Chemical Crimes: Science and Poison in Victorian Crime Fiction, by Cheryl Blake Price

Abstract

Reviewed by: Chemical Crimes: Science and Poison in Victorian Crime Fiction by Cheryl Blake Price Clare Clarke (bio) Chemical Crimes: Science and Poison in Victorian Crime Fiction, by Cheryl Blake Price; pp. xii– 195. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2019, $69.95. Cheryl Blake Price's Chemical Crimes: Science and Poison in Victorian Crime Fiction focuses on criminal poisoners, and examines how and why fictional poisonings transitioned into what Price terms "chemical crimes" over the course of the nineteenth century. For Price, chemical crimes and criminals are distinct from mere poisoners; they are instead "a rarefied group of criminals who drew from scientific knowledge and methodology to perpetrate domestic crime" (2). The terms "chemical criminal" and "chemical crime" are invoked frequently in this monograph (2), although never very satisfyingly defined beyond the broad claim that "chemical criminals" may be "professionally trained chemists and doctors and just people who employ scientific methodology in the commission of their crimes" (3). This definition seems to be so all-encompassing as to lose usefulness. The book's second aim is to "investigate the interesting correlation between chemical crime and innovations in genre development." For Price, "chemical crime is present in almost every significant moment in the development of Victorian crime fiction," with the chemical criminal appearing "at the origins of sensation, detective, and science fictions—and when the boundaries of genres like the Newgate novel expand and anticipate later genre developments" (3). Price argues that this book's "focus on the criminal applications of science offers a corrective to the current way of understanding the development of Victorian crime fiction by moving the critical focus back onto the criminal and away from the detective" (13). The focus upon the criminal is certainly worthwhile; however, this thesis overstates the originality of this project, as demonstrated by the introduction's almost entirely absent review of recent scholarship in the field. In a project devoted to exploring the development of crime and detective fiction, with particular attention to the porosity of generic boundaries, I would have expected detailed reference to the groundbreaking work carried out by Joseph A. Kestner, Maurizio Ascari, Lee Horsley, Caroline Reitz, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Christopher Pittard, Lucy Sussex, Srdjan Smajić, Michael Cook, and my own work. These scholars offer early and/or alternative, and much fuller, accounts of Victorian crime fiction, yet their voices do not contribute much or at all to Price's discussion. Chapter 1 examines Letitia Elizabeth Landon's silver fork novel Ethel Churchill, set in the 1720s and published in 1837, where the female protagonist murders her husband and her lover by poisoning. Price argues that Ethel Churchill strongly influenced Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Lucretia, a Newgate novel published in 1846. The two authors were indeed good friends, although Price admits that there is "no direct evidence that Bulwer had Ethel Churchill in mind when he began writing Lucretia" (49). The chapter attempts to chart the influence of the silver fork novel on the Newgate novel by arguing that the first has erroneously been left out of scholarly accounts of crime fiction's development. Landon's novel is a fascinating examination of female madness and criminality, but this does not automatically mean that we can term it crime fiction. The work of Stephen Knight, Tzvetan Todorov, or John Cawelti would have been useful here in helping to define the terminology. Furthermore, the employment of one silver fork [End Page 306] novel to argue for the significance of the entire genre on crime writing is problematic, especially given Price's admission that both novels are somewhat unrepresentative of their larger genres: Ethel Churchill "does not strictly adhere to the silver fork formula" and "is also unusual because it features a crime (other than the crime of adultery) perpetrated by a female character" (36); Lucretia "seems in many ways an awkward fit for Newgate fiction" (66). The book finds firmer ground in discussions of sensation fiction. Chapter 2 examines gothic medicine and the figure of the poisoning doctor in the fiction of Ellen Wood, connecting this to the lengthy discussion of Wilkie Collins's Count Fosco in the book's introduction. Building upon work by Tabatha Sparks, Andrew Mangham, and...