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This collection of essays seeks to question the security of our assumptions about the fin de siècle by exploring the fiction of Richard Marsh, an important but neglected professional author. Richard Bernard Heldmann (1857–1915) began his literary career as a writer of boys’ fiction, but, following a prison sentence for fraud, reinvented himself as ‘Richard Marsh’ in 1888. Marsh was a prolific and popular author of middlebrow genre fiction including Gothic, crime, humour, romance and adventure, whose bestselling Gothic novel The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Building on a burgeoning interest in Marsh’s writing, this collection of essays examines a broad array of Marsh’s genre fictions through the lens of cutting-edge critical theory, including print culture, New Historicism, disability studies, genre theory, New Economic Criticism, gender theory, postcolonial studies, thing theory, psychoanalysis, object relations theory and art history, producing innovative readings not only of Marsh but of the fin-de-siècle period. Marsh emerges here as a versatile contributor to the literary and journalistic culture of his time whose stories of shape-shifting monsters, daring but morally dubious heroes, lip-reading female detectives and objects that come to life helped to shape the genres of fiction with which we are familiar today. Marsh’s fictions reflect contemporary themes and anxieties while often offering unexpected, subversive and even counter-hegemonic takes on dominant narratives of gender, criminality, race and class, unsettling our perceptions of the fin de siècle.
siècle as a mirror upon our own society, a period in which were established many of the dominant facets of the culture we confront today. This volume focuses on one of the most popular and prolific writers of the fin de siècle who has, however, largely been written out of the literary history of the period. The ‘universal literary provider’ Richard Marsh (pseudonym of Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857–1915; see figure 1.1) was one of the motors behind the thriving, commoditised fiction industry of the fin de siècle, and is now increasingly recognised as an i
elite cultural 32 Marsh and late Victorian journalism terrain. Marsh’s environment was therefore reflexive, dynamic, morally ambivalent, even hypocritical. It suited him perfectly. The unethical Marsh When Marsh wrote under his original name Bernard Heldmann, the results tended to be didactic, hardly unexpected when he was writing serials for boys’ weeklies and coeditor of the Union Jack. However, in March 1883, ‘A couple of scamps’, his final serial in the paper, mutated almost without warning from a juvenile adventure into a Gothic penny dreadful. Whether or not
perhaps the combination of an actual crime with what contemporary racial theory assumed was a troubling ethnic and racial heritage in his Jewish ancestry and his father’s criminality.1 According to contemporary racial theory, Marsh’s personal history up until the mid-1880s could be cast as an inevitable descent into crime.2 It is not surprising if, released from prison in 1885, Bernard Heldmann wanted to conceal both his criminal history and his GermanJewish heritage. His transformation into Richard Marsh in 1888 successfully accomplished these related conversions. Mrs
(pp. 35–6). Specialists at the Victoria and Albert Museum hesitate about the nationality, period or uniform that the garments represent, concluding that they are partly ‘European’ (‘Tippoo’s tiger [mechanical organ]’). 31 M. Vuohelainen, Richard Marsh (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), pp. 95, 98. 32 Writing under his real name (Bernard Heldmann) during the early 1880s, Marsh contributed to and coedited the boys’ periodical Union Jack, which Henty edited (Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, pp. xi–xii). 33 W. Collins, The Moonstone, ed. S. Farmer (Peterborough
contribute to the reformation of the canon of 1890s decadent writers by 191 Richard Marsh and object relations arguing that the middlebrow Richard Marsh was very much a product of the aesthetics and decadence espoused by Thomas De Quincey, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, and a significant transmitter of aesthetic discourse into the popular fiction of the period. Marsh had engaged with the debate over the value of art in his earliest writings, including his final novel as Bernard Heldmann, Daintree (1883), his very first as ‘Richard Marsh’, The Devil’s Diamond (1893), the