“Have another?”: Edwin Drood ’s Princess Puffer and the Distorted Ethics of Victorian Hospitality

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood features Princess Puffer, who masters the tenets of Victorian hospitality while subverting their foundational purpose of social cohesion. This analysis explores Puffer’s rhetoric of hostessing through the genre of Victorian etiquette books and its gendered advice about serving, eating, and drinking. But as the hostess of an opium den, she distorts that purpose by employing hospitality rituals—not for social cohesion, but for fragmentation, individually and nationally. Traditional fears about witchcraft and contemporary fears about female poisoners encapsulate the specter of female defiance. Princess Puffer’s perversion of hospitality rituals casts her as a threat, as the antithesis of the Angel in the House, offering a vision of an England that is externally prosperous while deteriorating from within.