Under Lock and Key: Securing Privacy and Property In

UNDER LOCK AND KEY: SECURING PRIVACY AND PROPERTY IN VICTORIAN FICTION AND CULTURE By David L. Smith Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2007 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor John Halperin Professor Roy Gottfried Professor Jay Clayton Professor James Epstein To my wife, Beverly, my unfailing source of love, encouragement, and inspiration and To my sons, Chris and Coleman, for patience and good humor ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee for their insights into this project and recommendations for its further development, as well as Professor Carolyn Dever, from whom the idea for this dissertation originated. I owe special gratitude to Professor John Halperin, my dissertation director and a man of sterling character, who, throughout my graduate career, has consistently modeled the kind of scholar and educator I hope to someday become. My family has played a major role in the completion of this project. I am particularly indebted to my parents, Jerry and Jerrie Smith, for their wise counsel and encouragement, and to Rosa Winfree, James and Barbara Henderson, and Kathryn Combs, for their unflagging support. Most of all, I want to thank my loving wife, Beverly, and my terrific sons, Chris and Coleman, for sacrifices and endurance beyond the call of duty. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION................................................................................................................... ii ACKOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………… iii INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….. v CHAPTER I. A KEY OF ONE’S OWN: BRITISH PATENT LOCKMAKING AND THE “TRUE PRINCIPLES OF PERFECT SECURITY”…………………………………...... 1 II. SECURITY AND THE SOCIAL ORDER: REPRESENTING THE LOCKMAKER IN BARNABY RUDGE ………………………………………………... 70 III. VICTORIAN SECURITY IN CRISIS: PUBLIC INTERPRETATIONS OF THE GREAT LOCK CONTROVERSY……………………………………………………. 119 IV. BREAKING AND ENTERING THE ENGLISHMAN’S CASTLE: LATE- VICTORIAN SECURITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS………………………………. 213 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………. 252 iv Introduction In the 1850s English lock and safe manufacturers regularly held public exhibitions in which they subjected fire-proof safes to prolonged periods in bonfires and then opened them to show that the contents were unharmed. The popularity of these events increased when safe-makers raised the stakes and the drama by drilling, cutting, and blasting open competitors’ safes to demonstrate publicly that they offered inadequate security. Two of the principal rivals in such contests were George Price and William Milner. During a competition in 1860, one of Milner’s foremen packed the lock of one of Price’s safes with gun powder and ignited it. Because the safe was an older model not constructed to withstand blasting, the explosion destroyed the lock; but the blast also shattered the safe’s steel body with such force that one of the shards hurled into the crowd, piercing a young boy’s skull and killing him on the spot. The coroner assigned to investigate the tragic accident declared such contests a public danger and put an end to them. Price remained in business until his death in 1887. Milner, on the other hand, retired to the Isle of Man shortly after the incident, where he established charities for impoverished fishermen. The townspeople praised Milner, whom they called “Godfather of Port Erin,” for his generosity, and raised money to erect a tower memorializing his philanthropy. Upon discovering what his neighbors were doing, the retired manufacturer provided the funds necessary to finish the project. Completed in 1871, Milner’s Tower, located on the v southwest coast of the island where it stands in the place of a lighthouse, remains a notable local landmark in part because of its unique shape—a giant key. 1 Milner’s Tower stands as a monumental exception to the kind of “ordinary objects” that, as Yi-Fu Tuan observes, we tend to overlook because, even though they crucially define the places in which we live, such items “are almost a part of ourselves, too close to be seen” (144). Perhaps due to their commonness and seemingly prosaic quality, their status as “ordinary objects” which renders them all but invisible, lock and key, and the field of security generally, have received little attention from literary critics and historians, despite important studies on nineteenth-century domestic privacy in recent years. “Under Lock and Key” explores this overlooked area of Victorian literature and culture, examining the social origins, material conditions, sociocultural significance, and fictional representations of security from the late eighteenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. For their part, the Victorians had a well-documented fixation on security. In the nineteenth-century novel, for instance, lock and key are ubiquitous fixtures, appearing more often and in more contexts than nearly any other consumer artifacts of the era (Altick, Presence 228). 2 The proliferation of security in Victorian fiction attests to what was in fact a cultural obsession with protecting property—and, equally important, guarding the borders of privacy. What Jonathan Harker says of Dracula’s Transylvanian castle—“doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked and 1 See the article on George Price in A Gazetteer of Lock and Key Makers 4-6 and Porter’s Directory 311. 2 Aside from observing that middle-class Victorians were prosperous and thus had a lot to protect, Altick does not pursue the implications of the numerous references to security in nineteenth-century fiction. vi bolted” (39)—accurately describes the Victorian home, in fact as well as in fiction. 3 While we do not mean to imply that the proverbial Englishman’s castle was, like the vampire’s lair, “a veritable prison,” vigilant attention to securing bourgeois domestic space did transform the home into a fortress. Such a transformation was possible largely because of the rise of the patent-lock industry in London during the early decades of the industrial revolution, which serves as the focus of chapter I. The invention and production of patent-locks, in which England led the world throughout the nineteenth century, had a pervasive social impact. The early years of modern high-security played a crucial role in efforts to create and stabilize the physical and conceptual boundaries between the separate spheres and in producing a spatial framework for the articulation of liberal individualism and an array of Victorian values, not the least of which was acquisitive morality. Certain theoretical assumptions about social space inform the argument in this chapter and throughout the study as a whole. The first chapter focuses mainly on the production and material practices of security, and in some respects on what Henri Lefebvre describes as the “production of space.” Lefebvre argues that productive forces determine the ways in which we create, organize, partition, use, and therefore experience the physical environment, both practically and conceptually. He reasons: because “each mode of production has its own particular space, the shift from one mode of production to another must entail the production of new space” (46). The historical conditions in which the modern lock 3 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar observe that the mechanisms of security—“locked cabinets, drawers, trunks, strongboxes”—recur frequently in fiction written by women, signaling a feeling of confinement within the home (85). But references to security occur with arguably equal if not greater frequency in fiction written by men, though for different reasons, as we will see throughout this study. vii industry emerged—the shift to industrial capitalism and bourgeois liberalism—bear out Lefebvre’s formulation of the causal relationship between the mode of economic production and the production of space. 4 Taking the emergence of modern capitalist society as a backdrop, we attempt to reconstruct the history of the high-security industry and, in turn, the production of secure space, through readings of technical literature, industry reports, advertising, legal records, minutes of the Royal Society of Arts and the Mechanics’ Institute, as well as Georgian and Victorian writing on loss-prevention and crime. This chapter thus investigates a new area within the study of material culture in an effort to develop a cultural history of lock hardware and locked-space, arguing along the way that modern high-security signified a complex range of middle-class values even as it encoded anxieties about life in an industrial-capitalist society. Chapter I considers as well how the Victorians employed security in their representations of space, which, like the production of social space, played a vital role in the creation and maintenance of social order. Whereas “the ability to influence the production of space is an important means to augment social power” as well as social order, as David Harvey contends, “power in the realms of representation may end up being as important as power over the materiality of spatial organization itself” (233). Nigel South likewise maintains: “the symbolic defining of space (and the enforcement of definition) is clearly a major and extremely significant (if neglected) feature of the modern maintenance of social control and social order” (147). Arguing that the key was the principal trope of the English home as a castle—the

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