The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective by Sara Lodge

Author:Sara Lodge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300280517
Publisher: Yale University Press

The accused had, in the course of their not very refined occupation, shown an excess of zeal, as indeed there is a temptation to do to persons following their peculiar avocation . . . it is to be trusted that their imprisonment will act as a check on prying self-styled detectives, who have great inducements to better their instructions, and transcend the path-line of strict integrity marked out for ordinary humanity.55

Contrary to the Midland Daily Telegraph, I do feel a shred of pity for Ellen Lyon, the female detective in this case. It is hard to be sure of her history as she hid under various names, but she may have been the daughter of a coach-builder and grown up poor in Leytonstone, an area of North London close to modern-day Stratford. If this is the right Lyon, her family were involved in coach-painting, railway sign-writing and other artisanal work. She was already a domestic servant aged fourteen.56

In 1892, she was twenty-five; her employer, Henry John Clarke, was forty. According to a court witness, Clarke and Lyon had been a cohabiting couple in 1891 in Holborn-Buildings under the alias of Mr and Mrs Watson.57 Clarke paid Lyon to befriend Gertrude Barrett and to attempt to introduce her to men. It was certainly an unsavoury role, yet the promise of champagne and theatre must have been just as tempting to a working-class woman as they were to her middle-class mark. Personation was itself a form of theatre; in this case, Ellen had been hired to play Mrs Watson rather than Mr Holmes. But could a person of her limited education and experience have been expected to discern the legal difference? Ellen Lyon, aged thirty-four in the 1901 census, was apparently single and childless, living with her mother and engaged as a forewoman in ‘lace paper work’. She was supervising the making of doilies.

The plaintiff in the case, John Edward Barrett, escaped prison while the two women implicated both suffered permanent damage from his cruel attempt to frame his wife to obtain a cheap divorce. As was true in the Haddington case given to ‘Clara Layt’, the Barrett case exposed domestic violence and sexual abuse as the ground zero of crime against women, whose explosive effects rippled out into the community, producing aftershocks of shame, scandal, dependency and potential exploitation. The female detective – even when not explicitly a double agent – was liable to stand on both sides of the wall separating the ‘respectable’ from the ‘unrespectable’ Victorian woman. In witnessing and perhaps becoming an accessory to crime, she crossed the boundary she was notionally policing.

This inherent doubleness made her gaze powerful, though she herself was compromised. The activities she witnessed and exposed troubled the differentiation of a secure private space, in which women would be protected, from a public sphere that was predominantly inhabited by men. This was true when she infringed the supposed sanctity of the bedroom, but even more obvious when she was engaged in unearthing political secrets, whether to protect the public from anarchist bombs or to steal an election by smearing a candidate.

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