I

In 1861, in a review of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, a critic for the Spectator complained that, “We are threatened with a new variety of the sensation novel … the whole interest of which consists in the gradual unraveling of some carefully prepared enigma” (“The Enigma Novel” 20). He was hardly the only reviewer to use a vocabulary of “puzzlement” or “enigma” when discussing Collins's work. Whether we look to an earlier review of The Woman in White to find Collins faulted as “not a great novelist … the fascination which he exercises … [is] that he is a good constructor. Each of his stories is a puzzle, the key to which is not handed to us till the third volume” (Rev. of The Woman in White 249) – or whether we turn to a critic of The Moonstone, who found Collins and his latest production “[un]worthy”: “We are no especial admirers of the department of art to which he has devoted himself, any more than we are of double acrostics or anagrams, or any of the many kinds of puzzles on which it pleases some minds to exercise their ingenuity” (Page, ed. 171–72) – we come up against the fact that Collins's novels, and especially his sensation novels, were sometimes known as “enigma novels” in the Victorian period. We can see too that this was not necessarily intended as a complimentary label. Indeed, though our own contemporary tendency has been to employ this particular moniker in a more neutral, descriptive register – to denote simply some fictions' reliance on mystery – we quickly find that Victorian reviewers were not so dispassionate in their usage.Footnote ¹ Instead, tracking names like “conundrum novel” or “enigma novel,” and terms like “puzzle,” “enigma,” and even “anagram,” shows that Collins's critics often used such phrases to index some of the same kinds of problems or concerns they more familiarly described with a rhetoric of “sensation.”Footnote ² A short survey suggests that their language of “puzzles” and “enigmas,” like their language of shocks and nerves, expressed disappointment at Collins's tendency to create anticlimaxes (the novel fizzles when the “puzzle” is solved); his emphasis on plot – or “carefully prepared enigma[s]” – over character; and his potential to render readers amoral and passive – patient attendants of solutions (“the key to which is not handed to us”) – rather than creatively engaged thinkers or moral questers.Footnote ³ A simple nickname would seem to be a damning label indeed, on fuller survey.

All is not what it seems however, in print history, as in so many of Collins's novels, and in what follows I delve more deeply into Victorian reviewers' use of the term “enigma novel” to propose that the linked projects of recovering this nickname's source, and more fully apprehending its likely reception, have important implications for our understanding of Collins's print culture context, his audience relations – and even his authorial practice. Scholars before me have shown that taking seriously the historical specificity of “newspaper novel” as sensational soubriquet reveals an intricate network of symbiotic relations between sensation fiction and the Victorians' cheap newspapers: a network whose apprehension makes visible new truths about the intersections of class, literacy, entertainment, and publishing.Footnote ⁴ I propose that a similarly rich signification is embedded in the naming of the “conundrum novel.” First, seeking a source for critics' puzzle-based figures of speech – indeed, for what became a series of critical clichés – invites us to recover an important but now neglected area of Victorian print history: a proliferation of printed puzzles that marked the second half of the nineteenth century to constitute a veritable “puzzle mania” in the 1879 words of an All the Year Round critic (“The Puzzle Mania” 114) – a virtual puzzle culture.Footnote ⁵ But so too, attending to the reception of this puzzle culture, and recognizing that it was a divided reception, helps us to gain insight into an interesting triangle of critical attitudes, audience expectations, and authorial intentions when it came to Collins's fictions. We find a rich vein for exploring two broad and conflicting understandings of popular amusement, reading, and reception, as well as a new way of locating Collins's own views when it came to this divide.

In the eyes of those reviewers who drew on a strong flood of negative commentary about puzzles to sneer at Collins as a maker of “Chinese puzzle[s],” a deviser of “double acrostics,” or even as “the best puzzle-maker in the world” (Page, ed. 172), the rub of such attributions may have meant to suggest that author and readership alike lacked an interest in moral improvement and mental development – that puzzle novels, like puzzles themselves, were tedious and insipid. Complaints about one form of popular leisure were intended to underscore and elaborate complaints about another. But dropped into a culture where puzzles could be “highly relished” and “anxiously sought after” as often as they were censured (“The Puzzle Mania” 114), the negative thrusts of reviewers' parries were decidedly susceptible to mitigation or reversal. Many press organs' positioning of puzzles as prods to creativity and intellectual curiosity, and the claims of puzzle books promising “the Attainment of General Knowledge” (not to mention the “Encourage[ment]” of “Royal Precedent and Example”), might act as a direct counter to any more damning constructions.Footnote ⁶ And critics' very condemnations (the novel as like puzzles: dull and dulling) could have been taken as positive advertisements (the novel as like puzzles: stimulating and intellectual) by readers eager to feel good about their own chosen amusement and willing to look past reviewers' derogatory tone. In tracking the puzzle-based language of Collins's critics, and in recovering its source, we discover two very different models of thinking about the nature of popular leisure – whether this leisure consisted in sensation novel-reading or conundrum-solving. We find one model that is highly critical, and a second that is effusive with celebration. In probing the shape of this second model, we gain new insight into how a mass audience may have perceived its own practices, the nature of its own amusement. We can see how far this notion was from that of the critics who preached at this audience's members.

In the final part of my argument we will see how Collins himself entered the fray, to weigh critical and celebratory positions alike. For in his later fiction printed puzzles often come into his pages, and in works including Jezebel's Daughter and The Evil Genius he makes good on an ambivalence about “puzzle mania” first tested in The Law and the Lady. In that novel, he satirizes the devotion of Benjamin, faithful friend of heroine Valeria Woodville, to “the weekly Enigmas” of a cheap periodical, but he also makes Benjamin's creativity and “ingenuity in arriving at the right solution” the key to solving a crucial part of the novel's larger mystery (267; vol. 3, ch. 34). Here, I will argue, Collins directs a meta-commentary at his critics, reminding them that he might take his readers' side when it comes to the question of how to value “popular” entertainments, his own novels not least of all.

II

By the time that a writer in All the Year Round was commenting on what he called “Puzzle Mania” in 1879, printed puzzles were an important and established, if often an ambiguously-considered feature of Victorian print culture. Moreover, as the same All the Year Round critic wrote towards the end of his consideration, this “mania” was showing “no present symptom, either on the part of the journals, or on that of their contributors, of going out of fashion; on the contrary, it has of late spread so rapidly that even the cheapest and most ephemeral ventures are compelled to include in their programme some special attractions of the kind” (“The Puzzle Mania” 116). The same broad developments that helped to make possible the dramatic proliferation and popularity of Collins's novels – the advent of new forms of print culture and the rise of the mass audience that consumed them – were palimpsests also for a new prominence for the printed puzzle.Footnote ⁷ And on the first score, Henry Mansell may have intended to account just for the success of sensation fiction when he suggested in 1863 that that genre benefited from the advent of the railroad and the rise of a new kind of periodical, one which “from its very nature, must contain many articles of an ephemeral interest, and of the character of goods made to order” (483–84). But it is easy to see that the same need would have invited the creation of other such “goods made to order” also, and that puzzles were ready to the purpose. They too could be manufactured quickly; they too proved good friends on tedious train trips; and they too benefited from novel forms of periodical printing. For, as Gregg Hecimovich has pointed out, puzzles, like novels, worked well with serialization: the restrictions of such publication meant that an enigma posed in one month could go unanswered until the next; the overlap of the ensuing kind of tantalizing waiting and guessing with that associated with serial fiction's many cliffhangers seems clear (79).

Increases in literacy and the consequent development of an enlarged audience were likewise as important to the rise of the puzzle as they were to that of the novel, and the Victorians' puzzle pages were much like the latest number of Dickens, or the next part of The Woman in White in their ability to attract diverse eyes to the same broad class of endeavor – to the same “Weekly Sphinx” column, the same Christmas-timed “Budget of Puzzles.”Footnote ⁸ As Household Words noted in introducing its series of “Puzzles for Prizes,” the very “aim” of such pages was “to make competition universally attractive by setting each week Puzzles suited to all types of intellects” (emphasis mine). The magazine pledged to live up to this undertaking with gusto:

To the modern ear, some of these forms start to sound more like mythical beasts than types of puzzles, but there is no denying the incredible range promised, or the potentially heterogeneous audience such a range would go on to attract. Pictorial rebuses could appeal even to the illiterate at the low end of the social scale – for these required only that one could identify their iconographic elements with sounds or words. Meanwhile, at the top of the social ladder, puzzles were also à la mode, and Charlotte Eliza Capel's book of acrostics trumpeted in its title that the author had been “Encouraged by Royal Example,” then promoted its inclusion of a puzzle “from the palace, said to be written by the Queen for the royal children” (v-vi).Footnote ⁹ The author of a larger survey piece on “Enigmas” included puzzles whose authorship he attributed to Charles James Fox and Lord Macaulay (“Enigmas” 318). In answer to a query in Notes and Queries as to the origins of the double acrostic, “M. T.” suggested that he had “heard the invention of the double acrostic ascribed to the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Disraeli” (“M. T.” 203).Footnote ¹⁰

In the middle class alone there was great heterogeneity, and a single puzzle page might accommodate young solvers, keen to pass time deciphering wordplay-based “charades” about animals and natural phenomena.Footnote ¹¹ But the same page could also play to educated adults: those able to take on the double acrostic, with its multiple stages of solution and its often multiform references to current events.Footnote ¹² There were then plenty of puzzles for diverse kinds of amateur specialists too, and a historical enigma could draw solvers keen to find out the name of “[a] celebrated naval commander” by first identifying “An Italian painter of some celebrity” and “The assassinator of one of France's greatest kings” among other initial-yielding clues (“Historical Enigma” 285). An “Arithmetical” or a “Geometric Puzzle” could lure the Victorian precursor of the Sudoku fan (“Geometrical Puzzles” 64).Footnote ¹³ The Francophile, meanwhile, might be eager to prove her attainments with a “French Puzzle” (“French Puzzle” 95).Footnote ¹⁴ And in niche publications there were “Scripture Enigma[s]” for the reader of the Sunday at Home: A Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading (“Scripture Enigma” 224), or double acrostics with musical answers in the Musical Standard: A Newspaper for Musicians Professional and Amateur (“Double Acrostic”). Puzzle purists of today might object that many of these puzzle forms were misnamed – the “Scripture Enigma” of the Sunday at Home and the “Historical Enigma” of the Leisure Hour, for example, were actually acrostics, not species of the verbal riddle we now associate with the term “enigma”; meanwhile, the verbal riddles that did go by “enigma” were often indistinguishable from very similar riddles that went by “puzzle” or “charade.”Footnote ¹⁵ But this should remind us first, that these forms were in a period of development as much as one of consolidation, and second that when a reviewer called a novel an “enigma novel,” he might as well have been calling it a “puzzle novel” – highlighting a general dilemma of problem and solution, a general exercise requiring the combination of knowledge, intuition, and ingenuity, rather than a particular kind of verbal play.

Whatever their chosen kinds of puzzles, or their names for them, would-be puzzle makers or solvers often undertook their chosen pastime purely as a recreational endeavor. And such recreation could be to the pleasure of a writer on “Enigmas” who found drawing room riddles to be “full of ingenuity, fertile in idea, and graceful in language” (“Enigmas” 318). Or such recreation might be greatly to the puzzlement of other, grumpier critics. Indeed, wrote a commentator for the Contemporary Review, “it is difficult to conceive that a rational being, who has any serious work to do in the world, or who has any respectable means of occupying his time, would descend for five minutes to the inane abysses of riddle –guessing, and devote his leisure to working out the most imbecile of all conundrums” (“Signs of the Times” 686). Remarked a reviewer of an 1869 book of acrostics, “Of course there must be a ‘public’ somewhere to whom acrostics are a delight; to such we commend this pretty little book, the mysteries of which are quite beyond our ken” (“Puzzle Monkeys” 818). Puzzles could also be, as we will see shortly, intended as an educational tool. But the “mania” for puzzles was no doubt helped along by the prizes many publications came to offer both for creating and solving puzzles. And the reward of money or “Five Prizes of Three-Volume Novels,” were common enticements on offer if one successfully produced “the Best Set of Six Original Charades in verse,” or found the right key to solving a given problem.Footnote ¹⁶ Even the reward of seeing one's creative work in print could draw avid contestants, and as many contests for puzzle production cried out for puzzles introduced in verse, would-be poets took advantage of a rare chance to see their work on the printed page, producing original poetry or sometimes even parodying popular prose writers or poets as they framed their conundrums.Footnote ¹⁷ Solvers too saw versions of themselves pop up in print, and they demonstrated their cleverness not only by cracking riddles but also by devising what the vituperative author of the piece on “Puzzle Mania” called “euphonious” alter egos for submitting their entries. The fantastic run of contestants' pseudonyms included: “Verrie Sorrie … Phoscophoronia, High Jinks, Kemming-diggles, Shrew Mouse, Tumble Down Dick, ‘Arry Repressed, Londonderry katlappers, swaggswaggs … and tommy up a pear tree” among others (115–16).

Whatever the inducement, by the 1870s, the fad for puzzles was such a marked feature of print culture that it regularly drew not only daggers of negative commentary but also more humorous forms of critique, and an 1872 issue of Fun parodied the overwrought poetic form of many enigmas in “A Puzzle by a Nincompoop.” It also satirized the aspiration of many of the same to erudition: “An expression there is that used to perplex/My mind, whene'er it came pat in'/ And that was a phrase about Deus ex/ Machina,—which is Latin” (145). Three years later, an 1875 issue of Judy posed (unanswerable) head-scratchers like the following, under the heading “Judy's Prize Puzzles”: “Who are the most Peculiar People?” “How long ought a dinner to last?” “What are the gustative properties of – 1, the whelk; 2, the saveloy; 3, the railway refreshment-room sandwich?” and “How is it that people who are continually borrowing umbrellas have never got one?” (266). Six years later still, the wits at Judy struck again and under the cover of a “Classical Enigma,” they put forward this “riddle”-cum-terrible pun: “Why may editors of papers devoted to word-puzzles exclaim, ‘Facilis decensus Averni?’ – Because where-river they are, they always take Charon passing across Styx” (292). The actual classical knowledge shown off here seems shown off only to the end of highlighting the self-satisfaction of typical enigma-solvers, and the pun on the word “acrostics” is clever (if groan-worthy), but works mostly to support the point that puzzle editors may have found their quarry and its devotees to be an infernal prospect.Footnote ¹⁸

III

First recalling some of the negative remarks about puzzles just toured, or taking into account the satire just sampled, and then returning to Collins's novels, it should now be easy to see why his more frustrated critics might have had recourse to puzzle culture when giving vent to their complaints. And given, as we have just seen, that his popularity and that of the puzzle were helped along by similar cultural formations, but also that the puzzle itself was a site of inanity, empty diversion, and authorial self-satisfaction as far as many commentators were concerned – that the puzzle, too, represented “an amount of brain-cudgeling incomprehensible to the uninitiated” (“The Puzzle Mania” 114–15) – it could have seemed only logical to refer to the puzzle if one wanted to express that Collins's fictions, popular with the same audience, suffered from the same ills. Indeed, the reviewer of The Woman in White who found Collins to rely too much on puzzles – “He allows nothing to distract our attention from the narrative, or to induce us to forget that what he is putting before us is a riddle, and has its answer” – might as well have been drawing directly on the words of the Contemporary Review critic who rued the popularity of “inane abysses of riddle-guessing.” The reviewer of The Moonstone who offered with ennui that he was “no especial admire[r] of the department of art to which [Collins] has devoted himself, any more than … of double acrostics, or anagrams, or any of the many kinds of puzzle on which it please some minds to exercise their ingenuity,” would have found a friend in the acrostic reviewer who wrote that “there must be a ‘public’ somewhere to whom acrostics are a delight,” but also that this “public” did not include him. Across such reviews and correspondences, the puzzle acts as a highly convenient form of shorthand, signifying both an elitist critique of lower and middle class uses of leisure, and an aesthetic critique of Collins's fiction.

Recognizing the source for the “puzzling” analogies of Collins's critics helps us to see that these analogies often carried a specific vituperation and venom designed to highlight his fiction's perceived tendency to produce in readers an amoral, overly easy gratification.Footnote ¹⁹ Interestingly, the same recognition might prompt us to revise our usual sense of Collins's more negative contemporary reception. For where we often associate his productions' “newspaper novel” nickname not only with their roots in current events and (probable) ephemerality, but also with a certain degree of handwringing about salacious content and potential moral depravity, the “enigma novel” branding seems more designed to highlight a boringness and a pointlessness to the fiction – or best case scenario, a harmless but also a meaningless diversion.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, this is clearly what is meant when The Moonstone is faulted for its likeness to tedious “double acrostics, or anagrams.” Similarly the damnable thing for an Athenaeum critic about Poor Miss Finch's “puzzle”-bound nature is less any moral laxity, and more a sense of anticlimax that comes through the puzzle plot's (re)solution: “[It] piques us as a Chinese puzzle might … . In what is essentially the last chapter the answer suddenly bursts under our feet … . All is over at once” (Williams 193).Footnote ²¹ In a similarly revisionist vein, moreover, where scholars like D. A. Miller often frame Collins's fiction, his early fiction especially, as having been seen to work problematically on the neurasthenic body, the novel-as-puzzle analogy has a tendency to emphasize a different problem: automated, uncreative mental responses.Footnote ²² Certainly, the reviewer of The Woman in White who criticizes Collins for his “gradual unraveling of some carefully prepared enigma” emphasizes slow brain work rather than quick bodily shocks, and in a review of The Law and the Lady, a critic suggested that Collins could “form a puzzle that would be no discredit to a Chinaman” but also that “unraveling puzzles is at best but very dull work,” even if “to people of a sluggish mind it would seem as pleasant as any other occupation” (Rev. of The Law and the Lady 207). These are hardly raves, but their focus is notably on Collins's tendency towards mental taxation rather than on his ability to produce bodily exhaustion. We have cause to revisit the selection principal behind those nineteenth-century reviews we have come to make more metonymic of Victorian critical response to Collins, for in these there is more usually a hysteria about hair being raised, goose bumps being produced, or hearts being stopped.Footnote ²³ Accordingly, we confront here a corollary of our first crucial argument in favor of placing Collins in the context of a recovered puzzle culture: that doing so not only helps us better understand and interrogate Victorian critical practices, but also our own.

IV

Whatever we gain from unpacking the negative views of Victorian critics on Collins's fiction, and from seeing how they borrowed negative rhetoric about puzzles to shore these up, however, is only part of the boon to be garnered from apprehending Collins in the context of puzzle culture. And as I turn now to arguing that a crucial part of such apprehension consists in mapping also a positive rhetoric about puzzles – a species of rhetoric that Collins's critics ignored – we will see that this positive rhetoric couched an important set of terms that were available to possibly insurgent readers. Indeed, in some of the commentary presented above, we have already seen traces of some ways in which the analogy of Collins's critics might have been made to detach from its intention by readers. The tangible rewards offered for the creation of “original charades in verse,” for example, and the praise for those who created conundrums “full of ingenuity, fertile in idea, and graceful in language,” both indicate that in puzzle culture's commentary, the creators of puzzles, at least, could be given a grudging tip of the hat (not to mention actual financial rewards). We might expect that this alone could have worked to destabilize the negative figurations of Collins as “[T]he great living master of the enigma novel” (“Modern Novel and Romance” 437). What we will now see, however, is that there was also a positive rhetoric around solvers; that such rhetoric made the solution of puzzles out to be an enlightening and imagination-firing pursuit; and accordingly, that for many when the novel and pastime were compared, the former stood only to gain from the latter's reflected lights. Indeed, if solving puzzles constituted a form of active, engaged, even morally and intellectually beneficial attention, as far as many would-be solvers were concerned, then defaming the consumption of Collins's novels as a form of puzzle-doing might actually mean offering a form of high acclimation; and giving these readers a way of seeing virtue rather than vice in their practice. Surveying the two main ways in which solving came to be lauded may help us to see how readers could have patted themselves on the back – even while confronting critics' more acid ascriptions.

The most obvious (and certainly the most intuitive) strand of positive rhetoric around puzzle-solving that readers could have mobilized in thinking about their own practice was a strand that posed solving as an educational process, or project of intellectual improvement. We have already seen in brief, how various kinds of Victorian puzzles encouraged solvers to seek out (or to feel self-satisfied in their possession of) historical knowledge, mathematical ability and foreign language facility, not to mention spatial and verbal skills. Putting aside puzzles' insistent naysayers (and Collins's reviewers), we find that this, but also more general forms of knowledge acquisition, were often vaunted in eager terms. Already in 1850, the author of Aunt Rosamond's Historical Enigmas was introducing her collection of puzzles with a recognition that “The plan of conveying instruction under the garb of amusement is now so generally adopted, that no apology appears necessary for this little volume.” The trend she outlines in her supposedly “[un]necessary” apologia only had more room to expand, and both contemporary with her and after her, many a puzzle book – especially those for children – came to promote, as she did, an ability to “amuse” but also to “encourage a taste for … study” (3). The editor of the Boys' and Girls' Companion for Leisure Hours, for instance, averred in 1857 that its composers “t[ook] an interest in the moral and intellectual welfare of all who make us their ‘Companion’” (“Answers to Correspondents” 94). The editor of The Home Book of Pleasure and Instruction suggested that puzzles were the perfect crossing point of her title's promised ends: “They encourage a readiness of thought and a facility for considering a problem in many ways and in every possible light” (Valentine 140).

At greater length, after she offered her account of royal influence, Charlotte Eliza Capel promised that her acrostics, too, would be instruments of education. She wrote that she meant for “tutors” to use her puzzles as “a means of combining instruction with amusement,” safe in the knowledge that “careful selection” had been undertaken, so as to “introduce such subjects of general interest as call forth the greatest variety of research” – and safe too in the promise that puzzles would “promote a method of digesting information to its most interesting particulars, and correct the superficial tone acquired by hasty and inattentive reading, which sometimes tends to vain conceit, from ill-grounded knowledge” (v-vi). Reading such an introduction – or for that matter, any among the introductions cited above – might have made pupils shudder against the vivid specter of so much wholesomeness, so much “research” to do. But anyone who worried that puzzles (like popular novels) promoted a kind of intellectual stupefaction had to agree that a “correct[ion] of the superficial tone acquired by hasty and inattentive reading” was mightily to be desired. The same naysayers might not have approved the analogy of a writer for the magazine Knowledge, who compared enigmas to the components of university instruction: “in such exercises we have in reality as useful a mental discipline as our universities in their wisdom give for the training and testing of men who are to be our lawyers, our doctors, and above all our divines” (“Some Puzzles” 305). But they could hardly have quarreled with the stated goal of “training and testing.” In Capel's account, and in this Knowledge portrait especially, the puzzle is figured as a teaching tool, a first rung of a ladder at the top of which the laudable boons of intellectual curiosity and attainment sit. The self-promotional, book-flogging aspect of much of this rhetoric must, of course, be taken with a grain of salt. But booksellers were not alone in pushing forward the idea of puzzle-as-learning: reviewers too could make such claims – or at least, they could be susceptible enough to them to repeat them.Footnote ²⁴ Many readers, themselves possibly flattered by the interpellation, might also have bought in, and whether or not all of them did, the idea that puzzles were an empty and unintellectually stimulating pastime sits primed to be turned on its head.

Following Capel's admittedly self-vaunting logic, moreover, brings us to the second major positive approach Victorians took in talking about puzzles, and this approach sometimes intersected with ideals of education, while centering on puzzles' ability to promote activity and even creativity. For whereas pessimistic users of the novel-as-puzzle analogy often seem to conflate different kinds of puzzles (“double acrostics” with “anagrams,” “a Chinese puzzle” with “a charade”) only to suggest that they all have an obvious teleology – towards the kind of single solution attendant to “an ingenious mathematical problem” – in fact for solvers of many kinds of puzzles, the focus of their endeavor was less the attainment of an intended answer, and more the elegance, creativity, or even the “youthful ingenuity” of the solving process. The result of their alternative interest was a discourse focused on process rather than product, and on wit as much as on winning. Readers of the Collins's “conundrum novel” might have argued for the allures of their own practice on similar lines.

Certainly, Capel's emphasis was a more creative approach to solving, and when elucidating “The Style Suggested for the Solutions,” she offers a highly narrative and idiosyncratic exemplar of how one might “solve” clues, such that arriving at “answer” terms was less important than being able to give an account of one's deep understanding thereof. If, for example, the solution to an acrostic line was “Seville,” you might be expected to append to this solution the note that this city was “[t]he capital of the province of Andalusia,” but also that it was “on the Guadalquiver, in the south of Spain; it contains some remarkable buildings. In the cathedral is the tomb where Columbus was first buried. Many remains of Moorish walls surround the city. Its lat. Is 37 degrees 22 minutes N.; long. 61/2 degrees W” (x). It may be hard to see how this sort of exposition would promote the sort of “good conversational knowledge” that Capel promised for her readers – this being “the distinctive mark of every well-educated gentlewoman” (presumably few well-bred young ladies recited geographic coordinates in the drawing room). But it is easy enough to see that a different solver might accompany the signifier of “Seville” with a very different signifying exegesis.Footnote ²⁵ If the critique of the Woman in White reviewer who faulted Collins for creating a puzzle was that the novelist thereby created an abeyant readership – “Each of his stories is a puzzle, the key to which is not handed to us till the third volume” (Rev. of The Woman in White 249; the passive tense is telling) – then such an imagined reader does not square with the one envisioned by Capel. For the latter was meant to have encyclopedias out, and an eagerness to come up with an original purchase on the problem, ready at hand.

In popular magazines there might be less emphasis on exposition, but in these too there could be many demonstrations that the kind of uncreative, unidirectional sense for “puzzle” encoded by Collins's more critical commentators was not universally subscribed to. On a small order, even when puzzles were meant to have single solutions, readers could still inject originality and personal inspiration in small places like their noms de plume. (As we have already seen, “‘Arry Repressed” and Kemming-Diggles surely win points for being the works of original minds.) Solvers could often also challenge the validity or completeness even of answers intended to be finite, as the editor of the puzzle section of lady's magazine Sylvia's Home Journal found to her dismay, when forced feebly to defend her decision to entertain technically-correct, but not officially “right” answers to a puzzle: “My reasons for admitting these was a wish to give fair play to all, and to leave an open field for the exercise of ingenuity” (“Puzzles and Prizes” 143).Footnote ²⁶ Creativity, or at least the idea of multiplicity applied to the “correct,” loses out here, but not before it an impulse towards it is registered in print. Far from passive, solvers (or readers) are in a sparring relation with the authors of puzzles.

Then, more openly and avowedly, there could be puzzle forms that actually courted a motley sense of the “right.” Under the heading of “Puzzles for Prizes,” for instance, Household Words not only proffered “A Literary Puzzle,” recognizable to us as a “puzzle” by virtue of its singular solution; poetic lines were listed, and the reader had in turn to list the one correct poem in which each appeared. But the magazine also ran a “puzzle” competition headed “A Parody.” In this contest the charge of the solver (a title which might now go in air quotes) was to “Write Parody of Hood's ‘Bridge of Sighs’” under instruction that “In writing parodies, the object is to keep as close as possible to the sound of the original while conveying a different meaning … . Any subject may be chosen by the parodist; but the verses sent should not exceed thirty lines in length” (“Puzzles for Prizes” [1883] 119). The length restriction for the entries (and the tendentious definition of what a “parody” is) gesture at the sort of rigid rule and teleology we might today associate with “puzzles” but belie the fact that really, the “puzzle” here is an invitation into creative (and rather difficult) poetic writing.

At the other end of the propriety spectrum, the journal Vanity Fair also showed that to pose “puzzles” could be to invite originality rather than exact completion, and it began running a “puzzle” feature called “Hard Cases.” In this series, as the writer of “Puzzle Mania” sardonically observed, “some luckless individual is supposed to be placed in an awkward or embarrassing position, and correspondents are politely requested to get him out of it.” Here there was no single correct solution and, as the same writer testily pointed out, the answers were “judged correct or incorrect according to editorial fiat” (“The Puzzle Mania” 115–16). Such “puzzles” were usually judged prurient. Indeed, the same Contemporary Review critic who decried Vanity Fair's acrostics lambasted also its “Hard Cases,” writing: “We can conceive no man of ordinary culture or of common delicacy perusing these so-called ‘Hard Cases’ without abomination [though]… [t]hey convince [the gloating snob] that English society is as mean, as indecent, as ignorant, as foul-minded as he would fain believe it” (“Signs of the Times” 684). But these same types of puzzles, even as facetiously described by this same vituperator, seem certainly to have invited active narrative-making and creativity.

In any of these instances, we see how solving could be presented as the work of active, original, and generative minds, as a model of engaged reading and creative output. And if we look to the exemplary remarks of a writer on the enigma who noted that the form's “object is to exercise the ingenuity. It has not simply to be received but to be solved” (“Enigmas” 318; emphasis mine) we find that the distinction here between mere reception, and more noble and interactive “solv[ing]” is crucial. We have by now come a long way from the “enigma novel” nomenclature's intended suggestion that Collins's novels are problematic because their readers are mere receptacles, waiting to have the “key” to a novel's “puzzle” handed to them. Put all of this together with the educational discourse surrounding puzzles, and truly we have arrived at an alternative view of the work of solvers – and by extension, a view of how many Victorian readers might have been tempted to “misread” the puzzle-based analogies to which Collins's critics so often had recourse. We can come to see that the “conundrum novel” was a brand with a slippery semiotics, that readers might have turned critics' black into white, their down into up, very easily and with ample basis.

In closing, moreover, we will see how the position of such readers was fortified and commented upon by Collins himself in some of his later novels, and especially, in 1875's The Law and the Lady. For if, as Norman Page has noted, Collins could not let reviewers “pronounce judgment without contradiction” (2) nor could a writer of so many argumentative prefaces leave readers in any doubt about his aims or his relation to them, and in his later fictional pages, he brought in puzzles in a way designed to put critics and readers alike straight as to his own affiliations and his own status as a master puzzle-maker.Footnote ²⁷ The tendency of his earlier career to use his own more metaphorical vocabulary of puzzlement is replaced or supplemented with the inclusion of actual written ciphers, and as such, it seems clear that Collins is lodging a kind of meta-commentary.Footnote ²⁸ He seems to introduce printed puzzles into his pages as a form of self-reflection. He tries on the complaints of puzzle critics (and through this proxy, the complaints of his own critics) with an air of self-satire. But then he mounts a defense of pastime and makes a serious case for its goodness. The result in not only a reorientation of how we might think of Collins's later fictional recourse to printed puzzles, but also a clear insight into the fact that behind any apparent late tendency to “self-parody” (Pykett 110), Collins still has the needs and experiences of his readers seriously on his mind. He still believes in the “puzzle novel” he is crafting and is ready to make a claim for its positive effects on the “unknown public.”Footnote ²⁹

V

At first glance, of course, the appearance of printed puzzles in The Law and the Lady can seem incidental, or if purposive, then comedic. Like nearly all of Collins's books, this novel centers on a convoluted larger mystery – here, the question of whether the husband of heroine Valeria Woodville has poisoned his first wife – and it contains many highly eccentric characters: half-man, half-machine Dexter; mute neuter Ariel; womanizing Major Fitz-David; the list goes on. When printed puzzles come onto the scene, they do so in the middle of more exciting action, and attached to a more low-key, low-quirk figure. Ever eager to exonerate her husband, Valeria has found a new clue to impart to her old and faithful retainer Benjamin, and as she seeks him out to tell him of her discovery, we discover in turn that he has a faintly ridiculous predilection. Though we have previously met the charismatic older man as a figure zealous to guard his rectitude, Valeria finds him “poring over a cheap periodical; absorbed in guessing one of the weekly ‘Enigmas’ which the editor presented to his readers” (267). Evidently, if incongruously, both pastime and engrossed attention are to be expected according to Valeria, for: “My old friend was a great admirer of these verbal ‘puzzles,’ and had won all sorts of cheap prizes by his ingenuity in arriving at the right solution of the problems submitted to him. On ordinary occasions, it was useless to attempt to attract his attention while he was occupied with his favorite amusement” (267; vol. 2, ch. 34). This newly-disclosed affectation seems brought into the novel to “eccentrify,” and as such, to be a specimen of the same stock gentle ribbing that surrounds Betteredge's constant quotation of Robinson Crusoe in The Moonstone, or Mr. Gilmore's cranky invectives against “the new generation” in The Woman in White.Footnote ³⁰

If there is entertainment value in Benjamin's fondness for puzzles, however, there is also something more, and with all that we have just seen about Victorian puzzle culture in mind, I will suggest that this proposition has the potential to take us in two different interpretive directions. The resulting poles should be anticipatable from our survey of puzzle culture's commentary. If we discern a fond sense of amusement in Valeria's attitude towards Benjamin's chosen vice, and if we note that Collins seems to be reinforcing the “low” status of this weakness with the repetition of the adjective “cheap” (“cheap periodical”; “cheap prizes”), then one thing we could certainly see is Collins deriding the form to which his novels had, for nigh on fifteen years, been compared. Under these lights, we might take him to be mocking also the solvers of such puzzles, and by extension, an audience that included many of his readers amongst itself. In thinking along these lines we find ready fuel for the argument of the Victorian critics who suggested that in The Law and the Lady Collins had worked “an outrageous burlesque upon himself,” and that he had “played such fantastic tricks with his former works as must have made Mr. Mudie weep.”Footnote ³¹ We could read him as advertising his capitulation to the demands of the “unknown public” with their rapacious desire for trash. He reminds us of characters from better novels, but makes the latest addition to their ranks not, like Betteredge, a reader, nor like Mr. Gilmore, a reasoner, but a guesser merely; he points out the “cheap” nature of his own thrills by quietly winking analog. Or so we could say.

This proposition, however, must be amended, and a second direction pursued, when it proves that Collins is not content to rest his discussion of puzzles here. While some of his satirical tone comes with him in his later references to enigmas, so is born also a more positive way to think about the presence of the puzzle (or indeed its purpose). For the puzzle, unlike say, Betteredge's love of Robinson Crusoe, proves to be generative in the plot. When torn fragments of a crucial letter that will possibly exculpate Valeria's husband are searched for, it is Benjamin who suggests a system for their apprehension, and he does so thanks to his enigma-solving habit. He makes a set of “experiments with a little note of [his] own,” first tearing it up, and then putting it back together, with a facility that he attributes to puzzle culture: “It's the same as the principle in the ‘Puzzles’ which we used to put together when I was a boy. Only get one central bit of it right and the rest of the puzzle falls into its place” (343; vol. 3, ch. 44). And though Benjamin is concerned that this process may be “a childish thing to do… at my age” – and though, if he had been reading many a contemporary commentator on puzzles, or indeed, on Collins's novels, his anxiety is understandable – the advent of this exercise allows Valeria to confirm for him, and elicit from him, an avowedly positive gloss on solving. She “remember[s] my old friend's delight in guessing riddles in the columns of the cheap periodicals” (that word again) and when she “slyly” suggests that the potential task at hand is “almost as interesting as solving enigmas,” Benjamin “contemptuously” replies that “it's better than any enigmas I ever guessed” (343–44; vol. 3, ch. 44).

Her interest both in his project and Benjamin's own sense of its intrigue are then furthered when actual fragments are found, for here Benjamin's puzzle-solving truly comes into its own. He is so intrigued after his early “experiments” that he runs up to the site where the pieces have been found, and, if the “cheap” nature of his periodicals receives added emphasis, so too does the importance of his puzzling expertise once he arrives. To the end, we are reminded that “Benjamin's experience with the ‘Puzzles’ which he had put together in the days of his boyhood prove[s] to be of some use to his companions” (353; vol. 3, ch. 45). Working out from Benjamin's early experience and his more recent “experiments,” a chemist is able to disaggregate fragments from one another, and though Benjamin ultimately grows somewhat “hopeless” in the face of the mass of conjoined fragments with which they are working, this more professional solver is able to “correctly put together some five or six sentences of the letter.” His work encourages Benjamin to take heart, and he himself “succeed[s] in putting together a separate portion of the torn writing which makes sense” (354; vol. 3, ch. 45). Their work together leads to the conclusion that “legally as well as morally speaking” (353; vol. 3, ch. 45) the innocence of Valeria's husband is “absolutely” vindicated” (357; vol. 3 ch. 46).Footnote ³² The larger puzzle of the novel is solved through the local application of skills born of printed puzzle-solving Benjamin's devotion to a “childish” pastime, and his history of an “experience with… ‘Puzzles’” yields gravely good results.

Collins may take care from the outset of this puzzling project to underscore that the “enigma” he has set Benjamin is “better than any enigma [the retainer] ever guessed,” better, that is to say, than those enigmas printed all around his fictions in print culture. The fact that a training in puzzles literally saves a man's reputation nevertheless suggests a definite use, interest, and productivity to other people's printed conundrums, and, by implication, for the “enigma novel” too. Consistently, along the way, Collins is eager to highlight that this end is attained if not only, then very largely, because puzzles have, as Capel might have put it, “excited” Benjamin's “curiosity” and “stimulated” him to “research.” Benjamin's avidity for puzzles, like that of Collins's audience, may have laughable dimensions, but surely far worse, Collins seems to be saying, is to write off the creativity and inspiration that puzzles – or puzzle novels – can inculcate, as their critics and his own were wont to do. If puzzle culture set people to talking about inferior and superior kinds of aesthetic reception or reading, Collins's sense that this is an erroneous division or hierarchy seems clear – so too does the answer to how he imagines the praxis of his own readers. Moreover, once we are attuned to Collins's views, and to his use of puzzles to express them, we can see that The Law and the Lady marks only the beginning of a long argument or sustained apologia.

For puzzles would recur as a striking motif, or even plot feature, in Collins's concurrent and subsequent fiction, and always in a way designed to tease or to reprimand his critics, and to pique the interest of his readers. In the short story, “A Mad Marriage” (1875), a young wife corresponds by letter with her asylum-imprisoned husband using “a ‘cipher’ of [the husband's] invention,” and then, as the letters come to be suspected, this correspondence is continued “(still in cipher) by means of advertisement in the newspaper” (465).Footnote ³³ In Jezebel's Daughter (1880), the evils of scheming poison-fiend Madame Fontaine are tracked, furthered, and ultimately solved through a series of written ciphers involving chemical formulas devised by her husband. In the denouement of the same novel, surrogate detective figure Doctor Dormann offers a disquisition on cipher-solving and on how to tackle “the most simple, and most elementary, of all ciphers – that is to say, the use of the ordinary language of correspondents, concealed under arbitrary signs.” Nearly any cipher, he adduces, can be solved; it is “merely a question of time and patience”(199–200; postscript). Then, in The Evil Genius (1885), yet another written cipher appears, this one concealing the location of stolen diamonds, and a man is hired by newspaper advertisement to solve it; his theft of the diamonds in turn sets the main part of the plot in motion (69; prologue).Footnote ³⁴

In each of these instances, the puzzle could be seen as a negative form, a sordid pastime – the creation or quarry of, respectively, an inmate in an asylum (however wrongfully institutionalized), a poisoner, or a thief – but in each case, it is also possible, even easy, to see the puzzle and its solving in a positive light – as creative labor of and for love, as a species of scientific work, as entrepreneurial enterprise, not to mention path to riches. If Collins surely wants to use the puzzle to poke fun at the more aspersive charges levied against his own “enigma novels,” in works full of more obvious forms of meta-commentary – in The Evil Genius, he even has Mrs. Presty commenting outright on the relative merits of sensation fiction: “the new school [of novel writing] provides the public with soothing fiction … . No story to excite our poor nerves” – it seems just as possible that he is also mounting a winking self-defense, not only of his himself but of his readers and their pleasure (89; pt. 1, ch. 21). In the preface to Armadale (1866), he had separated out “Readers in general – on whose friendly reception experience has given me some reason to rely” – from “Readers in particular” who, he said, would likely be “offended” to find that the book at hand “oversteps in more than one direction, the narrow limits within which they are disposed to restrict the development of modern fiction.” His friendly readers, he was sure, would see that the same book was “not hastily meditated or idly wrought” (6). In his use of the puzzle he seems to be readying to meet the two camps again, with one camp now firmly sitting with his critics, and the other on his side.