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  • Murder and Morality in Victorian Britain: The Story of Madeleine Smith
  • Ian Burney (bio)
Murder and Morality in Victorian Britain: The Story of Madeleine Smith, by Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair; pp. vii + 204. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009, £60.00, £16.99 paper, $89.95, $33.95 paper.

Eleanor Gordon and Gwyenth Nair offer a lucid and instructive reinterpretation of the well-known case of Madeleine Smith, the young Glaswegian woman whose 1857 trial for the murder by poison of her lover ended in the distinctive Scottish verdict of "not proven." Smith and the Jersey-born Pierre Emile L'Angelier had conducted an increasingly passionate affair over the course of nearly two years, during which Smith wrote some two hundred fifty letters addressed to her paramour. These letters form the centerpiece of Gordon and Nair's account, but their interest is not solely, or even principally, with their status as evidence for Smith's involvement in L'Angelier's death. They are instead used as a means of contextualizing Smith in her Glasgow milieu—as a denizen of a thriving and expanding urban culture, as a member of a prominent middle-class family, and as an [End Page 562] individual negotiating these roles and their relation to her own sense of romantic and sexual being. There is a clear overarching theme linking these readings: for Gordon and Nair, the dominant framework for understanding Smith has been, since the time of her trial, her entrapment within a rigid Victorian domestic ideology. Though these readings of Smith have varied over time, the assumption that she lived in a claustrophobic and complacent social and moral order has remained constant.

Attentive to the wealth of incidental detail contained in these letters about the range of public and private pleasures available to young women of Smith's standing, Gordon and Nair launch an attack on the conventional Smith story at both the social and individual level. They embed Smith within a dynamic world of sociability, in which the public and the private interact in complex ways that belie the stereotypical view of prudish Victorian restriction. Domestic entertainment fixtures such as dinners and soirées come alive as opportunities for the pursuit of pleasure and self-expression for both men and women; everyday forays into the streets of Glasgow become exercises in engaging freely in the social and cultural offerings of a vibrant civic life; and families serve not to thwart but to enhance sociability through their networks of business, religious, and political interests.

In this way Gordon and Nair explicitly challenge the usefulness of separate spheres as a category of historical analysis within which to frame and interpret Victorian society in general. They also take this challenge to the personal level. Previous accounts of Smith, they argue, strip her of agency, casting her as a victim of a repressive social and moral order. Instead, they see in her letters a more complex, purposeful, willful protagonist who, though working within clearly delineated cultural conventions, was attempting to fashion for herself a distinctive social and emotional identity. No longer L'Angelier's (or society's) passive victim, Smith emerges as a spirited being who enjoyed the attentions of male admirers, had a sense of her own power as a social and sexual being, and recognized and largely embraced her "lusty" appetites (55).

In arguing this reinterpretation, Gordon and Nair demonstrate an admirable degree of self-reflection on their historical methodology at two levels. First, they articulate and for the most part successfully deploy a critical awareness of Smith's letters, not as transparent expressions of an authentic self but as culturally mediated exercises in self-fashioning. These efforts, they rightly observe, drew on a wide range of established cultural conventions—from etiquette manuals advising on proper epistolary form to melodramatic and romantic fiction that plotted in advance the generic thoughts and actions of men and women in love. And yet, Gordon and Nair argue, it is possible to detect, beyond the heavily scripted nature of Smith's letters, individual agency, one reflecting her "own particular understanding and adaptation of cultural conventions." Her letters thus "not only tell us something about the...

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