HORROR SHOW: Harriet - Elizabeth Jenkins

"But Harriet's condition...had blinded Mrs. Ogilvy to the fact that the world contains many people who are far from decent."

If you had never read anything about Harriet (1934) by Elizabeth Jenkins -- not a review, not a blurb, not anything on the back covers of its many editions -- you would never expect it to turn out the way it does. From page one Harriet prepares the reader for a mesmerizing trip into England's Victorian past from the author's attention to domestic details, to the class hierarchy, to the painstakingly rendered 19th century syntax and language. It appears on the surface to be a homage to the age old story of a ne'er-do-well fortune hunter flirting with an ugly duckling heiress, successfully manipulating her easily swayed emotions and eventually marrying her for her money.  Henry James told a similar story in Washington Square, countless romance novelists have capitalized on this plot in hundreds of cheap entertainments.  What makes Elizabeth Jenkins' novel striking, no less appealing as an entertaining suspense novel, is that the ugly duckling heiress is also developmentally handicapped. Harriet Woodhouse is called a "natural" (a Victorian euphemism for someone who is mentally retarded) by her mother and those who have an affection for her.  She is called much worse by those who treat her with indifference, jealousy or outright cruelty. Above all what makes this novel most shocking is that Jenkins based her story on a notorious criminal case in which four people were charged with criminal neglect, wanton cruelty and eventual murder of a young woman and possibly her child. The story of Harriet is not the product of a novelist's imagination. It actually happened in 1875.

From the outset we know that Lewis Oman is no good. He has no real job, he enjoys using woman, and thinks nothing about turning Harriet into an object of ridicule. He tells his lover Alice Hoppner that he will become the charmer for Harriet. "She's going to fall a victim to my fascinations. You keep a straight face, and we'll have some fun." Alice watches with a combination of revulsion and jealousy as Lewis' aimless flirting transforms into something far more dangerous and cunning. His attentions cease to become fun and games when Alice notices Harriet has fallen in love with him. Then Lewis learns Harriet has a small fortune held in trust that will become hers as soon as she marries and, of course, he homes in on Harriet with relentless charm and smarm. Harriet is no longer a plaything but the means to instant wealth for this schemer.

Mrs. Ogilvy, Harriet's mother, is onto Lewis from the start and attempts to prevent the marriage. She tries reasoning with him but is too shrewd. She tries to block the marriage legally by exploiting Harriet's mental disability and making her a ward of the state.  But Lewis knows Mrs. Ogilvy who loves her daughter and treats  could never take the next step which would require her to put her daughter in a state run institution.  He also threatens the woman by promising to tell Harriet of her plans. If he does so he promises Mrs Ogivly that would be the end the mother/daughter relationship she has so carefully cultivated.

 

But there are others who become involved in the destruction of Harriet's carefully sheltered world. Once she has married Lewis her exploitation begins and with it the inexorable ruin of her health, her personality, and her soul. Harriet has a child almost without Jenkins having told us and she is quickly shuttled off to Lewis' brother Patrick where she is set up as a long term house guest and then months later as a prisoner.  The horror of Harriet's story, the ingenuity of the novel as a whole, is the skill with which Jenkins manages to capture a flavor of Victorian comfort and domesticity and how the introduction of an unwanted guest slowly erodes the veneer of civility among the household's would be aristocrats.

Elizabeth Hoppner Oman, Alice's sister and Patrick's wife, seems like the one person who might become an ally for Harriet. But when Harriet moves into her home Elizabeth, once ever proper and courteous, soon grows weary of having to deal with Harriet's childish demands, putting up with her imperfect grammar and most of all Harriet's lack of comprehension in learning how to care for her own son. Elizabeth is more concerned with propriety and her relationship to Lewis and Alice who is now being passed off as Lewis' real wife, though he is legally married to Harriet. Astonishingly, for someone who presents herself as upright Elizabeth turns a blind eye to the immorality and deceit of this pretense. When Lewis tells Patrick that Harriet should remain isolated in an upstairs bedroom and not be allowed outside Elizabeth is relieved to be spared the humiliation of telling everyone that Harriet is the real Mrs. Oman. The ultimate revelation of Elizabeth's remarkably repellent transformation comes when she utters a statement she thinks excuses not only her own indifference but the cruelty of her barbaric husband who beats Harriet: "After all, it isn't as if she feels anything..."

Taking the idea of the yet-to-be-named subgenre of "domestic suspense" to its extreme Jenkins includes several excellent set pieces that highlight a Victorian household turned topsy-turvy when a family member with erratic, unpredictable behavior upsets their comfortable routines. With incredible detail we are shown how meal times are structured, the apparently agonizing selection of clothes, the mundane tasks of getting dressed and having hair meticulously styled. While all the other characters are caught up in the inundation of domestic life the horror of what is happening to Harriet who is being neglected and ignored by everyone but the compassionate maid Clara becomes all the more heartwrenching. Harriet's clothes and her jewelry are appropriated by Alice; her child is taken away from her; she is denied doctor's care when she becomes violently ill; meals are regularly delayed, reduced to nothing more than milk and bread or entirely withheld -- all of this done for the slightest affronts to the household members. All of this leads to a radical transformation in Harriet's already fragile mental state. With each new instance of Harriet's deteriorating mind each family member reacts not with kindness, concern or even alarm but with unnerving cruelty, sometimes giving into savage brutality. When Penguin reprinted Harriet in 1980 they called the novel an "absolutely spine-chilling exploration of the depths of human depravity."

Harriet won a literary prize for its author in 1934, one of the last of the short-lived Prix Femina Vie Heureuse, given out by two French magazines to an English language novel that best presents life in England to a French language audience. The award should actually be for Jenkins' masterful invention of a new genre, the true crime novel. For here is a fictionalized account of a long past actual criminal case characterized by aberrant behavior accurately imagined with vivid insight and keen observations, teeming with paradoxes and riddles of human inconsistency, that it rightfully belongs in the same category as the "non-fiction novel" -- something Truman Capote claimed to have invented three decades later with In Cold Blood.

Her achievements are all the more powerful when you realize that using a non-fictional account (The Trial of the Stauntons), a copy of the court transcript from 1877, and her own imagination she envisioned a world two centuries ago in which something so evil could be carried out with such commonplace ease. As a side note students of true crime might like to know that the Staunton trial is now considered a landmark in appeals cases. In real life though all four individuals charged with Harriet Staunton's murder were found guilty and sentenced to hang no one was executed. A published letter written by a group of physicians protested that the true medical evidence was overlooked during the trial and the judge Henry Hawkins was prejudiced against all four defendants. The court's verdict was overturned:  Alice was pardoned, Louis and Elizabeth were sentenced to hard labor and eventually set free. Patrick who died in prison never reaped the benefits of this unusual decision.  Jenkins did not agree with the overturned verdict and her characters get the harsh punishments and justice she felt was mocked by real life's own cruel ironies.

Harriet is available in a new edition from Valancourt Books published five years ago. This latest edition includes an afterword by literary critic and Victorian scholar Catherine Pope. Readers can also choose from a wide variety of used editions dating back to the US paperback of 1946 (Bantam 64, shown in two illustrations on this post) to the handsome reprint from Persephone Press. There are also French and Spanish language translations in contemporary reprints

The Death of Nevill Norway - John Rowland

In the coming months I suspect you will be hearing a lot about John Rowland on the many vintage mystery blogs. Two of his detective novels will soon be reissued by British Library Crime Classics. I've already received an ARC of one of his books, but since it won’t be released until April here in the US I can’t post my review yet. There is so much that is interesting about this forgotten writer, however, that I thought I’d get on jump on the rest of the gang out there in the blogosphere.

Rowland began his career as a chemistry teacher, veered into journalism and publishing with an emphasis on philosophical and religious magazines. Somewhere in mid-career as a fairly successful, albeit second tier, detective novelist Rowland began to show an interest in true crime cases. His first fictional account was of the poisoner Dr. William Palmer, published in 1938 as Slow Poison. Drawing from newspaper accounts, courtroom records, the Newgate Calendar and with a bit of the novelist’s embellishment Rowland recounts the story of one of England's most infamous serial killers who though tried and executed for one murder was more than likely responsible for many more, some of them his own children.

Only a few years later he wrote his second fictional account of a little known 19th century murder that took place in his own hometown. Using similar factual and legal accounts as the basis of his slightly fictionalized account Rowland tells the story of The Death of Nevill Norway (1942). Rather than structuring the book as a fair play detective novel Rowland instead chooses the "inverted detective novel" style of storytelling. The culprits are identified fairly quickly in one of the earliest chapters and we follow both the planning and execution of the crime as well as the police investigation as the two plot threads play out side by side.

Rowland was born in Bodmin, Cornwall where he attended school, college and spent his early adulthood. In his own hometown during the winter of 1840, almost eighty years before he was born, a highly respected businessman in the timber trade and sometime philanthropist named Nevill Norway was attacked and murdered by highwaymen. He was robbed of a sizable amount in cash, a debt that he had collected in town from a tradesman who was just about to embark on a journey to Canada. This transaction was witnessed by several people, including one of Norway’s killers.

Bodmin Jail, one of Britain's oldest jails & supposedly haunted
by the ghosts of the prisoners who were executed here.

 Early in the book Rowland reveals the murder plot concocted between the two criminally minded brothers William and James Lightfoot. Their home life is squalid, the two men are both unemployed and married to two harridans. Rowland paints them as despicable criminals with unforgiving wives. He also adds a subplot of his own creation not found in the court records in which the Lightfoot brothers intend to frame a young man who had an violent argument with Norway over his impending engagement to Norway’s niece. Rowland assigns the role of detective to Constable Jackson, the actual London policeman from the true case brought in by the Cornwall magistrate to solve the case when it becomes clear that Norway was murdered and robbed.

In Rowland's novel Jackson is an affable detective in what proves to be a generally unremarkable but capably told inverted detective story. Unfortunately, even with Jackson's uncovering of such clues as a broken pistol hammer, footprints indicating a struggle in the muddy ground of the crime scene, and a horse's bridle and reins stained with blood we as the reader know almost everything before Jackson does. Rowland allows two or three scenes of true detection with only one true surprise in the collection of the evidence that leads to the Lightfoot brothers’ arrest. And then the two turn on each other as the real brothers did in the actual Norway murder case.

What makes the book interesting are the colorful supporting cast including a shrewd farmer who with his keen observational skills suspects a murder long before the police. Other highlights are the well drawn Cornwall setting, a genuine sense of early nineteenth century living and customs with not one shred of anachronism, and Rowland’s talent in replicating the Cornish dialect. He manages to sprinkle the narrative and dialogue with Cornwall regionalisms like “wisht” (slang for miserable) and “thickee” (that) ; both definitions thankfully footnoted. One of the many things I learned related to the vocabulary is that the word “zany” was not only used regularly as an insult to someone’s intelligence during the 19th century, its use dates back to the 17th century according to the lexicographers at Merriam-Webster.

Even more fascinating than the ironic outcome of a case -- one that easily might have been a perfect murder were it not for the brothers' craven nature -- is the utterly surreal secondary true story. Uncovered in the early twentieth century by another writer it seems to have escaped Rowland's research. If only Rowland had uncovered this portion of the story the novel might have been a minor tour de force in the mingling of crime and paranormal.

Noted novelist, mythologist and Anglican priest S. Baring-Gould uncovered a single document from the early twentieth century that sheds a new and eerie light on Norway’s murder. Rev. Baring-Gould tells the same story from the viewpoint of Norway's naval officer brother in “The Dream of Edmund Norway” published in Chambers’s Journal (spelling is correct, BTW) in the August 8, 1908 issue. Drawing directly from Edmund Norway’s captain’s log for the British merchant vessel Orient, Gould reports how Captain Norway dreamed of his brother’s murder while sailing from Manila to Cadiz. The dream vividly details the method including how the two Lightfoot brothers grabbed the horse by the bridle, fired two shots and beat Nevill Norway senselessly with the pistol that jammed. It’s an uncanny report that belongs to the pages of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” and probably did appear there though I ran out of steam looking for it. Baring-Gould does a fine job of submitting for our approval the verbatim pages from the journal clearly dated the exact night of Norway’s murder and giving eyewitness accounts of the journal not having been tampered with after the sensational Lightfoot trial. You can read the story yourself via the miracle of Google Books.

But the fascination does not end there. Norway, it turns out, is the great-grandfather of the novelist Nevil Shute, author of (among many other books) the dystopian post-nuclear novel On the Beach later adapted for the movies with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Anthony Perkins in the cast. Shute’s real name – something I never knew – is Nevil Shute Norway! I found an amusing speech delivered by Shute’s daughter Shirley who gave a talk about her father in New Mexico on Jan 16,1999 to a Shute literary society gathered to celebrate the centennial of the writer’s birth. You can find that speech here.

There’s no end to the unusual ways one can be educated reading forgotten crime novels. This particular book turned out to be a treasure trove of unexpected riches.

The Thief of Words and Ideas

I have become fascinated with the plagiarism scandal surrounding the publication of Assassin of Secrets by Quentin Rowan (aka Q.R. Markham). After reading numerous reports, including the dogged detective work by Edward Champion, and following link after link from on-line newspaper articles I was finally led to the blog of Jeremy Duns, a spy novelist who gave a "fulsome blurb" (his own words) for Rowan's book. He called it "an instant classic" -- words he now shamefacedly admits were entirely inappropriate.

Duns writes in depth about his experience of reading the book, enjoying it, and now post-scandal he re-examines how he was duped by Rowan's amalgamation of other thriller writers' words. Included are emails sent to him from Rowan throughout the process of "writing" up to the final release of the book that reveal a manipulative sociopath enjoying his moment of glory. Read the essay here. Duns' final paragraph and conclusion so aptly sums up exactly how I feel about this. Rather than joining with the post-modernist fools who claim that Rowan is some sort of "genius" (read this speculation) he calls for all of us to condemn Rowan as the thief that he truly is.