The Pocket-book and the Pigeon-hole: Lady Audley's Secret and the Files of Victorian Fiction

This article argues that the Victorian novel is governed by the logic of storage: the accumulation of data and the deferral of action. Focusing on Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), I demonstrate that the sensation novel is caught between the winnowing directive of the detection plot and the capaciousness of Victorian literary form. The novel's many objects register information and delay narrative, but they never quite get activated as clues. I track three kinds of paper objects—files, memoranda, and keepsakes—all of which linger in storage, declining in value and awaiting an opportunity for transmission that might never arrive. Disposable yet persistent, paper evokes the cultural confusion over how to save and what, if anything, to discard. I contextualize the novel with government records and journalism from the period, all of which express similar archival anxieties. Braddon's novel ultimately muddles the distinction between clue and litter, keepsake and junk, archive and hoard, as well as between significant and insignificant narrative information.