Desperate Remedies (1871): A Trojan Horse

Abstract

Desperate Remedies was first submitted to Macmillan. Macmillan’s reader, John Morley, gave this reason for advising rejection:

the story is ruined by the disgusting and absurd outrage which is the key to its mystery — The violation of a young lady at an evening party, and the subsequent birth of a child, is too abominable to be tolerated as a central incident from which the action of the story is to move.¹

The novel was then submitted to Tinsley Bros. Tinsley’s reader for Desperate Remedies was William Faux, manager of W. H. Smith’s literary department. Tinsley’s assistant, Edmund Downey, reported that Faux saw the novel ‘almost as a joke’.² Widdowson makes the same point, with particular reference to the ludicrously specific chapter headings, suggesting that ‘there is an insistent possibility that the novel is simultaneously mocking the conventions of the genre it is imitating’.³