The last ceremony left to be performed was, as usual, the signing of the marriage register. In the confusion of the moment (and in the absence of any information to guide me) I committed a mistake—ominous, in my aunt Starkweather’s opinion, of evil to come. I signed my married instead of my maiden name.
This mistake does indeed foreshadow worse things to come. Like Julia, Valeria later learns that her husband has married her under a false name.
My references to Lady Audley’s Secret similarly foreshadow hidden identities, as well as illustrating the popularity of sensation novels. Chock-full of bigamy, murder, and madness, Lady Audley’s Secret was an enormous success with the novel-reading Victorian public. They devoured the story—and many others like it. As a novel reader herself, Julia would have been well aware of this trend. It’s why she encourages Jasper to revise Reunion at Waterloo, ultimately helping to make it a hit.
My nods to The Blue Castle are a little more straightforward. Like Julia, Montgomery’s heroine, Valancy Stirling, proposes marriage to a man with a bad reputation in order to escape her family. Barney Snaith agrees to marry her on the condition that she never enter the locked lean-to on his property. At the end of the novel, Valancy finally disobeys him, only to discover that Barney is the author of some of her favorite books.
I’d always intended to make Jasper a secret romance author, but the Bluebeard element—along with the Blue Castle connection—is what compelled me to give him a locked writing room in the tower of Goldfinch Hall. The vague rumors that Jasper is a forger are also an allusion to Montgomery’s novel.
Victorian Views on Novel Reading and Bloodletting
The views on novel reading espoused by Dr. Cordingley and Lady Wychwood aren’t as outlandish as they may sound. At the time, the effects of novel reading were often compared to that of drugs or strong spirits. For example, Books and Reading by Noah Porter (1871) refers to “excessive novel reading” as “intellectual opium eating,” while The Local Preachers’ Magazine and Christian Family Record (1875) calls it “mental gin drinking.”
Some of Dr. Cordingley’s quotes are paraphrased from an editorial in The Mother’s and Young Lady’s Annual (1853) that claimed reading novels tended to “inflame the passions, pollute the imagination, and corrupt the heart,” that morality was weakened by “the false sentiments” that novels provoked, and that “in young ladies, especially, do the sensibilities and imagination need to be repressed rather than stimulated.”
When blood was believed to be overstimulated or polluted, Victorian physicians often resorted to bleeding a patient to calm the inflammation and rebalance the humors. Bloodletting was considered a viable treatment in the 1860s, with physicians employing either leeches, a lancet, or the mechanized scarificator that Dr. Cordingley uses on Julia. As the century progressed and new scientific methods were introduced, the practice gradually began to fall from favor.
False Names, Marriage, and the Law
In the Victorian era, there were many cases of people marrying under false names. The courts generally found these marriages to be valid—providing the marriage was by license and not through the calling of the banns. Mr. Finchley’s explanation of this distinction was inspired by an article in Charles Dickens’s weekly journal All the Year Round (January 21, 1860), which states:
The very object to be gained by publication of the banns being publicity, this purpose, should the publication be made in false names, is utterly defeated. On the other hand, a license not being a matter of public notoriety, is granted by the ordinary upon such evidence as he may be content to receive.
As a result, if a marriage license was obtained under a false name, the subsequent marriage could still survive legal scrutiny. A Digest of the Law Relating to the Relief of the Poor by Henry Walter Parker, Esq. (1849), reports several cases of this variety, including:
A marriage under a license, in which one of the parties was described by a false Christian and surname held to be valid. (Cope v. Burt, 1 Hag. 434: S.C. on appeal, 1 Phil. 224.)
A marriage by license not in the man’s real name, but in the name which he had assumed because he had deserted, he being known by that name only in the place where he lodged and was married, and where he had resided sixteen weeks, was held a valid marriage. (R. v. Burton-upon-Trent, 3 M & S. 538.)
Even in Victorian fiction, this sort of marriage was upheld. In The Law and the Lady, Valeria Brinton consults a solicitor on the very subject.
At my request Benjamin put my case to the lawyer as the case of a friend in whom I was interested. The answer was given without hesitation. I had married, honestly believing my husband’s name to be the name under which I had known him. The witnesses to my marriage—my uncle, my aunt, and Benjamin—had acted, as I had acted, in perfect good faith. Under those circumstances, there was no doubt about the law. I was legally married.
Does that mean James Marshland wouldn’t have been guilty of some other crime for impersonating the deceased Captain Blunt? As with most legal questions, the answer is that it depends. In Belle, I chose to focus on the basic legality of the marriage—and on the moral justification for the hero’s actions—rather than delve deeper into other issues of criminality.
The Fall of Sebastopol
The Siege of Sebastopol lasted nearly a full year, from October 1854 to September 1855. Jasper’s account of the conditions he and his fellow soldiers suffered in the lead-up to the fall of the city was taken, in part, from an officer’s letter printed in the Reading Mercury (January 27, 1855). The officer writes:
I have thawed my ink to write, with the hope of saving life . . . [Your soldiers] have been left to die from starvation. For the last six weeks the rations issued have not been of a kind nor of a quantity to support strength or health. The clothing has not been sufficient to maintain the necessary vigour of the circulation . . . The men are now so sickly from dysentery and diarrhea, from emaciation and debility from disease marking the advent of scurvy and dropsy, not to mention affections of the feet and fingers that we cannot send them away from camp fast enough.
Similarly, a few of the lines of the newspaper article Julia reads from the fictional London Courant were partially excerpted from an actual report in Bell’s Weekly Messenger (September 15, 1855). The report, titled “The Fall of Sebastopol,” both declares the allied victory and laments the loss of all the “noble lives” sacrificed in achieving it.
Acknowledgments
During a difficult year, writing has been, at times, both a blessing and a burden to me. While it’s provided a much-needed escape from the grim realities of life, it’s also required a degree of focus that I was hard-pressed to maintain. In order to finish this story, I relied so much on the people in my life who left me alone when I needed to work, distracted me when I needed a break, and encouraged me when I felt too disheartened to go on.