an unforgettably sinister villain. Using archival material, she shows how real-life cases inspired many plots, with the fictional portrayal sometimes replacing reality in the public imagination. Flanders rightly concludes that quality varied, with Mary Elizabeth Braddon ranging from the zenith of Lady Audley’s Secret to the nadir of One Life, One Love:

… a story of the Paris Commune, double-identity, heroines regularly going mad and a plot so confusing that there is no real resolution, because I strongly suspect, the author could not quite work out what had happened, and understandably did not want to read it over again.

Of course, theatrical and literary representations of murder are several steps removed from grim corporeality. However, public executions of murderers were also popular entertainment, and nearly 30,000 people filed past the hanged body of the Resurrectionist Burke. A wallet was subsequently made from his scalp, and those with a taste for the truly morbid can view it in Edinburgh’s History of Surgery Museum. Such spectacles were big business, with traders plying a roaring trade in broadsides, grisly souvenirs and themed comestibles. Crowds eagerly watching the hanging of cabinet-maker James Greenacre, who murdered and dismembered his lover, were able to sustain themselves with Greenacre tarts (ingredients, fortunately, unknown).

Although Flanders provides full descriptions of many notable murders, her treatment is never gratuitous and she avoids potentially stomach-churning details. Victims remain human and are afforded respect; their killers are never glorified. Flanders’ dry wit also introduces much-needed levity into what could otherwise be a succession of bleak episodes. Other reviewers have criticised the book’s lack of cohesion or argument, but for me, this is its strength. Flanders synthesises a wealth of material, and there is no attempt to formulate the reader’s response or to draw simplistic parallels with twenty-first-century discourses on murder. The Invention of Murder is scholarly, engaging and comprehensive, allowing the reader to experience the multifaceted Victorian representation of murder from the safety of their armchair.

Henry Dunbar by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

June 27, 2010 By Catherine Pope

Cover of Henry Dunbar by Mary Elizabeth Braddon Mary Elizabeth Braddon is, of course, best known for her sensation classic Lady Audley’s Secret, with its infamous eponymous bigamist. A contemporary critic actually thought Henry Dunbar (1864) superior, praising its “excellence of plot,” “animal vivacity,” and “boldness of incident”. Not all reviewers were impressed, however. Some were outraged by the central murder plot and Braddon’s handling of the theme of crime and punishment, in which she appears to argue against the death penalty. Capital punishment was a hotly debated topic at the time, with public executions banned four years after the novel’s publication. The compelling plot and topical themes made Henry Dunbar an ideal candidate for stage adaptation, and successful playwright Tom Taylor did the honours the following year, with Kate Terry appearing as the female lead at the Olympic Theatre.

Henry Dunbar, heir to the respectable bank of Dunbar, Dunbar and Balderby, is discovered to have defrauded the business by forcing his clerk, Joseph Wilmot, to forge cheques. When confronted with his crime, he lays the blame squarely on Wilmot, refusing to take any responsibility for his actions. His uncle banishes Dunbar to the firm’s Indian office as punishment, while his accomplice is summarily dismissed. Having no other means of supporting himself, Wilmot re-offends and is eventually transported to Tasmania. The novel’s main action commences when the two men meet again after 30 years, the crime and its consequences still raw in both their minds. Wilmot’s daughter Margaret, a strong-willed young woman, turns detective in order to find out the truth surrounding the fateful reunion.

Margaret Wilmot is an early example of the lady detective, and through her, Braddon examines the fluidity of female identity and also the effects of a father’s crime on his daughter. Although Braddon in this case is concerned mainly with the social implications of having a felonious parent, she also tentatively explores the idea of heredity, which came to dominate some of her later work. Taylor’s stage adaptation was sub-titled ‘A Daughter’s Trials’, thus emphasising the importance of Margaret’s teleological experience. Margaret, despite her determination, essentially conforms to feminine ideals, and appears tame in comparison with more transgressive female detectives, such as Leona Lacoste in Florence Marryat’s Her Father’s Name. However, Margaret is more human, making it easier for the reader to engage with her quest, and her strength of mind sets her apart from other literary heroines.

In the scholarly introduction, Braddon scholar Anne-Marie Beller places Margaret within the context of other female detectives and considers recent criticism of the genre. Anne-Marie examines the novel’s other main themes, and also compares it with the serialised version, which was made even more sensational to appeal to working-class readers. The appendices include contemporary reviews, a parody of sensation fiction, and an extract from the script of the stage adaptation.

Henry Dunbar was one of the most financially successful of Braddon’s novels, with The Era commenting that its success “is a brilliant as the wing of a summer butterfly. Let us hope it will be more enduring.” As Anne-Marie writes in her introduction: “it deserves to be read today, not only as an interesting story in its own right, but also as a fascinating commentary on mid-Victorian ideas about class, gender, and crime.” I would certainly agree, and think it is one of Braddon’s most accomplished and tightly-plotted novels. Like The Era, I hope it endures a little longer.

Beautiful For Ever: Madame Rachel of Bond Street by Helen Rappaport

April 11, 2010 By Catherine Pope

Cover of Beautiful for Ever: Madame Rachel of Bond Street by Helen Rappaport Fellow Victorian geeks will recognise Madame Rachel as Maria Oldershaw, foster mother and business partner of the delicious Lydia Gwilt in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale. She and her beauty products were also referred to in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. In this excellent biography, Helen Rappaport tells the true story of the woman behind the infamous creation of “Madame Rachel”, purveyor of dubious unguents which promised to make women “beautiful for ever”.

Madame Rachel, aka Sarah Rachel Levison, cleverly exploited women’s perennial obsession with youthfulness. The wealth of background material includes descriptions of actresses nightly wrapping their hands and faces with slices of raw meat in order to preserve their complexions (presumably, it also worked to ward off any unwelcome sexual attention). There was a range of less repellant, but largely inffectual remedies on the market from such well-known names as Rimmel. Cosmetics companies vied to claim responsibility for Queen Victoria’s youthful appearance when she came to the throne, which was entirely explicable on account of her being only eighteen. Figaro in London commented that the queen “must have had decayed teeth, grey hair, a head nearly bald, scurf, superfluous hair, a tanned skin, rough and sallow complexion, pimples, spots, redness and cutaneous erruptions” in order to require so many products whose daily use was imputed to her. Madame Rachel was no less modest in her claims when she started advertising her Arabian preparations and enamelling technique in 1859, which were designed for the “restoration and preservation of female loveliness”, and had obtained the “patronage of royalty”.

Despite Punch lambasting what it called “Stucco for the Softer Sex”, Madame Rachel’s enamelling process was in high demand. This involved:

A careful removal of rough hairs or fuzz on the face … followed by the application of copious amounts of alkaline toilet washes, then a filling-in of wrinkles and depressions in the skin with a thick paste (usually made of arsenic or white lead and other ingredients), followed by applications of rouge and powder to finish off.

Although wealthy women flocked to undergo this dubious treatment, the actress Lola Montes was more sceptical, commenting: “Nothing so effectually writes memento mori! on the cheek of beauty as this ridiculous and culpable practice.”

The exact figures are unknown, but Madame Rachel seems to have made hundreds of thousands of pounds a year from this “ridiculous and culpable practice”, based at her New Bond Street premises. Gullible patrons were taken in by her risible claims that she and her daughters were many decades older than they appeared and had in fact witnessed the guillotining of Marie Antoinette. Her clients became addicted to the treatments, often running up ruinous bills which they were then unable to pay. She ended up in court after one Mrs Carnegie (and her bewildered husband) refused to settle a bill for £938 5s 0d (nearly £65,000 in today’s money). Interestingly, Rappaport argues that wives spending vast sums of money on beauty treatments partly informed the drafting of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, which paved the way for women being financially independent and therefore liable for their own debts.

The Carnegie court case gave Madame Rachel her famous catchphrase: ‘beautiful for ever’, which also became the title of her treatise on “Female Grace and Beauty”. This was essentially a glossy marketing brochure designed to butter up potential customers by praising their inherent female beauty, which could be subtly enhanced by products from an exclusive range. ‘Exclusive’ essentially meant expensive: an individual consultation with Madame Rachel cost a minimum of £250 (£16,250), and her miraculous Jordan Water cost the modern equivalent of £1,500. One could argue in her defence that such prices were simply a tax on stupidity (or naivety, if one is to be generous), but Madame Rachel was also engaged in more cynical activities to exploit human weaknesses. She would often recommend her female customers to take one of her patented Arabian baths at £5 (£325) a time, and then also charge “gentleman” visitors to spy on them through a Judas hole. To compound matters, she would then convince vulnerable spinsters that eligible aristocratic bachelors wanted to marry them, making all the necessary arrangements for an extortionate fee. Of course, the marriage never took place, and the hapless victim was left penniless and humiliated.

Amongst the press there was limited sympathy for the unfortunate dupes, but they made much of Madame Rachel’s Jewishness. The majority of the coverage indulged in sickening anti-semitism, portraying her as a hook-nosed crone who was trying to bleed her victims dry. In the two major court cases of her career, she was not given a fair trial and was sent to prison on the basis of ethnicity, rather than her questionable activities. An unbiased judge and jury would have acquitted her on both occasions, but she was born in an age where the aristocracy could do no wrong and all “foreigners” were dubious. The attendant publicity made her infamous, and her waxwork went on display at both Madame Tussauds and Smithfield Cattle Show. She became the subject of music hall songs, and there was even a farce called Beautiful For Ever playing to a packed Royal Surrey Theatre.

Apart from her wealthy patrons, Madame Rachel counted amongst her children amongst her victims. Although one of the daughters was a willing acolyte, setting up a branch in Paris and keeping everything going during her mother’s spells in prison, the other children struggled with notoriety. The sensational aspects of Madame Rachel’s extraordinary career are poignantly imbricated with the tragic implications for two of her daughters, whose own lives were ruined by association with a notorious con-artist and blackmailer.

Helen Rappaport has skilfully brought together a variety of resources detailing Madame Rachel’s extraordinary career, and has also unearthed hitherto unknown biographical material on her origins. The story is told compellingly, with clear but unobtrusive historical context. I am delighted to have had the opportunity to find out more about this curious character who pervades Victorian literature. While reading the book, I came across a reference to her catchphrase – ‘beautiful for ever’ – in a novel published in 1896, 16 years after Madame Rachel’s death. Henceforth, I shall be on the look out for her everywhere.

Beautiful For Ever by Helen Rappaport. Victorian Secrets publishes Helen Rappaport’s No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War