Animal Voices: Catherine Louisa Pirkis’ The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective and the Crimes of Animality

Christopher Pittard

doi:10.3390/h7030065

Abstract

While previous readings of Catherine Louisa Pirkis’ series The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894) have focused on Brooke’s status as New Woman detective, this article considers the series in the context of Pirkis’ own engagement with animal rights and anti-vivisection campaigns in the late nineteenth century. The discussion focuses on one Loveday Brooke story in particular, “The Murder at Troyte’s Hill,” arguing that Pirkis dramatises contemporary anti-vivisectionist rhetoric (that animal experimentation was not only scientifically flawed, but morally damaging, leading to human experimentation). Pirkis’ fiction instead presents a number of contact zones in which human and animal identities are renegotiated, most significantly in the figure of Loveday Brooke herself. The article considers the representation of comparative philology in the story, as an emerging linguistic science which raised anxieties of cultural dissolution and which was often associated with the image of the vivisector. It concludes that the Pirkis stories demonstrate, anticipating Derrida, that to write of the animal in the nineteenth century is inevitably to write about crime, and vice versa; the animal is a perpetual presence in Victorian detective fiction.

Highlights

Victorian detective fiction presents the reader with a bestiary
The question of the animal body became energised in the 1880s and 1890s with the growth of several anti-vivisection campaigns, a constituency which frequently overlapped with New Woman and emergent feminist movements, utilising a politics of identification in which the animal on the vivisection table was aligned with the woman as both medical and political subject
Pirkis’ animal advocacy should not be overstated; while an active campaigner for the welfare of animals, and closely connected to various anti-vivisectionist movements, it would be misleading to characterise her as a precursor to later critiques of anthropocentrism informed by poststructuralism

Summary

Introduction

Victorian detective fiction presents the reader with a bestiary. From Poe’s ourang-outang, it moves through the horses that pull Fergus Hume’s hansom cab, Holmesian trained snakes, the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, and culminates at the cusp of the twentieth century with Arthur Conan Doyle’s hound. Meade’s fiction avoids looking directly at the animal, for another practitioner of detective fiction the animal was a living concern, both in terms of literary production and political activism. This was Catherine Louisa Pirkis, a moderately successful author of romance fiction, who had turned to the Humanities 2018, 7, 65; doi:10.3390/h7030065 www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities. I consider one episode in particular from The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, demonstrating how Pirkis uses the detective story genre to dramatise anti-vivisectionist arguments, and to draw on cultural anxieties about the rise of a comparative philology which paralleled vivisectionist practice but often sought to deprive the animal of language. Victorian detective fiction— where it deals with murder—and questions of animality

Introducing Loveday Brooke

Animal Voices

Conclusions