Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:51:22.409Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“THE DISEASE, WHICH HAD HITHERTO BEEN NAMELESS”: M. E. BRADDON'S CHALLENGE TO MEDICAL AUTHORITY IN BIRDS OF PREY AND CHARLOTTE'S INHERITANCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2010

Nicki Buscemi
Nicki Buscemi*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Mary Elizabeth Braddon launched her editorship of Belgravia magazine by painting a picture for her readers of a murderous medical practitioner. At the outset of Birds of Prey (1867), the serial novel which kicked off the magazine's publication, Braddon introduces us to a surgeon-dentist named Philip Sheldon. The narrator ironically explains, “Of course he was eminently respectable . . . A householder with such a door-step and such muslin curtains could not be other than the most correct of mankind” (7; bk. 1, ch. 1). Sensation novels of the 1860s have long been critically recognized as vehicles for revealing the disparity between respectable façades and seedy interior truths, and Braddon's underexamined work Birds of Prey and its sequel Charlotte's Inheritance (1868) are no exception: by the close of the second novel, the seemingly upright Sheldon has been revealed as a liar, a cheat, and a killer.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 151 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Boyle, Thomas. “‘Fishy Extremities’: Subversion of Orthodoxy in the Victorian Sensation Novel.” Literature and History 9.1 (1983): 92–96.Google Scholar
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Birds of Prey. U.S.A. Hard Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Charlotte's Inheritance. U.S.A. Hard Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Daston, Lorraine. “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective.” Social Studies of Science 22.4 (1992): 597–618.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donaldson, J. A. The National Dental Hospital, 1859–1914. London: British Dental Association, 1992.Google Scholar
Dow, James K. “Case of Pleuro-Peripneumonia.” Lancet 46.1157 (1 November 1845): 474–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader, 1837–1914. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Pamela. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunt, Linda. “Strategic Suffering: Illness Narratives as Social Empowerment among Mexican Cancer Patients.” Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing. Eds. Mattingly, Cheryl and Garro, Linda C.. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. 88–107.Google Scholar
Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books, 1988.Google Scholar
“Medical Society of London.: Saturday, March 29, 1851.” Lancet 57.1441 (12 April 1851): 408–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“On the Prevention of Poisoning by Arsenic.” Lancet 55.1392 (4 May 1850): 551–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Onslow, Barbara. “Sensationalizing Science: Braddon's Marketing of Science in Belgravia.” Victorian Periodicals Review 35.2 (2002): 160–77.Google Scholar
Peterson, M. Jeanne. The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.Google Scholar
Phegley, Jennifer. Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Porter, Roy. Bodies Politic: Disease, Death, and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001.Google Scholar
The Queen V. Palmer: Verbatim Report of the Trial of William Palmer. London: J. Allen, 1856. Transcript. Google Books Search. Web. 21 Jan. 2009.Google Scholar
Reed, John R. “Laws, the Legal World, and Politics.” A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Brantlinger, Patrick and Thesing, William B.. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. 155–71.Google Scholar
Robb, George. “Circe in Crinoline: Domestic Poisonings in Victorian England.” Journal of Family History: Studies in Family, Kinship, and Demography 22.2 (1997): 176–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rothfield, Lawrence. Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980. New York: Pantheon, 1989.Google Scholar
Skultans, Vieda. “Anthropology and Narrative.” Narrative Based Medicine: Dialogue and Discourse in Clinical Practice. Ed. Greenhalgh, Trisha and Hurwitz, Brian. London: BMJ Books, 1998. 225–33.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. AIDs and its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.Google Scholar
Vrettos, Athena. Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
William Palmer. Dave Lewis. Staffordshire Multimedia Archive. 1 October 2007 <http://www.staffspasttrack.org.uk/exhibit/palmer/default.htm>. Web. 21 Jan. 2009..+Web.+21+Jan.+2009.>Google Scholar
Wise, Sarah. The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London. New York: Owl Books, 2005.Google Scholar
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. New York: Garland, 1979.Google Scholar