This essay examines the adventures of Richard Marsh’s female detective and lip-reader Judith Lee (1911–16). The short-story series offers a powerful example of the cross-fertilisation of the genres of detective, Gothic, New-Woman and science fiction through Marsh’s ambivalent construction of his protagonist as a potentially progenerate being with seemingly supernatural communication skills. Lee is a liminal heroine who is simultaneously resistant to and complicit with the normalising taxonomies of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class commonly associated with detective fiction. However, while the stories’ conformist position as scientifically minded crime fiction is complicated by their apparent tolerance of deviance, Lee’s expertise as a teacher of the deaf undermines counter-hegemonic readings because her profession aims to ‘cure’ a disability, deafness. Lee’s adventures show how popular fiction synthesised disparate discursive frameworks drawing on criminology, eugenics, science, communications technology and psychical research.

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In an article on "Nervous Diseases and Modern Life", published in the Contemporary Review in 1895, T. Clifford Allbutt explores the contemporary notion that "affections of the nervous system are on the increase". Allbutt lists a number of "nervous maladies" that contemporaries connected with modernity, including "nervous debility", "hysteria", "neurasthenia", "fretfulness", "melancholy" and "unrest"all of which were supposedly resulting from "living at a high pressure, the whirl of the railway, the pelting of telegrams, the strife of business, the hunger for riches, the lust of vulgar minds for coarse and instant pleasures, the decay of those controlling ethics handed down from statelier and more steadfast generations". Allbutt concludes his bitterly sarcastic commentary on the "outcry of the modern neurotic" by rejecting such concerns over the mental, moral and physical health of the nation. "Rich and idle people", he states, "run, as they always did, after the fashionable fad of the day; what was "liver" fifty years ago has become "nerves" today ." Nervous ailments, he contends, are characterised by the sufferer"s "restlessness, quackishness and craving for sympathy", and "the intellectual acuteness of many of these sufferers, the swift transmission of news by the press, and the facilities of modern locomotion all favour the neurotic traffic." Nervous illness, thus, has become a fashionable diagnosis with the "inquisitive and peremptory generation" of the fin de siècle: "our neurotics have begun like ghosts to walk, and we exclaim that the earth is full of them!" (Allbutt 210, 214, 217, 218). While Allbutt is concerned with criticising contemporary medical and social discourses on the degenerative and enervating impact of modernity, the comparison of neurotics to ghosts is intriguing. As David Trotter notes, medical men often used Gothic terminology to discuss psychological, particularly phobic, experiences in the nineteenth century. Moreover, in his analysis of phobic discourse in canonical Victorian and Modernist fiction, Trotter also argues that agoraphobia is commonly described in nineteenth-century fiction before Carl Otto Westphal named the condition in 1871: that, in effect, a fiction writer"s "diagnosis" of spatial phobia is not dependent on the existence of a preceding medical diagnosis (Trotter 464-70). To a certain extent literary texts thus provoked nosological classification. This essay will extend Trotter"s suggestive claim that fin-de-siècle medical debates and urban Gothic fiction share a common cultural context. It traces the ways in which phobic discourses are present within Richard Marsh"s urban Gothic novels The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) and The Goddess: A Demon (1900). Both novels are located within the contexts of modernity, the urban experience, and chronic fear, and their plotlines detail the plight of British protagonistsall somehow weak or wantingwho fall prey to foreign influences in a fin-de-siècle London that plays its own monstrous part in the novels. In The Beetle, a grotesque shap...

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This collection of essays seeks to question the security of our assumptions about the fin de siècle by exploring the fiction of Richard Marsh, an important but neglected professional author. Richard Bernard Heldmann (1857–1915) began his literary career as a writer of boys’ fiction, but, following a prison sentence for fraud, reinvented himself as ‘Richard Marsh’ in 1888. Marsh was a prolific and popular author of middlebrow genre fiction including Gothic, crime, humour, romance and adventure, whose bestselling Gothic novel The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Building on a burgeoning interest in Marsh’s writing, this collection of essays examines a broad array of Marsh’s genre fictions through the lens of cutting-edge critical theory, including print culture, New Historicism, disability studies, genre theory, New Economic Criticism, gender theory, postcolonial studies, thing theory, psychoanalysis, object relations theory and art history, producing innovative readings not only of Marsh but of the fin-de-siècle period. Marsh emerges here as a versatile contributor to the literary and journalistic culture of his time whose stories of shape-shifting monsters, daring but morally dubious heroes, lip-reading female detectives and objects that come to life helped to shape the genres of fiction with which we are familiar today. Marsh’s fictions reflect contemporary themes and anxieties while often offering unexpected, subversive and even counter-hegemonic takes on dominant narratives of gender, criminality, race and class, unsettling our perceptions of the fin de siècle.