STANLEY FISH RECENTLY IDENTIFIED the intersection between crime and religion as a hot topic, a trend that he gauged by paying attention to a popular television show: “Law and Order…from its beginning…has had its plots follow the headlines. Only if the tension between commitment to the rule of law and commitment to one's ethnic or religious affiliation was, so to speak, in the news would a television writer put it at the heart of a story.”¹

During the same week that Fish published this claim, a Texas woman who drowned her five children had her guilty verdict overturned when it was revealed that an expert witness for the prosecution had made false statements to the court about an episode of the very same show. Commentators on the case said the witness had confused plots from Law and Order with real-life trials.² One need not be Oscar Wilde to see a meta-dramatic chiasmus at work here: Law and Order imitates life, but life also imitates Law and Order. The same could be said of popular Victorian crime fiction, which was serialized in eagerly awaited autonomous episodes in a manner not unlike televised crime drama. Victorian authors, moreover, commonly sought inspiration in real-life criminal plots. Like Law and Order, such fictional representations both mirrored and created readers' “reality” outside the text.³ In this article, I will examine a previously unexplored instance of such fictional recycling and reinvention: L. T. Meade's popular detective series The Sorceress of the Strand, I argue, is an overt rewriting of the strange case of “Madame Rachel,” a notorious female criminal of the 1860s.⁴ Before I make my case concerning how, why, and to what end Meade revised Madame Rachel's story, let me briefly summarize the evidence for this connection.

From 1902 to 1903, L. T. Meade published The Sorceress of the Strand in the Strand Magazine, the most prominent format of the day for detective fiction.⁵

The series featured a master criminal named Madame Sara who was a thinly disguised–but far more lethal – impersonation of Madame Rachel. An extremely prolific author, L. T. Meade is chiefly remembered as a writer of fiction for girls, but she also made extensive contributions to the literature of crime. Meade was an advocate of feminist causes, and critics such as Sally Mitchell and Mavis Reimer have argued that her writings facilitated mainstream Victorian feminism by depicting strong female heroines and by establishing a separate subculture for girls.⁶ Whether it was her feminism or her interest in compelling female characters that led Meade to redact Madame Rachel's story so explicitly, the connection between her stories and her source would have been quite obvious to contemporary readers. The villain of her series, for example, is named Madame Sara, and Madame Rachel's real name was Sarah Rachel Leverson. Newspaper articles about Rachel commonly used her full name, so “Sara” would have been a familiar appellation.⁷ Even more strikingly, the two women share an unusual vocation: like Madame Rachel, Meade's Madame Sara is a “professional beautifier” who operates a perfumery and cosmetics shop in London's West End (“Madame Sara” 388). Both Rachel and Sara purport to make women look younger and more beautiful through cosmetic products and procedures, but this promise is primarily a lure that allows them to inveigle wealth and riches from unwitting clients. Sara's crimes are more extreme than Rachel's, but her name, shop, and business clearly identify her with Madame Rachel. Meade even uses real incidents from Rachel's life to form some of the plots in The Sorceress, associating the two women all the more obviously.⁸

Meade evidently found a wealth of inspiration in Rachel's well-documented criminal saga, which she employs less prominently in another crime serial called The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings.⁹

Her recycling of Madame Rachel's case was unusual, however, in the lengthy space of time that elapsed between Rachel's mid-Victorian crimes and Meade's fictionalization of them at the turn of the century. Crimes with a high degree of press exposure could guarantee audience interest for Victorian writers, and Richard Altick notes that many such authors “thrived on the public's consuming appetite” for coverage of contemporary crimes (531). If Meade sought to feed a “consuming appetite” for stories about Madame Rachel, however, her audience's gratification was quite delayed: The Sorceress was published twenty-two years after Rachel's death.¹⁰

For scholars of Victorian culture, the gap between Rachel's 1868 trials and Meade's 1902 series provides a fascinating case study of how turn-of-the-century feminist writing transformed the terms of cultural debate about women's place in Victorian society. As handed down in newspapers and popular sources, the story of Madame Rachel had been used to legitimate broad cultural apprehension about women's foray into the expanding urban commercial marketplace in the second half of the nineteenth century, but Meade alters her source material in significant and fascinating ways. She transports Rachel's story into the fictional setting of 1899 London, where women's social and economic position was considerably different from the 1860s, and thus traces the shifting character of consumer capitalism and “the woman question” in the late-Victorian period. Her stories connect earlier discussions about women in the commercial sphere with turn-of-the-century debates about women's entry into new bastions of male economic privilege, such as science and the professions. At the same time, the series seeks to redefine what constitutes British female identity in the wake of women's expanding social and economic roles. Exploiting the exotic and foreign elements of Madame Rachel's commerce, Meade imagines a new kind of feminine identity defined not by exclusion from the economic sphere, but by an ideology of feminized global consumption.

Critical work on The Sorceress has not yet acknowledged Madame Sara's real-life prototype, though historians and critics have documented the strong cultural resonance of Madame Rachel in the Victorian period.¹¹

Madame Rachel, or Sarah Rachel Leverson, was indicted for fraud three times: in 1865, 1868, and 1878. The 1868 case was particularly momentous, protracting for nearly a year and occasioning a media frenzy.¹² In this suit, Rachel was charged and imprisoned for swindling money, jewelry, and goods from a wealthy lady customer of her Bond Street shop. Her five-year prison sentence was unusually harsh for the crime of fraud, suggesting the degree to which the case unsettled contemporaries. Over the course of two trials, the first of which closed without a verdict, the press struggled to understand what “Madame Rachel” signified about the society from which she emerged. The London Times alone ran no fewer than 50 articles, reports, letters, and editorials about the 1868 trial.¹³ Rachel also spawned cartoons and lampoons in Punch, parodic vaudeville renditions, a popular street ballad, and literary allusions that persisted for more than a century.¹⁴ In September 1868, Madame Tussaud's wax museum prominently promoted the introduction of a model of Rachel into their collection, and The Stereoscopic Company advertised portraits of Madame Rachel and her accuser, made “from sketches in Court.”¹⁵ The slogan for Rachel's shop engendered the widespread Victorian catch-phrase “beautiful for ever,” signifying puffery (Altick 542); Rachel became the namesake for a New Zealand spring called “Madame Rachel's Bath” (Boase 323); and Kellow Chesney claims that a shade of face-powder called “Rachel” existed well into the twentieth century (240). The cultural impact of the trial was enormous and far-reaching. In court, the prosecutor himself admitted the case did not “involve a great catastrophe or a grave crime,” but still called it “one of the most extraordinary which had ever been brought into a court of justice” because “it was one of such a remarkable nature” (4).¹⁶

What was so “remarkable” and “extraordinary” about the case? In the years leading up to the proceedings, Madame Rachel had become famous by marketing and vending her own line of beauty products. Though illiterate, she had even authored via dictation an 1863 “how to” manual entitled Beautiful For Ever!¹⁷

Indeed, it was not simply her fame that made Rachel's indictment remarkable, but what she herself represented. In journalistic and popular sources, the discourse surrounding Madame Rachel is predicated upon a vexed entanglement of gender, ethnic, and economic anxieties: Rachel's villainous persona came to symbolize threats to traditional English national identity posed by feminism, immigration and cosmopolitanism, and consumerism. To position Meade's series in the context of such representations is to locate both The Sorceress and the Madame Rachel case within a network of late-Victorian cultural debate, largely conducted in the periodical press, about femininity, globalism and nationalism, and consumerism. The use to which Meade puts Rachel's story, I argue, exemplifies not only the dissemination of feminism in popular discourse, but also the way that early feminists intervened in cultural narratives that functioned to cordon women off from various forms of public engagement.

When considering Victorian writing about Madame Rachel, the boundaries between accuracy, hyperbole, and hysteria are not always easy to determine. Contemporary sources suggest Rachel's “beauty shop” provided more services than the merely cosmetic, but Victorian authors are reticent about what precisely these entailed. As George Boase wrote in Notes & Queries in 1894, “it would not do to enter into the particulars of the various services which Rachel rendered to some of her clients, in addition to selling them enamels and perfumes” (323). Some accounts indicate Rachel was a “madam” in more ways than one: William Roughead claims she “dealt in other wares than those exposed to public wonder in her windows,” and that her shop's “primary purpose” was “procuration and blackmail” (96). If this is true, it lends a particularly ironic tone to the slogan posted over her shop door: “Purveyor to the Queen.”

Wilkie Collins's 1866 novel Armadale, on the other hand, features a villain modeled on Rachel, and the novel implies that back-room abortions were provided in her shop. In 1928, Horace Wyndham made the same claim in a similarly oblique manner, writing that Rachel supplied clients with “‘medical treatment’ of a description upon which the Law frowns” (242). We cannot be sure Rachel was involved in anything more nefarious than extreme puffery and an occasional attempt at extortion, but some of the rhetoric in Beautiful For Ever! does echo advertising copy for late-Victorian abortion-inducing patent medicines. Rachel's method of “cleansing the system from many of its impurities, which may arise from different causes” (20) could be an oblique reference to abortifacients, which were often discreetly advertised in the Victorian periodical press in such terms. The title “Madame,” by the same token, was common among providers of abortions or abortifacients in nineteenth-century culture.¹⁸

Intriguing as this evidence is, however, it is not enough to verify Rachel's involvement in extra-cosmetic activities: rumors that Rachel practiced mesmerism, magnetism, and witchery circulate alongside rumors about procuration and abortion, casting a shadow of doubt on all such accusation and speculation.

Rachel's actual indictment concerned only the relatively petty crime of fraud, which nonetheless occasioned an astounding degree of vitriol among her contemporaries. In an article about Madame Rachel and the coverage of her crimes and trials in the Victorian press, Tammy Whitlock notes that Rachel's trial performed cultural work well beyond its alleged purpose of determining Rachel's “guilt” or “innocence” of defrauding customer Mary Tucker Borradaile out of £1400: “there were actually a series of ‘trials’ within the larger frame of the criminal trial. Rachel was on trial as a perpetrator of fraud, but she was also on ‘trial’ for her participation in retail trade” (30); consequently, she was judged “guilty not only of her crime, but of lacking the respectability, class, ethnic origins, and morality of a Victorian lady” (36). Rachel was illiterate, thrice-married, separated from her husband, and Jewish, yet she had managed to amass a degree of social capital unusual to her situation. Over the course of her trials, newspaper readers learned that she held a box at the opera and owned a home in the suburbs, that her children had traveled and been educated in Paris, and that Lord Ranelagh frequented her shop. She represented an affront to Victorian class and gender strictures, and such effrontery gave contours to the presumption of guilt that hung over the trial. Newspaper coverage, for example, marshaled public opinion against Rachel's character. The Express argued: “criminals do not acquire the deep cunning and terrible proficiency in evil displayed by Rachel without having served a long and painstaking apprenticeship….How many other victims are there who have sunk quietly and unresistantly out of sight?” (117). Even the Times, which doubted there was enough evidence to justly convict Rachel, reasoned: “whatever may be the difference of opinion about the prisoner's legal guilt, about her moral guilt we take it that there can be no doubt whatever” (107).

Popular depictions of Rachel as a procuress, a prostitute, and an abortionist hovered over the press coverage, suggesting that her villainous appeal was due to widespread apprehension about women's participation in public, capitalist enterprise. Reports from Rachel's various trials suggest that she was perfectly cognizant of such apprehension, and was willing to manipulate it to her own ends when it suited her. During her 1865 trial, when Rachel was sued for fraud by Aurora Knight, the defense attempted to discredit Knight by depicting her as a woman overly engaged in the public sphere and thus “not a lady, as she represents herself.” Not only had Knight “lately come from America,” linking her with travel, traffic, foreignness, and domestic unrootedness, but she was also “known at the Café de Lyons by various names.” Most telling of all is Rachel's argument as to why her course of beauty treatments did not work for Knight: Knight “had suffered from an attack of smallpox and wished to have the scars removed. Madame Rachel…recommended her to take baths. Of course Madame Rachel would not admit a woman who had just recovered from smallpox into her private baths, and she sent her to some baths in Argyll-place. But the complainant went to the Endell-street public baths” (“Marlborough Street”). Rachel's testimony suggests that her beautifying treatments are not effective in “public” baths, presumably because such places are impure. By telling this story in court, Rachel associates her accuser with public, transnational contagion. The irony, of course, is that she relies here upon the same conventional associations– between privacy and purity, between publicity and contamination–that corrupted her own character and femininity in the minds of her contemporaries. Rachel's expansive, ubiquitous advertising campaign and her engagement in public, commercial exchange had exposed her to the exact same kind of censure.

Rachel was not only a woman, however, but a “Jewess,” so her public image was tainted by ethnic as well as gender and class stereotypes. Newspaper reports of her trials often reminded readers of Rachel's Jewishness, evoking not only anti-Semitic fears of racial difference and cultural otherness, but also fears associated with immigration, job competition, cosmopolitanism, and the dilution of English national identity. Rachel's first appearance in court, for example, was in 1858, when she sued her landlord for assault after he allegedly locked her up and attempted to push her down a flight of stairs. In the Times's coverage of the case, Rachel is referred to as “an English Jewess,” and at the trial itself, the defense attempted to gain sympathy for the landlord by appealing to ethnic stereotypes. As evidence against Rachel, though it had nothing to do with the alleged assault, the defense produced one of her advertising circulars, where she refers to herself as “Madame Rachel of London and of New York” (“Court of Queen's Bench”). Later, a witness testified that Rachel often spoke German with her mother. Rachel denied to the court that she had ever been in New York, and denied that she spoke German, but such allegations were clearly intended to cast doubt on her “Englishness,” to present her as foreign and cosmopolitan, transnational and untrustworthy. The United States and Germany were Britain's primary economic competitors at this time, so Rachel's fiscal enterprise is figured as a threat to English capitalism rather than a manifestation of it. Similarly, when Rachel was convicted of debt in 1862, coverage of her case in the Times began: “The insolvent, a young Jewess…” (“Insolvent”). Representing the bankrupt Rachel as a financial drain on her society, the report takes pains to emphasize her Jewishness. Coverage of her 1868 trial performed similar discursive maneuvers. The Saturday Review called her a “Jewish purveyor of feminine charms” (Extraordinary 119), associating Rachel's business with exotic Eastern mysticism, which is racially and commercially antagonistic to Englishness in this account.

If Rachel's gender and ethnicity were “on trial,” the 1868 case also served as a trial of the victim, the widow Mrs. Borradaile, whose own failure to adhere to Victorian standards of respectable feminine behavior nearly lost her the case. According to Borradaile, Rachel had swindled her by leading her to believe Lord Ranelagh wanted to marry her, provided she underwent a series of expensive beautification treatments and lent him a good deal of money through Rachel's intercession. Borradaile was around fifty years of age, which made this story seem foolish to Victorian readers, but rumors surrounding the trial painted a much more sordid picture of the triad. Some evidence suggested that Ranelagh had watched Borradaile bathing in Rachel's back room, with her consent, and that Rachel's baths were specially designed to allow such voyeurism. Other rumors indicated that Borradaile had had an affair with Ranelagh years earlier, while she was still married, and that he had fathered one of her children. Most damaging to Borradaile was the argument used by the defense: that the Lord Ranelagh story was completely false, and that Borradaile was using it to shield her real “paramour,” William.

The prosecutors denied all of these allegations, but Borradaile's image and appearance did not attest to her respectability. Her lawyer later described her as “a spare, thin, scraggy-looking woman…her hair was dyed a bright yellow; her face was ruddled with paint; and the darkness of her eyebrows strongly suggested of meretricious art. She had a silly, giggling, half-hysterical way of talking” (qtd. in Roughead 109). To be visibly made-up was considered indecent at this time, and the falseness of Borradaile's appearance perhaps led jurists to doubt her testimony.¹⁹

In the first attempt to try the case, the jury failed to reach consensus because of disagreement about her reliability as a witness. Commentators on the case, too, were critical of her. The Saturday Review said her letters, brought as evidence in the trial, were a “very ugly romance of a vulgar and disgusting chapter of sin and shame.” They were skeptical of her claim that she wrote them while “bewitched” by Rachel (121). Even the prosecution, aware of their star witness's limitations, called her “weak, credulous, foolish, and vain” in closing statements (94).

The trial came down to the question of which of these two repugnant women the jury would believe: Madame Rachel or Mrs. Borradaile. Accordingly, both lawyers were at pains to prove their clients' allegiance to an ethos of proper Victorian femininity, and emphasized their devotion to their families while playing down their savviness in the consumer sphere. Transcripts from the trial suggest the extent to which, in the 1860s, proper feminine character was established not only by proof of domestic ties, but also by ignorance of all forms of financial intercourse. The prosecutor repeatedly referenced Borradaile's familial and social status, calling her a “gentlewoman…for she was gentle in birth, manners, and demeanour” (101), and noting that her husband had been a respected army officer. According to the Times, he “asked [the jury] to believe Mrs. Borradaile upon the ground that she had been a virtuous wife, and since her husband's death a virtuous widow, and that the slightest stain or slur could not be cast upon her. It was true that charges against her had been whispered, but he challenged [these]” (6). He also portrayed her as the innocent dupe of Rachel's business acumen, emphasizing that she was “a lady fresh from the country” (96) and claiming that, “Rachel, being a woman of great craft and very considerable mind, brought that craft to bear upon her victim” (95).

The defense, on the other hand, implied that Borradaile was “a woman of loose habits” (9), and questioned her commitment to the feminine sphere of home and family: “That there was something strange on the part of Mrs. Borradaile was clear, else why was she living in London, moving about from coffeehouse to coffeehouse, while her daughter and other relations were all living in Wales?” (“Central Criminal Court, Sept. 24”). Emphasizing Borradaile's domestic negligence, they made a point to present her as more comfortable in the public consumer sphere than she let on: the defense brought in a diamond merchant whose shop Borradaile had visited, and he testified that “she took a look round as ladies will do. She appeared to understand what she was about, and to be a shrewd woman of business” (65). They also put a linen draper on the stand, who said that Borradaile had spent 150 pounds in his store and had “appeared to be a woman of business” during the transaction (65). In his closing statement, Rachel's lawyer revisited this line of argument, insisting that “so far from being a fool, [Borradaile] appears to have been a shrewd woman of business, and quite capable of knowing what she was doing” (78). Given her profession, it was not possible for the defense to deny Rachel's involvement in the consumer sphere, so her lawyer portrayed her efforts at commercial success as prompted by devotion to her children, an appropriately feminine motivation, rather than mere desire for financial gain. Emphasizing that Rachel's seven children were enormously well educated, considering their birth, the lawyer reasoned, “whatever might be said against the prisoner, this must be admitted, that she had given her children a good education” (77).

As these “trials within trials” suggest, Rachel's case resonated with Victorian cultural debates about the status of gender and social identity in the expanding commercial marketplace and economy. As the ideology of consumerism spread and the accumulation of wealth became enough to ensure one's social capital, fears about the denigration of established social hierarchies came to the surface of popular discourse. That Rachel was a vendor of cosmetics heightened her symbolic relevance to such debates: her very trade entailed making people appear more attractive than they “really” were, and she represented consumer culture's penchant for obliterating supposedly “natural” divisions among gradations of humanity. As women became established as the preeminent consumers in the new economy, Rachel's trial posed profound questions: What kinds of financial intercourse were socially permissible for women in the modern marketplace? What social changes were entailed in Victorian ladies becoming “shrewd women of business”? And what did all of these changes mean for English national identity?

By 1902, these questions were not merely rhetorical but were being addressed and re-addressed on a daily basis. By the time Meade was writing, the presence of “respectable” women in the city marketplace was a reality experienced by millions of British urbanites. The expanding consumer economy had created a whole new class of young, single, working women, often from the country, who came to London to work and support themselves. Such women found jobs in a service economy that included “shop-girls,” office workers, typists, and other occupations that had not existed for women of Rachel's generation. At the same time that such working-class “girls” were establishing a legitimate presence in the city, leisured middle-class women had negotiated their own urban status as shoppers, charity workers, and political agitators. The “New Woman” had become a staple of popular discourse, and she was a mode of articulating real shifts in the relative freedom and occupational choice available to women at this time.²⁰

Sarah Grand first coined the term “New Woman” in her 1894 essay “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” thereby defining a figure already at the center of cultural debate: the woman who insisted on having more opportunities in conventionally male spheres of occupation and education. In The Sorceress, Meade identifies Sara as a New Woman by emphasizing not only her commercial success, but also her scientific and medical prowess; in this way, her stories translate the gender anxieties aroused by Madame Rachel into the era of the New Woman.

Feminist critics who have discussed women's role in the late-Victorian consumer sphere have tended to take one of two positions, which I will broadly refer to as “Marxian” and “historicist.” Marxian critics have read the expanding consumer marketplace as merely another arena for sexist oppression, in many ways worse than the private sphere. When women become enmeshed in modern consumer capitalism, the argument goes, they are subjected to an illusory or false consciousness of the world in which their very perceptions and desires are afflicted by commodity ideology. Because of their lack of power in relation to men, women have a heightened vulnerability to the dehumanizing, objectifying prerogatives of consumer capitalism. As Susan Buck-Morss has claimed, “sexual liberation for women under capitalism has had the nightmare effect of ‘freeing’ all women to be sexual objects (not subjects)” (124). Rachel Bowlby has similarly argued that consumer capitalism in the nineteenth century developed according to pre-existing models of domination supplied by the example of patriarchy: “the making of willing consumers readily fit into the available ideological paradigm of a seduction of women by men, in which women would be addressed as yielding objects to the powerful male subject forming, and informing them of, their desires” (20). Consumer capitalism, according to Bowlby, instills the illusion that customers, in buying, exercise a mode of power that echoes male sexual domination: “the very image used of the relation between commodities and buyers is one of seduction and rape: commodities cannot ultimately ‘resist’ the force of him who would take possession of them” (27). According to this model, the attraction of the consumer marketplace for Victorian women was the allure of a masculine, rapine form of power available in the sphere of the shop, even if they were denied power elsewhere. Needless to say, in shopping, women were actually not powerful at all, but were recapitulating and reinforcing an oppressive gendered division of labor and an oppressive patriarchal-capitalist system.

In contrast to these readings of the nineteenth-century consumer marketplace, some recent feminist critics have taken a more broadly historicist approach, rather than one based on critiques of ideology, and concentrated on the impact consumer culture had on the daily lives of Victorian women. Doing so, they have viewed the expansion of consumer culture quite differently. Sally Ledger, for example, reflects that, “the department stores, like the arcades, boulevards, and cafés, constituted a half-public, half-private social space which women were able to inhabit comfortably, so that the rise of consumerism was not all bad as far as women were concerned. The metropolitan department store enabled leisured women in particular to look, socialize, and simply to stroll” (155). Judith Walkowitz, discussing women in 1880s London, suggests that the road to women's public and political engagement was in many ways smoothed by the growth of consumer society. Female shoppers, enticed by new metropolitan retail development, carved out a space for middle- and upper-class women in the public spaces of the city. Along with lower- and lower-middle-class shop-girls and “girls in business,” such a presence made the urban landscape a “contested terrain” rather than the sole bastion of men and prostitutes (City, 11). This was a necessary prerequisite for women being “drawn into the vortex of political and religious activity” in 1880s London (73).

The conflict between these two critical perspectives revisits many of the same questions at issue in Madame Rachel's trial. As Rachel's success suggests, there was a connection between the growth of the consumer economy and women's emancipation in late-Victorian culture, which is one reason that entrepreneurs like Rachel elicited such anxiety from their contemporaries. To view patriarchy and consumer capitalism as utterly analogous is to ignore the ways in which the commercialization of culture transformed and broadened the lives of many women at the end of the century. Consumer culture induced the weakening of many strict social hierarchies, including Victorian gender roles: businesses were perfectly happy to court women customers, and to encourage greater public freedom for women, as a means of selling products. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to theorize late-Victorian consumerism as a straightforwardly progressive step toward female emancipation. The relationship between consumerism and sexist oppression at this time, I would argue, was not necessarily one of opposition or partnership, but of multiple contingent and variable effects. Women's new urban “freedom,” for example, offered little benefit for poor, disenfranchised women who could profit neither from new jobs in the consumer sphere nor from new opportunities for female consumption.²¹

Less obviously, the extent to which even bourgeois women “paid a price” for new freedoms at the end of the century is a significant question for critics of culture, and one that is particularly apropos in reading Meade's stories, since Rachel and Sara market and vend cosmetics. The proliferation of cosmetics and other feminine beauty products in the second half of the nineteenth century signifies how the feminization of consumer capitalism shifted the terms of women's oppression, so that women became increasingly sexually commodified under the auspices of an image-centered consumer culture. As post-Foucauldian feminist critics have argued, the category of “femininity,” since the Victorian period, has been constituted more and more by self-imposed regimens of health, beauty, fashion, and appearance.²²

Women's bodies have shifted from being the property of individual men (such as fathers or husbands), to being social property, in need of constant maintenance to meet the new cultural standards of femininity. Such a condition is oppressive for women, but not in conventionally “patriarchal” terms, wherein power is held or exercised by men. Consumerism afforded late-Victorian women greater access to and engagement with the public sphere, but did it also distort their desires so that they “advanced” merely to become their own oppressors–or the oppressors of others?

Meade's stories and the case of Madame Rachel suggest that neither a Marxian nor a historicist approach can fully account for the complex relationship between feminism and consumerism at the end of the nineteenth century. While many feminist objectives were aided by the expansion of consumerism, some may have become unrecognizably altered in the process. Rachel's story is a case in point: she was a lower-class and illiterate woman who became a wealthy business-owner, but she attained success by exploiting economically autonomous women and by insisting that women conform to commercialized “norms” of feminine image and appearance. Indeed, Rachel's sales tactics, as exemplified in Beautiful For Ever!, could be Machiavellian. In one section, she claims: “How frequently we find that a slight blemish on the face, otherwise divinely beautiful, has occasioned a sad and solitary life of celibacy–unloved, unblessed, and ultimately unwept and unremembered” (18). How to prevent such a bleak life? “If ladies bestow an extra hour at the toilette, it is to delight and please the sterner sex. It is therefore our endeavor to prove that a lady cannot be too careful in the arrangement of her toilette, as the future happiness of her life may depend upon her first appearance in society” (18). Clearly, Rachel was not merely ministering to the reality of feminine circumscription in the 1860s, but was bolstering oppressive ideology as a means of selling her products. Rachel owed her business success to women's increasing consumer independence in the 1860s, but by insisting such women have a duty to “buy” physical femininity, her advertising prose weaves a new set of fetters for her customers.

Meade revises Rachel's story, in part, by complicating the degree to which her cosmetic business corresponds with patriarchal interests. Meade's Madame Sara gains her influence over women with quite a different tactic than those employed in Beautiful For Ever! Instead of encouraging her female clients to beautify themselves to please men, Sara encourages them to disobey men by taking advantage of her services. For Sara's female clients, physical transformation and bodily modification become acts of ownership, independence, and rebellion rather than capitulation or compliance. The male relations of her female victims are continually complaining to Eric Vandaleur and Dixon Druce, the detectives on the hunt for Sara, about their wives' and relations' use of Sara's services. In the first story of the series, Jack Selby describes his wife's attraction to Sara as though it is a disease: “my wife is also infected. I suppose it is that dodge of the woman's for patching people up and making them beautiful. Doubtless the temptation is overpowering in the case of a plain woman, but Beatrice is beautiful herself and young. What can she have to do with cosmetics and complexion pills?” (“Madame Sara” 394). In another story, “The Bloodstone,” Vandaleur worries that one of his patients is seeing Sara. A police surgeon, doctor, and forensic detective, Vandaleur is a powerful representative of masculine authority, but he worries that Sara's appeal overwhelms his influence: “I warned Lady Bouverie on no account to consult [Sara] medically, and she promised. But, there, how far is a woman's word, under given circumstances, to be depended upon?…She is losing her looks; she gets thinner and older-looking day by day. Under such circumstances any woman who holds the secrets Madame Sara does would compel another to be guided by her advice” (199). Here, far from being a means of covering up a blemish that could occasion “a sad and solitary life” without men, the use of Sara's services constitutes a rebellion against authoritative men.

Indeed, part of Sara's genius is in how she manages to criminalize or corrupt her female clients, at the same time that she victimizes them, by encouraging them to disobey their husbands and doctors. Accordingly, in order for the victims to expose the crime, they must also expose themselves. Sara thus achieves the perfect crime: one in which no one is innocent. The prosecutor in Rachel's case, as Whitlock also discusses, likewise emphasized her sullying influence. According to the Times he “wished all the ladies who had heard or read this case would learn that if once they crossed the threshold of such places [as Rachel's shop] they would come out with a taint upon them” (5–6). Meade literalizes this concept of the “taint” in “The Blood-Red Cross.” Here, a young woman named Antonia Ripley asks Sara to remove a disfiguring mole from her neck. She has been warned not to consult Sara, but wants to get rid of the mole before her wedding, where she must wear a low-cut dress to show off an heirloom pearl necklace. Sara has uncovered a secret from Antonia's past, and after giving her chloroform, she literally tattoos the secret onto her body: “The words were very small and neatly done–they formed a cross on the young lady's neck…‘I AM THE DAUGHTER OF PAOLO GIOLETTI, WHO WAS EXECUTED FOR THE MURDER OF MY MOTHER’” (513–14). Sara writes the words with nitrate of silver, so they will be invisible until exposed to light; once exposed, they will be permanently indelible. An illustration in the text realized this chilling scene for readers (see Figure 6).

Sara's plan is to blackmail Antonia with a cross-shaped necklace that will prevent the tattoo from being exposed to light, in return for the heirloom pearls. Antonia has literally left Sara's shop with “a taint upon her”: hereditary theories of crime were prevalent at the turn of the century, thus her body will be visibly criminalized if she refuses to abet Sara's theft.²³

Vandaleur uncovers the plot, however, and treats her neck with “cyanide of potassium,” an antidote that obliterates nitrate of silver: “You have nothing to fear,” he says, “your secret lies buried beneath your white skin” (517). Meade had a source for this story in Rachel's real-life interactions with Mrs. Pearce (see note 8), but the tattoo is wholly her invention. With the trope of the tattoo, her version forcefully asserts the significance of writing in determining how women's bodies are interpreted, viewed, or “read.” Whether fiction, journalism, or advertising, the written word has the power to control and direct the way women are perceived. Meade's task as a feminist writer thus emerges clearly in this story: she exposes how women's bodies are “written on” by the forces of consumerism, and reveals women's bodily subjection to the perilous semiotics of respectability.

That the perception of female “respectability” is a particularly malleable sensation would be no surprise to Madame Sara. Her penchant for ruining her victims' reputations, as a means of preventing the exposure of her crimes, is most patently illustrated in “The Bloodstone.” Here, Sara first casts doubt on the good name of her victim, Violet Bouverie, by involving her in a series of secretive monetary transactions. Violet had been under the guardianship of Druce while still unmarried and named Violet Sale. Now, she enlists his help in accessing her fortune without her husband's knowledge; she refuses to tell why, but later it comes out that Sara had duped her into believing her brother was in trouble. She tells Druce: “I am in great trouble just now…I have not told my husband anything about it, nor do I wish him to know. It is not my duty to tell him, for the affair is my own, not his.” Druce replies, “I cannot understand any circumstances in which a wife could rightly have a trouble apart from her husband” (201). Violet's mother left her in “complete control of quite a large property” (198), but she cannot access it independently. She tells Druce, “I want to realize [some rupee coupon bonds] into cash immediately. I could not do so personally without my husband's knowledge” (201). Violet is clearly capable of being a “shrewd woman of business,” as her maiden name (“Sale”) implies. Indeed, she displays detailed knowledge of the financial markets: “I want you to sell them for me at the best price. I know the price is low owing to the fall in silver, but as they are bearer bonds there will be no transfer deeds to sign, and you can take them to your broker and get the money at once” (201). Druce reluctantly agrees to help, but is obviously uneasy about facilitating Violet's fiscal transactions.

Having first cast doubt on her victim's reputation, Sara next impersonates her while stealing the “bloodstone,” a Persian treasure owned by a guest of the Bouveries, and ensures that there is a witness to the crime. Seemingly in possession of eyewitness testimony, even Violet's husband believes her guilty, and he calls the police to arrest her. Violet's recent ploys to obtain money have considerably damaged her credibility. Vandaleur eventually clears her, however, through scientific analysis of a handkerchief left on the scene; he determines that the chemical composition of the residual bodily fluids does not match Violet's. Nevertheless, like “The Blood-Red Cross,” this story highlights how all women who get involved with Sara become “tainted”; the rouge, eyepencils, and other “paint” that she vends symbolize how women's reputations are conventionally sullied–unjustly, in Meade's stories–by engagement in commercial intercourse.

Cosmetics are an apt symbol for Meade to employ in this way because they provide a very visible sign of the changes that, by 1902, had altered women's position in British society so drastically from Rachel's day. In the 1860s, makeup was still considered disreputable, but by the end of the century it was widely used. In his history of cosmetics in England, Neville Williams claims the 1890s “saw a great advance in the popularity of cosmetics among women of all ages…the visible signs of women's emancipation were painted faces and rational clothes. Make-up was, indeed, one of the most striking expressions of Fin de Siècle. The new woman had arrived” (114). Recent scholarship would probably dispute Williams's association of cosmetics with the New Woman, who tended to espouse a more androgynous style, but makeup did rise in correlation with women's social and sexual freedom. An 1894 cartoon from Punch, for example, depicts the increasing use of cosmetics among “respectable” women by this time (see Figure 7). In contrast, an incident from Madame Rachel's history reveals the stigma associated with makeup in the 1860s. In 1863, one of Rachel's daughters sued a cabdriver who allegedly assaulted her outside her mother's shop. According to the Times, after getting into a dispute with “Miss Levison” about her fare, the cabdriver made “some coarse remarks about painted ladies and black eyes.” When Rachel emerged from her shop, he told her, “I've brought you one of your painted dolls, and I'll paint her eyes better than you can her cheeks” (“Police”). The driver was convicted, but Rachel munificently offered to pay his fine for him. Clearly, many of Rachel's contemporaries scorned her products, and this anecdote suggests that such feelings were not unrelated to the brutally inferior status of women.

As is evident in Meade's stories, the increasing sale of cosmetics near the end of the century hinged upon women having enough social and financial freedom to buy such products. What is more, use of makeup denotes a pronouncement of one's self as a sexual being, a departure from the performance of sexual disinterest that had been compulsory for Victorian women. For Meade's readers, Sara's business was thus a reminder of the changing social role of women. That cosmetics are a troubled signifier of women's emancipation, however, is clear from Max Beerbohm's essay “A Defense of Cosmetics,” published in The Yellow Book in 1894. Proclaiming it “useless” for men to protest women's growing attachment to cosmetics, Beerbohm suggests, with tongue firmly in cheek, that men should instead embrace the development. Makeup, he claims, will stem the tide of women engaging in archery, tennis, golf, bicycling, typing, and other new-womanly “horrors” (69), and will force them to go back to their appropriate position of “repose” (70): “When the toilet is laden once more with the fullness of its elaboration, we shall hear no more of the proper occupation for women” (74).

Meade's stories enact a conflicted response to the more general use of cosmetics at the end of the century. A visual signifier of women's shifting sexual and social roles, potentially connoting ownership of body and self, makeup also denoted artificiality and duplicity, and was incompatible with traditional Victorian values of feminine artlessness and naturalness. This explains Beerbohm's enthusiasm for it: claiming that “within the last five years the trade of the makers of cosmetics has increased immoderately– twentyfold, so one of these makers has said to me,” he calls makeup a “great sign of a more complicated life,” and claims, “of all the good things that will happen with the full renascence of cosmetics, one of the best is that surface will finally be severed from soul…too long has the face been degraded from its rank as a thing of beauty to a mere vulgar index of character or emotion” (67, 71). Outside of Aesthetic circles, however, the prospect of the masked, made-up women Beerbohm describes– whose faces reveal nothing of their inner lives–was to be feared rather than welcomed. Even feminists might dread such a development: in enabling performativity, make-up might enhance women's power as Beerbohm says, but it might also constrain them to the burden of playing “beautiful.”

Meade captures such concerns in her depiction of Madame Sara, who uses makeup to present a guileless and innocent face to the world. Contemporary sources imply that Madame Rachel had not benefited from her own beautification talents, but Meade depicts Sara as a strikingly lovely woman whose appearance is undoubtedly artificial and calculated.²⁴

In “The Bloodstone,” for example, Druce claims: “Sara, by her own showing, was an old woman, and yet…[her] face was brilliant, not a wrinkle was to be observed; her make-up was so perfect that it could not be detected even by the closest observer” (206). Here, the ostensible line between cosmetic artificiality and “genuine” beauty is obliterated. Druce knows Sara must be made up, but cannot find evidence for it, and as a detective he finds a lack of evidence maddening: “I hate all mysteries– both in persons and things. Mysteries are my natural enemies; I felt now that this woman was a distinct mystery” (“Madame” 390). Sara controls others' perception of her through makeup, suggesting that the cultural shift toward commercialized femininity is advantageous for women. Meade's depiction of the desperation gripping many of Sara's clients, however, simultaneously conveys the peril of inculcating a social duty of attractiveness in women.

By presenting Sara's appearance as a guarantor of sympathetic appeal, Meade highlights a connection between the perception of innocence and the visual manifestation of youth and whiteness in English society. Though it is primarily Sara's genius, rather than her appearance, that accounts for her criminal success, her looks do help her escape punishment and avoid detection. In the first story of the series, “Madame Sara,” Druce and Vandaleur manage to have Sara arrested (the only instance where they succeed at this endeavor), but she “appeared before the magistrate, looking innocent and beautiful, and managed during her evidence completely to baffle that acute individual….Thus Madame escaped conviction” (401). The court rules that one of Sara's dark-complexioned Brazilian assistants, now conveniently absent from the country, must have been guilty of the poisoning for which she has been charged. Sara's escape from criminal charges highlights her society's unwillingness to attribute anti-social behavior to a seemingly young and white woman. Her escape underscores the powers of cosmetic adulteration in a society that understands race as a visual category and ascribes racial significations of value.

At the same time, the disjunction between Sara's ethnic identity and her appearance implies a troubling (for Meade's audience) instability in racial and national categories. She is described as “a most lovely woman herself, very fair, with blue eyes, an innocent, childlike manner, and quantities of rippling gold hair. She openly confesses that she is very much older than she appears….by birth she is a mixture of Indian and Italian” (“Madame” 388). That Sara's Nordic appearance is so much at odds with her Indian/Italian identity hints again that her appearance is unnatural. Her use of cosmetics to achieve this disjunction reinforces makeup's role in the text as a signifier of the breakdown of social hierarchies.

In her portrayal of Sara, Meade alters Rachel's ethnicity from Jewish to Indian/Italian. Meade refrains from using Madame Rachel's story to evoke stereotypes about Jewish business owners, as many writers had before her; instead, she Orientalizes and exoticizes makeup by associating it, and Sara, with non-European countries. Sara reveals in the first story of the series, for instance, that she learned her trade “partly from the Indians and partly from the natives of Brazil” (389). By associating cosmetics and beauty procedures with India, Native America, and other non-European sites, the stories connect the emergence of Western women as sexual subjects with the objectification of colonial subjects. Because the English women whom Sara beautifies are initiated into sexual power via the use of colonial-derived cosmetics, their sexual empowerment depends upon the disempowerment of non-Europeans, inherent in the extraction of such products under colonial regimes. Women's emancipation in late-Victorian society thus functions as “proof” of British national superiority: far from posing a threat to the strength of the nation, as many contemporaries argued of feminism, Meade presents emancipated women as visual embodiments of imperial supremacy. Cosmetics in these stories thus generate and convey the sexual power dynamics couched in colonial conquest and domination.

The rise of a “New Imperialism” in 1890s Britain, characterized by a more virulent insistence on racial and national superiority as a justification for imperial expansion, provides a context for Meade's mode of depicting women, cosmetics, and colonialism in this series.²⁵

Madame Sara is nearly always attended by subservient colonial men, reinforcing the stories' association of Western female independence and Western imperial hegemony. Though Indian and Italian, she represents female economic autonomy in English society, and her “dazzlingly fair” complexion (389) is a visual focus of the narrative. Her mastery over dark, Eastern, male servants thus reinforces the stories' message that women's social and sexual emancipation in Britain is evidence of British racial and national superiority. At the beginning of the series, for example, Sara appears with two Brazilian attendants and “an Arab, a handsome, picturesque sort of fellow, who gives her the most absolute devotion” (388). Her Arabian servant surfaces throughout the series, always characterized by his dark skin and slavish demeanor toward Sara. In “The Blood-Red Cross,” she brings him to a country house party, much to her hostess's bewilderment: “she has also brought her black servant, an Arabian, who goes by the name of Achmed. I must say he is a picturesque creature with his quaint Oriental dress. He was all in flaming yellow this morning, and the embroidery on his jacket was worth a small fortune” (510). Achmed is just one example of Sara's penchant for extravagant displays of colonial finery. In one story, she dresses in “rich Oriental stuffs made of many colours, and absolutely glittering with gems” (“Madame Sara,” 393). In another, she engages in a series of machinations to obtain “Orion, the most marvelous diamond that Africa has produced of late” (“The Teeth of the Wolf,” 285). Her flaunting of colonial and Oriental splendor paradoxically affirms putative Western superiority: that she controls such beauty and riches is an assertion of her own power, but also of the power and prosperity of her adopted nation. She is, after all, a London entrepreneur.

By dominating colonial men and exhibiting colonial commodities, Sara represents British national wealth and prowess; as a woman of Indian heritage, however, she also embodies the perceived depravity of colonial nations, conventionally associated at this time with femininity, sexuality, bondage, and duplicity. In contrast, as I described earlier, the Jewish Madame Rachel signified not the threat of the colonial “Other,” but the threat of racial otherness within the national body, as imagined in the 1860s press. Still, Meade's use of exotic colonial imagery to “market” Western female emancipation was not without a source in the story of Madame Rachel. In promoting her cosmetics, Rachel touted the exotic and foreign origins of her products, though such origins were certainly imaginary. She even trademarked her products with the so-called “Royal Arabian Signet.”²⁶

Sexualized descriptions of non-European nations, in Rachel's advertising prose, encouraged Western women to consume such nations by means of her products. Beautiful For Ever! describes a plethora of Eastern and Oriental cosmetics, including products from Armenia (“Armenian Liquid for Removing Wrinkles”); North Africa (“Magnetic Rock Dew Water of Sahara for Removing Wrinkles” and “Egyptian Kohl”); China (“Pure Extracts of the China Rose” and “Chinese Leaves”); India (“Indian Coal”); and, most commonly, Arabia (“Royal Arabian Cream,” “Arab Bloom Powder,” “Arabian Perfume Wash,” “Arabian Fumigated Oils,” “Disinfecting Powder of the Choicest Arabian Odours,” and “The Royal Arabian Toilet of Beauty as arranged by Madame Rachel for the Sultana of Turkey”).²⁷

All of these products, from the far corners of the globe, were marketed and vended together, producing the illusion that the London female shopper had the entire world at her economic disposal, all in the service of beautifying her body. Particularly common among Rachel's inventory are product names that connote Eastern patriarchal despotism, such as “Sultana's Beauty Wash,” “Sultana's Bouquet Perfume,” “Favorite of the Harem's Pearl White Powder for the Complexion,” or “Favourite of the Harem's Bouquet Perfume.” Allusions to “sultans,” “sultanas,” and “harems” were perhaps intended to “bottle” the pleasures of sexual dominance and submission. Rachel's product names reveal the illusory commodity fetishism of cosmetics and perfumes, sold and marketed by means of an entirely imaginary association with imperialist constructions of Eastern gender, power, submission, and sexuality. Referencing harems, for example, Rachel organizes the sexual fantasies of her clients around conventionally Orientalist images of colonial sexual excess and debauchery. Eastern “enslavement” thus authenticates Western women's freedom: freedom to buy and use Rachel's products and freedom to consume the exotic treasures of the East.²⁸

In The Sorceress, Meade uses colonial imagery in much the same way that Madame Rachel did: as a means of establishing Western women's sexual and economic agency. This maneuver was particularly relevant in Meade's time, however, not only in light of the New Imperialism, but also in light of the suffrage movement and the general progress of feminism. If British national identity had previously been exceptionally reliant on an ideology of female domesticity, wherein the feminized space of home and hearth constituted the “heart” of what made the nation great, turn-of-the-century feminists like Meade had the task of rewriting the ideology of nationhood so that women were no longer excluded from the realm of economic, political, and public exchange. Interested in establishing women's rights and freedoms outside the domestic sphere, Meade utilizes the idea of empire–rather than home–as the organizing principle of British nationalism. Her series can be read as marrying feminist and imperialist ideologies: female economic intercourse is not a threat to what makes Britain great in The Sorceress, but an extension of its greatness. Women in the series consume colonial products, and their global commercial exchange demonstrates British financial dominance in the world.

Madame Sara's “whiteness” and beauty hence play a weighty, if ambivalent, role in the series: they signify her economic empowerment and her artificial duplicity at one and the same time. Still, Meade refrains from attributing Sara's success solely to her appearance or to other traditionally “feminine” means of influence, a significant way in which she adapts Rachel's story for turn-of-the-century gender ideology. Rachel's contemporaries had repeatedly referenced her ability to “bewitch” or “mesmerize” victims, which bespoke her society's unwillingness to understand her achievements outside a paradigm of female power limited to the occult. Meade, on the other hand, makes Sara a far more successful criminal than Rachel, and though she does title the series The Sorceress of the Strand, she resists accounting for Sara's abilities via maleficent magic. Instead, Meade locates Sara's power in her “genius” and her “marvelous scientific attainments,” a model of female achievement scarcely allowed to exist a decade earlier.²⁹

Sara's scientific abilities and her implementation of them in the cosmetics trade are emphasized throughout the series. In “The Talk of the Town,” she outsmarts Professor Piozzi, a man identified as “a phenomenon, a genius, probably the most brilliant of our times” (68). Sara manages to steal an abstract discovery Piozzi has made, which she quickly recognizes could be turned to “a means of manufacturing artificial foods in a manner which has long been sought by scientific men” (78). Hot on Sara's trail, Vandaleur tells Piozzi: “You did not grasp the deduction from your most interesting discovery…[but Sara] read your notes, and at a glance saw what you have not grasped at all, and what I have taken days to discover” (78).

Sara's scientific expertise is likewise apparent to Druce when he visits her beauty shop. He finds a site more closely resembling Frankenstein's workshop or Dr. Jekyll's laboratory than the collection of rouge-pots and perfumes he expects of a “professional beautifier”:

The back room of Sara's shop, with its operating table and anesthetics, may have reminded readers that Madame Rachel was a putative abortionist. The specter of this prospect hangs about the stories, occasionally verbalized in comments such as: “[Sara's] clients go to her there, and she does what is necessary for them. It is a fact that she occasionally performs small surgical operations” (“Madame Sara,” 388). Such insinuations represent Sara as a challenge to nineteenth-century medical professionalization, a trend that had led to the dwindling of midwives and other traditional female medical providers in the Victorian era. By the end of the century, however, a few women had managed to break the ranks of male professionalism and attain medical degrees. Sara acknowledges in “The Bloodstone” that she does not have professional medical training (“I do not hold diplomas” [206]), but the back room of her shop confirms that she is poised, like the New Woman, to infiltrate not only science and commerce, but also the professions.

If Rachel's trial served as a cultural marker of anxiety about women in the commercial marketplace, it also implied that her success was achieved by means of fraud and mesmerism rather than genuine aptitude for business. Meade, in contrast, gives Sara a much stronger grasp on the domain of capitalism than her predecessor, and her cosmetic powers reach a level of scientific and professional proficiency of which Rachel could not have dreamed. In this way, Meade zeroes in on emerging cultural debates about women's abilities and education, debates of less consequence in Rachel's day, when women (like Rachel herself) were routinely denied the most basic level of education and literacy. Thus, while Meade uses Madame Rachel's story to signify Victorian women's expanding role in the consumer sphere in the second half of the nineteenth century, with Sara she also demarcates the boundaries of new territories that turn-of-the-century women were on the verge of penetrating. At the same time, through her use of colonial subjects and imagery, Meade presents women's expansion into these new roles as part and parcel of British imperial ascendancy. In this way, despite her focus on an evil female villain, Meade's series actually popularizes and normalizes the ideals and objectives of feminism by packaging them in the rhetoric of New Imperialism. Englishwomen's advancement, in this series, becomes a symbol of national and racial superiority.