Richard Marsh

Minna Vuohelainen

Description

‘Richard Marsh’ (Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857–1915) was a bestselling, versatile and prolific author of gothic, crime, adventure, romantic and comic fiction. This book, the first on Marsh, establishes his credentials as a significant agent within the fin de siècle gothic revival. Marsh’s work spans a range of gothic modes, including the canonical fin de siècle subgenres of urban and imperial gothic and gothic-inflected sensation and supernatural fiction, but also rarer hybrid genres such as the comic gothic and the occult romance. His greatest success came in 1897 when he published his bestselling invasion narrative The Beetle: A Mystery, a novel that articulated many of the key themes of fin de siècle urban gothic and outsold its close rival, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, well into the twentieth century. The present work extends studies of Marsh’s literary production beyond The Beetle, contending that, in addition to his undoubted interest in non-normative gender and ethnic identities, Marsh was a writer with an acute sense of spatiality, whose fiction can be read productively through the lens of spatial theory.

Introduction
Chapter 1: ‘Exactly where I was I could not tell’: panopticism, imageability and the Gothic city
Chapter 2: ‘The key of the street’: displacement, transit and Gothic flux
Chapter 3: Houses of mystery: liminal thresholds and Gothic interiors
Chapter 4: Laughing in the face of the authorities: haunting and heterotopia in Richard Marsh’s short supernatural fiction
Conclusion
Bibliography
Primary: volumes
Primary: periodical publication
Primary: archival sources
Secondary

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Romance
• Gothic

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 26 août 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783163410
• Langue: English

Extrait

SERIES PREFACE
Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions is dedicated to publishing innovative introductory guides to writers of the Gothic. The series explores how new critical approaches and perspectives can help us to recontextualize an author’s work in a way that is both accessible and informative. The series publishes work that is of interest to students of all levels and teachers of the literary Gothic and cultural history.
SERIES EDITORS
Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield Benjamin Fisher, University of Mississippi
EDITORIAL BOARD
Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia David Punter, University of Bristol Angela Wright, University of Sheffield Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona
GOTHIC AUTHORS: CRITICAL REVISIONS

Richard Marsh
Minna Vuohelainen
© Minna Vuohelainen, 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN  978-1-78316-339-7 e-ISBN 978-1-78316-341-0
The right of Minna Vuohelainen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover design: Clifford Hayes Cover illustration: Lucanus cervus . © Life on white/Alamy.
In memory of Pirkko Vuohelainen (1949–2014)
C ONTENTS
Introduction
1 ‘Exactly Where I Was I Could not Tell’: Panopticism, Imageability and the Gothic City
2 ‘The Key of the Street’: Displacement, Transit and Gothic Flux
3 Houses of Mystery: Liminal Thresholds and Gothic Interiors
4 Laughing in the Face of the Authorities: Haunting and Heterotopia in Richard Marsh’s Short Supernatural Fiction
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Primary: volumes
Primary: periodical publication
Primary: archival sources
Secondary
Introduction

Why Richard Marsh?
‘Richard Marsh’ (Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857–1915) was one of the bestselling popular authors of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Commended during his life as ‘a master of his craft’, in command of considerable ‘constructive skill’ and an ‘unusually pleasant and lucid’ writing style, he marshalled ‘an ingenious series of plots and counterplots, devices, and mysterious inter-relations’ in his fiction. 1 Marsh, now increasingly recognised as a seminal popular writer of the fin-de-siècle, belonged to a generation of professional authors who produced genre fiction for a growing audience of lower-middle-class consumers of print who, in the aftermath of the 1870 Education Act, were increasingly demanding affordable and entertaining fiction, either in book or magazine form. In the course of his career, Marsh catered for a number of such audiences: in the early 1880s, he wrote boys’ adventure and school fiction under his real name, Bernard Heldmann; in the 1890s, his fiction largely fell into the topical genres of Gothic, occult and crime fiction; in the Edwardian period, the bulk of his writing exploited the vogue for thrillers and popular romances; during the first year of the First World War, at the very end of his life, he began to move towards spy and war fiction; and much of his work includes elements of the New Humour. Marsh was as prolific as he was versatile: he wrote, as Bernard Heldmann, seven novels, one further serial novel, and about a dozen short stories or novellas and, as Richard Marsh, fifty-four novels, twenty-two short-story collections, and over 250 short stories. Published alongside such popular authors as Arthur Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse, Edith Nesbit, H. G. Wells, Jerome K. Jerome and Grant Allen, Marsh’s work received substantial critical attention during his lifetime and was directly compared to the fiction of Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins. His greatest success came in 1897, when he published his bestselling invasion narrative The Beetle: A Mystery , a novel that articulated many of the key themes of fin-de-siècle urban Gothic and outsold its close rival, Bram Stoker’s Dracula , well into the twentieth century. 2
Marsh’s fiction continued to appeal to the reading public into the inter-war years, which also witnessed film and stage adaptations of The Beetle , but from the Second World War until the 1990s his work was all but forgotten, possibly because of the difficulty of translating his bestselling novel into an appealing cinematic format. In 1966, his grandson Robert Aickman, a fine author of ‘strange tales’, published The Attempted Rescue , an autobiography which established that Richard Marsh was in fact Bernard Heldmann and speculated on the possibility of some scandal in the author’s early life. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hugh and Graham Greene reprinted the first of Marsh’s Judith Lee stories in The Crooked Counties (1973), a volume in the series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes , and included The Beetle in Victorian Villainies (1984), a collection of four forgotten Victorian mysteries. This early interest in Marsh’s work provides some evidence of its appeal to collectors of genre fiction and other Victoriana. Critical interest in Marsh’s work dates from the University of Luton’s pioneering 1994 edition of The Beetle , introduced by William Baker, and academic interest in The Beetle steadily built up from the second half of the 1990s. In 2004, Broadview Press brought out the first critical edition of The Beetle by Julian Wolfreys. At the same time, interest in The Beetle began to translate into a broader enquiry into Marsh’s work, thanks to Valancourt Books’ enthusiasm for reprints of lesser-known Marsh texts. These editions have made the study of Marsh’s work possible to a new generation of scholars, and the author is now increasingly acknowledged as a key contributor to fin-de-siècle popular culture.
Initial interest in The Beetle was at least partly driven by its similarity and, indeed, perceived debt to Bram Stoker’s Dracula , also published in 1897. Marsh’s novel is now known to have predated Stoker’s in serial form, and it is perhaps more useful to consider how Marsh’s genre fiction fits within the culture and the literary market of the fin-de-siècle. 3 It is my contention that Marsh was a significant agent, not simply an imitator, within the fin-de-siècle Gothic revival. His work spans a range of Gothic modes, including the canonical fin-de-siècle subgenres of urban and imperial Gothic and Gothic-inflected sensation and supernatural fiction, but also rarer hybrid genres such as the comic Gothic and the occult romance. However, Marsh was not only a Gothic writer: such was his versatility that his work also includes detective stories, spy fiction, war stories, thrillers, female-focalised romances, male quest romances, comic sketches, New Humour, religious parables, essays and, under his real name Bernard Heldmann, school stories, boys’ adventure fiction and religious fiction. Just as humour, romance and crime intrude on Marsh’s Gothic productions, so Gothic tropes can often be located in Marsh texts best described as belonging to other genres. This study suggests something of Marsh’s versatility, and as a topical, professional, prolific author writing in a range of genres and often questioning the period’s dominant modes of thinking, he has much to offer to the student of the fin-de-siècle period. A century has passed since Marsh’s death, and the time is now ripe for a reassessment of his substantial oeuvre beyond The Beetle .
Engaging with a range of texts and themes thus far unexplored in Marsh criticism, this book argues that Marsh was a central figure in the fin-de-siècle Gothic revival, and that any critical study of the middlebrow literary landscape of the period must remain incomplete without a consideration of Marsh’s often ambiguous role within it. A journalist as well as a novelist, Marsh engages with topical fin-de-siècle issues such as gender, race, degeneration, criminality, and urban and imperial problems in ways that are often ideologically ambivalent, even counter-hegemonic, and a study of his work thus has the potential to challenge scholarly interpretations of the period’s dominant cultural ideologies. Existing studies of Marsh’s fiction tend to focus either on questions of gendered, sexual or racial identity in his work, or on the interaction of the Empire and London, its centre, almost exclusively in the context of The Beetle. 4 I contend that in addition to his undoubted interest in non-normative gender and ethnic identities, Marsh was a writer with an acute sense of spatiality, whose fiction can be read productively through the lens of spatial theory, an approach often neglected in studies of the period and of the Gothic mode more generally. The chapters in this book are intended to show how pervasive and diverse spatial tropes are in Marsh’s Gothic fiction and how spatiality defines his literary production, but also to suggest that spatial theory could usefully be applied to the study of the Gothic mode more broadly. They also point to a radical modernity in Marsh’s Gothic writing, suggesting that fin-de-siècle Gothic, a popular mode of writing, shares a spatial thematic with elitist, proto-modernist forms of writing, blurring the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture.
Richard Marsh and the fin-de-siècle literary marketplace
While the predominant genre of Marsh’s fiction varied over the course of his long career, his work almost invariably contains some Gothic