A Rambling Review of "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher"

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.

Last Review: Whicher

Overall The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher was entertaining because...

I thought the history lessons about Poe/Dickens and the newspaper articles serve two purposes. First, it gave Summerscale creditability. As the reader, I trusted her. Whenever there is a narrator that is not the main character, it immediately makes me feel on edge to question… Who is this narrator to be telling a story that is not theirs? What type of relationship did this narrator have with main character(s) to be telling the story; therefore, should I trust what this narrator has to say? The history lends the author creditability that I could trust her. I understood that Summerscale knew how her story was going to end so she worked backward as opposed to working forward. Usually, an author works forward and the character(s) or plot take the author on an unknown journey; the author is a portal of some sort for characters to tell their story and it is only them that know where the finish line is so-to-speak. Summercale knew where the finish line was from the start. The history acts as filling for a gap she was trying to close. It also provided necessary information for Summerscale to do something that was very familiar in Victorian Literature;The constant references of Poe and Dickens or Whicher was a model for the author to draw from for the audience. I appreciated that even though, thanks to this class, I’ve read Poe, Doyle, and Collins.

Prior, to this class I had not read Doyle or Collins. My previous education on Poe was his grotesque tales such as The Fall House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado or “The Raven”. I did not know that Poe was a pioneer for deductive fiction. So I can sympathize with the average Joe, who may know nothing about Victorian Literature and is simply reading this book for fun. Through that purpose, Joe gets educated on a significant genre that is part of Victorian Literature outside of the prime and proper world that Jane Austen presents. However, that is not to say that the constant references to Poe and Dickens becomes annoying and actually distracts to what the book is really about. The Book is about the murder of young Saville, yet Summeriscale names her book The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher. When really the book is about how Saville’s murder act as another model for other Victorians; the murder threatens the “supposed” domestic tranquility of the Victorian household. Everyone in the town is suddenly scared; their suspicious of what could or is going on in their household. By naming her book after Mr. Whicher Summerscale contradicts herself and confuses the reader. She confuses her reader on another front as well with the “supposed” killer Constance, Saville’s older sister. Later on in the book, the author tells the reader that it was either Constance or William, Saville’s older brother. Summercale could have done that at the beginning. It would have added more suspense to the book because for me this book was a merger between clue and cold case, and the history could have been an over layer to the story. However, Summerscale attempted to what I proposed as a fourth factor to defining detective fiction.

The author gave me a second hand version of stream of consciousness as way to enter the mentality of the killer, thereby by giving me more than just motive from an outsider’s perspective, who in this case is Mr. Whicher. When Whicher becomes certain that it is Constance, he goes to talk to a friend of Constance and ask her did Constance ever speak ill of her family. The friend says yes; then proceeds to quote Constance about her particular feelings on young Saville. This information made the story more so entertaining because Summerscale attempts close a gap that I believe Poe, Collins, and Doyle leaves open. It’s the perfect example of why that fourth factor is needed in defining detective fiction. The reader needs more than just the detective or others such as Dupin observing the criminals actions, and from that action drawing conclusions. The reader needs in-depth information coming from the criminal or someone who is close to the criminal about who they really are. I know I said in my last blog that this needs to be done where the detective is concern, but Summercale made it up to me by giving that extra something about Constance.

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.

Kate Symmerscale Could Learn a Thing or Two from Drew Brees

Kate Summerscale's non-fiction Victorian detective novel The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher begins with an exciting rush of information about the detecting protagonist Jonathan Whicher and the murder case (the murder at Road Hill) that he investigates. Like Edgar Allen Poe in his Dupin detective stories, Summerscale gives the reader an enormous amount of interesting information to include the reader in the case. We learn nearly everything there is to know about the murder of Saville Kent, the four year old son of Samuel Kent, and Mr. Whicher's findings concerning the case. However, after Summerscale reveals all this gory, intriguing information, she goes on to talk about...coral and copulating octopuses? Precisely.

After the mystery of the murder at Road Hill is solved and Mr. Whicher is somewhat redeemed (though the title claims that the case was the undoing of Whicher, it eventually led to a rather successful private detective practice, which doesn't sound very much like an undoing at all) Summerscale gives page after page after Trivial Pursuit fact-filled page of information concerning the lives of Constance, William Kent, Samuel Kent, Mr. Whicher, and a few other characters. In these final eighty pages or so we learn of William Kent's love affair with corals and his desire to watch octopuses get it on. Unlike Drew Brees, Kate Summerscale fails to"Finish Strong" with this non-fiction novel.

Though the final third of the novel falls flat, the initial two-thirds provide a valuable insight into the Victorian era. Summerscale brings the reader inside the Victorian home and shows us all the skeletons in the Kent family's closet, thus breaking down the Victorian facade of propriety and grace. Quoting Stapleton on page 220, Summerscale claims that the murder at Road Hill was evidence of a Darwinian devolution in well-to-do Victorian families. Summerscale should have developed this idea, which hearkens back to ideas presented in Wells' The Time Machine and Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, more fully in the final third of the text.

If, as a reviewer, I must give a recommendation of this novel, I would recommend it. The excitement of the first 220 pages outweighs the disappointment of the final 100 pages, and the insights into the doings of a real Victorian family are worth the coral digressions.

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.

Summertale in Victorian Land: I Still Believe in Time Travel

The names in this short account have been changed in order to not offend the living or the fictional.

Mrs. Summertale sat down to start typing her non-fiction piece concerning the Road Hill murder. Before she could get started, she needed felt her stomach growl; she needed inspiration. With hesitation, she headed out of her home into the London streets with her favorite deli shop in mind. Strolling through the damp streets, she came across a large pothole with dry ice fumes coming out of the top. The fumes formed swirls in the dense air. Curious, she loomed over the hole. Then suddenly, a gust of wind came from behind; she could hardly keep her balance and she feel into the pothole screaming while failing her arms about.
Summertale kept falling through the air. After what seemed like an hour, Summertale landed on the cold hard wood floor of a long corridor. She got up and rubbed the back of her neck. She walked down the dim lit corridor toward a larger room. The room had a round, mahogany table in the center with a long white tablecloth draped across it. The tablecloth covered the entire table. The corridor dead-ended to three doors each illuminated with a single light bulb: moral, riddle, and detective. She cautiously approached the door with the words moral thickly painted across. She opened the door and peered in.
With a deep breathe, Summertale stepped through the entrance, carefully closing the door behind her. The sun barely peaked through the tall tropical trees and the red blossoming flowers. The humid jungle air clung to the back of her neck. She started walking through the jungle, curiously taking everything in, half hoping to be dreaming and the other half craving a reality to grasp on to. She heard something rustling behind a bush. A tan mongoose appeared, body positioned vertical, eyes black. It was arguing intently with a fierce tiger. Summertale jumped back a few feet, frightened. She lay down on the jungle floor, intently watching the Mongoose and the Tiger. The Mongoose urged the Tiger to explain why he remained submissive to the Red Flower, referred to as the fire pot, when the boy held it in his face and burned him. The Tiger refused to answer the question. Instead he asked the Mongoose a question. He asked the Mongoose why he was submissive and ventured out of the jungle to live with the humans. The Mongoose did not respond to the Tiger’s question, he merely asked another.
“You let the boy call you a dog, and you bowed your head to him, you are submissive,” The Mongoose yelled, his eyes fixed on the Tiger. “At least I have model pride,” the Mongoose exclaimed.
The Tiger took a crouched glide toward the Mongoose, eyes yellow. In a low and toxic tone the Tiger responded, “Model Pride,” he snickered “you don’t live by the rules, and you try to control everyone around you. You didn’t kill the Cobra, the Man of the house shot the Cobra and would have shot you too if you had been in the way.” The Tiger chuckled, “you are a sad excuse for a prideful jungle creature.” “You’re full of Dewanee” he muttered under his breath.
The Mongoose’s eyes burned like hot coals, “ You were soft as they trampled over you, the boy and the other jungle creatures. That’s where your pride got you, an adjective associated with defeat and weakness.” “You are the one full of Dewanee.”
“Watch your back Mongoose,” the Tiger smiled showing his flawless, previously sharpened grin. “There cannot be two of us with Dewanee- the madness” He slinked off on all four paws with elegance and pride.
Summertale crawled on the jungle floor away from the Mongoose who was standing on his two hind legs, eyes still burning. She stood and walked quickly toward the door, which lead to the corridor. As she opened the door and entered the corridor, she made a mental note of the room with moral painted across it: jungle creatures have excessive pride that lead to their madness or Dewanee; all they need is a balance.
With curiosity, Summertale approached the second door. It had the word riddle glued to the surface. She pressed her hand to the letters; they were still wet from the glue. She opened the door and felt a strong ocean breeze. The tide swayed back and forth across the shore. Summertale came across a Jellyfish. The Jellyfish lay on the burnt yellow sand, baking in the sun. Summertale ventured toward the jellyfish, longing to help it and put it back in the ocean. Before Summertale moved any closer, a Sphinx appeared in a light blue mist. The Sphinx stopped her and would not let her get past unless she answered a riddle. Summertale refused to listen to the riddle and tried to push forward toward the dying jellyfish. Pushing, pulling, and tearing at the Sphinx, Summertale falls to the sand. She moved her palms over her eyes to try to block the tears from running down her face.
“You can’t save it,” the Sphinx whispered into her ear, “It’s natural selection, just let nature run its course. That’s all you can do.”
“But I can do something,” she sobbed and ran toward the door as the hot sand spilled in between her toes.
She opened the door and was back in the corridor. She moved toward the third and final door. The sign, detective, had been terrible stapled to the front and it was leaning towards the left. She reached for the intricately designed knob and the door was locked. She pulled and tussled the knob; however, it was glued shut. Then out of thin air, Edgar Allen Poe’s head appeared as a hologram in the corridor. Startled, Summertale lets out a cry of fear and excitement.
“Look under the table cloth for the key,” Poe whispered and bobbed his head toward the round table in the middle of the corridor.
Before Summertale could move toward the table, Sherlock Holmes’ head appeared as a holograph next to Poe.
“We need some more stimulation in modern day,” Holmes exclaimed as he stuck his upper forearm with a needle and rolled his eyes back with the delight of cocaine in his veins.
In a laughing fit, Poe and Holmes disappeared in a purple haze. Summertale ventured over toward the mahogany table. She lifted the plain, white tablecloth and found the intricate pattern of the table foot.
With a whip of the wind, the room started spinning. Summertale started falling and ended up in her desk in her home. Realized that she had been probably dreaming, Summertale started writing her non-fiction piece with Poe’s key, the intricate table foot, in mind.

The Review of Mr. Whicher and Summerscale

The Suspicisons of Mr. Whicher by Summerscale presents an interesting idea to tie together the fictional Victorian detective to a real person, Mr. Whitcher. Summerscale presents a well-put together introduction concerning the attributes of the voyeuristic and mysterious Victorian detective. Summerscale remains slightly sidetracked in her desire to solve the crime and impress the audience with the facts of the Road Hill murder. However, Summerscale effectively communicates and exposes the obsession with the private life in Victorian England with the continued desire of looking into the private in modern day.
In this excerpt, I played on the upside down world in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Mrs. Summertale is modeled after the author of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, Kate Summerscale. Summertale needs inspiration for writing her book and ends up falling down a pothole. In the corridor, she enters two rooms marked moral and riddle. By venturing into the room moral, Summertale is revealed to the pride and madness of the Jungle Books by Kipling. The moral of her encounter with the Mongoose and the Tiger is inspiration for writing her non-fiction book based on the Victorian era. In the second room, Darwin’s theory of evolution becomes inspiration for Summertale. Even though there is a third room, Summertale cannot get in because it is locked. She then meets with Poe and Sherlock Holmes. These figures were crucial in investigating fiction of the Victorian Era; they made an impact on the way people viewed fiction. These two figures provide her with inspiration for writing her introduction on the goals of investigating and finding a definition of the Victorian detective; she wants to define the Victorian detective.
In conclusion, as she writes her non-fiction piece, she becomes obsessed with the Victorian Era private life and she exposes all its forced secrets. As she concludes she returns to the table in the middle of the room with the table foot being exposed. She realizes that it is not about defining the Victorian detective but exposing the Victorian private life.

Victorian Voyeurs

When I signed on to take Victorian England, I had the same vision that many did about the era; in my mind, Victorian England was a time of prudishness, as we discussed in class, it was a time when a beautifully crafted table leg was considered too sordid for plain sight and had to be veiled by a lace table cloth. After a few weeks in the class, I soon came to understand that the table leg was an even larger metaphor for Victorian society—something scandalous covered by a prim and proper veil. I also came to understand that the Victorians had a need to pull back that veil and gaze upon something forbidden when they thought that no one was watching. The novels we read over the course of the semester only confirmed the veil over Victorian living and the need of for many to voyeuristically peek under that veil from time to time for a taste of scandal.

All novels are really just a peek under the veil into someone else's fictional though typically conflict-addled life, some novels with more layers of veils than others. Novels delve into the private sphere of their characters lives, and Victorian readers derived pleasure from looking in to these private spheres. For example, in this class, we started with The Jungle Book. In this novel, Kipling lets readers into a jungle setting that not many Victorians would get the chance to see in real life, though this is arguably the most public private sphere that we read about because almost the entire book takes place in the open jungle air. However, for Mowgli, the jungle is a private place, as other humans do not typically come into the jungle and bother him. Kipling lifts the mysterious curtain off of the jungle world and shows Mowgli's personal life and struggles, including Baloo's physical abuse, Mowgli's first tears, and his (thinly veiled) Imperialist attitudes.

Next, we read Water Babies, which took place away from closed doors, as well, but delved into the more private world of the water babies, which many people don't even know exists. Tom leads the reader through his new world and gives them an inside look at what it's like to be a water baby. We then moved on to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which also took place away from closed doors but occurred in an even more alien world than the jungle or the water baby realm. Alice's Wonderland is more private even than the water baby world, though, as exists within the constructs of her mind. The fact that she is a stranger in this land and that many of the characters that she meets in Wonderland could characterize her as intrusive gives this novel an Imperialist feel. Alice not only lets readers get a look into her imagination but also leads the reader through Wonderland by forcing herself into the lives of every character she meets, for example, by inviting herself to the Mad Hatter's tea party.

When we read The Time Machine, we were not only taken into the time traveller's home by the narrator and allowed to look at his private invention, but we are also allowed into the futuristic world of the Elois and the Morlocks and led around by the time traveller who explores this world in a similarly intrusive way to Alice's exploration of Wonderland. A similar thing happens in The Coming Race, though this particular narrator is more easily controlled by the Vril, he still manages to shake up their way of life simply by existing with his human flaws. In this story, he reader plays voyeur to a mysterious underground race of people who attempt to live in perfection.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde took the class into a new level of voyeurism, as it was the first story that took place primarily behind closed doors. Readers are allowed into the world of Dr. Jekyll, a man with many secrets, and as the story goes on the reader gets full-view of the secrets Jekyll so desperately tries to keep and, in the end, his grisly fate.

The intrusive curiosity of characters like Alice shifts into Victorian suspicion as we move into Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin stories. These characters are no longer just out to explore and experience new worlds but instead are out to examine their worlds under a magnifying glass in order to detect sinister activity. Similar to Jekyll and Hyde, these storied take place largely behind closed doors: one in a house in a very private neighborhood and one in the extremely private bedroom of the Queen. (One story takes place in the outskirts of the city, but we get the least private information in this story, as the mystery is left unsolved.) Next we read the Sherlock Holmes stories, which are very similar to the Dupin stories, except in Sherlock Holmes we get more of the less savory features of the detective, for instance his drug use and his arrogance, which make the stories even more scandalous.

The last book we read, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, was the ultimate Victorian voyeur novel. This book combines the elements of the scandal behind-closed-doors detective story with reality, which makes it even more appealing. This story is a full shift into suspicion over curiosity. ("Suspicion" is even in the title!) Kate Summerscale gives readers a look at a real Victorian detective case, which makes the case all the more appealing to readers. The case brings the private sphere of a well-to-do Victorian family with plenty of skeletons in the closet to public view with the murder of their son, Saville. If this book had been available to readers during the Victorian era, I'm sure that it would have been a bestseller. Perhaps because it is still a bestseller today, this proves that we've not completely grown out of this Victorian voyeurism. Though it's no longer forbidden to have a fancy table leg in plain sight, in some ways, this era has even taken voyeurism a step further with reality television. In our time, peeking into the lives of fictional characters simply isn't enough and we must film real people's lives in order to be satisfied.

A Clutter of Thoughts on Victorian England, or at least on the Private/Public .

In Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, the most enjoyable part was the details revolving around the crime of the young Francis Saville Kent. It seemed to me that many of her details were trivial to the novel, making it very difficult to read. However, despite the tangents on what Dickens and other novelists had to say, Summerscale did provide a basic detective story that showed the truth behind Victorian life.

To begin, the Kent’s seemed like a perfect family, as there was no sign of any impropriety or abnormality. We are presented with the day to day activities of the family, and are expected to think nothing but good thoughts of the family. Yet, as the story progresses, we learn about Mr. Kent’s first wife who was mentally ill and the desperate attempt for Mr. Kent to keep that part of his life secret as he and his family moved from place to place. It was not until the death of his first wife, that Mr. Kent would not have hide from the true nature of his now dead wife. This becomes an example of how the public and the private life remained separate or at least people tried to keep them separate.

When the class first began, we were asked our opinions on what we thought were characteristics of the Victorian Era. Due to our lack of familiarity, or at least my own lack of familiarity, we found ourselves focusing on the more “proper” characteristics with the frilly dresses and corsets. However, as we continued to read, we found that these proper characteristics seemed to correlate with the “public life” of Victorian England, as we saw many of the main characteristics who had dual natures.
The most obvious example of this would be Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. While they were both the same person, they both had different personas, one that remained a proper public figure (Dr. Jekyl) and Mr. Hyde, the private and anything but appropriate figure. By the end of the novel, we see that Dr. Jekyl goes as far to kill himself to prevent for the exposure of Hyde’s true identity, and the humiliation that Dr. Jekyl would face from society.

It’s interesting to see that through all of the things we have read, there is some sort of identity crisis that the main character or narrator goes through. There is a sense of belonging that the Victorians wanted within society, and yet at the same time, there was always something hindering the Victorian from fully emerging within the Victorian ideal. We looked at Mowgli who wanted to be a part of the jungle, but could not because of his human characteristics and his human nature. We see Sherlock Holmes, a wonderful detective who has the ability to solve crimes from his pure geniousness and yet he remains a heavy drug user.

What I am eventually getting to is the fact that, no one really seemed to be what they were. It’s a pretty scary thought if you think about because you cannot really trust anyone, or expect them to be whole heartedly good. It is a common battle that we even in today’s society must continue to fight, as we are caught between our own public and private spheres. Every day we take on different personas, as students, teachers, brothers, sisters, employees, boyfriends, girlfriends and etc. But how many of us act the same in every persona that we take?

Fact of Fiction? Fact IS Fiction: The Reviews of Mr. Whicher

Kate Summerscale’s Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a novel about a true murder that took place during Victorian England. The victim, Saville Kent, was found brutally murdered in the Road Hill outhouse, and the murder soon found a spot on the mystery shelf next to England’s detective fiction. The “Age of Detection” was at its peak, and Scotland Yard’s own detective, Jonathan Whicher, was on the case. The case soon expanded beyond the actual murder scene and into the previously forbidden quarters of the Victorian England household. Detective Whicher uncovered family dysfunction and grudges within the Kent household which led to his accusation of Constance Kent, half-sister to the victim, committing the murder. Whicher’s unspeakable, yet ultimately accurate, accusation led to the public disgrace of his character. Continued criticism of his personal background and skepticism of his talents resulted in Jonathan Whicher’s fall from his place as the “prince of detectives.” It appeared that only the detectives in fiction were allowed to have faults.
I thought Suspicions of Mr. Whicher was a fantastic way to end the semester. The course began with simply opening one’s eyes to the world (or worlds in Mowgli’s case,) which then led to a healthy, childish curiosity (that had good and bad consequences. Alice is a prime example of that!) and finally to curiosity evolving (just like Darwin said!) into detective fiction which largely concerned murders and/or heinous crimes. The Road Hill murder coincidentally happened during the same time detective fiction was becoming popular. This real-life murder transcended into a pseudo-fiction realm, which ended up causing ruin of Victorian England’s greatest, “real” detective. Compared to Holmes, Mr. Whicher was a saint. Aside from his mysterious family issues, Whicher was a nice and clever man who sought to do his job the best he could (and no one, to the best of my knowledge, caught him shooting up cocaine.) He was highly revered before his Road Hill murder case. Jonathan Whicher’s one crime was uncovering secrets that stretched beyond the actual murder. Those sorts of tricks only work for fictional detectives, such as Poe’s Dupin (as seen in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” even though that murder along with its background scandal were also based off of real events.)
The most interesting thing I’ve learned about Victorian England is that those fancy dress-wearing Brits I thought I knew ended up not being so different from modern people. Industrialization, colonization, and evolutionary theory hit Victorian England similarly to what we’re experiencing with “information overload.” Both changes led to an overflow of new ideas about God, nature, humanity, and morality. The Road Hill murder seems like a very, very early ancestor to the reality shows that are (unfortunately) imbedded in modern society. Scientific advances and globalization causes modern people to be very curious and to question everything much like the people of Victorian England. The resurgence of Victorian fiction in theatres also helps to make the connection. Stories such as Alice in Wonderland and Sherlock Holmes are still intriguing tales, though modern people need to see things in HD and in 3D to get a thrill anymore (thanks, technology.) Television shows, such as CSI, follow the trend of murder investigations and forensic science that were started during Victorian England. Although detection has now been around for over 200 years, there is a still a sense of shock when it is applied to actual events. It appears that, even now, fiction cannot prepare us for the shock of real events.



…and to show how smart I am, here is a picture of the spare change I’ve been saving. The jar even counts how much money I’ve saved. So far, I’ve got $56.58…what a smart move!

Review of "The Suspicions of Mr Whicher"

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher have confirmed my—forgive the repetition—suspicions about the nature of Victorian life. The book investigates a brutal 1860 murder of a three-year-old boy, Saville. The child was found in the servant's outhouse, his throat deeply slit. When the local police are unable to figure out who committed the crime, Jonathan Whicher, a brilliant officer and detective from Scotland Yard, is called to solve the case. The man delves into the household of Samuel and Mary Kent, the parents of Saville. What he finds begins to unravel the facade of the time—infidelity, insanity, and general scandal.

With that, I feel that The Suspicions of Mr Whicher epitomizes the Victorian era. In so much of what we have read in class, plots, while seemingly innocent, often run amuck after deeper consideration. For example, The Jungle Books—a children's story—reveal Kipling's bias toward colonialism. Also, in The Coming Race, Lytton emphasized what would become of Victorian society without the art and the humanities. Or, Lewis Carroll portrays the ridiculousness and roundabout circles made in such a culture.

Suspicions, at least for me, summed up the class. I had no idea what was in store when reading this book, and I was pleasantly surprised at how it portrayed and manifested Victorian England. Underneath that prudish mask—which Summerscale rips off with grace and detail—is something innately sinister.

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.

hindsight is 20/20.

From the other texts we've covered in class, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher would be the baby, if all of them got together. While the other texts are fiction, they offer the framework and principles that are expressed in the Summerscale text. A detective tale, almost in its finest, the text offers the Victorian era and all it stands for in one. In order for a crime to be solved, a family's history must be unveiled. This is a concept that doesn't, and wouldn't, sit well with a family from this time. Besides, who wants their dirty laundry aired for all to see?

Mr. Witcher, in my opinion, is the epitome of proper Victorian detectives. He showcases the skills we saw in Sherlock Holmes and Dupain from the Edgar Allen Poe tales, but brings a more realistic feel. This comes, in my opinion, because he existed. His colleagues consider him the "prince of detectives" and the Prologue is dedicated to previous crimes he's solved. It's as if the author wants to be sure that we understand how qualified our hero is.

The story contained so much detail and I found myself referring back to the list of family members written at the front of the book. This didn't help, so I wrote out my own to establish the relationship between one member to another. I'm not sure if the author was attempting to share so much detail to force us to solve the crime before the resolution is given, but I find it distracting. We cannot all be Sherlock Holmes in understanding and piecing together details to solve a crime.

The text is written from an all-seeing observer's point of view, providing details and hints throughout. The narrator offers the tale knowing the end to the beginning and shares the story in this manner. Obviously, the narrator wants the reader to know what has happened and fills in the details accordingly.

Considering the other texts on the syllabus, there seems to be a growth happening. The class started with children's books, The Jungle Books to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland then on to tales of discovery (comparable to adolescence, a time of growth and learning), The Coming Race and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At the end, we've finally reached a grown-up phase, with murder and deceit that only adults can stomach.

Personally, I find this text too long and drawn out for my tastes. Being a product of the 'microwave generation', I prefer tales that are to the point or at least hold my attention for longer than a couple of pages. For anyone interested in following a case from being to end and delving into the past of a Victorian family, then this text may interest you. For me, I'd rather read about Sherlock Holmes and his cocaine addiction.