This post celebrates the 49,000th unique title Distributed Proofreaders has posted to Project Gutenberg: The Trail of the Serpent, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Congratulations and thanks to all the Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg volunteers who worked on it!
I don’t suppose it rained harder in the good town of Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy than it rained anywhere else. But it did rain… A bad, determined, black-minded November day. A day on which the fog shaped itself into a demon, and lurked behind men’s shoulders, whispering into their ears, “Cut your throat!—you know you’ve got a razor, and can’t shave with it, because you’ve been drinking and your hand shakes; one little gash under the left ear, and the business is done. It’s the best thing you can do. It is, really.” … A bad day—a dangerous day…
This excerpt from the opening paragraph of The Trail of the Serpent, by the queen of the Victorian sensation novel, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, aptly sets the atmosphere for this dark tale of a career criminal, his many victims, and the mute detective who, despite his disability, is hot on the perpetrator’s trail. Some say that The Trail of the Serpent, published in 1860, was the first English detective novel. It helped begin the trend of thrilling novels that enraptured the British public, novels that in turn inspired the pulp fiction of the 20th Century.
The author of this decidedly unladylike story was born in London in 1835. Her mother left Braddon’s solicitor father due to infidelity and brought her up alone, managing to give her a good private education. She began writing stories as a child after her godfather gave her a writing desk. As a teenager, she became an actress to help support herself and her mother, performing under a stage name to preserve her family’s reputation. Though she initially had some success, her acting career began to wane when she was in her twenties, but not before she attracted the attention of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who became one of her literary mentors.
In 1860, a printer who had seen her poems in a local newspaper offered Braddon £10 for a serialized novel, combining, as she later described it in an article in The Idler magazine, “the human interest and genial humor of Dickens with the plot-weaving of G.W.M. Reynolds,” a popular mystery novelist. Published as Three Times Dead, the novel was not a success. “That one living creature ever bought a number of ‘Three Times Dead’ I greatly doubt,” she said. And instead of the promised £10, all she received was the printer’s 50-shilling advance. But the publisher John Maxwell – a married man who became her lover, later her husband and the father of her six children – convinced her to revise it and turn it into The Trail of the Serpent, which sold a thousand copies in the first week.
It’s not hard to see why it was so popular. The lurid melodrama has everything – horrid murders, dark secrets, shocking coincidences, miserable poverty, suicides, abandoned children. But what makes it worth reading today – so much so that it was brought back into print in 2003 – is Braddon’s wonderful writing style. It is piquant, wonderfully descriptive, and frequently funny. It is also quite reminiscent of the style of Dickens, including her keen interest in the lives of the poor, though Braddon is far less sentimental. And her characters are vividly drawn, especially the “serpent” of the title, Jabez North, and the detective Joe Peters, who, despite his inability to speak, brilliantly pursues him.
Braddon wrote over 80 novels, many of which are available at Project Gutenberg. Perhaps her best known are Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd. But The Trail of the Serpent is a very worthy beginning to her sensational career.
The volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders are proud to have The Trail of the Serpent as their 49,000th unique title for Project Gutenberg!
This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.
