"But What Will People Think?"
Detectives and disgrace in Victorian fiction
“Sometimes they faints at the very fust sight of such as we; but we has to bear it. A little more air, if you could, mum;—and just dash the water on in drops like. They feels a drop more than they would a bucketful,—and then when they comes to they hasn’t to change theirselves.”
If you’ve read a good deal of classic literature, you may have noticed that genteel characters in early-to-mid-Victorian fiction have a curious tendency to react to the sight of a police detective as one might to the appearance of a cockroach. I’ve often found this attitude puzzling. Why should respectable and upper-class citizens look down upon policemen, whose job was to preserve law and order and to protect such respectable citizens’ lives and property? Why did even the middle-class occupation of inspector or detective seem to be regarded as a vulgar or disreputable profession? It didn’t seem to be merely a fastidious objection based on their spending so much time in the company of the criminal classes—it seemed to be an aversion to the very nature of their work.
What was wrong with solving crimes?
It wasn’t until I read Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, a novel in which several titled characters are questioned in connection with a jewel robbery, that I began to see an angle that shed light not only on this attitude, but many of the tropes of Victorian detective fiction in general.
The Affront of Suspicion
“I have been asked questions that should not have been asked,” declares one character in The Eustace Diamonds stiffly during the course of the investigation; and around that point something about Victorian mindsets clicked for me.
Respectability—or if you couldn’t quite manage that, at least the appearance of respectability—was a paramount virtue of the Victorian era. Being questioned in connection with a crime, even if one was not a direct suspect, was a public implication that one might know something about it or might be connected to someone who did; and to make such an implication was an affront—an insult. So a detective, in a sense, was a person who offered insults to respectable people for a living.
The Eustace Diamonds is a set of variations on the theme of what might be considered the unofficial motto of the Victorian era: “But what will people think?” In a darkly comedic plot, Trollope gives us a breathtakingly self-centered anti-heroine who defies conventions and the threat of scandal and uses them as weapons when it suits her, to get her own way; plus several supporting characters variously cowering in the face of public opinion or exasperated at the necessity for delicacy standing in the way of legal justice being done.
The most overt expression of the theme comes through the character of the unhappy Lord Fawn, conventional, respectable, and extremely sensitive to public opinion, who desperately regrets his proposal to a woman who refuses to relinquish a diamond necklace that does not legally belong to her—but is afraid to break the engagement and be condemned by society as a jilt. Unless it can be publicly proved that Lady Eustace is guilty of some crime or impropriety, she will be considered the injured party; and so Lord Fawn writhes unhappily in his engagement. It is telling, however, that Lord Fawn is resigned to the idea of going through with the marriage if only Lady Eustace will give up the controversial diamonds and avoid a scandal. A selfish, lying, gold-digging wife is apparently not the worst evil that can befall a Victorian gentleman—as long as your joint social reputation remains technically unspotted.
A passage from chapter twenty-nine of the novel is particularly revealing regarding the concept of reputation:
[Lucy] did not quite understand the usages of the world in the matter; but she did know that the one offence which a gentleman is supposed never to commit is that of speaking an untruth. The offence may be one committed oftener than any other by gentlemen,—as also by all other people; but, nevertheless, it is regarded by the usages of society as being the one thing which a gentleman never does. Of all this Lucy understood something. The word “lie” she knew to be utterly abominable. That Lizzie Eustace was a little liar had been acknowledged between herself and the Fawn girls very often,—but to have told Lady Eustace that any word spoken by her was a lie, would have been a worse crime than the lie itself.
In other words, a certain brand of Victorian etiquette valued the appearance of virtue more than virtue itself—valued an unsullied reputation even more than justice being served. And if accusing a lady or gentleman of a crime is worse than the crime itself, then the detective who inquires where they were at eight o’clock on the night in question must be the worst offender in the world!
Applying this principle broadly to matters of crime and detection, the conventions of mid-Victorian detective fiction become more understandable, if no less maddening. The horror of disgrace drives so many Victorian mystery plots—indeed, half the labor of fictional detectives from the period seems to be spent in trying to convince someone who definitely knows something, but won’t talk, to do so. The disgrace of being publicly found out in a crime often looms larger than the crime itself, even if the crime is murder; and most of the characters are desperately trying to shield someone, whether that person be guilty or innocent.
Guilt by Association
While most of this anxious obstruction of justice comes from spouses, sweethearts, parents, or siblings fearing for a loved one’s reputation, the fear of being tarnished by association—another principle that looms large in Victorian thought—is often a major element as well. If one member of a family is guilty, it isn’t he alone who is disgraced for life—so are his sisters and his cousins and his aunts. (One wonders if the lingering effects of this shared-disgrace mindset, even more than family affection, account for the number of characters still determinedly shielding loved ones throughout the later Golden Age of mystery fiction.)
How seriously Victorians took this threat of disgrace, and the lengths to which characters in literature of the time go to avoid it, seems almost outlandish to a modern generation that is more inclined to shrug its shoulders and remark “oh, well, there’s one in every family” when they hear that a cousin of someone they know has been arrested for a bizarre crime. In an 1886 novel1 by Francis Marion Crawford, a woman whose husband is in prison for a financial crime poses as a widow and allows her young daughter to believe that her father is dead—and what is more, all the adult characters in the novel seriously agree that this is for the best, that if the little girl knew the truth about her father it would ruin her entire life. And in a minor effort2 by Louis Tracy coming as late as 1919, a man changes identities twice and fakes his own death once just to keep his grown daughter from knowing he has a criminal brother!
The Objectionable Spy
Another aspect of mid-Victorian prejudice toward detectives is the notion that it is disgraceful to spy on anyone, even criminals. An extremely heightened concept of the sanctity of secrets and confidences seems to have been another general Victorian characteristic—often exemplified by detectives’ hesitation to press direct questions on genteel suspects in mystery fiction of the era. In The Female Detective by Andrew Forrester, published in 1864, the nameless woman narrator observes:
My trade is a necessary one, but the world holds aloof my order. Nor do I blame the world over much for its determination. I am quite aware that there is something peculiarly objectionable in the spy, but nevertheless it will be admitted that the spy is as peculiarly necessary as he or she is peculiarly objectionable.
The world would very soon discover the loss of the detective system, and yet if such a loss were to take place, if the certain bad results which would be sure to follow its abolition were made most evident, the world would still avoid the detective as a social companion, from the next moment he or she resumed office.
Again, this feeling seems to have trickled down in subtle ways into the mystery genre in general. Even in some Golden Age fiction I’ve noticed the ghost of an idea that it’s somehow dishonorable to use subterfuge or trickery to secure evidence even against a guilty murderer (a thing I find baffling and intriguing and which could be a whole discussion of its own). But over time, it would seem, an acceptance of the detective’s usefulness and necessity gradually overtook the objection to ‘spying.’ (It’s interesting to contemplate whether this change coincided with a shift towards hunting for and interpreting physical clues as the main focus of detectives’ work, rather than cultivating or eavesdropping on suspects in hopes of catching a confession.)
But the dread of disgrace remained a firm fixture.
It’s amusing that as the popularity of detective fiction grew throughout the later Victorian period, scandal continued to drive its plots—swapped heirs, secret marriages, absconding embezzlers, stolen jewels, and forged papers abounded. Late-Victorians apparently enjoyed a good helping of scandal so long as it was safely confined between the pages of a book or magazine. But although the dread of disgrace continued to provide motives for fictional murders and shape suspects’ behavior, with each decade the attitude towards the investigating detectives seems to have relaxed a little, gradually shifting into admiration for their intelligence in figuring things out (despite the best efforts of suspects’ relations) and capturing the rightful criminals, until by around the turn of the 20th century the detectives were firmly fixed as heroes of the story in their own right. Seeing the truth brought to light and justice done became more overtly a primary goal in the mystery story—although sparing the family name often remained a solid secondary one.
Perhaps that was one reason for the popularity of private detectives: they could wind things up more quietly than official police investigators. The whole raison d’être for many private detectives of fiction was having some discreet person to ask for help with ominous puzzles “without having to bring the police into it.” And whether the police were involved or no, avoiding the scandal of a public trial and conviction by seeing off the perpetrator with a convenient accident or tidy suicide persisted far, far into the detective fiction of the 20th century.
In more than one way, Victorian tropes from the dawn of the genre cast long shadows.
If you enjoy The Second Sentence and you’d like to show appreciation without committing to a paid subscription, you could buy me a coffee or buy a book.
A Tale of a Lonely Parish
The House Round the Corner
I recently finished Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, which is an almost slapstick depiction of Victorian sensibilities. I find it quite funny that people used to get so ruffled over things like, as you pointed out, being questioned by officers, or being associated with people who had made mistakes, grave or otherwise. I suppose in a way we have made progress in that we don't as easily condemn people for things like being in debt, though we've swung the opposite way and that's not great either...
This was interesting! Should I put The Eustace Diamonds on my list? I've never read Trollope.