Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 18901915

This collection of essays questions our assumptions about the fin de siècle by exploring the fiction of Richard Marsh (1857–1915), one of the most prolific and popular authors of the period, whose bestselling Gothic novel The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula for several decades. 

Born Richard Bernard Heldmann, he began his literary career penning boys’ stories under his real name but, following a prison sentence for fraud, reinvented himself as ‘Richard Marsh’ in 1888. A versatile contributor to the literary and journalistic culture of his time, Marsh produced middlebrow genre fiction including Gothic, crime, humour, romance and adventure. His stories of shape-shifting monsters, daring but morally dubious heroes, lip-reading female detectives and objects that come to life helped to shape the genres with which we are familiar today. 

Building on a burgeoning interest in Marsh’s writing, this volume makes a significant contribution to Victorian and Edwardian literary studies by examining a broad array of Marsh’s genre fictions through a variety of critical lenses, including print culture, New Historicism, disability studies, genre theory, New Economic Criticism, gender theory, postcolonial studies, thing theory, psychoanalysis and object relations theory, producing innovative readings not only of Marsh but of the fin-de-siècle period. 

The essays explore how Marsh’s fictions reflect contemporary themes and anxieties while often providing unexpected, subversive and even counter-hegemonic takes on dominant narratives of gender, criminality, race and class, unsettling our perceptions of the fin de siècle.