The Trail of the Serpent Read online

  2003 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Introduction copyright © 2003 by Sarah Waters

  Biographical note, notes, editor’s afterword, and reading group guide

  copyright © 2003 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Braddon, M. E. (Mary Elizabeth), 1835–1915.

  [Three times dead]

  The trail of the serpent / Mary Elizabeth Braddon; edited by Chris Willis; introduction by Sarah Waters.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82884-2

  1. Bankers—Fiction. 2. Murderers—Fiction. 3. Foundlings—Fiction. 4. Mute persons—Fiction. 5. Paris (France)—Fiction. 6. Serial murders—Fiction. 7. Judicial error—Fiction. 8. Yorkshire (England)—Fiction. I. Willis, Chris, 1960– II. Title.

  PR4989.M4 T48 2003

  823′.8—dc21 2002026594

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON

  Actress, novelist, playwright, and poet, Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) was one of the most fascinating women of the Victorian age. In her fifty-five-year writing career, she became one of Victorian England’s best-loved writers, as well as being one of the most prolific. Her phenomenal output included more than eighty novels, five plays, and numerous poems and short stories.

  Braddon was born in London on October 4, 1835 (a date she later sometimes gave as 1837). Her father, Henry, was an unsuccessful London solicitor who was perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy. He and her mother, Fanny, supplemented the family income by writing articles for Pitman’s Sporting Magazine under the pseudonyms “Rough Robin” and “Gilbert Forester.” The marriage was unhappy, and Fanny and Henry separated in 1840. By the 1850s, Henry’s financial failures had left the family almost penniless. To support her mother and sister, Braddon embarked on a career as a professional actress with a touring repertory company, using the stage name Mary Seyton. This was a scandalous career for a Victorian woman: actresses were regarded as little better than prostitutes. Braddon safeguarded her reputation and her chastity by taking her mother on tour with her as chaperone.

  From 1852 until early 1860, she appeared in plays in London and the provinces. During this time she tried her hand as a playwright and poet. Several of her poems were published in provincial newspapers, and her play The Loves of Arcadia was performed successfully in London. She later put her knowledge of the theatre to good use in her novels. Actress heroines often appear in her fiction, and her 1875 novel A Strange World gives a lively picture of a Victorian traveling theatre company.

  In 1860, Braddon’s first novel, Three Times Dead, was published in serial form, but sold badly. Shortly afterward, Braddon met London publisher John Maxwell, who was soon to become her lover and then her husband. Under his guidance, she rewrote Three Times Dead as The Trail of the Serpent. It sold one thousand copies within a week of publication, prompting George Eliot to complain to John Blackwood that it was populist trash while bitterly bemoaning the fact that it sold better than her own carefully crafted novels. Braddon now moved in with Maxwell and embarked on a career as a full-time writer and editor. To meet the demands of the market, she wrote melodramatic serials under a variety of pseudonyms for Maxwell’s Halfpenny Journal. Braddon had no illusions about the literary merits of this hackwork, wryly commenting in a letter to her novelist friend Edward Bulwer Lytton that “the amount of crime, treachery, murder, slow poisoning & general infamy required by the halfpenny reader is something terrible.”

  But in 1862, Lady Audley’s Secret, which is considered to be her masterpiece, brought Braddon firmly into mainstream publishing and turned her into one of the era’s most popular novelists. The adventures of Braddon’s beautiful, bigamous anti-heroine became an instant bestseller, running to nine editions within three months of publication. High-minded critics condemned Lady Audley’s Secret as noxious and immoral, but their reaction only served to give the novel more publicity.

  Braddon’s output at this time was astounding. While writing Lady Audley’s Secret, she also wrote another serial, The Black Band, which appeared in the Halfpenny Journal under the pseudonym Lady Caroline Lascelles in 1861–62. This achievement is even more remarkable given that Braddon was heavily pregnant at the time. She gave birth to her first son, Gerald, on March 19, 1862. As the last installments of Lady Audley’s Secret and The Black Band appeared, Braddon began another novel, Aurora Floyd. Another immediate bestseller, this book scandalized critics because of the notorious scene in which the beautiful heroine becomes passionately aroused while horsewhipping a male stable hand.

  From the early 1860s until her death in 1915, Braddon wrote almost continually. Between 1861 and 1871 alone she wrote over twenty novels. Under constant pressure to publish, in 1864 she told Bulwer Lytton that she was “always divided between a noble desire to attain something like excellence—and a very ignoble wish to earn plenty of money.” Whatever her misgivings about commercialism, she wrote for pleasure as well as profit. Toward the end of her career she told a Daily Telegraph interviewer, “What does surprise me is that every girl who is well educated and endowed with imagination does not long to express herself with her pen.”

  Her hectic work schedule, in addition to a series of personal tragedies, contributed to Braddon’s having a nervous breakdown in 1868. During 1867–68, she had written and published eight books (The Lady’s Mile, Ralph the Bailiff, Circe, Rupert Godwin, Birds of Prey, Charlotte’s Inheritance, Run to Earth, and Dead Sea Fruit), as well as editing Belgravia magazine. Then in 1868, her sister Maggie died suddenly in Italy. Shortly afterward, her mother died. Heartbroken, Braddon suffered a yearlong breakdown and feared that she would never be able to write again. However, this experience led to her sensitive and moving portrayal of mental illness in Strangers and Pilgrims (1871–72), whose heroine has a breakdown after the death of her child.

  In 1874, after the death of Maxwell’s estranged wife, Mary Anne, Braddon and Maxwell finally married. Maxwell had been unable to obtain a divorce from his wife, who was alleged to be insane. Though Mary Anne was rumored to have been sent to a lunatic asylum, recent research by Braddon’s biographer, Jennifer Carnell, has uncovered no evidence of any such incarceration and indicates that, instead of being locked away, she may simply have gone home to her family in Ireland. At the time of their marriage, Braddon had already borne Maxwell six children (one of whom died in infancy) and had helped him raise his five children from his marriage to Mary Anne.

  Having established her name as a sensation novelist, Braddon went on to write successfully in a variety of genres. Eleanor’s Victory (1863) features one of fiction’s earliest (and least efficient) female detectives. The Doctor’s Wife (1864) is an English adaptation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary that focuses on the plight of a discontented, overimaginative woman trapped in a dull marriage in provincial English society. According to Professor C. Heywood and Robert Lee Wolff, it was a substantial influence on George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Vixen (1879) is a lively love story with an unconventional heroine. Mount Royal (1882) is a nineteenth-century reworking of the legend of Tristran and Iseult. Gerard, or The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1891) is based on the Faust story. Rough Justice (1898) and His Darling Sin (1899) are detective novels, written during the height of
Sherlock Holmes’s popularity. The Rose of Life (1905) is loosely based on the downfall of Oscar Wilde, who was a close friend. However, Edwardian convention dictated that she had to be suitably discreet about the nature of his offense. In Braddon’s novel the hero commits fraud, not sodomy.

  Condemned as a cheap sensationalist in the 1860s, by the turn of the century Braddon had become a respected literary figure. In September 1897, the Windsor Magazine said that “Miss Braddon’s name is a household word.” Her work, which was admired by Thackeray and Henry James and mentioned by James Joyce in Ulysses, was serialized in periodicals throughout Britain and appeared as far afield as Japan and Australia. Her earnings enabled her to buy luxurious homes in Hampshire’s New Forest and the London suburb of Richmond, as well as purchasing her mother’s beloved childhood home, Skisdon, in Cornwall. After Maxwell’s death in 1895, she lived in their Richmond home, Lichfield House, where she continued writing until her death in 1915. Her last novel, Mary, was published posthumously. With many of her novels now being reprinted, and a new biography recently published, Braddon is likely to provide a fruitful source of study for many years.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  INTRODUCTION by Sarah Waters

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  Epigraph

  BOOK THE FIRST. A RESPECTABLE YOUNG MAN I. THE GOOD SCHOOLMASTER

  II. GOOD FOR NOTHING

  III. THE USHER WASHES HIS HANDS

  IV. RICHARD MARWOOD LIGHTS HIS PIPE

  V. THE HEALING WATERS

  VI. TWO CORONER’S INQUESTS

  VII. THE DUMB DETECTIVE A PHILANTHROPIST

  VIII. SEVEN LETTERS ON THE DIRTY ALPHABET

  IX. “MAD, GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY”

  BOOK THE SECOND. A CLEARANCE OF ALL SCORES I. BLIND PETER

  II. LIKE AND UNLIKE

  III. A GOLDEN SECRET

  IV. JIM LOOKS OVER THE BRINK OF THE TERRIBLE GULF

  V. MIDNIGHT BY THE SLOPPERTON CLOCKS

  VI. THE QUIET FIGURE ON THE HEATH

  VII. THE USHER RESIGNS HIS SITUATION

  BOOK THE THIRD. A HOLY INSTITUTION I. THE VALUE OF AN OPERA-GLASS

  II. WORKING IN THE DARK

  III. THE WRONG FOOTSTEP

  IV. OCULAR DEMONSTRATION

  V. THE KING OF SPADES

  VI. A GLASS OF WINE

  VII. THE LAST ACT OF LUCRETIA BORGIA

  VIII. BAD DREAMS AND A WORSE WAKING

  IX. A MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIFE

  X. ANIMAL MAGNETISM

  BOOK THE FOURTH. NAPOLEON THE GREAT I. THE BOY FROM SLOPPERTON

  II. MR. AUGUSTUS DARLEY AND MR. JOSEPH PETERS GO OUT FISHING

  III. THE EMPEROR BIDS ADIEU TO ELBA

  IV. JOY AND HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY

  V. THE CHEROKEES TAKE AN OATH

  VI. MR. PETERS RELATES HOW HE THOUGHT HE HAD A CLUE, AND HOW HE LOST IT

  BOOK THE FIFTH. THE DUMB DETECTIVE I. THE COUNT DE MAROLLES AT HOME

  II. MR. PETERS SEES A GHOST

  III. THE CHEROKEES MARK THEIR MAN

  IV. THE CAPTAIN, THE CHEMIST, AND THE LASCAR

  V. THE NEW MILKMAN IN PARK LANE

  VI. SIGNOR MOSQUETTI RELATES AN ADVENTURE

  VII. THE GOLDEN SECRET IS TOLD, AND THE GOLDEN BOWL IS BROKEN

  VIII. ONE STEP FURTHER ON THE RIGHT TRACK

  IX. CAPTAIN LANSDOWN OVERHEARS A CONVERSATION WHICH APPEARS TO INTEREST HIM

  BOOK THE SIXTH. ON THE TRACK I. FATHER AND SON

  II. RAYMOND DE MAROLLES SHOWS HIMSELF BETTER THAN ALL BOW STREET

  III. THE LEFT-HANDED SMASHER MAKES HIS MARK

  IV. WHAT THEY FIND IN THE ROOM IN WHICH THE MURDER WAS COMMITTED

  V. MR. PETERS DECIDES ON A STRANGE STEP, AND ARRESTS THE DEAD

  VI. THE END OF THE DARK ROAD

  CHAPTER THE LAST. FAREWELL TO ENGLAND

  AFTERWORD by Chris Willis

  APPENDIX: MY FIRST NOVEL by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  NOTES

  The Modern Library Editorial Board

  INTRODUCTION

  Sarah Waters

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon is known to readers today—if she is known at all—primarily for the two bestselling novels written early in her career, Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–62) and Aurora Floyd (1862–63). With these, and alongside writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, and Mrs. Henry Wood, she helped to define and popularize that extraordinary mid-Victorian genre, the novel of “sensation.” Like Collins’s, her intrigue-based plots locate crime and the harboring of dreadful secrets at the heart of the middle-class household; like Reade, she sends her characters on extravagant narrative journeys; like Wood, she is interested in the oppressive social forces which might drive individuals—and women, in particular—into deceit, blackmail, bigamy, murder, and madness. And like all these writers, her contribution to the sensation genre made her vulnerable to conservative criticism which understood her fiction to be unhealthy and amoral, a gratuitous dwelling on “nasty sentiments and equivocal heroines,”1 a pandering to the bourgeoisie’s fascination with its own corruption, which was helping to make “the literature of the Kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing room.”2

  The Trail of the Serpent occupies a fascinating place in relation both to Braddon’s sensational œuvre and to the criticism that greeted it. Her first finished novel (she had previously written poetry, sentimental juvenile fiction, and a pastoral play, The Loves of Arcadia), it was begun at the instigation of a Yorkshire printer, C. H. Empson.3 Empson had read and admired her work; what he sensed particularly, perhaps, was her burgeoning affinity with literary formula, for he encouraged her to write in more or less blatant imitation of the popular, plot-based fictions of Dickens and G.W.M. Reynolds.4 The result—produced in the spring and summer of 1860—was this lurid, improbable story, originally entitled Three Times Dead, or the Secret of the Heath. Braddon wrote it swiftly, in what was clearly, for her, an exhilarating kind of professional innocence: by April 1863 she would have grown used to creating serialized novels for a demanding public and having “the printer at me all the time”;5 she wrote Three Times Dead “with all the freedom of one who feared not the face of a critic,” with “a pen unchastened by experience … faster and more facile at that initial stage than it ever became after long practice.”6 Even so, the novel was not an immediate financial success. Issued by Empson in cheap serial form, it “could hardly have entered upon the world of books,” she recalled later, “in a more profound obscurity.”7

  Within a year, however, Braddon had embarked upon a professional and romantic liaison with the more experienced and ambitious publisher, John Maxwell; more crucially, she had begun publication of the novel that was to make her famous, Lady Audley’s Secret. On the strength of this success, Three Times Dead was reissued with a new title which, like the first, hinted at enigma, convolution, and surprise, but added another element: the subtle foregrounding of the process of detection through which the enigma was to be unraveled. In short, it was reinvented and secured more firmly within the genre that Braddon was even then helping to form—the genre of sensation. The tactics worked. With Maxwell’s money behind it, and in its new guise as The Trail of the Serpent, the novel sold a thousand new copies in its first week.8

  What strikes us about The Trail of the Serpent today, perhaps, is its likeness to that other great mid-Victorian popular cultural phenomenon, the melodrama. Braddon recognized this herself: “I gave loose,” she wrote of the novel, “to all my leanings to the violent in melodrama. Death stalked in ghastliest form across my pages; and villainy reigned triumphant till the Nemesis of the last chapter.”9 The twenty-four-year-old author’s “leanings to the violent” were, as even the most casual reading of The Trail of the Serpent could not fail to discover, considerable. Two gruesome murders—one of a delirious child—take place before the end of book 1, chapter 3; by chapter 6, an abandoned
woman has cast herself and her illegitimate baby into a river; within another seven chapters the novel’s villain, Jabez North, has killed his own twin brother and set in motion the dastardly plot that will persuade a duped heiress to poison her husband. Much of this, of course, is the stock violence of popular literary and theatrical tradition, and leaves us relatively unmoved. Some images, however—for example, that of Jabez washing his blood-stained hands and then disposing of the “dark and ghastly” water by calmly drinking it—are more original, and more unsettling. Most shocking, I think, is the casualness with which violence, and violent, untimely deaths, are invoked. There is a preponderance of dead or vulnerable children in this novel—a grim reflection, perhaps, of nineteenth-century infant mortality rates; but consider the cynicism of Braddon’s description of the Slopperton river, the Sloshy:

  It has quite a knack of swelling and bursting, this Sloshy; it overflows its banks and swallows up a house or two, or takes an impromptu snack off a few outbuildings, once or twice a year. It is inimical to children, and has been known to suck into its muddy bosom the hopes of divers families; and has afterwards gone down to the distant sea, flaunting on its breast Billy’s straw hat or Johnny’s pinafore, as a flag of triumph for having done a little amateur business for the gentleman on the pale horse.

  This is not the tone we tend to associate with Victorian lady novelists; there is something almost Dickensian, in fact, about the mix of coolness and imaginative fancy, the controlled insouciance of that glorious final phrase, “a little amateur business for the gentleman on the pale horse.” Equally memorable and troubling—and perhaps more truly Braddonesque, more “female”—is the recurrence throughout the novel of casual references to violent domestic crime. Note, for example, the man who “invited a friend to dinner and murdered him on the kitchen stairs while the first course was being dished.” Note “John Boggins, weaver,” who “beat out the brains of Sarah his wife, first with the heel of his clog and ultimately with a poker.” Note the girl who poisoned her father with “the crust of a beef-steak pudding,” the “boy of fourteen” who committed suicide “by hanging himself behind a door,” the man who “cut his wife’s throat … because she hadn’t put no salt in the saucepan when she boiled the greens.” Such references amount, collectively, to a kind of chorus or commentary, forming a counterpoint to Jabez’s increasingly grandiose criminal career, his steady ascension into aristocratic villainy and the higher flights of melodrama.