Mary Elizabeth Braddon launched her editorship of Belgravia magazine by painting a picture for her readers of a murderous medical practitioner. At the outset of Birds of Prey (1867), the serial novel which kicked off the magazine's publication, Braddon introduces us to a surgeon-dentist named Philip Sheldon. The narrator ironically explains, “Of course he was eminently respectable . . . A householder with such a door-step and such muslin curtains could not be other than the most correct of mankind” (7; bk. 1, ch. 1).Footnote ¹ Sensation novels of the 1860s have long been critically recognized as vehicles for revealing the disparity between respectable façades and seedy interior truths, and Braddon's underexamined work Birds of Prey and its sequel Charlotte's Inheritance (1868) are no exception: by the close of the second novel, the seemingly upright Sheldon has been revealed as a liar, a cheat, and a killer.

The revelations that occur in Birds of Prey and Charlotte's Inheritance, though, go beyond the attacks upon middle-class respectability or the repressive mores of Victorian society, which critics often attribute to sensation novels. Instead, Braddon uses these two works to target the potential duplicity and often-unquestioned authority of the medical profession and its discourses. Braddon couples this criticism with a defense of her own writing of sensational literature and the female readership supposedly imperiled by this fiction. In order to mount this dual assault and vindication, Braddon employs a surprising tactic: she acknowledges both the potential danger of reading and the immoral nature of sensational behavior. Birds of Prey and Charlotte's Inheritance locate the threat of reading within medical literature instead of novels, though, and the sensational activities that she highlights are carefully planned murders committed by a rational doctor rather than the impetuous actions of a passionate woman. Braddon thus utilizes Belgravia, a periodical venue for “light” literature, to question the power dynamics set up and reinforced by prominent and “serious” medical journals such as The Lancet.

Braddon's Birds of Prey, a “strong sensation story” according to her (qtd. in Wolff 179), ran in serialized form with a new installment each month from the first issue of Belgravia in November 1866 until September 1867. Though this novel remained out of print until as recently as 2004, at the time of its original publication, Birds of Prey enjoyed immense popularity. In fact, due to reader demand for the sequel, Braddon altered the format of Belgravia, adding an additional thirty-two pages to each edition so that she could include Charlotte's Inheritance alongside Dead-Sea Fruit, the serial novel originally scheduled to follow Birds of Prey (Phegley 138). In the first book of Birds of Prey, a surgeon-dentist named Philip Sheldon uses information gleaned from The Lancet to poison his friend Tom Halliday under the guise of treating him for a head cold so that he can marry Tom's wife and inherit Tom's money. Later, in Charlotte's Inheritance, Sheldon perpetrates a similar crime, poisoning his soon-to-be-heiress step-daughter while he ostensibly bolsters her health.

Braddon uses the character of Philip Sheldon in his role as medical professional to question the quality and availability of Victorian medical literature and the belief that doctors should be implicitly trusted. In the process, she also disarms popular concerns regarding women's susceptibility to their reading and the genre of sensation fiction by offering an alternative, and even more sensational, possibility for narrative contagion that involves a seemingly more objective reading population: male, medical practitioners and their professional reading. In turn, this sensational depiction of the deceitful Sheldon questions the trope of truthful doctor/lying patient common in the medical literature of the day. Moreover, through her depiction of the diseases that Sheldon is able to simulate because of his reading, Braddon illustrates the consequences for the uninformed and unquestioning patient in the increasingly clinical landscape of nineteenth-century medicine. Birds of Prey and Charlotte's Inheritance together dramatize the ways in which misdiagnosis or ineffective treatment can place the weight of responsibility for continued suffering on the shoulders of the sufferers themselves rather than their practitioners.

I. “Philip Sheldon Reads The ‘Lancet’”: The Spread of Medical Information and the Threat of Reading

Near the beginning of Birds of Prey, Braddon challenges both the discourses through which the medical profession established its authority and the popular belief that women were especially at risk of becoming contaminated through unregulated reading. She creates this indictment by setting up a prominent medical journal as the primary tool by which Philip Sheldon is able to commit his crimes. In order to plan his poisoning of Tom Halliday, Sheldon examines issues of the Lancet, one of the main British medical publications during the Victorian period. His reading of this well-known medical journal is foregrounded by the title of the second chapter, “Philip Sheldon Reads The ‘Lancet,’” as well as Sheldon's lengthy, late-night perusal of volumes of this periodical near the chapter's end.

Braddon's incorporation of the Lancet into her novel serves a dual purpose: she casts doubt on the quality of the information available in this impersonal format and the implicit assumption that doctors reading the Lancet are morally qualified for unlimited access to such information. As Lorraine Daston points out in her article “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” the nineteenth century was a time of a greatly increased spread of information in the natural sciences, including medicine. However, this dispersal of information occurred through impersonal forums such as journals rather than through the personal friendships that predominated in previous centuries. Braddon had intimate knowledge of the perils of such impersonality from her experiences in the publishing world. Both Braddon's life and her writing were ceaselessly and viciously attacked by critics in a host of magazines, ranging from Blackwood's to the Pall Mall Gazette. As a result, defenses of Braddon and her work became a regular part of Belgravia. As Jennifer Phegley has noted, one of the main tactics that Braddon condemned in her responses to these critics was “the shroud of anonymity that enabled such cutthroat critical practices” (122). Braddon countered the hidden dangers associated with this namelessness by having critics writing in Belgravia forego anonymity.

Braddon's representation of Sheldon and his reading of the Lancet play on similar themes. However, her evaluation here focuses not on the anonymity of the writers but instead on Sheldon's anonymity as a reader in the newly-available sea of medical information and the potential hazards resulting from this accessibility. Because Sheldon is able to look to the Lancet in order to carry out the poisoning of Tom and then Charlotte, he, like the critics castigated by Braddon, is able to remain a nameless attacker. Braddon's critiques of Sheldon are thus aimed at the ease with which he is able to misuse the information he gleans from the pages of this medical journal. While Sheldon would certainly not have asked a friend or fellow doctor how to poison Tom Halliday, after an evening spent anonymously flipping through medical periodicals, he is easily able to acquire this information.

Sheldon would certainly have had plenty to read regarding poison in the Lancet. Just a quick look through issues of this periodical from the 1840s reveals that most volumes included anywhere from three to twelve articles on poisoning. One essayist from 1850 explains this preoccupation with poisoning as originating in “the wholesale system of poisoning by arsenic, which has now become so prevalent” (“On the Prevention” 551). Throughout the century, the fear of poisoning as a form of murder was widespread. In large part, this fear stemmed from a series of trials, beginning in the 1840s, of women who poisoned their husbands. Though the number of spousal murders of husbands by their wives was dwarfed by the number of husbands committing such crimes, the method of the wives’ attacks (and the fact that wives would dare to kill their husbands) captured the media's attention and the public's imagination (Robb 176–77), leading to the impression that there was indeed a “wholesale system of poisoning” plaguing their nation. Though media attention primarily focused on the women who employed this method, as the historian George Robb notes, “in spite of popular prejudice, it was men who were most knowledgeable about poisons,” and “a number of husbands accused of poisoning their wives were druggists or physicians” (182).

Braddon was aware of the reality of the male, medical professional as poisoner. Within Birds of Prey, a character who is suspicious of Sheldon even obliquely compares him with “Palmer, at Rugely, who . . . poisoned a few of his friends in a quiet gentlemanly way” (327; bk.7, ch. 6). William Palmer of Rugely was a notorious Victorian murderer who had been convicted in 1856 of killing his friend John Parsons Cook and who was suspected of killing many others. He was also a surgeon, and the facts suggest that he poisoned his friend Cook with strychnine as he ostensibly treated him.Footnote ² In her depiction of Philip Sheldon and his reading of the Lancet, Braddon is thus targeting the double-standard that erroneously suggests that women (who have lesser access to the relevant information about poisoning than their male counterparts) pose a greater threat, while she also voices her suspicions regarding the knowledge available to the not-always-trustworthy medical man.Footnote ³

Many of the articles on poisoning in the Lancet are full of particulars about specific means of poisoning that an unscrupulous reader could use to his advantage. For instance, one doctor in 1851, after relating in detail a case of poisoning which he treated, laments that this case demonstrates that some poisons can take much longer to set in than was previously realized. He fears that this fact will lead many people who might not have poisoned someone to do so because it will now be easier to escape detection (“Medical Society” 410–11). The irony here, of course, is that through his detailed relation of this case, this doctor has provided the precise information necessary for someone, such as another doctor reading the Lancet, to do exactly what he fears.

Braddon herself highlights this irony in Charlotte's Inheritance when the specific articles used by Sheldon to poison Tom Halliday are discovered. The first article is entitled “On the Fallibility of Copper Gauze as a Test for the Detection of Arsenic,” and the narrator makes the potential danger of such an article in the wrong hands quite explicit. The passage reads: “It was one of those papers which, while they aid the cause of science, may also further the dark processes of the poisoner, by showing him the forces he has to encounter, and the weapons with which he may defend himself from their power” (242; bk. 8, ch. 3, emphasis added). While articles on poison and poisonings were quite common in the popular press, it is significant that Braddon is not highlighting a mass media article, but, rather, one that is directed toward a specialized, professional audience. Moreover, this potentially dangerous article is, as the narrator goes on to describe, “one of a series on the same subject, or range of subjects” that appear in this journal. Dealing as it does with technical topics like chemical testing, the type of information that Braddon highlights as alarmingly accessible would prove threatening only when wielded by someone with the specific scientific knowledge necessary to sort through this information and determine its value. Braddon's focus on a journal primarily available to male, medical professionals, coupled with the narrator's repeated use of the pronouns “him” and “he” to describe the potential poisoner, suggest that it is the male practitioner, not the downtrodden wife, who is most in jeopardy of succumbing to the temptation of employing “the dark processes of the poisoner.”

In addition to engaging debates regarding the nature of poisoning as a crime, through her use of the Lancet, Braddon is also able to upend prevalent nineteenth-century fears about women, contagion, and their reading of sensational literature by illustrating the contaminating potential of scientific reading for a predominantly male readership. Critics such as Pamela Gilbert in Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels have shown that sensation fiction in particular was seen as possessing the potential to materially and morally infect its presumably female, and thus passive, readers by way of the sensations stimulated by such reading. Braddon reverses this critique by showing the potential danger to the professional, male reader whose specialized, supposedly objective, medical reading gives him the tools to perpetrate a crime.

Most critical examinations that focus on Braddon's defense of sensation fiction and her female readership investigate her attribution of greater competence to this audience than was popularly granted them; I, however, locate Braddon's justification of her sensational writing in the attention she draws to a genre less safe for its readers than her own. Kate Flint has suggested that sensational writers such as Braddon undermined the notion of the passive female reader by encouraging women to actively interpret the myriad literary references included in these texts as well as the actions taken by the novel's transgressive heroines. Phegley augments this argument in Educating the Proper Woman Reader, maintaining that Braddon “went beyond claiming that sensation was harmless to argue that by studying sensational plots and characters women could become more, rather than less, skilled at reading critically” (135).Footnote ⁴ While I appreciate Flint and Phegley's claims regarding Braddon's treatment of her female audience, I contend that Braddon also employs a subtler tactic in the defense of her fiction. In Birds of Prey and Charlotte's Inheritance, Braddon allows the potential contamination involved in reading, but she uses the figure of Philip Sheldon to suggest that when critics locate the threat of reading in sensation fiction, they are looking in the wrong place.

Braddon's vindication of the woman reader arises, in other words, through the depiction of a type of professional reading whose potential for morally infecting its readers is much more concrete than that assigned to women's reading of sensation fiction. Throughout this section, Sheldon considers the possibility of poisoning Tom and weighs the merits and demerits of this plan, but it is his act of reading that seals Tom's fate, for without the information gathered from the Lancet Sheldon would be unable to carry his plans into action. Moreover, it is the way that Sheldon reads, a manner which draws on the biological differences supposedly separating men from women, that allows him to be contaminated. As Flint has exhaustively illustrated, according to the medical literature of the period, it was women's greater sensitivity and imagination – traits supposedly biologically housed in the brain – that allowed them to be so easily influenced by what they read. This female sensibility was juxtaposed against male biological traits such as the ability to reason and carefully judge.

Significantly, the narrator's descriptions of Sheldon's brain and thought processes emphasize Sheldon's association with shrewd reasoning as opposed to fancifulness. As Sheldon sits considering whether or not he should poison Tom, the narrator explains, “He was not prone to the indulgence of idle reveries or agreeable daydreams. Thought with him was labour; it was a ‘thinking out’ of future work to be done, and it was an operation as precise and mathematical as the actual labour that resulted therefrom” (Birds 14; bk. 1, ch. 2). Sheldon appears to be almost a thinking machine, and Braddon explicitly relates this mechanistic reasoning to the organization of Sheldon's brain. And it is Sheldon's practicality and reasonableness that eventually lead him to his reading of the Lancet, for he simply concludes before turning to that journal, “‘I had better read up that business before they come,’ . . . when he had to all appearance ‘thought out’ the subject of his reverie” (19; bk. 1, ch. 2). Thus, Braddon does not simply argue that men are just as suggestible or as easily influenced by their reading material as women. Rather, she cleverly sidesteps the issue of sensibility – she would, after all, have had to argue against an entire established medical tradition ostensibly based on the biological differences between men and women – and targets the very characteristics of men that supposedly differentiated them from their overly sensitive and intuitive female counterparts, namely, their abilities to reason and carefully consider.

Furthermore, this medical literature, unlike sensation literature, does not merely provide a fictional model of bad behavior, which, notably, usually ends up being punished by the novel's end. Instead, the information that Philip Sheldon encounters in the Lancet provides real-world instructions for criminal behavior (types of effective poisons, amounts necessary, methods for administering the poison) as well as the tools necessary to avoid the detection of these crimes. Braddon's use of the Lancet in this context thus operates on several levels. It serves as an implicit defense of the sensational literature that Braddon was so popular for creating, an indictment of widely-held and medically-based Victorian beliefs regarding women's susceptibility to narrative infection, and a critique of the assumptions that separated the supposedly objective discourses of the medical field and its practitioners from the sensational. Braddon illustrates the potential danger attendant upon men's typically masculine, professional reading and she does so by focusing on the questionable nature of the very medical literature that supported the popular beliefs about women and their reading.

II. Sensational Science

The sensational genre through which Braddon conveys the story of Philip Sheldon is key to her critique of the authority granted to the medical profession via its increasingly clinical methods and its association with scientific objectivity. Braddon aligns Sheldon with the clinical side of medicine through both his professional interests and his relations to other characters while simultaneously painting these interests and interactions as unnatural and thus sensational. Though overblown passion is often at the heart of the scandalous behavior found in the sensation novel of the 1860s, Sheldon's actions are shocking to the reader because of the coldly clinical and scientific manner in which he carries out his crimes. In the same way that Braddon granted the potentially harmful influence of reading in order to highlight the threats inherent in professional rather than leisure reading, so too she takes advantage of the negative connotations associated with the sensational in order to sensationalize, and thus call into question, the more authoritative and distancing aspects of medical practice.Footnote ⁵

On the very first page of Birds of Prey, Braddon describes Philip Sheldon's profession as “surgeon-dentist” (6; bk. 1, ch. 1), a designation which frequently recurs and which aligns Sheldon with medical specialization as well as the more scientific rather than treatment-based elements of the medical field. Historian M. Jeanne Peterson explains that medical specialization increased during the second half of the nineteenth century, and “specialists’ scientific claims helped shake the English medical establishment loose from its devotion to ‘the practical aspects of diagnosis and treatment’ and prompted English medicine to engage more actively in the search for ‘scientific explanations’” (279–80).Footnote ⁶ At the turn of the nineteenth century, dentistry was still often associated with rather medieval methods of tooth extraction and the sale of questionable tonics and powders for treating tooth aches. However, by the middle of the century, dental surgery required special licensure through a body such as the Royal College of Surgeons.Footnote ⁷ Thus, when Braddon paints Philip Sheldon as sensational, she is not simply sensationalizing the dentist-barber of earlier centuries (an easy target, indeed), but a medical practitioner schooled in scientific objectivity. This is not to say that Braddon is opposed to clinical medicine or medical specialization in and of themselves. Rather, her sensationalizing of Sheldon attacks the distancing from the patient as human and emphasis on the patient as problem-to-be-solved potentially encouraged by these scientifically-based aspects of medical practice.

From the first, Sheldon's own medical practices are more closely tied to experimentation and the objects of his profession than to patients. A look into his surgery reveals him honing his skills in mechanical dentistry rather than treating sufferers. The narrator overtly sensationalizes Sheldon's professional focus on such activities, describing Sheldon's work on the model of a lower jaw as a “mysterious process in connection with a lump of plaster-of-pans, which seemed to be the model of ruined battlements in the Gothic style” (Birds 37; bk. 1, ch. 5). What should be an indicator of medical progress is instead associated with the gothic past, a time dominated by disorder, dark plots, and murder. Philip's suspicious brother implicitly connects such examples of Philip's predilection for “experimentalising” with his ability to poison Tom, noting “You're rather fond of experiments, I think, Phil” (Birds 37; bk. 1, ch. 5). It is thus not just the model of the lower jaw that becomes an object of sensation; Philip's medical knowledge, which allows him to experiment on Tom, is sensationalized as well.

While Sheldon may show interest in scientific trials, Braddon otherwise portrays him as mechanistic and utterly detached from the feelings of others. Particularly egregious is the lack of feeling expressed by Sheldon toward Tom's wife Georgy, since this is the woman whom he will marry following Tom's death. In one interchange between the two, Sheldon's questions cause Georgy to dissolve into tears, and his reaction illustrates his application of a clinical gaze in even the domestic sphere:

Just as Sheldon experiments with the plaster-of-pans to see how well he will be able to shape it into the form of a lower jaw, his encounter with Georgy is a test intended to reveal how well he will be able to mold her. The critic Thomas Boyle has argued that what outraged critics of sensational villainesses like Lady Audley was “the suggestion that the passionate instincts are as human as they are bestial, and that such subconscious drives . . . could triumph over reason” (96). I suggest that what is outrageous about the sensational villain Philip Sheldon has nothing to do with passion, but, rather, the fact that scientific objectivity and cool reasoning could so easily triumph over the consideration of the feelings of anyone else.Footnote ⁸

III. “If you knew as much of doctors as I do, you wouldn't be in any hurry to trust a friend to the mercy of one”: Lying Doctors and Fictionalized Afflictions

At mid-century, existing power structures in the medical profession began to shift and medical practitioners gained greater governance over their occupation. With the introduction of medical schools into the hospitals in the 1850s, choices regarding both hiring and admission were more and more in the hands of the doctors serving in these medical schools rather than the lay boards who had previously served this function. The surge toward specialization beginning in the 1860s served to further distance the lay public from knowledge of the medical world. Peterson explains this shift in terms of access to information: “Authority came to the [medical] experts as the public was increasingly closed off from knowledge of their work . . . The experts gained stature not because they could always act effectively, but because only they could name, describe, and explain” (286).Footnote ⁹ Unfortunately, Sheldon is able to carry out his crimes in large part due to the power granted him by his ability to “name, describe, and explain.”

Braddon's sensational depiction of the surgeon-dentist thus casts doubt on the causal link between this type of expertise and the unconditional granting of authority, warning readers to be more wary with their acceptance of such relationships. Her questioning of this trust highlights and inverts the dynamic of truthful doctor/lying patient that is repeatedly set up and reinforced through case studies in journals like the Lancet. Braddon upends this convention through her representation of the deceitful Sheldon and the danger of unreservedly accepting his veracity – by misusing the trust placed in him as a medical professional, Sheldon is, after all, able to murder his patient.

While this situation is indeed extreme, Braddon's portrayal of Sheldon also illustrates a less deadly but perhaps more likely and thus more troubling consequence: when doctors are provided with unchecked authority, they are able to unduly influence not only patients’ physical experiences, but even the shape that patients’ illnesses take. By illness I mean a patient's unique, experiential story of his or her disease – as opposed to disease itself, the actual biological disorder from which a patient suffers.Footnote ¹⁰ Due to the false etiology of disease encouraged by Sheldon's misnaming of Tom and Charlotte's ailments, both father and daughter feel largely responsible for the diseases from which they believe they suffer. By providing the impetus for his patients’ complaints and then manipulating their diagnoses, Sheldon writes a certain level of guilt into the narratives of Tom and Charlotte's illnesses that would not be part of their experiences without his intervention. In a Victorian landscape in which medical expertise was often defined more by mastery of medical discourse than by efficacy of treatment or accuracy of diagnosis, this exaggerated example illustrates the impact on patients’ illnesses present in any case in which ailments are misdiagnosed or a diagnosis cannot be provided at all.

The belief in patients’ inherent deceitfulness and lack of cooperation found free reign in case histories appearing in prominent Victorian medical periodicals such as the Lancet and the British Medical Journal. In these case studies, the patient and the patient's family are repeatedly depicted as lying, concealing important information, or, at the very least, obstinately disagreeing with the doctor's (obviously) correct advice or request. For instance, in one typical case published in the Lancet in November of 1845, James K. Dow relates how it was only through his examination of “Elizabeth F” for another complaint that he discovered that she was pregnant. Moreover, once treatment begins, the patient and her family continue to lie, for “after some equivocation, [Dow] was informed by [Elizabeth's] mother that her thirst had been quenched an hour previously by some warm rum-and-water, she, it was alleged, preferring that to an infusion of toasted bread” (475, emphasis added). The language used by Dow vividly illustrates the distrust with which he accepts his patient's and his patient's family's statements as well as the well-foundedness of his belief in their lack of veracity. Elizabeth F's death at the end of this case history completes the feeling of cautionary tale for potentially dishonest patients that infuses this narrative. Though not every case study depicts the patient as this untrustworthy, the belief in patients’ deceptiveness permeates case narratives of the nineteenth century.

In Birds of Prey and Charlotte's Inheritance, though, it is Philip Sheldon, the surgeon-dentist, who is unequivocally dishonest. Even the medical specialization that Sheldon has chosen, surgical dentistry, allows him to hone his dissimulative abilities. As the advertisements for his practice suggest, his talents lie in the fine-tuning of “false teeth” and the replacement of real gums with coral ones (Birds 8; bk. 1, ch.1, emphasis added). Sheldon's application of his faculty for altering appearances to the field of mechanical dentistry elevates his ability to create an artful façade into a science. Moreover, the manipulation of physical appearances perfected by Sheldon in his choice of professions parallels the manipulation of the people surrounding him which Sheldon later enacts via his medical authority. After Sheldon's housekeeper gets sick by way of beef tea intended for Tom Halliday, Sheldon counters her concerns, explaining, “if you knew as much about atmospheric influences as I do, you'd know that food which has been standing for hours in the pestilential air of a fever-patient's room isn't fit for any body to eat” (Birds 43; bk. 1, ch. 6). Not only does Sheldon use beef tea, something often prescribed by doctors to maintain the strength and bolster the health of invalids, to undermine the health of his patient; in addition, it is his medical knowledge, or, rather, his profession of medical knowledge that allows him effectively to silence his housekeeper.

This dishonesty on the part of Sheldon is juxtaposed against the general belief in his rectitude exhibited by his patients and those surrounding them. Though these patients willingly reveal all of their symptoms to their doctors and believe that Sheldon is only doing what is best for them, the trusting Tom Halliday dies just as surely as did the dissembling Elizabeth F under the treatment of Dr. Dow in the Lancet case cited above.

One of the alarming consequences of this connection between expertise and authority in Birds of Prey and Charlotte's Inheritance is the shaping of patients’ illnesses that the practitioner's ability to name (or misname) can exert. Even though Sheldon is unable to cure, or even improve, Tom's condition, he has provided it with a label: “bilious fever” (Birds 31; bk. 1, ch. 4). This capacity to diagnose Tom's ailment subsequently allows the surgeon-dentist to explain away all of Tom's symptoms, a move which simultaneously solidifies his authority and shields him from any suspicion of wrong-doing. As a result, Tom repeatedly blames his own supposed weakness for the course that his sickness has taken, assuring Sheldon, “I'm not going to blame you when it's my own constitution that's in fault” (Birds 46; bk. 1, ch. 6). His belief in this defect in his own body and the fatalistic viewpoint that results from this belief stem from his false knowledge that he is only suffering from an “ordinary” and “mild” (Philip Sheldon's words) attack of bilious fever, something which should be quite easy to overcome. The false seeds sown by Sheldon lead Tom to believe his demise inevitable, a fact which assists Sheldon in the continued poisoning of his unresisting patient.Footnote ¹¹

The doctors’ pronouncements that there is nothing organically wrong with Charlotte place the onus of her sufferings even more squarely on her shoulders than Tom's misguided belief in his weak constitution did. In the view of Charlotte, her friends, and her family, it is not that Sheldon and the puppet-doctor that he has called in to consult are unable to name the disease from which Charlotte suffers; rather, the lack of a named ailment leaves little possibility in their minds that Charlotte's disorder is anything but an attack of nervousness on Charlotte's part and that she is thus to blame for the progression of her complaint. Charlotte herself asserts that “My nerves are the beginning and the end of mischief; and if I could get the better of my nerves, I should be as well as ever” (Charlotte's 179; bk. 7, ch. 2).Footnote ¹² We as readers know that Charlotte's sufferings have a definite locus in the poison which she is being fed, but without knowledge of this poisoning, her experiences, just like her diagnosis, remain (literally) ill-defined – her suffering simultaneously contributes to the delineation of who she is yet is dismissed inasmuch as it does not stem from a clear underlying cause.

The fictional nature of the diseases from which Tom and Charlotte supposedly suffer further highlights the role of Sheldon and his medical reading in the etiology of their ailments and the shaping of their illnesses. The narrative chain of contamination begins with Sheldon's careful reading of the Lancet and ends with his writing of disease into the bodies of both Tom and Charlotte. Their pain and distress may be quite real, but Sheldon has in effect created fictional afflictions for both of these individuals. When Charlotte's fiancé finally discovers her poisoning, this connection becomes clear to him, and he, the layman, is ultimately able to accurately diagnose what has plagued both Tom and then his daughter. In a moment of epiphany, he thinks, “Murder! The disease, which had hitherto been nameless, had found its name at last” (Charlotte's 222; bk. 8, ch. 1). Sheldon's professional reading allows him to serve as a carrier for this disease called murder, a disease which he inevitably passes on to his victims.

Braddon uses Birds of Prey and Charlotte's Inheritance to identify the potential for a very different kind of narrative contagion than the type traditionally assigned to her own sensational writing. Ironically enough, the very publication that Braddon most overtly targets in her critiques – the Lancet – was founded in 1823 in order to promote reform in the medical profession. Thomas Wakley, founder of the Lancet, intended for the journal to shine a light on the ineptitude and nepotism dominating the medical establishment of the 1820s. In contrast, he hoped that the creation of his periodical would encourage scientific excellence in the profession.Footnote ¹³ While Wakley's efforts undoubtedly contributed to change in the power structures within the profession, through her own periodical, Braddon illuminates the unacceptable power dynamics reinforced through journals such as Wakley's. Braddon employs her sensational fiction, a type of literature viewed as “light” in relation to its more “realistic” counterparts, to defend groups (women and patients) not taken as seriously as their more powerful counterparts (men and doctors).

Ultimately, though, it is not only the behaviors of male medical doctors that Braddon evaluates. Charlotte and Tom's unmitigated trust in those treating them, coupled with their readiness to assign fault to themselves without ever considering the possible flaws of those doling out medical advice, damns them just as surely as Philip Sheldon's actions. In her discussion of the thinking woman reader encouraged by Braddon's works, Phegley notes that one of the lessons of Braddon's novels is to look beyond the respectable façades generated by social standing. Phegley maintains that “Braddon's motley crew of deceivers and criminals exemplifies the dangers of judging individuals solely on their outward appearances and apparent social positions. Her novels instead encourage the careful discrimination of character based on behavior rather than class status” (140). While I find Phegley's claims persuasive, I would suggest that in Birds of Prey and Charlotte's Inheritance, Braddon's admonition extends beyond the careful consideration of class. In these two novels, Braddon employs an over-the-top, sensational story to caution readers about a very real problem – namely, that the profession of medical knowledge by medical practitioners is increasingly becoming equated by patients with the possession of moral rectitude and an implicit authority. Thus, like the Lancet, Braddon's Belgravia also serves as an instrument for reform: her publication of these two “light” novels within its pages calls for patients to revise their perceptions of both themselves and the doctors who minister to them.