Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Production of Bloomsbury by Matthew Ingleby

Author:Matthew Ingleby
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137546005
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

In Burkham’s view, the medical profession needs properly to formalize its relationship to the law, and rigorously to bone-up on the “science of murder” in order to prevent experiments such as Sheldon’s from having a positive result. Furthermore, in order to protect patients from the “hazards” of poison, the young trainee doctor needs extra protection himself, so that he can speak plainly, in tones more forceful and direct than those etiquette may encourage him to employ customarily. If it had been so, Burkham might have spoken out and saved both Hallidays, père and fille.

Whether the novel endorses such a counter-factual idea is a moot point. Burkham’s call for institutional reform does not seem extensive enough to encompass the novel’s implicitly more radical, more materialist analysis of the first murder’s concealment. Burkham’s relative poverty, which the narrator’s depiction of him in unfashionable Bloomsbury explicitly relates, would not have been alleviated by any of the procedural changes he suggests. The novel, which foregrounds first Sheldon’s financial difficulties as a Bloomsbury dentist then Burkham’s as a Bloomsbury doctor, implicitly worries about the uneven field of Victorian metropolitan medicine. In Birds of Prey, the narrator had lingered sympathetically with young Burkham and his moral struggle upon the day that ended in the fatal completion of Thomas Halliday’s murder:“What ought I to do?” he asked himself. “What course ought I to take? If I am right, I should be a villain to let things go on. If I am wrong, anything like interference would ruin me for life.”

He had finished his morning round, but he did not go straight home. He lingered at the corners of quiet streets, ad walked up and down the unfrequented side of a gloomy square. Once he turned and retraced his steps in the direction of Fitzgeorge-street. But after all this hesitation he walked home and ate his dinner very thoughtfully, answering his wife at random when she talked to him. He was a struggling man, who had invested his small fortune in the purchase of a practice which had turned out a very poor one, and he had the battle of life before him.35

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