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As the creator of The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), a novel which was one of the best-selling of the popular cycle of late-Victorian gothic tales, the prolific Richard Marsh was for a time a successful and widely-read author. Despite the amount of commentary his work attracted in the contemporary periodicals (much of it sarcastic), Marsh, like his lurid fiction, had fallen deeply into obscurity by the mid-twentieth century and was for a long time consigned to the margins of fin-de-siècle scholarship. In recent years, his work has started to attract a greater degree of critical scrutiny as his important contribution to several late-Victorian popular fiction genres—crime, comedy and romance, as well as gothic—is increasingly recognised. In fact, the first collection of scholarly essays on Marsh, aimed at exploring his fiction beyond The Beetle, is currently in production. 1 Though he remains an elusive and even downright evasive author, recent Marsh scholarship has also produced breakthroughs in filling in some of the missing details of his biography, largely through the pioneering research of Minna Vuohelainen. At long last the reason for his puzzling disappearance and change of name has been revealed—he was sentenced to eighteen months hard labour for fraud (as this chapter subsequently discusses). 2 Before such details came to light, Julian Wolfreys, in the introduction to his fore-running 2004 edition of The Beetle, stated, ‘Marsh’s writing … gives little if any clue as to the author’s life … If anything, Marsh’s anonymity is virtually guaranteed by the fact that his writing is so typical of late Victorian popular melodramatic and sensation fiction’. 3 While the characterisation of Marsh’s writing as highly representative of fin-de-siècle sensation is apposite, the assertion regarding the author’s anonymity is less so.

Bearing in mind the now-known details of Marsh’s career, it is possible to catch glimpses of the author lurking behind his texts. Fraud plays a crucial role in several of his novels, and forgery of the specific kind Marsh committed underpins the plot of the sensational gothic tale The Goddess: A Demon (1900). 4 The theme of precariousness, of falling out of the safety net of middle-class life into the depredations of the underworld of poverty and crime, pervades The Goddess, The Beetle and the comparable gothic tales The Devil’s Diamond (1893) and The Joss: A Reversion (1901), as well as much of Marsh’s work in other genres. It is the remit of this chapter, therefore, to try to elicit traces of this elusive author via a close reading of his seminal fin-de-siècle gothic tales, as these are what Marsh is now best known for (though, in fact, the romance was his principle genre). This reading will focus not on the gothic content of these tales, analysis of which understandably dominates critical engagement with them, but on the incongruous moments of realism which jar with their gothic modality, arguing that it is in these moments that the connections with Marsh’s life are most visible.

Entertainer, Author, Fraudster, Celebrity: The Known Facts of Marsh’s Multiple Life

In order to highlight where Marsh’s gothic fiction resonates with his personal experience, a brief overview of what is known of his life makes a necessary starting point. 5 A biographical fact most emblematic of the elusiveness of his identity is the author’s aforementioned self-refashioning— his change of name from Bernard Heldmann to Richard Marsh (as the author will be referred to throughout) in the mid-1880s. Given that he produced fiction under the names Heldmann and Marsh, it is not only his personal identity that is complex and multiple, but his authorial identity also. But this was not the reasonably straightforward case of an author producing work under one or more pseudonyms in order to reach a wider audience. Instead, Bernard Heldmann, an author starting to make a name for himself for boys’ school stories in the early 1880s, disappeared in 1884 and re-emerged in 1888 as Richard Marsh, writer of a wide variety of popular fiction for adults. 6 The reason for the name change was the subject of much speculation before Marsh’s fraud was discovered in 2009, and it warrants some explanation here, starting with a look at immediate Heldmann family history, as Marsh was not the first of his family to engage in fraud.

The author was born Richard Bernard Heldmann in London in 1857 to a seemingly respectable middle-class mercantile family, which was in fact on the brink of scandal and ignominy. At this time Marsh’s father, the recently-arrived German immigrant Joseph Heldmann, was working as the London agent for the Nottingham lace manufacturing business of his wife’s relations, while the business was struggling in the 1857–8 global economic crisis. 7 Just after Marsh’s birth, his father was discovered to have systematically defrauded his partners of the substantial sum of c. £16,000, seemingly to meet bills for the lavish furnishing of his new house. 8 This was revealed in well-publicised bankruptcy proceedings in 1857–8, following which Heldmann reinvented himself as a school master so successfully that he was elected to the College of Preceptors by 1860 and opened his own school in West London. 9 Reportage of the bankruptcy proceedings characterises Heldmann as a charlatan who had set up in business on credit in order to entrap his English partners and ensnare his English wife, and the lengthy excerpts cited from his letters certainly reveal a considerable talent for lying or for self-deception, either of which may have made him a difficult father. 10 A latent xenophobia towards Heldmann is also evident in suggestions of the desirability of his potential repatriation and, in the judge’s view, of the defrauded as ‘most respectable men’ versus what he casts as ‘the knaveries’ and ‘effrontery’ of Heldmann. 11 It is also pertinent to note that Heldmann was from a Jewish background but must have converted to Christianity by this point. 12 The cited excerpts of his letters show an emphasis on his adopted religion as a means of establishing solidarity with his business partners once relations became strained, suggestive of an ability to craft a persona convenient to the requirements of his situation. 13

Whether by coincidence or influence, the pattern of Marsh’s life was to replicate that of his father closely. The reason for his disappearance was that he too engaged in swindling, incurring the conviction for fraud, and he too was to reinvent himself several times, ultimately successfully. Fleeting references in contemporary periodicals suggest that in the late 1870s the young Marsh tried and failed to make a career in the world of musical entertainment. 14 Certainly by 1880, he had switched to fiction writing, and by 1882 the recognition he had gained for his boys’ stories (written as Heldmann) earned him an editorial position under G. A. Henty in the ‘jolliest magazine ever published for boys’, Union Jack. 15 But in June 1883, Union Jack disassociated itself publically from Marsh and in 1884 the likely reason for this emerged. 16 Marsh, over the course of 1883, had been passing forged cheques in various locations in southern England, Guernsey and France under a variety of aliases in order to maintain a lifestyle considerably beyond the means of a fledgling novelist. 17 The aliases he gave, Captain Roberts, Captain Martyn and Dr Wilson, for example, were selected to evoke professional gentlemanly respectability and certainly the effect was convincing, contemporary reports describing his ‘appearance [as] a well-to-do gentleman’ and even rendering his ‘awistoquatic’ accent in print. 18 The story broke in the regional newspapers in February 1884, with Marsh sentenced in April 1884 and serving 18 months imprisonment in Maidstone Jail.

The details of Marsh’s life remain scanty, but he was released in 1885, married quickly and had a rapid succession of children, which would have put him under severe pressure to earn a living. It seems that he turned again to fiction, and by 1888, if not before, was living and publishing short stories under the name of Richard Marsh. His success and output grew over the course of the following decade to the point where he felt it necessary to defend himself sporadically in the popular literary press from charges of hasty production. 19 Victoria Margree designates him one of those ‘commercially successful writers whose significance for fin de siècle literary culture is increasingly recognised today’ noting a newsagent’s recollection that he was among a handful of authors whom ‘every other person’ was reading. 20 His establishment as a successful professional author was ensured by the reception of The Beetle in 1897 and grew until his death in 1915, as confirmed in a rare (posthumously published) interview in the prestigious Strand Magazine, his main periodical outlet after 1897. 21

In terms of the possible connections between the chequered events of Marsh’s life and those depicted in his fiction, Callum James has observed that the theme of dual identity is strongly present across his oeuvre—in ‘The Mask’ (1892) and A Metamorphosis (1903), for example. 22 Even before the details of Marsh’s own incarceration were known, Vuohelainen had identified the possible autobiographical nature of the detailed accounts of prison life in Marsh’s several short stories on the theme. 23 And Margree observes that ‘many of his fictional characters are actual or aspiring authors, whose professional struggles … are integrally related to his plots’. 24 Further suggestive of the possibility of autobiographical traces, the schoolboy fiction written as Heldmann was frequently praised for its verisimilitude, reviews disclosing assumptions of the author’s close familiarity with his subject: ‘the boys and their doings have a certain reality about them’, are based on ‘close observation’ and ‘drawn from life’; whereas his contemporary attempt at a boys’ nautical adventure tale was slated for its lack of realistic detail. 25 Interestingly, Marsh’s grandson Robert Aickman (also a writer of supernatural fiction), writes in his autobiography that Marsh attended (and was sent down from) Eton (6), though no documentary evidence supports this claim; but Vuohelainen suggests his school tales may have been informed by experience of his father’s school. 26 Aickman himself praises this very quality of verisimilitude in Marsh’s tales of ‘lower middle class life’ depicting the adventures of the junior clerk Sam Briggs: Marsh ‘could see things from Sam’s point of view’ because, like Sam, Marsh came ‘from a lower tier of the [social] pyramid’ and ‘really knew the milieu’ (7–8). Echoing the negative reviews of the nautical tale, Aickman claims Marsh later failed to convincingly place Sam amidst the action of the First World War as he ‘did not know the milieu, or, along with most of his contemporaries, have the smallest idea what was happening’ (8, original emphasis).

Locating the Author: Fraud, Precariousness and the Realist Gothic

Autographical traces are perhaps less to be expected in tales of gothic horror and sensational excess than in tales from the more realist traditions depicting boys’ schools, prison conditions and clerk life. And certainly in the reviewers’ appraisals of The Beetle, The Goddess and The Joss, convincing detail was neither noticed nor praised. What was highlighted either for commendation or opprobrium were the horrific and fantastical elements, while the tales’ implausibility was a recurrent theme. The Academy, for example, praises The Beetle as ‘a very ingenious book of horrors … [which] succeeds in producing that sensation of horror in … readers which is a prime necessity in a story of this kind’. 27 The Goddess is variously described as a ‘creditable’ ‘shocker’ and a ‘red-hot melodrama’. 28 On the other hand, The Athenaeum scathingly deems that The Beetle’s half-hearted gesture at verisimilitude, a formulaic disclaimer about not divulging the ‘real name[s]’ of the characters, is ‘as improbable as the rest of the story’. 29 Of The Goddess, meanwhile, The Academy holds that ‘The public who will accept the solution of this story will accept anything’. 30 Jarlath Killeen observes that there was a very similar initial response to Bram Stoker’s now much better-known Dracula (1897), a text which runs along such strikingly similar lines to The Beetle as to provoke frequent comparison between the two in contemporary and current criticism. Early reviewers of Dracula were not concerned about what the Count may have connoted, as per the modern critical response, but whether the character had the power to frighten readers—especially nervous children and maiden aunts—and if so, whether this was to be lauded or decried. 31

Like Dracula, Marsh’s gothic texts can be placed firmly at the centre of the late-Victorian gothic tradition, not least because The Beetle considerably outsold Dracula into the early twentieth century. 32 This fin-de-siècle tradition of texts written in the gothic mode has been noted both for its contemporary topicality and for the critical interest it has since generated; this latter is based, among other things, on its ability to negotiate the social concerns of an era of profound social transformation—concerns about science and technology, secularisation, catastrophe, urbanisation, gender, race, class and empire, to name but a representative few. As Alexandra Warwick observes, the point at which the gothic ‘could be said to be “Victorian”, is the moment at which it is being used explicitly to articulate the concerns of the present, and setting them within that same recognisable present’, as Marsh’s fiction very much does. 33 This exploration, however, will eschew employing the traditional and productive lenses of science, empire, gender, class, and so on, as the means through which to read Marsh’s gothic, in favour of highlighting the numerous jarring moments of realism which are present in the texts, despite the reviewers’ dismissals. And, indeed, these moments too engage with contemporary concerns, but directly and not via the familiar gestures of indirection and metaphor which characterise the gothic mode. This exploration of the incongruous moments of realism which jar with the gothic modality of Marsh’s texts, then, will help to provide a fuller picture of both the remarkable revival of the gothic literary mode at the fin-de-siècle and the under-acknowledged interaction between the gothic and realist modes, as well as widening our perspective on Marsh in line with recent work on his texts beyond The Beetle.

To retain a manageable scope, this essay focuses on two sets of realist intrusions into the selected gothic texts— those depicting fraud and debt and those depicting the threat of social precariousness and downward mobility. The specific crime of cheque fraud, Marsh’s own offence, recurs with surprising frequency in The Goddess, committed by multiple characters; but though it provides the motive for the violent crime that drives the main plot, its presence is much obscured by the narrative’s far more prominent sensational elements. In brief, the ‘goddess’ is a sacrificial idol of Indian provenance, a ‘diabolically ingenious’ contrivance of ‘leaping’ blades encased in scarlet leather; the gory descriptions of its effects form the most arresting aspect of the narrative, not least because its malign ferocity seems to exceed the material explanation of its mechanism. 34 The idol was brought to London by the text’s main fraudster, the degenerate imperial adventurer, Edwin Lawrence, and used by him to murder his wealthy brother Philip after Edwin was discovered passing forged cheques in Philip’s name. Here it should be noted that Marsh’s own ‘respectable’ brother Harry Heldmann had provided the introduction that allowed him to open the bank account on which Marsh’s own fraudulent cheques were drawn. 35 The autobiographical resonances do not end here, though: the crime of cheque forgery drives the romantic subplot of The Goddess too, as the heroine’s younger brother also turns out to be a forger—the ‘expert penman’ forced to fake the bills for Lawrence after falling into debt to him (155). The narratorial voice, solely condemnatory of the debauched Lawrence, seems to oscillate between sympathy and disgust in relating the young penman’s position. Debt and forgery are the reasons for his downfall, just as Marsh had been passing forged cheques to meet his expenses in 1883–4, and disgust seems to account for the ultimate fate Marsh assigns the young man when drunkenness and drowning derail his fresh start in Canada.

The accounts of debt and fraud are by no means the only autobiographically resonant details in The Goddess: the young penman has been attempting to evade detection using an ‘assumed name’ (38), and it transpires that he has been led astray by a shady Jewish financier. Despite Marsh’s father’s Jewish background (a fact it seems Marsh must have known, given that his grandson Aickman was aware of it), Marsh’s writings contain some deeply offensive portrayals of Jewish characters. The Jewish master forger in The Goddess, not only ‘makes a speciality of dealing in forged cheques’, but also ruins good, and implicitly non-Jewish, young men by initiating them into the trade (141). Similarly, a story in Marsh’s collection The Seen and the Unseen (1900) features an unscrupulous diamond dealer who is not just Jewish, but a ‘German Jew’—Joseph Heldmann’s specific ethnicity; he is depicted in a most unfavourable light as an ‘oily Houndsditch Hebrew’, ‘oddly out of place’ in fashionable [London] society, to which Marsh was by then gaining access. 36 In the absence of any relevant letters or diaries it is impossible to know anything of Marsh’s relationship with his father, but these representations, though stereotypical fare for the time, seem at very least untoward for someone of his parentage. 37 Although The Goddess is generically hybrid, a blend of crime and gothic tale, the sordid, realistically detailed account of the circle of forgers (Lawrence, the indebted young penman and the Jewish ringleader) sits in uneasy tension with the preposterousness of the main plot: with the sensational violence of the deaths, the exoticness of the demonic weapon, and the gothic elements that set the tone of the text, such as the prescient dream and the uncanny laughter. And while the forgery subplot is easily overlooked, it is in this realist intrusion into the melodramatic Goddess that the connections with the known facts of Marsh’s life are clear.

The sordidly commonplace quandary of unpaid bills also crops up amidst the similarly sensational shenanigans of the main plots of The Joss and The Devil’s Diamond. There is an incongruous emphasis in The Joss upon the precariously-situated lower-class characters’ inability to pay a restaurant bill—they fear being ‘sent to prison for obtaining soup on false pretences’, 38 as the newspaper reportage documents that Marsh’s conviction was for obtaining supplies under ‘false pretences’. 39 While in The Devil’s Diamond, contention over an outstanding undertaker’s bill forms a curiously mundane counterpoint to the bizarre main plot concerning the terrible supernatural power of a cursed Indian jewel which is haunted by a demonic ape. Further demonstrative of the potentially autobiographical nature of the representation of debt in Marsh’s fiction is one of the first stories published under his adopted name in 1888. ‘Payment for a Life’ is a crime tale which opens with an impecunious English writer down on his luck in France in the mid-1880s, unable to pay his landlady, waiting for his publisher’s cheque and dreading eviction, the timing and location particularly evocative of Marsh’s experience. 40 The tale additionally features an English swindler who nearly pins his crime on the young author, and forgery is also mentioned in connection with the ‘dreadful characters’ assumed to inhabit the ill-fated house in The Joss (123; discussed subsequently). While ‘Payment for a Life’ is not a gothic tale, it certainly highlights the importance of debt and swindling as themes in Marsh’s work from a very early stage. Debt, swindling and forgery continue to pervade Marsh’s oeuvre, are frequently the devices on which the plots of his crime tales turn, and thus even amidst the different modality of the gothic tales, their presence is marked.

The downward social trajectory of all three forgers in The Goddess is indicative of the second set of realist interludes in Marsh’s gothic fiction under consideration here—that of social precariousness, the danger of falling out of the security of middle- or even solid working-class existence, into the hand-to-mouth conditions of destitution and criminality. Here the connections to Marsh’s biography are less direct and operate more at a thematic level rather than at the level of plot detail, but Marsh had, of course, personally experienced social fall from the relatively secure middle-class position of his family, via his brief masquerade as a gentleman of means, to the hardships of imprisonment and forced labour. In The Goddess, Lawrence, a man of good family, has descended from luxurious chambers in Imperial Mansions to squatting in a disused studio in Pimlico, impelled by gambling, alcohol, debt and what seem to be hereditary failings; the young penman has fallen from his more marginal lower middle-class position to a life of concealment in the criminal underworld and exile in Canada; while the Jewish financier disappears leaving debts outstanding to him uncollected. This precariousness is more prominent in The Beetle and The Joss, while the haunted jewel in The Devil’s Diamond effects the very threat of social fall as the curse it unleashes dispossesses its owners of all their wealth.

The opening scene of Marsh’s best known work, The Beetle, is curiously compelling, its poignancy in marked contrast to the voyeuristic sensationalism of the rest of the text. In it, the recently-dismissed clerk Robert Holt is turned away even from the ignominious shelter of the casual ward of Hammersmith workhouse into the rainy night, his downward slide from the relative status and security of a clerk’s position to that of tramp is compellingly articulated:

To have tramped about all day looking for work; to have begged even for a job which would give me money enough to buy a little food … in vain, – that was bad. But, sick at heart, depressed in mind and in body, exhausted by hunger and fatigue, to have been compelled to pocket any little pride I might have left, and solicit, as the penniless, homeless tramp which indeed I was, a night’s lodging in the casual ward … that was … [m]uch worse. (41)

Following this refusal, Holt finds himself breaking into an empty house where he encounters and is mesmerically enslaved by the shape-shifting, gender-bending, demonic Egyptian Beetle creature, the villain of the piece. While this memorable scene eclipses the previous account of Holt’s wanderings and initiates the main gothic revenge plot, it is Holt’s very destitution that leaves him vulnerable to attack:

It was only because I feared that if I attempted to spend the night in the open air, without food, when the morning came I should be broken up, and fit for nothing, that I sought a night’s free board and lodging. It was really hunger which drove me to the workhouse door … [and] through the window… (45, 54)

Before the sensational encounter with the Beetle creature, the narration of Holt’s experience reads much like the realist slum and outcast London school of fiction exemplified by the work of George Gissing and Arthur Morrison, capturing well the untenable position of those caught in the system of day labour and temporary accommodation. 41 While these authors certainly borrowed gothic tropes to highlight the horror of slum conditions (Morrison’s best-selling A Child of the Jago (1896) opens in a far more gothic register than The Beetle, for example), in Marsh’s fiction the reverse process is at work and realist moments relating to his own experience and sense of social precariousness urge themselves into what is otherwise a sensational gothic tale.

There is a more sustained account of social precariousness in the depiction of the hand-to-mouth daily existence of the lower-class characters in The Joss in a similar but more protracted realist prologue to arch-gothic events that ensue. A farrago of implausibility that is difficult to summarise briefly, The Joss tells of the fateful inheritance bequeathed upon the shop assistant Mary (Pollie) Blyth by her seemingly deceased uncle Benjamin Batters. Batters, an English colonial miscreant previously transformed via a process of mutilation into the eponymous Joss, the living deity of a barbaric Chinese sect, has eschewed his divine status and absconded back to England with the sect’s treasure. The ‘reversion’ of the novel’s full title refers not only to Batters’ desertion, but also to the spurious, conditional bequest upon Pollie of a ‘disreputable’, shuttered house in which Batters is concealed from aggrieved Chinese sectaries who have pursued him to London (154). As in The Beetle, it is Pollie’s precarious social position that makes her vulnerable to the novel’s hostile forces: she is willing to comply with the stringent conditions of the will (she must admit no one to the house but one female companion, and be in residence every night) and preclude any hope of normal social intercourse to obtain the seeming security of possessing a home. It is, however, the very bequest which seems to save her from penury that exposes her to the vengeance—natural and perhaps supernatural—of the sectaries who would recover the Joss. Highlighting this chain of causality, the equally-penurious shop assistant Emily Purvis, who becomes Pollie’s companion in the house, is attacked and almost sacrificed by the stereotypically barbaric Chinese pursuers. 42

That the violence of The Joss is predicated on the precarious situations of the socially marginal characters (as the violence in The Goddess is predicated on debt and fraud) shows the deep thematic level at which this concern operates in Marsh’s text. The opening scenes of The Joss provide a realistic and highly detailed account of the inequities of a shop worker’s existence that lays major emphasis on its precariousness and implies some degree of authorial personal knowledge (though this cannot be substantiated). 43 Live-in assistants at the aptly named emporium of Cardew & Slaughter—Pollie, Emily and Pollie’s fiancé Tom Cooper— are hungry and badly fed, fined for trivial offences, and constantly on the brink of dismissal. When they are detained at night by the Joss’s retinue and miss the strict 10.30 curfew at the firm’s sleeping quarters, they exhibit the same terror as Holt in The Beetle of being locked out and forced to sleep on the street. Sacked without references the next day, they face destitution within a matter of days and it is at this point that Batters’ will emerges and Pollie must decide whether to accept its conditions—the overwhelming thematic logic of precariousness making the outcome inevitable. The main victim in The Devil’s Diamond, who experiences near financial ruin as a result of the jewel’s curse, is the unscrupulous landlord of the kind of insecure ‘weekly properties’ that the socially marginal found themselves forced to live in. Indeed, the novel opens with him contemplating summarily raising the rent (1), 44 which again highlights the irresistible allure of Pollie’s prospect of ‘life tenancy’, whatever the conditions (44). Again, as per the curious example of ‘Payment for a Life’, another early Marsh story, ‘A Bed for the Night’ (1889), corroborates the prominence of homelessness and insecurity in Marsh’s work. Beginning as a comic story about respectable men who have a missed train and need accommodation, it proceeds to show them wandering miserably in the rainy night, accidentally breaking into a barracks (which is described as resembling a workhouse), and ending up with a jail cell and court hearing. 45

Far from being non-autobiographical, Marsh’s fiction harps almost compulsively on themes which chime with his personal experience, which is all the more perplexing given that he had taken the trouble to change his name to distance himself from his past actions. Other themes that crop up persistently in Marsh’s work are the wearing of cloaks, speaking to concealed identity; breaking in through windows, speaking to breaching boundaries; contested inheritances, and Marsh was disinherited by his mother; train crashes; violent misogyny and feuding brothers, making it extremely tempting to speculate upon further autobiographical echoes in his texts. Of course, demonic creatures in the form of idols, beetles and apes also recur with some frequency, pointing to the pitfalls of following this logic too closely. Two of the gothic texts under consideration here, The Beetle and The Joss, employ the device of multiple narrators (another feature in common with Stoker’s Dracula), which makes explicit the multiplicity of perspectives at play in all of Marsh’s texts and signals the impossibility of truly locating the author within them, but it is nonetheless possible to highlight the strong connections between his biography and recurrent themes, tropes and devices in his texts.

Marsh’s Conclusion: ‘Literature is Synonymous with Squalor’

Despite the success and celebrity Marsh achieved for his writing after 1897, he, like many of his contemporary celebrity authors, does not seem ever to have achieved real financial security, or an income commensurate with his ‘fast … flashy’ lifestyle. 46 The precarious finances of Guy Boothby and William Le Queux, fellow prolific, best-selling ‘yarners’ with whom Marsh’s name was frequently linked, are highly comparable. 47 Aickman notes that Marsh sold the rights to The Beetle ‘to keep his family for a week or two’ (7) and that over the course of his lifetime he ‘spent all that his pen earned and appreciably more’ (9). Vuohelainen documents the relatively small estate remaining at the time of his death; his urgent need to keep writing, or, as Aickman describes, ‘pour[ing] forth words in his tiny handwriting at the highest pressure’ (10); and the possible contribution of overwork to his early death at 57. 48 All of this suggests that financial and therefore social precariousness remained pertinent to Marsh throughout his life, as it certainly pervades his oeuvre. In a strident unpublished article on the travails of the professional author and the inequities of writing as a trade, Marsh asserts that there is a prevalent view that ‘Literature is synonymous with squalor’. 49 He laments the fickleness of the reading public and the unpredictability of its verdict, speaking to an acute awareness of the potential transience of literary success, which seems reflected in the precariousness of his marginal characters.

This equation between literature and squalor, though differently inflected, would seem to have found its way into Marsh’s gothic also. His superficially generic and arch-gothic texts in fact contain dissonant, convincing, and occasionally poignant moments of mundane squalor, which depict not so much ‘the fantastic horrors of a nightmare’ but the real horrors of poverty and desperation. 50 These moments function to blur the boundaries between gothic and realist fiction and allow the gothic to transition into the contemporary traditions of slum fiction, clerk fiction and crime fiction, and these generically liminal narrative moments are those that intersect most closely with Marsh’s biography. Far from avoiding dealing with difficult personal topics, aspects of Marsh’s experience pervade his oeuvre, coming to give his otherwise generic fin-de-siècle gothic its distinctive edge and enhancing its saleability by appealing to the concerns, conscious or unconscious, of its predominantly lower-middle-class readership. While the recurrent and varied use made of gothic manoeuvres in canonical Victorian realism has received considerable critical attention, essentially signalling the existence of something akin to Bakhtin’s concept of ‘gothic realism’, it is the converse that can be observed in Marsh’s ‘realist gothic’, in which realist moments jar with and disrupt the predominant gothic and sensational registers in a generically innovative manner. 51 This examination of a forgotten but highly representative Victorian author, then, provides a new understanding not only of his work, but also of the complexity of the interaction between two of the most prominent modes of Victorian literature, the realist and the gothic.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my far more knowledgeable fellow ‘Marshians’ Victoria Margree and Minna Vuohelainen for all the invaluable feedback and assistance with accessing primary Marsh sources.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Margree, Victoria, Daniel Orrells and Minna Vuohelainen (eds) Richard Marsh: Re-Reading the Fin de Siècle, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, in preparation).

  2. 2.

    See Minna Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’ to Richard Marsh, The Goddess: A Demon (Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2010) and Callum James, ‘Callum James’s Literary Detective Agency, Case #1: Why was Richard Marsh?’, (30 November, 2009), callumjames.blogspot.ie/2009/11/callum-jamess-literary-detective-agency.html

  3. 3.

    Julian Wolfreys, ‘Introduction’, Richard Marsh, The Beetle (Ontario: Broadview, 2004), pp. 9–34, p. 10.

  4. 4.

    Other Marsh plots involving swindling and forgery include The Chase of the Ruby (1900), The Twickenham Peerage (1902), The Death Whistle (1903) and A Master of Deception (1913).

  5. 5.

    There are no known Marsh diaries and few personal letters or interviews.

  6. 6.

    Richard was one of his first names, Marsh was his mother’s family name. By 1890 he had published a wide selection of short stories in the genres of crime, humour, romance, supernatural and sport; see Minna Vuohelainen’s extensive bibliographical article, ‘Richard Marsh’, Victorian Fiction Research Guide 35 (October, 2009), pp. 1–57, Victorian Secrets, www.victoriansecrets.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/35-Richard-Marsh.pdf

  7. 7.

    ‘Court of Bankruptcy – Yesterday [Before Mr. Commissioner Fane] In Re Joseph Heldmann’, The Morning Chronicle (22 June, 1858), p. 6.

  8. 8.

    He had sold the goods at a considerable loss, concealed the fact and made false sales returns, see ‘Court of Bankruptcy’ (The Morning Chronicle, 22 June, 1858), p. 6 and Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, The Goddess, p. xi.

  9. 9.

    See ‘Miscellanea’, The Critic, 20:510 (14 April, 1860), p. 468; and Minna Vuohelainen, ‘Distorting the Genre, Defining the Audience, Detecting the Author: Richard Marsh’s “For Debt” (1902)’, Clues, 25.4 (2007), pp. 17–26, p. 25.

  10. 10.

    ‘Court of Bankruptcy’, The Morning Chronicle (22 June, 1858), p. 6 and ‘Daily and Periodical Press’, Newcastle Courant (2 July, 1858), p. 6.

  11. 11.

    ‘Court of Bankruptcy’, The Morning Chronicle (22 June, 1858), p. 6.

  12. 12.

    Vuohelainen, ‘Richard Marsh’, p. 3; Robert Aickman, The Attempted Rescue (Leyburn: Tartarus Press, 2001), p. 4; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

  13. 13.

    ‘Court of Bankruptcy’, Morning Chronicle, (22 June, 1858), p. 6.

  14. 14.

    ‘Concerts’, The Orchestra, 3.35 (August, 1876), p. 3; advertisement, The Musical World, 55:19 (12 May, 1877), p. 326; ‘Provincial Theatricals’, The Era (28 October, 1877), p. 9.

  15. 15.

    Henty’s description cited in ‘Christmas Books’, The Times [Review of The Union Jack: Tales for British Boys] (13 December, 1881), p. 3.

  16. 16.

    Minna Vuohelainen, ‘Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897): A Late-Victorian Popular Novel’, Working With English: Medieval and Modern Language, Literature and Drama, 2.1. Literary Fads and Fashions (2006), pp. 89–100, p. 90.

  17. 17.

    Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, The Goddess, pp. xii–xvii.

  18. 18.

    ‘Capture of a Forger at Tenby’, Western Mail (12 February, 1884), p.4 and ‘“Captain George Martyn, of the Indian Army”’, North Wales Chronicle (23 February, 1884), both cited in Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, The Goddess, pp. xv, xvi.

  19. 19.

    Richard Marsh, ‘Mr Marsh Explains’, letter to The Academy, 1330 (30 October, 1897), p. 358; Richard Marsh, ‘Mr Richard Marsh’s Stories’, letter to The Academy, 1501 (9 February, 1901), p. 131. Marsh published 83 volumes of fiction, placing him among the most prolific 2.7 percent of contemporary novelists according to Vuohelainen in ‘“Contributing to Most Things”: Richard Marsh, Literary Production, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodicals Market’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 46.3 (2013), pp. 401–22, p. 402.

  20. 20.

    Victoria Margree, ‘Metanarratives of Authorship in Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction: “Is that all you do, write stories?”’, English Literature in Transition, 59.3 (2016): pp. 1–28, p. 2; newsagent’s recollection from Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 33, cited in Margree, ‘Metanarratives of Authorship’, p. 7.

  21. 21.

    Vuohelainen, ‘“Contributing to Most Things”’, p. 408; Richard Marsh, ‘How I “Broke into Print” III: Richard Marsh’, Strand Magazine, 50 (November, 1915), pp. 573–74.

  22. 22.

    James, ‘Why was Richard Marsh?’, n.p.

  23. 23.

    Vuohelainen, ‘Distorting the Genre’, pp. 24–5.

  24. 24.

    Margree, ‘Metanarratives of Authorship’, p. 10.

  25. 25.

    ‘New Books and New Editions’ [Review of Bernard Heldmann, Dorrincourt: the Story of a Term There], The Pall Mall Gazette (7 January, 1882), p. 5 and review of Dorrincourt in The Belfast News-Letter (18 November, 1881), p. 3; ‘Gift-Books’ [Review of Bernard Heldmann, The Mutiny on Board the Ship ‘Leander’], The Academy, 548 (4 November, 1882), p. 326.

  26. 26.

    Vuohelainen, ‘Richard Marsh’, p. 3.

  27. 27.

    Review of The Beetle, The Academy, 1330 (30 October, 1897), p. 99.

  28. 28.

    Review of ‘The Goddess: A Demon’, The Academy, 1475 (11 August, 1900), p. 112.

  29. 29.

    Richard Marsh, The Beetle, p. 319 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text); review of The Beetle, The Athenaeum, 3650 (9 October, 1897), p. 487.

  30. 30.

    ‘The Yarning School’, The Academy, 1487 (3 November, 1900), p. 423.

  31. 31.

    Jarlath Killeen, ‘Introduction: Remembering Stoker’, Bram Stoker: Centenary Essays (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014), pp. 15–36, pp. 19–20.

  32. 32.

    Vuohelainen, ‘Richard Marsh’s The Beetle’, p. 94.

  33. 33.

    Alexandra Warwick, ‘Victorian Gothic’, in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Gothic (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), pp. 29–37, p. 33. See also Andrew Smith and William Hughes, ‘Introduction: Locating the Victorian Gothic’, The Victorian Gothic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 1–14, pp. 5–6.

  34. 34.

    Richard Marsh, The Goddess, p. 165; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

  35. 35.

    Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, The Goddess, p. xiv.

  36. 36.

    Richard Marsh, ‘The Diamonds’, The Seen and the Unseen (London: Methuen, 1900), pp. 193–221, pp. 208–9. Similar stereotypes are present in ‘The Adventure of the Ikon’ in Curios: Some Strange Adventures of Two Bachelors (Kansas City: Valancourt, 2007), pp. 73–4, 88. See also the evil hypnotist Aaron Lazarus of A House of Mystery (1898).

  37. 37.

    For an account of popular anti-Jewish sentiment, see Michael Diamond, ‘Lesser Breeds’: Racial Attitudes in Popular British Culture, 1890–1940 (London: Anthem Press, 2006), chapter 6.

  38. 38.

    Richard Marsh, The Joss: A Reversion (Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2007), p. 8; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

  39. 39.

    ‘False Pretences at Tunbridge Wells’, Kent and Sussex Courier and Southern Counties Herald (11 April, 1884), cited in Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, The Goddess, p. xiii.

  40. 40.

    Richard Marsh, ‘Payment for a Life’, Belgravia, 66.224 (October, 1888), pp. 61–69. The opening to the potentially autobiographical ‘For Debt’ is very similar, as Vuohelainen notes, ‘Distorting the Genre’, p. 22.

  41. 41.

    For an account of the intersections between social writing on slum conditions and Marsh’s gothic, see Minna Vuohelainen, ‘“Oh to get out of that room!”: Outcast London and the Gothic Twist in the Popular Fiction of Richard Marsh’, in Karen Sayer (ed.) Victorian Space(s), Leeds Centre Working Papers in Victorian Studies, 8 (2006), pp. 115–26.

  42. 42.

    The Joss was serialised in 1900 shortly after the Boxer Rebellion in China and Marsh is trading on the corresponding surge in anti-Chinese prejudice in his stereotypical, ‘yellow peril’ inflected account of Chinese malevolence in the text.

  43. 43.

    For example, the fictional Pollie works at a drapery counter and speaks authoritatively about handling lace (Marsh’s mother’s family were lace manufacturers).

  44. 44.

    Richard Marsh, The Devil’s Diamond (London: Henry, 1893), p. 1.

  45. 45.

    ‘A Bed for the Night’, Belgravia, 69.276 (October, 1889), pp. 70–80.

  46. 46.

    Aickman, The Attempted Rescue, p. 12.

  47. 47.

    See, for example, ‘The Yarning School’, p. 423. For Le Queux’s and Boothby’s finances, see Roger T. Stearn, ‘The Mysterious Mr Le Queux: War Novelist, Defence Publicist and Counterspy’, Soldiers of the Queen, 70 (1992), 6–27; and Ailise Bulfin, ‘Guy Boothby’s “Bid for Fortune”: Constructing an Anglo-Australian Colonial Identity for the Fin-de-Siècle London Literary Marketplace’, in Changing the Victorian Subject, ed. by Mandy Treagus et al. (Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2014), pp. 151–76.

  48. 48.

    Vuohelainen, ‘“Contributing to Most Things”’, pp. 416–7.

  49. 49.

    Richard Marsh, ‘Literary Grumblers’, (MS 2059/1, University of Reading archive), p. 3; via a copy and transcript provided by Victoria Margree. While Marsh’s position in this piece is critical of his fellow authors, notably Grant Allen and George Gissing, for acting as if the public owed them recognition, the draft in effect contributes to the very kind of literary grumbling it rebukes.

  50. 50.

    ‘Fiction’ [review of The Beetle], The Speaker, 16 (30 October, 1897), p. 489.

  51. 51.

    On the use of the gothic in realism, see Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Literature 1825–1914, Gothic Literary Studies series (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 18–19; Martin Willis, ‘Victorian Realism and the Gothic’, in William Hughes and Andrew Smith (eds.) The Victorian Gothic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 15–28; and Audrey Murfin, ‘The Gothic Challenge to Victorian Realism: Buried Narratives in Villette, Aurora Leigh, and Lady Audley’s Secret’, Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 10 (30 October, 2011), online, n.p.