Summerscale: (an irritating) conflation of facts and fiction.

A real murder as the storyline to tell and teach about the increasing Victorian fascination with detection and the “licence” to sleuth other’s privacy – that is the basic idea for Kate Summerscale’s (historical-documentary) novel “The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.” The case is simple and horrifying at once: Francis Saville, youngest son of the Kent family, has brutally been murdered at night, and due to the fact that the house was closed from the inside, the murderer has to be a member of the family or the household. The investigations, however, are quite tricky. Mr Whicher, though one of the original eight Scotland Yard officers, a “figure (…) of mystery and glamour” (Summerscale xxii) has some trouble solving the crime: evidence appears, suddenly disappears, has never been there – and the local police are also working against the detective from London. Whicher eventually arraigns Constance, one of Saville’s half-sisters, but fails as the court does not find her guilty. Not an easy situation for Mr Whicher. But in some sense, his “failure” makes him a more realistic and credible character, and it is refreshing to see that even for a detective, not everything works out so smartly and elegant as it is presented in detective fiction of this time, e.g. Poe’s Dupin stories, or Doyle’s tales about Sherlock Holmes, where the detectives (almost) effortlessly reveal the felony. Summerscale points out that the reality looks different. But here, things get complicated. She tells a real story, but uses it as a guideline to create her own deductive story, almost fictionalizes the facts by withholding information up to the very end, creating artificial suspense which never really turns out to be as thrilling as it might thought to be (provided that Summerscale intended to write some kind of detective story) as the reader pretty soon has a first suspicion – but has to go on for 300 more pages in order to get a confirmation. And even at this moment, the solution entails the feeling that there is still something untold, that there has to be a final, surprising move. Well, there is something, but do not expect too much.
The aspect one always has to remember is: this is a real case. It is not one of these stories which are, how crucial and horrifying they might be, invented, created by someone’s imagination. Saville has been a living human being, and the fact that this child was murdered, even worse: murdered by a close relative, is the real thrilling moment of the story.
It is the insight into the thought-to-be proper- and- prudish Victorian household that opens up a new, intriguing and at the same time disturbing view into what it could mean to live a Victorian life. It is as if the demand and highlighting of the value of privacy almost inevitably has to lead to ‘dark secrets’ and a double-layered morality. The proper façade includes (or perhaps initially creates?) an inner dark side, which finally turns against oneself: the basic idea of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Public investigations and murder cases allow the Victorian citizen to engage in the solution of a crime, to intrude someone else’s privacy without being openly denounced for it. The idea of the Victorian mindset is very well laid out in the text, as well as a sense of the detective scene, language, and genre. However, it is still considered to be a novel (and the smart way the chapters are entitled support this impression). Fiction and reality conflate in an irritating way. The moment I had the feeling that I got into the story, I was disrupted and disoriented by, for example, a reference to a Dickens quote in one of his novels. The reference appeared to be real (real in the sense of factual), whereas the story at hand resembled a fictitious tale. Also, Summerscale claims that history, explicitly the case she re-investigates, shaped or has been the source of inspiration for detective fiction, neglecting that the Dupin stories were published 20 years prior to the Saville-murder. Trying to find out the difference between fiction and non-fiction in this text (which, in the end, claims to be completely non-fiction) is challenging.
In providing the reader with so overwhelmingly detailed and multifarious pieces of information, Summerscale takes over the didactic task of “classical” Victorian tales. But like Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland gets bored by the textbook without any pictures and is looking for an escape, an escape she finally finds in an alternative, imaginative dream world, the reader of the Summerscale novel might be discouraged from reading on, too (there are pictures and maps in the novel, though). A clearer orientation towards either fiction or non-fiction could have done a lot in order to lead the reader’s expectation to the right way.
But whatever might be criticized with regard to her text and its composition, Summerscale forces us, the 21-century-perspective readers, to confront ourselves with the manifold layers of society and individuals. By presenting the Victorians as being voyeuristic, suspicious and even immoral, she uncovers a world that is not the least as perfect as it first appears and claims to be. And the reader’s longing to unravel all the familial connections in order to get to the solution of the crime mirrors that we are as curious and interested in others’ lives and ‘dark’ secrets as the citizens of England in the 19th century. “Victorian England”, its mindset and ideas, is, despite the historical distance, in fact much more modern and contemporary than it seems to be.



References

Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Toronto: Broadview Press Ltd, 200o. Print.
Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir. Sherlock Holmes. Selected Stories. Oxford, New York: 2008. Print.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Tales. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Toronto: Broadview Press Ltd., 2005. Print.
Summerscale, Kate. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Print.