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Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Summerscale Sorts Through our Exquisite Clutter

The recently published true crime novel “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher” very accurately captured much of what is at the core of our Victorian era. In this non-fiction narrative the author exposed some of the dirty secrets of our seemingly prim lives and also drew from much of the social and scientific atmosphere in which we are living.
In the novel a young boy is kidnapped and brutally murdered in one of the idyllic country homes of our country. Immediately our new forms of journalism covered this sensational tale and created a national stir. In response Scotland Yard sent one of their finest officers from their new detective branch to investigate and solve this heinous crime. The approaches he used had basis in the scientific revolution we have been experiencing. Mr. Whicher used the burgeoning field of forensics to come to the disturbing conclusion that it was the half-sister of the victim, Constance Kent, who committed this vicious crime. It was unfortunately this revelation that was to be the downfall of this brilliant man. His accusation was anathema to the ideal of the Victorian family. He transgressed the private life and revealed not only this terrible deed but also the dirty secrets of what seemed like a perfect family. In the end the suspicions of Mr. Whicher served to indict him more than the girl who murdered her brother.
Detective fiction is in many ways the culmination of what it is to be Victorian. The exposure to other cultures and the necessary worldliness that was occurring during this second age of exploration is evidenced in books like “The Jungle Book” and in the voyages of the naturalist Charles Darwin. This led to a curiosity of the things of the world that we have read in Lewis Carroll and Charles Kingsley. We have become curious about our world and fantasy worlds and have begun speculations into their nature. This curiosity has brought us to a point where we are now interested in the nature of our natural world as well. We have combined our penchant for science with our new frontiers and horizons with the result being a sort of speculative fiction. In novels like “The Time Machine,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and “The Invisible Man” we Victorians have looked into the looking glass and examined ourselves. All of these investigations have culminated in this detective fiction we are given in “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher” and the fiction of Poe and Conan Doyle. The men in these stories are the amalgam of all that has been our current era. The concepts and concerns of Victorian England, the exquisite clutter of our current state, have brought us to a pivotal point in our lives. We have created for ourselves a world full of exceedingly new and peculiar things. We have more potential and more knowledge than any time in human history. It is only natural that at some point we became introspective and examined the transgressions of our society.
Kate Summerscale has captured much of what it is to be Victorian. In this case study of a ghastly event she not only does an excellent job of presenting detective fiction as a literary genre, but also shows the hidden life of the Victorian; the scientific advances of our time; and the affects this period has cultivated.

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