Victorian Q2 Read-Along: The Law and the Lady

The Law and the Lady is the 14th novel by Willkie Collins.

Serialized in The Graphic (26 September 1874-13 March 1875) and Harper's Weekly (10 October 1874-27 March 1875) on both sides of the ocean (UK and US respectively if the titles do not help differentiate); then published in book form in 1875.

One of the first detective novels with a woman as the detective (if not the very first).

PS: The full UK serialization does not seem to be available anywhere, I will see if I can find all the installments details. The first part of it (from 26 September 1874 to 19 December 1874), is available here:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433105621522&view=1up&seq=3... (the link will get you to the start of the first installment) - which is page 301 in the book and page 339 in the document (the rest of the available installments are:
II: page 329 (375 in the document, start of chapter 4)
III: page 349 (395 in the document, start of chapter 7)
IV: page 373 (419 in the document, start of chapter 9)
V: page 397 (443 in the document, chapter 10 (Continued))
VI: page 421 (469 in the document, start of chapter 11)
VII: page 444 (492 in the document, start of chapter 13)
VIII: page 469 (517 in the document, start of Part II of the novel, start of chapter 15)
IX: page 493 (541 in the document, start of chapter 17)
X: page 516 (566 in the document (but this page is damaged; the serial continues on page 568)
XI: page 541 (591 in the document, start of chapter 20)
XII: page 565 (615 in the document, start of chapter 22)
XIII: 589 (639 in the document, chapter 24 (Continued) and ends with the end of chapter 25)
XIV-?? - Chapters 26-50.

As usual Project Gutenberg has the complete text of course: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1622

The Harper's serialization is available here:
1874: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015030616430&view=1up&seq=7... (the beginning of the first installment)
1875: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015030616422&view=1up&seq=9... (this is where the first installment for the year starts; no index so not easy to assemble the pages as above but I may do it later)

Just including these here again for context if someone is interested. More issues links: https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=harpersweekly and https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000061498 (in case you decide to read a serial that starts/end in a different year)

PS: The Harper's scans are much more legible than the Graphic ones. if someone will use them to read the thing, let me know and I will get the correct page numbers (Hathi's numbers are... weird - they have scan ID and page number but the page number is NOT the page number printed inside of the page so there is some sliding - and as there are additional scans, it is not an exact slide).

Thanks for setting this up. I am not sure at what point it's safe to include spoilers in posts. Maybe someone can direct us luddites to the html for making those bars that cover up the spoilers. No idea.

<spoiler>Text goes here</spoiler>

Just copy from my message - the characters are the correct one, I just did some voodoo (also known as html encoding) so they show up. This will produce Text goes here

As for when it is safe... this thread WILL be spoilery - so as long as you mention where in the book you are, up to you if you want to hide it under a spoiler tag. Unless we set a schedule on when certain parts are safe to talk about (and if we want to, we can try that), long reads like ours here will always that problem :)

>3 AnnieMod: Thanks! I usually am done with a book in a few days once I start, so want to be polite to readers who like taking theirbtime.

Anyone started in on this yet? I am about a quarter of the way in, and I feel the absence of Collins's usual interesting cast of characters. I'm starting not to care about the Big Secret, and guessing it may not be all that compelling when it is revealed. Not sure it works that Collins is writing from a female POV ...

>5 nohrt4me2: I read up to the end of Ch.20 a couple of weeks ago, then put it aside so as not to get too far ahead (and promptly forgot all about it). It’s the kind of book it’s easy to rush through in no time.

It does all seem rather unnecessarily cumbersome, with the whole Bluebeard’s Castle thing, and then the silly treasure-hunt and the need to go through the whole of what she finds there before we learn — to our astonishment — that it’s really just a murder mystery.

It is obviously a positive feature that the narrator should be a young woman who is determined to get to the bottom of it all and won’t take no for an answer, but Collins seems to have had a hard time imagining what a creature like that might be like, perhaps not surprisingly, so she’s not all that convincing. And one wonders how someone as clever and resourceful as that would be silly enough to marry a Mysterious Stranger with a Dark Secret on the strength of a very brief acquaintance and seeing him fail to catch a fish...

Read this about 18 months ago, so it is perhaps too soon for a reread, however, I'll be following others' comments with interest.

Well, I thought I’d read just a little bit more last night, and ended up finishing the book. I’m obviously not good at reading crime stories in instalments.

I posted my review here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/340923#7811651 — I don’t think there are any major spoilers in it.

I think Valeria grew on me as I advanced through the book, but she never really convinced me.

Miserrimus Dexter and Ariel were fun to start with (can we count Ariel as an early trans character?), but there is far too much of them in the second half of the book. Valeria redeems herself a bit by her sympathy for them, but she burns most of the credit she earned there by her snobbish contempt for the Major’s Cockney Songbird.

> I'd forgotten the Cockney Songbird - maybe a touch too gauche and frightening for Valeria's tender sensibilities?

I've just started this, and I'll likely read it straight through over the next week or so. Seems like it will read pretty fast. I've read The Woman in White and The Moonstone, but I know that Wilkie Collins's later works are not as highly thought of as those two, so I have my expectations in check!

I finished this last night. I found it fine enough to roll along with, but yes if you think too deeply about it, it sort of falls apart. I was did find Miserrimus Dexter and Ariel a bit troubling from a modern sensibility. Ariel as transgender or Ariel as an early, misunderstood version of Down's Syndrome? Did that strike anyone else as a possibility? I'm not sure why these characters were included in with the physical/mental issues they had and what Collins thought he was adding to the story.

I was disappointed that Valeria cedes the investigation to the men at the end.

I have totally stalled on this a third of the way in, what with the crying and fainting fits without any of Collins's odd ducks (so far) to break that monotony. For my money, the best Victorian legal thriller is The Eustace Diamonds. Lizzie Greystock Eustace is deliciously calculating and awful.

>11 japaul22: I think it's a kind of lazy convention among thriller-writers that characters with a disability or abnormality add to the sinister atmosphere. The sort of thing Kubrick was sending up in Doctor Strangelove. But it's also there in Long John Silver, Richard III, and a million others. If there's some reason behind it, maybe it's the idea that those people have a particularly strong reason to hate the world? And of course it sometimes allows the author to add a twist by revealing that the "scary" character actually is actually benevolent.

>12 nohrt4me2: Definitely. The Eustace diamonds revolves on a legal point of formidable obscurity which Trollope brings in very subtly and uses to illustrate all kinds of things about how contemporary society thinks about women. The law and the lady starts from what's possibly the most famous oddity of Scottish Law, but doesn't really do very much with it. It's hardly a legal thriller at all.

It occurs to me that there's another famous 19th century novel about a woman determined to correct a miscarriage of justice in Scotland: The heart of Midlothian (published 1818, so not Victorian).

I also loved The Eustace Diamonds which is a much more complex and interesting novel.

Yes, I think you’re right that the “sinister” element was what Collins was going for with Dexter and Ariel.

Anyone reading this one?

I am up to chapter 15 (just before the Trial record starts - start of Part 2 in the serialization and most of the volume-editions) and despite some annoying elements (Collins trying to write a woman voice has its peculiarities), I am actually enjoying this one a lot - when not feeling like just locking everyone in the same room until they all share what they know... :) It can be a lot more long-winded than it should be in places but once I got into the style after the first 30 pages or so, it seems to just work.

>11 japaul22: I had been thinking on what Ariel is. She is a bit too coherent in some places to be really Down's Syndrome or any mental development issue though. And transgender does not fit either - she does not behave as a man really, not from a modern perspective (if anything, Dexter is more feminine than she is masculine -- I suspect that this was a desired effect - the feminine vs. male and the physical vs. mental issues). I am not sure that we can map her anywhere - Collins probably collated multiple different cases/possibilities into one thus making it impossible to actually find a proper explanation.

>16 AnnieMod: agreed that the flipped expectations for Dexter and Ariel was probably more the point that creating a character in Ariel that was a faithful portrait of any one disability.

I ended up liking this one more than I expected to in the middle of it - there was a part that was almost unreadable. While it has issues, it still ended up being an enjoyable read. Review in the work page if anyone is interested.