Kate Summercale has received great praise and a major literary prize for The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. This response is in part justified. The book concerns the famous Road Hill murder case of 1860, to which Constance Kent eventually confessed. Most readers would probably already be aware of the story, so there isn’t really any dramatic tension. Also, Summerscale doesn’t have anything new to add to our understanding of Kent’s movtive. However, she does set the case within the context of emergence of the Victorian detective and the growing public interest in such cases. This aspect of the work is particularly successful, and she draws interesting parallels with contemporary fictional detectives, such as Inspector Bucket and Sergeant Cuff. Unfortunately, she also discusses Lady Audley’s Secret without, I suspect, actually having read the book. Her synopsis is completely inaccurate and it would appear that much of the discussion of the novel is drawn from critical works such as D A Miller’s The Novel and the Police. Also, I spotted a couple of factual errors elsewhere, which probably means there are others. Isleworth has never been in Surrey – having been born there, I know it was latterly in Middlesex and now falls within the Glorious London Borough of Hounslow; divorce didn’t become legal in 1858 – it was already legal, but the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 theoretically made it more accessible. Having just written a dissertation on this very topic, I’m bound to be Mrs Picky.
On a more subjective note, I was not very happy with Summerscale’s description of a “new breed of chilly female criminal whose concealed passions had twisted into violence.” Here she seems to be conflating real-life murderesses with their fictional counterparts and also subscribing to the contemporary view that sexual women were somehow deviant. The bibliography includes Mary S Hartman’s excellent Victorian Murderesses, so I would have liked Summerscale to at least briefly examine other explanations for the proliferation of female murderers during this period. For many of them, their frustrations concerned their daily lives, rather than their sexual appetites.
Overall, the book is interesting and well-written, but it has its limitations for those with a more detailed knowledge of the period.
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