Endnotes

1  For more information about physiognomy, see Mary Cowling’s The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art (1989), Lucy Hartley’s Physiognomy and The Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth Century Culture (2006), or Sharrona Pearl’s About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2010).

2  Indeed, even scholarly criticism that does not directly reference the pseudoscience of physiognomy typically points out the incongruence between Lady Audley’s feminine, childish, and angelic appearance and her immoral and criminal behavior. See Jenny Bourne Taylor’s In the Secret Theatre of the Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (1988) and Laurence Talairach-Veilmas’s Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Fiction (2007) for analyses that specifically discuss physiognomy and ways of reading the female body in the sensation novel.

3  At one point in the novel, Lady Audley does seem aware of the possibility, if not the inevitability, that her beauty will eventually fade. While walking through the lime walk on a dreary October day, she observes aloud to Phoebe, “Every thing [sic] dropping to ruin and decay, and the cold flicker of the sun lighting up the ugliness of the earth, as the glare of gas-lamps lights the wrinkles of an old woman. Shall I ever grow old, Phoebe? Will my hair ever drop off as the leaves are falling from those trees, and leave me wan and bare like them?” (138-139). Readers never learn whether Lady Audley’s beauty defies the laws of aging in the same way it defies the laws of physiognomy and nature, because Lady Audley dies while she is still fairly young. However, even if Lady Audley were to visibly age, the loss of her beauty—by the thinning of her hair or the addition of wrinkles, for example-- is not tantamount to the type of physiognomic change that would reveal her crimes.

4  Of course, the Victorians saw evidence of class mobility every day—and, as many critics have pointed out, the sensation novel is particularly invested in the thematization of such topics as the loss of class identity, the rise of the professional middle-class man, the illegitimate social ascension of the deceitful woman, and the liminality of figures like the detective and servant (see below for recommended reading on these subjects). However, as the social boundaries between certain groups collapsed, some Victorians relied all the more heavily on pseudosciences like physiognomy, which naturalized social distinctions and offered at least the semblance of ordered, stable, and permanent identities. For a discussion of the loss of class identity within the context of parliamentary reform, see Johnathan Loesberg’s “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction” (1986). For a discussion of several middle-class professionals, including doctors, lawyers, and artists, see John Kucich’s The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (1994). For a discussion of the ways in which middle-class women were responsible for displaying the signs of middle-class status see Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (1995). For a discussion of the detective figure, see Anthea Trodd’s Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (1989) or Ronald Thomas’s Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (2004). For a discussion of the servant in the sensation novel, see Bruce Robbins’s The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (1989) or Elizabeth Steere’s The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction: ‘Kitchen Literature’ (2013).

5  Johann Gottfried Schadow, who lived from 1764-1850, was a German sculptor and an influential director of the Berlin Academy.

6  Speaking of Braddon’s ghost stories rather than her sensation novels, in “Spectral Politics: M.E. Braddon and the Spirit of Social Reform” (2000) Eve Lynch observes that her working-class characters are often figured as ghosts and that their “social position in the house was analogous to the spectral apparition that haunted it: like the ghost, the servant was in the home but not of it” (237). Building upon this reading, in “‘I Thought You Was an Evil Spirit’: The Hidden Villain of Lady Audley’s Secret” (2008), Elizabeth Lee Steere applies Lynch’s observation to Braddon’s earlier character, Phoebe Marks, who is similarly described in ghostly language as “a very dim and shadowy lady; vague of outline, and faint of coloring” (quoted in Steere 304). Although readers may disagree with Steere’s extreme interpretation of Phoebe as “the true ‘devil’ behind the plot,” she correctly asserts that servants like Phoebe worried readers because “under the pretense of being unseen” they had the opportunity to indulge in “unchecked voyeurism” (304).

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