Victorian Horrors

Sarah Waters’ Gothic Fingersmith is set in Victorian England, and she does not spare the reader from the realities of the period.

Beyond the wall lay Mr Ibbs’ sister, who was kept to her bed; she often woke ith the horrors on her, shrieking. And all about the house — laid top-to-toe in cradles, like sprats in boxes of salt — were Mrs Sucksby’s infants. [..] any little thing might set them off. Then Mrs Sucksby would go among them, dosing them from a bottle of gin.

Sue Trinder is speaking, and she had once been one of these infants, but was always treated as special by Mrs Sucksby, protected from going out to pickpocket or work the streets as a young prostitute. But why?

I was not a jewel; nor even a pearl. My hair, after all, turned out quite ordinary. My face was a commonplace face.

Into this haven of thieves and fences led by Mr Ibb and Mrs Sucksby comes Richard Rivers, who is called ‘Gentleman’, with a proposition: he will take Sue to be a ladies maid for Maud, an heiress in a remote old house. Sue is to help convince Maud to marry Gentleman, after which he will take her fortune and abandon her in a madhouse. A cruel scheme indeed, but one that 17-year-old Sue accedes to for the promise of three thousand pounds.

Briar House is a classic Gothic mansion, with lanterns and old grooms and suspicious servants including a cook, a few girls and a boy. Miss Maud is about the same age as Sue, appropriately pale and thin and delicate. The plot proceeds to a startling plot twist at the end of the first section.

Then the book hits a slump, as much of section 2 is the same story retold from another point of view. New aspects of the story are brought out, and some are unexpected and creepy, but still, it covers old ground and feels tedious.

By section 3, the plot twists are such that this reader had to stop reading to mentally un-entangle them, the story began to seem contrived, and the ending rather gloomy. I suppose this is appropriate for a Gothic novel.

Waters does very well with atmosphere and historical accuracy (as best as I could judge, not being a scholar of Victorian life), and the dialog too seemed very authentic.

[Mrs Sucksby talking about Sue’s mother] Fairer than you, but sharp like you, about the face; and thin as paper. What was her lay? She said it was only prigging. [..] I know she was hard as a nut.

‘Well,’ I thought, ‘bad coins will gleam as well as good.’

The novel contains plenty of Victorian gore: hangings, pornographic literature, gaols, and all. A chunk of this book is set in a madhouse, and that is truly grim reading.

My legs had been pulled so hard they shook like things of rubber, and my head was ringing from the punch. [..] The door itself was covered in a dirty canvas, padded with straw. [..] I turned back to the door and put my fingers to it — to the keyhole, to the canvas, anywhere — to try and pull it. But it was tight as a clam — and, what was worse, as I stood plucking at it I began to make out little dints and tears in the canvas — that I understood all at once must be the marks left by the fingernails of all the other lunatics.

Waters has a distinctly feminist take, focusing on the women throughout, including the mothers of the two main characters. This in itself adds a twist to the Dickensian male-oriented stories that most of us have read before. Walters is also, I discovered later, known as a lesbian writer, and some of the plot twists might have been less surprising if I had known that in advance.

The intriguing title of this book?