Miss Scarlet (and the Duke) and Late Victorian History
Over the summer, we got a subscription to PBS to watch the French mystery series The Mountain Detective (Alex Hugo), and then having quickly dispatched all the available episodes of that show, we went on to Moonflower Murders.
A couple of weeks ago, as I wondered whether there is no more to watch on PBS while contemplating the state of my streaming subscriptions, a timely notice came to our email about a show called Miss Scarlet apparently starting its fifth season. After a brief bit of research, I discovered that the show was Miss Scarlet and the Duke for four seasons but that its co-star (amicably) left the show at the end of the fourth season.
For those who are not familiar: Miss Scarlet (with or without “the Duke”) centers around a young woman named Eliza Scarlet who, in late Victorian London, is determined to pursue a career as a private detective after the death of her father, a former Detective Inspector and then a private investigator. William “Duke” Wellington is a family friend and ex-colleague of her father’s who, as Scotland Yard Detective Inspector, both aids Eliza and is perpetually exasperated with her stubbornness.
Since the series seemed to receive generally positive reviews, we decided to try it on for size, so to speak. After completing the first season, I find it genial, if not necessarily gripping or original or clever. It’s a pleasant show, perfect for the PBS crowd (and the target audience for its myriad Viking cruise line ads)—which I mean in a (mostly) positive sense, especially since it looks like we’re keeping our subscription. I realize it sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise, so let me also add that it’s a show that I might consider teaching in future iterations of my detective fiction class.
Some might complain that Miss Scarlet and the Duke is a bit “revisionist” in presenting us with a gentlewoman protagonist* who never made her own bed in her life and has a maid attending to all her household needs but who also appears (for her time) fairly progressive in matters of sexual orientation as well as class, race, and (of course) gender politics.
On the other hand, storylines such as one for Season 1, Episode 3: “Deeds Not Words” offers a fairly authentic historical picture of the role of women in the latter half of the 19th century. Even if the series does not pinpoint a specific timeline for its episodes, “Deeds Not Words,” an episode revolving around the burgeoning suffragist movement, helps us place it around the late 1870s and early 1880s because of the recognizable cultural and historical moment it depicts.
1860s: With John Stuart Mill’s election to Parliament in 1865 and then his introduction, in subsequent years, of the motion to grant women the right to vote, the British suffrage movement would have clearly been a topic of conversation by the 1870s. Mill’s Subjection of Women (published in 1869) is an impassioned appeal on this topic that I often teach excerpts of.
Disappointing history spoiler: The legislation to grant ALL voters aged 21 or older, male and female, the right to vote doesn’t get achieved until 1928.
1870s: The middle of Episode 3 presents us with a moment when Eliza Scarlet’s maid asks her about the meaning of words on a pamphlet. Our detective protagonist responds that Ivy—the maid—would know how to read if she had been a boy. Of course, that can be somewhat misleading in that class position might have consigned male servants also to a lifetime of illiteracy even in the late 19th century. However, it’s also true that various education reforms—namely Education Act of 1870 (and again 1880)—made available (and then compulsory) education for all young children only late in Queen Victoria’s reign.
1880s: When I talk about the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act, students are variously surprised or outraged or resigned. Some students had not considered that a woman’s property would be considered her husband’s as a matter of course until legislation that specifically allowed for the opportunity to hold onto her wealth in her own name. (We see the importance and the clear need for this Act with the very first episode of Miss Scarlet and the Duke, but I don’t wish to provide any spoilers.)
Also significantly, the late 1860s to 1880s saw growing numbers of women attending British universities—though not being able to take degrees, especially from Oxford or Cambridge, until much later. We are told that a character from Episode 3 has taken classes at university, another important plot and historical point.
All in all, Miss Scarlet and the Duke (we haven’t said goodbye to “the Duke” yet in Season 1) provides an interesting gloss on the culture of its late Victorian London setting, so if you are inclined to take your mystery with a dose of history, this easy-viewing PBS show might just be your ticket?
*I write about another Victorian gentlewoman detective from Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875).