Research Blogs

 

Jennifer Wood recently finished her Masters degree and is hoping to begin a PhD in 2018 to continue her work. She is researching the history of divorce in Victorian literature and its role in pushing the boundaries of decency in Victorian culture and hopes to expand into transcontinental studies of divorce. When not working on her research, she teaches both American history as well as Western civilization to undergraduates at Metropolitan Community College in Kansas City.

You can reach Jennifer at Jennifer.wood@mcckc.edu

 

---

 

Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman, first serialized in The Lady’s Pictorial between January and March of 1894, is known as a quintessential ‘New Woman’ novel. John Sutherland calls it “the greatest unread novel of female struggle of the century.”[i] Dixon used her book to address both a double standard in expectations for women’s behavior and in expectations for the publication of fiction. That is, she explored the subject of adultery in the life and fiction of the “modern woman” in her title. By examining Dixon’s novel alongside the divorce accounts in the London Times, I argue that Dixon fought against these double standards in life and fiction even while forcing her main character to succumb to them.

 

Divorce became a civil issue after the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, and as soon as the courts opened for business, the London Times reporters were there, documenting each divorce case. With each new case heard, sales increased and publishers realized they had a fresh and constantly renewable form of scandal that would sell papers. Claiming ‘democracy of print’ or the important role of making political and judicial figures accountable to the public, the London Times and other newspapers would use divorce cases to titillate their readers.  Both the press and the public would attend regular open divorce hearings, crowding into the courtroom to bear witness to the spectacle. Petitioners for divorce were required to offer all of the proof they had concerning the affairs of the accused, and the accused would then have to defend themselves. Giving testimony, especially for a woman was a difficult undertaking, where being “put on the stand” often meant standing before a packed courtroom revealing the most intimate aspects of her life. Divorce proceedings became such a popular form of entertainment that people had a hard time getting a seat in the courtroom.^[ii] It was alright if you couldn’t see it in person, however, because multiple London newspapers would report all of the scandalous testimony in detail.

For instance, in 1891 the case of Russell v Russell made headlines.   Lady Russell petitioned for a judicial separation due to her husband’s cruelty.  Countess Russell claimed that Earl Russell threatened to shoot her on multiple occasions, and on the night of June 10th he:

Insisted on his wife leaving his bed, and on leaving it she fell on the floor.  A nurse found her lying there naked, and the respondent’s explanation was that, she having fainted, he threw water over her and she became so wet that he had to take off her nightdress.  After that she felt she could live with him no longer.[iii]

The charge of cruelty, however, would be overshadowed by her claim of her husband’s homosexual relationship with Herbert Roberts, head mathematics master at Bath College.  The Times reported that Earl Russell:

insisted upon a man named Roberts sleeping in the house for three or four days and nights, and after the respondent had undressed, going up to Robert’s bedroom, remaining with him for several hours, and again in the morning.  Upon the petitioner expostulating with him upon his conduct the respondent told the petitioner to go to the devil and mind her own business.^[iv]

 

The scandal involved with the Russell case was intense.  Anyone reading the newspapers would know the activities going on within their home and the testimony would leave no question as to the character of all the parties involved. Despite the final ruling of the Russell case, Earl Russell would forever be associated with a homosexual relationship and cruel behavior leaving plenty of fodder for gossips in all level of society.   For those cases that were especially popular, newspapers such as the Illustrated Police News (Fig.2) would use illustrations allowing the scandal to be not only visualized for audience members, but for those who were illiterate, the pictures would allow them to join in on the gossip.

 

Some people found the newspaper reports to be vulgar and a danger to public morality.   Even Queen Victoria implored the courts to cease the flow of news reports.

None of the worst French novels from which careful parents try to protect their children can be as bad as what is daily brought and laid upon the breakfast-table of every educated family in England, and its effect must be most pernicious to the public morals of the country.^[v]

While the Queen’s opinion was taken into account, court officials hoped that the printing of these court cases would act as a deterrent to those tempted to wander off the path of marital virtue.  They would argue that the newspaper accounts acted as an informal education on what not to do in a marriage.^[vi]  Even those most opposed to the passage of the divorce act believed that the publications of the hearings were to the ultimate benefit to the public as a whole.^[vii]

Many respectable people internalized the lessons intended by the courts, reassuring them about their own honorable lives –“I’d never do that”– and helped them set limits of expected behavior.^[viii] This ability of the reader to distance themselves from those on trial was what kept newspapers safe from the obscenity laws and what allowed readers to feed on the scandal without feeling influenced by it. By placing those at the center of the controversy outside the regular sphere of everyday life, it distanced the reader from temptation of the immoral act of adultery.  It especially helped if those unlucky few on trial were of a higher social station.^[ix] Despite their belief in scandal for the public good however, divorce numbers continued to increase in the last half of the nineteenth century.^[x]

 

Fiction, though, was held to different standards. While novelists often used stories and headlines from the newspapers as a means of inspiration and proof of relevancy, they also sought to use their medium as a way to push back against this double standard that existed between fiction and journalism.^[xi] The obscenity laws were keenly felt among Dixon and her peers, and more successful authors chose pamphlets and essays to argue their case.  George Moore spent his own money to publish Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals, as a way of criticizing circulating libraries, specifically Mudies, for their censorious natures, noting that “the character of strength, virility, and purpose, which our literature has always held, the old literary tradition coming down to us through a long line of glorious ancestors, is being gradually obliterated to suit the commercial views of a narrow-minded tradesman.”^[xii] Moore displays disgust at Mr. Mudie’s decision to discontinue carrying his novels based on the letters of a couple of disapproving “ladies in the country”.[xiii]  Moore’s newest novel A Mummer’s Wife was censored because it was told from the point of view of the wife who cheats on her husband and subsequently divorces him for another man.

 

Eliza Lynn Lynton also had words about the double standard but contemplated a different solution, namely that “a great nation should be candid and truthful in art as well as in life, and mature men and women should not sacrifice truth and common sense in literature for the sake of the Young Person.”  She advocated for age specific genres and “locked bookcase(s).”^[xiv]

Ella Hepworth Dixon would use her novel as a similar vehicle for protest against “circulating library” standards. Mary Erle, the protagonist of The Story of a Modern Woman, is an orphaned young woman responsible for the care of her younger brother. Though she aspires to be an artist, she takes up journalism and fiction writing as a faster means of supporting her small family. Educated and raised in polite society, Mary remains free to mingle among those with whom she was raised despite her misfortune. Her friends exist in both the upper classes of London as well as the working class and because of her situation; she is able to afford her readers the perspective of both worlds. Dixons first exploration of divorce comes in the form of Lady Blaythewaite, a secondary character, who hovers in the background of Dixon’s tale. In the story, Lady Blaythewaite is known for her beauty and her jewels but she is introduced as a soon to be divorcee. “She brings the case, of course, but she won’t get it.  They’re betting on it at the clubs.”^[xv]  Dixon shows how Lady Blaythewaite had become the object of scandal in polite society by the whispered talk about her at the theater, and later by the way Dixon portrays the actual divorce through the medium of newspapers.

When Mary goes to discuss her novel with the editor of Illustrations magazine, she has to pass the Strand, an area near the center of London where newspaper boys shouted headlines to passersby.  Mary would stop to read the headlines. “The Great Divorce Case. Cross-Examination of the Plaintiff. Unabridged Report. Ladies Ordered Out of Court. Sketches of the Co-Respondents.”^[xvi] Dixon would compare the Blaythewaite divorce case to a disease that would infect all of London, influencing conversation wherever people met.  “Spesh–shul! Extra spesh–shul! The great divorce case! Extraordinary evidence! Cross-examination of Sir Horace Blaythewaite!”[xvii] Not unlike real life and the Russell divorce case, the Blaythewaite divorce became highly publicized and incredibly detailed fodder for newspapers.  Dixon’s very next scene brings home the jarring contradiction in the publishing industry at the time.

When Mary sits down to discuss the manuscript of her novel, the editor rejects her ending as too scandalous. As George Moore’s case suggests, in an effort to avoid violating the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, editors often censored their writers prior to publication. Mary’s editor attempts to curb her discussion of potential adultery:

You’ve put the most extraordinary things in this last chapter. Why, there’s a young man making love to his friend’s wife.  I can’t put that sort of thing in my paper.  The public won’t stand it, my dear girl.  They want thoroughly healthy reading.” “Do they?” said Mary, who could not help remembering the columns of unedifying matter which had lain on the breakfast table that morning, nor the newsboys vending the latests details of the great scandal, served red hot, at the street corners. “I thought,” she continued quietly, “that the public would take anything – in a newspaper.” ^[xviii]

Dixon uses the voice of the editor to stand in for the censorship and morality laws that regulated the print industry for fiction. Dixon goes on to push this double standard home when the editor, during their meeting, takes a phone call about the Blaythewaite case and urges his photographer to get as many photos as possible of Lady Blaythewaite and asks for a “couple of pages of drawings” in an attempt to boost revenue through scandal^[xix].  Oblivious to his own contradiction, the editor continues with Mary telling her that “the fact is…novels are-er-well-novels.  The British public doesn’t expect them to be like life.”^[xx]  Mary goes on to defend the literary world when she argues, “But even the people in the country parsonage must occasionally see life as it is — or do they go about with their eyes shut?”^[xxi]  It is in this line that Dixon spells out her frustration with English morality and the double standard in publishing.

 

So, why was it acceptable to read about scandalous divorce cases in the papers but not in literature?  The assumed audience of novels was impressionable young women. It would be incorrect to presume that young women didn’t also read newspapers, but novels took a different, more important role with their readers.  Fictional literature, worked to close that distance between the reader and the story. Where newspapers allowed the reader to place the subject of adultery at a distance so as to ridicule and objectify, novels did the opposite.  Authors asked their readers to empathize, to identify, and to imagine themselves as aligned with their characters, thus eliminating any gap between the two. Where newspaper stories were merely scandalous, literature was dangerous.  If an impressionable reader could empathize with a character, they could then imagine themselves doing the actions of the characters. Because of this, stories that dealt with scandal and adultery attempted to place the main character as the victim of the crime instead of the perpetrator.

Despite Mary’s failure to conclude her serial with an adulterous scene, Dixon does so in her novel.  The Story of a Modern Woman begins with Mary’s courtship with an ambitious family friend, Vincent Hemming.  Hemming makes clear he intends to marry her.  However, when he impulsively chooses to marry another woman for her money, Mary is left heartbroken.  At the end of the novel, Vincent confesses his mistake and pleads with Mary to run away with him. “You are above the prejudices of our false civilisation, you are capable of being a true woman, of giving up something for the man you love.”^[xxii] What Vincent pleads with Mary to give up is her pride and place of respectability in English society. He suggests they move somewhere far away so that she would not have to deal with the opinion of others or the scandal that his divorce case might incur. Mary refuses Vincent, yet despite her resistance, she is still “conscious of the fascination, the odious fascination which belongs to sin.”^[xxiii] Dixon plays here with that fine line of protagonist as victim.  She allows Mary to imagine for a moment that she could exist outside of social prejudices.  In the end however, Dixon rallies for the plight of women and their helplessness at the hands of men and society.  “…the impotence, the helplessness of woman, struck her with irresistible force.  She was the plaything, the sport of Destiny, and Destiny always won the game.”^[xxiv] Mary’s choice allowed Dixon to remain on the right side of the censors while still candidly exploring the subject of adultery.

 

The obscenity laws and editors fearful of conviction dictated the rules of publishing in nineteenth century England, and those in control of the systems held tight reigns on what was and was not accepted as publishable material.  Newspapers like the London Times flaunted their ability to freely publish erotic stories thus ensuring daily readers, while authors such as Dixon pushed against their restraints in ways that represented the reality of publishing while simultaneously upholding the straw man of adultery. Dixon understood the difference between the two audiences and their ability or inability to distance themselves from the subject at hand, and she wrote with those audiences in mind. She didn’t hesitate to reveal, however, the double standard at play in the publishing world with her realistic story of frustration in the face of contrasting principles. The loophole in the obscenity laws regarding newspapers would hold fast in England until 1926 when, instead of the courts loosening their grip on censorship, they deemed it no longer proper nor educational to report on divorce cases.^[xxv]

---

 

End Notes:

[i] The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989):2.

^[ii] Horstman, Allen. Victorian Divorce. Croom Helm Ltd, 1985. 89.

[iii] London Times, December 2, 1891, pg3; issue 33497

^[iv] Ibid.

^[v] Victoria, Queen of Great Britain.  The Letters of Queen Victoria: a selection from Her Majesty’s correspondence between the years 1837-1861, published by the authority of His Majesty the king ed. Arthur Christopher Benson and Viscount Esher.

^[vi] Ibid. 94.

^[vii] Savage, Gail. “Erotic Stories and Public Decency: Newspaper Reporting of Divorce Proceedings in England.” The Historical Journal Vol.41, no. 2 (1998) 512.

^[viii] Horstman, Victorian Divorce. 97.

^[ix] Ibid.

^[x] Savage, Gail. “The Operation of the 1857 Divorce Act, 1860-1910 a Research Note”. Journal of Social History, Vol. 16 no. 4 (1983) 104.

^[xi] Rubery, Matthew.  The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News. Oxford University Press, 2009. 163.

^[xii] Moore, George. Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals. 1885.

[xiii] Ibid. 3.

^[xiv] Lynton, Eliza Lynn. “Candor in Fiction”. 1890.

^[xv] Dixon, Ella Hepworth. The Story of a Modern Woman. Broadview Press, 2004. 138.

^[xvi] Ibid. 145.

[xvii] Ibid.

^[xviii] Ibid. 146.

^[xix] Ibid. 147.

^[xx] Ibid.

^[xxi] Ibid. 146.

^[xxii] Ibid. 183.

^[xxiii] Ibid.

^[xxiv] Ibid. 184.

^[xxv] Savage, Gail. “Erotic Stories”. 528.

---

List of Images:
[1] “The Divorce Court” Image. “The Mordaunt Divorce Case,” London Journal, 26 March 1870. 196-197.  This illustration depicts The Mordaunt Divorce Case.  This was an incredibly sensational divorce case as Lady Harriet Mordaunt confessed to having had affairs with several men, including the Prince of Wales. She had a daughter that was suspected to be from one of the men she named.  She was later examined and found to have puerperal mania or postpartum psychosis and her husbands divorce was dismissed on these grounds. Lady Mordaunt lived the rest of her life in an asylum.
[2] “Scenes and Incidents in the Crawford Dilke Case.” Illustrated Police News, 7 August 1886. This illustration shows how cases could be visualized in detail almost fictionalizing the story through illustration.
[3] “Ella Hepworth Dixon” Image. Circa 1888 (from her autobiography, As I Knew Them, 1930).

 

Quintus van Galen is a PhD candidate at Edge Hill University, working on the application of computerised textual analysis to historical questions in periodical studies. His thesis will focus on the methodological viability of such analyses within historiography, by the use of a case study on imperial identity in Victorian newspapers. When not working on his own research, he teaches methodology to undergraduates, and acts as an assistant for Bob Nicholson’s digital projects.

Quintus would be happy to answer any questions you have regarding LSI and what it can do for your research at vangaleq@edgehill.ac.uk or through twitter @QVgalen

---

 

When I graduated with an MA in History in 2015, I was part of the first cohort that started their programmes after the genesis and widespread adoption of digital archives in the early 2010s. We had been part of the first generation to have access to full-text web-searchable databases for our dissertations. Many of our generation, myself included, gratefully used those resources and many would not have been able to complete their dissertation without them. While on archival research in India, I could cross-reference documents found there with those in Kew, Brussels or The Hague with just a few mouse-clicks. Yet there was one thing our training left us unprepared for when using these fonts of knowledge – the incredible amount of material they contained. The methodologies that have served historians so well for as long as historiography has existed were always meant to cope with a dearth of information, in the implicit understanding that there was always some source that was unknown or unavailable to the historian. Now, it seems we are swamped by sources the moment we hit the search bar.

One possible solution to this textual overload comes in the form of ‘distant reading’. A term popularized by Franco Moretti in 2005, it offers the historian a way to analyse a large collection of texts and gaining a clearer understanding of the way these texts influenced each other – and society. The simplest way to preform distant reading for historical research, on both a practical and conceptual level, is the N-gram method. First conceived in the 1990’s, these are graphs measuring occurrences of a string of words of length n over a set of documents over time. They are commonly used in the branch of historiography known as culturonomics, which seeks to analyse of culture based on statistical evidence.

The research for my PhD will use N-grams in a primarily exploratory role. By adding the tables of the category under investigation (for example, a year of a specific periodical) and deriving the relative word frequencies from these we can construct N-gram graphs, which can answer very specific research questions. While no n-gram corpora exist (publically) for periodicals, short grams are easy to generate.[i] In the initial stages of the project, I built a simple 1-gram viewer. This allowed me to do two things: to get a very rough overview of the content of the digitised periodicals and its evolution over time, and to choose subsets for further programs to work with in a less biased way.

But there are questions N-grams cannot answer. They look at grams in isolation, therefore they lose the contextual meanings of the words they chart. An N-gram to research the adoption of the American term ‘skedaddle’ in Victorian newspapers would indeed show its adoption in the British vocabulary, but would also show the brief reign of the racehorse of the same name – without distinguishing between the two. The list of context-sensitive terms is almost endless. Without contextual semantic information embedded in the rest of the sentence, it is impossible to know which you are mapping. Collocate searches can provide some solace, but only to a degree.

The solution is to no longer consider words as solitary semantic units, but to include their contexts in the analysis. This is easier said than done, and only recently have computers become ‘smart’ enough to deal with semantic ambiguities; the most accessible way of achieving this is by using semantic vector spaces. These programs apply the saying “you shall know a word by the company it keeps”, and encode each word as a vector containing its relation with all other words in the corpus. Among others, one such method is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).

My PhD research focusses in on the perceptions of Imperial identity in the British press, and the way the press helps construct this identity. As part of this process, I am using LSI to discover whether there is an evolution in the topics discussed in British newspapers, and if different newspapers generally report on different topics. Both of these questions require the use of a large dataset of digitised newspapers, which is fortunately available in the form of the British Library Nineteenth Century Newspaper Archive.

To answer these questions, a slice is made in the newspaper corpus to narrow it down to a time period, newspaper, or keyword-topic. In this case, the Gensim LSI algorithm was applied to a sample of one thousand newspaper articles which contained the keywords ‘empire’ and either ‘border’ or ‘frontier’, with the aim of discovering trends in the narrative about the edge of the Empire. The reason for this relatively small sample size is that the analysis program is still in heavy development, and using more articles would incur exponentially longer processing times. Eventually, the goal is to use a sample around the ten to one-hundred thousand mark. The output is a list of the strongest semantic clusters. Very few historians have employed the technology yet, so its full potential is still unknown. However, promising experiments on the Dutch Newspaper corpus Delpher have seen the technique used to calculate the most important words in a text, and subsequently determine the associations between these words and the entire text. My PhD project was in large part inspired by those experiments.

Several of these are clearly garbage – a sure sign the OCR-cleaning algorithm is slacking at its job. Some of the associations are expected in a dataset such as this, for example, the Boer War. This is a good sign, because it means the program is to some extent working like it should. There are, however, several interesting observations that can be made from these. For one, about half of the clusters contain some form of reference to the military, the backbone of the Empire; seven clusters containing “Troops”, and three mention staff officer ranks (Colonel and General). Additionally, there are clear clusters of enemies, most notably the Russians (who are strongly associated with the Turks and the French), and above all the Boers. It needs to be stressed though, that the importance given to this latter group is a reflection of the overrepresentation of the late 1890’s in the sample. Of particular interest is the cluster I interpreted as discussing the national budget, which contains strong associations with “Army” and “Tribes”. These findings seem to suggest that the British Empire was indeed strongly defined in the papers by its military actions on the frontiers, supporting scholarship by Makenzie, Potter, Williams and others.

The second interesting find is the lack of “Britain” or “England” in the clusters. “British” occurs in only two clusters: once with “Government” and “War”, and once with “Africa” and “Turkish”. This absence might be explained by the theory of Banal Nationalism: there was no need to explicitly state a paper was discussing the British Empire – this was known by the reader by virtue of it being the only ‘Empire’ worth mentioning as such. A closer reading will have to be carried out to verify this, but this suggests the importance of the British press in ‘Flagging the Empire’ on a daily basis cannot be overestimated.

Going forward, the biggest obstacle to overcome is the lack of quality in the OCR, and improving this will be the first step towards producing better analyses. Fortunately, there are various options available to deal with this issue, so there are multiple avenues to explore. Once this is dealt with, I hope to apply LSI to various slices of the newspaper archive (by time, newspaper, or topic), which should allow for tracking trends over these categories. This should provide both an insight in the viability of LSI as a historical research tool, and allow an overview of the entirety of newspaper reporting without having to resort to sampling.

 

 

[i] The n-grams that do exist for the BLNP dataset have to remain within institutions for copyright reasons. They have been built and operated with great success by the University of Bristol. See: Lansdall-Welfare et al, ‘Content analysis of 150 years of British periodicals’, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1606380114

---

 

References:

Michel et al. ‘Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books’,  Science, December 2010.

Nicholson, B. and Johnes, J., ‘Sport History and Digital Archives in Practice, in G. Osmond and M. Philips (eds.), Sport History in the Digital Era (University of Illinois Press: Chicago, 2015). Pp. 53-74.

Lansdall-Welfare et al. ‘Content analysis of 150 years of British periodicals’, PNAS, January 2017.

Williams, K., Read All About It! A history of the British Newspaper (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).

Potter, S. (ed.), Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c.1857 – 1921 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004).

MacKenzie, J., Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of the British Public Opinion 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984)

Billig, M., Banal Nationalism (London: SAGE, 1995).

http://lab.kb.nl/tool/frame-generator

http://radimrehurek.com/gensim/

 

 

Katie Bell is a PhD student at the University of Leicester. Her thesis is titled “The Diaspora of Dickens: Death, Decay and Regeneration”, the focus of which is the intertextuality of Dickens’s works and 20th century American texts of the Southern Gothic genre. The American authors examined in her thesis are William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers.  She is based in the United States where she is also a volunteer docent for The Wren’s Nest, the home of Atlanta author Joel Chandler Harris most famous for his ‘Br’er Rabbit’ tales.  She can be found on Twitter @decadentdickens

 

Edgar Allan Poe is remembered as an eccentric loner, a poet, and a writer of gothic “tales.”  He earned his living (albeit a meagre one) as a journalist, writing more literary criticism than poems or tales.  As a critic, he quickly gained the nick-name of “the man with the tomahawk,” a racist epithet but one which was meant to make light of his cutting negative critiques, for which his reviews became popular for giving.[1]  From 1835 until his death in 1849, Poe wrote approximately one thousand critical pieces and defined the American “standard for book reviewing.”[2]  In these pieces Poe criticised many American newspapers for “puffing” second–rate American books simply because they were American, and he identified himself as being one of the first American fans of Charles Dickens when he reviewed Sketches by Boz in June of 1836.  Poe had never heard of Dickens (or Boz) prior to his review (Sketches was Dickens’s first collection, so few readers knew of him), and Poe wrote of Dickens: “we know nothing more than that he is a far more pungent, more witty, and better disciplined writer of sly articles, than nine-tenths of the Magazine writers in Great Britain.”[3]

  In the Saturday Evening Post, Poe went on to attempt to solve the mystery of the murder in Barnaby Rudge after having read only the first three available chapters, which he did for the most part. Through his reading and critique of Barnaby Rudge, Poe crafted the framework necessary for a finely tuned detective story which would come into his work with his character Dupin later that year.  Dickens and Poe met briefly in Philadelphia on Dickens’s 1842 American tour, and there is no concrete evidence of what the two discussed (partly due to Poe’s tendency towards fabrication and Dickens’s later burning of his personal letters), but from most accounts, it is understood that the two got on very well.  Poe felt the most important aspect of Barnaby was the relationship between Barnaby and Grip.  In Poe’s first review of the available chapters of Barnaby he wrote of Barnaby and Grip that:

[Grip’s] croakings are to be frequently, appropriately, and prophetically heard in the coarse of the narrative, and whose whole character will perform, in regard to that of the idiot [Barnaby], much the same part as does, in music, the accompaniment in respect to the air. Each is distinct. Each differs remarkably from the other…This is clearly the design of Mr. Dickens¾although he himself may not at present perceive it.[4]

This relationship between Barnaby and Grip is revisited in “The Raven” and Poe picks up where he felt Dickens left off; Poe’s raven is the answer to the questions that the narrator of the poem poses and the echo of his deeper self.

Before he had “The Tell-Tale Heart” published in The Pioneer in 1843, he was taken with Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840) and reviewed the collection favourably in 1841.  He specified that of all the tales held within Humphrey, “A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second” was the most “power[ful].”  He wrote, “The other stories are brief…The narrative of ‘The Bowyer,’ as well as of ‘John Podgers,’ is not altogether worthy of Mr. Dickens.  They were probably sent to press to supply a demand for copy…But the ‘Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second’ is a paper of remarkable power, truly original in conception, and worked out with great ability.”[5]

 

Many are not aware of this lesser known Dickens piece, as the way in which we currently read The Old Curiosity Shop is not in its original serialised form within Humphrey, therefore, the short stories which come between the larger texts (Curiosity Shop and Barnaby) are lost for most modern readers. To summarise the story, a retired soldier finds himself the adoptive father of his nephew, whose eyes and gaze he fears for an inexplicable reason.  Ultimately, the narrator becomes so overwhelmed with this little boy’s gaze that he is driven to murder him and bury his body in the garden.  Friends of the narrator come to call, and he entertains them with food and drink upon the very spot the boy is buried.  The denouement is that a neighbour’s errant bloodhounds enter the party having sniffed out the boy’s remains, and dig up the body in front of the narrator and his guests, thus exposing his evil deed.  The narrator ends his piece by stating he is writing this account while sitting in jail awaiting his execution.

Modern-day readers will be more aware of the plot of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in which he explores the mind of a killer who becomes obsessed with “the evil eye” of a perceived oppressor.  After killing the old man with which he lives, the also unnamed narrator buries him under the floorboards of their shared house, invites investigating police officers in and offers them refreshments on the very spot the old man is buried. His undoing is that the narrator continues to hear the beating of the old man’s heart and also believes the police officers hear the beating as well, and are ignoring it in order to make “a mockery of [his] horror.”[6]

“The Tell-Tale Heart” was extremely well received by both its American and British readers; it was a “sensation.”[7]  Reviewing it for the New York Tribune in July 1843, Horace Greeley (the founder and editor of the Tribune) noted it “a strong and skilful, but to our minds overstrained and repulsive, analysis of the feelings and promptings of an insane homicide.”[8]  The success of “The Tell-Tale Heart” is due in part to the extent to which Poe utilized the then undefined Freudian term “uncanny,” but also to the powers of Poe’s editorial skills: his talents at seeing how to best manipulate a plot into a “tale.” As well, it is due to a seed planted by Dickens in his early work with Master Humphrey’s Clock, which we can trace back through Poe’s thoroughly written reviews of Dickens’s works.  Poe “tomahawked” most every writer in his reviews, but he never once had a negative word to say about any of Dickens’s pieces. Re-reading “Confession” through the eyes of Poe, we can see how deeply Dickens was interested in the psyche of a madman at this early point in his career, and that he sought to explain the motives of a killer.  Poe was undoubtedly paying tribute to Dickens with “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but he does so in a way that gives a rebirth to Dickens’s work and allows for a new interpretation to emerge, chiefly that Dickens’s “Confession” is one of the first pieces in which an author sought to explain the “why-done-it” as opposed to the “who-done-it” of horror stories.

 

[1] Hutchisson, James M. Poe. University of Mississippi Press, 2005, p. 62.

[2] ibid., p. 57.

[3] Poe, Edgar Allan. “Critical Notices.” Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. II, no. 5, June 1836, p. 447.

[4] Poe, Edgar Allan. “Original Review.” Saturday Evening Post, May 1, 1841.

[5] ¾. “Review of New Books.” Graham’s Magazine, May 1841, p. 249.

[6] Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The Annotated Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015, p. 265.

[7] Hayes, Kevin J. Annotations of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allan Poe, The Annotated Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015, p. 259.

[8] ibid.

 

Images:

Image 1:

“Critical Notices” Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. II, no. 5, June 1836, pp. 445-460. Made available through Making of America Journal Articles, www.quod.lib.umich.edu

Images 2 and 3:

“Master Humphrey’s Clock By Charles Dickens. Part I. Containing The Old Curiosity Shop, and other Tales, with Numerous Illustrations, &c. &c.” Graham’s Magazine, May 1841, pp. 248-251. Original image held by Indiana University, made available through the Hathi Trust, Digital Library, www.catalog.hathitrust.org.

Image 4:

Image of Poe from the Edgar Allan Poe House, Baltimore, Maryland.  Photograph by the author. www.poeinbaltimore.org

 

Works Cited:

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The Annotated Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015. 259-265.

“Critical Notices.” Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. II, no. 5, June 1836, pp. 445-460.

“Original Review.” Saturday Evening Post, May 1, 1841.

“Review of New Books.” Graham’s Magazine, May 1841, May 1841, pp. 248-251.

Hutchisson, James M. Poe. University of Mississippi Press, 2005.