Chemical Crimes: Science and Poison in Victorian Crime Fiction by Cheryl Blake Price (review)

The victorian era was marked by a fascination with poison. A few mid-century trials, famous for their difficulty in establishing the guilt of the poisoner, ignited the public imagination and fuelled debates on toxicology in all social spheres—see, for example, Ian Burney's Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination (2006). Although murder by poison was not as common as beatings, stabbings, or shootings (1), Victorians feared poison's ability to transform bodies, infiltrate homes, and invade communities, but also marvelled at its mysterious possibilities. Yet, despite the significance of chemical crimes in Victorian culture, scholars concerned with nineteenth-century crime fiction have paid little attention to fictional poisoners, focusing instead on the figure of the detective. Cheryl Price ventures into this neglected research arena with Chemical Crimes. Through fresh readings of familiar and less familiar texts by Elizabeth Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Ellen Wood, Charles Warren Adams, Wilkie Collins, and L.T. Meade, she effectively argues that the chemical criminal adds nuances to our former understanding of the relationship between Victorian crime fiction and scientific advancement.

Several critics, including Ronald Thomas in his Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (2000), have associated the genre with a legitimization of science. The Victorian detective arises as a sort of scientific hero—as Rosemary Jann contends in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order (1995)—who illustrates, again and again, the necessity and potential of forensic detection and toxicology to instill order even in the most chaotic cases. Cheryl Price's turn to the fictional poisoner sheds lights on the apprehension of scientific progress that equally characterizes Victorian crime fiction. On the one hand, Ellen Wood's poisonous doctors warn against the growing social and professional authority of physicians, who are meant to cure but—if their moral standards are not questioned and their influence is not checked—are free to cause injury. The uncontested power of doctors, Price shows, is what allows the criminals of Lord Oakburn's Daughters and "Mr. Castonel" to use their scientific knowledge to control female reproduction and reduce women's mandate in the domestic sphere. The two antagonists intrude into pregnant women's private space, undermine their domestic influence, harm their kinships, and, at last, strip them of their reproductive power through death.

On the other hand, the "unruly" bodies (105) of Charles Warren Adams's Rosalie Anderton, who is hypnotized in a plot to murder her sister, and Wilkie Collins's Franklin Blake, who steals a diamond after he is intoxicated by his enemy, act as reminders of the limits of scientific thinking and methodology. To make sense of the death of Gertrude Anderton, seemingly poisoned but leaving no trace of chemicals, Adams's detective must go beyond the strictly rational realm of forensic detection and recognize the possibility of poisoning by proxy. Likewise, Collins's detective succeeds in proving that Blake never intended to steal the diamond by adapting his science and "embracing paradox rather than standardization" (135), yet he fails to locate the diamond as a result of his unbending scientific beliefs: he refuses to acknowledge the possibility that each body may react differently to the same dose of laudanum. Adams's The Notting Hill Mystery and Collins's The Moonstone thus caution against a rigid, closed-minded science, which can only lead to a dead end, and conceive a successful, progressive science as one that is flexible—one that can acknowledge its weaknesses and learn from them.

Another noteworthy contribution of Price's book pertains to the intersection of women and the sciences. Scholarship on Victorian female poisoners has repeatedly highlighted the way they are vilified by contemporaries, who brand them as bad women for straying from standards of acceptable female behaviour. Price questions this coherent criticism of the female chemical criminal, notably with her study of Meade's The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings and The Sorceress of the Strand. By positioning...