Decadent aesthetics and Richard Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death

Richard Marsh’s fiction made a significant contribution to the arguments that circulated during the 1890s about aesthetics and the commodification of culture. The plots of sensational popular novels and the sights and sounds of the music hall were all deemed unworthy, addiction-inducing forces by cultural commentators at the time. This chapter focuses on The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death (1892/1897), a murder-mystery novel in which a work of art – a poisoned Renaissance cabinet – apparently kills its owner, a collector of curios: the dangers of art could hardly be more pressing. Marsh’s novel looks back on a century of writers who have associated fine art with crime, from De Quincey’s provocation that murder could be a fine art to Pater’s and Wilde’s interest in the aesthetics of transgression and the entertaining nature of murder. This chapter explores how Marsh's writing was at the heart of 1890s debates about collecting, aestheticism and decadence.

Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in Richard Marsh’s The Goddess

This chapter analyses Richard Marsh’s 1900 novel The Goddess in relation to the late-Victorian imperial Gothic mode of writing. It suggests that Marsh’s novel demystifies the occult and supernatural aspects of the imperial Gothic through its depiction of a mechanical goddess. Marsh’s goddess is notable because she is not a supernatural being but an automaton, an example of ‘clockwork machinery’ set in violent motion by the novel’s criminal antagonist. Marsh’s novel looks back to Tipu’s tiger, a late-eighteenth-century automaton from Mysore, India, which enacted the death of an Englishman by a tiger. Marsh recalls Indian violence against the English through a fictional reimagining of the tiger, a familiar museum piece, as a goddess. The exposure of the goddess’s machinery is a shocking aesthetic strategy that strips the imperial Gothic of its veil of mysticism and, through a negotiation of the plot machinery of the fantastic, interrogates imperial Gothic conventions.

‘In that Egyptian den’: situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt

This chapter analyses the relationship between Marsh’s bestselling novel of Egyptian malevolence, The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), and a subgenre of Gothic Egyptian fiction which developed partially in response to contentious Anglo-Egyptian political relations. Marsh began writing his novel in 1895, the same year General Herbert Kitchener launched his famous and ultimately successful campaign to quell Islamic-nationalist rebellion in northern Sudan, then indirectly under Anglo-Egyptian control. This chapter exposes the links between the novel and colonial politics, placing The Beetle within the context of Anglo-Egyptian and Sudanese conflict, rather than broadly reading it against general imperial concerns. The chapter provides a fuller picture of both the remarkable revival of the Gothic literary mode at the fin de siècle and the society in which this literary phenomenon occurred. The chapter also reveals how Marsh’s text dramatically exceeded Gothic Egyptian genre conventions in its emphasis on pagan as well as colonial monstrosity.

Introduction

The introduction to the volume sets Richard Marsh in his historical context and argues that our understanding of late-Victorian and Edwardian professional authorship remains incomplete without a consideration of Marsh’s oeuvre. The introduction discusses Marsh as an exemplary professional writer producing topical popular fiction for an expanding middlebrow market. The seeming ephemerality of his literary production meant that its value was not appreciated by twentieth-century critics who were constructing the English literary canon. Marsh’s writing, however, deserves to be reread, as its negotiation of mainstream and counter-hegemonic discourses challenges our assumptions about fin-de-siècle literary culture. His novels and short stories engaged with and contributed to contemporary debates about aesthetic and economic value and interrogated the politics of gender, sexuality, empire and criminality.

Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller: The Datchet Diamonds

Marsh’s The Datchet Diamonds (1898) weaves together crime and romance elements with a financial plot concerning stock market speculation. Drawing on New Economic Criticism, this chapter argues that the novel is fascinatingly ambivalent in its treatment of speculation, appearing to condemn it as dishonourable and criminal while surreptitiously endorsing the very risk-taking behaviour on which it relies. The novel’s ‘decent-man-tempted’ protagonist is rendered attractive to readers through his willingness coolly to stare down danger and play the odds, putting him in uncomfortable proximity to the models of criminal masculinity that the text presents. As a crime thriller, The Datchet Diamonds works by soliciting readerly enjoyment of exposure to risk: as such, it reveals the limitations of crime scholarship that has focused too narrowly upon ‘ideologically conservative’ detective fiction, pointing instead to the willingness of readers to identify with transgressor-protagonists, to see laws broken and social hierarchies questioned.

‘Something on which you may exercise your ingenuity’: diamonds and curious collectables in the fin-de-siècle fiction of Richard Marsh

This chapter analyses a selection of Marsh’s diamond fictions in order to show how his curious stones are active in narratives expressing anxieties over masculine mastery of imperial objects and the viability of overseas commodities and global trade. The curiously animate, materially unstable and malevolently metamorphic stones pose questions as to the consequences of the exploitation of Empire. They challenge the expertise of collectors, dealers, and jewellers, indicating the perils of speculation, and of the return of the exotic to the heart of the Empire. The chapter analyses how Marsh’s diamond narratives generate anxiety over a fin-de-siècle market economy and concepts of value, contributing to the fin-de-siècle imaginary an impression of beleaguered masculinity, problematic objects, and an unstable global market.

‘Something was going from me – the capacity, as it were, to be myself’: ‘transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Richard Marsh

This chapter explores the treatment of objects, things, in Marsh’s major Gothic works: The Beetle, The Goddess and The Joss. The increasing popularity in the late nineteenth century of collecting and consuming objects offers a context in which boundaries between people and things become uncertain, with objects seemingly exercising a disturbing agency. Marsh’s texts present mutually transforming encounters between objects and characters that question the stability of identity. The chapter suggests that whilst transgressing boundaries between self and not-self is often explored in critical analysis through mesmerism, a more appropriate conceptual framework for Marsh is provided by object relations psychoanalysis, and specifically Christopher Bollas’s notion of ‘transformational objects’. Developing this notion in relation to Bill Brown’s ‘thing theory’, the chapter identifies Marsh’s objects as ‘transformational things’, encounters with which often lead to terrifying breakdowns of selfhood, conveying a pervasive sense of existential horror and exposing the precariousness of late-nineteenth-century identity.

‘The crowd would have it that I was a hero’: populism, New Humour and the male clerk in Marsh’s Sam Briggs adventures

This chapter situates the adventures of Marsh’s male clerk Sam Briggs (1904–1915) within the context of the ‘New Humour’ of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, in order to explore the intersections between populism, comedy and mass readership at the turn of the twentieth century. Specifically, the chapter examines how Marsh tapped into the burgeoning lower-middle-class literary marketplace by deploying slapstick, satire and farce to interrogate some of the most pressing issues of his day, including the expansion of London and the effects of suburban sprawl, the ambiguous social and economic position of the male clerk, the crisis in masculinity, the contentious debates about evolution and degeneration, the rapid advancements in industry and technology and the profound consequences of the First World War.

Mrs Musgrave’s stain of madness: Marsh and the female offender

This chapter ties Richard Marsh’s Mrs Musgrave – And Her Husband (1895) to the anxiety surrounding the degeneration debate. Simultaneously crime novel, detective novel and Gothic fiction, Mrs Musgrave – And Her Husband mobilises the discourses of eugenics and criminal anthropology as they were articulated by figures such as Francis Galton and Cesare Lombroso. The chapter argues that the novel provides a unique contribution to the debate surrounding hereditary criminality by simultaneously and deliberately validating and critiquing the racist and sexist matrix that arguably informed late-nineteenth-century British culture and society. Unlike much other late-nineteenth-century fiction, the novel employs a pattern where racial and sexual discourses are repeatedly set on course only to be derailed, and derailed only to be brought back on track again.

Tall tales and true: Richard Marsh and late Victorian journalism

Focusing largely on short stories of the 1890s and 1900s, this essay examines Richard Marsh's many similarities and connections with late-Victorian newspapers, particularly the tabloid press typified by George Purkess's Illustrated Police News. It argues that Marsh used the direct and accessible language of popular journalism to clothe his outlandish sensation fiction in the trappings of believability, while at the same time exploiting the literary possibilities of the news itself, notably in his responses to the infamous Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel in 1888 in stories such as 'The adventure of the phonograph' (Curios, 1898) and 'A member of the Anti-Tobacco League' (Under One Flag, 1906).