A Very British Murder (21 page)

The historian Helen Rappaport has discovered that some of Madame Rachel’s clients required ever more personal services. One Mrs Esdaile, for example, embarked upon a course of Arabian Bath treatments at Madame Rachel’s salon. She complained that her diamond earrings had gone missing from the changing room. Mrs Esdaile’s husband marched her along to a solicitor: he believed that the earrings had been stolen, and wanted Madame Rachel’s salon investigated. However, as the couple concluded their meeting with the solicitor, Mrs Esdaile nonchalantly left her gloves on his desk. Returning later, alone, to pick up the gloves, she admitted that she’d been using the salon to meet up with a lover in a private cubicle.

Madame Rachel’s fees for this extra service and for her continued discretion had escalated over the months to the level of blackmail. It was no good Mrs Esdaile refusing to pay, Madame Rachel had threatened: ‘I know who you are. I have had you watched. I know where you live.’ But Mrs Esdaile quietly asked her husband’s solicitor to abandon the case. She knew that she
had even more to lose than Madame Rachel if he brought about a successful prosecution.

The fraudster and blackmailer was eventually indicted in 1865 for a poignant crime: she’d undertaken to remove the smallpox scars from the face of a client who had, in return, promised to give Madame Rachel all her jewellery. Madame Rachel was finally exposed in a trial conducted under a glare of publicity, and was confirmed as a celebrity criminal when her waxwork entered Madame Tussaud’s.

The fictional Madame Rachel, Mother Oldershaw, the nearest person Lydia has to a mother, lends the anti-heroine money and helps her with her schemes, but is ready to turn and stab her in the back on the slightest provocation. Collins ran the risk of libel in creating such similarities between Oldershaw and Rachel, although Helen Rappaport has discovered no evidence to prove that the real-life Madame Rachel had links with backstreet abortionists, like her fictional equivalent. Setting the novel in 1851, ten years before its date of publication, Rappaport suggests, was a deliberate strategy that Collins came up with to defend himself from accusations of feeding upon the distress of real people.

Despite the scandal caused by characters like Lydia Gwilt and Mother Oldershaw, the sympathy that Collins showed for women and the engaging complexity that he gave to his female characters ensured that he had many devoted female readers. A manual for women published in 1889 told them how they ought to react to the disappointments of life: ‘Perhaps you are unhappy; perhaps your heart is bursting. But do not look for consolation, even in the realm of ideas, these are dangerous if they can become sinful. Resign yourself. Lose yourself completely in your children.’

‘Sensation’ novels like
Armadale
– or Ellen Wood’s
East Lynne
, or Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s
Lady Audley’s Secret
– provided an alternative to this. In them women were often bad, mad, dangerous and murderous. ‘Female anger, frustration and sexual energy’ bursts out of these stories, writes the critic Elaine Showalter, and often ‘the death of a husband comes as a welcome release, and women escape from their families through illness, madness, divorce, flight and, ultimately, murder’.

The ‘sensation’ novel has retained its admirers ever since its emergence in the 1860s. The magnificent detective novelist of the 1930s Dorothy L. Sayers was devoted to the form. In her masterpiece
Gaudy Night
(1935), her bluestocking heroine Harriet Vane returns to her old Oxford college to research a very appropriate pet project: the work of ‘sensation’ novelist Sheridan Le Fanu.

And Collins and his contemporaries still influence writers today. Sarah Waters was inspired by the hits of the 1860s for her fabulous novel
Fingersmith
(2002). ‘I was hooked on the “sensation novels” of writers such as Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’, she wrote in the
Guardian
in 2006, ‘novels whose pre-occupation with sex, crime and family scandals had once made them runaway bestsellers.’ In
Fingersmith
, Sue, the child of an urban baby farmer (like Mother Oldershaw), is sent by her family of thieves to a remote country house. Her mission is a plot against Maud, an isolated, strange young lady, who lives with her uncle, a noted collector of pornography. The plan is that Sue will persuade Maud to elope with a man who’s really a fraudster. He will then place her in a madhouse and claim her fortune.

It’s a story Wilkie Collins would have loved.

‘Harrowing the Mind, making the Flesh Creep, Causing the Hair to Stand on end, Giving Shocks to the Nervous System … and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of Life.’

Punch
, describing the novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon

LIKE MANY OF
her contemporary writers, and many of her own heroines, Mary Elizabeth Braddon would probably have preferred to live a less lurid life. But she had little choice. She desperately needed the money to be made by exploiting the British weakness for crime.

The daughter of a solicitor, she grew up in Frith Street, Soho. In 1839, when she was four, her parents broke up. Braddon’s father’s infidelity and spend-thriftery drove her mother to leave him, taking her daughter with her, and to set up home in Kensington. Here the future novelist received a good education at a girls’ school.

Yet cash was short. In her early twenties, Braddon was forced to find work, to make ends meet, and she chose to go on the stage.
With her mother in tow, she toured the Midlands as an actress. Suitably for a girl forced by circumstances to act older and wiser than her years, she often took the part of a middle-aged matron rather than the ingénue.

Even during her theatrical years, though, Braddon had an alternative career in mind. Eventually she picked up an admirer who was willing to fund her to write, full-time, for six months. Her earliest published efforts were Penny Dreadfuls, which were published weekly, and cheaply, in serial form – ‘Dreadfuls’ were aimed at a slightly younger market, particularly boys. Judith Flanders
points out that, in 1861, 9 out of the total population of 20 million were aged 18 or under, so 45 per cent of the potential reading public were children. Feeding their demand for entertainment as a serial writer involved sustained, disciplined work, which evidently suited Braddon: ‘I have never written a line that has not been written against time.’ And yet, as she began to find success, she also found herself constrained by her genre, complaining: ‘the amount of crime, treachery, murder, slow poisoning and general infamy required by the halfpenny reader is something terrible’.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Braddon lost her generous patron, because she had set herself up with another man. She became a literary assistant to John Maxwell, publisher of fiction magazines. He was married, and had five children, and in a turn of events that would not be out of place in one of Braddon’s own novels, his wife had been locked away in a lunatic asylum.

Braddon (her faithful and long-suffering mother still in tow) now moved into John Maxwell’s house in Bloomsbury, and began to act as his wife and as stepmother to his five children. She would live with him, unmarried, for many years, and have a further five children with him, giving her many critics ammunition for accusations of impropriety.

And bigamy formed the central theme of Braddon’s first great triumph,
Lady Audley’s Secret
. Published in serial form in 1861, it sold enormously well. The story of Lady Audley’s infamy unfolds through the investigative work of her husband’s nephew, a handsome, lazy and unemployed barrister called Robert Audley. As the book progresses, he toughens up, becomes increasingly dedicated to his task, and finishes up as the rather high-handed arbiter of retribution.
At the very end, once it has become clear that Lady Audley was indeed guilty of attempted murder, Robert Audley takes it upon himself to imprison her in a mental institution rather than drag his family name through the scandal of the criminal courts.

At the heart of
Lady Audley’s Secret
is the ancient mansion of Audley Court. Braddon’s model for the house was Ingatestone Hall in Essex, dating from the 1540s. It was the secondary home of its owners, the Catholic Petre family, who rented it out as a series of apartments. It seems that John Maxwell rather than Braddon herself was their tenant, and it’s unclear whether his landlords knew that the lady writer whom he installed for a while in the apartment was his lover. Braddon’s description of Audley Court still applies to Ingatestone Hall to this day:

The house … occupied three sides of a quadrangle. It was very old, and very irregular and rambling. The windows were uneven; some small, some large, some with heavy stone mullions and rich stained glass; others with frail lattices that rattled in every breeze … the principal door was squeezed into a corner of a turret at one angle of the building … a glorious old place. A place that visitors fell in raptures with; feeling a yearning to have done with life.

Running alongside a sluggish green canal behind Ingatestone Hall is the celebrated Lime Walk. In the story, the Lime Walk leads to the infamous well down which Lady Audley pushes her first husband. Braddon claimed later that it was walking beneath the Ingatestone limes that inspired the whole story. Only to a ‘sensation’ novelist like
Braddon would this peaceful and secluded spot have suggested (in her words) ‘something uncanny’ and ‘a history of domestic crime’.

Robert Audley and Lady Audley at the well down which she has pushed her husband.

Middle-class reaction to this scandalous book (and to its equally scandalous author) was predictable. ‘She has temporarily succeeded in making the literature of the kitchen the favourite reading of the drawing room,’ sniffed one critic. She satisfied only ‘the cravings of a diseased appetite,’ huffed another, while a third marvelled at her invention, ‘which could only have been possible to an Englishwoman knowing the attractions of impropriety’.

Much of the impropriety of the book lay in its anti-heroine, Lady Audley. She looked good as gold with her china-doll, passive prettiness, and yet she was quite capable of murder. The heroine
in Braddon’s next book,
Aurora Floyd
(1862), would be even less womanly: she actually horse-whips her blackmailer, in a celebrated scene, which deranges her clothing in a manner that suggests that she enjoyed the sadism.

But it was
Lady Audley
who made her creator a fortune, and with it Braddon purchased a grand house in Richmond where she wrote many of the rest of her 80 novels. Lichfield House (dating from the eighteenth century, and demolished in the 1930s) was grand and substantial, not quite as grand as the ancient Audley Court but more than respectable. Braddon’s publisher, William Tinsley, built himself a villa at Barnes, Audley Lodge, with his own share of the profits.

Reading
Lady Audley’s Secret
today, one is struck by how unfair the contemporary vilification of the heroine seems. We know that Helen (alias Lady Audley) is a villainess by the repeated references to her beautiful, ethereal, feathery
golden
curls: the sub-text is that she (shamefully) dyes her hair. Just as with Lydia Gwilt, though, it’s hard to dismiss Lady Audley as a truly evil character.