Lady Audley's Secret (ME Braddon, 1862)

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley's Secret. Pub. 1862. Ed. Natalie M. Houston. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003.

• Serialized partly in Robin Goodfellow, 7-9/1861, wholly in Sixpenny Magazine 1-12/1862, rerun in London Journal 3-8/1863; 3 vols, Tinsley, 1862
• Good for: novel's proximity to news/periodicals: 91, 76 (Helen's obituary), clue of Helen/Lady A's handwriting in an 1845 annual (184); time and technology: 222, clock @ Audley Court, train timetables; key passage 226-7; Robert's notebooks (133, 261); Robert using literature to interpret life (169, 406-9)

General Notes

• 60 Talboys goes to Australia for the gold rush beginning in 1851, same that the characters rob a convoy for in Sherlock Holmes "Boscombe Valley Mystery"
• 91

We hear every day of murders committed in the country. Brutal and treacherous murders; slow, protracted agonies from poisons administered by some kindred hand; sudden and violent deaths by cruel blows, inflicted with a stake cut from some spreading oak, whose very shadow promised -- peace. [...] No crime has ever been [92] committed in the worst rookeries about Seven Dials that has not also been done in the face of that sweet rustic calm which still, in spite of all, we look on with a tender, half-mournful yearning, and associate with -- peace.

• • reminiscent of Holmes's similar statement in "The Copper Beeches"
• 103 "Indeed I believe all ghosts to be the result of damp." (Robert A)
• 107 Lady Audley's portrait compared to pre-Raphaelites
• 109 Talboys' perceived sensitivity to the weather (by Robert), reminiscent of Lucy Villette
• 222 time an impt motif: the clock at Audley Court, train timetables, Clara Talboys says she thought she had to "trust to time", then Talboys' death described on 223 as "untimely"
• 226-7 "Who has not felt, in the first madness of sorrow, an unreasonable rage against the mute propriety of chairs and tables...this hopeless persistency of the orderly outward world, as compared with the storm and the tempest, the riot and confusion within"
  • key bringing together of image clusters: time (before quote), objects, the storm
  • then tied somewhat cheekily to ideas, "the young philosopher of the modern school...the nothingness of everything"
• 229 kind of amazing mix of feminism and misogyny
• 232 storm metaphor for Robert's revelations
• 261 Robert becoming more detective-like (barrister-like?), he used a notebook to interview old Mrs. Vincent and now again with the hotel owner in Yorkshire
• 263 RA dreams of a storm over Audley Court
• 268 the phrase circumstantial evidence keeps being used - was it in currency in the news or something? Or just legalese?
• 297 she goes into Eliotian mode to didactically analyze RA as a type of character but interestingly does it at least in part in print/literary terms:

 "the mute inglorious Miltons who die voiceless and inarticulate for want of that dogged perseverance, that blind courage, which the poet must possess before he can find a publisher;"

• 326 emotions taking up Textual space in "closely printed volumes" quote
• 356-66 Lady A confesses to sir Michael and Robert
• 366 Robert calls for his valet - can we assume he's been tacitly traveling around the country with him?
• 377 here and repeatedly the figuration of Clara Talboys as having eyes like George's -- reminiscent of a piece of Dracula criticism (Mighall? Craft?) about how same sex desire is authorized through heterosexual relationships
• 380 RA "Physicians and lawyers are the confessors of this prosaic nineteenth century"
• 406-9 RA thinking of his situation in specifically popular/sensation fiction terms, Dumas, Wilkie Collins

Theme Tracking

Reading/Writing

• Cluster of important documents: George's wife's obit in the Times, report of George's return to Britain in an Essex paper, Audley's record of the case, Audley's advertisements in Australian newspapers (Melbourne and Sydney),
• 63: Talboys admits he never wrote to his wife: "I could not write and tell her that I was fighting hard with despair and death."
• 71:

Sometimes, when the weather was very hot, and he had exhausted himself with the exertion of smoking his German pipe, and reading French novels, he [Robert] would stroll into the Temple Gardens, and lying in some shady spot...would tell grave benchers that he had knocked himself up with over work.

• 75-6

By-and-by George looked up, and mechanically taking a greasy Times newspaper of the day before from a heap of journals on the table, stared vacantly at the first page. [76] I cannot tell how long he sat blankly staring at one paragraph among the list of deaths, before his dazed brain took in its full meaning... "On the 24th inst., at Ventnor, Isle of Wight, Helen Talboys, aged twenty-two."

• 89 RA's pigeon-hole marked "Important" - "Heaven knows what wonderful documents there were in this particular pigeon-hole, but I do not think it likely to have contained anything of great judicial value."
• 96: "A telegraphic message!" she [Lady A] cried; for the convenient word telegram had not yet been invented.
• 109: He [RA] lay on a sofa in the sitting-room, ostensibly reading the five-days'-old Chelmsford paper, and regaling himself occasionally with a few sips from a large tumbler of cold punch.
• 128: The half-burned telegraph (falsely) reporting that George boarded a Liverpool boat for Australia
• 133: RA begins his record:

JOURNAL OF FACTS CONNECTED WITH THE DISAPPEARANCE OF GEORGE TALBOYS, INCLUSIVE OF FACTS WHICH HAVE NO APPARENT RELATION TO THAT CIRCUMSTANCE.

• 138: Phoebe knew enough of the French language to be able to dip into the yellow-paper-covered novels which my lady ordered from the Burlington Arcade, and to discourse with her mistress upon the questionable subjects of those romances.
• 147: (Alicia to RA) "You are good for nothing but to hold a skein of silk or read Tennyson to Lady Audley."
• 154: Lady A's speech is "stereotyped," an early figurative usage of that term (earliest cited in OED is 1850)
• 169

"Oh, pray do not be alarmed, Lady Audley," he [RA] said gravely. "You have no sentimental nonsense, no silly infatuation, borrowed from Balzac, or Dumas fils, to fear from me. The benchers of the Inner Temple will tell you that Robert Audley is troubled with none of the epidemics whose outward signs are turn-down collars and Byronic neckties."

• 170: RA describing the ads he placed in Australian newspapers for Talboys
• 182: George's modest library:

There was an old Greek Testament and the Eton Latin Grammar: a French pamphlet on the cavalry sword exercise; an odd volume of Tom Jones, with one half of its stiff leather cover hanging to it by a thread; Byron's Don Juan, printed in murderous type, which must have been invented for the special advantage of oculists and opticians; and a fat book in faded gilt and crimson cover.

• 184: Clue in an 1845 annual:

Robert Audley breathed more freely: he had arrived at the last but one of the books without any result whatever, and there only remained the fat gilt-and-crimson-bound volume to be examined before his task was finished. It was an annual of the year 1845. [It contains Helen's handwriting, which he can compare to Lady A's]

• 199: The old man's [Mr Maldon] agitation had very much subsided by this time. He had found another pipe stuck behind the tawdry frame of the looking-glass, and was trying to light it with a bit of twisted newspaper.
• 230

The snug rooms in Fig-tree Court seemed dreary in their orderly quiet to Robert Audley upon this particular evening. He had no inclination for his French novels, though there was a packet of uncut romances, comic and sentimental, ordered a month before, waiting his pleasure upon one of the tables.

• • later: Clara Talboys' handwriting resembles her brother's too
• 235: As it was, Fig-tree Court was a pleasant hermitage in its way, and for breviaries and Books of Hours, I am ashamed to say the young barrister substituted Paul de Kock and Dumas fils.
• 244: Alicia bored by a romance novel (Changes and Chances, by the author of Follies and Faults)
• 252: in Mrs. Vincent's home, Helen's guardian: The green-baize covered card-table was adorned with gaudily-bound annuals or books of beauty, placed at right angles; but Robert Audley did not avail himself of these literary distractions.
• 297:

Sir Michael Audley made that mistake which is so commonly made by easy-going, well-to-do observers, who have no occasion to look below the surface. He mistook laziness for incapacity.... He forgot the mute inglorious Miltons who die voiceless for want of that dogged perseverance, that blind courage, which the poet must possess before he can find a publisher[.] 

• 301 - speculating about whether RA is mad: [Lady A] "Perhaps he reads too much, or smokes too much."
• 326

However verbose I may be in my description of her feelings, I can never describe a tithe of her thoughts or her sufferings. She suffered agonies that would fill closely printed volumes, bulky with a thousand pages, in that one horrible night. She underwent volumes of anguish, and doubt, and perplexity. Sometimes repeating the same chapters of her torments over and over again. Sometimes hurrying through a thousand pages of her misery without one pause, without one moment of breathing time. She stood by the low fender in her boudoir, watching the minute hand of the clock, and waiting til it should be time for her to leave the house in safety.

• 388: Robert had consulted a volume of Bradshaw, and had discovered that Villebrumeuse lay out of the tracy of all railway traffic, and was only approachable by diligence from Brussels.
  • earlier he tries to find Mrs. Vincent in the Postal Directory
• 406: RA relating his situation to sensation fiction: "I haven't read Alexandre Dumas and Wilkie Collins for nothing," he muttered. "I'm up to their tricks, sneaking in at doors behind a fellow's back, and flattening their white faces against window panes, and making themselves all eyes in the twilight."
• 416: Phoebe MArks' husband talking about his lack of gratitude: "They've give me soup, and tracks [tracts], and flannel, and coals; but, Lord, they've made such a precious noise about it that I'd have been glad to send 'em all back to 'em."
• 446:

The meerschaums and the French novels have been presented to a young Templar, with whom Robert Audley had been friendly in his bachelor days, and Mrs. Maloney had a little pension paid her quarterly for her care of the canaries and geraniums.

Shakespeare references

• 179 describing the locksmith "there was nothing that he need have been ashamed of in his face, except the dirt, and that, as Hamlet'smother says, "is common""
• 211 Talboys' father reminds RA of John Philip kemble
• 264 houses on Yorkshire seaside look "as if built for the especial accommodation of some modern Timon"
• 281 RA references "the Scottish leech" (Macbeth V.3.43-7) in confronting lady a
• 339 free indirect discourse as narrator speculates that Sir Michael mentally compares Robert and Alicia to Benedick and Beatrice in Much ado