Professor Sara Lodge’s talk about her book The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective was captivating, engaging and full of interesting facts about the lives of female detectives in the Victorian period. Lodge began by introducing us to two key pieces of pulp fiction from 1864 (The Female Detective and Revelations of a Lady Detective) which, back in 2012, acted as the starting block for her research into Victorian female detectives.
The main thing that Lodge wanted to be clear to the audience right from the start was that there definitely were female detectives working during the Victorian period. She explained how both the police and private detective agencies were hiring women to undertake work that male detectives couldn’t do, such as search women for pawn shop tickets and go undercover (and not be suspected!). What I found interesting was that the 1857 Matrimonial Act, which made divorce a lot more accessible for the common Victorian person, really accelerated the need for women to work as private detectives since proof of adultery was still necessary for divorce to be granted.
In her talk, Lodge mentioned several of the case studies that she includes in her book. For example, Kate Easton was an actress-turned-private-detective who ran her own private inquiry agency whilst also writing about her exploits in a newspaper. What Lodge wanted to point out through this example was the mixing of the factual and the fictional with regards to the image and work of the Victorian female detective. Throughout her talk, Lodge highlighted that, in reality, most female detectives were working-class mothers who could not control their workload, were not necessarily models of propriety, and were definitely not solving murders on a day-to-day basis! I thought that this distinction between the factual and the fictional was really important since the role of the Victorian female detective has tended to be glamourised in literature and the real lives of Victorian female detectives have been lost to history. Towards the end of her talk, Lodge highlighted that her work in this book has been about “seeing these women” (the working-class mothers who were not always paid for their work) “as detectives” in a way that has not been done by male history.
In addition to discussing female detectives in real life and in literature, Lodge also briefly touched on the role of female detectives on stage. She explained how this was a tradition that was played out on the working-class stage through the use of melodrama and became very popular both in the UK and abroad. Despite this success, most of these plays were never published, so remain only in manuscript and have, therefore, been largely forgotten. This rediscovery of what has been forgotten is what made Sara Lodge’s talk so engaging for the audience. Lodge also made good use of giving us enough information so that we remained interested throughout whilst not giving away too many secrets of the book – I thought she balanced this very well!
You can buy Sara Lodge’s book The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective at Waterstones or through any other good book retailers, and you can buy tickets for the rest of the Off the Shelf events online.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
