Of the many cultural references that surround Lady Audley’s Secret, the 1857 trial of Madeline Smith resonates not only in its content—the two cases both feature the murder, or attempted murder, of former love interests in order to stifle their existence and ensure the success of their match with a person of a higher social standing—but also in their evidence. Like Lady Audley, Madeline Smith’s case was preoccupied with correspondence, paper evidence, and its intelligibility. More than just the echo of an importance placed on paper documentation, each were judged by the public on their toxic textuality. Both Braddon’s novel and Smith’s “case, especially once it was printed in the newspapers, w[ere] considered to be…equally dangerous “‘stor[ies].’”1
Having touched on the ubiquitous discourse of sensationalism,2 the reader will be recall that the period of the 1860s was an “Age of Sensation,” characterized by a preoccupation with scandal, violence, and spectacle of all forms. This was especially apparent in the print culture of the decade which saw the rise and resounding reign of sensation in journalism and fiction. These narratives had much in common and, indeed, the sensation novel borrowed quite heavily from its kinsman in print. In fact, much of what characterized this type of writing was the blending of realism in its pages. Sensation fiction tended to be set in the familiar spaces, usually occurring “in the otherwise prosaic, everyday, domestic setting of a modern middle-class or aristocratic English household.”3 This amalgamation of the ordinary and the outlandish caused a heightened anxiety about the effects, and affects, of the public’s interest in sensational stories, both fictive and real.
Madeline Smith was charged with and stood trial for the murder of her lover, Emile L’Angelier, in 1857, just four years prior to Lady Audley’s Secret’s first partial publication in the Robin Goodfellow magazine. Born to a prominent Glasgow family, Smith’s trial shocked the British and Scottish public and was widely discussed both in private homes and in newsprint. Smith and L’Angelier, a man who was her senior in age but not in rank, began a clandestine affair during which much correspondence passed between the two. Once Smith became engaged to another man, she attempted to break off her relationship with L’Angelier and asked for the return of her letters, but he refused and instead threatened to expose her to her parents and to the public if she continued with her engagement to William Minnoch. Soon after, L’Angelier became ill and died. The autopsy revealed the cause to be arsenic poisoning and soon after, Smith, having been observed recently purchasing the drug from a chemist, was charged with his murder. The trial commenced on the thirtieth of June, 1857,4 but “[b]ecuase Madeline Smith never took the stand…it was rather her letters that stood trial.”5
Smith’s letters were critiqued in much the same manner as other forms of sensationalism and were deemed obscene for their sexually explicit content. Accusations of depravity, spectacle, guilt, and indecency were launched at their contents—they were “‘mental pollution’”6 much like those novels which “softened the brain.”7 The textual focus of this trial, though unable to prove Smith’s guilt, did not escape the scrutiny of the press and public. She was given a verdict of “Not Proven,” “an acquittal with the same effect as ‘not guilty’” but its meaning “is closer to ‘we think you did it, but the prosecution couldn’t prove it’.”8 Like Lady Audley, Smith’s case rested upon a collection of “paper objects not just as texts but also as things, as matter occupying space and persisting through time.”9 Though the accumulation of both of these textual archives, in the case of Smith’s letters and in the fragments of Lady Audley’s identity as Lucy Graham, do not prove the guilt of either person, their collection and constant presence, in newsprint and in Robert Audley’s pocket-book and pigeon-hole repositories, create a dialogue which surrounds their figures as if in a fog, ensuring their disappearance. This disappearance is two-fold. In one sense, each recede into the textual environment of their stories and take on an other-worldly notoriety as villainesses of the most sensational nature, carrying an implied guilt, both saved by the indistinguishability of their paper evidence and simultaneously convicted by it.10 In the other, each character literally disappears. Lady Audley is committed to a maison de sante in Belgium and Smith is committed to an asylum of a different nature, self-imposed and under a new name in a new country.
The infamy of Smith’s trial would have virtually ensured the readers of Lady Audley’s Secret’s familiarity. But even so, the explicit connections between the two stories and their embodiment of the sensationalism that exploded in the print culture leading up to and during the 1860s marks a certain kind of resemblance between these two stories and their very “writerly” natures. Much of the public’s distrust of Smith and their assurance that she was guilty were premised upon her ability to pen sensationally-charged letters. Braddon and her story were subject to the same distrust, the same charges of culpability in the public poisoning of the mind that this type of sensationalism supposedly wrought. As such, the legacies of Smith’s trial reaches out beyond its “not proven” verdict. Participating in a dialogue which branched across the lives of real and fictive characters, Lady Audley’s and Madeline Smith’s stories form the sensational female archetype in the mind of the public and on the print of the page.