The Lodger

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

The Lodger
by Marie Belloc Lowndes
Edited by

Elyssa Warkentin
The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Edited by Elyssa Warkentin

This book first published 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2015 by Elyssa Warkentin

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-7818-9

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7818-0
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii

Note on the Texts........................................................................................ ix

Introduction ................................................................................................ xi

Notes ............................................................................................... xxviii

Chronology of the Ripper Murders......................................................... xxxi

Biographical Timeline .......................................................................... xxxiii

Bibliography of Marie Belloc Lowndes’s Work ................................. xxxvii

The Lodger 1911 ....................................................................................... xli

Notes ................................................................................................. lxxii

The Lodger 1913 ......................................................................................... 1

Chapter One ........................................................................................... 3

Chapter Two ........................................................................................ 12

Chapter Three ...................................................................................... 20

Chapter Four ........................................................................................ 26

Chapter Five ........................................................................................ 31

Chapter Six .......................................................................................... 38

Chapter Seven ...................................................................................... 46

Chapter Eight ....................................................................................... 53

vi Table of Contents

Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 60

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................... 68

Chapter Eleven .......................................................................................... 74

Chapter Twelve ......................................................................................... 82

Chapter Thirteen ........................................................................................ 90

Chapter Fourteen ....................................................................................... 97

Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 103

Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 109

Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 117

Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 124

Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 131

Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 143

Chapter Twenty One................................................................................ 152

Chapter Twenty Two ............................................................................... 157

Chapter Twenty Three ............................................................................. 164

Chapter Twenty Four ............................................................................... 172

Chapter Twenty Five ............................................................................... 178

Chapter Twenty Six ................................................................................. 182

Chapter Twenty Seven............................................................................. 188

Notes........................................................................................................ 193
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Photograph of Marie Belloc Lowndes circa 1888

Figure 2: “The Lodger” title illustration

Figure 3: “I came down to see if you had a gas-stove.”

Figure 4: “I believe—is it not a fact that you let lodgings?”

Figure 5: “Was it possible that their place was being watched—already?”

Figure 6: “‘Keep innocency,’ he says, wagging his head at me.”

Figure 7: “Suddenly Mr. Sleuth swerved to one side.”

 NOTE ON THE TEXTS

The short story “The Lodger” was first published in January 1911 in
McClure’s Magazine along with sketches by famed illustrator Henry
Raleigh, which are included here. This is an original transcription of that
text.
The novel version of The Lodger was published serially in the Daily
Telegraph between August 2 and September 2, 1913, and then, with minor
typographical edits, as a single-volume novel by Methuen later that same
year. This text follows that of the Methuen volume, and is lightly
annotated in order to clarify historical references which may be obscure to
modern readers, particularly when they are relevant to the themes of the
novel.
 INTRODUCTION

In 1910, writer Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868-1947) was a guest at a

fashionable literary dinner party in London. The fact of her attendance
was, itself, unremarkable: her engagement book was often full to bursting
and she claimed acquaintance—perhaps hyperbolically—with nearly every
professional writer working in London at the time. At this dinner,
however, she heard an anecdote that would inspire her most popular and
enduring novel and have a profound effect upon her life.
In one of her four memoirs (published in 1941, 1942, 1946, and
posthumously in 1948), Lowndes explains:
I sat at dinner next to a man who told me that a butler and lady’s maid,
who had been in his parents’ service, had married, and set up a humble
lodging-house. They were convinced Jack the Ripper had spent the night
in their house before and after he had committed the most horrible of his
murders. I told myself that this might form the core of a striking short
story.1

In this chance dinner conversation, Lowndes recognized a plot that would

allow her to explore several of her greatest interests in a single book,
through a unique focus on the infamous so-called “Ripper” murders:
women as victims and as perpetrators of crime; women and citizenship;
domesticity; the constraints of the detective-fiction genre; the interaction
of gender and class; and the power and reach of mass media. The resulting
novel offered a nuanced examination of the role of gender in the Ripper
case itself and in the way the story circulated and evolved in the larger
Victorian cultural imagination. In imagining the Ripper case as a domestic
plot with a working-class, middle-aged landlady detective, Lowndes
pushed the boundaries of the detective fiction genre itself.
Even in 1910, Lowndes and her dinner companions would have been
conversant with many of the details of the Ripper case that had occurred
more than two decades earlier. It had been the media sensation of its time,
and Lowndes, who had been a bright, engaged writer of 20 years old
during the months spanning the murders, would have remembered public
response and near-hysteria firsthand. During the autumn of 1888, five
women had been killed and mutilated in the poverty-stricken Whitechapel
district of London’s East End: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman,
Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Kelly. This is virtually all
xii Introduction

that is known with any certainty about the Whitechapel killer; however,
this lack of information did not stop the London press from publishing in-
depth coverage of the inquests, interviews with witnesses, speculative
editorials, weighty polemics, and hundreds of letters to the editors. The
case was covered extensively in every London newspaper, as well as
nationally and internationally. On the days following the murders,
newspaper circulation spiked, and hundreds of sightseers from all over the
city mobbed the crime scenes. East Enders organized themselves into
vigilance committees that patrolled the streets, and the atmosphere in the
East End was one of barely controlled chaos.2 Although public interest in
the case grew less intense when the killings ceased, it never waned
completely, and continues to this day in pop-culture films, websites,
graphic novels, and pseudo-criminological books and theories. By 1910,
there had been several non-fiction books published about the murders, and
short, speculative fictional accounts abounded in cheap periodicals—but
there had never been a novel written about the case.
The theory espoused by Lowndes’ dinner companion, that the Ripper
had hidden in rented lodgings during his crime spree, was common in the
years following the murders, when pundits strove to make sense of the
sudden cessation in the Ripper’s activities. The idea was initially proposed
by at least two men directly involved in the investigation of the murders:
psychiatrist Lyttleton Stewart Forbes Winslow, who believed he could
identify the murderer and was consulted by police, and the painter (and
sometime Ripper suspect) Walter Sickert. Each espoused the theory in the
years immediately following the murders. Their stories are substantively
similar, varying only slightly in their details, leading contemporary
“Ripperologist” Stephen P. Ryder to argue that “the story had reached the
level of urban myth within a few years of the Whitechapel murders.”3
Other theories of the Ripper’s identity ranged from an escaped lunatic to a
butcher to a foreign Jew to a doctor to a wealthy gentleman—even to a
member of the royal family. When the murders stopped in November
1888, it was thought that perhaps the Ripper had died, that he had gone
mad and been institutionalized, or that he was not from London and had
now moved on to different locales: America, Europe, or Australia.4
Because the crimes remained unsolved, the theorizing never stopped and
continues vigorously to this day.

The Lodger: Publication History

In January 1911, Lowndes published a short story, “The Lodger,” in the
last edition of a dying American monthly magazine called McClure’s. It is
 The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes xiii

unsurprising that editors were eager to acquire Ripper-themed stories,

since short fiction about the crimes was both popular and lucrative in the
months and years following the murders. News of the Ripper’s crimes
spread quickly throughout the Western world, and writers and publishers
in many different countries quickly took advantage of the case’s notoriety
to increase their profits. Many short, magazine-length stories appeared
within months of the crimes, published as “penny dreadfuls:” cheap,
sensational publications intended to be affordable and easily accessible to
the lower classes. Lowndes’s short story “The Lodger” draws on the
tradition of these penny dreadfuls, presenting salacious “true crime”
stories for the express purpose of entertainment. Lowndes’s short story is
the first expression of the lodger theory of the Ripper’s identity in a work
of fiction.
Lowndes then went on to develop the short story into a novel of the
same name—the first appearance of the Ripper in a full-length novel. The
novel follows the plot of the short story, each recounting the involvement
of a poverty-stricken London couple with the lodger who lifts them out of
financial ruin but also may be a terrifying serial killer. The novel,
however, places much greater emphasis on the landlady Mrs. Bunting’s
character and motivations than those of her husband. It was published
serially in England in the Daily Telegraph and then as a single volume by
Methuen in 1913. The dual publication, which was not unusual for
mystery, sensation, and Gothic novels, allowed Lowndes to maximize her
earnings from the novel. The novel was immediately popular with the
book-buying public. In her 1946 memoir, Lowndes reported that “in thirty-
five years over a million copies of the novel were sold, and it has been
translated into almost every language.”5 The financial success of the novel
led to Lowndes’s continued interest in fictionalizing crime cases; since she
was often the primary financial supporter of her family, popular appeal
was an important consideration in her selection of subject matter. In fact,
despite her interest in a myriad of other genres such as biography, memoir,
journalism, and travel writing, Lowndes remains best known as a crime
novelist.
The Lodger was not a critical success until long after Lowndes’s death.
She recalled in the same memoir, “The Lodger, on publication, was hailed
by the critics with universal condemnation, and when I tried to find a few
lines suitable for quotation, when the novel was about to be published in
America by Scribner’s, I failed.”6 Decades later, the novel was lauded by
writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein as a fine
example of crime fiction. Despite Lowndes’s popularity and prolific body
of work, she has received surprisingly little academic attention, and her
xiv Introduction

novels are now almost entirely out of print. One reason could be that
Lowndes’s preferred genres, true crime and detective fiction, have been
slow to gain literary credibility in academic spheres. Regardless, The
Lodger remains the novel for which Lowndes is remembered, and it is
universally considered her finest work.

Lowndes’s Life: Women and Writing

In many ways, Lowndes was the ideal person to undertake the task of
writing the very first novelization of the Ripper’s crimes: as a feminist,
popular crime writer, and journalist, she had personal insight into many of
the salient themes of the case. Lowndes was born in 1868 in France to a
prominent family; her mother was British suffragist and writer Bessie
Rayner Parkes, and her father, Louis Belloc, was a French lawyer, an
invalid who died just four years after Marie’s birth. Marie’s only sibling,
Hilaire, became a prolific writer himself. Bessie, the children, and their
nurse split their time between the family home in La Celle St. Cloud,
France and London, and Marie remained fluently bilingual and bicultural
for the rest of her life. Her mother was a Catholic convert, and she and
Hilaire remained staunchly Catholic throughout their lives. Marie’s family
provided her with several unconventional proto-feminist role models, and
her memoirs revolve around a close-knit group of politically and
artistically active women: her mother; her mother’s closest friend and
fellow suffragist Barbara Bodichon; her aunts and grandmothers; and her
own friends. Marie’s mother, Lowndes reports in her 1941 memoir, “cared
ardently for literature and longed to take a place among the poets of her
day.”7 She passed this love of literature on to her children, and also tried to
impart her progressive political views, with varying success. In one letter
to Bodichon, Bessie wrote, “I found baby Marie diligently sucking one of
your pamphlets on Woman Suffrage. I let her go on doing it, as I thought
some of it might in that way percolate into her infant mind.”8
Marie’s childhood was in some ways stultifying in its conventionality,
despite Bessie’s avowedly progressive views on childrearing. Marie was a
spirited child with little interest in formal education. Bessie hired an old-
fashioned English nurse for the children, a Mrs. Mew, who favoured
Hilaire and disliked Marie. Emma Lowndes, Marie’s great-granddaughter,
writes, “It seems extraordinary that Bessie, the feminist, should have
employed a woman who made her daughter unhappy, nor did this fit with
her stated beliefs in freedom and initiative for her children.”9 Before the
birth of her children, Bessie was stridently in favour of equal education for
boys and girls, even publishing a pamphlet on the subject: Remarks on the
 The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes xv

Education of Girls, with Reference to the Social, Legal, and Industrial

Position of Women in the Present Day.10 Perhaps Bessie’s heavy and
persistent grief at the death of her husband just two years after Hilaire’s
birth left her abstracted and less attentive to her daughter’s upbringing and
education than she might otherwise have been.
In 1888, When Marie was 20 years old, she convinced her mother to
move to London with her, hoping to find writing commissions. Marie
wrote, “My mother was aware I wished to be a writer, and she … made a
real effort to get in touch with various men and women she had known in
her youth,”11 with the object of finding a career mentor for Marie. The two
called on prominent and successful women writers such as Margaret
Oliphant, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Elizabeth Charles, but Marie relates,
“each and all of them … did their best to dissuade me from following in
their footsteps.” She adds, “Fortunately for me, I did not care what the
people my mother consulted thought. What made me sad was that I saw
she on the whole agreed with them.”12
Marie’s mother and the women in her circle were early proto-feminist
pioneers who generally espoused increased equality between the sexes and
increased freedoms for women. Their abstract views on social reform, as
Marie had discovered to her detriment in the past, did not translate into
action on Lowndes’s behalf, and she never did find a female mentor to
ease her path into professional writing. Instead, a family friend offered to
introduce her to W.T. Stead, the larger-than-life newspaper reformer and
editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Stead was widely known for his
encouragement of professional women writers, and his willingness to
employ women in prominent positions at his various publications, as,
indeed, he did for Lowndes, who he accepted as a contributor. He arranged
for a mentor, Edmund Garrett, to teach her how to write for the press.
Lowndes got on well, and was commissioned to co-author the Pall Mall
Gazette Guide to the Paris Exhibition of 1889 which required her to travel
to Paris. She quickly proved her worth as a valuable and trusted
contributor. When Stead left the Gazette and founded the Review of
Reviews in 1890, Lowndes followed. Their friendship was close and
affectionate; a fellow Pall Mall staffer, E.H. Stout, even reported that “he
was once so much shocked by seeing Stead kiss Marie Belloc that he
remonstrated with him” (240-1).13 For Marie, as for many women, Stead
was a gatekeeper to the journalistic profession, and once she had
established herself as a successful writer with the Review of Reviews, the
path of her career became much smoother and she was able to branch out
into other periodicals and long-form novels, as well.
xvi Introduction

Figure 1: Marie Belloc in 1888, twenty years old.14

Marie was married in 1896 to journalist Frederic Sawney Lowndes,

with whom she was “always happy, though often very anxious about
money.”15 The couple had three children, and Marie suffered at least one
miscarriage. Frederic was on staff at the Times, but it was Marie who often
earned the bulk of the family income through her writing both as a
journalist and novelist. She was socially connected to most of the
prominent literary and political figures of her day and was particularly
supportive of young, unestablished, and female writers. She was also an
inveterate name-dropper who kept a sharp eye on the social and political
influence of her acquaintances. She often befriended the wives of
prominent literary and political men, such as Constance Wilde and Margot
Asquith, and praised them highly in her memoirs for the unacknowledged
contributions they made to their husbands’ careers. Her mother wrote of
her adult daughter, “I am extremely thankful that [Marie] is radically
independent, with a small income of her own and an ample power of
making money.”16
Marie shrewdly selected the subject matter for her novels in order to
appeal to a broad market. She once explained this strategy to the secretary
 The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes xvii

of the Society of Authors when she wrote to him suggesting an article for
the society’s periodical. She wrote, “at a smart restaurant in spite of the
beautiful things set down on the menu, the majority of people chose sweet
apple pie and cream. My object [in this article] is to draw a parallel
between these people and the readers of fiction.”17 Despite this deliberate
bid for popularity, however, she never compromised her own interests, be
they artistic, cultural, or political. For example, although she wrote many
“true crime” novels that touched on current events in order to draw in
large numbers of readers, she invariably presented her characters with
great subtlety and nuance, and told their stories compassionately and
intelligently from a decidedly feminist perspective.
Marie earned enough money to support her family, but often worried
about making ends meet. The vast body of her unpublished correspondence
suggests that she struggled with financial administration: she was often
scattered, constantly losing cheques and forgetting bills. Emma Lowndes
speculates that she “was probably done out of large amounts of copyright
fees by her agents and publishers.”18 Her inability to maintain control of
her finances may have been in part due to her poor health; she suffered
from various chronic conditions throughout her life and had to be careful
not to overwork lest she exhaust herself and become ill. As early as 1920
she was withdrawing from social obligations due to illness and overwork;
in 1932 she complained of constant weakness, saying, “I have a ‘tired’
heart.”19 She normally published at least one novel per year, and this
grueling pace was for her, a financial necessity. She discovered that “by
the end of six months, even in England, the real sale of a novel, except in
extremely exceptional cases, is at an end,”20 and she would need a new
source of income. Her usual workday began in the morning: she rose with
the sun or earlier and wrote in bed for several hours with her signature
quill pen.21 The afternoon was devoted to social and household tasks, and
her late evenings were spent with her husband, who habitually worked an
evening shift at the newspaper until his death in 1940.
Marie wrote prolifically throughout her life. By the time of her death
from stomach cancer in 1947, her bibliography included some 44 novels
(many of them bestsellers), many short stories, seven plays, four volumes
of memoirs, several biographies, and a vast body of journalistic work. In
1971, a writer for the Times Literary Supplement summed up the current
attitude towards the work of Lowndes and her cohort, saying, “Mrs. Belloc
Lowndes was one of that monstrous regiment of writing women who
flourished in Edwardian England and gave to that period something of its
unique literary quality. Most of them are forgotten now.… Of their huge
xviii Introduction

number of novels, only one survives: The Lodger remains as a minor

classic of suspense, the single monument to all that labour.”22
This is indeed damning with faint praise, and it is doubtful whether
Lowndes herself would have appreciated the disparagement of a large and
varied body of writers for whom she worked and campaigned tirelessly.
Despite her penchant for name-dropping and social climbing, Lowndes
had a great sense of affection for her fellow writers—especially young
women—and believed that established writers should take some
responsibility for the wellbeing of those just starting out. She had no
patience for colleagues who lacked esprit de corps within the profession.
She was a member of the Society of Authors and the League of British
Dramatists, but was much more active in the Society of Women
Journalists (of which she was an original member), and the Women
Writers Suffrage League, of which she was for a time vice president. She
gave talks and lectures at meetings, provided formal and informal
mentoring to members, gave donations and subscriptions when she could,
ran formal training courses, served on committees and executives, and
even gave a radio lecture series.
Lowndes never forgot her difficult entry into the profession, and strove
throughout her career to encourage young writers, especially women, in
their aspirations. She wrote, “The memory of how I was treated … has
influenced me all my life in my treatment of would-be writers. I have
always encouraged those who came to me for advice as to a literary career,
and I have given, I can truly say, innumerable letters of introduction to
publishers and editors.”23 Her standard advice to young women wishing to
write for a living was to read widely and travel independently. A woman
writer must “make up her mind to be ready to accept any kind of work
given her,” and not use her feminine delicacy as an excuse for shirking
difficult or unconventional assignments.24
Still, Lowndes has a somewhat bewildering reputation for being less
politically motivated than her mother and less intelligent a writer than her
brother. Emma Lowndes describes Marie as a “‘passive’ feminist” who
was “not very interested in her mother’s role in ‘bettering’” the position of
women in British society.25 Bessie herself wrote that her daughter “had no
taste at all for intellectual pursuits, which was quite the reverse of
Hilaire.”26 And yet, Marie’s independence, her canny and strategic writing
choices, and her tireless support for other women writers suggest the
opposite.
 The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes xix

Lowndes and Jack the Ripper

Lowndes seized upon the Jack the Ripper narrative for her short story and
novel for several reasons, many of which echoed the reasons for the
Victorian public’s compulsive interest in the case during the Autumn of
Terror in 1888. The Ripper case quickly became a nexus for pre-existing
social debates about class, race, gender, and of the burgeoning power of
mass media. One particularly heated aspect of this debate was the nature
of women, their proper roles in society, and the causes of female
deviance—all of which preoccupied Lowndes throughout her career. The
figure of the prostitute, so central to Ripper narratives, seemed to embody
many of these issues. The prostitute was considered by many to be the
most extreme result of female sexual deviance, the “Great Social Evil” of
the late-Victorian age. The categorization of women as prostitutes during
the Victorian era was imprecise at best and could encompass everyone
from streetwalkers to any woman appearing in public unescorted by a
man. Markers of female deviance depended largely upon women’s
relations to men and their economic status—a clear indication of the
interconnectedness of class and gender that exists at the site of the
prostitute. Because the Ripper’s victims were all involved with prostitution
(although to varying extents), gender and sexuality are some of the most
pervasive themes across most articulations of the Ripper story.
Because of the centrality of the prostitute figure, and because of the
ferocity of the murderer’s attacks upon the victims, critics have described
the dominant cultural narrative that coalesced around the Ripper and his
victims as a “mythic story of sexual danger,”27 in which London was
shown to be a dangerous place for women who transgressed the
boundaries of the private sphere. In other words, the cultural narrative or
“modern myth” of the Ripper’s crimes presented a warning for women: if
they transgressed the margins of traditional domestic femininity, they
risked incurring the ferocious punishment meted out by the Ripper. The
victims’ public identification as prostitutes set them apart from chaste,
“respectable” women, and their circulation in the public sphere only
underlined this status.
Lowndes’ adaptation of the Ripper case implicitly responds to this
gendered story of sexual danger that emerged during the autumn of 1888
and the weeks, months, and years that followed. The Lodger details the
experience of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting, a retired butler and maid, who take in
a mysterious lodger (improbably named Mr. Sleuth) in order to avert the
financial ruin that continually threatens their household. Over the course
of the novel, first Mrs. Bunting and eventually Mr. Bunting begin to
xx Introduction

suspect that their strange lodger is in fact “the Avenger,” an insane

criminal terrorizing the streets of London, killing women with apparent
abandon. Neither Mrs. Bunting nor her husband reports their suspicions to
the police, fearing the financial loss his arrest would entail, despite the fact
that their young friend and sole visitor, Joe Chandler, is himself a
policeman. Over the course of the novel, a strange bond of sympathy
develops between Mrs. Bunting and her lodger as she observes and
investigates his activities. They are both outsiders to society, and Mrs.
Bunting struggles with the question of her responsibility. Must she tell the
police her suspicions, thus losing the lodger who is her only source of
income and throwing her household back into poverty? Does her duty to
society at large trump her duty to her own family and household? Does she
have a duty to the women who are victimized by the Avenger? Mrs.
Bunting, as the detective figure in the novel, gradually confirms her
suspicions about her lodger’s identity. The story ends with a dramatic
dénouement in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, when she attends
an exhibit with Mr. Sleuth and he, seeing a policeman, assumes (wrongly)
that she has lured him there to be captured, and flees.
As a fictionalized adaptation, The Lodger takes artistic liberties with
the factual events of the Ripper case, although it remains true to its source
material in many ways. While the general facts of the Ripper and Avenger
murders are the same—a serial killer attacks women on the streets of
Victorian London, causing public uproar—there are also significant
differences. Motive is one. The Ripper’s motivation for his crimes is often
assumed to be punishment for the perceived sexual misbehaviour of
London prostitutes. This theory originates with the so-called “Dear Boss”
letter of September 25, 1888, the same letter that gave the Ripper his name
and that was widely publicised. It contained the statement, purportedly
from the killer himself, “I am down on whores and I shan’t quit ripping
them till I do get buckled.”28 Lowndes’ Avenger says nothing about the
sexual conduct of his victims, but instead targets women who appear
intoxicated in public and who frequent public houses. Indeed, this is the
only description we ever get of his victims. The main object of the
Avenger’s rage is alcoholism in women, and his obsession is driven by
Biblical tracts prescribing modesty and temperance in women. There is no
overt mention of any sexual motivation nor of any genital mutilation in
any of the Avenger’s crimes. As for the Avenger himself, his description
as a mentally-unbalanced gentleman corresponds with several theories
advanced about the Ripper in the London press. The press was highly and
overtly politicised in its Ripper theories: upper- and middle-class
mainstream publications typically characterized the Ripper as working
 The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes xxi

class, perhaps a butcher, an immigrant, or Jewish. Papers with a strong

working-class readership, however, such as the East End locals, tended to
suggest that the killer was a gentleman, a West Ender, perhaps a doctor.
Lowndes aligns herself with the latter, positing a down-at-heel gentleman
for her criminal.
Lowndes also makes a significant change with regard to the settings of
the murders. While all of the Ripper’s murders took place in (or very close
to) Whitechapel, a slum in London’s East End, the Avenger’s murders
gradually move into the wealthier West End, which is also where the
Buntings live. It seems likely that Lowndes allowed the Avenger’s crimes
to straddle the East and West ends of London, and changed the victim’s
crimes from prostitution to drinking alcohol—a habit that many
‘respectable’ women, after all, shared—in order to emphasize the
connection between all women in the city of London. Geography is not
enough to protect women from the Avenger, nor is leading a relatively
respectable life, if that life includes the occasional glass of wine or beer.
The threat represented by the Avenger, in other words, is not determined
by class or geography, and thus should be of concern to all women. In
short, Lowndes adapts the story to disallow the female reader from
assuming a distance from the victims. In this way, Lowndes insists on the
inherent connection and sisterhood of London women, and advocates for
mutual concern and understanding between different classes of women.

Lowndes and the Female Detective

The prevailing theme in all of Lowndes’s novels is women’s experience
with crime, either as criminals, victims, or as amateur detectives: crime
was her favourite metaphor through which to explore women’s struggles
within a society that was often hostile to their sex. In The Lodger,
Lowndes employs a female housekeeper as her detective. While
professional female detectives are relatively rare in fiction prior to
twentieth century, Mrs. Bunting is part of a rich tradition of female
characters who engage in investigative activities on an amateur basis.
Critics have named characters from Emily St. Aubert in Ann Radcliffe’s
classic Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), to Mrs. Bucket in
Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-3), to Marian Halcombe from Wilkie
Collins’ The Woman in White (1859) as the first amateur female detective.
It may in fact be fruitless to attempt to identify the originator of this
character type, for the field is very broad.
Lowndes’s amateur detective, Mrs. Bunting, is presented throughout
the novel in highly gendered ways, and her detective skills are functions of
xxii Introduction

her gender role. Further, Lowndes continually highlights the gendered

nature of Mrs. Bunting’s body and uses the resultantly feminine traits Mrs.
Bunting exhibits to aid in her investigation. This is a common tactic for
early female writers of detective fiction, who demonstrated the efficacy
and appropriateness of female detectives by basing their detective skills on
what society thought of as women’s natural spheres of interest:
domesticity and female intuition, for example. Instead of seeing
traditionally female traits as handicaps, then, women writers provide their
female detectives with tools that emanate from their gender.29 Thus, The
Lodger turns a tale of the London streets into a domestic narrative, and
Mrs. Bunting uses the tools of domestic labour (cleaning implements, for
example) for investigative purposes. This strategy echoes the tenets of
Victorian domestic feminism, which held that women’s prowess in the
domestic sphere and, not coincidentally, their absence from the public
sphere made them morally superior to men, who were seen as tainted with
more worldly concerns.
For example, Mrs. Bunting uses her routine cleaning of Mr. Sleuth’s
rooms as an opportunity to conduct a “methodical search” (68) of his
belongings. Lowndes writes,
As soon as [Mr. Sleuth] had left the house, she went quickly up to the
drawing-room floor. Now had come her opportunity of giving the two
rooms a good dusting; but Mrs. Bunting knew well, deep in her heart, that
is was not so much the dusting of Mr. Sleuth’s sitting-room she wanted to
do—as to engage in a vague search for—she hardly knew for what. (68)

Again and again, Mrs. Bunting’s domestic responsibilities, such as

cleaning, cooking, and waiting on Mr. Sleuth, provide her with
opportunities for close observation and investigation. In fact, they almost
lead her on in spite of herself; because she is a good housekeeper, she
becomes a good detective.
Although the novel participates in many of the cultural tropes of
domestic feminism, it ultimately demonstrates that women require
influence beyond the domestic sphere if they are to be full and equal
citizens, with rights and responsibilities to society at large. As the novel
goes on, Mrs. Bunting becomes complicit with the crimes of her suspect:
she confirms her suspicions through her investigation of him, but she does
not turn him in—even knowing that he will go on to kill again. Domestic
prowess and power within her home is not enough to motivate Mrs.
Bunting to sacrifice her own financial wellbeing for the good of society at
large, as a responsible citizen might be expected to do. Lowndes makes
clear that there is significant danger to both the private and public spheres
 The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes xxiii

when they are separated so strictly along gendered lines. “Because she is
subject rather than citizen,” Lowndes writes, “her duty as a component
part of civilized society weighs but lightly on woman’s shoulders” (93). If
women are excluded from standing as full equals in society—as members
of the public sphere—then they cannot be expected to take an active
interest in its wellbeing.
Lowndes had a colleague working in London who shared her interest
in criminality and female detective characters: Agatha Christie. The two
writers shared a love of the mystery genre, although Christie tended to
dramatic denouements while Lowndes preferred to write slow, domestic
uncoverings that explored psychological motivations. Lowndes and
Christie clashed, professionally, over the character of one of Christie’s
most famous and successful detectives: Hercule Poirot. Christie introduced
her Belgian detective in 1920 with the publication of her first novel, The
Mysterious Affair at Styles. Remarkably, in 1920 Lowndes herself
published a novel called The Lonely House, which introduced a character
she intended to use recurrently in future work: a Frenchman named
Hercules Popeau. He and Christie’s Poirot are strikingly similar.
There are many possible antecedents to this composite Popeau/Poirot
character, but Lowndes was convinced that Christie had somehow stolen
her creation. She wrote in protest to the Secretary of the Society of
Authors, “It is exactly as if someone had taken ‘Sherlock Holmes’ ... and
called him ‘Shernock Holme’, using all his mannerisms and making him
the central character of a murder mystery.”30 Christie’s immediate and
meteoric popularity rubbed salt in Lowndes’s perceived wound,
particularly since no publisher or theatre would accept work from
Lowndes that included her Popeau after Christie’s Poirot was established.
Lowndes complained, “the injury done me is a very real one.”31 Whether
or not Christie was unduly influenced by Lowndes’ Popeau, Lowndes was
unable to ever use her character again. She consulted with the legal staff of
the Society of Authors, seeking financial redress, but was advised that she
had no legal grounds for suit. Lowndes’s letters indicate that she was quite
ill and in financial distress at this time, refusing to give charity donations
(which was very unusual for her) and cancelling engagements. The
mysterious affair of Popeau/Poirot was never satisfactorily concluded, and
it left Lowndes bitter, sick, and angry. It remains her most significant
professional rivalry.
In contrast to Christie’s huge and enduring success, Lowndes’ literary
reputation rests almost entirely upon The Lodger. Like many of her other
novels—and indeed, like the author herself—it is somehow simultaneously
entirely conventional, provocatively feminist, and commercially shrewd.
xxiv Introduction

She repeatedly employed the crime fiction genre as a way of exploring the
subordinate role of women in society in the late-nineteenth and early-
twentieth centuries, insisting that the insider/outsider role they occupied
(integral to society as wives and mothers, but locked out of institutional
power and authority) was the major psychological cause of women’s
criminality. She returns obsessively to this theme: see, for example,
Studies in Wives (1909), Lilla (1917), The Story of Ivy (1927), and The
Chianti Flask (1935). Her skillful use of the crime fiction genre allowed
her to combine this subtle ideological crusading with massive popularity—
a canny reversal of the often anti-feminist nature of the detective genre
itself.

Lowndes, the London press, and the Ripper

1888 was the first year of Lowndes’s writing career proper, and although
she lived in London, during the height of the Ripper crisis she was in Paris
on a commission for the Pall Mall Gazette. She was extremely interested
in both journalism and criminality, and was thus able to observe the
frenzied Ripper reportage on both sides of the English Channel. Certainly,
Lowndes’ thematic interest in class and gender in her adaptation of the
Ripper story is matched by her interest in exploring the impact of mass
media on the case. She makes newspapers central to her novel, drawing
both on her understanding of the Ripper case and on her personal
experience as a journalist. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the
London newspapers in the evolution of the Ripper narrative.
The London press in the 1880s was exceedingly diverse, due in a large
part to increasing literacy rates and falling newspaper prices. By the time
of the Ripper murders, there were approximately 150 daily newspapers
being published in England, and nearly every segment of the population
was able to both afford and read a paper. By the end of the century,
newspapers had become the chief means through which the average
Londoner engaged with the world outside of his or her immediate
community.32 The Victorian era thus saw the birth of the press as a vital,
habitual, popular tool for engagement with the world at large, and
Lowndes was eager to play a role in this exciting new world which also
offered new professional opportunities for educated middle- and upper-
class women.
Lowndes, the literary pragmatist, recognized that newspapers wishing
to remain commercially successful must appear relevant to the day-to-day
lives of their readers: people will buy, and continue to buy, news that is
somehow linked to their own lives, even if the link is a tenuous one. In the
 The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes xxv

autumn of 1888, middle- and upper-class women’s near-hysterical fear of

Jack the Ripper ensured that many newspapers sold thousands of extra
copies, despite the fact that only a very small segment of the population
(East End prostitutes) was likely to be at risk of actual harm from the
Ripper. Newspapers managed to exploit women’s fear of the Ripper, often
by explicitly predicting that the Ripper would move out of the East End
into more affluent sections of London and by castigating women for
ostensibly inviting harm through activities as innocuous as walking
unescorted in the streets. While provoking fear in women readers, the
papers simultaneously targeted male readers by inviting implicit
identification with both the Ripper and his pursuers. As Lowndes
demonstrates satirically in The Lodger, these techniques allowed many
London newspapers to spin the Ripper murders from a horrific tragedy
into a financial windfall.
The Ripper case, however, presented the press with a problem. The
absence of an identifiable criminal agent in the case created a particular
problem of interpretation for the press. Without a villain or narrative
closure, any story of the case was structurally incomplete. How could the
narrative move forward? Since there was little factual evidence available
about the Ripper himself, the London press was forced to speculate about
his identity and characteristics, often relying upon preexisting, popular
narrative genres such as melodrama and the Gothic. As Judith Walkowitz
observes, articles about the Ripper often bear “resemblance to the
literature of the fantastic: they incorporated the narrative themes and
motifs of modern fantasy—social inversion, morbid psychological states,
acts of violation and transgression, and descent into a social underworld.”33
Thus in the face of the unknown Ripper, the press fell back upon proven,
popular generic strategies in order to construct coherent narratives for its
readers.
The fact that the identity of the murderer was unknown allowed the
press to speculate endlessly on who he was, what characteristics he had,
how he looked, and what his motives were. Martin Fido, in A History of
British Serial Killing, describes the killer as “gloriously mysterious,”34
perfectly capturing the almost heroic stature the Ripper came to possess.
Although his crimes, all the papers agreed, were horrific, the boldness
needed to perpetrate them and the cunning required to evade the police for
so long provoked the public fascination that continues to the present day.
Meanwhile, coverage of the Ripper’s victims tended to typecast them all
simply as poverty-stricken prostitutes, degraded fallen women with few
distinguishing characteristics and fewer redeeming qualities.
xxvi Introduction

Other newspapers offered counter-narratives to these prevalent ways of

telling the story. Progressive women’s groups, Jewish organizations, and
East End community associations, among other groups, took issue with the
Ripper narrative constructed by the popular press. While these groups
remained tremendously interested and invested in the press coverage of the
Whitechapel murders, they neither ran nor influenced a large daily press,
and their concerns did not routinely receive coverage in the larger-
circulation dailies. Small, weekly, local papers, especially those published
in the East End, took issue with the image of their area of the city that
appeared in the mainstream dailies. The East End was usually portrayed in
the Ripper reportage of the popular press in a less-than-positive light, as a
dark, dangerous, uncivilized pocket of savagery in the heart of London.
The local papers used their own coverage of the crimes to challenge this
depiction. Similarly, publications by Jewish groups and progressive
women’s organizations responded strongly to elements of the mainstream
press’s Ripper reportage that they and their readerships found
objectionable. The Jewish papers contested pervasive suggestions that the
killer must be a foreign Jew, and women’s papers raged against the living
conditions of poverty-stricken prostitutes. These papers had their work cut
out for them; Judith Knelman observes, “By the end of the Victorian era,
gender and class bias were more evident in the press than they had been at
the beginning.”35
Cannily, Lowndes makes newspapers central to her novel. Newspapers
provide the conduit through which Mr. Bunting, oblivious to his lodger’s
connection to the case, obtains information about the case. (In fact they are
the only conduit, apart from his relationship with Joe Chandler.) One of
the pleasures of the novel is the way it offers the reader a first-hand
account of the thrills of the special editions and hysterical newspaper boys
that accompanied this case. And Lowndes does not simply highlight the
importance of the press; she actually borrows content directly from the
Ripper reportage. Some headlines that the Buntings discuss include
“BLOODHOUNDS TO BE SERIOUSLY CONSIDERED” (77) and
“PARDON TO ACCOMPLICES” (78)—both of which were ripped from
actual headlines about the Ripper case. And during the inquest scene
towards the end of the novel, Lowndes calls the credibility of the press
into question by showing the lengths to which journalists will go to tell the
type of story they want to tell—regardless of the facts.
The Lodger is the first novelization of the Ripper case, but
significantly, it is also the first known telling of the Ripper story that
might allow a female reader to assume imaginative power over and control
of the Ripper—to identify with a female character other than that of a
 The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes xxvii

victim. This figure of terror was so real to women that one 1888
newspaper reported an instance of a female reader dying of terror just
reading about the case.36 He was so real to men that hundreds immediately
adopted his persona and began to harass women both physically, on the
streets, and in print, in letters to the editor. The Ripper thus allowed for the
expression of a potent vein of misogynist violence in late-Victorian
London. Walkowitz observes that the Ripper case “established a common
vocabulary and iconography for the forms of male violence that permeated
the whole society.”37 But by allowing a female protagonist (and,
potentially, female readers) to assume imaginative control over the
Ripper/Avenger in her novel, Lowndes stages a protest against the
problem of male violence against women more generally. In The Lodger,
we have an account of the Ripper murders in which women are not solely
victims, but are able to assume a measure of power and agency as
detectives, and as readers.

The Afterlife of The Lodger

Although Lowndes was herself a playwright, she did not routinely adapt
her own work for the stage. The Lodger was first adapted in 1916 by
prolific theatre writer Horace Annesley Vachell (1861–1955), who “very
freely adapted” the story as a comedy.38 The Lodger: Who is He? played at
the Haymarket theatre in London with Howard Ainley in the title role. It
was generally well received, although the critic for the London Times
found Vachell’s comic touches to be somewhat inconsistently received by
the audience.39 Having clearly never read the novel, the critic speculates,
“Probably the main story belongs to Mrs. Lowndes, because it seems to
call for the quiet, easy, fireside development of the novelist and proves on
the stage a little frail for the burden of four acts. We guess the love-
making to be hers and the farcical trimmings Mr. Vachell’s. But our
attribution may be quite wrong.”40 It was, indeed, wrong. There is almost
no love-making in Lowndes’s novel; the emphasis on the romantic subplot
and the comedic elements—the elements the critic describes as the least
successful and popular with the audience—were all Vachell’s. In 1917, the
play debuted in New York on Broadway with Lionel Atwill as the lead,
but received mixed reviews. The critic for the New York Times found the
show to be “highly amusing” and declared Beryl Mercer as Mrs Bunting
“enormously laughable as the tender-hearted but suspicious landlady.”
Atwill, he felt, played up the comedic elements too broadly. 41
The New York production happened to be seen by a young aspiring
filmmaker: Alfred Hitchcock. He later recalled, “I had seen a play called
xxviii Introduction

Who Is He? based on Mrs. Belloc Lowndes’ novel The Lodger. The action
was set in a house that took in roomers and the landlady wondered
whether her new boarder was Jack the Ripper or not. I treated it very
simply, purely from her point of view.”42 Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story
of the London Fog was released in 1927 by Gainsborough Pictures. The
very successful silent film starred matinee idol Ivor Novello and was
considered by the director himself to be “the first Hitchcock picture.”43 It
includes such typically Hitchcockian devices as a symbolic, transparent
glass floor through which Mr. and Mrs. Bunting watch their lodger pacing
and the first instance of Hitchcock’s trademark cameo. Hitchcock freely
adapted his source material, turning Lowndes’ feminist take on the Ripper
case into a narrative of false accusation and police corruption: his lodger is
an innocent man hounded and threatened by a mob fuelled by prejudice
and misinformation. Novello also appeared in the sound remake (or
“talkie” version), The Phantom Fiend (1932), directed by Maurice Elvey.
Over the century following the publication of the novel, film adaptations
continued. In 1944, John Brahm directed The Lodger for Twentieth
Century Fox. In 1953, Jack Palance starred in The Man in the Attic,
directed by Hugo Fregonese for Panoramic Productions. Most recently,
David Ondaatje directed a contemporary adaptation, The Lodger (2009),
for Sony Pictures, starring Alfred Molina. Adaptations were also produced
for radio and television over the course of the century. The Royal
Academy of Music even commissioned Phyllis Tate to write an opera
version, which was produced in 1960. The adaptations vary in quality, but
their continuing appearance demonstrates the vigour of the afterlife of
Lowndes’s original text, which remains embedded in the popular
imaginings of the Jack the Ripper murders—a touchstone for our culture’s
conceptualizations of murder, mystery, and violent crimes against women.

Notes
1
Marie Belloc Lowndes, Merry Wives of Westminster, (London: Macmillan,
1946), 171.
2
See Tom A. Cullen, When London Walked in Terror, (London: Bodley Head,
1965).
3
See “The Lodger,” Casebook, accessed 1 April 2015,
http://www.casebook.org/suspects/lodger.html.
4
See Donald Rumbelow, The Complete Jack the Ripper, (London: WH Allen,
1975), 156-61.
5
Marie Belloc Lowndes, Merry Wives of Westminster, (London: Macmillan,
1946), 172.
 The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes xxix

6
Marie Belloc Lowndes, Merry Wives of Westminster, (London: Macmillan,
1946), 92.
7
Marie Belloc Lowndes, I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia, (London: Macmillan,
1941), 2.
8
Ibid.
9
Emma Lowndes, Turning Victorian Ladies into Women, (Bethesda: Academica
Press, 2012), 207-8.
10
Bessie Rayner Parkes, Remarks on the Education of Girls, with Reference to the
Social, Legal, and Industrial Position of Women in the Present Day, (London:
John Chapman, 1854).
11
Marie Belloc Lowndes, Where Love and Friendship Dwelt, (London:
MacMillan, 1944), 145-6.
12
Ibid.
13
Quoted in J.W. Robertson Scott, The Life and Death of a Newspaper, (London:
Methuen, 1952), 240-1.
14
Photograph courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge.
15
Marie Belloc Lowndes, Where Love and Friendship Dwelt, (London: Dodd,
Mead, 1942), 149.
16
Emma Lowndes, Turning Victorian Ladies into Women, (Bethesda: Academica
Press, 2012), 218.
17
Letter to Mr. Thring, April 8, 1909. British Library archive ADD 56739.
18
Emma Lowndes, Turning Victorian Ladies into Women, (Bethesda: Academica
Press, 2012), 218.
19
Letter to K. Roberts, June 17, 1932. British Library archive ADD 56740.
20
Letter to Mr. Thring, April 3, 1928. British Library archive ADD 56739.
21
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Matthew, Henry Colin Gray ed.,
Brian Harrison ed., and Lawrence Goldman ed.. 26 October 2004,
http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy1.lib.umanitoba.ca/.
22
“View from the tea table,” TLS, (17.9), 1971, 1180.
23
Marie Belloc Lowndes, Where Love and Friendship Dwelt, (London: Dodd,
Mead, 1942), 147.
24
Marie Belloc Lowndes, “Journalism as a Profession for Women,” The Leisure
Hour, (50), December 1901, 121-127.
25
Emma Lowndes, Turning Victorian Ladies into Women, (Bethesda: Academica
Press, 2012), 5.
26
Emma Lowndes, Turning Victorian Ladies into Women, (Bethesda: Academica
Press, 2012), 208.
27
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in
Late-Victorian London, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2.
28
Letter transcripts and facsimiles available at “Ripper Letters,” Casebook,
accessed 1 April 2015, http://www.casebook.org/ripper_letters.
29
See Carla T. Kungl, Creating the Fictional Female Detective: The Sleuth
Heroines of British Women Writers, 1890-1940, (Jefferson, North Carolina:
McFarland, 2006), 56.
30
Letter to Mr. Thring, June 1, 1928. British Library archive ADD 56739.
xxx Introduction

31
Ibid.
32
Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1985), 48.
33
Judith Walkowitz, “Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence,” Feminist
Studies (8.3), 1982, 550.
34
Martin Fido, A History of British Serial Killing, (London: Orion Publishing,
1988), 45.
35
Judith Knelman, “Class and Gender Bias in Victorian Newspapers,” Victorian
Periodicals Review (26.1), 1993, 35.
36
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in
Late-Victorian London, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 218.
37
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in
Late-Victorian London, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 220.
38
“Who Is He?” London Times, 10 December 1915, 11.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid.
41
Christopher T. George, “The Lodger, From Page to Screen,” Casebook, accessed
1 April 2015, http://blog.casebook.org/chrisgeorge/2011/11/13/the-lodger-from-
page-to-stage-to-screen.
42
Ibid.
43
Quoted in Peter Conrad, The Hitchcock Murders, (London: Faber and Faber,
2000), 34.