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UNDRESSING READERLY ANXIETIES: A STUDY OF CLOTHING AND ACCESSORIES IN SHORT CRIME FICTION 1841-1911 by Alyson Hunt Canterbury Christ Church University Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2019 Contents Abstract 1 Acknowledgements 2 Introduction 3 Chapter One: Whodunnit? Anxieties of Criminal Identification 31 Chapter Two: Anxieties of Sex and the Body 77 Chapter Three: Anxieties of the Imagination - Fashioning the 122 Fictional Female Detective Chapter Four: Anxieties of Fashionable Modernity in Fin de 177 Siècle Serialised Crime Fiction Chapter Five: Anxieties of Crime - Strands, Clues and Narrative Threads 221 Conclusion 265 Works Cited 275 Alyson Hunt 1 Abstract Dress changes the way that we, as readers, perceive and interpret characters within fiction because of the hugely subjective way that it influences individuals. We all have some experiences and opinions of dress because we have all been exposed to it in some way, whether consciously or unconsciously, and therefore the way that we read dress is fraught with ambiguity because our own experiences are so varied. Clothing functions as an indicator of gender, class, identity, aesthetic taste, fashion and social and economic success. It can sexualise and desexualise, entice and repel, reveal and conceal, lead and mislead and thus functions as a useful tool for writers to influence readers. Despite the instability of dress as a stable sign, writers make assumptions that readers understand what is being implied by dress and make conscious decisions to describe dress within their narratives. In crime fiction, clothing is particularly useful because it allows hiding in plain sight: as an item so mundane it is barely noticed by the reader, yet it can function as compelling clue to reveal the identity of a criminal. There is a tension between what is obvious and what is implied and thus readers are both empowered and frustrated by depictions of clothing in crime fiction. Clothing is deployed by crime writers in a different way from other fiction because the genre encourages close reading in which every detail must count, familiar to readers through Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories yet also vital in a range of other texts discussed in this study such as the serialised adventures of C.L.Pirkis’s female detective Loveday Brooke and the escapades of Grant Allen’s master criminal Colonel Clay. This interdisciplinary study focuses on the anxieties generated by readings of dress in Victorian and Edwardian short crime fiction at a time when sartorial matters constituted a form of language in upper- and middle-class society. Considering short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, L.T. Meade, Guy Boothby, Baroness Orczy and George Sims alongside lesser known writers including Mrs George Corbett, Alyson Hunt 2 Rodrigues Ottolengui and Mary Wilkins Freeman amongst others, this study examines visual, verbal and haptic considerations of dress to analyse how nineteenth and early twentieth century writers used clothing to enable and disable their readers. Alyson Hunt 3 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Susan Civale, for her guidance and support throughout this project, for her endless patience and meticulous attention to detail. Her ability to spot a comma splice from a vast distance is unparalleled. Without the encouragement of my second supervisor, Professor Carolyn Oulton, I would never have started this PhD. I am indebted to her for the experiences fostered as research associate at ICVWW and her unwavering faith in my abilities over many years. She is the Holmes to my Watson. My grateful thanks also to the CCCU staff development fund who graciously provided a partial fee waiver, precluding the need to sell all of my possessions. The support of the CCCU library team and the graduate school were also invaluable and a wonderful asset to the learning environment. Thank you! The generosity of scholars on the Victoria ListServ, Twitter, #WIASN and at conferences and study days have been fundamental in building my knowledge, signposting resources and stimulating my curiosity. The prevalence of online materials is truly breath taking, and I feel honoured to be part of such a generous scholarly community. Lastly, I am supremely grateful for the encouragement and patience of all my friends and family who have accompanied me to exhibitions and conferences, fed me tea and biscuits and listened to me read aloud endless rewrites. I got there in the end. In the words of Wilkie Collins: “She was more like a fly than a woman: she couldn’t settle on anything.” Published parts of this thesis are as follows: ‘Fashioning Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Serialised Crime Fiction’ chapter for Fashion & Material Culture in Victorian Fiction & Periodicals edited collection, published by Everett Root. November 2019. 17-31. (Chapter Four). “‘Emphatically un-literary and middle-classʼ: Undressing Middle-Class Anxieties in Ellen Wood’s Johnny Ludlow Stories” chapter for British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Vol 2 – 1860s and 1870s edited collection published by Palgrave Macmillan. Forthcoming 2020. (Chapter Five). Alyson Hunt 4 Undressing Readerly Anxieties: A Study of Clothing and Accessories in Short Crime Fiction 1841-1911 Introduction “You appeared to read a good deal upon her which was quite invisible to me,” I remarked. “Not invisible but unnoticed, Watson. You did not know where to look, and so you missed all that was important. I can never bring you to realise the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb- nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace. Now, what did you gather from that woman’s appearance? Describe it.” Conan Doyle, “A Case of Identity” 476. Dress and appearance are important in Victorian and Edwardian crime fiction because they tell a story beyond the aesthetic. In a genre deeply concerned with the minutiae of human lives, every garment can be read as clue, as essence of characterisation and as a function of the narrative, simultaneously concealing and revealing vital information. Yet as Dr Watson remarks, the stories that can be read from dress vary from reader to reader and are subjective, nuanced and slippery. This leads to disparate understandings and missed information that can be useful narrative devices for the author but frustrating for the reader as they seek to decipher the mystery of the story. However, the subjectivity of sartorial readings can put the interpretation of dress outside of the writers’ control because readers deduce a huge range of information from clothing, reading below the aesthetic level to the symbolic and metaphorical connotations beneath. After all, clothing oneself is a conscious act. Choosing garments, adjusting the fit, putting clothes on and off and cleaning and maintaining clothing are all personal and quintessentially human acts that vary in degrees from one person to the next. We all have some experience and opinions Alyson Hunt 5 of dress because we have all been exposed to it in some way. It is therefore inherently troubling when these sartorial acts are disrupted and when dress does not look or function as we might expect because it makes us question our own behaviours. This leads to the assumption that something is amiss, a culturally conditioned response that, “disordered dress always betrays disordered minds” (Jann 690). Readings of dress are influenced by contemporary concerns about identity, sex, gender, fashion, modernity and crime that change expectations of appearance and the way that a viewer interprets how someone is dressed. Clothing therefore functions not just as material object to add realism to the narrative but also as a signifier of a host of wider concerns. This thesis examines how writers use clothing and dress in short crime fiction between 1841 and 1911, arguing that the ambiguous interpretation of dress and its dual literal and metaphorical meanings disrupt the reader’s quest to discover the ‘truth’ while exposing a myriad of wider thematic anxieties. Clothing is utilised by writers in a particular way in crime fiction apart from other fiction because the genre encourages close reading in which every detail must count. There is a supposition that dress can be clearly defined, as Holmes demands of Watson in the opening quotation, and that there are mutual terms of understanding between readers in the ability to transform sartorial observations into indicators of identity, gender, modernity, social belonging and even criminality. These interpretations make assumptions about the reader’s own sartorial knowledge and their ability to uniformly understand these signs, though, as this thesis reveals, these signs are never stable. Writers make conscious choices about the details they include, using dress in imaginative ways which both enable and disable the reader. Unravelling the signification of dress prompts new readings of the narratives and reinstates the importance of popular culture in understanding fiction in the context of its readers. Alyson Hunt 6 Dress signifies a host of cultural and social associations that are read differently by observers according to their own experiences, backgrounds and purpose. For example, in “A Case of Identity” Watson comprehensively describes the dress of a woman who wears a slate-coloured, broad-brimmed straw hat, with a feather of a brickish red. Her jacket was black, with black beads sewn upon it, and a fringe of little black jet ornaments. Her dress was brown, rather darker than coffee colour, with a little purple plush at the neck and sleeves (477). From this, he ascertains she is “fairly well-to-do” (477), using her dress as a visual marker of her wealth and social position. Yet he cannot read her appearance without making his own judgements about what her dress implies, concluding that she is “fairly well-to-do in a vulgar, comfortable, easy-going way” (477), without explicitly stating which details of her appearance create this reaction.