Victorian

The Belton Estate (1865) is the story of a young woman, Clara Amedroz, who vacillates between two suitors: her bucolic but passionate cousin Will, who is heir to her father’s entailed farm, and Captain Aylmer, an urbane but unemotional MP who is tied to his rebarbative mother’s apron strings. The narrative reflects the Jane Austen novels read by Trollope during the 1860s, and they inform his portrayal of an impecunious unmarried woman. With no income of her own and an ailing father, marriage is Clara’s only means of survival, and she struggles with her impending dependence on the men who surround her. She dramatically articulates her frustration: “I think it would be well if all single women were strangled by the time they are thirty.” The sub-plot, involving Captain and Mrs Askerton, deals with society’s intolerance towards others marital misfortunes (an echo of Dr Wortle’s School) and it also serves to highlight both Clara’s humanity and the superficiality of one of her suitors. ...

There can’t be many conditions more protean and elusive in nature than hysteria. Andrew Scull’s Hysteria: The Biography is, therefore, a considerable achievement. It is at once concise, detailed, eminently readable, and also peppered with pleasing literary allusions. The story begins with hysteria’s uterine origins, and the ancient Greeks’ curious belief that it was caused by “the womb wandering around in search of moisture”. Yes, quite. Although it’s easy to be dismissive of such musings, not much progress was made in intervening centuries, and hysteria simply became an easy diagnosis for anyone who was behaving a bit oddly, and it often obfuscated underlying conditions such as tertiary syphilis, multiple sclerosis, tumours, and epilepsy. Hysteria was also big business, with a profusion of quacks touting their patented remedies. Sufferers of hysteria, and especially their families, desperately wanted to believe that is was a somatic, rather than mental, illness, and were willing to pay large sums of money for supposed treatments. ...

As with many Victorian writers, George Gissing’s life (1857-1903) reads rather like one of his novels. In some spooky cases, his life actually imitated his art, the fates suffered by some of his characters later befalling the author. Born in Wakefield in 1857, George Gissing’s existence was one of eternal struggle. Although a gifted scholar, the early death of his pharmacist father left Gissing perennially short of money. His extraordinary talent won him a prestigious scholarship to Owen College (now the University of Manchester) and it looked as though his troubles were over, with a distinguished academic career virtually guaranteed. However, his weakness for a prostitute called Nell was to be his undoing. Initially her client, they soon became lovers, but she still demanded increasing sums of money from him to fund her alcohol addiction. With very limited means, he was forced to steal on her behalf and was eventually caught when the suspicious college authorities laid a trap for him. He was expelled in disgrace and his family wanted nothing more to do with their black sheep. ...

Samuel Plimsoll MP (1824-1898) is a peripheral character in Victorian history, but his contribution to politics was immense. His Big Idea was to mark a line on the side of a ship to indicate the lowest level at which it might safely sit in the water. Although that might sound like plain common sense, opposition to Plimsoll’s proposal was colossal. Some ruthless shipowners would deliberately over-insure their vessels and send them to sea in a terrible state of repair. If the ship sank, they would receive several times its value, but the crew would meet with a salty death. Although such extreme cases were mercifully rare, it was relatively common practice for businessmen to seriously overload their vessels in a bid to maximise profits. Understandably, sailors were reluctant to crew these “coffin-ships”, but refusal meant three months’ imprisonment - the law protected the criminal, rather than the victim. ...

My Trollope season continues with The Eustace Diamonds (1873), the third in the series of Palliser novels, and my least favourite thus far. The young and beautiful Lizzie Greystock traps the elderly and very wealthy Sir Florian Eustace into marriage, and within a year she is a widow in possession of a necklace worth £10,000 (around half a million quid): the Eustace diamonds. Although she is adamant that the jewels were a gift from her late husband, the Eustace family lawyer insists they were an heirloom and therefore not hers to keep. He embarks upon a quest to retrieve them from the clutches of the recalcitrant Lady Eustace, who boldly repels the intrusions of detectives and decamps to Scotland in order to protect her assets. ...

The second of Trollope’s Palliser novels, Phineas Finn, is also the first of his works with a predominant parliamentary theme. Although of relatively humble origins, the eponymous hero is elected MP for Loughshane through the support of his father’s old friend Lord Tulla. His father urges him to merely dabble in politics and focus on building a more lucrative legal career, but Finn is seduced by a life in Westminster and the circles in which he is now moving. ...

Although “Victorian Sex Goddess” is a rather sensational title for a book, this account of the redoubtable Lady Colin Campbell by G H Fleming is refreshingly understated. I’m sure few writers could resist the temptation to ham up one of the most dramatic court cases in British legal history. He mainly allows the case to speak for itself, but includes a plethora of seemingly insignificant details which both delight and enlighten the reader. ...

Referred to by G A Sala as “that remarkable and eminently disagreeable fiction”, Caroline Clive’s Paul Ferroll is a rare example of a unique novel. Published in 1855, it could be described as an early sensation novel with a strong element of psychological drama. Although the eponymous Ferroll is the embodiment of a successful Victorian gentleman – he is an eminent author, respected magistrate and friend of the local gentry – there is a cold-blooded killer lurking beneath the respectable exterior. The reader gradually learns that he murdered his first wife in order to marry his true love, Elinor, with whom he goes on to have a daughter. Although his neighbours gossip about the unseemly haste with which he re-marries, they cannot imagine that a man of his standing could have committed such a crime. Instead, a servant is charged then acquitted, and subsequently emigrates to Canada in order to escape the scandal. It is the return of this servant after eighteen years that prompts Ferroll to publicly confess his crime. Although sentenced to death at the conclusion of a dramatic trial, he manages to escape to a new life in Boston. ...

I was prompted to seek out The Mysterious Marie Corelli: Queen of Bestsellers after reading The Sorrows of Satan. Quite apart from the astonishingly narcissistic writing style, I was tantalised by the short accompanying biography, which suggested a fascinating and contradictory life. Although an independent and successful woman, she vehemently opposed women’s suffrage, referring to the Suffragettes as “Ladies who scream”. Her novels portray marriage as the desideratum of all girls, yet she chose to share her life with another woman, Bertha Vyer. ...

Antonio Melechi’s Servants of the Supernatural is an eclectic selection of accounts describing the Victorians’ fascination with the supernatural, what he calls a “gallery of contrasting thumbnail portraits”. Perhaps the most intriguing portrait is that of Franz Anton Mesmer, an Austrian who took the continent by storm with his theory of animal magnetism, which he believed was capable of “curing directly all disorders of the nervous system, and indirectly all other maladies.” People were queuing up to be healed, and Mesmer built a makeshift infirmary in an oak tree, personally magnetised by him. Incredibly, it housed up to 100 patients, who were tied in by a rope. The popularity of this bizarre treatment enabled Mesmer to franchise animal magnetism throughout France. Franchisees would be instructed by Mesmer and then receive a diploma authorising them to practice. One can but wonder how he would have fared on Dragons’ Den. ...