'I saw him take a different shape before my eyes.
His loose draperies fell about him…and there issued out of them a monstrous
creature of the beetle tribe…'
From out of
the dark and mystic Egypt comes The Beetle,
a creature of horror, 'born of neither God nor man', which can change its form
at will. It is bent on revenge for a crime committed against the devotees of an
ancient religion. At large in London, it pursues its victims without mercy and
no one, it seems, is safe from its gruesome clutches.
Richard
Marsh's weird, compelling and highly original novel, which once outsold
Dracula, is both a horror masterpiece and a fin de siècle melodrama embracing
the fears and concerns of late Victorian society.
Richard Marsh, born Richard Bernard Heldmann (1857 - 1915),
was a prolific late Victorian author who, over the course of thirty-five years,
published over eighty volumes of fiction. Under his birth name he was a
prolific author of boys’ adventure stories, and between 1880 and 1883 rose to the
rank of co-editor at boys’ weekly magazine Union
Jack. For reasons not entirely biographed, in 1883 his final serial for the
publication was dropped (the content felt to be unsuitable for the magazines
younger readership), and he suffered a public disagreement with G.A. Henty, the
weekly’s editor. Heldmann disappeared from the public stage, and never
published under his own name again.
In 1888
he began writing under the penname Richard Marsh. Marsh being his mother’s
maiden name. With the new name came a grittier, cynical style of writing. Gone
was the work pitched at juveniles, replaced by up-to-date genre fiction that,
through the use of horror, romance, and crime, cut straight to the topical
issues of the day. This style of writing marks Marsh’s body of work a worthy
study for scholars examining social and cultural issues of the time.
So what does The
Beetle tell us about the issues weighing upon the late Victorians? As
described on the back of the Wordsworth edition, Marsh’s most popular novel is
a fin de siècle melodrama. In its simplest form fin de siècle is French for ‘end of the century’, but it is also
the name given to the short period of time between the Victorians and
modernism, roughly 1885 to 1901. To describe literature as fin de siècle is to
evoke the tension that plagued the late Victorians as their certainties over
morality, aesthetics, politics, and science began to break down.
In The Beetle these tensions are embodied
in the narrative’s five main characters, with each representing a differing
aspect of fin de siècle London’s concerns. In 1897 London was awash with
anxieties as modernity ushered in rapid social change, and boundaries of race,
gender, and class were no longer static.
Paul
Lessingham, the reformist politician, can be seen as representing the forward
motion of social reform, and embodies the political change of the period. Yet
at times he is gripped by crippling hysteria that paralyses and robs him of his
faculties. In this manner The Beetle’s
characters are either a study in duality, or the embodiment of a particular
social anxiety. Lessingham’s fiancée Marjorie Lindon is an advocate of
suffrage, and a figure of the ‘New Woman’. Her defiance of her father, and eventual
disguise as a man, challenged many of society’s ideas about the role and
abilities of women. It’s worth noting that she is sadly transformed a more
conservative female figure at the end of the novel. Sidney Atherton, the
renowned scientist, is the very embodiment of technological progress; at one
point even using science to convince the beastly antagonist that he must be
some kind of god figure. But Sidney is dangerously oblivious to his desires,
and his pettiness near reigns ruin on the other characters. Robert Holt, an
unemployed lower-middle class clerk, draws attention to the plight of the newly
formed lower-middle class; a social group only made recently literate by the
education acts of the 1870s, and coincidently one of the main consumers of the
magazine that The Beetle was
published in. He also draws attention to the problems of unemployment and
poverty. The last character Augustus Champnell is the narrative’s Sherlockian
figure, a brilliant detective who at the end finds his logic and scientific
outlook vested by the mysterious and unknowable nature of the novels
antagonist.
All of
these tensions are succinctly expressed in the physicality of The Beetle itself. With a shifting
physical form that is neither one thing nor another, these blurring lines of
race, gender, and class find a beastly incarnation that prays upon the modern
figures of London.
Originally published as a thirteen part serial in Answers, a penny weekly newspaper, under
the title The Peril of Paul Lessingham:
The Story of a Haunted Man, The
Beetle was an instant success. Formatted into instalments of several pages culminating
in a cliff-hanger, the readership of Answers,
some half a million people, were hooked. The serialisation ran between March
and June of 1897, and was swiftly followed by a volume form publication in
September/October of the same year.
The
first edition instantly sold out, and three re-issues followed in October,
November, and December. To contextualise its success Bram Stoker’s Dracula provides a useful analogue.
Published in the same year, after some eight years of research, Dracula achieved substantially lower
sales than Marsh’s The Beetle, and by
1913 when The Beetle was on its
fifteenth pressing, Dracula was only
on its tenth. By the end of the 1920s the novel had been translated into
several languages, adapted for film, and appeared on stage at the Strand
Theatre in London. It was even reissued during the First World War, with its representation
of the evil foreign ‘Other’ striking a chord with a new generation.
In light of such success, why is
it that outside of the “dedicated cognoscenti of the supernatural”[ii]
so few readers have heard of it? Stoker’s Dracula
is instantly recognisable, and although not everyone may have read the book,
the mythos and semiotics of the Vampire have permeated popular culture, with
the story itself has being adapted for film repeatedly. In the introduction to
the 2007 pressing of The Beetle David
Stuart Davies postulated on the why:
“Perhaps the wide-ranging scope of the narrative
style, with Marsh not concentrating solely on the horror elements, is one of
the reasons why the novels fame and its sales gradually faded, and … The Beetle became as forgotten as did
its author.”[iii]
In her 2006 paper on The Beetle, published in Working With English: Medieval and Modern
Language, Literature and Drama, Dr Minna Vuohelainen suggests the reason
could be the novels titled antagonist:
“By the 1960s, however, while Dracula was being reinterpreted for new audiences by Hammer, The Beetle was becoming an anachronism:
the horrendously ugly beetle-creature could not be sexy or sympathetic in the
same way as vampire, and the novel began to fall out of print.”
Both explanations are hard to
ignore. The use of four character points of view, although crucial in Marsh’s
ability to tap into the late Victorians fin de siècle fears, can be frustrating
upon an initial read through. As too can the serialised origins of the story,
which press through the narrative perhaps too strongly, with continual mini
climaxes littering the pages.
The depiction of the figure of
the Beetle can also vex the modern reader. Marsh only hints at the description
of the creature, never furnishing the reader with vivid details. David Stuart
Davies notes that this “allows the reader’s imagination full rein to fill in
the gaps himself, resulting in the creation of a far more personalised and
horrific demon.” He also points out that unlike the modern horror writer Marsh
“leads us gently into the nightmare and tantalises and torments with
fragments”. Although I do not disagree with Davies, I would like to have seen a
little more of the ancient terror.
In all these ways The Beetle is a product of its time, and
should be read as such. It provides a valuable insight into “typical … fears
and fantasies of the fin de siècle”[iv]
Victorian. The success of the novel in both its volume and serialised forms
lends weight to the issues raised in the text holding sway in the public psyche
at large. The insight that late Victorian popular fiction provides into
Victorian society is invaluable, and in the case of this novel, eminently enjoyable.
I found Richard Marsh’s shocker to be a tale worthy of discovery, and one whose
esteem is not only apparent immediately, but grows in the reflection and recollection.
I cannot recommend it highly enough.
I owe a lot of the information here, and indeed the pictures, to the scholarly work of Dr Minna Vuohelainen at Edge Hill University. If you would like to know more about The Beetle or Richard Heldmann/Marsh you might consider checking out these PDF:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~aezweb/working_with_english/special_issues/literary_fads_and_fashions/Vuohelainen_31_07_06.pdf
http://www.victoriansecrets.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/35-Richard-Marsh.pdf
[ii]
David Stuart Davies in the introduction of the 2007 Wordsworth press re-issue.
[iii]
David Stuart Davies in the introduction of the 2007 Wordsworth press re-issue.
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