Popular Novels Research Articles

STRANGE SYMPATHIES: GEORGE ELIOT AND THE LITERARY SCIENCE OF SENSATION

This essay argues that George Eliot's Romola (1862–63), an exhaustively researched historical romance, shares important concerns and generic conventions with her contemporaries' more popular sensation novels. Heavily influenced by the “science of sensation” developed by her partner George Henry Lewes, Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain, Eliot explores through plot and characterization the blurry distinction between sympathy and sensation. Her sympathetic heroine, whose feelings are too easily swayed by the mirroring presence of others, must become reattuned to her more instinctual self. Romola thus stands not only for the female reader, who might benefit from exposure to literary sensation, but also for her creator, who remains ambivalent about the unruly effects of double consciousness.

“With Badinage and Repartee”: Freeing Women's Talk Through Capitola in Southworth's The Hidden Hand, Or Capitola the Madcap

E.D.E.N Southworth's novel The Hidden Hand, or Capitola the Madcap, was one of the most popular novels of nineteenth-century America. The enthusiastic public response to the first serialized versio...

SENSATION INTERVENTION: M.C. HOUSTOUN'S RECOMMENDED TO MERCY (1862) AND THE NOVEL OF EXPERIENCE

Matilda Charlotte Houstoun's Recommended to Mercy (1862) has many plot features of a sensation novel, including a fallen heroine, a bigamy trial and marital infidelity. But Houstoun's nuanced examination of the reasons behind fallen heroine Helen Langton's asocial choices complicates its designation as sensational. In particular, Houstoun's narrator challenges the value system that condemns Helen, largely by contesting the assumed judgments of the novel's readers. By cultivating the reader's mercy for Helen, Houstoun's narrator disputes our conventional understanding of the sensational and popular novel as entertainment for uncritical readers. This essay thus reads Recommended to Mercy as an amalgam of the sensation and realist novel by broaching a new category, the “novel of experience”, which merges these genres' characteristic plots and social critique, and, by doing so, elevates the “fallen heroine” to a position of forgiveness and even social reintegration. This subcategory of the “novel of experience”, moreover, suggests that a reading of non-canonical, popular novels can expand our understanding of the mid-century novel's generic conventions, as well as the sophistication of its readers.

The Authority of the Imagination in an Age of Wonder

Historians of the early American republic should pay attention to novels because the people we study paid attention to them. The sudden popularity of novels is a historical development that requires a historical explanation. Literary texts are historical documents that reveal not only the preoccupations of large numbers of people but a way of organizing experience that acquired widespread legitimacy between 1800 and 1850. We might benefit from reading novels less literally and more for what they reveal about the shifting structure of discourse and discourse communities. We need to consider them not as sources of information or cultural values but as a dynamic genre that underscores the persistence of eighteenth-century ideas about commerce and sympathy into the nineteenth century. They challenge our preoccupation with categories. Not everyone in the early nineteenth century fit within national borders or political models; most everyone in the early nineteenth century was a fluctuating compound of competing identities. Because novels were constructed around careless conversations and half-finished sentences, because they celebrated choice and change over time, they captured that dynamic process more effectively than any other genre. Novels also remind us that for many contemporaries the age of revolution was less about an embrace of liberty as the apotheosis of the autonomous individual free to act as he saw fit than the embrace of liberty as a voluntary location of one’s self within overlapping social networks, with seeking other perspectives on individual behavior, and with comprehending the often ironic extent to which the price of one person’s liberty is the slavery of another. The novels celebrate the interdependence of human beings.

The Husband’s Chastity: Progress, Equality, and Difference in 1930s Japan

Otto no teisō (The Husband’s Chastity) was one of the most successful popular novels of 1930s Japan. In recounting the consequences of a husband’s extramarital affair with his wife’s best friend, the story highlights the idea of male chastity or fidelity. Teisō, a term with such varied meanings as “fidelity to one’s spouse” and “sexual innocence before marriage,” represented a key set of notions associated with and prescribed for female identity but was never required as a male virtue. As the author Yoshiya Nobuko notes, in Japan “a wife’s chastity” is stressed, but “the idea of a ‘husband’s chastity’ is easily forgotten.” The Husband’s Chastity is known as a work that criticizes this sexual double standard. Rather than focusing only on this one aspect, however, I highlight the text’s complexity by analyzing the novel through its implicit engagement with issues of gender equality and difference, vital concepts for understanding prewar Japanese female identity. The Husband’s Chastity uses male chastity as a progressive idea to criticize legal and social inequalities for women and to problematize the view that gendered traits and social roles are natural and predetermined. But, at the same time, the story reifies the notion of gender difference, particularly through images of female purity and motherhood, in ways that mirror changes within specific women’s movements and the broader sociopolitical landscape. Through its critical engagement with ideas about gender and social/sexual progress, this popular novel provides a window into mid- to late 1930s Japanese society.

Beyoğlu, Turkey

80 worldliteraturetoday.org top photo: gabriele quaglia bottom photo: vince millett outpost I n the nineteenth century, as Old Istanbul south of the Golden Horn struggled to awaken from its medieval slumber, a new European-style city sprang to life on the north shore: Pera. Foreign embassies built their palatial residences on the hills among Pera’s vineyards, competing for space with the prosperous businesses and Frankish houses of Ottoman Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. Pera, now known as Beyoğlu, became the Ottoman Empire’s window to the West, the lens through which most Turks first saw European culture. Through the difficult first half-century of the Turkish Republic and the 1950s and ’60s that Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has rightly described as “melancholy,” Beyoğlu struggled to maintain this role. Things got worse, then much better. Symbolic of Turkey’s phenomenal economic and social progress during the 1990s was the opening of a new foreign-language bookshop in Beyoğlu on İstiklâl Caddesi (Independence Avenue), the former Grande Rue de Péra. Robinson Crusoe Kitabevi (www.rob389.com), founded in 1994 by Uğur Eruzun and Deniz Kunkut, was designed to bring foreign authors to Turkish readers in their original language. “Our customers include Turks who want to read foreign authors in the original version, foreign residents who want both books in English and a good selection of the best Turkish authors in Turkish, and visitors looking for guidebooks, histories, contemporary studies, and Turkish literature in translation,” staff member Seda Ateş explained. “The best-sellers in the shopwindow satisfy some customers and help to cover our overhead, but it is the well-selected assortment of new, standard, and classic works that gives Robinson Crusoe its literary and philosophical depth.” Ateş proudly showed me the shop’s authors’ guest book bearing the tributes and signatures of Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber), Arundhati Roy, Jacques Derrida, John Freely, Godfrey Goodwin, Soraya Faroqhi, and, of course, Istanbul native Orhan Pamuk. And yes, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, first translated into Turkish a century and a half ago, became and still is one of the most popular novels for both young and mature Turkish readers. Tom Brosnahan’s latest book is the humorous travel memoir Turkey: Bright Sun, Strong Tea (brightsunstrongtea.com). Beyoğlu, Turkey Tom Brosnahan ...

“What mighty transformations!”: Disfigurement and Self-Improvement in Emma May Buckingham's <em>A Self-Made Woman</em>

"What mighty transformations!":Disfigurement and Self-Improvement in Emma May Buckingham's A Self-Made Woman Jaime Osterman Alves In Emma May Buckingham's little-known 1873 novel, A Self-Made Woman; or, Mary Idyl's Trials and Triumphs, a young girl embarks on a program of self-construction common to legions of nineteenth-century American males and familiar to readers inundated, by late century, with textual examples from the popular self-improvement genre.1 As Buckingham notes in her novel's preface, "We often hear the remark:—'He is a self-made man;' but the term is rarely applied to a woman" (9). Historians of self-culture tend to corroborate this view: Daniel Walker Howe's Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln suggests that the nineteenth century witnessed a profusion of texts purporting to teach white American males how to access and fulfill their individual potential, to nurture and grow the perfection God had planted in each of them like a seed, "to make oneself better—mentally, morally, and physically—[and] use one's abilities to proper advantage" (123). Yet as Sylvia D. Hoffert's work on midcentury female self-making sums it up, "the most socially acceptable way" for a woman to improve her station "was to marry well"; men alone were "glorified" for the "pluck and luck [that] brought them economic success and the personal autonomy, social influence, and political power that accompanied it" (35). Nina Baym's study of woman's fiction also bears this out: Although large numbers of nineteenth-century women's novels tell about a young female who "win[s] her own way in the world," a young woman's "'own way' . . . seldom involves more than domestic comfort, a social network, and a companionable husband" (ix). Nevertheless, Buckingham's novel appropriates the self-improvement genre for a female protagonist and is dedicated to female readers who may be "struggling up towards a higher moral and intellectual life," presenting a rare tale of female self-culture and self-construction (9). Athough [End Page 101] Mary begins the novel in despair, "disowned" by her father for pursuing an education and thereby impoverished (29), over the course of nearly a quarter century (from the 1850s to the 1870s) she shapes her own destiny and becomes a wildly popular novelist, wealthy colliery owner, Civil War nurse, proprietor of a school for orphaned children, and happily married mother of two. If Buckingham's novel is striking for the agency and self-realization it affords a female character and female readers, it is additionally remarkable for the fact that its protagonist also begins her narrative as a "sickly, puny" ten-year-old, "dwarfed [and] deformed" in face and limb by a bout of scarlet fever she endured before the novel's start (17, 9).2 Despite the censure of her father, doctors' warnings against brain work for sickly girls, and her own poor health and constant pain, Mary educates herself with scavenged books, becomes a teacher and governess for several young children, and saves her earnings to fund both her own formal education and a set of radical, brutal elective surgeries that lengthen her contracted limbs and correct the facial features distorted by her illness. In keeping with the novel's emphasis on total self-improvement, Mary's inner development—the cultivation of her mind and heart—is reflected in her outward physical transformation: By the end of the novel, she is described as a "noble-hearted" intellectual who is also physically lovely and even "perfect" (342). In this essay I trace the function of Mary's disfigurement in Buckingham's novel to question its centrality to the project of her self-making and to interrogate the meaning of its gradual, somewhat troubling "eradicat[ion]" (9). I am intrigued, on the one hand, by the work of disability studies scholars Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, who argue that disabled figures in literature have long functioned not as representations of real people with real bodies but as "narrative prosthesis," "a metaphoric signifier," and "a crutch on which literary narratives lean for their representative power, disruptive potential, and social critique" (Mitchell 16, 17). Assuming this is...

La novela popular y "2666" (2004) de Roberto Bolaño

In these lines it is demonstrated that “De la parte de Archimboldi”, a chapter of 2666 (2004) by Roberto Bolaño (1947–2000), can be linked to a series of Spanish realistic popular novels that began in the second half of the 19th century. It is said that the postmodern novel has adopted the popular and the cultural streams although no definite examples of current novels have been studied. On discovering the popular features which distinguish 2666 (2004), we analyse the contemporary Hispano–American novel, following the paths of authors such as Vance R. Holloway and Gonzalo Navajas. The text shows how Roberto Bolaño takes advantage of the features of the popular novel but uses its narrative codes in an ironic and new manner.

The P-Word: Reconsidering the Relationship Between Modernism and the Popular Novel

In recent years the historical categorization of cultural objects as high-, middle-, or lowbrow has come under increased scrutiny and the demarcations and motivations of those who initially determined them are being questioned and re-evaluated. Martin Hipsky's study attempts to reconsider the hierarchical cultural assumptions of the ‘popular’, which distinguish bestselling work from that which is intellectually and artistically innovative, challenging, and therefore, apparently more culturally desirable. Consequently he reconsiders the frequently aired assumption that popular art objects are middle- or even lowbrow, and therefore not connected to high modernism. University reading lists and elite academic publishing houses have largely determined the last generation of students' understanding of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ literature, without interrogating how these ranks were initially assigned. For this reason, Hipsky's thoroughly researched contribution to this field is very welcome. Kate Macdonald, in her edited collection The Masculine Middlebrow 1880–1950: What Mr Miniver Read (2011), and building on previous work by John Baxendale, observes that it has been the proponents of modernist ‘highbrow’ writing who have generally dictated how we view the popular. When figures such as Virginia Woolf have spoken derogatorily of the middlebrow, they have demonstrated not only their own tastes and aspirations but also their social class.1Yet, Woolf ought not to have had such a lasting influence on the way we continue to define writers who pre-date her and who did much to formulate a literary environment where high modernism was possible. In other words, while many of the popular writers whom Hipsky considers cannot be grouped as ‘modernist’, they can be credited with contributing to the evolution of the cultural environment that produced modernism. If the popular novels of the late Victorians are to be considered for their share in the modernist moment, and their contribution to the artistic sphere that spurred such innovators as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, then the factors that put the literary hierarchy in place must be reconsidered and the texts seen in terms of their merits as well as their failings. Hipsky does this without crediting authors like Corelli, Orkzy and Ward with the cerebral exactitude and deft creativity of the high moderns. He recognises their role as creators of dynamic fictions, that reflect their period, exhibiting the influence of their literary past as well as offering evidence of the future direction of British writing. As he asserts, the study will ‘reconsider … writing by Mansfield, Lawrence, Joyce, West and Woolf to explore how these modern writers incorporated elements of the romance mode and a related neo-Romanticism into their innovative fiction and (in the cases of West and Woolf) literary criticism’ (pp.xvi–xvii).

Modernism and the women's popular romance in Britain, 1885-1925

Today's mass-market romances have their precursors in late Victorian popular novels written by and for women. In Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance Martin Hipsky scrutinizes some of the best-selling British fiction from the period 1885 to 1925, the era when romances, especially those by British women, were sold and read more widely than ever before or since. Recent scholarship has explored the desires and anxieties addressed by both low and high British culture in the decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century. In keeping with these new studies, Hipsky offers a nuanced portrait of an important phenomenon in the history of modern fiction. He puts popular romances by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Marie Corelli, the Baroness Orczy, Florence Barclay, Elinor Glyn, Victoria Cross, Ethel Dell, and E. M. Hull into direct relationship with the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, among other modernist greats.

The Girl Athlete

A popular novelist and short story writer in the sixties, the Czech writer Ivan Klima has not been able to publish any of his work in Prague since the cultural freeze that followed the Soviet invasion of 1968. This story (‘Koulařka’ in Czech original) appeared last year in the second issue of Spektrum, the unofficial magazine put out in typescript by banned Czech authors and printed in London by Index on Censorship.

Agrarideologie und Sozialreform im Deutschen Kaiserreich: Heinrich Sohnrey und der Deutsche Verein fur landliche Wohlfahrts- und Heimatpflege 1896-1914

The growing depopulation of rural Germany, particularly in the Prussian east, stimulated a great debate at the end of the nineteenth century. The poles in the debate, ‘agrarian state’ (Agrarstaat) and ‘industrial state’ (Industriestaat), related less to the causes of this demographic trend than to its long-term social, cultural and political implications. While the one side accepted rural depopulation as an aspect of the transition to a modern industrial society, the other insisted that the price of this transition was unacceptable, for it would destroy the rural fundaments of Germany’s domestic peace and national power. No proponent of rural Germany enjoyed more contemporary prominence and resonance than Heinrich Sohnrey, the author of popular novels and stories of rural life, the editor of an influential journal, and the founder and driving spirit of an organization that was devoted to improving the quality of rural life, the Deutscher Verein für ländliche Wohlfahrts- und Heimatpflege.

Contemporary Paganism, Utopian Reading Communities, and Sacred Nonmonogamy: The Religious Impact of Heinlein's and Starhawk’s Fiction

Contemporary Paganism’s emphasis on sacred story and narrative has led to an interdependent relationship with popular media. Pagans draw inspiration from fiction and also bring their practices to life in popular novels. Robert Heinlein’s 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land has had a major impact on the practice of ethical nonmonogamy in the Pagan community, an impact that is reflected in Starhawk’s 1993 The Fifth Sacred Thing. Along with liturgical echoes from Stranger, Starhawk’s novel contains sacred sex practices similar to those Heinlein describes. Unlike Heinlein, however, Starhawk is writing from life; The Fifth Sacred Thing reflects the developing real-life norms of her San Francisco-based Pagan community. Both novels also follow the generic conventions of the American utopian novel, a literary form that has influenced communal and millennial movements of the past. Together, Heinlein and Starhawk’s novels demonstrate how fiction can inspire religious practice that then appears again in fiction.

ISLAM, ROMANCE AND POPULAR TASTE IN INDONESIA

In the last few years, the general book market in Indonesia has seen a flood of Islamic novels commonly identified by the Islamic text on the book cover. More significantly, these novels have been a popular and commercial success with record sales figures stimulating more such novels and giving rise to the phenomenon of popular Islamic novels. To ascertain whether these novels actually carry Islamic themes as suggested by their cover and if so, how is Islam represented in these novels, this study analyses two popular Islamic novels: Ayat ayat cinta (2004) by Habiburrahman El-Shirazy and Syahadat cinta (2006) by Taufiqurrahman Al-Azizy. The analysis aims to determine how Islam is represented and to draw conclusions on aspects of narrative construction in the respective novels. The analysis successfully determines that Islam is presented on a few levels in the studied texts, and concludes that two important ingredients underscore the narrative construction of both novels: Islam and the love story.

Arkadii Gaidar, the New Socialist Morality, and Stalinist Identity

This article explores the role of children’s literature in the formation of Stalinist identity and assembles a list of moral principles developed in the most popular early works of Arkadii Gaidar. It is not in Marxist texts nor in Pioneer slogans, but in these simple stories that the essential narrative structures of Soviet morality were created. Gaidar’s books are representative of a whole group of Soviet children’s literary classics published in the late 1920s–early 1930s and written by young people whose coming of age coincided with the years of political and social turmoil. This study argues that Gaidar’s own personal experiences as a youthful Red Army commander during the Civil War underpinned the moral vision of these popular novels. A new military-like value system, with courage (not kindness or love) as its central value, originated in Gaidar’s books and moulded several generations of Soviet children.

WAR GRAVES REGISTERS., MONUMENTS., HEADSTONES AND CROSSES WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE WAR OF 1880-1881

The study of warfare, military matters and battles has a great romantic appeal and in recent years has attracted a great deal of public interest. Evidence of this is seen in the growth of military museums or the military sections of museums, the large number of books on military matters which are published and the plethora of magazines, periodicals and newspapers dealing with almost every aspect of warfare and the history of war. Some of the most popular radio and TV programmes deal with war or military matters. Many societies confine themselves exclusively to military history, war models, war games, etc. Amongst the most popular excursions are those to battlefields. Many of the most popular novels of our time deal with war and the aftermath of war, while many teachers are using this growing interest to introduce their pupils to history.

Arnold Bennett’s Hotels

Hotels are exercises in practical salvation. --Wayne Koestenbaum Virginia Woolf famously accused Arnold Bennett of caring more about the mundane houses characters live in than about those characters themselves, neglecting the interior defining qualities of characters in favor of superficial descriptions that reveal too little. He is trying to make us imagine for him, she tells us in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924), He is trying to hypnotize us into the belief that, because he has made a house, must be a person living there (328-29). Bennett's fascination with the space, in life and in art, would seem to support this claim. In Those United States (1912), a collection of essays detailing his first transatlantic voyage, Bennett confesses [his] secret ambition had always been to be the manager of a grand (149-50), though this ambition was hardly as secret as Bennett suggests. Two of his most popular novels, The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902) and Imperial Palace (1930), feature hotels based on London's Savoy as the setting for nearly all of their action. A number of his other and short stories--notably The Old Wives' Tale (1908), his masterwork--similarly take place in and around hotels. (1) Yet in these works, Bennett enthusiastically reconceives accepted notions of home and domestic life, resituating his characters within the parameters of the hotel, and thus creating new kinds of characters, representing in new ways individual subjectivity and its relation to material space as he explores the modern in all its various incarnations. In doing so, Bennett addresses the very questions he is accused by Woolf of avoiding, illuminating the deeply complicated relationship between internal and external conditions, between domestic selves and public identities. Chronologically situated between Victorianism and high modernism, Bennett closely examines the transition of his characters from the one period to the other, and thus focuses, in the most pragmatic sense, on the question of where they live, how they define and are defined by the rooms they occupy. Where Woolf sees this as banal materialism, we might recognize Bennett's acute realization that the houses of the nineteenth century--and the identities they shape--were becoming obsolete, and something needed to replace them. While Woolf accuses Bennett's characters of deserting even the well-built villa in the Five Towns for eternity of bliss spent in the very best in Brighton (Modern 148)--leaving a dull though solid grounding for an existence wholly trivial--she ignores the very real significance of such relocation as Bennett represents it. As brilliantly as modern authors might explore inner psychological worlds, the physical realities of characters' lives remained important, the inner worlds and the outer realities shaping one another in a variety of ways. Domestic life might change radically--as it does, time and again, in Bennett's works--but it remains crucial to character. Bennett's two explicit hotel novels were written at opposite ends of his career. Imperial Palace was Bennett's last completed novel and is a far lengthier and more ponderous work. Each book focuses on the operations of a London luxury (modeled on the Savoy) and each is deeply invested in the question of Englishness, signaling Bennett's concerns with larger issues of nation and identity. The Grand Babylon Hotel is filled almost entirely with non-English characters, while within its walls the Imperial Palace offers a miniature reproduction of England--specifically of its class system. Even more urgently, perhaps, these are concerned with the desire to find or create a home in the modern world, and how the hotel, seemingly at odds with such desire, becomes the means by which a new model of domesticity can be identified. Modernism has traditionally been defined by its rejection of Victorian notions of the domestic, a breaking away from home and family, and from all the network of connections and loyalties that such material conditions and relationships entail. …

Disability on Trial

Bestselling author Jodi Picoult draws upon extreme, emotional human drama to craft sentimental, even melodramatic plotlines that almost always revolve around a courtroom trial. Often inspired by true stories, her topics explore complex ethical questions around dying, abandonment, abuse, high school shootings, and not surprisingly, illness and disability. The article considers three of Picoult's novels, My Sister's Keeper (2004), Handle with Care (2009), and House Rules (2010), to contrast the author's realistic depictions of familial and individual experiences of disability with the melodramatic frames girding these stories. Drawing upon recent work in disability studies scholarship, the suggestion is that Picoult at times pushes the boundaries of disability representation beyond the traditional binaries of medical versus social, toward a "rhizomatic model" of disability. Simultaneously, however, these popular novels resolidify the "problem" of disability as personal and familial, and reflect a deep cultural ambivalence—between a growing awareness and understanding of disability rights, from one perspective, and a haunting fear which illness and disability continue to evoke in an ableist culture.

‘Pulp Methodism’ Revisited: The Literature and Significance of Silas and Joseph Hocking

Writing pseudonymously in the New Age in February 1909, Arnold Bennett, acerbic chronicler of Edwardian chapel culture, deplored the lack of proper bookshops in English provincial towns. A substantial manufacturing community, he claimed, might be served only by a stationers shop, offering ‘Tennyson in gilt. Volumes of the Temple Classics or Everyman. Hymn books, Bibles. The latest cheap Shakespeare. Of new books no example, except the brothers Hocking.’ Bennett’s lament was an unintended compliment to the ubiquity of the novels of Silas and Joseph Hocking, brothers whose literary careers spanned more than half a century, generating almost two hundred novels and innumerable serials and short stories. Silas Hocking (1850–1935), whose first book was published in 1878 and last in 1934, has been described as the most popular novelist of the late nineteenth century. By 1900 his sales already exceeded one million volumes. The career of Joseph Hocking (1860–1937) was slightly shorter, stretching from 1887 to 1936, but his output was equally impressive. The Hockings’ works have attracted interest principally among scholars of Cornish life and culture. It will be argued here, however, that they have significance for the history of late Victorian and Edwardian Nonconformity, both reflecting and reinforcing the attitudes, beliefs and prejudices of their large and appreciative readership.

The Jesuit as Villain in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

InThe Jesuit, an early work by the popular novelist John Frederick Smith, three young English officers pass through Lisbon during the Peninsular War. While exploring a church they meet a mysterious Jesuit, who engages them in conversation about hostile British attitudes to his order. He tells them that ‘You paint a devil of your own creation, give it horns and attributes, then shudder at the phantom you have raised’. However, in the context of the novel, the threat from Jesuits is all too real. The villain of the story, the orders General in Spain, has no scruples about engaging in a sustained career of deception, manipulation, theft, abduction, rape and murder behind a façade of outward respectability and high religious office. He also exercises considerable power behind the vacant Spanish throne and even attempts unsuccessfully to make the future Duke of Wellington the unwitting agent of his nefarious purposes. The ‘devil’ Smith himself created was indeed a formidable one.