C. L. (CATHERINE LOUISA) PIRKIS'S “The Murder at Troyte's Hill,” second in her series of stories about Detective Loveday Brooke, begins with Brooke's boss debriefing her on a case: “Griffiths, of the Newcastle Constabulary, has the case in hand…. Those Newcastle men are keen-witted, shrewd fellows, and very jealous of outside interference. They only sent to me under protest, as it were, because they wanted your sharp wits at work inside the house” (528). This is a typical beginning for one of Brooke's adventures, which were published in the London magazine Ludgate Monthly in 1893 and 1894. As one of the earliest professional female detectives in English literary history, Brooke's career was marked by conflicts with territorial male officers and the ever-present pressure to keep her detective work “inside the house.” Emerging at a historical moment when understandings of women, criminality, and law enforcement were rapidly changing in Britain, Pirkis's stories offer an interpretation of these intersecting cultural shifts that is surprisingly different from her contemporaries. In a decade rife with scientific interrogation into the nature of criminality, such as in the work of Havelock Ellis and Francis Galton, detective fiction of the 1890s tended to mimic scientific discourse in its representations of criminals. The Brooke stories, however, challenge such conceptions of deviance and reveal the poverty of their underlying understandings of crime as well as gender.
Pirkis published a total of seven stories about Loveday Brooke, six of which were serialized in Ludgate Monthly from February 1893 to July 1893. In March 1894 the stories were collected and published as a book, The Adventures of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective. A seventh story, “Missing!,” was added to the book and simultaneously published in the March 1894 edition of Ludgate. Pirkis was not the first or only Victorian author to write about a professional female detective.1
The first fictional accounts of professional female detectives were written by two male authors in the 1860s: “Anonyma” (identified by Kathleen Gregory Klein as the nom de plume of W. S. Hayward) published The Experiences of a Lady Detective in 1864, featuring a detective called Mrs. Paschal, and Andrew Forrester wrote stories about a detective named Mrs. Gladden in his 1865 The Revelations of a Lady Detective. Aside from these, however, there are no known fictional accounts of professional female detectives before the 1890s.
In the 1890s, amidst a general surge in the popularity and production of detective fiction, a number of “lady detectives” began to appear in the pages of Victorian periodicals. Kathleen Gregory Klein calculates that between 1890 and 1910 at least twelve different novels featuring lady detectives were published (
The Woman Detective 56). Pirkis's work stands out among these, however, for several reasons. Loveday Brooke is truly a
professional woman detective, not a woman forced into amateur detection to avenge her husband, as in Wilkie Collins's
The Law and the Lady (1875), nor a helpful sidekick. Brooke is paid for what she does, and though she may find pleasure in the thrill of her occupation, the primary motivation behind her detective work is to be paid. Several other 1890s “lady detectives” were also professional, but all except Brooke were involved in detection for acceptably feminine reasons, such as clearing a wrongfully accused fiancé, or supporting a maimed husband no longer able to work (cf. Clarence Rook's Miss Van Snoop, Emma Orczy's Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, George Sims's Dorcas Dene).
Importantly, Brooke was the only one of the 1890s lady detectives who was unmarried and unspoken for, and of whom there is never any indication that she would consider marriage. Though forced to work because of her circumstances, detection is Brooke's chosen vocation, not something she falls into as a wifely or womanly duty like other 1890s lady detectives. Moreover, Brooke was one of the first, if not the first, woman detectives to come from the pen of a woman author.2
The only woman author of a professional female detective who may pre-date Pirkis is Mrs. George Corbett, whom Michele Slung credits with the publication of Adventures of a Lady Detective around 1890 (Experiences x). Douglas Greene, however, maintains that “no one of my acquaintance has ever seen a copy of this book, and I fear that it was never published” (xi). My own search for it has also proved fruitless; perhaps it was published in a periodical.
Pirkis was well-established in her profession by the time she wrote the Brooke stories, having already written thirteen novels and countless magazine stories (none of which were about detection). With Brooke, she turned for the first time to the popular genre of the detective story, which she re-invents as a feminist form within the pages of a mass-market Victorian magazine. Some recent scholars have considered the structure of the detective story inherently misogynist, but have traced the possibility of its subversion in the late-twentieth-century feminist “takeover” of detective fiction (cf. Klein, “
Habeas Corpus”; Munt). Pirkis's work prefigures this phenomenon, and a closer look at Loveday Brooke suggests that she disrupts norms of gender and criminality that many critics have thought endemic to her time and her genre.
The She-Dick Vs. the Lady Detective
IN THIS ARTICLE, I argue that the Loveday Brooke stories constitute a feminist appraisal of the relationship between gender, work, and criminality in late-Victorian culture. To this end, I employ the term “she-dick,” rather than “lady detective,” to describe Brooke.3
“Dick” was not, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, used as slang for “detective” until the first decade of the twentieth century, though it was used as slang for “penis” as early as 1890. Although referring to Brooke as a “she-dick” is thus somewhat anachronistic, I believe the term's usefulness as a critical concept overrides its historical imprecision.
As Michele Slung points out in
Crime on Her Mind, the expression “lady detective” follows “a journalistic cliché of the times, for a quick glance through Victorian periodicals turns up any number of articles on lady fencers, lady photographers,” etc. (xix). Clearly, a gender binary is embedded in the term “lady detective” in that it qualifies the “male” category of “detective” with the feminine and class-specific prefix “lady.” Although “she-dick” similarly adds a sexual qualification to “dick,” the word-play on male genitalia in “she-dick” has the effect of undermining the term's gender normativity. While “lady detective” destabilizes both of its terms by highlighting their contradictory quality, thereby calling into question the extent to which the “lady detective” can fill either role, “she-dick” potentially reinscribes the female detective's identity altogether outside of these roles. Instead of signifying a lack or a negation, “she-dick” suggests the doubleness or multiplicity of identity that is the hallmark of Brooke's detection: she combines a professional skill understood in her time as male with opportunities for invisibility made possible by her gender and class. The she-dick's doubleness, as embodied in Brooke, has the effect of undoing ideologies of gender division as well as corollary conceptions of labor.
“She-dick” is also a useful critical term to describe Brooke because it registers her transgressiveness in its suggestion of sexual alterity. In her article on late-twentieth-century feminist re-workings of American hard-boiled detective fiction, “The Female Dick and the Crisis of Heterosexuality,” Ann Wilson employs the term “female dick” and discusses “the female dick's transgression of gender codes,” noting how “the female private investigator poses a threat to male police officers–their heterosexual manhood is threatened by the mere existence of the female dick” (155, 152), so that “there is little possibility of a satisfying relationship with a man” for the female dick, who remains “an anomaly…something of an outsider” in her society (153, 155).4
I find Wilson's articulation of the female dick's position as metaphorically and literally outside the normative heterosexual couple to be quite useful, but I disagree with her conclusion that “the constraints of form [in the detective story] prevent a radical analysis of gender and sexuality” (155). Perhaps this is true of the authors Wilson analyzes (Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, and Sara Paretsky), but I do not find it to be a universal trait of she-dick fiction, since it is not true of the Brooke stories.
Likewise, Brooke's status as a “she-dick” positions her outside the binary norms of late-Victorian gender and sexual culture. In late-twentieth-century detective fiction, the alterity of the female dick has been registered in the pervasiveness of lesbian detectives (cf. Munt). In Pirkis's stories, in the same way, Brooke's outsider quality is suggested through metaphors of criminality. Brooke is a detective and an official representative of the law, but ironically, her anomalous status is figured as criminal because of a perceived incongruity between late-Victorian conceptions of what women do and what detectives do. While it is now a common feature of detective fiction to suggest an ontological equivalency between detectives and criminals, in the Brooke stories, Pirkis specifically utilizes this parallel to make a point about gender.
5 Criminalized detectives are characteristic of twentieth-century detective fiction and de rigueur in the sub-genres of film noir and hard-boiled (cf. The Big Heat through L.A. Confidential), where they often function as a critique of stable domains of knowledge. We can, however, trace this motif back to nineteenth-century detective fiction, where, I would argue, it serves primarily as a critique of identity. Inspector Bucket of Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Sergeant Cuff of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, for example, both carry the taint of the criminal underworld into upper-class homes, and it could be argued that Dickens and Collins use the criminalized detective to make a point about class in the same way that Pirkis uses the criminalized detective to make a point about gender.
The minor character Mrs. Greenhow nicely articulates this for us in Pirkis's final Brooke story, “Missing!”: “Lady detectives, she said to herself, were a race apart … thank Heaven, she would soon see the last of this one!” (93). Here, Greenhow suggests that the she-dick is as effectively separated from the rest of her society as though she were a member of another race; she does not say this of
all detectives, though she has encountered several male investigators already, but only of “lady detectives.” As this suggests, and as I show later in this essay, Pirkis subtly connects the alterity of the anomalous she-dick to late-Victorian conceptions of criminal women and working women, in effect revealing the ideological connections among all of these categories.
Past critical work on the Brooke stories has, for the most part, presented them as reinforcing a vision of gender essentialism that was supposedly monolithic in late-Victorian mass culture. What little attention has been given to Pirkis has treated her as a casualty of the publishing industry, potentially interesting but unable to formulate her burgeoning feminist sentiments because of her fiction's status as a commodity in a market of popular magazine literature. Loveday Brooke stories have shown up with relative frequency in anthologies of Victorian crime fiction, for example, but editors have tended to write them off as historical curiosities.6
See, for example, Cox's introduction to Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection, Hugh Greene's The Crooked Counties: Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, or Dalby's introduction to “The Black Bag Left on a Door-Step.”
Of the small amount of critical work that has been done on Pirkis, most was written in the late-1970s and in the 1980s, when feminist critics were recovering a forgotten tradition of women writers, many of whom were previously considered merely “popular.” Often, early feminist critics used this recovery work mainly as evidence of the history and depth of gender oppression, and this is the case with treatments of Pirkis, such as in the work of Klein, Craig and Cadogan, Pennell, and, to a lesser degree, Slung. While this early criticism was crucial for bringing Pirkis to the attention of late-twentieth-century readers, as well as for furthering feminist re-conceptions of literary history, it did undermine the stories' feminist potential in various ways. By focusing on authors' need “to succeed commercially” and “readers' reactionary preferences” (Klein 1, 5), early criticism about woman detectives depicted a Victorian popular press programmed to preserve the gender status quo. Of course, recent work on Victorian magazine culture suggests that such assumptions require a vision of the periodical press utterly different from what we see in the actual publications. A short consideration of the late-Victorian magazine industry, and recent critical studies of it, will illustrate this point.
The She-Dick and Late-Victorian Magazine Culture
ONE MIGHT SAY that Pirkis's means of publishing the Brooke stories did not so much preclude a critique of Victorian gender ideology as facilitate it by proffering it to a vast audience; for mass-market, family magazines in the 1890s, such as Ludgate, obtained circulations much larger than had ever been experienced in the English literary marketplace. According to Graham Law's recent study Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press, the 1890s saw “an entirely new generation of illustrated monthly miscellanies, the first and most successful of which was George Newnes's Strand Magazine (1891–1950), followed by Pearson's Magazine (1896–1939), both of which were populist and imperialist, sold at only sixpence, and had circulations of over a quarter of a million by the end of the century” (32). Michael Cox classifies Ludgate among this group of magazines, along with Harmsworth's Magazine, Cassell's, Royal Magazine, Windsor Magazine, and others (xxi). According to Ludgate's editor Philip May, in an early edition of the magazine, Ludgate could claim “the largest circulation of any threepenny magazine in the United Kingdom” (May 320). The Brooke stories follow a trend common to such 1890s illustrated magazines: “these new magazines tended to avoid lengthy serial novels … complete short stories were the dominant narrative form, though continuity was often provided by the concept of the series of anecdotes” (Law 33). Such new formats were an implication of the rapid shifts occurring in the publication industry of the 1890s. Alexis Weedon claims that the 1890s “mark[ed] the beginning of modern mass-market publishing” in Britain (178), and according to Law, the second half of the nineteenth century was characterized by a gradual transformation from “the ‘Gentlemanly Publishing’ of the mid-century, with its cloth-covered volumes and literary monthlies,” to “the mass-market magazines and paperbacks of the turn of the century” (34). Better education and higher literacy rates toward the end of the century had expanded the market of readers, just as simultaneous developments of more efficient means of production and distribution lowered the costs of reading materials, the combined effect of which was the explosion of the literary marketplace.
In 1891, Ludgate Monthly, a mass-market magazine coming out of this volatile commercial and literary milieu, labeled itself an “illustrated family magazine … suitable for young and old,” featuring stories “that, without being either pedantic or uninteresting, … will each have some lesson to teach or good cause to plead,” always including something “of interest to young ladies with a little spare time” (“Introduction”). According to this description, Ludgate may seem an unlikely source for transgressive portrayals of gender roles or sexuality. However, as Laurel Brake has shown in her groundbreaking work on Victorian periodicals, the idea that publications such as Ludgate had such a unity of vision as this statement implies is an artifice necessitated by the magazine's need for a “brand” identification: “the illusion of a characteristic ‘identity’ (whether eclectic or singular) is one of the constitutive conditions of newspapers or periodicals, as commodities competing in the marketplace and as forms of cultural production” (11). To assume that the demands of the Victorian magazine marketplace precluded a radical interrogation of gender or sexuality is to buy into the magazine's artificial construct of a unity of vision, necessitated by capitalist modes of distribution and consumption. In reality, the aesthetic of the late-Victorian periodical is less monolithic and more akin to a modernist heteroglossic pastiche, and as such resists blanket ideological affiliations.
Ludgate, for example, identifies itself as a “family magazine,” and according to Brake's analysis of Cornhill Magazine, which used this same tagline, “this nomenclature singled out journals which women might read with impunity” (61, 88). Law claims that during the 1890s, the new mass-market magazines “gradually came to see the woman reader as their dominant target” (141), and that this was the first time in history that magazines not aimed solely at women (such as Woman's World) envisioned women as their primary readership. In editorial terms, according to Brake, marketing toward women meant that politics and religion were left out of the magazine altogether. Thus, as any current reader of Cosmopolitan could attest, editorial decisions did make constraints on the kind of topics that would be included in a magazine that wanted to court women readers. A brief example, however, illustrates the imprudence of assuming that these constraints served to excise all radical or transgressive elements in the periodical.
“Towle's Pennyroyal and Steel Pills for Females.” Advertisement, from: Ludgate Monthly, Aug. 1893: viii.
In the August 1893 edition of Ludgate, there is a small advertisement for Towle's Pennyroyal and Steel Pills for Females (viii), which promises to “Quickly correct all Irregularities” (see Figure 8). This ambiguous ad copy becomes strikingly conspicuous when one remembers, as contemporary women readers of the ad no doubt did, that the herb pennyroyal has a long history of being used as an abortifacient. References to pennyroyal's abortive capacities can be found in Western literature and medical texts from as early as 421 B.C.E., as John Riddle has shown (47). Nineteenth-century England's history of industrialization, urbanization, and medical professionalization posed a threat to Englishwomen's long-held folk knowledge of “cures” such as pennyroyal, primarily passed down through word of mouth between generations of women. As the century progressed, however, an extensive market developed for abortifacients disguised as patent medicines, so that women in cities could still retain some measure of control over when or whether to be pregnant. The surge of these patent medicines was contingent on the expansion of forums for broad advertising in the periodical press. In the 1890s, the medical journal Lancet claimed that in a week's worth of British newspapers, 100 of the publications contained advertisements for disguised abortifacients (Riddle 235). According to Lucia Zedner's history of female criminality in Victorian England, only a little more than a dozen women were prosecuted every year for “attempts to procure a miscarriage” (39), but widespread advertising of abortifacients in the Victorian periodical press suggests that far more than a dozen women each year were in fact likely “guilty” of this “crime.”
Critical formulations of late-Victorian periodicals as ideologically monolithic are quite inadequate in the face of a prominent, popular 1890s magazine's advertising for drugs that would induce abortions. Indeed, these ads are an arresting reminder of the degree to which such critical understandings need to be countered in favor of a more balanced treatment of mass cultural forms, such as in the recent work of Brake and Law. This ad obliquely served a feminist function in dispersing information about contraband means of reproductive control, and in Victorian England, when a woman could be made criminal for attempting to terminate a pregnancy, the marketing of an abortifacient can only be considered a transgression of dominant cultural values. Like Pirkis's stories, published in the same magazine, the advertisement for Towle's pills reminds us of the complexity and variety of mass-cultural consumption in the late-Victorian era.
Private Eyes: The She-Dick and Social Control
LOVEDAY BROOKE was a successful fictional “lady detective” almost twenty-five years before women could actually work in the Metropolitan London Police Force. After 1883, some women were employed as wardens in women's prisons,7
See Zedner for an interesting account of the close ties, sometimes sexual in nature, which occasionally developed between female wardens and female prisoners.
but there were no women police officers until 1915, when some were employed “to deal with prosaic and sordid cases of child prostitution, wife-beating, and the like” (Slung,
Crime vxiii). Aside from being legally prohibited until 1915, the very idea of a professional “lady detective” seems as though it would be anathema to Victorian conceptions of femininity and the occupation of policing. In addition, a surveilling woman goes against the dominant critical understanding of Victorian ideologies of vision and power. Indeed, Loveday Brooke offers a corrective to the tendency toward unilateral deployment of the categories of “male gaze” and “female spectacle” in criticism of Victorian literature, a tendency that some critics have begun to dismantle. In her recent book
Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity, for example, Deborah Parsons discerns that “feminist literary criticism and cultural sociology has tended to support the masculine definition of the urban observer” (4), even though “women can be seen to occupy public positions in the city from the mid-nineteenth century that locate them as observers” (5). Pirkis's stories resonate with Parson's argument in that they portray a woman in the position of the watcher, and the object of her gaze is just as often men as it is women.
Indeed, Brooke's profession underscores the power of her gaze, despite her gender, and in this way Pirkis's stories register a larger shift at the end of the nineteenth century toward power through professionalism and specialized knowledge as opposed to power derived solely from social position.8
Professionalization was a trend in many different areas of late-Victorian society, affecting both detectives (see Thomas's Detective Fiction) and fiction authors (see Arata, especially chapter 2).
Pirkis's fictional use of a woman detective, prior to the advent of real female detectives, can thus be read both as an innovative representation of women and as an imagined innovation in the professions of detection and police work. For, indeed, the male detectives and police officers in the Brooke stories seem to conceive of the she-dick as a means of more fully penetrating the feminine, domestic world without arousing suspicion. In effect, this extends the range of their professional gaze of social control into the private realm, rife with crime and corruption. Brooke is in high demand as a detective in the fictional world of Pirkis's stories; she seems to be working all the time, and on her one attempt at a holiday, in the story “The Ghost of Fountain Lane,” Inspector Clampe searches her out in Brighton for help on a case (235). Her boss, Ebenezer Dyer, explains the demand for Brooke at the beginning of “The Redhill Sisterhood”: “The idea seems gaining ground in many quarters that in cases of mere suspicion, women detectives are more satisfactory than men, for they are less likely to attract attention” (581). The necessity of having “someone in the house” is also brought up in all of the Brooke stories, suggesting an understanding of the domestic as an arena where crime might occur and which needs to be under greater surveillance. In “The Black Bag Left on a Door-Step,” for example, while debriefing Brooke on a case, Dyer tells her that the local police “want someone within the walls to hob-nob with the maids generally, and to find out if [a maid under suspicion] has taken any of them into her confidence respecting her lovers” (402).
Focusing on such passages, it is possible to consider Brooke and other late-Victorian female detectives as taking part in a larger shift toward increased state-authorized vigilance of the personal. Martin J. Weiner, in Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914, claims that “Running through late Victorian and Edwardian social policymaking can be traced a mental thread of diminishing faith in the rationality, freedom, and efficacy of the will power of the ordinary individual” (186); this philosophical shift, at least partially caused by growing belief in biological and environmental determinants for human behavior, resulted in a stronger emphasis on policing and social control at the level of the state. The popularity of detective fiction in this era has often been linked to this larger shift in the understanding of and treatment of individual deviance; for instance, Ronald Thomas suggests that “the elevation of detective fiction to the pitch of sensational popularity it enjoyed in 1890s England signals the emergence of a narrative of authoritarian containment to compete with and discipline the dominant nineteenth-century narrative of self-determination” (“Fingerprint” 656). The stronger emphasis on policing at the end of the century led to the emergence of various new technologies of detection and police-work, including fingerprints, mug shots, and lie detectors. We can see these developments in detective fiction and detective technology as interconnected phenomena. For example, Thomas has shown that the detective stories of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle “sometimes anticipated actual procedures in scientific police practice by offering fantasies of social control and knowledge before the actual technology to achieve either was available. At times these texts seemed to call those technologies into being” (Detective 4). Brooke can similarly be read as Pirkis's anticipation of a new technology in policing: the she-dick.
While the she-dick may indeed be taking part in a growing shift toward greater police and state intervention in the lives of individuals, it is wrong to read her solely as such because of the new freedom she represents for women. By many measures, in fact, women of this era experienced not a collective decrease in individual freedom but an increase in social, educational, occupational, and other opportunities. In terms of the cultural context out of which Brooke emerged, then, the she-dick marks a new level of occupational possibility for women. Brooke is representative of a relatively new population of unmarried, professional women in the 1890s. Past the age of 30, Brooke works because she must, even though she was raised and educated in higher-class circles. The many setbacks and prejudices she faced to achieve her position are explained to readers in some detail. Early in the first Brooke story, “The Black Bag Left on a Door-Step,” we are given a brief history of how she became a detective:
Some five or six years previously, by a jerk of Fortune's wheel, Loveday had been thrown upon the world penniless and all but friendless. Marketable accomplishments she had found she had none, so she had forthwith defied convention, and had chosen for herself a career that had cut her off sharply from her former associates and her position in society. For five or six years she drudged away patiently in the lower walks of her profession; then chance, or, to speak more precisely, an intricate criminal case, threw her in the way of the experienced head of the flourishing detective agency in Lynch Court. He quickly enough found out the stuff she was made of, and threw her in the way of better-class work–work, indeed, that brought increase of pay and of reputation alike to him and to Loveday. (402–03)
The language of this passage suggests a lack of agency on Brooke's part, depicting her as variously “thrown” into circumstances, but it also indicates that she purposefully “defied convention” and “chose” her career. Brooke's story thus resonates with late-Victorian understandings of both the “odd woman” and the “new woman.”
9 Slung has also pointed out Brooke's similarity to the odd or new woman, in her introduction to the Dover edition of The Adventures of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective.
While these figures were interconnected, in that both worked and both represented new types of
fin de siècle femininity, they were differentiated mainly by issues of class and agency. The new woman, as Parsons defines her, is characterized by a “rejection of men as partners” and a deliberate “turn from claustrophobic patriarchal demands [to] find recompense in the social, professional, and vocational opportunities of the city” (147). She has the money or class position to afford this choice. The odd woman, on the other hand, is a middle-class, unmarried, working woman without a fortune to support herself, and is typically forced into her situation through a lack of money or sudden death of friends, as in George Gissing's 1893 novel
The Odd Women. Brooke fits aspects of both categories, and her stories thus tap into various cultural debates about women going on at the time of their publication.
10 Gissing's novel The Odd Women, for example, was published within a month of the first Brooke story and produced a flurry of response in the periodical press. The 1998 Broadview edition of The Odd Women offers a good selection of these contemporary responses.
More than any other quality, it was work outside of the domestic sphere that made the odd and new women so sensational to their contemporaries. Reading the Brooke stories with this cultural context in mind highlights the significance of the stories' explorations of gender and labor. It is misguided to consider Brooke merely as a harbinger of stricter state control over the private sphere without also considering that readers would have contextualized her as another cultural emblem of increasing rights and opportunities for unmarried women outside of the domestic realm.
11 Stricter state control over the domestic arena was an increasingly popular legal development through the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, and was in many ways a welcome change. From the 1880s through the rest of the century, D. H. Macfarlane, Liberal M. P., “kept before the public eye the lack of seriousness with which the courts treated assaults against women and children as compared to offenses against property” (Weiner 281). For example, it wasn't until the end of the century that the ideology of the sanctity of the home had sufficiently dissipated for stricter legislation against wife-beating to pass. Similarly, legislation against child neglect didn't come until near the end of the century (1889–93). The problem with such legal developments was that they were often corrupted by purity advocates who used them to forward other aims. For example, Walkowitz shows in Prostitution and Victorian Society how the final version of the infamous 1885 Criminal Amendment Act, originally intended to raise the age of consent and thereby protect young girls from sexual abuse and exploitation, included a clause that made male homosexuality illegal, for which the act is now better known.
Public Women: Gender and Criminality in the Loveday Brooke Stories
BEYOND ITS AFFINITY to debates about odd or new women at this time, however, Brooke's story of becoming a detective is also reminiscent of the many personal narratives of prostitutes that permeated Victorian culture. Out of context, the quotation, “Marketable accomplishments she had found she had none, so she had forthwith defied convention, and had chosen for herself a career that had cut her off sharply from her former associates and her position in society,” might well be read as the story of a prostitute. The friendless girl forced to sink into a circle considered less than respectable by her former acquaintances was a story often related in the Victorian periodical press.12
See, for example, Hemyng Bracebridge's “Prostitution in London,” volume four of Henry Mayhew's influential London Labour and the London Poor. Although this was published in the 1860s, it remained influential through the late-Victorian era. For an example more contemporary with Pirkis, see Walkowitz's City of Dreadful Delight and her description of the periodical press's coverage of the Maiden Tribute prostitution controversy.
Indeed, the similarities between the she-dick and the prostitute are subtly worked out through the Brooke stories, consequent to broader Victorian imaginings of the prostitute or sex worker as the consummate working-woman, the logical extension of any woman's participation in the labor market. Prostitution is, of course, first and foremost a job, and for many centuries sex work was one of a very few kinds of work open to women outside the home. As Judith Walkowitz has shown in
Prostitution and Victorian Society, most late-Victorian prostitutes were working-class women who had previously tried other kinds of public service occupations: “in the last decades of the nineteenth century shopgirls, waitresses, and barmaids entered the ranks of prostitutes” (15–16). This is perhaps one reason why female labor in the public sector was often associated with prostitution in late-Victorian culture.
Indeed, late-Victorian criminologists tended to construct the female criminal as one of two figures: the prostitute or the woman laborer, and these roles were in fact two sides of the same coin. Victorian anthropologists since the 1870s had been likening the institution of prostitution to polyandrous marriage in “primitive” cultures, thus associating prostitutes with biological degeneracy and the atavistic affinity to “lower races” that was also believed to account for criminality among otherwise “civilized” populations (Stocking 203). Late-Victorian criminal anthropologists took this theory further and categorized the degenerate, criminal prostitute with all laboring women. For example, Havelock Ellis's widely-read 1890 treatise The Criminal, the first work of criminal anthropology in English, finds “among women criminals, in marked contrast to men, a very large proportion (35 out of 41) who possessed some more or less honorable occupation” (218). He further claims: “the domestic seclusion of women is an undoubted factor in the determination of the amount of women's criminality…. In England, … which has taken the lead in enlarging the sphere of women's work, the level of feminine criminality has for a half a century been rising” (217).13
In fact, the number of female criminals seems to have decreased substantially through the late-Victorian era, if we take prison populations as an indication. According to Weiner, “The female proportion of average local prison populations fell from about 22% in 1870 to 16.5% in 1895 to 15.25% in 1912; for convict prisons the decline was from 14% in 1878 to 6.75% in 1895, to a little over 3% in 1912” (309). There is no perception of this decrease by Ellis, who claimed, “There has been on the whole a steady increase in the proportion of women criminals in England” (214). Extant documentation does not back Ellis up, but in any case, Zedner argues that “In Victorian England women made up a far larger proportion of those known to be involved in crime than they do today” (1).
After thusly constructing the female criminal as a working woman, he goes on to present the prostitute as the consummate female criminal. Ellis was deeply influenced by the work of Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who propagated the idea that criminals could be identified by the extent to which they fit a physiological criminal “type.” Referring to his previously-outlined typology of the “criminal” physique, borrowed heavily from Lombroso, Ellis finds prostitutes to be a “complete type”: “prostitutes exhibit the physical and psychic signs associated usually with criminality in more marked degree than even female criminals” (221). Thus the most patent of the female “instinctive criminals,” according to Ellis, is the prostitute.
14 Ellis prefers “instinctive criminal” to Lombroso's better-known term “born criminal” (17 footnote 2).
If the working woman is inclined to be criminal, and the perfect female criminal type is the prostitute, then the extension of Ellis's logic is that a prostitute is the consummate working woman.
Pirkis, writing two years after the first edition of The Criminal was published, subtly explores connections between prostitution and other “women's” labor in the Brooke stories. Many characters in the stories treat Brooke as though she is disrespectable, or a sullying influence on the home: recall Mrs. Greenhow's claim in “Missing!” that “Lady detectives … were a race apart” (366). Brooke is more explicitly linked with prostitution in “The Redhill Sisterhood,” when she “street-walks” home late at night, by herself, after performing some investigative work: “The church clocks were sounding the midnight hour as Loveday made her way through the dark streets to her hotel outside of town. As she passed under the railway arch that ended in the open country road, the echo of not very distant footsteps caught her ear…. [S]he was being followed and watched” (586). A reference could not be made, in Victorian literature, to a woman walking alone on the streets at midnight without raising some question about her respectability; indeed, Parsons rightly defines “‘public women’ in the Victorian sense” in part as “walking a night-time city” (146).
Brooke's endless movement between cities and towns and among many different people, her persistent “social intercourse,” is a defining characteristic of her detection and another quality she shares with the late-Victorian prostitute. As Walkowitz has pointed out, the dangers of prostitution were most often portrayed in Victorian society through “metaphors … of social intercourse…. Literally and figuratively, the prostitute was the conduit of infection to respectable society” (Prostitution 4). Brooke's profession brings her into contact with people of many different classes from many different places. Constantly riding trains, moving between town and city amongst various crime scenes, investigating everyone from servants to princesses, Brooke is characterized by her social mobility. Likewise, she is portrayed as carrying the taint of her social mobility into the upper-class homes that she often investigates, another way that Pirkis subtly exploits the connections between the prostitute and the she-dick.
The female criminal's connection to labor in late-Victorian criminal theory not only links her to the sex worker, but also, conversely, establishes her as unsexed or masculinized because of her participation in the male sphere of work outside the home. Late-Victorian criminologists understood female criminals as degenerate, and one of the most obvious signs of degeneracy in women was thought to be masculinity. According to Ellis, “If … the criminal woman is compared with the normal woman, she is found to approach more closely to the normal man than the latter does; while the corresponding character (feminility) [sic] is not found so often in the criminal as in the normal man” (53). He also claims that criminal woman have a “remarkable abundance” of body hair (73), another masculine quality, and that their sexual organs “reveal pathological conditions” (89). He maintains that, “Masculine, unsexed, ugly, abnormal women” are the women “most strongly marked with the signs of degeneration, and therefore the tendency to criminality” (217). Ellis essentially suggests that criminality, whether existing in men or women, is a masculine trait: criminal women are “masculine” but criminal men are not apt to be “feminine.” Consequently, women who violate physical norms of gender are imagined as abject, criminal subjects in a way that men are not.
Brooke's male colleagues endorse such a view of non-feminine women. In “The Redhill Sisterhood,” one particular woman, Sister Monica, comes under police suspicion in part because of her “criminal” appearance. Sister Monica is part of “an undenominational Sisterhood that had recently been founded by a wealthy lady” (581). As an ugly woman who has chosen to live her life in a community of women, rejecting marriage and family, Sister Monica is criminalized. Inspector Gunning says to Brooke: “I have heard of a man's face being enough to hang him, but until I saw Sister Monica's, I never saw a woman's face that could perform the same kind office for her. Of all the lowest criminal types of faces I have ever seen, I think hers is about the lowest and most repulsive” (583). As is typical of Brooke, however, she immediately begins to doubt the accepted suspicions of the male police officers. Brooke has been called in to build a case against the Redhill Sisters, but she begins her own investigation to find new suspects. Eventually, she proves the sisters innocent and pins the case on a group that includes John Murray, a “well-featured man” (585), and Arthur Lee, a “handsome, bright-faced young fellow” going by “George White” (587). White's pseudonym ironically connects him with St. George, patron saint of England, as well as Anglo-Saxon “whiteness.” When Inspector Dyer, surprised at Brooke's discovery, asks her how she came to doubt the other officers' theory, Brooke recalls observing the sisters when she first began the case:
Sister Monica, I must admit, is not pleasant to look at; at the same time, there was something absolutely beautiful in the way in which she lifted the little cripple out of the cart, put his tiny thin hand round her neck, and carried him into the house…. I would like to ask some rabid physiognomist how he would account for Sister Monica's repulsiveness of feature as contrasted with young Lee's undoubted good looks–heredity, in this case, throws no light on the matter. (594)
Here, Pirkis undermines the theory of criminal typology as well as the criminalization of masculine, unattractive women. Brooke's removal of suspicion from Sister Monica is typical of the stories' general defense of women who are regularly marginalized because of appearance, class, occupation, or nationality. In opposition to contemporaneous theories of criminality, Brooke repeatedly discounts physical typology as a meaningful way of identifying criminality. Furthermore, one of the central radical qualities of Pirkis's series of stories is her refusal, unlike her contemporaries, to blame crime on “the usual suspects”: the ugly, the unattractive, the poor, and the foreign are all exonerated by Loveday Brooke.
Women under Cover: Invisibility and Domesticity in the Loveday Brooke Stories
SEVERAL OF THE Loveday Brooke stories portray maids and domestic workers coming under immediate suspicion with regard to crimes in the houses of their employers, and Brooke always finds them innocent.15
An exception is “The Ghost of Fountain Lane,” where a female servant is guilty of theft, but even here Brooke finds the woman to be acting under the mesmerizing influence of an apocalyptic Christian preacher.
“Larceny by servants” was a separate offense from ordinary theft in Victorian law, suggesting the degree to which such a crime disturbed English lawmakers. Women made up about 20–30% of those tried for larceny by servants, according to Zedner, who points out that “given the large numbers of women in domestic service it is perhaps surprising that they did not make up an even larger proportion” (37). Still, Pirkis's stories thematize a cultural anxiety about dishonest female servants. For example, in “The Black Bag Left on a Door-Step,” which centers on a jewelry robbery, Brooke is called in specifically to gain clues about the domestics. Inspector Dyer tells her, “it is in the servants' hall that your services will be required” (401); Brooke will “pass in the house for a niece of [the housekeeper]” (404). Dyer and the local police have identified a French maid as the culprit:
She is a young French girl, Stephanie Delcroix by name…. things look very black against the girl. Her manner…is not calculated to remove suspicion. She goes from one fit of hysterics into another; contradicts herself nearly every time she opens her mouth, then lays it to the charge of her ignorance of our language; breaks into voluble French; becomes theatrical in action, and then goes off into hysterics once more. (402)
As a maid and a foreigner, Stephanie Delcroix is doubly typologized as criminal according to 1890s criminology. Nevertheless, Brooke is immediately skeptical of Dyer's theory: she responds, “All that is quite Français, you know” (402). Here, Brooke indicates that she sees bodily manifestations of innocence or guilt as culturally bound, which undercuts theories of physical criminology by revealing the appearance of innocence or the appearance of guilt to be cultural constructs rather than innate, inherited conditions.
When Delcroix disappears shortly after she is questioned, the male detectives triumphantly take her flight as proof of her guilt. Inspector Gates of Scotland Yard proclaims, “Told you so! told you so! Now, didn't I, Miss Brooke?” (409). Brooke views the matter much differently, however, and believes Delcroix to be wrongfully accused: “I can see another possible destination for the girl–the stream that runs through the wood we drove past this morning. Good night, Mr. Bates” (409). Brooke's prediction turns out to be correct: Delcroix has gone to the stream to attempt suicide, convinced that she will not be able to clear her name. Brooke is able to identify the true culprit, however, and Delcroix is found alive: “At the last moment her courage failed her, and instead of throwing herself into the stream, she sank down, half-fainting, beside it” (414). The real thief, it turns out, was Mr. Emmett, who entered the house disguised as a clergyman, was “young and decidedly good-looking,” and whose “manner was affable and pleasant” (410). In other words, Emmett is in no way outwardly criminal. Delcroix's near-suicide highlights the dangerous injustice of criminal typology: in this case, the French domestic (a cliché culprit in Victorian crime fiction16
See, for example, Dickens's Bleak House and Henry James's The Princess Casamassima.
) was innocent, yet almost died as a result of being wrongly accused, while the true culprit appeared as a holy man. This is typical of Brooke's cases: her sympathy for marginalized women and exposure of male viciousness recur again and again.
In “Missing!,” the last Brooke story, the Italian maid Maddalena provides Brooke with information that leads her to solve the case after the male detectives have botched the whole investigation. Brooke is called in after the regional male detectives have gone ten days without a lead. The officers have failed because of their inability to understand or relate to the domestic workers and the domestic world altogether. Dyer tells Brooke: “it is just possible that they have concentrated too much attention on the search outside the house, and that a promising field for investigation may lie within” (356). The case is a possible homicide; Miss Irene Golding has been found drowned in a stream. The main suspect is her former suitor, Gordon Cleeve. Irene “cut him dead” after she “saw [Cleeve] cruelly thrashing one of his setters” (360).17
Pirkis herself was an animal rights activist and co-founded the National Canine Defense League, which still exists in England (Slung, Crime 3). She portrays characters mistreating dogs to signify their brutality and/or murderous instincts here and in “Murder on Troyte's Hill.”
In an ill-planned response, Cleeve “threatens to shoot first his rival, then himself, then Miss Golding” (358). The story begins, then, with the specter of male brutality and domestic violence. Ramsay, the chief male detective, is also brutal in his interrogation of Maddalena: he “made such a dead set at 'Lena that the girl felt herself insulted, grew sullen and refused to open her lips” (361). Later, however, Brooke's respectful treatment of Maddalena leads to the discovery that a murder has not in fact taken place; the body in the stream was not Irene, but that of her mother, long thought dead by her husband, while Irene has instead run away. The male police officers are shocked at Brooke's success; Inspector Ramsay says, “It is marvelous to me how you contrived to get anything out of that woman 'Lena … she was most obstinately taciturn with me.” Brooke responds, “Pardon me if I say that was because she had been most injudiciously handled” (368). Pirkis describes Maddalena thus: “Twelve years of English domestic life had considerably modified the outer tokens of her nationality … [a hair ornament and a ring] were about the only things that differentiated her appearance from that of the ordinary English lady's maid” (361). Again, Pirkis emphasizes the constructedness of cultural difference, showing Maddalena's “foreignness” to be a style rather than an innate condition. This has the effect of diffusing the aura of criminality through which the other police officers perceive her.
Brooke's sympathy with maids such as Maddalena is especially significant because Brooke herself regularly assumes the position of a domestic worker in order to solve cases. For example, in “The Redhill Sisterhood” Pirkis is “supposed to be a nursery governess on the lookout for a situation” (582), and, when traveling to the site of the crime in “The Black Bag Left on a Door-Step,” she “dressed in the neat black supposed to be appropriate to servants of the upper class” (405). While many late-Victorian fictional detectives made use of disguise, the disguise of a domestic worker is particularly significant in that it allows Brooke intimate access to those in the house whom she is watching, as well as a heightened capacity for invisibility because of her society's blind-spot with regard to women's domestic labor. As many critics have shown, female domestic workers were very much a point of cultural anxiety through the second half of the nineteenth century.18
See, for example, Poovey's work on the Victorian governess.
Codes of ideal femininity constrained women from working, but at the same time, middle- and upper-class standards of living depended upon female domestic labor. The conflict between these mutually exclusive values was met with an attitude of repression, or erasure, toward women's labor in the cultural consciousness. Anne McClintock has shown how this erasure is played out in late-Victorian mass culture, pointing to magazine advertisements as evidence: “An ad for Stephenson's Furniture Cream figures a spotless maid on all fours, smiling up from a floor so clean that it mirrors her reflection. The cream is ‘warranted not to fingermark.’ A superior soap should leave no telltale smear, no fingerprint of female labor…. so soaps erased the imprint of women's work on middle-class history” (219). Ideal domestic labor, according to McClintock, was represented as
agentless in late-Victorian mass culture, yet in Pirkis's stories, we see a secret
agent entering the domestic sphere, looking for the very fingerprints, hairs, and other telltale marks of crime that this advertisement promises to erase.
Pirkis's central concern with the erasure of female domestic labor is underscored in her treatment of the real female workers whom Brooke encounters. Mademoiselle Cunier, for example, a young Swiss domestic in “A Princess's Vengeance,” “disappears” into the city after a flight from her employer, whose son has developed an inappropriate interest in her: “Madame Celine receive[d] and [hid] her–not a difficult feat to accomplish in London, more especially if the one to be hidden is a foreign amanuensis, who is seldom seen out of doors, and who leaves no photograph behind her” (14). It is easy for Cunier to go under cover because in a sense she has always been so, folded into the invisible cloak of female domestic labor. Her anonymity in this position was only threatened in the first place because her good looks had made her too noticeable, and in fact had initially made it difficult for her to find a position in London: “Lady Gwynne intended to make her governess to her young children, but when she saw that the girl's good looks had attracted her husband's attention, she thought better of it, and suggested to Mrs. Druce that Mademoiselle might be more useful to her in conducting her foreign correspondence” (6). It is in Mrs. Druce's home that Cunier attracts the unsought attention of her employer's son, and thus must “disappear.” Her work is interrupted by her inability to remain unnoticed, again highlighting the conflicted role of the Victorian woman worker: as a young, unmarried woman she is an object of spectacle, but as a worker she is meant to remain invisible.
Unburdened with Cunier's good looks, Brooke is much more successful at disappearing into the domestic realm.19
Brooke's physical appearance is described negatively, in a sort of anti-blazon: “She was not tall, she was not short; she was not dark, she was not fair; she was neither handsome nor ugly. Her features were altogether nondescript” (“Black Bag” 402). Rather than functioning to handicap her, as late-nineteenth-century literature often depicts absence of beauty in a woman, Brooke's plainness serves her in good stead as a detective. On an abstract level, nondescript features can resist the technologies of criminal typology emerging at this time: if one's features cannot be described, they cannot be classified, identified, or diagnosed. On a more immediate level, Brooke's mundane physique eases her ability to cross-dress, pass, or use disguise, enhancing her success as a detective.
Most late-Victorian crime stories feature a domestic element, but there is only a certain degree of penetration that a disguised male detective can make into the home. By donning the “invisible woman” costume of the domestic worker, however, Brooke can gain access to a private, privileged vantage point of surveillance. Because of the obscurity surrounding female labor in her society, Brooke is able to go undercover in a series of disguises representing various acceptable occupations for women. The anonymity and imperceptibility of these positions allow her opportunities for knowledge and power that bring her success in the male occupation of detection. At the same time, Pirkis never puts Brooke in a disguise that would position her in a class much lower or higher than that which she normally occupies, which is perhaps unsurprising given the rigid class structure of Victorian Britain. In “The Murder at Troyte's Hill,” for example, Brooke goes undercover in the wealthy Craven family's household to solve a murder case. She poses as an amanuensis to the elder Mr. Craven, who is writing a “Key-to-All-Mythologies” sort of book on comparative philology. Her ability to avoid notice is crucial to her success in identifying the murderer. The Craven household is not the least bit suspicious of the new amanuensis who has entered their home on the pretext of being “a lady of impoverished means” in search of employment (530). The butler, for example, “treated Loveday in an easy, familiar fashion, evidently considering that an amanuensis took much the same rank as a nursery governess–that is to say, a little below a lady's maid and a little above a housemaid” (533). Again, Brooke is reminiscent of the “odd women”: too refined to do “dirty” service, they took liminal positions as governesses, companions, or amanuenses. The ease and naturalness with which Brooke is integrated into the Craven home and with which her job is positioned within a hierarchy of female service exemplify the normality of such “odd” roles in late-Victorian middle- and upper-class homes.
Brooke's position in the Craven household allows her opportunity for minute scrutiny of her surroundings, through which she solves the crime. While the local police are convinced that young Mr. Craven, son of the master of the house, is the murderer, Brooke alone recognizes that a daughter, Miss Craven, is actually cross-dressing as her brother, who has left the country. Miss Craven has already successfully passed as her absent brother during a doctor's examination (he was “not much of a practitioner,” one officer allows), and she has scared off a legion of police officers by unexpectedly appearing sans disguise: “Griffith and his confreres entered [what they think is young Mr. Craven's bedroom], to find pretty Miss Craven, looking very white and scared, in a long, flowing robe-du-chambre. Griffiths departed in haste and confusion” (538). Brooke alone discovers that Miss Craven is a woman pretending to be a man, which leads to the solving of the case. Significantly, as Thomas has pointed out, the only instances when Sherlock Holmes “fails” as a detective are instances when, like Griffiths and the other male police officers in “Murder on Troyte's Hill,” he does not recognize someone as passing for another gender or race (“Fingerprint” 682). Late-Victorian male detectives, it seems, have a key blind-spot that she-dick Brooke does not have.
The “murder” of the story's title is itself a result of role inversions. The victim, Old Sandy, was a servant who held an inordinate amount of power over his master. In the course of the story, we learn that Sandy had been blackmailing the elder Mr. Craven, the real perpetrator of the murder, for decades, threatening to expose a secret marriage Craven made to a “disreputable” barmaid while at Oxford. Ironically, it is one of Mr. Craven's purported servants–Brooke in disguise–who uncovers his guilt. The murder is eventually revealed to be an attempt to cover up a cross-class marriage, and at the heart of the crime is a barmaid who works in a “public house,” highlighting again Pirkis's central investigation into women's work and women's publicity.
Likewise, in Pirkis's story “Drawn Daggers,” Brooke goes undercover as a “lady house decorator” to similarly penetrate a household via disguise. Brooke is called into the Hawke household to locate the visiting Miss Monroe's lost necklace, but she must go undercover because Miss Monroe is strangely adamant that the police not be brought in to search for the necklace. Brooke ends up discovering that the real Miss Monroe actually eloped with an “unsuitable” suitor en route to visiting the Hawkes, and the woman passing as her is really an Irish housemaid, Mary O'Grady. Again, at the center of the story is a transgressive marriage, and again, Brooke solves the case by recognizing someone as passing for someone she is not. Brooke is tipped off to O'Grady's true identity by the condition of her room and by a recognition of the kind of work that makes the room appear so:
The one point … that chiefly attracted Loveday's attention was the extreme neatness that prevailed throughout the apartment–a neatness … carried out with so strict an eye to comfort and convenience that it seemed to proclaim the hand of a first-class maid…. [E]verything that a lady could require in dressing lay ready to hand. The dressing-gown lying on the back of a chair had footstool and slippers beside it. A chair stood in front of the toilet table, and on a small Japanese table to the right of the chair were placed hair-pin box, comb and brush, and hand mirror. (263)
Ironically, it is O'Grady's ability to make her own labor
invisible, as though everything were magically “ready at hand” for her lady, which leads Brooke to recognize the maid's real identity. Here, Brooke's ability to
see women's domestic labor, a commodity usually fetishized into invisibility, accounts for her success, which has the effect of furthering its visibility to all readers. Brooke's ability to perceive O'Grady's labor is not only a way of attributing value to that labor, however: it is also what leads her to recognize the maid as passing for a member of the upper class. This situation is depicted as particularly volatile, since Brooke's solution of the mystery only just halts O'Grady's accelerating flirtation with an upper-class nephew of the Hawkes'. In this way, Brooke's labor stabilizes the class system, even as she highlights the fissures of class ideology by paying attention to women's domestic labor.
The Loveday Brooke stories challenge conventional critical assumptions about turn-of-the-century detective fiction, mass culture, and gender roles, and invite a more balanced view of the volatile cultural and literary climate of 1890s England. The detective story as a genre has often been considered a narrative of social control, inherently conservative in its rooting out of the criminal “other” in order to preserve the status quo. Pirkis's stories, however, challenge generic norms in the same way that they challenge criminal norms. From Galton's experiments with composite photography and fingerprinting to Lombroso and Ellis's mapping of the criminal body, turn-of-the-century social scientists attempted to construct a fixed criminal type, but Pirkis objects to this conception of criminality as well as its attendant ideologies of gender and national difference. As a woman, Pirkis would have been herself linked to criminals and “primitives” by late-Victorian anthropologists, in that all three groups were believed to lack the ability to repress impulsive feelings, the supposed foundation of civilization (Stocking 60). Her dismantling of the typological normativism of contemporaneous crime fiction and criminal anthropology, however, suggests not only that the criminal, in late-Victorian fiction and science, was often the figure on whom fictions of gender, race, and class could be played out, but also that the she-dick has a paradoxical capacity for undoing such epistemological constructions.
I would like to thank Susan David Bernstein, Jacqueline Labbe, and Matthew Stratton for reading and commenting on various versions of this article. I presented a brief, early version of this argument at the British Women Writers Conference at the University of Kansas in March 2001, and I would like to thank the audience of that presentation for their insightful questions and comments.
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