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Paul Ferroll
Paul Ferroll , a scandalous success when it first published in 1855, shocked contemporary opinion with its moral ambiguity and authorial detachment, and its refusal of traditional fictional values.
The hero, Paul Ferroll, is the embodiment of the English notion of what constitutes a handsome, a devoted husband, and community leader. His neighbors admire his selflessness during a cholera epidemic and his bravery in controlling a violent mob by killing the ring-leader. They admire
his beautiful wife and daughter, and his brilliant literary reputation. There is one problem, however. Ferroll brutally murdered his first wife in order to marry his second. Out of print for sixty years, Paul Ferroll is certainly a highly unusual Victorian crime novel by an intriguing
authoress.
The hero, Paul Ferroll, is the embodiment of the English notion of what constitutes a handsome, a devoted husband, and community leader. His neighbors admire his selflessness during a cholera epidemic and his bravery in controlling a violent mob by killing the ring-leader. They admire
his beautiful wife and daughter, and his brilliant literary reputation. There is one problem, however. Ferroll brutally murdered his first wife in order to marry his second. Out of print for sixty years, Paul Ferroll is certainly a highly unusual Victorian crime novel by an intriguing
authoress.
236 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1856
2 people are currently reading
73 people want to read
About the author
Caroline Clive
18 booksCaroline Clive, sometimes known as Caroline Wigley Clive (24 June 1801 in Brompton Grove, London –13 July 1872 in Whitfield, Herefordshire) was an English author. She was the daughter of Edmund Wigley of Shakenhurst, Worcestershire. She married, in 1840, the Rev. Archer Clive. She published, over the signature "V.", eight volumes of poetry, but is best known as the author of Paul Ferrol (1855), a sensational novel about murder, and Why Paul Ferroll Killed His Wife (1860).
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 18, 2021
‘A remarkable tale, full of passionate energy and development, and almost without a superfluous word’. Thus, one representative literary reviewer at the time greeted Caroline Clive’s now-forgotten Paul Ferroll (1855). The novel was a best-seller, compared by critics to Charlotte Brontë’s recently published Jane Eyre, and the subject of much, heated moral controversy on account of its scandalous subject-matter (‘the book is very horrible indeed’).
I found Paul Ferroll a fascinating curiosity, unlike any other Victorian novel I have read. It’s important historically as a forerunner of the ‘sensation novels’ that took readers by storm in the following decade, but it’s distinctly more amoral and more unconventionally structured than anything by Wilkie Collins or Mary Elizabeth Braddon. It’s also stylistically distinctive, written in a lean, fast-paced style, with not a trace of the orotundity often said (sometimes unfairly) to characterize Victorian fiction. The earlier reviewer is spot-on in describing it as ‘without a superfluous word’.
The novel’s pared-down writing and its cool, distanced narrative voice make Paul Ferroll read at points almost more like a modern historical novel than a work actually written at the time it is set. The moral stance of the work is also distinctly unVictorian (and, indeed, pretty challenging even today). The title character, an unaccustomed mixture of country squire and literary intellectual, is portrayed in some ways as a paragon—attractive, cultured, naturally authoritative, courageous and philanthropic enough to throw himself into charity work among the poor during a vividly described outbreak of cholera. Yet extracts from his diary during that same epidemic reveal a less savoury side to his character. He seems disturbingly exhilarated by his encounters with others’ death and anguish, which he casts as a form of entertainment. I, the well and strong man, have my stall at this opera … it is charming to see how poetical human nature is in its extremities. At one point, he confesses that the excitement of rushing about with a human spectacle everywhere so kindled my spirits that I stopped at the end of a by-way and indulged in one quiet laugh.
So, a curious, high-functioning, half-idealized sociopath; and his family relationships are also pretty peculiar. He loves his wife Elinor to the point of obsession, but he doesn’t always seem sensitive to her needs, especially towards the end of the novel when her health is failing. She sometimes seems closer to a Stockholm Syndrome sufferer than your average adoring Victorian wife. The two of them are, moreover, so focused on one another that their daughter Janet—the most sympathetic character in the novel—is almost neglected, especially by her father. Ferroll even at points responds to Elinor’s affection for Janet with a kind of jealousy (‘No, Nelly, you chose me; you are my partner, not Janet’s’).
Paul Ferroll was Caroline Clive’s first novel, published when she was in her mid-fifties (she had previously authored an acclaimed volume of verse). In some ways you can tell she is new to the novelist’s trade. The structure of the book is episodic and the pacing uneven, with a semi-comic interlude in France decidedly overstaying its welcome. Also, the titanic figure of Paul Ferroll monopolises the novel’s energies to the extent that the other characters struggle to emerge.
Despite these flaws, however, Paul Ferroll is a memorable, distinctive, and disruptive read. It also made an excellent follow-up to my last nineteenth-century read, Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Eugene Aram, with which it has quite marked thematic consonances (as I discovered quite by chance).
One of the pleasures of exploring these literary paths less travelled is that you get to meet new authors as well as new books. I enjoyed making Caroline Clive’s acquaintance. She was born with the most silvery of silver spoons in her mouth, but she had her share of ill fortune; she was lame for life after a childhood illness, probably polio. She was also, in the trenchant pronouncement of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘the ugliest woman I ever saw in my life’. This didn’t stop her—much to the astonishment of her contemporaries—bagging a highly eligible husband, Archer Clive, with whom she had a long and happy marriage. After her death, Archer wrote in his diary, in suspiciously Paul Ferrollian style, ‘she loved her children, but less than she loved me’.
All these details come from the excellent introduction to the Valancourt Classics edition, which also reports Florence Nightingale’s delightful remarks on Caroline Clive after her marriage. I never saw happiness stamped on any human creature’s face. I like her exceedingly, & admire her husband for disproving the general proposition, that we are to be treated as furniture or a piece of clothes for the man’s vanity, while they are to be as ugly as they please, & no one is to wonder at anyone’s marrying them.
I found Paul Ferroll a fascinating curiosity, unlike any other Victorian novel I have read. It’s important historically as a forerunner of the ‘sensation novels’ that took readers by storm in the following decade, but it’s distinctly more amoral and more unconventionally structured than anything by Wilkie Collins or Mary Elizabeth Braddon. It’s also stylistically distinctive, written in a lean, fast-paced style, with not a trace of the orotundity often said (sometimes unfairly) to characterize Victorian fiction. The earlier reviewer is spot-on in describing it as ‘without a superfluous word’.
The novel’s pared-down writing and its cool, distanced narrative voice make Paul Ferroll read at points almost more like a modern historical novel than a work actually written at the time it is set. The moral stance of the work is also distinctly unVictorian (and, indeed, pretty challenging even today). The title character, an unaccustomed mixture of country squire and literary intellectual, is portrayed in some ways as a paragon—attractive, cultured, naturally authoritative, courageous and philanthropic enough to throw himself into charity work among the poor during a vividly described outbreak of cholera. Yet extracts from his diary during that same epidemic reveal a less savoury side to his character. He seems disturbingly exhilarated by his encounters with others’ death and anguish, which he casts as a form of entertainment. I, the well and strong man, have my stall at this opera … it is charming to see how poetical human nature is in its extremities. At one point, he confesses that the excitement of rushing about with a human spectacle everywhere so kindled my spirits that I stopped at the end of a by-way and indulged in one quiet laugh.
So, a curious, high-functioning, half-idealized sociopath; and his family relationships are also pretty peculiar. He loves his wife Elinor to the point of obsession, but he doesn’t always seem sensitive to her needs, especially towards the end of the novel when her health is failing. She sometimes seems closer to a Stockholm Syndrome sufferer than your average adoring Victorian wife. The two of them are, moreover, so focused on one another that their daughter Janet—the most sympathetic character in the novel—is almost neglected, especially by her father. Ferroll even at points responds to Elinor’s affection for Janet with a kind of jealousy (‘No, Nelly, you chose me; you are my partner, not Janet’s’).
Paul Ferroll was Caroline Clive’s first novel, published when she was in her mid-fifties (she had previously authored an acclaimed volume of verse). In some ways you can tell she is new to the novelist’s trade. The structure of the book is episodic and the pacing uneven, with a semi-comic interlude in France decidedly overstaying its welcome. Also, the titanic figure of Paul Ferroll monopolises the novel’s energies to the extent that the other characters struggle to emerge.
Despite these flaws, however, Paul Ferroll is a memorable, distinctive, and disruptive read. It also made an excellent follow-up to my last nineteenth-century read, Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Eugene Aram, with which it has quite marked thematic consonances (as I discovered quite by chance).
One of the pleasures of exploring these literary paths less travelled is that you get to meet new authors as well as new books. I enjoyed making Caroline Clive’s acquaintance. She was born with the most silvery of silver spoons in her mouth, but she had her share of ill fortune; she was lame for life after a childhood illness, probably polio. She was also, in the trenchant pronouncement of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘the ugliest woman I ever saw in my life’. This didn’t stop her—much to the astonishment of her contemporaries—bagging a highly eligible husband, Archer Clive, with whom she had a long and happy marriage. After her death, Archer wrote in his diary, in suspiciously Paul Ferrollian style, ‘she loved her children, but less than she loved me’.
All these details come from the excellent introduction to the Valancourt Classics edition, which also reports Florence Nightingale’s delightful remarks on Caroline Clive after her marriage. I never saw happiness stamped on any human creature’s face. I like her exceedingly, & admire her husband for disproving the general proposition, that we are to be treated as furniture or a piece of clothes for the man’s vanity, while they are to be as ugly as they please, & no one is to wonder at anyone’s marrying them.
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July 17, 2017According to the introduction, one contemporary reviewer believed that this was the type of book that was "very dangerous for young women of the middle and upper classes to read," since it could "fill the mind with details of imaginary vice and distress and crime." Cool. My kind of book. And all in all, it was pretty good, considering that I actually couldn't stand the titular character. Not that I have to like the characters to enjoy a novel; in this case I think that the author was leaving it to the reader to decide just what sort of person he is because every so often he has his moments of redemption, most especially toward the end of the novel.
What starts out quite peacefully with a picture of the "calm loveliness" falling over the Ferroll country home of the Tower of Mainwarey is interrupted with Ferroll being summoned home with the news that "Your lady has been murdered," and indeed, she'd been found with her throat slit. By whom was never really discovered, since the gardener, Mr. Franks, who'd been accused of her death was acquitted. But far from being a detective novel or a story about a murder investigation, the novel follows Paul Ferroll over a period of about sixteen/seventeen years as he goes on about his business after the death of his wife. He remarries and has a daughter, yet while he is highly respected in his community, he remains completely aloof in terms of friends, social concerns, and his own child. Why this might be is so is just part of the mystery surrounding Paul Ferroll, and overall the novel tells one of those stories where all I could do is to guess at the motivations behind the main character here, since right up until the last few pages there is absolutely no clue as to why he does what he does. It's frustrating, but in the end, it pays off.
Paul Ferroll, as one scholar notes is "further evidence of women writers challenging convention and contributing to the nascent crime and detective genre," and to me, that's the novel's primary importance, and then, of course, the discovery of Caroline Clive and her work. I don't know that other people get so worked up about finding new old authors to read, but it's something that's quite meaningful to me so it's a big deal. So many male writers from this time period have names and work that have never been forgotten or have yet to lapse into obscurity, but that's not the case with a huge number of female writers, especially those whose work crosses into the crime/mystery area.
I have more at my reading journal; I want to say also how pleasantly surprised I was to have found that Valancourt had published this book, bringing yet another largely-forgotten work out of obscurity.
recommended but likely to a rather narrow audience; it would likely be less attractive to modern crime readers who would probably find it beyond tame.
What starts out quite peacefully with a picture of the "calm loveliness" falling over the Ferroll country home of the Tower of Mainwarey is interrupted with Ferroll being summoned home with the news that "Your lady has been murdered," and indeed, she'd been found with her throat slit. By whom was never really discovered, since the gardener, Mr. Franks, who'd been accused of her death was acquitted. But far from being a detective novel or a story about a murder investigation, the novel follows Paul Ferroll over a period of about sixteen/seventeen years as he goes on about his business after the death of his wife. He remarries and has a daughter, yet while he is highly respected in his community, he remains completely aloof in terms of friends, social concerns, and his own child. Why this might be is so is just part of the mystery surrounding Paul Ferroll, and overall the novel tells one of those stories where all I could do is to guess at the motivations behind the main character here, since right up until the last few pages there is absolutely no clue as to why he does what he does. It's frustrating, but in the end, it pays off.
Paul Ferroll, as one scholar notes is "further evidence of women writers challenging convention and contributing to the nascent crime and detective genre," and to me, that's the novel's primary importance, and then, of course, the discovery of Caroline Clive and her work. I don't know that other people get so worked up about finding new old authors to read, but it's something that's quite meaningful to me so it's a big deal. So many male writers from this time period have names and work that have never been forgotten or have yet to lapse into obscurity, but that's not the case with a huge number of female writers, especially those whose work crosses into the crime/mystery area.
I have more at my reading journal; I want to say also how pleasantly surprised I was to have found that Valancourt had published this book, bringing yet another largely-forgotten work out of obscurity.
recommended but likely to a rather narrow audience; it would likely be less attractive to modern crime readers who would probably find it beyond tame.
Want to read
September 1, 2022Discussed in The Life of Crime, ch. 3
February 11, 2024
This novel, published in 1855, caused a stir in the reading public, apparently because of its complex treatment of a murderer. The book's ending is exciting but I found other parts of it rather rough going, mainly because of the elliptical way in which the characters speak. The author subsequently wrote a "prequel" and that is next on my reading list. All in all, this was an interesting book, but Ms. Cline is remembered more for her poetry than her novels, and I can understand why. The edition I read was part of the " Oxford Popular Fiction" series and could have used more annotations explaining contemporary references.
January 3, 2016
WEIRD Victorian drama. Ferroll was significantly more monstrous to me as a reader than I think Clive intended him to be...
August 3, 2016
A rather strange Victorian proto-sensation novel, featuring a probably psychopathic (but also kind of sympathetic) protagonist.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews