The Moving Gaze and its Captured Subjects: The Victorian Female Detective in the Colonies

Engaging with two of Grant Allen’s works that feature intrepid and well-travelled female detectives—Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899) and Hilda Wade: A Woman with Tenacity of Purpose (1899)—I explore a central tension therein. While the narratives are premised on the protagonists’ mobility, their far-flung adventures materialize in spaces that Allen depicts as moribund and primitive. Drawing on Ana Parejo Vadillo’s work, I signpost the technological interventions that impacted public transport in the nineteenth century, with profound implications for the female detective figure. In particular, Vadillo notes the transformation of vision and its “uprooting” from a stable point of view—omnibuses, trams, and Underground trains altering the (female) commuters’ optical field. Passengers become observers, creating unprecedented opportunities for surveillance and detection (Vadillo 34). I contend that this “vehicular panorama” enables a gaze that is equally long-range. (36). Unsurprisingly, Hilda Wade and Georgina “Lois” Cayley voyage across Europe and into Rhodesia, Egypt, and India, posing or employed as nurses, journalists, photographers, professions where increasingly the agentive/observant eye is the woman’s. However, I query how the detective’s clarity of sight, that penetrates social pretentions and criminal tendencies in the metropolis, becomes obscured by and weighted with racial assumptions. How may Cayley and Wade’s forays into autonomy be read against emerging definitions of “Britishness” and the “Savage Other?” Rewriting gender boundaries and expectations in the “home country” as a prominent New Woman writer, does Allen’s stereotypical thinking blunt the edge of the sleuths’ gifts of divination? Paying particular attention to cover art, in-text illustrations, and transnational print networks, I spotlight Allen’s whiting out of history and cultural context, focusing on his complicity in Britain’s propaganda machine and its “civilizing mission” in its foreign territories.