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Notes
1 Arsenic was “the most common poison for homicide” in Britain with expensive opium as the next commonly used poison that accounted only one fifth compared to arsenic (Parascandola Citation2012, 7).
2 Along with industrial usages, arsenic was a popular medicine for syphilis before the discovery of penicillin in 1928.
3 In response to the rise in poisoning homicide, Britain sought ways to prevent its sinister use. In 1851, Britain imposed legal restrictions on the sale of poisons, making it difficult to obtain and misuse poison. The British chemist James Marsh invented the Marsh test for detecting arsenic and published it in 1836. Since the Marsh test was too complicated to get results, Hugo Reinsch, a German chemist, developed a simple test for arsenic in 1841. The invention of arsenic detecting tests contributed to the rapid decrease in homicidal poisoning after the mid-nineteenth century.
4 Mary Hartman argues that Victorian murderesses were commonly working class. Working-class women adopted arsenic as a convenient murder weapon due to the cheap price (see Hartman Citation1976, 6 and Parascandola Citation2012, 8). In addition, the number of female criminals during the Victorian period cannot represent their crime rate because, as Zedner argues, the “acts of deviance women did commit often took place in the privacy of their own homes and so rarely reached the public scrutiny of the criminal justice system” (Citation1991, 25).
5 The popularity of poisoning among female criminals is not restricted to this era but a general trend throughout history. However, it does not mean that poisoning was mostly adopted by female criminals in other centuries. Although poisoning was a popular means of murdering among women, men also favored poisoning to eliminate their political enemies, as exemplified by the Borgias in Italy during the Middle Ages (see Parascandola Citation2012, 18–19).
6 Upon marriage, Victorian women lost rights to their bodies and property. Under coverture, a wife belonged to her husband legally, which deprived her of any means to survive separated from her husband. The total annihilation of social status and extreme dependency engendered unwholesome relationships in Victorian households.
7 “Rule of thumb” refers to an English rumor that Sir Francis Buller, an eighteenth-century English judge, stated that a man may use a stick no wider than his thumb to beat his wife. Though the origin of the rumor was never proven, it became a popular joke to imply husbands’ right to chastise their wives physically. Elizabeth Foyster acknowledges that “violence was regarded by many as an acceptable way to resolve disputes and settle the balance of power within marriage” (Citation2005, 39).
8 See Whorton (Citation2010), 34 for statistics on the gender ratio of female poisoners.
9 See Parascandola (Citation2012, 8).
10 While my analysis mainly focuses on women’s use of poisoning in Collins’s novels, there are invaluable studies on Victorian women’s femininity, suicide, and medical issues. See Emma Liggins’s “Her Resolution to Die: ‘Wayward Women’ and Constructions of Suicide in Wilkie Collins’s Crime Fiction” (Citation2001), Laurence Talairach-Vielmas’s Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Fiction (Citation2007) and Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (Citation2009).
11 Gwilt’s sins are nearly as equal to those of Lucy Graham (commonly called Lady Audley) in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the most successful sensational novel, where the protagonist commits bigamy, kills her first husband by pushing him into a well, plans to poison her second husband, and sets fire to a hotel. Lady Audley’s behavior is sensational because of her adoption of physical violence in spite of her beautiful and feminine appearance; she is strong enough to kill a British man, her first husband, and bold enough to set fire to a public place. Her violent physical actions are incongruent with the delicate images of Victorian femininity. In contrast to Lady Audley, who adopts her physical power and conspicuous violence (i.e. setting fire) to achieve her desires, Gwilt uses sneaky and surreptitious poison as a weapon. While Lady Audley’s violence engenders a spectacle to the Victorian public, Gwilt’s sinful behavior is hard to detect and can be buried even after discovery because of the furtiveness of poisoning. Gwilt excels Lady Audley in achieving aims while eluding detection.
12 Throughout the novel, Gwilt’s refined elegance and gracefulness are frequently mentioned to emphasize her feminine perfection in movements, which corroborates her disguised position, “A governess [that] is a lady who is not rich” (Collins [Citation1866] Citation2004, 296). For instance, when Gwilt first encounters the Reverend Decimus Brock, he gives her directions to find Jane Blanchard, which results in the latter’s sudden death, because he is impressed by her “remarkably elegant and graceful” appearance (70). Gwilt’s graceful movements prevent people from suspecting her ulterior motives.
13 Sara Murphy explains that “Collins asked his solicitor William Tindell to provide a copy of the Smith trial” while preparing to write The Law and the Lady (Citation2016, 164). Since the Smith case was reported widely and dealt with repeatedly in following decades, Collins included several elements from the case in Armadale, such as secretly poisoning someone’s drink, public opinions of the defendants, and the acquittal of poisoners.
14 See also Victoria M. Nagy’s (Citation2015) Nineteenth-Century Female Poisoners: Three English Women Who Used Arsenic to Kill where its author makes an argument about the ways in which femininity and arsenic poisoning are culturally linked.
15 Personation plays a key role in developing Gwilt’s story. Gwilt closely evades Mr. Brock’s surveillance by impersonating Mrs. Maria Oldershaw’s housemaid and comes to Thorpe-Ambrose to marry Armadale by personating as a governess in his estate, while the servant pretends to be Gwilt by wearing her clothes.
16 In the note, Taylor explains that Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal and Backwood’s Edinburgh Magazine published articles on the practice of arsenic-eating in Styria.
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Jina Moon
Jina Moon is an assistant professor at Kumoh National Institute of Technology in Korea. She is interested in gender and postcolonial studies. Her study of Domestic Violence in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction appeared from Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2016.