The Beetle

Richard Marsh’s The Beetle and Bram Stoker’s Dracula were both published in 1897 – and The Beetle, believe it or not, outsold Dracula, and not just by a small margin: it was a runaway best-seller.  This might surprise you, as it certainly did me, as I’d never heard of it before the start of this academic year.  It has been out of print for most of the past century, quite inexplicably, but thankfully it is now in print again.  Don’t just take my word for it: everyone who did the course for which it was prescribed thought it was tremendously enjoyable and couldn’t understand why it isn’t far better known than it is. 

Like Dracula, The Beetle is a fin de siècle novel dealing with a fantastical, monstrous, “Other” presence in London, the centre of Empire.  This time it is a thing which is extremely resistant to definition, a sort of man-woman-beetle-goddess-thing which has come to London from Egypt to wreak a terrible revenge for a perceived wrong.  Marsh’s novel also shares with Stoker’s book the use of multiple narrators – Marsh does this wonderfully well, building suspense and, in the narratives of Sydney Atherton and Marjorie Lindon in particular, adding a great deal to the enjoyment of the novel (Marsh’s sense of fun in inhabiting these at least partially silly characters is palpable).  I neither want nor am able to divulge a great deal more of the plot – it is complicated, for a start, but I also thoroughly enjoyed being able to come to such an excellent piece of work with absolutely no preconceptions whatever: it truly is a lost masterpiece, and I can only urge anyone with even the slightest interest in the fiction of the end of the nineteenth century; the fantastic; the gothic; reverse invasion narratives; detective novels (I would say this would appeal to those who like Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Stoker, Stevenson and the like) to seek it out.  It’s about 300 pages and you’ll read it in one sitting.

Further, I particularly recommend the photographed edition, published by Broadview with an excellent introduction by Julian Wolfreys; it thoroughly sets up many of the ways this novel addresses contemporary concerns (such as the New Woman and late imperial anxieties).