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M. J. Carter--historian, essayist, novelist, and blogger--created a compelling Victorian imperial adventure in THE STRANGLER VINE (2015), which introduced the investigative team of uptight, elitist adventurer William Avery and his bookish sidekick Jeremiah no-relation-to-the poet Blake. Now, Avery and Blake are back, in 1840s London, where they probe the gruesome murders of a series of printers, whose professional milieus are less Grub Street than Holywell Street--the realm of various kinds of questionable publishing activity. In this new novel, THE INFIDEL STAIN, Avery and Blake tangle with the Chartists and Anti-Corn Law League: two groups of would-be reformers who don't always see eye to eye. Ever the historian, Carter teaches the reader about these groups' eerily contemporary struggles for political representation by the working classes and affordable decent food. Along the way, we meet historical figures including the anthropologist or poverty tourist Henry Mayhew (author of the monumental London Labour and the London Poor) and the Chartist leader Peter Murray McDouall. Carter brings them memorably to life.
THE INFIDEL STAIN also sheds light on a long-neglected but increasingly popular publishing phenomenon: the 'penny press' of the 1840s. Radical news and serial fiction poured forth from the presses of pioneers such as Edward Lloyd and G. W. M. Reynolds, both of whom were also associated with Chartism. The current television drama Penny Dreadful alludes to this publishing activity, though its inspiring stories all originated in more expensive literature by elite writers. In THE INFIDEL STAIN, Lloyd is represented by the character Eldred Woundy, whose innovations include advertising on altered pennies circulated across the capital and faster, more powerful steam presses. (Both were actually Lloyd's innovations.) And in the struggle between a pornography publisher and his Chartist son, Carter evokes the conflicts that shaped Victorian culture but are not much discussed in school history--and the attitudes about them that prevailed in the past. "I did at one stage believe it might be possible to find what you might call 'common ground' with" the Chartists, declares an upper-class character. However, "they are dangerous: they have the power to rally a whole class, and for all their peaceful claims, their true aims are revolution, the death of property rights, anarchy...." And the printers find themselves suspected of playing an integral role in this "revolution," as publishers always have.
Carter's evocation of Victorian society doesn't have the richness of physical detail nor the psychological depth of, say, Sarah Waters' masterpieces AFFINITY and FINGERSMITH, but Avery and Blake's adventures make for a picaresque page-turner. Their prototypes are not George Eliot but the penny action-and-horror 'romances' with which Lloyd captivated readers. As an entertainer and a public historian, Carter succeeds admirably. Here's to hoping for a third Avery and Blake outing.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. She specializes in nineteenth-century literature. https://uwgb.academia.edu/RebeccaNesvet
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, February 2016
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