M. E. Braddon - Works of M. E. Braddon

The Collected Works of

M. E. BRADDON

(1835-1915)

Contents

Delphi Classics 2013

Version 2

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The Collected Works of

M. E. BRADDON

By Delphi Classics, 2013

Collected Works of M. E. Braddon

First published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by Delphi Classics.

Delphi Classics, 2013.

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Frith Street, Soho Square, London Braddons birthplace

Braddons brother, the Australian politician Sir Edward Nicholas Coventry Braddon, 18 th Premier of Tasmania

OR, THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT

This novel was first published in 1860, while Mary Elizabeth Braddon was working as an actress in order to help support herself and her mother. It was published in 27 weekly instalments by the Yorkshire publisher C. R. Empson. The sensation thriller (the forerunner of the modern crime or mystery genre) had been popularised by Wilkie Collins with his publication of The Woman in White (1859) and Empsons serial text added no less than three exclamation marks to the title, to emphasise the novels sensational plot. The Trail of the Serpent is the later (and now better known title) of the novel and the one under which it subsequently appeared in volume form. The story involves Daredevil Dick, who is wrongfully accused of murder, leaving the suspicious Mr. Peters to clear his name and discover the truth.

In the late nineteenth-century, sensational or melodramatic page-turners were re-marketed for a mass-audience; these so-called yellowbacks had lurid yellow covers and were typically sold cheaply at railway bookstalls. Most of Braddons novels were reprinted in this format, as shown in the above example.

Opening of the serial

An illustration from the original serial

I DONT SUPPOSE it rained harder in the good town of Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy than it rained anywhere else. But it did rain. There was scarcely an umbrella in Slopperton that could hold its own against the rain that came pouring down that November afternoon, between the hours of four and five. Every gutter in High Street, Slopperton; every gutter in Broad Street (which was of course the narrowest street); in New Street (which by the same rule was the oldest street); in East Street, West Street, Blue Dragon Street, and Windmill Street; every gutter in every one of these thoroughfares was a little Niagara, with a maelstrom at the corner, down which such small craft as bits of orange-peel, old boots and shoes, scraps of paper, and fragments of rag were absorbed as better ships have been in the great northern whirlpool. That dingy stream, the Sloshy, was swollen into a kind of dirty Mississippi, and the graceful coal-barges which adorned its bosom were stripped of the clothes-lines and fluttering linen which usually were to be seen on their decks. A bad, determined, black-minded November day. A day on which the fog shaped itself into a demon, and lurked behind mens shoulders, whispering into their ears, Cut your throat! you know youve got a razor, and cant shave with it, because youve been drinking and your hand shakes; one little gash under the left ear, and the business is done. Its the best thing you can do. It is, really. A day on which the rain, the monotonous ceaseless persevering rain, has a voice as it comes down, and says, Dont you think you could go melancholy mad? Look at me; be good enough to watch me for a couple of hours or so, and think, while you watch me, of the girl who jilted you ten years ago; and of what a much better man you would be to-day if she had only loved you truly. Oh, I think, if youll only be so good as watch me, you might really contrive to go mad. Then again the wind. What does the wind say, as it comes cutting through the dark passage, and stabbing you, like a coward as it is, in the back, just between the shoulders what does it say? Why, it whistles in your ear a reminder of the little bottle of laudanum youve got upstairs, which you had for your toothache last week, and never used. A foggy wet windy November day. A bad day a dangerous day. Keep us from bad thoughts to-day, and keep us out of the Police Reports next week. Give us a glass of something hot and strong, and a bit of something nice for supper, and bear with us a little this day; for if the strings of yonder piano an instrument fashioned on mechanical principles by mortal hands if they are depressed and slackened by the influence of damp and fog, how do we know that there may not be some string in this more critical instrument, the human mind, not made on mechanical principles or by mortal hands, a little out of order on this bad November day?