Richard Marsh and the Realist Gothic: Pursuing Traces of an Evasive Author in His Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction

Abstract

This chapter reads key works by fin-de-siècle popular author Richard Marsh in light of recent biographical discoveries about him, focusing on his best-selling late-Victorian gothic novels The Devil’s Diamond (1893), The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), The Goddess: A Demon (1900) and The Joss: A Reversion (1901). It uncovers traces of Marsh’s chequered early career in the accounts of criminality and social precariousness that underpin the horror in these texts, arguing that Marsh’s experience manifests in incongruous moments of realism which disrupt the texts’ gothic modality. The chapter contributes to the ongoing critical rediscovery of Marsh, largely forgotten by the mid-twentieth century, providing new insights into his work and into the complex interaction between two prominent Victorian literary modes, the realist and the gothic.

Mr Richard Marsh is prodigious … The tradition current in the receiving department of this office [is] that he publishes a new novel every Tuesday… he throws off a story with an abandon … that is refreshing.

‘The Yarning School’, The Academy (3 November 1900), p. 423.