Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics

Ruth Heholt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000173239
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first full-length study of the popular Victorian writer Catherine Crowe (1790-1872). Crowe is increasingly being recognised as an important and influential figure in the literary and Spiritualist circles of the nineteenth century. This monograph offers a reassessment of her major works, arguing that her writing is prescient. Best known today for her collection of "real" ghost tales The Night Side of Nature: or of Ghosts and Ghost Seers, Crowe also wrote five popular novels as well as numerous short stories and essays. Innovative and sometimes original in their use of genre, her works cover the Newgate genre, help to initiate detective fiction, include elements of the social problem novels of the 1840s, and point the way to the sensation novels of the 1860s. Politically radical in many ways Crowe was vocal about women's oppression by men, social inequality, poverty, slavery, and animal rights. This volume aims to restore an author who was "[o]nce as famous as Dickens or Thackeray" (Wilson 1986, v) to her proper place in the scholarly discussion of Victorian literature.

Part One

From Newgate to Sensation

1 The Newgate Novel, Crime, and Detection in Catherine Crowe’s Early Fiction

Four months before Edgar Allan Poe published his short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and three days before the publication of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Newgate novel Night and Morning, an innovative crime novel appeared. Published in January 1841, originally called Susan Hopley: Or Circumstantial Evidence and later known as Susan Hopley: The Adventures of a Maid Servant, Catherine Crowe’s debut novel was produced by Saunders and Otley, who also published Bulwer-Lytton’s text. Susan Hopley is a rollicking story centring around the gruesome murder of the eponymous Susan’s master, Mr Wentworth, and the subsequent uncovering of his murderer. Susan Hopley is a crime novel which brims with subplots. Crimes of all sorts are committed and there are twists, turns, and red herrings. Murder, mayhem, theft, betrayal, desertion, sexual peccadillos, duals, fraud, and false marriages form only some of the crimes and misdemeanours in the narrative. Crowe’s second novel, Men and Women: Or Manorial Rights (1843), is a novel of the same water as Susan Hopley. This novel features the sensational murder of the blackguard aristocrat Sir John Eastlake and the narrative follows the subsequent hunt for his murderer, with many subplots and asides. This novel is also packed with incidents and there are gamblers, smugglers, murderers, thieves, and seducers. Crime fiction was blossoming in the 1840s, and Crowe’s first two novels were influential in the phenomenon. Both texts have a sustained focus on crime and criminals, and this chapter explores how these novels expanded on and helped to create the nascent crime fiction genre by examining Crowe’s work in light of crime fiction, the Newgate genre, and the rise of detective fiction.

Crime fiction has often been dismissed as populist and “trashy.” As Martin Priestman suggested, until relatively recently, crime fiction was more of a “guilty pleasure” than a subject fit for serious academic consideration (Priestman, 2003, p. 1). In the last 50 years though, and increasingly in contemporary times, crime fiction has become a mainstream and very fruitful subject of enquiry for scholars. However, the scholarly discussion of historic crime fiction tends to coalesce around male authors. Female-authored crime fiction is seen to be almost a different genre. In relation to Crowe, critics disagree about the importance and impact of her work. In 2015, Stephen Knight claimed,

There are several candidates for the title of the first major crime story by a woman writer. The earliest must be Catherine Crowe’s The Adventures of Susan Hopley (1841) published as Poe’s first detective story was appearing. The enquiries made by Susan, a maidservant, are central to unveiling the crime, but as the novel had no real influence it is best seen as a potent forerunner.

(p. 65)

The question of literary influence must always be a slippery one, but this statement seems particularly dismissive. In fact, more recently, Knight wrote,

Susan Hopley can hardly be claimed as a woman’s pioneering creation of the crime novel – the plotting is too obvious and clumsy, the narrative sequences both manipulated and random-seeming. […] Susan’s detective work is on a very small scale.

(2017, p. 133)

Of course, it could be argued that clumsy plotting and contrived narratives are often a part crime fiction. There is, however, a resistance from Knight to seeing Susan Hopley as either detective or crime fiction that is somewhat unaccountable. He stated baldly that the novel “is not the start of female detection that some feminist critics have felt it to be” (2017, p. 100).

Despite Knight’s claims, the evidence seems to point towards Susan Hopley having a powerful impact on scholarship about crime fiction and the debates about the origin of the genre. His comments are in stark contrast to the view of Lucy Sussex (probably one of the “feminists” to which Knight refers) who said “its influence cannot be underestimated” (2010, p. 62). Sussex stated,

Crowe was the first major woman author in the crime form, writing two novels devoted to murder mysteries when her contemporaries relegated the subject of murder to a small part of their novelistic canvases. She was the first writer, perhaps, to successfully apply the murder mystery to the novel and sustain it over the narrative unflaggingly. Moreover she made use of the sleuthing female, making for the first time a female detective the protagonist of a novel.

(2010, p. 63)

It is tempting to take out “woman” from the first sentence not least because for many years, Edgar Allan Poe has been fêted as the “father of detective fiction” (Messent, 2013, p. 109). Indeed, it is often claimed by scholars that “the detective story was invented in 1841 by Edgar Allan Poe” (Priestman, 2003, p. 2). The academic discussion of the first women-authored crime fiction tends to coalesce around Sensation fiction in the 1860s, in particular that of Mary Elizabeth Braddon.¹ In line with the idea of Poe as the progenitor of detective fiction, scholarly explorations of crime fiction have created a “canon” of crime writers that is pervasive in academic accounts. Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, M. E. Braddon, and Arthur Conan Doyle form the list of the pre-Golden age writers most often considered as inventing the genre. And although Priestman noted an increasing attempt to break the canon of crime fiction and its criticism (2003, p. 2), the move away from the discussion of the “usual suspects” is grindingly slow, and the number of female authors included is very small indeed. It may be that neither Susan Hopley nor Men and Women are particularly elegant novels, and there are certainly flaws in plotting and writing style. However, they mark a significant and perhaps unique moment in women’s writing in the 1840s and as such deserve attention and a place in the history of Victorian crime and detective fiction.

Susan Hopley and the Newgate Novel

In the 1830s up to the mid-1840s, a new sub-genre of novels dubbed the “Newgate novels” led the reader into a dark world of crime and vice. Arising out of the popular penny press and “real-life” crime publications, such as the Newgate Calendar, they were popular for only about a decade. Newgate novels have equivalence with the “Sensation decade” of the 1860s, and although the number of novels is far fewer than Sensation novels, they scandalised critics to the same degree. The term was a pejorative one coined by contemporary reviewers, and it referred to both the notorious Newgate gaol where many of the novels’ characters were incarcerated and the Newgate Calendar with its reports of true crime. The genre was almost universally excoriated in the press and Fraser’s Magazine called the Newgate novels “the gallows school of literature” (1840, p. 227), while the Athenaeum dubbed them “a class of bad books, got up for a bad public” (1839, p. 803). The pages of these novels were populated with highwaymen and housebreakers, fallen women, thieves, murderers, and vagabonds of all kinds, and the Newgate novel’s popularity was proportional to its criticism. The fast-paced narratives delved into the criminal underclass, revelling in urban lives of crime and seeming to uncover the vicious and dangerous side of early Victorian society.

Heather Worthington claimed,

The Newgate novels are important in a number of ways: they represent an increasing interest in the construction and motivation of the criminal; they have an element of detection or feature a detective figure; they bring crime firmly into mainstream fiction and so make possible the later genre of sensation fiction.

(2010, p. 19)

In many recent scholarly works, the importance of the Newgate novels is being reappraised. Their role as a pivot or bridge between the salacious penny press publications and the middle-class appropriations of crime and scandal in Sensation and detective fiction is increasingly seen as significant. Yet, very few novels are identified as being in the Newgate genre. In his influential appraisal of the Newgate genre, Keith Hollingsworth stated the number of Newgate novels “amid the host of novels published in the thirties and forties, is very small: eight or nine titles claim special attention. The most important authors – fewer still – are Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens and Thackeray” (1963, p. 15). This list of authors was repeated by Edward Jacobs and Manuaela Mourão who wrote that “[t]he Newgate novels are always identified as: ‘a small corpus of popular novels by a handful of authors: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, William Harrison Ainsworth and Charles Dickens’ ” (2011, p. 26). The list of novels and authors has not changed since Hollingsworth’s study in 1963, and critics uniformly identify the Newgate novel as a male genre: written only by men, with male heroes and romanticised and glamorised male criminals. Jacobs and Mourão stated, “The protagonists of Newgate novels were almost exclusively male, as were their authors” (2011, p. 35). Lyn Pykett also backed up this idea, saying definitively, “The Newgate novel was associated exclusively with male authors” (2003, p. 19). This limited view persists, and while the Sensation genre is being revisited and reassessed in terms of authors and dates (the genre is no longer seen in anywhere near as rigid a way as it once was), the Newgate novel continues to be viewed as a fixed category belonging exclusively to a certain time and to certain authors.²

Although undoubtedly popular, the Newgate novels were viewed as immoral, sensationalist, and damaging to the reader. Just after its publication, a reviewer of Susan Hopley in the Athenaeum (unaware of Crowe’s gender), recognised the possibility of the novel falling into the disreputable category of these new novels:

We need scarcely say that so skilful a caterer for the taste of the times, as our author, has not failed to avail himself of the melo-dramatic elements which the prison and the scaffold supply: though it is but justice to add, that his materials of this kind have not the foul and immoral taint, that savours of the ruffianism of his predecessors. Nevertheless, ruffians abound in his pages; but they, and their schemes, have no chance against Susan.

(1841, p. 94)

The reviewer recognised that the author had deliberately employed some of the themes and elements that were proving so popular in the early 1840s. Melodrama, “the prison and the scaffold” are all present in Susan Hopley. That Susan defeats the ruffians is not entirely the point. Thackeray had already condemned the Newgate school for its depictions of “ruffians whose occupations are thievery, murder, and prostitution” (Gillingham, 2010, p. 94). Crowe’s first novel is full of these types of characters, and if it misses “the foul and immoral taint” of other novels, it still smacks strongly of the “gallows school of literature” (Fraser’s Magazine, 1840, p. 227).

Crowe wrote to her old friend Robert Chambers, editor of the periodical Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, half joking that the journal was too staid and conservative to serialise Susan Hopley. She argued that the format was restrictive and the journal itself too polite for the type of tale she was writing. To quote the letter at some length, she stated,

To paint human life and character, in the first place, requires space – for to tell a story well requires room for details – it is details that make the interest and the life. For this reason I look upon your story department as your weak one – for which I don’t blame the writers, but the restrictions – they are shells of stories – there’s no life, no individuality of character, no freedom, and therefore no interest. But suppose we get over the limited space, there arise other difficulties even more potent – one must be so on one’s ps. and qs. – no broad pictures – no slang – no low dialects – one must wash it till all the colour is washed out. You admire my novel but how much of it is there you would transfer to your pages unwatered – How much is there of Dickens? Or of Ainsworth? Your stories are of the old school and we are of the new. […] My forte is not for painting delicate perplexities. I can write stories...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One From Newgate to Sensation
• Part Two Realism and Politics
• Part Three Gender
• Part Four Supernature and the Gothic
• Index