Abstract
The neo-Victorian interest in the marginalised “Other” is the driving force behind Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, a murder mystery set in the London’s East End Tower Hamlets. At the time of the novel’s setting, Limehouse was home to some of the city’s poorest residents, but it was also incredibly cosmopolitan with a mix of cockneys and emigrants, casual labourers and women working in the home industries, as well as artists and social activists. With its neo-Victorian approach to the Victorian East End, The Limehouse Golem (both original novel and 2016 film adaptation) gives representation to those East End characters beyond the pale of dominant accounts of the period: from cross-dressing pantomimes and actresses, to homosexuals, prostitutes and murderers. Cameron concentrates on the role of female agency within this neo-Victorian narrative. As a murder mystery, The Limehouse Golem invites readers into a world of criminal intrigue in which women were too often the victims. However, Ackroyd’s novel and its film adaptation ultimately thwart readers’ expectations of generic conventions—specifically, the gendered plots of melodrama and murder mystery—by giving us the female offender who insists upon writing her own “devil[ish]” plots (to quote her poisoned husband). The neo-Victorian, in this case then, encourages us modern readers to confront our own cultural biases and, more importantly, our continued need to go “slumming” in the Victorian period for characters who are still comfortably Other(ed).
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Notes
- 1.
For more on this history, See Peter Honri (1985).
- 2.
The murderer sees that Solomon has been reading from Hartlib’s Knowledge of Sacred Things, which is left open on the Hebrew meaning of the Golem, and decides to cut off his penis and leave the severed member upon the open page. This act, of course, recalls Lizzie’s earlier readings from Deuteronomy 23:1 on banning the castrated from heaven (12–13).
- 3.
Regarding the former, the word “slum” continues to refer to a “street, alley, court, etc., situated in a crowded district of a town or city and inhabited by people of a low class or by the very poor” (OED).
- 4.
The OED records the following entry from the Christian World (May 22, 1884): “I am not one of those who have taken to ‘slumming’ as an amusement.”
- 5.
Louisa Hadley describes the Neo-Victorian as both a “a critical approach and a creative practice” in its representation of the nineteenth century (2010, 3).
- 6.
This is because, as Llewellyn continues, neo-Victorian texts open up space for otherwise “marginalized voices, new histories of sexuality, post-colonial viewpoints and other generally ‘different’ versions of the Victorian” (2008, 165).
- 7.
The label “respectability” (“lady”) would also elude Victorian actresses for the greater part of the period by virtue of the fact that they simply worked for a living, but the music hall performer would have been de facto excluded by nature of the fact that they worked (in a non-caregiving profession) for a living (Russell 380).
- 8.
Though as Dagmar Kift has shown, in her analysis of the provincial music hall, there was still much variation among reformers as to both form of action (if any, really) as well as end goal (eliminate or revise the hall) (1996, 77–134).
- 9.
Pykett’s point that this was an ideal, which did not necessarily encompass the “actual female experience of the domestic” (6), also works in service of my larger argument regarding this gender ideal as compulsory—even if impossible for those in the upper classes.
- 10.
Some of the other, though small, social groups included in the audience include “‘bohemian’ army officers, medical students and city gentlemen to shopkeepers, tradesmen and their wives, who took up some of the better seats in halls / all over the country” (381–82). The poorest of the poor would have been largely excluded from most of the good seats, if not most, of the music halls.
- 11.
The implicit suggestion is that, in this transitional period or before gentrification, those upper-class women who did go to the music hall were in a sense slumming (as in crossing class boundaries for entertainment).
- 12.
I am, with this colloquialism, referring to Gissing’s simultaneous research (for journal publication) on Charles Babbage’s difference engine.
- 13.
The fictionalised Gissing writes in this chapter, “at the center of the Romantic movement was the belief that the fruits of isolated self-expression were of the greatest importance and were capable of discovering the heist truths” (Ackroyd 37).
- 14.
Butler also notes that “there is nothing in [de Beauvoir’s] account that guarantees that the ‘one’ who becomes a woman is necessarily female” (1990, 8).
- 15.
Later examples include the 1880 police raid of a drag ball at Temperance Hall, York Street Hulme when, again, men in drag were charged with acts of solicitation, not cross-dressing.
- 16.
By the late 1880s, with the rise of the New Woman figure, such rigid gendering of women’s clothing was increasingly challenged. At the same time, the proliferation of literary representations of female cross-dressing would also go a long way to allowing late-Victorian female Decadents and Aesthetes to experiment with gender-bending identities—consider Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Vernon Lee, and Radclyffe Hall.
- 17.
Leno is, of course, talking about a career as a pantomime actress, but for Lizzie, these words set in motion her life as a serial killer.
- 18.
See Kohlke for more on how “biofictional representation and remediation always produces a hybrid, composite, historical self-and-Other” (2013, 7).
- 19.
Even Kohlke is cautious in her discussion of biofiction’s ability to re-centre marginalised subjects: “our absorption in their life-stories stems from the alternative, privileged, or skewed insights and revelations their narratives provide into the (more) noteworthy personalities. This produces a sort of centripetal instead of the desired centrifugal reaction that would disperse imaginative power outwards and away from the cultural centre” (2013, 11).
- 20.
Hallie Rubenhold has recently argued, in The Five (2019), that the women were actually homeless and not soliciting sex at the time they killed (murdered while “sleeping rough”), and that both the sensationalised coverage of the crimes as well as subsequent scholarship have failed to consider this alternate history, opting instead to continue sexualise the victims.
- 21.
An early introduction to Cree, for example, describes him as a man “fascinated by poverty, and by the crime and disease which it engendered” (Ackroyd 44).
- 22.
See, for example, William Booth’s In Darkest England (1890) and Margaret Harkness’s In Darkest London (1889), both inspired by Henry Morton Stanley’s In Darkest Africa (1890) and, as this lineage suggests, both participating in slumming narratives that mark the East End poor/working-class inhabitants as essentially, if not racially, Other.
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Cameron, B. (2024). The Limehouse Golem: Female Agency and Neo-Victorian Slumming. In: Ayres, B., Maier, S.E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32160-3_19
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