As a cross of both fictional and historical literature, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher seems like the perfect story to end with. Throughout the semester, we’ve learned about the interests and traits of the Victorian public through its different types of literature, but when all is said and done, there is more to the Victorian era than its literature, and the literature may not always present the same views of the era as historical accounts and “facts”—though I don’t think one is necessarily more “true” than the other.
Though the details of the book were overpowering to some, I found them intriguing. I happened to have had a fair bit of time set aside to read the book, and so for the most part I found the tangents and random encyclopedic facts more engaging than annoying. The way that the book is part detective story, part history of Jonathan Whicher and the creation of the detective was fantastic. I appreciated many of the tangents –which revealed everything from educational customs to the method of detective work to stories of real-life murders and “insanity”—as they taught a great deal about the Victorian era that I hadn’t known before (on the other hand, while we may have already mentioned that the book could have been a bit shorter, I think the fact may deserve a repetition).
One thing I especially liked about the book was how Summerscale spoke of the one of the contradictions we’ve discussed in class. While the Victorian public wished to be prim and proper on the outside, their actions behind closed doors did not necessarily mimic their external appearances; we can see this best in Constance’s move from an initial “pure” exterior to, after the darker revelation of her involvement, another prim and proper exterior later in life. I feel like this contrast is also echoed in Summerscale’s examples of the reactions to the new detectives: the Victorians simultaneously loved and feared the idea of detective work. While they may have enjoyed being "armchair detectives" as Poe’s Auguste Dupin was, at the same time this new invasion of privacy must have made them uncomfortable. Summerscale notes that the Victorians “had a horror of surveillance…the detectives had to be introduced by stealth” (50). Modern humans may be used to such intrusions, but the idea of outsiders searching through private homes must have been terrifying for Victorians when it first came about.
Summerscale also notes that Freud linked detective work with psychoanalysis, as the concern of both is “with a secret, with something hidden…we have to uncover the hidden psychic material; and in order to do this we have invented a number of detective devices” (103-4). As with memories buried in the unconscious, maybe the Victorians would rather not discover the things that lurk beneath the surface. After all, who would want to know about the criminal children that Summerscale mentions, or about the cases of insane murderers? All this knowledge did was create “the fear that [the killer] could be duplicated in any home” (111).
Victorians, as we’ve learned throughout the semester, were curious about many aspects of life; we’ve seen curiosity and discovery as major themes in the early texts for the class, like The Jungle Books, Water Babies, and Alice in Wonderland, as well as some of the sensational fiction we’ve read. We’ve also seen this curiosity lean more toward suspicion in the more recent detective stories. The Victorians were so curious about other people and places, but were suspicious of themselves. Maybe they were more suspicious of real detectives and investigations, as real life stories don’t tend to be as cleanly solved. Maybe they would rather escape to new ideas and new lands than deal with the drama buried beneath the surface of their society (and I love how Summerscale noted that this curiosity and suspicion was simultaneous: “As…explorers spanned out across the empire, charting new lands, the detectives moved inwards to the core of the cities, neighbourhoods that…were as strange as Arabia” (96)).
The contrast between the exterior appearance and the hidden interior of a household, between the love and fear of new detective work, and between the simultaneous curiosity about other lands and the suspicion of their society and new detective work makes the Victorian era so interesting, and the fact that Summerscale included all of these contrasts in her book has made me realize how much of a paradox life was during this era. I love all of these contrasts and odd juxtapositions we've discussed in this book and in the books throughout the semester, as they give the Victorian era a flair and flavor all its own, as well as the intrigue of a mystery not yet solved.
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