—Jorge Luis Borges
At the end of my previous novel Murder as a Fine Art, I explained that a 2009 film, Creation—about Charles Darwin’s nervous breakdown—prompted my interest in Thomas De Quincey. Darwin’s favorite daughter died while he was preparing On the Origin of Species. Meanwhile, Darwin’s wife, a devout Christian, wanted him to abandon the project because she believed that his theory of evolution promoted atheism. Grieving, he was also guilt-ridden, fearing that God might have killed his daughter as a warning for him to stop.
Darwin’s breakdown took the form of persistent headaches, stomach problems, heart palpitations, weakness, and insomnia. In a pre-psychoanalytic world, his doctors were baffled, unable to link all these symptoms to any disease with which they were familiar. At the pivotal moment in the film, a friend suggests the true problem, saying, “You know, Charles, there are people such as Thomas De Quincey who maintain that we can be controlled by thoughts and emotions that we don’t know we have.”
This sounded like Freud, but Creation is set in the mid-1850s, and Freud didn’t develop his ideas until the 1890s. Was the reference an anachronism, I wondered, or did De Quincey actually anticipate Freud?
The rest of the film was a blur to me. I couldn’t wait for it to end so that I could hurry to my old college textbooks and learn more about De Quincey, whom my nineteenth-century English literature professors had relegated to the status of a footnote because of their prejudice against his notorious 1821 memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
That book was the first literary work to deal with drug dependency, but I discovered that it was far from De Quincey’s only “first.” He invented the term “subconscious” and did indeed anticipate Freud’s psychoanalytic theories by many decades. In addition, he created what he called psychological literary criticism in his famous essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.” His fascination with the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811—the first publicized mass killings in English history—prompted him to write “Postscript (On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts),” in which he dramatized those murders with such vividness that he created the true-crime genre. He wrote amazingly intimate essays about his friends Wordsworth and Coleridge and helped to establish their reputations. He influenced Edgar Allan Poe, who in turn inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes.
I became so fascinated that I tumbled down a Victorian rabbit hole. Until then, my novels had mostly been about contemporary American subjects. To cross an ocean and go back more than a century and a half required research equivalent to earning a doctorate about London in the 1850s. For several years, the only books I read were related to that city and that period. Those fogbound streets (a large map of 1850s London hangs in my office) often felt more real than what was happening around me.
One of my goals was to see how closely fact could be combined with fiction. For example, the two snowstorms depicted here are based on newspaper reports about unusually severe winter weather that struck London during early February of 1855, allowing me to substitute snow for the notorious London fogs, known as “particulars,” that I described in Murder as a Fine Art.
William Russell’s shocking dispatches from the Crimea did cause the British government to collapse on Tuesday, 30 January 1855. On Sunday, 4 February, Queen Victoria did reluctantly ask Lord Palmerston to become prime minister, and on Tuesday, 6 February, he assumed his duties, as I indicate here.
Birds in cages indeed decorated the galleries of Bedlam. Jay’s Mourning Warehouse existed. The ice-skating accident in St. James’s Park is based on an 1853 magazine account. So too is the account of the starving boy who earned pennies at Covent Garden market by keeping thieves away from carts while farmers delivered their vegetables. The menu at Queen Victoria’s dinner is taken from Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, a contemporary social-etiquette manual with such influence that even the queen’s kitchen staff would have consulted it. Tavern owners hired doctors of drink to adulterate gin and beer, using the recipes I provide. Rat poison was an ingredient in the green dye of clothing. Seating in churches was based on the box-pew system that I describe. Members of the congregation rented the pews and gained access via keys that pew-openers carried. Wealthy churchgoers sometimes equipped their pews with canopies and curtains.
Lord Palmerston’s mansion, directly across from Green Park, still exists. Once known as Cambridge House (because it was owned by the Duke of Cambridge), today it’s the only property on Piccadilly that’s set back from the street and has a semicircular driveway. A Naval and Military Club purchased it after Lord Palmerston’s death in 1865 and attached IN and OUT signs at the gates to direct arriving and departing vehicles, with the result that the building acquired the nickname the In and Out Club. Deserted since the 1990s, it fell into disrepair. In 2011, two wealthy brothers announced their intention to renovate it for £214 million and make it the most expensive residential property in London, but by early 2014 repairs had not yet begun, and the ghost of Lord Palmerston seemed to haunt it.
Similarly, Commissioner Mayne did live in the Chester Square area of Belgravia. That exclusive London district isn’t named after a European country in an operetta. Rather, its name derives from the aristocratic Belgrave family, who developed the area. Its adjacent white-stuccoed mansions rivaled those of Mayfair, with the added luxury that the streets were wider. These days, many of its buildings function as embassies.
St. James’s Church still exists, despite massive damage during World War Two. If you visit this simple, wondrous church at the southeastern corner of Mayfair, you’ll feel transported back in time. Light streaming through the tall windows indicates why Sir Christopher Wren favored this church more than any other that he designed, including St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The graveyard at St. Anne’s Church in Soho still exists also. This is where Colin O’Brien imagines that his family was buried. The yard is elevated above the street, the result of soil having been frequently added during the Victorian period as more and more bodies were buried on top of one another. Sometimes gravediggers jumped up and down on the previous remains in order to make room for new occupants. If you’d like to see photographs of many of the locations in this novel, please go to the Inspector of the Dead section of my website, www.davidmorrell.net, or else www.mulhollandbooks.com.
As a further example of how I tried to link fact with fiction, the only Thomas De Quincey detail that I invented is his presence in London in 1855. He was actually in Edinburgh at that time. Otherwise, every biographical reference to him is factual. His dead sisters, the Edinburgh sanctuary where he hid from debt collectors, the Glasgow observatory where he also hid from debt collectors, his failed friendship with Wordsworth, his opium dreams about sphinxes and crocodiles, the landlord who held him captive for a year, his chance meeting with King George III and his lie that his family had a noble lineage dating back to the Norman Conquest, his habit of setting fire to his hair when he leaned over candles and wrote—the list could go on and on. Also, I incorporated numerous passages from De Quincey’s work into his dialogue. My fascination with him is so great that after several rereadings of his thousands of pages, I started to feel that I was channeling his spirit.
Form should match content. Inspector of the Dead incorporates many literary elements from the Victorian era. While modern novels almost never use the third-person omniscient viewpoint, novels of the nineteenth century favored it (the beginnings of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House, for example), allowing an objective narrator to step forward and provide information. That device is helpful in explaining elements of Victorian life that modern readers would otherwise find baffling. I ignored another modern convention by mixing the third-person viewpoint with a first-person journal and a first-person letter. This combination is seldom used today but was common in Victorian novels. Employing nineteenth-century techniques to dramatize nineteenth-century London felt liberating, old devices suddenly feeling new.
Inspector of the Dead is my version of a specific type of Victorian novel. The thriller as we know it was invented during the mid-1800s in what disapproving critics of the period called the sensation novel. Previous thrillers tended to take place in remote locations and distant times, involving clanking chains and drafty castles, but sensation novelists brought immediacy to their thrills, postulating that very real terrors occurred in the very immediate present in very familiar London locations that readers walked past every day.
Another previous thriller tradition, known as the Newgate novel, portrayed the exploits of thieves and murderers among the lower class, the best-known example of which is again by Dickens: Oliver Twist. But sensation novelists postulated that vicious crimes occurred not only in slums but in the supposedly respectable houses of the middle and upper classes, a concept that provoked outrage among highbrowed critics, who maintained that wealth, education, and good breeding were antidotes against evil impulses.
The first famous sensation novel was Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60), the female-in-jeopardy chills of which set off a merchandising extravaganza involving items such as Woman in White stationery, perfume, clothing, and sheet music. People named their pets and their children after characters in that novel. Two other novels reinforced the power of this new genre: Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Although Collins and Mrs. Wood became less popular after the 1860s, Braddon (my favorite of the three) enjoyed a successful career until the end of the century.
Sensation novels favored topics such as insanity, arson, bigamy, adultery, abortion, poisonings, forced imprisonment, madhouses, stolen identities, drug abuse, and violent alcoholism. De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is an early example of sensation literature. Also, his “Postscript (On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts)” illustrates the start of the genre, as do his suspense-filled novellas “The Household Wreck” and “The Avenger,” elements of which I incorporated here. In one of the first detective novels, The Moonstone (1868), Wilkie Collins acknowledged his literary debt to De Quincey by using Confessions of an English Opium-Eater to solve the mystery. Because of the regard Collins felt for De Quincey, I couldn’t resist borrowing a location from The Moonstone: the Wheel of Fortune tavern, on Shore Lane, just off Lower Thames Road, where a major incident occurs in this novel.
The numerous attempts against Queen Victoria aren’t fiction. After Edward Oxford, John Francis, John William Bean Jr., William Hamilton, and Robert Francis Pate attacked the queen, there was indeed a sixth would-be assassin, although he didn’t make his attempt in 1855, as I imagine, but rather in 1872. A seventh man attacked the queen in 1882, firing at her carriage as she departed from the Windsor train station.
But even though Victoria amazingly survived so much violence, her life had effectively ended two decades earlier. In November of 1861, Prince Albert became ill with what at first seemed to be influenza. As his chills and fever worsened, he was diagnosed with typhoid fever. After several weeks of suffering, surrounded by his family and friends, he died at Windsor Castle on 14 December. His popularity had waxed and waned during the twenty-one years that he was married to Queen Victoria. As if to compensate for the periods of low esteem, the nation entered a marathon of grief that lasted not merely the traditional year but an entire decade, during which countless communities erected monuments to him.
Queen Victoria’s grief lasted not a year or a decade but the next forty years. Seldom seen in public except when a new statue was dedicated to Albert, she secluded herself in Windsor Castle. Always wearing black, she frequented the prince’s death chamber, taking care that everything was preserved as he had left it, to the point that its linen was changed daily and hot water for shaving was delivered each morning. In contrast with her youthful intentions, she became as remote from her subjects as her predecessors had been.
There’s no evidence that Edward Oxford was a pawn in a conspiracy, but when I read various accounts about his attack on the queen, I realized that the events could be interpreted two ways. Whatever the truth behind his actions, after twenty-seven years of his incarceration, first in Bedlam and then in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, his physicians convinced the government that he was sane. They pointed out that he had made productive use of his time, learning Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, German, and French. In addition, he had learned to play chess and had developed skill as a painter, earning £60 for his efforts.
Perhaps Queen Victoria agreed to the government’s recommendation for clemency because Oxford’s new home at the Broadmoor asylum wasn’t far from Windsor Castle. It may be that she imagined him escaping and sneaking through the woods to attack her again. The condition of Oxford’s release was that he would leave England and never return. In 1867, more than two and a half decades after he shot at the queen, he sailed to Australia, where he settled in Melbourne, in the state of Victoria, names that are doubly ironic because Melbourne was serving as prime minister when Oxford shot at Victoria. Using the allegorical alias John Freeman, he married and became a journalist. Nobody, not even his wife, knew his infamous background. He died in 1900, at the age of seventy-eight. Victoria died one year later, at the age of eighty-one, her remarkable sixty-four-year reign having defined an era.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m indebted to De Quincey biographers Grevel Lindop (The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey) and Robert Morrison (The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey). The quality of their scholarship is matched by their generosity in answering my questions and guiding me through De Quincey’s world.
In Grevel Lindop’s case, he literally became a guide, escorting me through De Quincey locations in Manchester, England (where De Quincey was born), and Grasmere in the Lake District (where De Quincey lived in Dove Cottage after Wordsworth moved out). Meanwhile Robert Morrison sent me numerous pieces by and about De Quincey that I hadn’t been able to locate and that were invaluable to my research. Sometimes we exchanged e-mails several times a day.
Historian Judith Flanders graciously answered my questions and offered advice. Her books about Victorian culture—especially The Victorian House, The Victorian City, and The Invention of Murder (How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime)—are central to my understanding of London in the 1850s. In addition to being a consummate scholar, Judith is also a novelist (Writer’s Block) and has a rare sense of humor.
For more information about Queen Victoria’s attackers, read Paul Thomas Murphy’s Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy.
The go-to volume for information about the Crimean War is Orlando Figes’s The Crimean War: A History.
About Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, read Gillian Gill’s We Two: Victoria and Albert, Rulers, Partners, Rivals.
The following books were very helpful also: Peter Ackroyd’s London: A Biography, Richard D. Altick’s Victorian People and Ideas, Anne-Marie Beller’s Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction, Alfred Rosling Bennett’s London and Londoners in the 1850s and 1860s (a memoir), Ian Bondeson’s Queen Victoria’s Stalker: The Strange Case of the Boy Jones, Mark Bostridge’s Florence Nightingale, David Brown’s Palmerston: A Biography, Jennifer Carnell’s The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Belton Cobb’s The First Detectives and the Early Career of Richard Mayne, Police Commissioner, Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, Heather Creaton’s Victorian Diaries: The Daily Lives of Victorian Men and Women, Judith Flanders’s Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain, Alison Gernsheim’s Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey, Ruth Goodman’s How to Be a Victorian, Winifred Hughes’s The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic, Petrus de Jon’s De Quincey’s Loved Ones, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (a
contemporary account published in 1861–62), Sally Mitchell’s Daily Life in Victorian England, Chris Payne’s The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime through the Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective, Liza Picard’s Victorian London, Catherine Peters’s The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, Daniel Pool’s What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, Charles Manby Smith’s Curiosities of London (an 1853 account), Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and his Queen Victoria, Judith Summers’s Soho: A History of London’s Most Colourful Neighborhood, Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective and her Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady, F. M. L. Thompson’s The Rise of Respectable Society (A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830–1900), J. J. Tobias’s Crime and Police in England 1700–1900, and Yvonne M. Ward’s Censoring Queen Victoria: How Two Gentlemen Edited a Queen and Created an Icon.
The complete Works of Thomas De Quincey are available in twenty-one volumes, for which Grevel Lindop acted as general editor. Robert Morrison edited two compact collections, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Thomas De Quincey: On Murder. David Wright’s edition of Thomas De Quincey: Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets features De Quincey’s candid reminiscences about Coleridge and Wordsworth.
I’m grateful for the friendship and guidance of Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich along with the other good folks at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, especially Lauren E. Abramo, Mike Hoogland, Sharon Pelletier, and Rachel Stout.
I’m also indebted to the splendid team at Mulholland Books/Little, Brown/Hachette, particularly (in alphabetical order) Reagan Arthur, Pamela Brown, Judith Clain, Josh Kendall, Wes Miller, Miriam Parker, Amelia Possanza, Michael Pietsch, and Ruth Tross (in the UK).