Subjectivity and the Novel

Caught in that twilight realm between fast-paced thriller and scholarly tome, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is an attempt to educate a sensationalist public in actual history. While this book, conceptually, is an interesting undertaking, Kate Summerscale gets bogged down in unnecessary details from page one, causing the narration to sound unnecessarily lofty and ultimately alienating the reader. While the cover proudly proclaims that The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a New York Times bestseller, one wonders how many of the people who bought it actually bothered to read it all the way through. By attempting to write a book in the form of a murder mystery novel while retaining the restrained objectivity of a reference book, Summerscale has produced a hybrid volume with more weaknesses than strengths. A more artful form of alchemy could have produced an informative, subjective text which might have played to the strengths of both mediums.

From page one, Summerscale makes it clear that this is an information dump which, if not unfiltered, is certainly less filtered than it could be. “On Sunday, 15 July 1860, Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher of Scotland Yard paid two shillings for a hansom cab to take him from Millbank, just west of Westminster, to Paddington station, the London terminus of the Great Western Railway. There he bought two rail tickets: one to Chippenham, Wiltshire, ninety-four miles away, for 7s.10d., another from Chippenham to Trowbridge, about twenty miles on, for 1s.6d. The day was warm: for the first time that summer, the temperature in London had nudged into the seventies.”

We can only guess what kind of impression Summerscale was hoping to engender with such an opening paragraph, but at gunpoint I would say that she was trying to create an aura of objectivity about the story. Perhaps she was trying to say “These are things we know: Whicher bought his train ticket on a day with nice weather. Far be it from me to put any notion in your heads of which there isn’t absolute proof”. So perhaps it is my own personal bias against objectivity that makes me feel that a little more in the way of subjectivity would be of use here. Yes, providing us with as many details as possible will enable us to better understand the murder case, provided these details are in some way related to the murder. The reader gains nothing from knowing what the temperature was on the day Whicher bought his train ticket. Of course, I am working under the possibly foolhardy assumption that the twin focal points of this work are the murder at Road Hill House and Mr. Whicher himself. It is my belief that my understanding of neither of these focal points profits from knowing what the weather was like on the day Whicher bought his train ticket.

Subjectivity is the advantage which a novel has over a work of nonfiction. The author is entirely in control, presenting information how and when he deems it necessary. He is not held to any outside “truths”, and as a result he can often present us with a more compelling narrative. By choosing to write her story in a format similar to a novel, Summerscale buys herself some scope for subjectivity. She now has a duty to the narrative, and she can filter information all-but-shamelessly to achieve the effect she desires. Summerscale has shied away from doing this in a way which does not benefit the narrative, but mirrors many of the texts we’ve read this semester from Victorian England.

In literature from this time period we see a similar need for objectivity, to tether oneself to outside truths. In both The Time Machine and The Coming Race the pace and level of excitement are both subject to the author’s scientific ramblings— in sections of The Coming Race this becomes almost unbearable, as the author spends entire chapters developing the civilization of the vril-ya to the exclusion of any sort of plot. The Time Machine is not a more compelling narrative because it sacrificed the depth of the examination of the culture of the Eloi, but because the story is filtered through the lens of mystery— the narrator is not simply handed information about his subjects, and neither is the reader. It is the narrator’s process of discovery, the constant revisions of his theory, the fact that he is initially wrong which makes the story fascinating. We as readers are invited to second-guess the narrator’s first hypothesis, predict subsequent revisions, and even to disagree with his ultimate conclusion. This effect is not achieved through The Coming Race’s objectivity, in which we are spoon-fed detailed information. It is achieved through subjectivity, through having someone in the text with thoughts and opinions and the ability to filter data. Whereas in The Coming Race the narrator is essentially invisible, and his job is to relay information from one civilization to the other as unobtrusively as possible (excluding those more exciting occasions where he argues with Zee on behalf of our civilization), in The Time Machine our protagonist is not merely a conduit but an active participant, a researcher and scientist of his own accord.

And in this way The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher fails as a narrative. We are led to believe that Whicher is our protagonist, our flawed Victorian hero who will theorize and revise. But Whicher sweeps onto the scene and immediately concocts a theory and spends the rest of the novel pursuing his first guess. We are simply handed the information— Whicher thinks that Constance did it— and this would be perfectly acceptable if, in fact, Constance had not done it. But she did, and so we spend two hundred pages with this unrevised hypothesis: Constance did it. This is a less than exciting prospect, and ultimately we feel cheated.

Of course the solution isn’t to make Whicher any less a detective hero. While Sherlock Holmes is occasionally wrong, in many stories Dupin or Holmes arrive on the scene and immediately have a solution to everything (for instance in Murders of Rue Morgue). What is missing in The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is not a Holmes but a Watson. We are not given a character who acts as a pacer, giving us the information we need when we need it. We are reading Sherlock Holmes from Holmes’s perspective, which is not nearly as fascinating. Holmes is too objective a hero— this is why he berates Watson for having “attempted to tinge [the science of detection] with romanticism”. It is the twists and turns in a narrative which make it exciting, not “the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes”, though these are incredibly rewarding when seen through the correct filter.

For The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher to be a compelling literary work, Summerscale would have needed to shelve her role as detective in favor of the more modest and less alluring role as Watson. She would have had to withhold information selectively from the reader, let herself be the filter through which the information passed. In refusing to give up the glamorous role of detective— she even knows what the weather was like!— Summerscale has sacrificed the subjectivity of her narrative, and with it many of the compelling features which cause people to turn to novels in the first place.

Victorian England occurred as an explosion of information. I would argue that this was why the scientific novel was so popular at this time— when information exists in such overwhelming quantities, one’s primary mode of relating to this information shifts from gathering and hoarding information to filtering the information available and attempting to make it stick together in a cohesive fashion via synthesis. At their best, these Victorian works of literature do exactly that— The Time Machine, The Coming Race and the Sherlock Holmes mysteries we read contained vast quantities of information about science and philosophy, but the information was purposeful and made worth remembering because there was a narrative to hold it together, associations already built in. In works such as The Time Machine and the Sherlock Holmes stories I would argue that this technique is achieved more effectively, whereas in works such as The Water Babies and The Coming Race the text tends towards the irritatingly didactic. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher errs on the side of the didactic because Summerscale fails to filter the vast quantities of information with which we are presented through a lens of subjectivity.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. Sherlock Holmes, the Complete Novels and Stories. New York: Bantam, 1986. Print.

Kingsley, Charles, and Richard Kelly. The Water-babies. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2008. Print.

Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and Peter W. Sinnema. The Coming Race. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2008. Print.

Summerscale, Kate. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: a Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective. New York: Walker & Company, 2009. Print.

Wells, H. G., and Nicholas Ruddick. The Time Machine: an Invention. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2001. Print.