Bleak Houses. Lisa Surridge
INTRODUCTION
In “the adventure of the abbey grange” (1904), Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are called to investigate a murder in an upper-class home. Sir Eustace Brackenstall lies dead in his dining room, felled by a blow from his own poker. Lady Brackenstall, also injured, has a “terrible mark upon her brow” and two “vivid red spots” on her arm (SSH, 714). When Holmes and Watson arrive, she tells them what happened. The night before, she had been making a last tour of the house before bedtime. She entered the dining room, surprising three thieves who were coming in through the French windows. One man grabbed her by the wrist and throat; when she tried to scream, he struck her a “savage blow with his fist over the eye” (SSH, 715). When she came back to consciousness she was gagged and bound to a chair with the cord from the bell pull. Her husband rushed into the room with his cudgel in his hand. One of the thieves dealt Sir Eustace a deadly blow with the poker, whereupon Lady Brackenstall fainted again. When she came to, the thieves had collected up the silver and were helping themselves to the Brackenstalls’ best wine. They checked Lady Brackenstall’s bonds and fled through the French windows, taking the silver with them. She called the servants, who sent for the local police, who in turn called in Holmes. By the time Holmes arrives, the local police have identified the criminals as the “Lewisham gang of burglars”—“commonplace rogues,” as Watson describes them (SSH, 713; 715).
The private upper-class home shattered by lower-class poker-wielding ruffians; the protection of the wife by the husband; the wife as passive victim—“The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” seems a tissue of class-based assumptions about who commits crime, against whom, and how. But not so fast. Holmes notices that though three wine glasses are soiled, only one contains bees-wing, a crust that forms in fine wines after long storage. He also wonders how the criminals managed to use the bell pull to tie up Lady Brackenstall, since pulling on the rope would presumably rouse the servants. Although Holmes gets back on the train to London, these anomalies—meaningful only to those who understand fine wine and good servants—so obsess Holmes that he gets off the London train and goes back to Kent. There he minutely examines the window, the carpet, the chair, the rope, and the bell pull. “We have got our case,” he tells Watson, “one of the most remarkable in our collection” (SSH, 719). He tells Lady Brackenstall that her story is an absolute fabrication. He then sends a telegram to a ship’s captain working on the Adelaide-Southampton line.
Captain Croker arrives in Baker Street and relates a different story. He tells Holmes that he met and loved Mary Taylor (the future Lady Brackenstall) when he was first officer on the ship that brought her from Australia to England. When she married Sir Eustace, he accepted his loss, but he could not accept what he heard from her maid: that her husband abused her. According to Croker, there were no thieves, no intruders: the villain, he says, was Sir Eustace himself. Lady Brackenstall’s eye was blackened by her baronet husband, who was “for ever illtreating her” (SSH, 721). Croker himself killed Sir Eustace when he saw him “welt” her across the face with a stick (SSH, 725). The sailor then tied the wife to a chair to make her look innocent; poured the wine into the glasses to create the illusion of three thieves; threw the family silver in the pond to provide a motive for the crime; and disappeared until the telegram from Holmes summoned him to the Baker Street flat.
Like the first story, this one is heavily inflected by class, and it overturns all the assumptions of the first about where and how domestic violence occurs, and by whom and against whom it is committed. Holmes, Watson, and the reader are forced to reassess their assumptions surrounding domestic violence—assumptions that wife beating occurs in the kitchen rather than the dining room; that black eyes belong to the East End, not the east wing; and that commonplace rogues rather than baronets cudgel their wives. “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” then, is quintessentialy a text about reading narratives and signs of marital violence. With its multiple stories, multiple tellers (Lady Brackenstall, the maid, the sailor, the local police), and multiple interpreters (Holmes, Watson, the local police, the story’s reader), the text draws attention to how such narratives are produced, disseminated, and interpreted. It draws attention to the intrusion of the public gaze into the private sphere; to the body of the woman as a text to be deciphered by medical or legal experts (fig. 0.1); to the question of how a woman’s private loyalties may impact public narratives about or investigation into spousal assault; and to the role of the courts in the punishment of the assailant. As such, it foregrounds many of the key themes of this book.
Figure 0.1. Sidney Paget, “I Am the Wife of Sir Eustace Brackenstall,” illustration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” Strand Magazine (1904).
When I first started thinking about Victorians and marital violence, I was writing a footnote to an article on an entirely different subject. Like Holmes, I had a train to catch (although mine was metaphorical), and I almost walked away from the subject that now forms the focus of this study. At the time, I had not read the extensive wife-assault debates in the Victorian print media, and I