The mother of Sherlock Holmes
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victorian221bIn a way, C. Auguste Dupin can be considered Holmes’s father, as Conan Doyle himself acknowledged having being inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s creation. The world’s very first detective is rather famous, but it seems that ACD also had more obscure sources of inspiration. Recently I watched Lucy Worsley’s documentary A Very British Murder. The series mentioned early examples of detective stories featuring female investigators. One of them is Revelations of a Lady Detective, a collection of short stories by William Stephens Hayward published in 1864.
William Stephens Hayward (1835-70) was a prolific author of Victorian "sensation" novels, historical novels, and stories for boys' papers. It is possible that ACD read his stories as a boy. Frankly, the stories gravitate towards “yellow-backed” fiction Watson occasionally favoured: the writing style and the plots are somewhat crude. But the lady detective herself is a very interesting character.
Mrs. Paschal is a widow “verging upon forty” with a “vigorous and subtle” brain. After the sudden death of her husband which left her “badly off”, she was approached “through a peculiar channel” with an offer from the Metropolitan Police to become a female detective. She is “well-born and well-educated”, resourceful, and likes an adventure. Her job is to be a police informant under different guises which she assumes “like an accomplished actress”.
Here are other very familiar features:
- Her wardrobe is “extensive and as full of disguises as that of a costumier's shop”;
- She uses logical reasoning. “I had seen a few things in my life which appeared scarcely susceptible of explanation at first, but which, when eliminated by the calm light of reason and dissected by the keen knife of judgment, were in a short time as plain as the sun at noonday.” As it was later put more elegantly by ACD, “if you eliminate the impossible...”;
- She doesn’t like to stay idle: “I was always happier in harness than out of it. I do not mean to say that I despised reasonable relaxation, but I depreciated any great waste of time”;
- She employs a street urchin “to discover minute and petty details which it was inconvenient for me to investigate myself” like watching someone on the street without raising suspicion. The urchin’s name is Jack Doyle, by the way. They met when she caught him pickpocketing, and instead of reporting him, she gave him a chance of an honest life. He became a servant in her household. She “had him washed and dressed”, “treated him kindly, gave him a certain weekly sum for wages, so that he might not be tempted to return to his own way of living from absolute want of pocket-money” and even taught him to read and write in her spare time;
- Her boss is Colonel Warner, “head of the Detective Department of the Metropolitan Police. It was through his instigation that women were first of all employed as detectives.” He is “a man of spare build, but with keen searching eyes, like those of a ferret”. He adopted the practice of employing female detectives from “Fouché, the great Frenchman”, who first came up with an idea that female informants could “assist him in discovering the various political intrigues“.
The very first story about Mrs. Paschal involves a female adversary cross-dressing as a man (hello, SCAN) and using an underground passage to steal gold from a bank (is that you, REDH?). The culprit is a rich countess, and to “unravel a tangled skein”, Mrs. Paschal gets a position of a lady’s maid in her house (just like Holmes posed as an plumber in Milverton’s house. Also, the working title of STUD was A Tangled Skein).
To follow the robber underground, Mrs. Paschal does not hesitate to ditch her crinoline, which was a sensible thing to do. Having witnessed the crime, she lamented having forgotten to take her “Colt’s revolver” with her.
Lacking a devoted companion, Mrs. Paschal narrates the stories herself. The later stories contain less personal details about her and flair in general, but if some of the better ones were adapted for TV by talented screenwriters, I’d love to see a mini-series about a badass Victorian woman in her late thirties, investigating on her own well before our good Sherlock’s time.
Revelations of a Lady Detective is available at Google books for free.
William Stephens Hayward (1835-70) was a prolific author of Victorian "sensation" novels, historical novels, and stories for boys' papers. It is possible that ACD read his stories as a boy. Frankly, the stories gravitate towards “yellow-backed” fiction Watson occasionally favoured: the writing style and the plots are somewhat crude. But the lady detective herself is a very interesting character.
Mrs. Paschal is a widow “verging upon forty” with a “vigorous and subtle” brain. After the sudden death of her husband which left her “badly off”, she was approached “through a peculiar channel” with an offer from the Metropolitan Police to become a female detective. She is “well-born and well-educated”, resourceful, and likes an adventure. Her job is to be a police informant under different guises which she assumes “like an accomplished actress”.
Here are other very familiar features:
- Her wardrobe is “extensive and as full of disguises as that of a costumier's shop”;
- She uses logical reasoning. “I had seen a few things in my life which appeared scarcely susceptible of explanation at first, but which, when eliminated by the calm light of reason and dissected by the keen knife of judgment, were in a short time as plain as the sun at noonday.” As it was later put more elegantly by ACD, “if you eliminate the impossible...”;
- She doesn’t like to stay idle: “I was always happier in harness than out of it. I do not mean to say that I despised reasonable relaxation, but I depreciated any great waste of time”;
- She employs a street urchin “to discover minute and petty details which it was inconvenient for me to investigate myself” like watching someone on the street without raising suspicion. The urchin’s name is Jack Doyle, by the way. They met when she caught him pickpocketing, and instead of reporting him, she gave him a chance of an honest life. He became a servant in her household. She “had him washed and dressed”, “treated him kindly, gave him a certain weekly sum for wages, so that he might not be tempted to return to his own way of living from absolute want of pocket-money” and even taught him to read and write in her spare time;
- Her boss is Colonel Warner, “head of the Detective Department of the Metropolitan Police. It was through his instigation that women were first of all employed as detectives.” He is “a man of spare build, but with keen searching eyes, like those of a ferret”. He adopted the practice of employing female detectives from “Fouché, the great Frenchman”, who first came up with an idea that female informants could “assist him in discovering the various political intrigues“.
The very first story about Mrs. Paschal involves a female adversary cross-dressing as a man (hello, SCAN) and using an underground passage to steal gold from a bank (is that you, REDH?). The culprit is a rich countess, and to “unravel a tangled skein”, Mrs. Paschal gets a position of a lady’s maid in her house (just like Holmes posed as an plumber in Milverton’s house. Also, the working title of STUD was A Tangled Skein).
To follow the robber underground, Mrs. Paschal does not hesitate to ditch her crinoline, which was a sensible thing to do. Having witnessed the crime, she lamented having forgotten to take her “Colt’s revolver” with her.
Lacking a devoted companion, Mrs. Paschal narrates the stories herself. The later stories contain less personal details about her and flair in general, but if some of the better ones were adapted for TV by talented screenwriters, I’d love to see a mini-series about a badass Victorian woman in her late thirties, investigating on her own well before our good Sherlock’s time.
Revelations of a Lady Detective is available at Google books for free.
