The Trail of the Serpent

By Catherine M. Welter and Mary Elizabeth Braddon

This is Braddon's debut novel, first published in 1860. It has all the usual elements of a sensation novel, but its role as a detective novel is arguably more important. The present edition includes the text of the 1866 edition. It is accompanied by two appendices and 292 explanatory notes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Universitas Press
• Release date: Oct 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781988963532

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Introduction

Catherine M. Welter

I wish my days to be bound each to each by Miss Braddon’s novels, wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in 1894 (qtd. in Wolff 9). In the same letter, the author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island describes the excitement that each new Braddon novel occasioned in the South Seas, where he lived for several years. Yet Stevenson and his neighbors were not the only ones who loved Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s work. By the end of her astounding career, Braddon could count such literary giants as Thackeray, Dickens, Collins, Tennyson, Hardy, Doyle, and James as fans—and many of them as friends (Wolff 9, 15).[1] Like many of the century’s most popular writers, however, Braddon had her share of storms to weather before she would reach the level of success required to become the Queen of the Circulating Libraries (Miss Braddon’s Novels 109).

Life began for Braddon on October 4th, 1835, in London’s Soho neighborhood. She was the youngest of three children born to a mother she adored and a father she would later describe as nobody’s enemy but his own (qtd. in Carnell 4-5). At a time when the patriarch’s role as provider and protector was taken very seriously, Henry Braddon shirked his responsibilities over and over again, providing his children with affection, but little else. He was a lawyer by trade, but, as Jennifer Carnell relates in Literary Lives, he cared more about his hobbies (gambling in particular) and his appearance than about paying bills or employees (Carnell 3-5). The family found themselves in debt many times before Braddon’s mother, having discovered that Henry was having an affair, left him for good. From 1840 on, Braddon’s mother Fanny raised her youngest child alone, relying mostly on financial support from relatives. Braddon’s older brother and sister were already out of the house by this time. They, too, were supported primarily by kind relatives, who paid for their food, clothing, and education.

Unlike her brother and sister, who both attended boarding schools, Mary Elizabeth Braddon received most of her education at home. In Before the Knowledge of Evil, the memoir that she left unfinished at her death in 1915, Braddon recalls having a governess in the early 1840s and briefly attending a boarding school, which she left because she was unhappy (77-78, 173).[2] Much of what she learned came from her mother, who was described as an unusually cultivated woman in an article from 1912 (Holland 151). Fanny Braddon had often used her pen to dig the family out of debt—writing articles for sporting magazines, chiefly—and it was not long before she began to share her knowledge of languages, music, and literature with young Mary (Holland 151; Carnell 7; Willis v). Documents in the Braddon Family Archive reveal that Braddon also learned history and geography; these subjects, along with French and literature, supplemented the grammar and arithmetic that she had acquired in school (Braddon, Before the Knowledge of Evil 144, 147). Unlike some mid-Victorian parents, Braddon’s mother allowed her to read widely, and Braddon notes in her memoir that she read and enjoyed Shakespeare, Edgeworth, Scott, and Dickens in her youth (147, 169-70). As a result of her mother’s tutelage, Braddon developed a life-long thirst for knowledge that later led her to study new languages, like German and Italian, and to conduct detailed research for her novels.[3]

By the time she turned seventeen, Braddon was accomplished in the arts that the Victorians considered desirable for young ladies; she knew French and could paint, sing, and play the piano well, but instead of following in her sister’s footsteps and securing a suitable husband, Braddon chose a more adventurous path. For most of her youth, Braddon and her mother had survived on the generosity of relatives, but teenage Mary now chose to provide for herself and her mother. Archival documents reveal that she considered careers in art, music, and writing before settling on the riskiest choice of all: acting. In terms of reputation, Victorian actresses were akin to prostitutes. On the stage, their bodies were on display in a way that many deemed inappropriate, and it was not uncommon for wealthy men to form relationships with actresses they admired. Acting was, however, one of the few careers available to women in the 1850s, and Braddon protected her reputation by bringing her mother with her and taking the stage name Mary Seyton. The two of them travelled around England with various acting troupes, and Braddon played many different roles in melodramas, farces, comedies, and tragedies from 1852 to 1860 (Carnell 13). She was successful enough to support herself and her mother, but at some point during these years, Braddon must have realized that her career was no longer advancing. Friends who had not been acting as long were moving up faster and getting better reviews (Carnell 71-73). Thus, Braddon began to build a writing career in her spare time. Her earliest publications, including poems published in local newspapers and a play that was performed in London, were written while she was still working as an actress.

Since Braddon had been writing stories ever since she was a child, it seems unlikely that a writing career was simply her Plan B. In an essay entitled My First Novel, Braddon notes that she began her pilgrimage on the … road of fiction not long after she learned to write, and that she was especially prolific between the ages of eight and twelve (328-329, in the present volume). My First Novel, Braddon’s letters, and her memoir provide an excellent picture of the literary influences that shaped her work in this early period and the years to come. In her youth, she was inspired by fairy tales, Jane Eyre, Byron’s poetry, and Thackeray’s fiction (My First Novel 328-329, 331). As a young woman, she was influenced by the plays she acted in, as well as the work of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a writer she admired and corresponded with for many years. He wrote a variety of poetry, fiction, and criticism, but his crime novels likely had the greatest impact on Braddon’s Trail of the Serpent. By the time she discovered Lytton’s novels, Braddon’s interest in crime had already been piqued by Sarah Hobbs, the cook the Braddons had employed while Mary was growing up. Hobbs had regaled young Mary with popular stories about murder victims (Before the Knowledge of Evil 129), and those tales, along with Braddon’s extensive reading, gave her the foundation required to write the book that would become the first British detective novel.

Braddon’s fledgling writing career took a step forward when she met John Gilby, the wealthy Yorkshire landowner who would become her literary patron and mentor. How they met is unknown; one source suggests that he discovered her through her published poems, but it is also possible that he met her through a mutual friend or at one of the races that they enjoyed attending. However their meeting came about, Gilby was so impressed by her talent that he gave her the financial support necessary for her to quit the stage and write full time. Technically, he was paying her to write a collection of poetry that he hoped would turn a profit when published (My First Novel 331-332, 334), but Braddon also sent him other manuscripts, and he would respond with advice for revision and publication.[4] While Braddon was working on the collection that Gilby had sponsored, she was approached by a local printer, who offered to pay her ten pounds for a novel that would combine … the human interest and genial humour of Dickens with the plot-weaving of G.W.R. Reynolds (My First Novel 332). Braddon accepted with enthusiasm, and began writing the novel in weekly parts while also working on the poetry collection that Gilby had commissioned. In My First Novel, Braddon recalls that the poetry collection had become a chore; she did not like the topic that Gilby had chosen and she struggled with the strict rhyme scheme required for Spenserian stanzas (334). The novel, however, which she entitled Three Times Dead; or, The Secret of the Heath, fascinated her; and it was this novel that would later be renamed The Trail of the Serpent.

Braddon never received more than fifty shillings for Three Times Dead, but writing the novel gave her the chance to unleash her creativity (My First Novel 332). She writes that it was an infinite relief to turn … to the angels and the monsters which my own brain had engendered (334). She adds,

I gave loose 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. . . . I dashed headlong at my work, conjured up my images of horror or of mirth, and boldly built the framework of my story, and set my puppets moving. To me, at least, they were living creatures, who seemed to follow impulses of their own, to be impelled by their own passions, to love and hate, and plot and scheme of their own accord. There was unalloyed pleasure in the composition of that first story . . . (332)

Despite Braddon’s excitement over the novel, the weekly instalments did not sell well. The printer did not invest much money in the illustrations or the format, and Braddon was disappointed with the overall quality of the copies (My First Novel 333). Yet the experience itself, coinciding with her frustrations over the poetry collection that she was writing for Gilby, may have set her on the path which soon led to fame.

Although Braddon continued to write poetry and plays, fiction is where she made her mark. After she finished Three Times Dead and the poetry collection she wrote for Gilby, Braddon relocated to London, the literary center of the nation. Several of her short stories were published in magazines owned by John Maxwell, and as her writing career began to grow, so did her relationship with Maxwell. Gilby, irritated by the fact that Braddon had a new mentor and disturbed by the possibility that Braddon had fallen in love with a married man, ended his friendship with her (Wolff 94-97). She and Maxwell, however, made a great team, and Braddon soon revised and reissued Three Times Dead as The Trail of the Serpent. The alterations that she made were fairly minor; Braddon changed the names of characters, towns, etc. (Ivy 66), and edited the original text to improve the writing. She added a few new details, including the origin of Detective Peters’s muteness, but the vast majority of her revisions are stylistic in nature.[5] Therefore, as far as the content is concerned, the two novels are essentially the same. The main difference is the way they were published, and when the novel came out with its new title in March of 1861, roughly six months after Braddon had finished writing the version that was serialized in 1860, Trail became a huge success. Maxwell sent Braddon the pleasant news that "one thousand copies … sold in seven days" (Maxwell to Braddon, 22 Feb. 1861, qtd. in Carnell 131). Maxwell’s emphasis on the number of days shows just how impressive those sales were for a novel in 1861.[6] The Trail of the Serpent sold so well, in fact, that more established novelists, like George Eliot, envied Braddon’s success (Andres 561). Braddon, however, was just getting started.

Five months after The Trail of the Serpent was published, Braddon began serializing Lady Audley’s Secret, the novel that would catapult her to fame and secure her a place as one of the founders of the genre of sensation fiction. Not long after that, she began Aurora Floyd, another best-seller that captivated audiences around the English-speaking world. Throughout the remainder of the 1860s and up until her death in 1915, Braddon continued to write best-selling novels, while also producing new short stories, plays, and essays. Her fans were loyal, and her novels were so popular that even notoriously picky subscription libraries like Mudie’s bought her work, thus prompting others to dub Braddon the Queen of the Circulating Libraries.

Fame, however, came with its downside, as it often does. In the 1860s, Braddon was attacked in the press for everything from writing immoral novels to encouraging radical behavior.[7] Conservative reviewers detested sensation fiction, which attempted to thrill its readers with tales of crime, adultery, and family secrets, and they often targeted Braddon because she was one of the best-known sensation novelists. Some writers even went so far as to attack Braddon on personal grounds, suggesting that a woman who could write about such low topics must have little class and even less morality. Several of these attacks were motivated by animosity towards Maxwell, with whom Braddon had been living since the early 1860s. He had separated from his wife before he met Braddon, but he was still legally married, so he could not marry Braddon until after they had already had several children together (Wolff 107-08, 223). When the public found out that Braddon and Maxwell had been living as husband and wife without being married, the scandal hit Braddon hard. Her brother, whom she loved and respected, shunned her, and she and Maxwell lost friends and servants over the scandal (Wolff 225-27). To many of Braddon’s critics, it must have seemed as though her immorality had finally been proven. Yet, as all things do with time, the scandal eventually died down. Braddon and Maxwell married after his wife’s death in 1874 and remained together until Maxwell died in 1895 (Wolff 101). They had five children of their own, and Maxwell’s five children from his previous marriage lived with them.[8] The blended family was accepted into high society, and Braddon became friends with the literary and social elite of her day, including Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Mary Cholmondeley, and Rhoda Broughton, among others.

In addition to her newfound social acceptance, Braddon acquired a more respectable literary reputation after the 1870s. For some time, she had been experimenting with other genres, writing realist, historical, detective, and domestic novels in addition to the sensation novels that she was best known for, but as the century progressed, a new aura of respectability surrounded her work. The author of the 1912 Bookman article about Braddon even went so far as to write that Braddon’s sensation fiction, like Wilkie Collins’s, was of superior quality, and that it had nothing in common with the sensational rubbish which now pours from the printing press almost every day throughout the year (Holland 151). Braddon, he added, has for a period of nearly fifty years held a place in English fiction to which no other writer has succeeded in attaining (151). Thus, the woman who was once pilloried for her sensation fiction became one of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ most venerable authors. By the time she died in 1915, Braddon had written some 200 works of fiction, as well as plays, poems, and essays.[9] For her extraordinary talent and productivity, Henry James described her as a magnificent … benefactress to the literary State (James to Braddon, 1 Oct. 1911, Harry Ransom Center).

Unfortunately, as the twentieth century progressed, literary tastes shifted again. World War I changed the way people thought about a number of things, and Braddon’s favorite son, W.B. Maxwell, was disturbed to find that his mother’s literary reputation had faded by the 1930s (Maxwell 283). It’s likely that Braddon’s innumerable fans passed down their love of Braddon to their children, but literary critics dismissed her work as popular, rather than artistic. The taint of popular success would not begin to wear off until the 1970s, when Braddon’s first modern biographer, Robert Lee Wolff, and feminist literary critics began to rediscover women writers whose work had been unjustly neglected. Even then, scholars tended to focus mostly on Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, the two novels that earned Braddon a place as one of the founders of sensation fiction. Only in the twenty-first century has Braddon’s other work, including The Trail of the Serpent, begun to receive the attention it deserves.

The Trail of the Serpent: Sensation Fiction

or Detective Fiction?

The Trail of the Serpent is both a sensation novel and a detective novel. It has all of the usual elements of a sensation novel, including family secrets, crime, and adultery (a ruse, in this case), and it depicts these as features of middle- and upper-class life. Yet The Trail’s role as a detective novel is arguably more important, for while it is an early example of both genres, it has the distinction of being the first British detective novel.[10] It predates, and, in many respects, influenced Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock series, but unlike these works, The Trail’s place in the history of detective fiction has often been overlooked.[11]

Detective fiction rose out of several popular genres, including crime reporting, Newgate novels, and police memoirs. Like all literature, it was influenced by the events of the day, and as police forces were created and contested in the first half of the nineteenth century, reading audiences became interested in detectives and the process of detection. As Audrey Peterson and Caroline Reitz have pointed out, the public was suspicious of the police in the 1820s and ’30s, but attitudes began to change in the 1850s and ’60s, roughly ten to twenty years after the position of detective was created (Peterson 171; Reitz xiii, 44). Reitz attributes this shift in attitude to the effect that Dickens and Collins had on readers; Dickens’s popular magazine, Household Words, for instance, published a series of essays on the police, and Dickens and Collins both incorporated clever, hardworking detectives into some of their novels and short stories. Yet Collins and Dickens were not alone in generating respect and acceptance for detectives in the middle decades of the century; Braddon’s Trail of the Serpent likely had the same effect.

As the first British novel to focus on a detective’s attempt to solve a crime and catch a criminal, The Trail of the Serpent is unique, but it also reflects the tensions of the early years of detective fiction. Braddon represents most of the novel’s detectives well, just as Dickens and Collins do in Bleak House (1853) and The Moonstone (1868), but she also shows that competence may vary. Gardenford’s Detective Jinks, for instance, is as much up to his business as a kitting [kitten] (The Trail 194, in the present volume), and Jinks’s incompetence, along with his ableist attitude towards Peters, enable the true murderer to escape. The Liverpool detectives, on the other hand, are a credit to their profession. Like Dickens’s detectives from the 1850s, Braddon’s Liverpool detectives are discreet, intelligent men; they respect Peters’s talent and follow his lead. Peters himself is Braddon’s greatest contribution to the image of the Victorian police, for he is a true genius and likeable to boot (The Trail 286). He shares several characteristics with Dickens’s detectives, including his kindly disposition and desire to benefit humanity, but he is also unusual for the time period.[12] By creating a detective who could sympathize with other marginalized members of society not only on the basis of compassion, but through personal experience (Peters, for instance, knows what it is to be misjudged and treated unfairly), Braddon gave Victorian readers an image of authority that they would not be likely to forget.

In addition to improving the image of the mid-Victorian police detective, Braddon’s first published novel also had a lasting impact on the genre of detective fiction. As Willis has noted, Peters’s adopted son, Slosh, is likely the first child detective in the genre, and Collins would later create a similar character, Gooseberry, in The Moonstone (Willis 410). Doyle, who wrote to Braddon in 1909 about how much he respected her and her work, also added child detectives to his Sherlock Holmes mysteries (25 July 1909, Harry Ransom Center). The Baker Street Irregulars, as Doyle’s band of street urchins is called, gathered information and assisted Holmes with various schemes throughout the series; their popularity was such that the first literary society cum fan club dedicated to Sherlock Holmes took their name. Doyle might also have been inspired by Peters’s talent for acting and disguise, which we see when Peters pretends to be a tourist or dresses like an Irish workhand.[13] Decades later, Holmes would profess an interest in acting and use disguises to fool suspects.[14] In the years after Braddon’s death, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, two of the twentieth century’s most popular mystery writers, would refer to Braddon in their work (Willis 411), thus suggesting that even after Braddon’s reputation had been downgraded and her work forgotten by scholars, her influence continued to percolate throughout the detective and mystery genre.

Angles for Interpretation

In My First Novel, Braddon wrote that she penned Three Times Dead (later called The Trail of the Serpent) with all the freedom of one who feared not the face of the critic (332). Since she had not yet, at this early stage in her writing career, experienced the sting of the critical lash, she wrote with unreserved exuberance (332). It follows, then, that The Trail of the Serpent is Braddon’s least censored novel. Later in her career, she would write with a pen chastened by experience and fearful of the blows that critics were eager to send her way, but The Trail escaped unscathed because it was her first (332). The next three subsections will examine Braddon’s chartered libertine through three different lenses with the goal of providing multiple angles from which to read the novel (332).[15] These sections are not meant to be exhaustive, for there are many other lenses through which to interpret The Trail, but they are intended to introduce readers to some of Braddon’s earliest and least inhibited explorations of disability, class, and gender.

Disability in The Trail of the Serpent

Readers will find a great deal of social criticism, some subtle and some not so subtle, in Braddon’s fearless first novel. There are attacks on hypocrisy, the permanency of marriage, and other topics, but The Trail is especially progressive in its portrayal of physical difference (or disability) and hand-based communication. In this respect, it stands out against other Victorian novels, many of which have acquired a dismal reputation for contributing to the creation of disability as a concept that stigmatizes and marginalizes real-life people. In The Trail, and through Detective Peters in particular, Braddon rejects many of the stereotypes and conventions that disability scholars have identified as some of the most pervasive and problematic in literature.

One such convention, as Rosemarie Garland Thompson and Cindy LaCom have pointed out, is that readers are often introduced to the concept of disability through marginal, simplistic characters who function solely as metaphors and have little or no interior life (Garland Thompson 8-10; LaCom 190). Such characters are generally denied access to marriage and children (Stoddard Holmes 6-7), and are often cured or eliminated once they have fulfilled their symbolic function (Mitchell and Snyder 56-7). Peters, however, is never reduced to a stereotype or symbol, nor is he cured or killed at the end of Braddon’s novel. In his last scene, he communicates his plans to marry, and since his wife is young, it seems reasonable to assume that the family he began with his adopted son will continue to grow. More importantly, as the detective who solves the crime around which the novel revolves, Peters has a prominent role and a complex inner life, which Braddon allows us to access through interior monologue and his hands, on which he often thinks out loud (The Trail 198).

Of course, as Tobin Siebers and other scholars have pointed out, even when characters with disabilities are portrayed in positive ways or take leading roles, they are often romanticized to such an extent that authors risk misrepresenting what life is like for real people (Siebers 64; Hafferty and Foster 190-99). In Peters’s case, the professional and financial success that he earns throughout the novel could be said to misrepresent the economic realities faced by many Victorians with impairments, but Braddon refuses to gloss over the difficulties of his daily life. Instead of suggesting that there are no real barriers … in society for persons with disabilities, as Hafferty and Foster have said of twentieth-century crime-writers (199), Braddon emphasizes that Peters faces prejudice, unequal treatment, and communication difficulties on a daily basis. There are too many of these passages in The Trail to discuss in depth, but a few brief examples will suffice. In his superior officers’ initial assumption that his infirmity … makes him scarcely worth his salt (The Trail 37), in the impatience with which some of his colleagues react when they are not skilled enough to follow his hands (23, 294), and in the behavior of strangers who treat him like a child or forriner when he signs to them that he is mute (198), Braddon displays the ignorant assumptions and reactions that plague the disability community to this day. Therefore, while The Trail is not entirely devoid of idealism or disability metaphors, it stands out for highlighting the realities of physical difference and for rejecting most disability conventions.[16]

Another important facet of The Trail’s representation of disability lies in the way Braddon depicts sign language and finger spelling. In the nineteenth century, a movement known as oralism gradually spread across Great Britain and the United States. It originated in Europe, where educators claimed to have had great success in teaching their deaf and mute pupils to speak with their tongues, rather than with their fingers and hands (Kyle and Woll 41). The so-called pure oralists believed that sign language and finger spelling were barbarous and that students should be forbidden from learning or using them, but in the middle decades of the century, many British and American educators continued to favor methods that combined oralism with nonverbal forms of communication (Kyle and Woll 41-44). Unfortunately, even these more moderate educators often agreed with the oralists’ basic premise, which was that any communication conducted with the hands was inferior to speech.[17] As the century progressed and the British oralist movement gained momentum, more and more educators switched to the oralist side against the wishes of many pupils, their parents, and other members of signing communities. In 1890, oralism became the official form of instruction for deaf and mute students across Britain despite evidence that many could not thrive without sign language and finger spelling (Kyle and Woll 38-45). Braddon could not have predicted this outcome in 1860, but it was against this backdrop—one in which hand-based communication was increasingly viewed as primitive—that Braddon created her brilliant, signing detective. Through Joe Peters’s adept hands, Braddon represents sign language and finger spelling as a form of communication worthy of the greatest crime-solvers and the ultimate judge (Braddon’s Christian god).

Considering that detectives had not yet been fully accepted in 1860 and that people who were mute were not expected to be intelligent, Braddon could easily have made Peters a bumbling, ape-like fellow, but she chose not to cater to these stereotypes.[18] Instead, she created a man whose mental swiftness is matched by the agility of his fingers. Readers will note that even though Peters’s hands are sometimes dirty, he is far from primitive. In Gus Darley’s words, Peters has head enough to be prime minister, and [to] carry the House along with every twist of his fingers (The Trail 294). Peters’s mastery of hand-based communication is part of what makes him such an outstanding detective. While educators were busy debating the merits of sign language and finger spelling, Braddon chose to represent these forms of communication as tools that could benefit humanity in multiple ways. The most obvious advantage, of course, is that signing enables people to communicate with others, but Braddon also depicts Sign and finger spelling as a language that is particularly useful for detection. Since understanding the language required knowledge that the average Victorian did not have, Peters and his finger-spelling cohorts are able to communicate in secret, signing to each other across crowded rooms and streets. This ability comes in handy several times in The Trail, ultimately enabling Peters to save an innocent man’s life and to bring the murderer to justice.

Braddon continues her progressive representation of sign language by depicting Peters’s signing hands as God’s instruments. When she renamed Three Times Dead as The Trail of the Serpent, Braddon drew attention to a subtle Christian theme that runs through much of the novel. Several times in the text, Jabez North is aligned with Satan, an angel who rebelled against God and later disguised himself as a serpent to trick Eve into committing the first human sin. Like Eve, Valerie de Cevennes is deceived by her own arch tempter, North, who makes it easy for her to commit a terrible crime (The Trail 135). Detective Peters is the one who must follow the trail of clues left by this particular serpent, but Braddon makes it clear that he has more than human help on his side. Early in the novel, Richard says that he ha[s] hope that Heaven, with a mighty hand, and an instrument of its own choosing, may yet work out the saving of an innocent man from an ignominious death (37). Even though Peters is not explicitly identified as God’s instrument in this passage, the implication is clear: he is the one who will save Richard’s life and capture the serpent. As the narrator tells us later, Peters has an extra share of the divine afflatus (295), which suggests that he has been guided by God’s mighty hand all along. If God’s hand has been guiding Peters’s hands, then Peters’s hands, with all of their signing and finger spelling, have been, in a sense, sanctified. God is willing to work through signing human hands, Braddon seems to suggest, so how could Sign and finger spelling be beneath human dignity?

As if to clear up the matter once and for all, Braddon shows that God uses hand signs, too. In the narrator’s words, the sunset is a blessed sign-manual of an Almighty Power (68). In the nineteenth century, sign-manual referred both to the signature of a monarch and to the hand signs used in sign language (OED). Both definitions work with Braddon’s phrasing and in the context of the passage. Thus, Braddon’s God sends the sunset both as a stamp of authority over his creation and as a symbolic hand-sign to indicate his presence. Taken along with her representation of Peters’s signing hands and of Sign’s crime-busting benefits, Braddon’s suggestion becomes clear: a language worthy of the Divine and his agents is a language worthy of human beings. Therefore, in the midst of controversy over a language deemed primitive by some, Braddon chose to write a novel in which sign language and finger spelling play a hugely important role. This aspect of the novel, along with Braddon’s rejection of most disability conventions, is what makes The Trail so progressive in its depiction of physical difference.

Class in The Trail of the Serpent

Although Braddon was proud to have come from a family that played an influential role in England’s history (Holland 151), she highlights the superficialities of the upper class in The Trail, which was originally written for a working-class audience. Careful readers will find social commentary directed towards members of all classes in the novel, but Braddon saved her most extensive criticism for the wealthiest. Note, for instance, how easy it is for North to fool the aristocracy into thinking that he is one of them. By wearing the right clothes and affecting aristocratic mannerisms, the foundling who spent his youth in a workhouse manages to deceive the rich and powerful. Through his actions, Braddon reveals how superficial certain class distinctions are, while also satirizing the upper class for its attitude towards emotion. At North’s wedding, for example, the characteristic that most impresses the social elite is North’s well-bred indifference (The Trail 142). Thanks to this one trait, the elite immediately set him down as a great man (142). Only in an arena where emotion is viewed as vulgar, as the narrator wryly remarks earlier in the novel, would a class of people consider indifference to be a sign of good breeding (110). North succeeds in projecting wealth and privilege with his dispassionate demeanor, but in a novel where feelings of love and gratitude are often granted a power surpassing speech, the class that he works so hard to enter hardly seems worth the effort.

Gender in The Trail of the Serpent

In The Trail, Braddon often represents her female characters in ways that defy typical Victorian gender norms. Unlike some of Dickens’s novels, there are no doll-like women or perfect Angel-in-the-House heroines. Instead, we have Kuppins, Isabel, and Valerie, who are all strong female characters with unconventional characteristics.

Kuppins and Isabel, for instance, both have traits that were considered to be masculine. At the beginning of the novel, Kuppins moves, sounds, and looks like a boy. The narrator tells us that:

A voice at the bottom of the stairs responded to the call of Kuppins; a boy’s voice most decidedly; a boy’s step upon the stairs announced the approach of Kuppins; and Kuppins entered the room with a boy’s stride and a boy’s slouch; but for all this, Kuppins was a girl. Not very much like a girl about the head, with that shock of dark rough short hair; not much like a girl about the feet … but a girl for all that. (The Trail 38)

In addition to her boyish characteristics, Kuppins shows an interest in crime and detection, and even gets to play a role in the discovery of the body on the heath. Isabel, who is of a higher class than the working-class Kuppins, also demonstrates an interest in the case and displays manly qualities. Braddon contrasts her with conventional women by describing the difference between their handshakes. Isabel’s was no languid and lady-like pressure, such as would not brush the down off a butterfly’s wing, but an honest hearty grasp, that comes straight from the heart (193). Just as Braddon’s description of Kuppins’s movements and voice suggests that conventionally feminine traits like graceful motion and gentle voices are not innate characteristics, her portrayal of Isabel’s earnest handshake implies that qualities deemed natural in women are, in fact, learned. Isabel shakes hands honestly, instead of affecting a proper, lady-like form of motion. According to Peters, she also "sits up so manly, with none of yer faintin’ nor ’steriky [sic] games, as I a’most forgot she was a lady (194). The fact that Peters refers to stereotypically feminine behavior like fainting and hysterics as a game" further highlights the artificial nature of Victorian gender norms for women.

Through Valerie, Braddon brings her rejection of certain female attributes to the upper class. North expects her to be frightened and upset when he surprises her in her apartment, but he finds that she is calm and resolute, ready to face anything and prepared to give him battle (104). As he admits later on, she has courage, self-endurance, and determination, all of which make her superior to what he calls the ordinary weakness of [her] sex (107). In her strength and fearlessness, Valerie is a precursor to Lady Audley, but she is also a derivation of Mrs. Rochester from Jane Eyre and Hortense from Bleak House. Like Brontë’s and Dickens’s characters, Valerie’s unconventionality as a woman is tied to her foreign blood. She is half Spanish and half French, and the Victorians associated foreign women with hot passions and even hotter tempers. The reader may recall, for instance, that Brontë’s Mrs. Rochester is described as lustful and violent before her husband locks her up, and Dickens’s murderous French maid, Hortense, is called a tigress (Dickens 773). Although Valerie impresses North with her self-command, her feelings of betrayal and anger are so strong that she chooses to poison her secret husband. Therefore, while Braddon rejects some gender conventions with her portrayal of Valerie, she also supports a common Victorian stereotype by assigning a violent role to a foreign female character.

Although most of the female characters in The Trail are unconventional in one way or another, Braddon often makes concessions to convention where romance is concerned. Kuppins, for instance, who moves and dresses boyishly in the first half of the novel, later becomes a bouncing young woman with rosy cheeks and a feminine hairstyle (The Trail 178). Braddon appears to have made these changes in preparation for the marriage plot that she intended for Kuppins and Peters.[19] Peters himself, who is more domestic than the typical male hero in Victorian novels, is also gendered in more conventional ways when he is around Kuppins. When they go to the tea gardens, he drives the trap, and we are told that he is armed with a formidable whip; later, when Kuppins is reluctant to investigate the figure on the heath, she does so because the laws of the Medes and Persians would have been mild compared to the word of Mr. Peters, whom she admires so greatly (The Trail 82, 86). Thus, even though Peters assists Isabel with pouring tea and buttering bread, Braddon gives him a more conventionally masculine role around Kuppins. He takes the lead, and his handmaiden (Kuppins) assumes a more conventionally feminine appearance and role as their personal relationship progresses (81).[20]

Why would Braddon, who subverts so many gender norms in The Trail, and who avowedly enjoyed creating these unconventional characters, decide to uphold some gender conventions? Perhaps The Trail reveals the limits of Braddon’s ability to think outside the norms of her society. The novel mocks some conventions and expresses Braddon’s impatience with others, but it also shows the way Braddon thought a heroine in a dark romance (87) should look and the way a foreign female character should act. Her acceptance of some literary and social conventions, however, should not overshadow what she accomplished in her debut novel. The Trail of the Serpent boldly held a mirror up to society, all while captivating readers and inspiring a new genre of literature. Today, it continues to be as fascinating in its social commentary as it is entertaining to read.

Works Cited

Andres, Sophia. The Pre-Raphaelite Realism of the Sensation Novel. A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Ed. Pamela K. Gilbert. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 559-75.

Braddon Collection. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll53

Braddon Family Collection. Canterbury Christ Church University.

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Before the Knowledge of Evil. Braddon Family Collection, Canterbury Christ Church University.

________. My First Novel. The Trail of the Serpent. Montreal: Universitas Press, 2019. 328-335.

________. The Trail of the Serpent. Montreal: Universitas Press, 2019.

________. The Trail of the Serpent. Ed. Chris Willis. Modern Library, 2003.

Carnell, Jennifer. The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Hastings, East Sussex: Sensation Press, 2000.

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Frank, Lawrence. Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Hafferty, Frederic W., and Susan Foster. Decontextualizing Disability in the Crime Mystery Genre: The Case of the Invisible Handicap. Disability & Society 9: 2 (1994), 185-206.

Holland, Clive. Miss Braddon: The Writer and Her Work. The Bookman 41 (July 1912), 149-157.

Ivy, Randolph. M.E. Braddon in the 1860s: Clarifications and Corrections. The Library 8: 1 (March 2007), 60-69.

Kyle, Jim G., and Bencie Woll. Sign Language: The Study of Deaf People and Their Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

LaCom, Cindy. ‘It is More Than Lame’: Female Disability, Sexuality, and the Maternal in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. The Body and Physical Difference. Ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 189-201.

Logan, Heidi. Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Mattacks, Kate. ‘Natural Pantomime:’ Spectacle, Silence, and Speech Disability. Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 37: 1 (Summer 2010), 33-44.

Maxwell, W.B. Time Gathered: Autobiography. London: Hutchinson, 1937.

Miss Braddon’s Novels. Athenaeum 19 July 1890, 109.

Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Our Female Sensation Novelists. The Christian Remembrancer July 1863, 209-236.

Peterson, Audrey. Victorian Masters of Mystery: From Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984.

Raeper, William. George MacDonald: Novelist and Victorian Visionary. Sutherland: Lion, 1987.

Reitz, Caroline. Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004.

Scott, W.R. The Deaf and Dumb: Their Position in Society, and the Principles of their Education, Considered. London: Joseph Graham, 1844. Deaf Collections and Archives, Gallaudet University Library.

Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.

Sign-manual. Oxford English Dictionary Online, oed.com.

Stoddard Holmes, Martha. Fictions of Affliction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Sussex, Lucy. Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Tomaiuolo, Saverio. In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

Watson, Kate. Women Writing Crime Fiction, 1860-1880: Fourteen American, British, and Australian Authors. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.

Willis, Chris. Afterword. The Trail of the Serpent, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, New York: Modern Library, 2003. 408-14.

________. Biographical Note. The Trail of the Serpent, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, New York: Modern Library, 2003. v-ix.

Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. New York: Garland, 1979.

Suggestions for Further Reading

The following articles and book chapters all discuss The Trail of the Serpent.

Bennett, Mark. Generic Gothic and Unsettling Genre: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the Penny Blood.Gothic Studies 13: 1 (2001), 38-54.

Ferguson, Christine. Sensational Dependence: Prosthesis and Affect in Dickens and Braddon. Literature Interpretation Theory 19 (2008), 1-25.

Helfield, Randa. Poisonous Plots: Women Sensation Novelists and Murderesses of the Victorian Period. Victorian Review 21: 2 (Winter 1995), 161-88.

Mangham, Andrew. "‘Drink it up, dear: It will do you good:’ Crime, Toxicology, and The Trail of the Serpent." New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Ed. Jessica Cox. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 95-112.

Palmer, Beth. Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Wagner, Tamara. ‘We have orphans in stock:’ Crime and the Consumption of Sensational Children. The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture. Ed. Dennis Denisoff. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 201-15.

Catherine Welter is a doctoral candidate at the University of New Hampshire, where she specializes in Victorian literature and disability studies. Before attending UNH, she earned a Master’s degree from the University of Connecticut and a B.A. from Union College in New York State. Currently, she is writing her dissertation, which applies a feminist disability and mobility studies lens to several kinds of Victorian fiction, including detective fiction and fiction for children.

Her introduction to the Universitas Press edition of Trail of the Serpent is based on research that she conducted for a dissertation chapter on the same novel. She would like to thank the International Center for Victorian Women Writers at Canterbury Christ Church University for granting access to the Braddon archive. She also gratefully acknowledges summer research funding from the Northeast Modern Language Association and the University of New Hampshire.

Wolff does not mention Arthur Conan Doyle’s admiration for Braddon’s work, but several letters in the Braddon Family Collection at Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU) and the Braddon Collection at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) reveal that Doyle admired and corresponded with Braddon and at least one of her sons.

Carnell believes that Braddon may also have attended a day school, and a different boarding school, for short periods of time in the early to mid-1840s (6-7).

For more about how Braddon taught herself several new languages, refer to W.B. Maxwell’s chapter on his mother in his autobiography, Time Gathered (especially 282). Several notebooks and letters in the Braddon Family Collection at CCCU prove that Braddon conducted in-depth research for her later novels. Whether or not she had the time to do so for her earliest published novels is unclear, but in My First Novel, she states that she conducted research for one of her unfinished novels at the British Museum’s reading room (331). The fact that she was already doing research for her books even before she had a publishing agreement suggests that she would have done as much research as possible for her early published novels, although time constraints may have limited the scope of such work.

Canterbury Christ Church University has several Braddon manuscripts that bear Gilby’s editorial marks. More extensive remarks can be found in Gilby’s letters at CCCU and the HRC.

My comparison of the British Library’s copy of Three Times with the Modern Library edition of The Trail revealed, for instance, that Braddon altered many of her verb tenses, cut long sentences in half, and removed awkward phrases before reissuing the novel under its new title.

For an interesting comparison, consider John Ruskin’s essay collection, Unto this Last, which was published as a book in 1862. According to William Raeper, it took Ruskin’s publisher ten years to sell 1,000 copies of this unpopular tome (Raeper 216).

For an example of one of these attacks on Braddon, read Our Female Sensation Novelists, an essay published in 1863.

By all accounts, Maxwell’s children adored their step-mother (Wolff 107-08).

For a list of Braddon’s published work, refer to the appendix in Carnell’s Literary Lives.

Chris Willis was, perhaps, the first to give The Trail this distinction in her afterword to the Modern Library edition, but it has since been repeated by Heidi Logan, Kate Watson (46), and others. Jennifer Carnell points out that Braddon is also the first woman to publish detective fiction (237).

Audrey Peterson’s Victorian Masters of Mystery: From Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle (1984) discusses Braddon, but only as one of several minor voices (see chapter five). Even in the 21st century, most scholars skip from Godwin and Poe to Dickens, Collins, and Doyle. Reitz’s Detecting the Nation (2004) and Lawrence Frank’s Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence (2003) are notable examples. Lucy Sussex set out to address this gap in Women Writers and Detectives in 19th-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre (2010), but since she focuses on the writers’ lives and their overall influence, she does not say much about The Trail.

Braddon’s second biographer, Jennifer Carnell, briefly analyzes Braddon’s influence on later detective fiction, as do Chris Willis, the editor of the Modern Library edition of The Trail, and Kate Watson in Women Writing Crime Fiction (2012). Most Braddon critics who write about her detectives focus on her amateurs, like Robert Audley in Lady Audley’s Secret, or John Faunce, a professional detective who appears later in Braddon’s career. Saverio Tomaiuolo’s In Lady Audley’s Shadow (2010) is, perhaps, the most extensive study of Braddon’s detectives.

For more about Dickens’s detectives, see Reitz’s third chapter.

Willis mentions the workman example (411), but not the tourist example, most likely because Peters acts the latter role without wearing a disguise.

See, for instance, The Sign of Four or A Scandal in Bohemia.

In My First Novel, Braddon refers to Three Times Dead as a chartered libertine because its initial obscurity and its status as her first novel enabled readers and most critics to forgive its faults and follies (332). In other words, the novel that she wrote without fear of censorship was allowed to remain a libertine.

One problematic example of the metaphorical use of disability in The Trail lies in Braddon’s affiliation of blindness with the ignorance of the inhabitants of Blind Peter’s Alley and the moral darkness of the Board of Health’s members, who ignor[e] the horror of the place with fatal blindness (58). Readers should also note that Braddon’s representation of mental illness, although sympathetic, is not as progressive as her depiction of physical difference. Later in life, after she had experienced mental illness personally, she wrote about it with greater realism (see Strangers and Pilgrims, 1871-72).

See, for example, W.R. Scott’s Deaf and Dumb: Their Position in Society, and The Principles of Their Education, Considered. Scott was the Director of the West of England Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb. His treatise, which was published in 1844, can be found in Gallaudet University’s digital archives.

In Victorian England’s court system, people who were deaf and/or mute were considered to be mentally incompetent unless they could prove otherwise; since the Nation’s laws made such assumptions, ordinary citizens would have as well (Mattacks 33-36).

Braddon writes in My First Novel that she was asked to shorten the novel’s intended length a few weeks after the first issue of Three Times Dead appeared in print (333). Such a request explains why Peters’s and Kuppins’s marriage plot is wrapped up so quickly at the end of the novel. Most likely, Braddon had originally intended to devote more space to the development of their relationship, as well as to Richard’s and Isabel’s.

Reviews for The Trail of the Serpent

[bookmarque · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

If you’re going to take up reading Victorian Sensation Novels, you’re going to have to come to grips with a few things. First is coincidence. The things are dirty with them. Entire plots and resolutions are built on them. They are the foundation. People and events seemingly insignificant will later be revealed to not only be connected, but important in ways no one could even guess. Second is exaggeration. At least it seems that way in this century. At the time though people’s reactions to events and actions were proper and correct. People did worry themselves to death over what we deem unimportant these days. Public opinion, mostly. No one dies of shame about anything these days, but the wrong word or look or hat could send someone into a tailspin in 1865. Third is that your sense of tension and dread comes not from being ignorant of the main mystery, but from the solving of it by the characters not in the know and how many of them will be hurt along the way. At least with Braddon it seems this way. The main secret isn’t one for the reader, but the joy of reading one of her books comes from watching the others figure it out and bring the villain to justice. If you like tinkering with clues and parsing dropped hints to find a solution to a central puzzle, Victorian Sensation Novels probably won’t float your boat. If you like watching events unfold with maximum melodrama, coincidences and flair and you have no problem with following a big cast, VSNs are right up your alley. Happy endings guaranteed.The Trail of the Serpent is an early book and it shows. It’s not nearly as tight as say Lady Audley’s Secret. There are scenes, people and descriptions that don’t directly move the plot forward or add any necessary information. They’re extraneous and often not tied up later to anything that is necessary or important. They’re window-dressing and in later books, Braddon doesn’t get caught up in them like she does here. I’ve read that TTotS was retooled and republished, and it could stand some more of that.Don’t let that put you off, though. If you like Wilkie Collins for his snakey plots and dastardly villains, you’ll like Braddon, too. She doesn’t get as preachy as Collins and she doesn’t use his epistolary/multi-POV style, but she tells a ripping good tale. Even though this is an early book, she still uses little hooks like this - “If he had known that such a little incident as that could have a dark and dreadful influence on his life, surely he would have thought himself foredoomed and set apart for a cruel destiny.”Our main victim, Richard, is a bit of a dope and I think Braddon created him a bit too pathetically at the beginning and it doesn’t check up with the schemer he becomes later. Still he didn’t have too many scenes and so wasn’t too annoying. We did get a lot of scenes with our villain though and that’s different from later novels when I found myself wanting to know more from the bad guy directly. The Serpent of the title gets lots of screen time, he’s fun to watch and is a thorough bastard. Braddon gives him what he deserves in the end. Even though he isn’t running an official investigation, Mr. Peters is trying to help Richard and find the real killer. He’s mute, but not deaf and the descriptions of how he has to communicate before the invention of any standardized Sign Language is great. He basically writes letters into other people’s palms which takes a long time to communicate anything. Take this example - “At this moment the bell hung at the shop-door [...] rang violently, and our old friend Mr. Peters burst into the shop, and through the shop into the parlour, in a state of such excitement that his very fingers seemed out of breath.” Braddon also has great, galloping sentences that really capture the tumultuous impact London has on a newcomer - “But oh, the shops - what emporiums of splendor! What delightful excitement in being nearly run over every minute! - to say nothing of that delicious chance of being knocked down by the crowd which is collected round a drunken woman expostulating with a policeman. Of course there must be a general election, or a great fire, or a man hanging, or a mad ox at large, or a murder just committed in the next street, or something wonderful going on, or there never could be such crowds of excited pedestrians, and such tearing and rushing, and smashing of cabs, carts, omnibuses, and parcel-delivery vans, all of them driven by charioteers in the last stage of insanity...” How great is that?I won’t write too much more, but I did LOVE this unknowingly prophetic quote about the state of journalism in Braddon’s time -“The two papers which appeared on Friday had accounts varying in every item, and the one paper which appeared on Saturday had a happy amalgamation of the two conflicting accounts - demonstrating thereby the triumph of paste and scissors over penny-a-liners’ copy.”Sound familiar?

[alcracka · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Good news: the characters. The mute detective Peters, and the alchemist Blurosset are particularly wonderful, but there are a host of other memorable ones. Nice job, Braddon.

Bad news: the plot. Do the contrivances and coincidences of Dumas, Dickens and Hugo irritate you? For heaven's sake, then, do not read this book. Right from minute one, the dumbest shit happens. The three authors I just mentioned are not being lazy when unlikely things happen; they're communicating something about their worldview. Braddon, though, is being lazy. Sorry, but it's totally true.

So, y'know, I had fun. I'm glad I read it. I'd check out more of her stuff.

Is it sexist to say I feel like Braddon writes like a dude? I don't even know what I mean by that. I guess it just feels like...kindof a dude book. Women don't play a very important role in the story.

[souloftherose · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Despite being a lover of British 19th century fiction generally, Mary Elizabeth Braddon is an author I've never read before although I've heard of her books. The Trail of the Serpent was one of her first books, originally published serially as Three Times Dead in 1860 it flopped dramatically . Braddon then rewrote it and it was republished in 1861 as The Trail of the Serpent and sold 1,000 copies within a week of publication. Although out of copyright, there's no ebook edition of this book available and until The Modern Library issued a reprint a few years ago, it seems to have been out of print for almost 100 years (according to the blurb on the cover anyway). Given all this, before reading the book I was expecting something that felt like an early novel in a writer's career; something that showed promise, that might be interesting to read if you wanted to consider the development of the author or the particular genre but something that perhaps wouldn't be considered a classic in its own right. Something perhaps like Wilkie Collins' Basil.Instead I was pleasantly surprise to find The Trail of the Serpent to be a really good book and felt rather sheepish about having made all those assumptions before reading it. It's a mix of detective and sensation fiction with touches of Dickensian humour and social commentary but without Dickens' sentimentality. Murder, revenge and the slow but steady hunt to bring the killer to justice led by Mr Peters, a mute, although not deaf, detective who communicates through sign language. I thoroughly enjoyed it and if this is the quality of one of Braddon's overlooked books then I can't wait to read her most famous work, Lady Audley's Secret.It's also probably the first detective novel - it's definitely earlier than the other two major claimants (The Moonstone and The Notting Hill Mystery) but the introduction to my copy of The Notting Hill Mystery says that The Trail of the Serpent 'is in no way a detective novel' which I'm flummoxed by. It's got a detective, he's a main part of the storyline (rather than only being part of a smallish subplot like Inspector Bucket in Bleak House), he solves the crime, he tracks down the killer - seems like a detective novel to me, but apparently not.