Burrow, Merrick

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University of Huddersfield RepositoryBurrow, MerrickThe Filth and the Purity: Policing Dirt in Late-Victorian Detective FictionOriginal CitationBurrow, Merrick (2013) The Filth and the Purity: Policing Dirt in Late-Victorian Detective Fiction. Journal of Victorian Culture, 18 (4). pp. 562-564. ISSN 1355-5502 This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/24791/The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of theUniversity, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the itemson this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners.Users may access full items free of charge; copies of full text items generallycan be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in anyformat or medium for personal research or study, educational or not-for-profitpurposes without prior permission or charge, provided:• The authors, title and full bibliographic details is credited in any copy;• A hyperlink and/or URL is included for the original metadata page; and• The content is not changed in any way.For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, pleasecontact the Repository Team at: E.mailbox@hud.ac.uk.http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/The Filth and the Purity: policing dirt in late‐Victorian detective fiction Purity	and	Contamination	in	Late	Victorian	Detective	Fiction,	by	Christopher	Pittard,	Farnham:	Ashgate,	ʹͲͳͳ,	xii	+	ʹ͸Ͳ	pages,	illustrated,	£͸Ͳ	ȋclothȌ,	)SBN	ͻ͹ͺ	Ͳ	͹ͷͶ͸	͸ͺͳ͵	ͺ		Down	the	Ǯmean	streetsǯ	of	detective	fiction,	Raymond	Chandler	famously	wrote,	Ǯa	man	must	go	who	is	not	himself	mean,	who	is	neither	tarnished	nor	afraidǯ.ͳ	Such	a	ȋfor	Chandler,	inevitably,	maleȌ	detective	must	be	free	from	corruption,	but	at	the	same	time	not	impervious	to	it;	his	courage	should	serve	above	all	as	a	sign	of	vulnerability.	Chandlerǯs	detective	was	to	be	both	knight‐errant	and	Everyman.	(is	honour	marked	him	apart	from	the	amoral	cynicism	of	Dashiell	(ammettǯs	corrupt	gangsters	and	equally	corrupt	policemen,	while	his	gritty	humanity	distinguished	him	from	the	upper‐crust	detectives	of	the	English	inter‐war	ǮGolden	Ageǯ.	)t	was	for	the	latter	that	Chandler	reserved	his	scorn,	whose	tales	of	murder	and	investigation	were	characterized	by	improbable	motivations	and	exotic	means	of	assassination,	from	Ǯhand‐wrought	duelling	pistolsǯ	to	Ǯcurare,	and	tropical	fishǯ.ʹ	Chandler	outlined	his	ideal	detective	against	the	backdrop	of	this	wry	sketch	of	the	genre	as	it	had	developed	after	the	First	World	War.	What	was	primarily	at	stake	in	his	own	detective	fiction	was,	in	contrast,	the	threat	of	moral	contagion	as	the	untarnished	hero	rubs	up	against	the	grime	and	corruption	of	those	Ǯmean	streetsǯ—a	phrase	which,	as	Christopher	Pittard	reminds	us,	derives	originally	from	Arthur	Morrisonǯs	Tales	of	Mean	Streets	ȋͳͺͻͶȌ.	As	such,	Chandlerǯs	hardboiled	style	marks	Ǯthe	reassertion	of	a	materialityǯ	that	was	already	Ǯinscribed	in	British	Victorian	detective	fictionǯ	prior	to	the	advent	of	the	ǮGolden	Ageǯ	ȋʹͳ͸Ȍ.	What	returned	in	Chandlerǯs	writing,	according	to	Pittardǯs	impressive	study	of	late‐Victorian	detective	fiction,	was	the	very	thing	that	the	English	ǮGolden	Ageǯ	had	sought	to	repress.		Materiality	and	contagion	are	key	terms	for	Pittardǯs	analysis	of	the	development	of	late‐Victorian	and	Edwardian	detective	fiction,	together	with	cognate	concepts	from	the	sociological,	criminological,	medical,	publishing,	and	popular	cultural	contexts	whose	histories	are	intertwined	with	it.	Pittardǯs	core	thesis	is	that	detective	fiction	of	the	late‐Victorian	and	Edwardian	eras	Ǯdramatises	an	anxiety	about	material	contamination	and	impurity,	including	a	metaphorical	category	of	crime	as	dirt,	and	aligns	detection	with	the	act	of	cleaningǯ	ȋ͵Ȍ.	The	emblem	for	this	figuration	of	crime	and	detection	in	terms	of	dirt	and	purification	is	the	image	that	appears	on	the	front	cover	of	the	book,	an	ͳͺͺͺ	advertisement	from	the	Graphic	depicting	a	policeman	who	holds	up	his	bullsǯ	eye	lamp	to	illuminate	a	poster	whose	text	reads:	ǮARREST	all	Dirt	and	cleanse	Everything	by	using	(UDSONǯS	SOAP.	REWARD!!	PUR)TY,	(EALT(	&	SAT)SFACT)ON	BY	)TS	REGULAR	DA)LY	USE.ǯ	ȋͳȌ	Late‐Victorian	detective	fiction,	according	to	Pittard,	imagines	crime	and	detection	Ǯin	exactly	the	way	that	the	(udsonǯs	advertisement	doesǯ	ȋ͵Ȍ.		Purity	and	contamination	are,	of	course,	preoccupations	that	extend	beyond	the	confines	of	the	Victorian	period	or,	indeed,	of	detective	fiction.	As	a	formal	opposition,	purity/contamination	looks	like	the	foundation	of	any	kind	of	exclusionary	cultural	formation,	from	animistic	and	religious	prohibitions	to	the	politics	of	race,	gender,	nation,	sexuality	and	any	other	category	in	which	difference	is	codified	and	policed.	)n	one	respect	this	might	appear	to	weaken	the	thesis	of	the	book,	since	it	could	no	doubt	be	argued	that	the	literature	of	any	given	period	manifests	anxieties	of	one	form	or	another	regarding	purity	and	contamination.	The	strength	of	Pittardǯs	analysis	arises,	however,	from	the	way	in	which	he	situates	this	broad	thematic	concern	within	a	series	of	admirably	specific	and	impressively	detailed	contextual	readings	of	Victorian	detective	novels	and	stories.	The	overall	critical	significance	of	the	study	is	therefore	not	so	much	its	discovery	of	contamination,	taken	either	literally	or	figuratively,	as	a	central	nineteenth‐century	preoccupation,	but	rather	the	rich	insights	that	such	a	charged	concept	provides	into	the	diversity	of	Victorian	culture,	within	which	both	the	materiality	of	filth	and	the	representation	of	difference	acquired	increasingly	intense	significations.			Detective	fiction	is	an	inspired	choice	for	such	an	analysis	because	it	opens	the	discussion	onto	several	distinct	but	related	arenas	of	cultural	and	social	anxiety	in	the	second	half	of	the	nineteenth	century.	The	metropolis	provides	a	central	focus	for	much	of	the	discussion,	along	with	the	associated	pollution‐related	issues	into	which	Victorian	detective	fiction	immersed	its	readers,	from	the	literal	mire	of	the	streets	to	the	fears	regarding	the	East	End	as	a	space	of	criminality,	miscegenation	and	degeneration.	Such	reading	matter	might	itself	be	feared	to	have	a	contaminating	effect—a	concern	which	Pittard	discusses	in	relation	to	the	moral	panics	concerning	sensation	fiction	and	penny	dreadfuls.	This	is	duly	taken	up	in	relation	to	George	Newnesǯs	efforts	to	purify	the	genre	when	he	established	Strand	Magazine.	Pittardǯs	reading	of	Conan	Doyleǯs	ǮThe	Man	with	the	Twisted	Lipǯ	is	axiomatic	in	this	regard,	the	counterpart	to	the	(udsonǯs	soap	advertisement	in	which	the	process	of	detection	is	reinvented	as	an	act	of	cleansing.	)n	this	story,	a	respectable	middle‐class	man,	Neville	St.	Claire,	is	feared	murdered	by	a	filthy	and	disfigured	beggar	named	(ugh	Boone.	(owever,	Sherlock	(olmes	deduces	that	Boone	is	in	fact	St.	Claire	in	disguise,	and	that	he	has	been	earning	his	income	by	acting	as	a	beggar	in	the	City	ȋitself	another	risk	of	contamination	that	threatens	the	distinction	between	forms	of	capitalist	speculation,	as	well	as	crossing	the	social	barrier	between	respectable	and	non‐respectable	class	identitiesȌ.	(olmesǯs	dramatic	unmasking	of	St.	Clair	takes	the	form	of	an	attack	with	a	soapy	sponge,	which	removes	his	disguise	and	in	the	process	washes	away	the	crime	itself,	since	there	is	no	longer	any	murder	victim	nor	any	suspected	perpetrator.	Pittardǯs	reading	of	this	scene	touches	upon	anxieties	regarding	the	presence	of	beggars	in	the	City	and	the	urban	legends	of	wealthy	tramps.	But	the	substance	of	the	analysis	is	to	show	how	(olmesǯs	act	of	purification	is	aligned	with	the	presiding	ethos	of	the	magazine,	enacted	through	Newnesǯs	editorial	policy	and	in	the	accompanying	illustrations	by	Sidney	Paget,	which	Ǯreinforce	the	suppression	of	sensationalism	desired	by	Doyle	and	Newnesǯ	ȋͻ͸Ȍ.		Pittardǯs	wide‐ranging	study	traces	a	series	of	such	moments,	in	which	the	rhetoric	of	purity	and	contamination	helps	to	illuminate	the	relationship	between	detective	fiction	and	the	material	contexts	with	which	it	engaged,	from	the	moral	tone	of	popular	print	media,	to	debates	over	criminal	anthropology,	medicine,	the	Social	Purity	and	anti‐vivisection	movements	and,	less	familiar	to	recent	critical	discussions,	the	emergence	of	another	popular	genre	in	the	nineteenth	century:	the	urban	myth.	The	book	begins	and	concludes	with	discussions	of	genre,	starting	with	an	original	and	persuasive	reading	of	Fergus	(umeǯs	The	Mystery	of	A	Hansom	Cab	as	a	hybrid	novel	of	Sensation/detection,	and	ending	with	an	interrogation	of	the	efforts	by	detective	novelists	in	the	nineteen	twenties	to	police	the	genre	for	compliance	to	a	set	of	formal	prescriptions	and	avoidance	of	tabooed	clichés.	This	is	the	Ǯeugenics	of	genreǯ,	in	Pittardǯs	slightly	strained	metaphor,	from	which	the	materialism	of	the	Victorian	era	was	likewise	expunged	and	which	would	have	to	await	(ammett	and	Chandler	for	its	rediscovery.			This	is	an	avowedly	interdisciplinary	study	of	detective	fiction,	which	takes	its	conceptual	reference	points	from	Mary	Douglas,	Kristeva,	Foucault	and	Bourdieu,	but	which	carries	its	theoretical	baggage	lightly	and	is	almost	entirely	free	from	jargon.	)t	will	be	of	obvious	interest	to	scholars	of	Victorian	literature,	for	whom	discussion	of	staple	authors	like	Arthur	Conan	Doyle,	Arthur	Morrison	and	Grant	Allen	is	brought	into	illuminating	connection	with	less	widely	discussed	writers	such	as	L.T.	Meade	and	Marie	Belloc	Lowndes.	Equally	welcome	is	Pittardǯs	recognition	of	female	detectives	in	late‐Victorian	fiction,	highlighting	an	area	where	more	work	remains	to	be	done.	This	is,	however,	a	work	of	cultural,	rather	than	narrowly	literary,	history	and	its	engagement	with	fiction	is	articulated	with	a	variety	of	other	kinds	of	texts	including	putatively	scientific	studies	of	the	criminal	by	Lombroso	and	Goring;	social	investigation	and	polemics	by	W.T.	Stead	and	Andrew	Mearns;	Florence	Nightingaleǯs	criticisms	of	germ	theory	and	her	recommendations	for	hospital	design	to	combat	the	spread	of	disease	through	miasmatic	infection;	Pagetǯs	illustrations	and	Galtonǯs	experiments	with	composite	photography.	Much	of	this	will	be	familiar	ground	to	scholars	of	the	late‐Victorian	period.	But	Pittardǯs	discussion	repeatedly	turns	up	interesting	details	and	unexpected	angles	on	the	familiar	that	make	it	worthy	of	attention.	Occasionally	his	claims	for	the	connection	between	the	literal	and	the	figurative	seem	to	overreach,	as	for	example	in	the	suggestion	that	the	function	of	soap	as	Ǯself‐defence	against	illnessǯ	gave	it	Ǯthe	potential	to	act	in	a	similar	wayǯ	to	the	gun	in	America	as	Ǯthe	totem	of	democracyǯ	ȋͳͷ,	n.͸ͺȌ.	Such	moments,	however,	are	comparatively	rare	and	do	not	significantly	detract	from	what	is	on	the	whole	a	thorough,	detailed	and	substantial	contribution	to	the	scholarship	around	detective	fiction	and	late‐Victorian	culture.		Merrick	Burrow,	University	of	(uddersfield																																																											ͳ	Chandler,	Raymond.	ǲThe	Simple	Art	of	Murderǳ	in	(oward	(aycroft	ȋed.Ȍ	The	Art	of	the	Mystery	Story:	a	Collection	of	Critical	Essays.	New	York:	Simon	and	Schuster,	ͳͻͶ͹:	ʹ͵͹	ʹ	)bid:	ʹ͵Ͷ																																																																																																																																																																		Note	on	contributor:	Merrick	Burrow	is	(ead	of	English	at	the	University	of	(uddersfield.	(is	recent	publications	include	ǮThe	)mperial	Souvenir:	Things	and	Masculinities	in	(.	Rider	(aggardǯs	King	Solomon’s	Mines	and	Allan	Quatermain,ǯ	Journal	of	Victorian	Culture,	volume	ͳͺ,	no.ͳ	ȋʹͲͳ͵Ȍ	and	ǮConan	Doyleǯs	Gothic	Materialismǯ,	Nineteenth	Century	Contexts,	volume	͵Ͷ,	number	͵	ȋJuly	ʹͲͳ͵Ȍ.	(e	is	currently	working	on	the	treatment	of	childhood	and	the	primitive	in	the	writings	of	R.L.	Stevenson.	

The Filth and the Purity: Policing Dirt in Late-Victorian Detective Fiction

Merrick Burrow

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Journal of Victorian Culture

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The Filth and the Purity: policing dirt in late-Victorian detective fictionPurity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction, by Christopher Pittard, Farnham: Ashgate, 2011, xii + 260 pages, illustrated, £60 (cloth), ISBN 978 0 7546 6813 8Down the ‘mean streets’ of detective fiction, Raymond Chandler famously wrote, ‘a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid’.[endnoteRef:1] Such a (for Chandler, inevitably, male) detective must be free from corruption, but at the same time not impervious to it; his courage should serve above all as a sign of vulnerability. Chandler’s detective was to be both knight-errant and Everyman. His honour marked him apart from the amoral cynicism of Dashiell Hammett’s corrupt gangsters and equally corrupt policemen, while his gritty humanity distinguished him from the upper-crust detectives of the English inter-war ‘Golden Age’. It was for the latter that Chandler reserved his scorn, whose tales of murder and investigation were characterized by improbable motivations and exotic means of assassination, from ‘hand-wrought duelling pistols’ to ‘curare, and tropical fish’.[endnoteRef:2] Chandler outlined his ideal detective against the backdrop of this wry sketch of the genre as it had developed after the First World War. What was primarily at stake in his own detective fiction was, in contrast, the threat of moral contagion as the untarnished hero rubs up against the grime and corruption of those ‘mean streets’—a phrase which, as Christopher Pittard reminds us, derives originally from Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets (1894). As such, Chandler’s hardboiled style marks ‘the reassertion of a materiality’ that was already ‘inscribed in British Victorian detective fiction’ prior to the advent of the ‘Golden Age’ (216). What returned in Chandler’s writing, according to Pittard’s impressive study of late-Victorian detective fiction, was the very thing that the English ‘Golden Age’ had sought to repress. [1:  Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder” in Howard Haycroft (ed.) The Art of the Mystery Story: a Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947: 237]  [2:  Ibid: 234Note on contributor: Merrick Burrow is Head of English at the University of Huddersfield. His recent publications include ‘The Imperial Souvenir: Things and Masculinities in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Allan Quatermain,’ Journal of Victorian Culture, volume 18, no.1 (2013) and ‘Conan Doyle’s Gothic Materialism’, Nineteenth Century Contexts, volume 34, number 3 (July 2013). He is currently working on the treatment of childhood and the primitive in the writings of R.L. Stevenson.] Materiality and contagion are key terms for Pittard’s analysis of the development of late-Victorian and Edwardian detective fiction, together with cognate concepts from the sociological, criminological, medical, publishing, and popular cultural contexts whose histories are intertwined with it. Pittard’s core thesis is that detective fiction of the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras ‘dramatises an anxiety about material contamination and impurity, including a metaphorical category of crime as dirt, and aligns detection with the act of cleaning’ (3). The emblem for this figuration of crime and detection in terms of dirt and purification is the image that appears on the front cover of the book, an 1888 advertisement from the Graphic depicting a policeman who holds up his bulls’ eye lamp to illuminate a poster whose text reads: ‘ARREST all Dirt and cleanse Everything by using HUDSON’S SOAP. REWARD!! Purity, Health & Satisfaction by its regular daily use.’ (1) Late-Victorian detective fiction, according to Pittard, imagines crime and detection ‘in exactly the way that the Hudson’s advertisement does’ (3).Purity and contamination are, of course, preoccupations that extend beyond the confines of the Victorian period or, indeed, of detective fiction. As a formal opposition, purity/contamination looks like the foundation of any kind of exclusionary cultural formation, from animistic and religious prohibitions to the politics of race, gender, nation, sexuality and any other category in which difference is codified and policed. In one respect this might appear to weaken the thesis of the book, since it could no doubt be argued that the literature of any given period manifests anxieties of one form or another regarding purity and contamination. The strength of Pittard’s analysis arises, however, from the way in which he situates this broad thematic concern within a series of admirably specific and impressively detailed contextual readings of Victorian detective novels and stories. The overall critical significance of the study is therefore not so much its discovery of contamination, taken either literally or figuratively, as a central nineteenth-century preoccupation, but rather the rich insights that such a charged concept provides into the diversity of Victorian culture, within which both the materiality of filth and the representation of difference acquired increasingly intense significations. Detective fiction is an inspired choice for such an analysis because it opens the discussion onto several distinct but related arenas of cultural and social anxiety in the second half of the nineteenth century. The metropolis provides a central focus for much of the discussion, along with the associated pollution-related issues into which Victorian detective fiction immersed its readers, from the literal mire of the streets to the fears regarding the East End as a space of criminality, miscegenation and degeneration. Such reading matter might itself be feared to have a contaminating effect—a concern which Pittard discusses in relation to the moral panics concerning sensation fiction and penny dreadfuls. This is duly taken up in relation to George Newnes’s efforts to purify the genre when he established Strand Magazine. Pittard’s reading of Conan Doyle’s ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ is axiomatic in this regard, the counterpart to the Hudson’s soap advertisement in which the process of detection is reinvented as an act of cleansing. In this story, a respectable middle-class man, Neville St. Claire, is feared murdered by a filthy and disfigured beggar named Hugh Boone. However, Sherlock Holmes deduces that Boone is in fact St. Claire in disguise, and that he has been earning his income by acting as a beggar in the City (itself another risk of contamination that threatens the distinction between forms of capitalist speculation, as well as crossing the social barrier between respectable and non-respectable class identities). Holmes’s dramatic unmasking of St. Clair takes the form of an attack with a soapy sponge, which removes his disguise and in the process washes away the crime itself, since there is no longer any murder victim nor any suspected perpetrator. Pittard’s reading of this scene touches upon anxieties regarding the presence of beggars in the City and the urban legends of wealthy tramps. But the substance of the analysis is to show how Holmes’s act of purification is aligned with the presiding ethos of the magazine, enacted through Newnes’s editorial policy and in the accompanying illustrations by Sidney Paget, which ‘reinforce the suppression of sensationalism desired by Doyle and Newnes’ (96).Pittard’s wide-ranging study traces a series of such moments, in which the rhetoric of purity and contamination helps to illuminate the relationship between detective fiction and the material contexts with which it engaged, from the moral tone of popular print media, to debates over criminal anthropology, medicine, the Social Purity and anti-vivisection movements and, less familiar to recent critical discussions, the emergence of another popular genre in the nineteenth century: the urban myth. The book begins and concludes with discussions of genre, starting with an original and persuasive reading of Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of A Hansom Cab as a hybrid novel of Sensation/detection, and ending with an interrogation of the efforts by detective novelists in the nineteen twenties to police the genre for compliance to a set of formal prescriptions and avoidance of tabooed clichés. This is the ‘eugenics of genre’, in Pittard’s slightly strained metaphor, from which the materialism of the Victorian era was likewise expunged and which would have to await Hammett and Chandler for its rediscovery. This is an avowedly interdisciplinary study of detective fiction, which takes its conceptual reference points from Mary Douglas, Kristeva, Foucault and Bourdieu, but which carries its theoretical baggage lightly and is almost entirely free from jargon. It will be of obvious interest to scholars of Victorian literature, for whom discussion of staple authors like Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Morrison and Grant Allen is brought into illuminating connection with less widely discussed writers such as L.T. Meade and Marie Belloc Lowndes. Equally welcome is Pittard’s recognition of female detectives in late-Victorian fiction, highlighting an area where more work remains to be done. This is, however, a work of cultural, rather than narrowly literary, history and its engagement with fiction is articulated with a variety of other kinds of texts including putatively scientific studies of the criminal by Lombroso and Goring; social investigation and polemics by W.T. Stead and Andrew Mearns; Florence Nightingale’s criticisms of germ theory and her recommendations for hospital design to combat the spread of disease through miasmatic infection; Paget’s illustrations and Galton’s experiments with composite photography. Much of this will be familiar ground to scholars of the late-Victorian period. But Pittard’s discussion repeatedly turns up interesting details and unexpected angles on the familiar that make it worthy of attention. Occasionally his claims for the connection between the literal and the figurative seem to overreach, as for example in the suggestion that the function of soap as ‘self-defence against illness’ gave it ‘the potential to act in a similar way’ to the gun in America as ‘the totem of democracy’ (15, n.68). Such moments, however, are comparatively rare and do not significantly detract from what is on the whole a thorough, detailed and substantial contribution to the scholarship around detective fiction and late-Victorian culture.Merrick Burrow, University of Huddersfield 

Book review: The Filth and the Purity:Policing Dirt in Late-Victorian Detective Fiction

http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/24791/1/JVC_-_Purity_and_Contamination_in_Late_Victorian_Detective_Fiction.pdf

The Filth and the Purity: Policing Dirt in Late-Victorian Detective Fiction

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