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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.
8 •• Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in Richard Marsh’s The Goddess Neil Hultgren The title of Richard Marsh’s 1900 novel The Goddess: A Demon confronts readers with a juxtaposition of two very different nouns balanced by a colon: one designating a potentially beneficent female deity and another a harmful supernatural entity. Yet the title’s shift from a definite to an indefinite article implies that the goddess in question is, in fact, an example of a larger category, that of the demonic. The potential goodness of the title seeps away as
10 •• Decadent aesthetics and Richard Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death Daniel Orrells Richard Marsh was writing at a particular moment in the history of the commodity and mass consumption.1 The fin de siècle witnessed a specific interest in objects – curios – the subject of much of Marsh’s writing. The fascination with the curio reflected changes in habits and cultures of collecting. In France in post-revolutionary fervour, as Janell Watson outlines, ‘many precious decorative art objects, luxurious household goods, and religious cult objects f
The following considers Richard Marsh’s 1897 gothic novel The Beetle in relation to fin-de-siècle anxieties, specifically sexual deviancy, empire, and venereal disease. While the domestic Contagious Diseases Acts had been revealed in the 1880s, continued high rates of VD amongst British soldiers in particular continued the debate as to who was responsible for spreading diseases such as syphilis both at home and abroad. At a time of ‘colonial syphiliphobia’, to extend Showalter’s term, The Beetle suggests the necessity of regulating venereal disease in the Empire to protect Britain’s ‘racial superiority’ and conservatively warns against the potential consequences of dabbling with the sexually ‘deviant’ and dangerous Orient.
This essay explores the influence of the theological tradition of privation theory upon Richard Marsh‘s novel The Beetle (1897). Focusing on images of ontological nothingness, corruption and uncreation, it argues that the novel employs the concept of privation both in its depiction of the supernatural Other and in its parallel interrogation of its contemporary modernity. Imagery of privation in the novel is associated not only with the Beetle itself, but with the modern urban environment and weapons of mass destruction. The essay concludes by examining the corruption of language and absence of a creative logos able to respond adequately to the privations of the modern city and industrial economy.
Through an analysis of Richard Marsh‘s The Beetle (1897), this article explores a link between the practice of mesmerism and Victorian insecurities about the state of masculinity. It argues that The Beetle attempts– through the characterisation of mesmeric power as a dangerous virile energy and suggestibility to trance as effeminate and degenerate– to make a clear but highly unstable distinction between ideal and deviant forms of masculinity. In the process, Marsh‘s novel illuminates a complex relationship between the permeability of mind, body, and nation that paradoxically serves to both uphold and undermine the virility of the British male subject.
1 •• Introduction Victoria Margree, Daniel Orrells and Minna Vuohelainen Rediscovering Richard Marsh In the early twenty-first century, late Victorian and Edwardian culture has become a profitable commodity. Scenes of a foggy, dimly lit, Jack-the-Ripper London, a crowded metropolis inhabited by prostitutes, criminals, immigrants and detectives and cluttered with strange and remarkable objects and curiosities, now populate our c ontemporary imaginations, thanks to novels, films, television, radio and theatre. Academic studies ask us to look to the fin de
2 •• Tall tales and true: Richard Marsh and late Victorian journalism Nick Freeman Read all about it!: some introductory parallels Richard Marsh was a direct beneficiary of the educational reforms that swept Victorian Britain from 1870 onwards. An insistence upon the practical benefits of literacy created an ever-expanding readership for engaging, accessible and diverting fiction, and armed with a no-frills prose style, a fertile imagination and an ability to meet the tightest deadline, Marsh answered this audience’s call for a quarter of a century, lodging
4 •• ‘The most dangerous thing in England’? Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories Minna Vuohelainen In August 1911, the Strand Magazine introduced its readers to Richard Marsh’s latest fictional female, a sexually and ethnically ambiguous, highly strung and startlingly independent boundary-crosser with seemingly telepathic ability. Her first name, rather ominously, was Judith, aligning her with a murderous Jewish femme fatale, while her surname, Lee, suggested Gypsy heritage. Described by her enemies as a ‘black-faced devil
3 •• Mrs Musgrave’s stain of madness: Marsh and the female offender Johan Höglund Mrs Musgrave – and her Husband is arguably the first truly topical, readable and provoking novel Richard Marsh wrote. Published in June 1895, it entered a fierce debate caused by the publication of the English translations of Max Nordau’s Degeneration, in February, and Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero’s The Female Offender, in April, of the same year. Informed by post-Darwinian speculation on the possibility of racial deterioration and its connection to social erosion