servants as surveillance

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The Kitchen Police: Servant Surveillance and Middle-Class TransgressionAuthor(s): Brian W. McCuskeySource: Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2000), pp. 359-375Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25058524.

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Victorian Literature and Culture (2000), 359-375. Printed in the United States of America.Copyright ? 2000 Cambridge University Press. 1060-1503/00 $9.50

THE KITCHEN POLICE: SERVANTSURVEILLANCE AND MIDDLE-CLASSTRANSGRESSION

By Brian W. McCuskey

I. Privileged SpiesToward the end of Lady Audley's Secret (1862), the most infamous femme fatale of theVictorian novel retires to her dressing room after a long day of committing arson andattempting murder. Shamming a headache, Lady Audley sends her maid from the room.The narrator explains her motive:

Amongst all privileged spies, a lady's-maid has the highest privileges. It is she who bathesLady Theresa's eyes with eau-de-cologne after her ladyship's quarrel with the colonel; it isshe who administers sal-volatile to Miss Fanny when Count Beaudesert, of the Blues, hasjilted her. She has a hundred methods for the finding out of her mistress's secrets. She knowsby themanner inwhich her victim jerks her head from under the hair-brush, or chafes at thegentlest administration of the comb, what hidden tortures are racking her breast ? whatsecret perplexities are bewildering her brain. That well-bred attendant knows how to interpret the most obscure diagnoses of all mental diseases that can afflict her mistress; she knowswhen the ivory complexion is bought and paid for? when the pearly teeth are foreignsubstances fashioned by the dentist ? when the glossy plaits

are the relics of the dead, ratherthan the property of the living; and she knows other and more sacred secrets than these.(Braddon 336; v. 3, ch. 2)

Lady Audley shares with her Victorian readers amounting anxiety about the eyes and earsof servants in the home. While Lady Audley's secrets are exceptionally incriminating,nineteenth-century periodicals and household manuals warn even the most genteel householders to beware the spying and eavesdropping of servants. Privacy, one of the cornerstones of Victorian domestic ideology, remains under siege as long as the family remainsunder surveillance. "Everything that you do, and very much that you say at home,"cautions an 1853 North British Review article, "is related in your servants' families, and bythem retailed to other gossips in the neighborhood, with appropriate exaggerations, untilyou almost feel that you might as well live in a glass house or a whispering gallery" (Kaye97). Through servants' curiosity and gossip, the private affairs of the family become public

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360 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

knowledge: the master's business interests are disclosed, the mistress's confidences broadcast, the daughter's flirtations and son's debts exposed.To counter such invasions of privacy, household manuals written for servants exhortvalets and chambermaids to hold the secrets of the family sacred ? or, preferably, toignore and forget those secrets altogether. James Williams, author of The Footman'sGuide (1847), advises that there are "times and seasons in all establishments, particularlyin a numerous family, when the domestics are bound by every consideration of honestyand honour to act with the greatest circumspection and prudence; when they must notobserve what they cannot but see, must not notice what they cannot but hear, and when,although present, they must consider themselves absent" (23). Ironically, in warningservants what not to observe, the manuals acknowledge and articulate precisely the guiltysecrets ? alcoholism, illness, adultery, domestic violence ? that middle-class householders were so determined to suppress. The Lady's Maid (1877), for example, broaches thevery problems that it asks its servant readers to deny: "If your master should be unfortunate in his temper, or in any of his habits, ? if you should hear harsh words, or see yourmistress in distress, you are bound in honour to be as silent upon the whole matter,whether you are so desired or not, as if itwere a secret committed to your keeping" (32).Servant manuals and advice books thus inadvertently shine a bright light into the darkclosets of the Victorian middle-class home.

Given the association of servants and secrets in these instructive texts, it comes as nosurprise that so many nineteenth-century novels feature servants prominently as snoops,voyeurs, and blackmailers. Anthea Trodd has argued that "the householder's outragedsense of routine invasion of privacy by his domestic staff expressed itself in the productionof crime plots in which servants, so often inconspicuous in other kinds of fiction, routinelyplay highly visible and sinister roles" (46). Trodd catalogues an impressive rogue's galleryof servants ? including Dickens's Littimer and Thackeray's Morgan ? whose prying eyesand loose tongues compromise the secrets and security of the middle-class home. Servants,in Trodd's view, constitute an "alien community under [the householder's] roof, whomight aggressively manipulate their knowledge of the family for their own ends, or at leastinvoluntarily expose and misrepresent it to the outside world" (53). Taking her cue fromVictorian writers who complain about a crisis of privacy in the home, Trodd contends thatservant spying is a transgression that must be punished or at least corrected in the fictionif the middle-class reader's own anxieties are to be soothed. Her analysis thereforeassumes that surveillance below stairs necessarily subverts middle-class authority above.

However, a blunt opposition between spying servants and spied-upon family cannotcomprehend the complex negotiations of privacy and publicity in the Victorian home. Forone thing, as Bruce Robbins has noted, surveillance in the home moved in both directionsacross the employer-servant relation, as the middle-class family's "fear of being observedemerged together with a new burden of observing" (109). The domestic manuals recommend diverse strategies of keeping an eye on servants below stairs; they advise employersto monitor any visitors to the servants' hall, to double-check the kitchen accounts, toenforce strict curfews, and so on. Furthermore, surveillance also cuts both ways across thefigure of the servant itself: far from simply violating the privacy of the home, servantsurveillance often actually guaranteed privacy. Leonore Davidoff explains, "The hall, andin larger establishments, special anterooms, were used to 'hold' the caller in limbo whilethe servant went to find the required member of the family in the private regions of the



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Servant Surveillance and Middle-Class Transgression 361

house," thus protecting the family "by space and time lapse from initial contacts withoutsiders" (87). Servants therefore acted as a buffer between the family and the street,helping the family to screen visitors and to stall intruders.Even once a visitor had been fortunate enough to pass this initial screening, householders still expected their servants to supervise visitors within the home. Emily AndrewsPatmore (writing in 1859 as "Mrs. Mary Motherly") offers this advice to young housemaids: "Should the person be ever so well dressed, and yet ask only for 'your mistress,' or'the lady of the house,' do not ask such a one into a room where there is anything valuable"(71). Servants were expected to guard vigilantly not only the silver and plate, but also thephysical safety and emotional well-being of the mistress. In some cases, the manservantassumed the place of the absent husband as chaperone. James Williams instructs thenovice footman:

There is another thing you must be on your guard against, particularly if you live with singleladies, or with married ones, when the gentleman isnot at home. There will be persons comewith a double knock, and ask for the ladies, with all the assurance imaginable, pretending toknow the whole of the family. If it is a person you do not know, and your lady is at home, youcan do no less than show him into the room where she sees company; if she is in the roomwhen you announce his name, you can judge whether she knows him or not, by the mannerof receiving him; ifyou cannot, wait at the outside of the door till you hear whether they beginto converse together as if they were acquainted; if they do, of course you will go away directly;but ifnot, wait at the door until the stranger departs. You can let your lady know that you arenear the door, by coughing, or walking about just loud enough to be heard, if she has not givenyou directions how to act on such occasions. (82-83)

Of course, ameaningful cough or creaking footstep also lets the dubious visitor know thatthe conversation and his behavior are being monitored from without, by a servant who hasbeen not forbidden but directed to eavesdrop, make noise, and exercise judgment. Servants therefore perform a policing function in the home ? guarding valuables, sizing upstrangers, escorting their employers ? that necessarily but not offensively encroachesupon the family's privacy. The amorous policemen and blushing housemaids whose liaisons are caricatured in Punch have more in common than physical attraction alone. Farfrom violating bourgeois norms of privacy and order, the activity of servants in the homereveals those norms to be much more complex and ambivalent than the official separationof private and public spheres seems to indicate.Victorian novels, of course, help to enforce and even produce that official separation,but they also seize upon and exploit the symbolic ambivalence of the servant precisely inorder to manage the ideological conflicts that underwrite norms of privacy and publicity.

Certainly, as Trodd demonstrates, the Victorian middle class does exhibit a great deal ofanxiety about the spying and eavesdropping of servants, but her argument ignores the

ways in which novels refigure rather than merely reflect cultural anxieties. The novel'srepresentations of domestic life are both motivated and empowered by its productionwithin the Victorian cultural order; for that reason, points of friction and moments ofanxiety in the novel do not necessarily or exclusively threaten middle-class authority. Inshort, one must attend to the ways in which the novel appropriates servant surveillancefor its own complex and even competing ideological ends.



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For example, one might note that servants exercise police powers in the Victoriannovel quite as much as they do in the Victorian home, as the passage above from LadyAudley's Secret suggests. Their snooping

uncoversguilty

secrets and past crimes; theirgossip brings those secrets and crimes to the attention of public opinion and even the law.This police power becomes apparent when one reviews the major secrets that servantsthreaten to disclose ? illegitimacy, bigamy, adultery, murder, forgery, wrongful inheritance ? problems that radically upset the social order and which therefore must beconfronted and corrected. Lady Audley actually poses amuch greater threat to the socialorder than the spying of her maid, who would then be doing bourgeois society a serviceby spying and tattling on her mistress. From this point of view, the effect of servantsurveillance is normative rather than subversive, facilitating the restoration of law andorder in the community.

Of course, to conceive of spying as surveillance is already to invoke the spirit ofMichel Foucault and to provoke an examination of the normative interests served byeyes and ears below stairs. Following the main argument of Foucault's Discipline andPunish, Bruce Robbins has argued that the middle-class family's "observation of servantswas only one point of the many-pronged, long-term process of imposing a new disciplineon the new industrial work force" (110). The servants' counter-surveillance of the family,however, may also be understood as a disciplinary mechanism: a household populatedby spying servants below stairs and nervous employers above closely resembles thePanopticon, a machine that Foucault notes can be run equally well by servants "in theabsence of the director" (202). Caught up within a complex diffusion of surveillance inthe home, the householder comes to believe himself monitored by an invisible but omnipresent agency that threatens to discover every lapse and transgression. Whether ornot the servants are actually spying is of no consequence; what matters is the householder's belief that they are doing so. The Panopticon and the figure of the spying servantboth produce a similar effect: "to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanentvisibility that assures the automatic functioning of power" (Foucault 201). Believinghimself to be watched by servants, the householder monitors and polices himself; bothhe and the prison inmates are "caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers" (201). In projecting his own fear of detection and discipline onto theservants, the guilty householder in fact internalizes the mechanism of control itself. Fromthis perspective, the householder's complaint about spying servants actually mobilizes adisciplinary fiction that manifests itself most completely and most irresistibly in the Victorian novel.

Far from inducing anxiety, that disciplinary fiction can be seen to generate its owncompensations and pleasures that make the condition of surveillance and discipline tolerable. Most importantly, the Victorian complaint about peeping and prying servants bothfixes the middle-class family as the center of servants' attention and affirms middle-classsecrets as worth possessing. The pleasure of the text cannot fully be recognized if, with

Trodd, one views the fiction as providing only anxious fantasies of revenge upon deviousservants. Instead, a further source of pleasure lies in the fiction's subtle assertion, throughthe figuring of servants as spies, of middle-class eminence and esteem. Blackmail andgossip are only a threat to those members of society who have social status and reputationto lose; to experience, however vicariously, the sensation ofthat threat is also to be assuredof one's own standing. Oscar Wilde would remind us that the only thing worse than being



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talked about is not being talked about; in the same vein, perhaps the only thing worse thanbeing spied upon by one's servants is not being spied upon.As persuasive as the parallels between household and prison are, however, the employer-servant relation diverges from the panoptic model of discipline in one crucialrespect: servants give discipline faces and bodies where no such corporeal presence shouldexist. Disciplinary power, by Foucault's definition, must "be like a faceless gaze" (214); ifthe prisoner is ultimately to keep watch over himself, "the presence or absence of theinspector" in the central watchtower must be "unverifiable" (201). If discipline can beverified, then it can also be resisted and evaded; such power can exercise itself withoutchallenge only "as long as it [can] itself remain invisible" (214). To say that servants aredisciplinary agents is necessarily oxymoronic: discipline by definition can have no specificagents. Servant surveillance therefore can function only imperfectly as the medium for adisciplinary power requiring total saturation in the community; the panoptic model of thehousehold collapses as soon as the servant appears from below stairs to answer the bell.

However, this difficulty in fact suggests an interesting possibility: that the Victoriannovel constructs servants as a domestic police force precisely because they are not agentsof discipline. Instead, servants act as surrogates of discipline, standing in for the forms ofpower and authority that circulate invisibly within Victorian society. As a police presencethat is both visible and verifiable, servants afford their middle-class employers the opportunity to rehearse their relationship to social discipline and to reassure themselves of theirautonomy from its control. The representation of servant spying as police surveillancetherefore produces only obliquely the conditions of nineteenth-century culture that Foucault describes. For that reason, spying servants have no consistent ideological function,whether normative or subversive, inVictorian fiction. Rather, the servant's undergroundis a place where novels unofficially interrogate ? even as they officially install ? theseparation of private and public spheres. In developing this argument, the remainder ofthis essay examines closely two major Victorian novels ? Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone(1868) and Mrs. Henry (Ellen) Wood's East Lynne (1861) ? inwhich servants constitutea kitchen police that mediates between the private lives of guilty individuals and the publicsocial forces that seek to discipline them.

II. House Detectives in The MoonstoneFoucauldian literary CRITICISM has profitably explored the disciplinary function ofsurveillance inVictorian culture. Most famously, D. A. Miller has argued that the Victorian novel not only represents the exercise of panoptic discipline, but also itself operatesas both product and agent of that power. In his seminal discussion of The Moonstone,Miller demonstrates that the novel ejects Sergeant Cuff from the genteel community onlyso as to absorb and diffuse his spectacular powers of detection in subtle, nearly microscopic ways throughout the community. "Thus," argues Miller, "the move to discard therole of the detective is at the same time a move to disperse the function of detection" (42).

Although Miller doesnote

briefly that the "[njatural curiosity andcommon

gossip" ofservants constitutes "an informal system of surveillance" within the novel's middle-classcommunity (45), the extent to which this and other novels consistently and explicitly alignservants and the police has gone unremarked. As in Lady Audley's Secret, servants in TheMoonstone play the role of house detectives. They are granted the power to read the



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bodies and interpret the behavior of their employers in order to detect social and moraltransgressions. Through the surveillance and gossip of servants, the middle-class homepolices itself, rooting out corruption and solving crime. Of course, nearly every characterinCollins's novel engages in some form of detective work, but the servants' hall constitutesa unique site of surveillance where the novel negotiates specific concerns about thecompeting imperatives of privacy and publicity, the family and the state, subjective autonomy and social control.Police duties actually seem more important (and certainly more interesting) thanhousehold duties to The Moonstone's servants. Penelope, Rachel Verinder's outspoken

maid, spends much of her time poking around the house and grounds, reporting what shesees and hears to her father, the house steward, Gabriel Betteredge. Penelope and a fellowservant eavesdrop on the three Indians plotting to steal the Moonstone from FranklinBlake; she and the footman bring news of Franklin's first dinner with the family back toBetteredge; she makes the "awkward discovery" that the lovesick housemaid Rosanna hasreplaced the rose picked by Rachel for Franklin's buttonhole with a rose of her own; sheis the first to know that Rachel has refused the suit of Godfrey Ablewhite; and she reportslater to Betteredge that Rachel has been "stealing looks at Mr Franklin, which no intelligent lady's maid could misinterpret for a single instant" (111). Penelope's powers ofdetection and surveillance surpass even those of the local policeman, SuperintendentSeegrave: she understands the meaning of the paint smear on Rachel's door long beforeCuff appears and points it out. Betteredge himself polices the home in similar ways,

walking a nightly beat with the footman around the house to be sure all iswell: "Samueland I went all over the house, and shut up as usual. I examined everything myself, andtrusted nothing to my deputy on this occasion" (114). He resembles his daughter in hisstealthy surveillance work: "It showed a want of due respect, it showed a breach of good

manners, on my part; but, for the life of me, I couldn't help looking out of window whenMiss Rachel met the gentlemen outside" (123). Betteredge, Samuel, Penelope, and theother maidservants, who are notorious for "whispering together in corners, and staring atnothing suspiciously" (118), form an extensive network of information acquisition, exchange, and analysis, allowing "domestic question[s]" to be "debated" in the servants' hallafter dinner (86).

Superintendent Seegrave sabotages his own investigation by rudely searching the servants' rooms and thus alienating their powerful network. Sergeant Cuff, on the other hand,understands that his detective work depends upon the assistance of the household staff; hisfirst step is to soothe the wounded feelings of the outraged servants and make them "voluntary witnesses" (140). Furthermore, Cuff makes himself as familiar with the daily operationof the household as the best servant; glancing through the washing book, he "understood itperfectly in half aminute" (146). The novel further associates the servant and the detectivethrough the "extraordinary liking" that Betteredge and Cuff take for each other (152); theyshake hands repeatedly and walk arm in arm, discussing the details of the case. Through thisphysical contact, Betteredge catches from the Sergeant what he calls "detective fever," aburning desire to solve the mysteries of the household (160). Cuff, for his part,

so admiresthe loyal steward that he declares, "I would take to domestic service to-morrow, Mr.

Betteredge, if I had a chance of being employed with You " (220). The immediate friendship of the two men attests to both the detective's appreciation of household matters and theservant's aptitude for police work, as the novel aligns domestic and detective duties.



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Those duties, however, are not strictly interchangeable. When Betteredge goes behind Cuff's back and questions the servants himself, Cuff reprimands the steward fordoing "a little detective business

on your own account. For the future, perhaps youwill be

so obliging as to do your detective business along with me" (157). Later, Betteredgeadmits that he "couldn't help liking the Sergeant ? though I hated him all the time" (221).The tension between the detective work of servant and Sergeant arises from the crucialdifference between them: personal loyalty, or the lack of it, to the family itself. Cuff'ssuspicion that Rachel has stolen her own diamond upsets both Betteredge and Lady

Verinder, who each base their defense of Rachel on emotional knowledge that the policedo not possess: "I know my child," the proud mother announces to the detective (205)while the loyal servant warns him, "You don't know her; and I do" (174). The jointinvestigation of Betteredge and Cuff ends at that point, in a stalemate.

The novel thus explicitly stages a conflict between two detective agencies, the servantsand the police, the former subject to the will of the private family, the latter subject to theinterest of public order. Because the family has failed to police itself properly, Cuff arrivesat the scene of the crime; because his powers of detection threaten to place the domesticsphere under state surveillance and control, the police must be sent away again. Althoughservants and the police may double for one another, they cannot simply substitute for oneanother. Lady Verinder makes this distinction clear when she objects to Cuff's requestthat an undercover policewoman take Rosanna's place as housemaid. Loyal servantsknow their place in the family; suspicious police officers cannot be trusted to do so. Facedwith the awkward questioning of policemen and the alarming threat of publicity, thegenteel family chooses instead to conduct, with the help of its servants, an in-houseinvestigation.The Moonstone's conspicuous employment of servants as house detectives demandsthat Miller's claims about the novel be reconsidered. Miller's vision of a Foucauldiannineteenth century, ruled by the totalizing logic of discipline, has been questioned mostfrequently by feminist and cultural critics who insist upon the political ambivalence ofVictorian novels. The examination of servant figures inVictorian fiction, however, suggests a different but complementary line of counter-argument: Foucauldian readings ofthe novel, even when they are most persuasive, refuse the Victorians much awareness ofthe conditions of power in their own century. Miller himself insists upon the middle-classcommunity's "naive state of vulnerability": "Its most radical innocence, then, derives fromits sheer ignorance of power, its incapacity to assume amachinery of surveillance, control,and punishment" (36). Such Foucauldian claims about disciplinary power, the novel, andnineteenth-century culture must be tempered and complicated by attending to the waysin which the Victorians themselves both recognized the nature of that power and negotiated their relation to it.

Miller urges us to "think of the hysterical housemaids in The Moonstone" as evidencethat the detective's investigation is "a dramatic exception to a routine social order inwhichpolice and surveillance play no part" (36). Yet, as we have seen, those very housemaidsprovide evidence that the domestic routine already includes police and surveillance work.Miller does recognize that "[a] preventative detection inheres in the very management ofthe estate" (45), but he does not acknowledge the extent to which the novel self-consciously develops the police powers of servants. Miller's Foucauldian claims about powerdemand that "a direct assumption of policing power by the community is avoided" (49).



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But it isMiller, not the novel, who avoids that assumption; it is the critic and not the textwho "satisfies a double exigency: how to keep the everyday world entirely outside of anetwork of police power and at the same time to preserve the effects of such power withinit" (50). Neither the novel nor itsmiddle-class community is "radically innocent" enoughto imagine that domestic life can be, or should be, kept free of police power. Rather, thequestion at stake is how the community can best locate and construct that power so as tomake its presence both tolerable and manageable.The most immediate answer is that the novel grants police power to servants in order tolimit the scope of that power by fixing it firmly on the subordinate side of the class differential. Thus, Cuff's spying and snooping cannot be tolerated for long, but, as Betteredge saysto Franklin, "prying, and peeping, and listening are the natural occupations of peoplesituated as we are" (183). Betteredge here complains about the taint of mystery in the home,but his comment ironically holds true for his own and the servants' behavior in the homeeven before the theft of the Moonstone. When Cuff reports to Lady Verinder that Betteredge's services were invaluable to him during the investigation, the loyal steward, fearingfor his "professional existence," protests vigorously that he never "helped in this abominable detective business" (209). He need not worry: his mistress, sure of his loyalty and hercommand, honors him with "a little friendly pat on the shoulder" (209). Betteredge's ownspying and snooping do not threaten the integrity of the home and authority of the family;after all, it is only "natural" that he and the other servants should be so occupied (183). Withtheir help, the family can confront and resolve its own guilty secrets without compromisingitself before the eyes of all the world. The privacy of the home remains untarnished by theintrusions of an external bureaucratic control; the conflicting imperatives of discipline anddomesticity may be negotiated successfully below stairs.

Furthermore, the novel's employment of servants as police can be understood as aresponse to the very dispersal of a microscopic disciplinary power that Miller describes.

By investing servants with a policing function, the novel and itsmiddle-class communityrefigure that power so as to make it tangible, visible, distanced, and thus psychologicallytolerable. Both Miller and Alexander Welsh have argued that Victorian novels play uponmiddle-class anxieties about circumstantial evidence ? the tiny traces and effects left inthe wake of even minor transgressions. The belief that a disciplinary power circulateswithin the minutiae of everyday life gives rise to both fascination and dread. Robert

Audley, for example, tortures the guilty Lady Audley with this speech (at the end of whichshe faints dead away):

Upon what infinitesimal triflesmay sometimes hang the whole secret of some wicked mystery,inexplicable heretofore to the wisest upon the earth A scrap of paper; a shred of some torngarment; the button off a coat; a word dropped incautiously from the over-cautious lips ofguilt; the fragment of a letter; the shutting or opening of a door; a shadow on awindow-blind;the accuracy of a moment; a thousand circumstances so slight as to be forgotten by thecriminal, but links of steel in thewonderful chain forged by the science of the detective officer.(Braddon 119-20; v. 1, ch. 15)

Cuff, master of that science, concurs with Robert Audley in his recollection of a recentcase: "At one end of the inquiry there was amurder, and at the other end there was a spotof ink on a tablecloth that nobody could account for. In all my experience along the dirtiest



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ways of this dirty little world, I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet" (136). Inthe most trivial of details, in the most fleeting of moments, lies a power that relentlesslyexerts itself in the interests of discipline and order, exposing guilt and punishing transgression. Collins, inNo Name (1862), describes this power as a force of nature, and even ofprovidence itself: "Nothing in this world is hidden for ever. . . .Look where we will, theinevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secretis amiracle which the world has never yet seen" (21).The Victorian novel thus instills the suspicion that one's smallest indiscretions arebeing monitored and judged by a silent and invisible police force: a surveillance that,having no particular agent, is internalized by the individuals who conceive of themselvesas its object. However, if that anonymous detective function can be localized ? even ifonly temporarily ? within the servant class, then its power, far from being internalized,can instead be kept at bay and in its place. This is not to say that only servants performdetective duties in The Moonstone; in fact, everyone in the novel, servants and employersalike, at some point plays detective. Rather, the novel figures servants and employers asdetectives in different but complementary ways. Middle-class figures engage in detectionas ameans of affirming their own subjective power to order and control their experience.The detective work of servants, on the other hand, soothes their employer's anxietiesabout a superior disciplinary power that might in fact order and control middle-classsubjectivity. Victorian narratives of mystery and sensation, according toWelsh, habitually"find psychological guilt quite general in the population and then make criminal guiltsatisfyingly specific" (102). Along the same lines, these novels also suggest that a facelesspolice power circulates through the population everywhere at once and then ground thatpower provisionally within the servant class. The Moonstone, then, not only rehearses aFoucauldian deployment of disciplinary power through the world of the novel, but alsoarticulates a possible psychological response for individuals who, caught up within thatpower, would rather be policed by their servants than by no one in particular.

III. Law Enforcement in East LynneEAST LYNNE SHARES the same general concerns as The Moonstone about the encroachment of institutional police power into private life. Midway through Wood's novel, Richard Hare, exiled from West Lynne for amurder he did not commit, returns in disguise tomeet with Archibald Carlyle, affluent local lawyer and hero of the novel. Wondering atchanges in the village during his long absence, Richard comments, "There's a new brickhouse at the corner where old Morgan's shop used to be." Carlyle answers, "That's thenew police station: West Lynne, I assure you, is becoming grand in public buildings" (222;bk. 2, ch. 8). As the fugitive and the lawyer discuss new evidence about the murder, theircasual opening banter comes to seem more and more ominous. Richard, after all, has spentmost of the last ten years in hiding from the London police; part of the sensation of Wood'snovel arises from his furtive life on the lam. Even here, in this remote country village, aninstitutional police power reaches out from the metropolis to assert its authority, supplanting familiar local landmarks like old Morgan's shop with an anonymous brick facade.

However, aside from the polite and somewhat apologetic officers who materialize atthe end of the novel to arrest Francis Levison for murder and subpoena Afy Hallijohn asa witness, the police do not make their presence felt inWest Lynne. The grand new police



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station is conspicuous but unoccupied, for the community polices itself quite well withoutthe services of an official detective force. Like Lady Verinder's estate in The Moonstone,both West and East Lynne depend upon a less official, but no less effective, system ofsurveillance and report to maintain the internal discipline of the community as well as todefend itself against the intrusion of bureaucratic authority. Servants once again are calledupon to exercise their powers of observation on behalf of the social order. But whereas inThe Moonstone the relation between the professional police detective and the amateurservant sleuth oscillates uneasily between alliance and defiance, East Lynne develops asmooth continuum between police and servant, courtroom and kitchen, public records andfamily secrets. As we will see, that continuum allows Wood's novel not only to pursue TheMoonstone's concerns with police control and private life but also to question the functionand value of bourgeois privacy itself.In The Moonstone, the law is dangerous because invasive; in East Lynne, the law isdangerous because capricious, prone to unpredictable errors and abuses. The law, afterall, indirectly initiates the two major plot complications of the novel: Lord Mount Severndies without making provision for his daughter Isabel, who is left penniless and alone;Richard Hare finds himself wrongly accused of murder, convicted by "the odium ofcircumstances" (297; bk. 2, ch. 16). To emphasize the arbitrary nature of the law, the novelpresents a most bizarre example early in its story: Lord Mount Severn's creditors arresthis corpse for debt, a move that stumps even the legal expertise of Carlyle. As a lawyer,Carlyle understands better than anyone the law's potential for error and excess. He pointsout to Barbara Hare that her brother "acted as though he were guilty" when he fled thescene of the crime: "And that line of conduct often entails as much trouble as real guilt"(214; bk. 2, ch. 7). Carlyle, as we learn, often refuses to accept cases which involve needlesslitigation; in fact, he has been known to settle disputes informally rather than go to courtand pocket a fee. The good lawyer eventually speaks what comes to be the novel'sdefinitive statement on the vagaries of the legal system: "But justice and law are sometimes in opposition" (223; bk. 2, ch. 8). This principle allows the highly scrupulous Carlyleto shelter the outlaw Richard long enough to prove his innocence, even though thisgesture makes the lawyer an accessory after the fact.If justice is to be done, then, the law must be held at a distance from the community,at least long enough for the community to interrogate and police itself before yielding toan outside authority. East Lynne therefore arranges a series of displacements ? fromcourtroom to servants' hall ? designed to wrest the policing and judicial functions awayfrom the assize courts at Lynneborough and reconstitute those functions within the socialand domestic life of the community itself. West Lynne does have its own justice-room, butthe hearings conducted there depart from strict legal decorum: "In that primitive place ?primitive inwhat related to the justice-room and the justices ? things were not conductedwith the regularity of the law. The law there was often a dead letter" (451; bk. 3, ch. 16).Specifically, the magistrates allow evidence that is "inadmissible ? at least that wouldhave been inadmissible in amore orthodox court; hearsay testimony, and irregularities ofthat nature" (451-52; bk. 3, ch. 16). Even at itsmost official, West Lynne practices a kindof informal country justice that feels no compunction about ruling on the basis of whatamounts to local gossip.Local gossip, however dubious from a legal standpoint, wields far more influence inWest Lynne than the magistrates themselves; the magistrates implicitly acknowledge this



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in admitting hearsay evidence to their deliberations. The eyes, ears, and tongues of WestLynne do most of the actual work of policing the village and judging its residents. Thenovel consistently foregrounds the power of gossip and public opinion to enforce

communal norms and punish individual transgressions. As the narrator says, "How the worldwould get on without gossip, I'll leave the world to judge. That West Lynne could not havegot on without it, and without interfering in everybody's business but its own, is enoughfor me" (260; bk. 2, ch. 13).West Lynne cannot get on without it precisely because gossipensures the articulation and circulation of the very standards that keep the communityintact; it is the business of the community itself to interfere in? that is, monitor andcorrect ? the business of its members. Throughout the novel, West Lynne appears as acharacter in its own right, a collective entity, highly conservative, capable of preserving thestatus quo and passing judgment on those individuals who defy convention.

Nearly every major character in the novel feels the corrective power of West Lynnegossip at one time or another. The promiscuous Afy Hallijohn, daughter of the murdervictim, dreads the witness stand not somuch because she fears perjuring herself but ratherbecause she is all too "aware that her doings at that period would not shine out clearly ...in the gossip of West Lynne" (451; bk. 3, ch. 15). Justice Hare, who has publicly denouncedhis son without real evidence of his guilt, learns with surprise of his son's innocence; ratherthan express joy for his son or remorse for his own hasty judgment, the justice initiallyfears that "West Lynne and the public would not fail to remember his unnatural harshness" (465; bk. 3, ch. 17). His daughter, Barbara, not-so-secretly in love with Carlyle, fearsWest Lynne's "prying gossip" about her hopes and desires: "I would far rather you hadkilled me, Archibald," says Barbara, after his engagement to Isabel sets the town buzzing(139; bk. 1, ch. 16). Lady Isabel laughingly flouts public opinion early in the novel andinsists upon attending the poor music-master's concert to "show West Lynne that I don'ttake a lesson from their book" (59; bk. 1, ch. 8). Once she has disgraced herself withFrancis Levison, however, she cannot help but agonize, "What does the world say of me?"(259; bk. 2, ch. 12). In these and other cases, West Lynne gossip must be reckoned with asa disciplinary power interested in even the most minor infractions, the briefest lapses: "Ina small place like West Lynne, every little event causes a stir and excites curiosity" (311;bk. 2, ch. 18).As in The Moonstone, the chief agents of gossip in the middle-class community areits servants, always alert to the activities of their employers, always eager to discuss thoseactivities with whomever will listen. Susan, housemaid at East Lynne, giggles aboutBarbara's repressed love for Carlyle; Wilson, nursemaid at East Lynne, gleefully tells herfellow servant Joyce about private conversations she has overheard between Barbara and

Carlyle. The servants at Castle Marling gossip about Lady Mount Severn's violence toIsabel; Lady Mount Severn's maid, Afy, eavesdrops on her mistress's spiteful commentsabout Isabel. The servants at East Lynne whisper about the slow death of Carlyle's son,and raise the alarm when Isabel flies with Levison: "At that moment the voices of theservants in the corridor outside penetrated to [Carlyle's] ears: of course they were peeringabout, and making their own comments, Wilson, with her long tongue, the busiest. Theywere saying that Captain Levison was not in his room; that his bed had not been slept in"(235; bk. 2, ch. 9). Through the surveillance and gossip of servants, the transgressions ofmasters and mistresses become open secrets within West Lynne, and therefore not onlysubject to the police power of public opinion but also vulnerable to more institutional



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forms of that power. Warning Justice Hare of a "nasty report" that Richard has returnedtoWest Lynne in disguise, one villager points out that gossip "may only serve to put thepolice inmind of bygone things, which itmay be better they should forget" (264; bk. 2,ch. 13).When Miss Corny snipes that the maid Wilson "has a tongue as long as from here toLynneborough" (147; bk. 1, ch. 18), where the assizes are held, she neatly compresses thenovel's chain of associations between servant gossip and the distant courts of law. Themiddle-class community is keenly aware of police power below stairs: its nervousnessabout servant surveillance frequently heightens the sensation of the novel. When a darkfigure appears in the Hare's garden, Barbara's "first thought was to alarm the servants; hersecond, to be still; for she remembered the fear and mystery that attached to the house"(25; bk. 1, ch. 3). Her first thought makes explicit the policing of the home by servants; hersecond betrays the anxiety of being so policed, an anxiety shared by her friends and family."Are the servants astir much this evening?" asks Carlyle, before a clandestine meetingwith Richard (40; bk. 1, ch. 6). "What a blessing it is the servants' windows don't look this

way," Richard exclaims during that meeting. "If they should be looking out upstairs " (46;bk. 1, ch. 6). Richard steals away again after seeing his mother for only a few minutes, bothof them "dreading interruption from the servants" (49; bk. 1, ch. 6). Anxiety aboutservants arises not only when Richard slinks back in disguise toWest Lynne, but also whenthe secret life of any member of the community is in danger of being exposed. When thelove-sick Barbara fights off tears at the news of Carlyle's wedding, she hears a servant atthe door and realizes "the necessity of outwardly surmounting the distress at the presentmoment" (112; bk. 1, ch. 13). Isabel, disguised asMadame Vine, fears "Joyce's keen eyesmore perhaps than she feared any others" (337; bk. 3, ch. 2) and feels that "Wilson, thecurious, was devouring her with her eyes" (342; bk. 3, ch. 2). During the whole of her illicitstay at East Lynne, Isabel "feared the detection ofWilson and Joyce more than she fearedthat of Mrs. Carlyle" (357; bk. 3, ch. 3). In each instance, housemaids and footmenthreaten to surprise and disclose their employers' violations of social code and criminallaw. At the end of the long arm of the law, we find the servant's hand.As in The Moonstone, granting police power to the servants brings that power backunder the provisional control of their employers. If the servants' hall functions as thedomestic branch of a disciplinary network that, like Wilson's tongue, stretches from theparlor at East Lynne to the courthouse at Lynneborough, then middle-class householderscan manipulate that network for their own ends. Carlyle, for example, employs Joyce tospy on the soldier whom he suspects of being the murderer; she waits on the soldier,studies his face, and then reports back to Carlyle ? inconclusively, as it happens (161; bk.1, ch. 19). Furthermore, just as servant gossip comes to represent (because it generates)the gossip of the village at large, so too does the opinion of servants stand in for theopinion of the general public. Early on, the novel makes this connection when Joyce saysof Afy, "I have felt certain always that she is with Richard Hare, and nothing can turn mefrom the belief. All West Lynne is convinced of it" (49; bk. 1, ch. 6). Carlyle does not thenattempt to turn her from the belief that Richard is innocent; but later, when Richardcomes to East Lynne, Carlyle arranges ameeting between the fugitive and the servant "totry," as he says to her, "to shake your belief" inRichard's guilt (296; bk. 2, ch. 16). Richardtoo wants the opportunity "to see her and convince her" (296; bk. 2, ch. 16). Theirinterview resembles a police interrogation, with "Joyce asking question after question"



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and "Richard talking vehemently" (297; bk. 2, ch. 16). Richard's desire is ultimately toprove himself innocent before theWest Lynne public and the Lynneborough courts, buthe cannot do so without first proving himself innocent before Joyce. In changing her mind,Richard gains leverage within the structures of police power that oppress him; his interview with the servant stands at one end of a long struggle that will conclude at a moreformal interview ? with a judge.The middle-class manipulation of East Lynne's kitchen police has its limits, however:Wood ismuch less confident than Collins that servants can be trusted to know their placeand remain loyal to their employers. Afy and Wilson hop from place to place and gossipabout previous employers with a zeal that would disgust the fiercely devoted Betteredge.Taken together, the two novels neatly encapsulate the debate over the "servant problem"that raged inmiddle-class periodicals throughout the 1860s. Relations between mastersand servants had reached a crisis largely because the conditions of labor had shifted andbrought two different notions of service into conflict: a pre-industrial paternalism versusa newly emerging economism. Frances Power Cobbe, in her 1868 essay on "HouseholdService," explains that "the old theory of service, wherein the patriarchal ideal waspredominant, has left behind it customs and notions wholly foreign to the new theorywherein contract is all in all" (124). Some Victorian commentators resolved with Cobbe"to eradicate from their minds the whole patriarchal idea of service" (132) and to accept"the great evil of constant migration of servants" on the free market (134). Others, like ananonymous contributor to Once aWeek in 1861, clung to the nostalgic ideal of a servicerelation "in which high wages do not bear a part" and "long service gives a claim toprotection and future assistance" ("Domestic" 432).The Moonstone invokes precisely this nostalgic ideal of a loyal servant class in orderto keep police power in its proper place; East Lynne chooses instead to accommodate theconstant migration of servants within its representations of police power. Far from threatening middle-class privacy, the antagonism between employers and servants inEast Lynneeffectively expands rather than forecloses the opportunities for middle-class transgression.Servants in the novel stand in for a disciplinary power which would otherwise seem at onceomnipresent and invisible. If that power can be localized below stairs, then it can also bedodged and evaded ? only temporarily, perhaps, but long enough to satisfy an illicitdesire, or to prepare oneself for the inquisition. Thus Isabel, who cannot endure theseparation from her children, returns to East Lynne in disguise. She knows that in doingso she risks being humiliated, chastised, and even punished, but by focusing her "excessivedread of detection" on the servants she can evade police power long enough to enjoyprecious stolen moments with her children (495; bk. 3, ch. 21). Richard, who cannot stepforward publicly until he has proven his innocence, also returns to East Lynne in disguise.He risks detection and punishment, but he too dodges the servants long enough, in thiscase, to assemble evidence that he is innocent, at which point he drops the disguise andsubmits himself to the courts. Even the real criminal of the novel, Francis Levison, feelshimself to be safe at East Lynne as long as Joyce, the servant capable of identifying himas the murderer, is confined to bed with a broken ankle. The figuring of servants as policeis thus both a narrative strategy employed by the novel as it tests and questions the

policing of everyday Victorian life as well as a psychological defense initiated by characters who would otherwise find themselves on the run from an institutional authority thatexists everywhere at once.



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In both East Lynne and The Moonstone, the figuring of servants as police helps topreserve the middle-class family's sense of privacy. In Collins's novel, however, the familyprefers the spying of its own loyal servants to the prying of detectives; whereas inWood'snovel, secrets are more easily kept from nosy servants than from other, more official andless visible, forms of police power. The Moonstone never questions the value of privacy ortests its effects: to preserve the integrity of the home, the family must resist the intrusionsof snooping detectives, scheming foreigners, and unscrupulous house guests. East Lynne,on the other hand, even as it facilitates the middle-class evasion of police power, alsowarns of the danger of the privacy thus gained: namely, that its effects ? secrecy, silence,reserve ? too often upset the personal relations upon which the community itself depends. Carlyle, for example, keeps Barbara's family affairs to himself rather than confidingin his wife; as a result, she misinterprets their clandestine meetings and reacts jealously,running off with Levison. In fact, the good lawyer's professional reserve more than oncedisturbs the equilibrium of his personal affairs. Acting with what John Kucich calls an"almost pathological tendency toward deceit" (182), Carlyle manages to alienate his wife,to offend his sister by not telling her of his impending marriage, and to torment the smittenBarbara by not making clear his own strictly platonic feelings for her. As a man who hasdevoted his career to negotiating between the individual and public authority, Carlylevalues his own privacy above all else, even to the point of jeopardizing his social andfamilial relationships.

Carlyle's professional secrecy is infectious: again and again in the novel, the failure tospeak candidly, even from the best of motives, ultimately erodes individual trust and leadsto disaster. Isabel cannot bring herself to tell Carlyle of her attraction to Levison and thusescape his evil influence: "The whole truth, as to her present feelings, itwas not expedientthat she should tell, but she might have confided to him quite sufficient" (182; bk. 2, ch. 3).Nor can she find the courage to tell her husband about Miss Corny's subtle abuses; later,ironically, he comes to blame her "for not giving him [her] full confidence on the point,that he might have set matters on the right footing" (255; bk. 2, ch. 12). Both Miss Cornyand Barbara detect Madame Vine's resemblance to Lady Isabel but do not mention it forfear of offending Carlyle: "However great a likeness we may have detected, we could notand did not speak of it, one to another" (521; bk. 3, ch. 24). Instead, Isabel's deception isallowed to continue and finally to kill her. Similarly, Barbara long suspects that Captain

Thorn and Levison are one and the same, an insight that might have led more quickly toher brother's freedom, but she keeps it to herself out of respect for Carlyle's feelings: "Theterrible domestic calamity which had happened toMr. Carlyle the same night that Richardprotested he had seen Thorn, had prevented Barbara discussing the matter with him then;and she had never done so since" (266; bk. 2, ch. 13). In each of these cases, Carlyle'sfiercely private habits, by discouraging the exchange of confidences and prohibiting opendiscussion, constitute nothing less than an obstruction of justice.The novel, by figuring servants as police, may allow institutional forms of law andorder to be obstructed for a time, but law and order within personal relations must beenforced at all costs. Servants inEast Lynne, precisely because they are so antagonistic totheir employers, perform a curative function within the domestic sphere: their eyes, ears,and tongues serve as an antidote to the corruption of excessive secrecy and silence. Joyce'soutburst to Carlyle about his sister's cruelty to Isabel make this function most explicit: "Ihave longed to say it to you many a hundred times, sir; but it is right that you should hear



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it, now things have come to this dreadful ending" (234; bk. 2, ch. 9). Upon servantsdevolves the responsibility for speaking what must be spoken ? illicit desires, naggingsuspicions, scandalous behavior ? if the community is to function healthily becauseopenly and honestly. As long as middle-class privacy is invested with intrinsic positivevalue, as in The Moonstone, official police power will appear invasive and threatening.

However, once the value of privacy is called into question, as it is inWood's novel, thenservant surveillance reveals itself as a necessary corrective to privacy's potential dangers."Private feelings must give way to public interests," one of Levison's friends says (382; bk.3, ch. 6), and we may take his comment as central to the project of the novel itself.

IV. Servants vs. ProfessionalsMID-CENTURY VICTORIAN novels like The Moonstone and East Lynne employ the figureof the servant to think through the complex dynamics of surveillance in the middle-classhome because servants are highly conflicted figures who both guarantee and threaten theiremployers' privacy. This symbolic ambivalence allows the Victorian novel to negotiate thecompeting ideological imperatives of privacy and publicity in such a way as to consolidatemiddle-class subjective autonomy. With the help of servants who act as kitchen police,middle-class employers rehearse their shifting relationship to the fields of social powerthat both underwrite and undermine that autonomy.But if the Victorian novel seeks a figure who embodies the paradoxes of surveillancein the middle-class home, and who allows the novel to exploit those paradoxes in theinterests of middle-class authority, then it comes as a surprise that this figure turns out tobe the servant, rather than amuch more obvious choice: the professional. Robert Audleyasserts that "physicians and lawyers are the confessors of this prosaic nineteenth century"(Braddon 374; v. 3, ch. 5), but these men and their professional colleagues are the century'ssurveillants as well. The reputation and authority of doctors, lawyers, detectives, scientists,and other kinds of professionals depend upon their skills as observers, information-gatherers, and interpreters ? the very skills that the novels attribute to servants. In the passagethat opens this essay, Lady Audley's maid exhibits the professional privileges and powersof a general physician (administering sal-volatile), a Holmesian detective (interpretingnervous mannerisms), and a clinical psychologist (diagnosing mental diseases).

Why, then, if the Victorian novel wishes to appropriate the power of surveillance onbehalf of the middle class, does it not grant that power to the middle-class figure of theprofessional? The refusal to do so is all the more striking when we consider the failures ofthe professionals to see clearly, despite their on-the-job training. In East Lynne, forexample, the lawyer Carlyle does not notice the suffering of his first wife; nor does heperceive the designs that Levison has upon her. In The Moonstone, not only does SergeantCuff fail to solve the mystery, but the mystery itself arises because the aptly-named Dr.Candy spikes Franklin Blake's brandy with a dose of opium. The good doctor's little jokeis only the most glaring example of the remarkably unprofessional behavior exhibited byother professional figures in the fiction. With their finer observation, shrewder analysis,and better judgment, the servants in these novels show up not only the detectives, as wehave seen, but also the doctors and lawyers. Carlyle's maid, Joyce, finally confronts thesurprised lawyer with the disturbing fact that his wife has been miserable for years and theperhaps even more disturbing fact that the entire household staff has known this for years:



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"We all loved her, we all felt for her" (Wood 234; bk. 2, ch. 9). As for Levison's designs,even the lawyer's coachman perceives immediately, unlike his master, that Levison is "afalse sort of chap" (226; bk. 2, ch. 8). East Lynne's lawyer pays a high price for overlookingwhat his servants see and know, but not as high a price as The Moonstone's doctor. Notonly is it Betteredge and not Dr. Candy who accurately diagnoses Franklin Blake'sinsomnia as a symptom of nicotine withdrawal (434), but the doctor also drives home fromthe fateful dinner party in an open gig in the driving rain, ignoring Betteredge's admonition that "he would get wet through" (111). The good doctor consequently catches a feverand suffers a permanent amnesia that wrecks his reputation and career. Professionals ofall sorts ? detectives, doctors, and lawyers ? ignore at their own risk the insight andadvice of the amateurs below stairs.

The Victorian novel's bestowal of professional powers of surveillance upon the servant class must first be understood as ameans of managing anxieties about working-classeyes and ears in the middle-class home. Having identified the servants' hall as a volatilesymbolic space inwhich competing imperatives of secrecy and knowledge may be successfully negotiated, the novel develops strategies of co-opting the power of servant surveillance even as it threatens to undercut middle-class authority and privilege. But in doingso, the novel also counters anxieties about the increasing authority and privilege ofprofessionals in relation to the rest of the middle-class community. Arguing that bothCollins and Wood "wrote in uneasy opposition to the professional class" (158), Kucich hasdemonstrated that mid-century Victorian novels exhibit a great deal of nervousness anddefensiveness about the rise of a professional elite within the middle class. Differentnarratives articulate different anxieties about the professional, but the fundamental andshared concern is that the existence of a professional elite heightens competition andfactionalism within the middle-class community, potentially undermining the solidarityand the authority of the middle class as a whole.In this context, servants armed with the power of surveillance actually exert a disciplinary pressure upon the professional elite. The novel repossesses the very skills thatconstitute the special character of the professional and redistributes those skills among thefigures who have the lowest status in the middle-class household, a leveling gesture thatboth checks the social elevation of the professional and divests him of his exclusive powerover middle-class secrets, bodies, and spaces. Once the disciplinary function of surveillance has been displaced within the domestic sphere onto the servant class, that functionceases to be the special province of the detective, doctor, or lawyer and instead becomesavailable to the entire middle class. As a result, the professional finds his expertise calledinto question and his claim to special status thwarted. The novel, by figuring servants as

privileged spies, thus manages not only interclass tensions between middle-class householders and their suspect servants but also intraclass tensions between those householdersand the equally suspect professional elite.Utah State University

WORKS CITEDBraddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley's Secret. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.Cobbe, Frances Power. "Household Service." Frasefs 11 (1868): 121-34.



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Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966._. No Name. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.Davidoff, Leonore. The Best Circles: Women and Society inVictorian England. Totowa, New Jersey:Rowman and Littlefield, 1973."The Domestic Service Question." Once aWeek 5 (1861): 430-34.Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:Random House, 1979.Kaye, J.W. "Domestic Service ? Nelly Armstrong." North British Review 20 (1853): 95-111.Kucich, John. The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.The Lady's Maid. London: Houlston, [1877].Miller, D. A. The Novel and thePolice. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.Motherly, Mrs. Mary [Emily Andrews Patmore]. The Servant's Behaviour Book. London: Bell and

Daldy, 1859.Robbins, Bruce. The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.Trodd, Anthea. Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel. London: Macmillan, 1989.

Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.Williams, James. The Footman's Guide. London: Dean andMunday, [1847].Wood, Mrs. Henry. East Lynne. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1984.

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