In short, these references keep violence ordinary, reminding us of its grisly proximity to middle- as well as to “criminal”-class life. Jabez himself—like many sensation novel protagonists—is a respectable public figure with terrible secrets. Raised by the Slopperton Humane Society, whose founder—a “very excellent gentleman”—is known for “maltreating his wife and turning his eldest son out of doors,” he proves to be the abandoned son of a powerful man with a similarly shameful secret history. The very names “Slopperton” and “Sloshy”—silly as they might appear to us now—nevertheless have the important effect of establishing Braddon’s town and its dark and “poisonous” river (poisoned, perhaps, through acts of industrial rather than domestic abuse, by the local mills and factories) as generic, emblematic locations, a sort of English “anywhere.” The “black-minded” weather of the novel’s opening recalls the rain and the mud of London from the start of Bleak House; Braddon’s breathtaking vision of the inhabitants of a county town driven to ideas and perhaps to deeds of murder, suicide, and madness by the depressing effects of the British climate is entirely her own. “Keep us from bad thoughts to-day,” she writes, inclusively, in her first paragraph, “and keep us out of the Police Reports next week.”
Of course, the sensation novelist’s unhealthy dwelling on the stuff of police reports—and of coroners’ courts and “low” newspapers—was exactly what the genre’s critics so deplored. Braddon’s implication of herself and her readers in a shared capacity for private and public violence effectively anticipates such criticisms and confronts them on their own terms. She even has a character give explicit voice to them: “I don’t like these subjects,” exclaims the Marquis de Cevennes, watching a performance of Lucretia Borgia at the Paris Opera with Valerie, his niece.
“Even the handling of a Victor Hugo cannot make them otherwise than repulsive: and then again, there is something to be said on the score of their evil tendency. They set a dangerous example. Lucretia Borgia, in black velvet, avenging an insult according to the rules of high art and to the music of Donizetti is very charming, no doubt; but we don’t want our wives and daughters to learn how they may poison us without fear of detection.”
Here, distaste at the “repulsive” nature of melodramatic fictions becomes a distinctly gendered anxiety that such fictions might be setting patterns of transgression for emulation by the womenfolk of respectable men. With Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, Braddon was soon to refine the formula that would allow her to trouble those anxieties more precisely; The Trail of the Serpent is dominated by men, but contains at least one magnificently vengeful female: it’s a nice irony that when the Marquis makes his speech, Valerie has recently poisoned her opera-singer husband and is about to watch him apparently die on stage.
Increasingly, in fact, the novel revels in such ironies, as the casual calling up of images of domestic savagery gives way to a self-reflexive preoccupation with theatrical and literary code. Confronted with the details of his niece’s abuses within her miserable (and, as it will turn out, bigamous) marriage to the fortune-seeking Jabez, the Marquis is philosophical. “I never,” he says, “alarm myself when everything is hopelessly wrong, and villainy deliciously triumphant; for I know that somebody who died in the first act will come in at the centre doors, and make it all right before the curtain falls.” Joseph Peters, the detective on Jabez’s trail, is knowing in a different sort of way, but to a similar effect: his observations serve to nudge Braddon’s readers into an awareness of themselves as readers by reminding them not just of the conventions of the genre-bound book in their hands, but of the very establishment—the private lending library, whose codes of taste and decency Braddon would become so skillful at negotiating—from which they probably obtained it.
“But the likeness?” said Dr. Tappenden. “That dead man was the very image of Jabez North.”
“Very likely, sir. There’s mysterious goin’s-on, and some coincidences in this life, as well as in your story-books that’s lent out at three half-pence a volume, keep ’em three days and return ’em clean.”
This is more, I think, than simply Braddon having fun. The pleasures and the perils of reading are important matters throughout The Trail of the Serpent. The novel bristles with systems of signs and forms of communication; messages are translated—or resist translation—from one language or one medium to another, with crucial consequences. Most memorable, perhaps, is Peters’s “dumb,” or “dirty,” alphabet. He manages, with this, to persuade Braddon’s hero, Richard Marwood, into feigning madness, so saving him from being executed for a murder he did not commit; he is driven to this extreme, however, because the proper system for the interpretation of meaning—the reading of evidence in a public courtroom, the determining of truth—has broken down. Jabez, meanwhile, prospers in his career of villainy because he is adept both at manipulating his own public image (“Slopperton believed in Jabez North”), and at orchestrating the signs through which the activities of others are to be interpreted—stage-managing, Iago-like, the scene in which Valerie believes her husband to be making love to another woman. Alphabets, in this novel, emerge as “dumb” and “dirty” indeed: signs are terrifyingly vulnerable to misreading by the careless, and to manipulation by the unscrupulous; popular opinion is dangerously prone to taking things at face value—and then as dangerously prone to changing its mind. Ultimately, of course, Braddon’s message is a reassuring one: Peters succeeds in disentangling reality from fiction; there are some signs, after all—the physical marks of heredity, for example—which speak an incontrovertible truth. What lingers, however, is our unease at the fact that misapprehension—individual and collective—can make signs function falsely to the extent that men might lose their lives by them, or women be provoked to devastating crimes of passion.
This is what makes The Trail of the Serpent, finally, a novel of social rather than psychological significance. Sensation literature has been criticized—in its own day as well as in ours—for privileging plot over character development and motivation. It has been derided, too, for its dramatic form, its unwillingness to penetrate the minds of its characters, so that they have to expose their emotional lives to us via swoons, mutterings, gnashings of teeth. (Thank heavens for Peters’s extraordinary habit of “thinking aloud” on his fingers!) But the effect of this, of course, is to make us equal players with the characters in Braddon’s story: we must learn, with them, the slipperiness of signs; we must ponder the proper management of those semipermeable social membranes through which we experience the lives of others and risk the under- or over-exposure of ourselves; and we must discover that personality, at some point, becomes opaque—that there are moments of psychic stress that language is incapable of containing or even describing, scenes, as Braddon puts it, “too painful and too sacred for many words.”
I am suggesting, in short, that we look beyond what might seem to be the clichés and limitations of Braddon’s prose—or rather, that we use those very clichés as our way into the culture from which Braddon’s novels emerged. Consider, for example, the coincidences and contrivances with which The Trail of the Serpent is increasingly cluttered. Some—such as Richard’s leaving Slopperton on the morning his uncle is murdered; Jabez seeing Valerie slip de Lancy the letter of assignation; Slosh taking the post of keeper’s boy in Richard’s asylum—are vital to the furthering of Braddon’s plot. Others are curiously redundant—in particular, the fact that Jabez, having secured Valerie’s fortune by blackmailing her into marriage, then discovers himself to be the abandoned son of her uncle the Marquis, and so legitimate heir to the fortune anyway.… The point, surely, is that if we attempt to apply the rules of realism to Braddon’s text, we will fail to read it. As, again, in Dickens—and in a prefiguring, perhaps, of the novels of Hardy, in which the deeds and misdeeds of criminal and blameless characters alike invariably return to haunt them—coincidence and contrivance are invoked to remind us of the patterns and cycles in which individuals, communities, an
d sometimes whole societies can be fatally enmeshed.
This explains why the novel is filled with doubles: with shadows, echoes, and repetitions; it explains, too, the preoccupation with revolution—a word that suggests both the cyclical recurrence of events and the violent transformation of them. Jabez’s seduction and abandonment of the suicide-bound young woman of the novel’s first chapters replicates his father’s treatment of his mother whilst an impoverished French refugee; his marriage to Valerie echoes the Marquis’s bigamous post-Restoration marriage with the “wealthy widow of a Buonapartist general”; the fate of his son—who is thrown into the river, rescued, and brought up as a Slopperton “fondling”—exactly repeats his own. Crucially, however, Slosh is raised, as Jabez was not, by kind and considerate foster-parents, and the cycle of abuse leading to villainy is broken. He inherits the aristocratic features of the de Cevennes, along with a certain “undercurrent” of Jabez which, put at the service of the police, sets him on the road to becoming “the glory of his profession”—though we might well be made a little uneasy by the image of Slosh with which Peters jocularly leaves us: that of him bellowing “for three mortal hours because his father committed suicide, and disappointed the boy of seein’ him hung.” Here, in fact, at the very emergence of the detective literary tradition, Braddon is suggesting something that will become a troubling truism of the genre: that little distinguishes the criminal from the detective mastermind but the channeling of its powers into evil or into good; that the categories of “evil” and “good” themselves are sometimes worryingly liable to slip and blur.
Modern critics have suggested that sensation fiction can best be understood as having offered its contemporary audience an alternative to dominant Victorian values of rationality, containment, and social control;10 but I wonder, too, whether the genre may not have spoken most intimately to its readers’ daily experiences of a complicated modern life in which those values were looking increasingly inadequate. This was a world, after all, of gross distinction between poverty and wealth; a world in which friendless people really were at risk of being falsely incarcerated in asylums and subjected to all sorts of abuses whilst inside them; a world in which women—particularly working-class women—were routinely liable to seduction, rape, abandonment, and to the abuse of alcohol and drugs; a world in which orphans and other vulnerable children were at risk of neglect and exploitation. So, far from being hysterical or melodramatic, sensation fiction might ultimately be read as an entirely appropriate literary mode for such a world; and to the extent that that world still resembles our own, sensation novels like The Trail of the Serpent—astonishingly, out of print until now for almost a century—will retain their power to unsettle and impress.
SARAH WATERS has published articles on literature and cultural history, and is the author of three award-winning neo-Victorian novels: Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith. She lives in London.
NOTES
1. [Oliphant, Margaret], “Novels,” Blackwoods, Vol. CII, No. DCXXIII (Sept. 1867), pp. 257–80, p. 280.
2. [Rae, W. F.], “Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon,” North British Review, No. LXXXV (Sept. 1865), pp. 180–204, p. 204.
3. Wolff, Robert L., Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York and London, 1979).
4. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, “My First Novel: The Trail of the Serpent,” The Idler Magazine, Vol. III (Feb. to July 1893), pp. 19–30, p. 25.
5. Wolff, Robert L., “Devoted Disciple: The Letters of Mary Elizabeth Braddon to Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1862–73,” Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol. XXII, No. I (Jan. 1974), pp. 5–35, p. 12.
6. Braddon, “My First Novel,” p. 25.
7. Ibid., p. 26.
8. Wolff, Sensational Victorian.
9. Braddon, “My First Novel,” p. 25.
10. For example, Hughes, W., The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton, 1980), p. 13.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
The Trail of the Serpent was first published in 1860 as Three Times Dead (London: W&M Clark; and Beverley, Empson). It was published in weekly parts starting in February 1860, but sold poorly. Under the guidance of London publisher John Maxwell, Braddon condensed and revised the book. (In “My First Novel” [reprinted on this page of this edition], Braddon recalls reducing the novel by around ten thousand words, but a comparison of the two texts indicates that the cuts were rather less substantial.) Reissued as The Trail of the Serpent in March 1861, it sold one thousand copies within a week of publication. It was serialized in the Halfpenny Journal in twenty-eight parts, from August 1, 1864, to February 28, 1865, and was reprinted several times during the following years.
This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the text of the 1890 Stereotyped Edition published by the London firm of Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. A handful of typographical errors and minor inconsistencies have been silently corrected.
“Poor race of men, said the pitying Spirit,
Dearly ye pay for your primal fall;
Some flowers of Eden ye yet inherit,
But the trail of the Serpent is over them all.”
THOMAS MOORE1
BOOK THE FIRST
A RESPECTABLE YOUNG MAN
CHAPTER I
THE GOOD SCHOOLMASTER
I don’t suppose it rained harder in the good town of Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy than it rained anywhere else. But it did rain. There was scarcely an umbrella in Slopperton that could hold its own against the rain that came pouring down that November afternoon, between the hours of four and five. Every gutter in High Street, Slopperton; every gutter in Broad Street (which was of course the narrowest street); in New Street (which by the same rule was the oldest street); in East Street, West Street, Blue Dragon Street, and Windmill Street; every gutter in every one of these thoroughfares was a little Niagara, with a maelstrom at the corner, down which such small craft as bits of orange-peel, old boots and shoes, scraps of paper, and fragments of rag were absorbed—as better ships have been in the great northern whirlpool. That dingy stream, the Sloshy, was swollen into a kind of dirty Mississippi, and the graceful coal-barges which adorned its bosom were stripped of the clothes-lines and fluttering linen which usually were to be seen on their decks. A bad, determined, black-minded November day. A day on which the fog shaped itself into a demon, and lurked behind men’s shoulders, whispering into their ears, “Cut your throat!—you know you’ve got a razor, and can’t shave with it, because you’ve been drinking and your hand shakes; one little gash under the left ear, and the business is done. It’s the best thing you can do. It is, really.” A day on which the rain, the monotonous ceaseless persevering rain, has a voice as it comes down, and says, “Don’t you think you could go melancholy mad? Look at me; be good enough to watch me for a couple of hours or so, and think, while you watch me, of the girl who jilted you ten years ago; and of what a much better man you would be to-day if she had only loved you truly. Oh, I think, if you’ll only be so good as watch me, you might really contrive to go mad.” Then again the wind. What does the wind say, as it comes cutting through the dark passage, and stabbing you, like a coward as it is, in the back, just between the shoulders—what does it say? Why, it whistles in your ear a reminder of the little bottle of laudanum1 you’ve got upstairs, which you had for your toothache last week, and never used. A foggy wet windy November day. A bad day—a dangerous day. Keep us from bad thoughts to-day, and keep us out of the Police Reports2 next week. Give us a glass of something hot and strong, and a bit of something nice for supper, and bear with us a little this day; for if the strings of yonder piano—an instrument fashioned on mechanical principles by mortal hands—if they are depressed and slackened by the influence of damp and fog, how do we know that there may not be some string in this more critical instrument, the human mind, not made on mechanical principles or by mortal hands, a little out of order on this bad November day?
But of course bad influences can only come
to bad men; and of course he must be a very bad man whose spirits go up and down with every fluctuation of the weather-glass. Virtuous people no doubt are virtuous always; and by no chance, or change, or trial, or temptation, can they ever become other than virtuous. Therefore why should a wet day or a dark day depress them? No; they look out of the windows at houseless men and women and fatherless and motherless children wet through to the skin, and thank Heaven that they are not as other men:3 like good Christians, punctual ratepayers, and unflinching church-goers as they are.
Thus it was with Mr. Jabez North, assistant and usher4 at the academy of Dr. Tappenden. He was not in anywise affected by fog, rain, or wind. There was a fire at one end of the schoolroom, and Allecompain Major5 had been fined sixpence, and condemned to a page of Latin grammar, for surreptitiously warming his worst chilblain at the bars thereof. But Jabez North did not want to go near the fire, though in his official capacity he might have done so; ay, even might have warmed his hands in moderation. He was not cold, or if he was cold, he didn’t mind being cold. He was sitting at his desk, mending pens and hearing six red-nosed boys conjugate the verb Amare, “to love”—while the aforesaid boys were giving practical illustrations of the active verb “to shiver,”—and the passive ditto, “to be puzzled.” He was not only a good young man, this Jabez North (and he must have been a very good young man, for his goodness was in almost every mouth in Slopperton—indeed, he was looked upon by many excellent old ladies as an incarnation of the adjective “pious”)—but he was rather a handsome young man also. He had delicate features, a pale fair complexion, and, as young women said, very beautiful blue eyes; only it was unfortunate that these eyes, being, according to report, such a very beautiful colour, had a shifting way with them, and never looked at you long enough for you to find out their exact hue, or their exact expression either. He had also what was called a very fine head of fair curly hair, and what some people considered a very fine head—though it was a pity it shelved off on either side in the locality where prejudiced people place the organ of conscientiousness. A professor of phrenology,6 lecturing at Slopperton, had declared Jabez North to be singularly wanting in that small virtue; and had even gone so far as to hint that he had never met with a parallel case of deficiency in the entire moral region, except in the skull of a very distinguished criminal, who invited a friend to dinner and murdered him on the kitchen stairs while the first course was being dished. But of course the Sloppertonians pronounced this professor to be an impostor, and his art a piece of charlatanism, as they were only too happy to pronounce any professor or any art that came in their way.
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