The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1898)   

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings was written by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace and first appeared in a set of ten stories published in The Strand (Jan-Oct., 1898). “L. T. Meade” was the pseudonym of Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith (1844-1914) and “Robert Eustace” was the pseudonym of Eustace Robert Barton (1854-1943). Smith is forgotten today, but in her time she was an important writers of detective fiction and one of the earliest and most prolific authors of girls’ school stories. Barton was a British doctor and mystery writer.

The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings is a secret society which first established itself in Italy in the eighteenth century and has terrorized that country ever since. In 1894, led by the their chief, Madame Koluchy, the Brotherhood spreads to England. Koluchy is “beautiful¼a scientist of no mean attainments herself,”¹ but she is also thoroughly evil and is responsible for a variety of unnamed wicked crimes. The narrator of the Koluchy stories, Mr. Head, fell in love with her in Italy in 1884 when she called calling herself “Katherine,” but he eventually grew frightened of her and fled from her and the Brotherhood to England, where he placed himself “under the protection of its laws.”² In 1894, Katherine appears in England under the name of "Madame Koluchy," a worker of wonder cures: “the rage of the season, the great specialist, the great consultant.”³ In this guise she insinuates herself into London's Society and becomes the talk of the town. When Mr. Head encounters her at a party he recognizes her almost immediately. She also recognizes him, and the duel between them begins almost immediately. Koluchy does her level best to carry out the (ill-defined) goals of the Brotherhood, and the plucky (though stiff) Mr. Head tries to stop her and save the lives of her victims. Among her other acts, Koluchy kills a prize racehorse by setting tsetse flies infected with encephalitis loose into the horse’s stable, destroys an antique Venetian glass by composing a waltz whose vibrations destroy the glass, and tries to murder someone through an overdose of x-rays. Head eventually succeeds in getting the police to try to arrest her, and Koluchy kills herself in a furnace.

The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings is only moderately entertaining. The stories read like a run-up to the much better The Sorceress of the Strand series, although the prose in Brotherhood is at least competent—Meade was never less than that. Madame Koluchy is neither as interesting a villain or transgressive an adventuress as Madame Sara, but she has her moments, and a woman who would inject an annoying, treacly young boy with “Mediterranean fever” is someone who deserves a certain amount of admiration.

The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings is far more interesting when considered in its historical context.

First, Brotherhood is about an international criminal conspiracy. There’s little chance that Meade and Eustace were aware of the work of Paul Féval (see: The Black Coats Adventures), which were the first novels to present an international conspiracy based not on an anti-authoritarian sentiment, as with the “Black Judges in Secret” in Rinaldo Rinaldini, The Bandit Chief (1799-1801), but on greed. More likely a large or perhaps the primary influence on the idea of a novel about an international criminal organization is the “Brotherhood,” the group Count Fosco works for in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1859-1860):

Although the series¼exploited current anxieties about criminal gangs, secret societies, and terrorist organizations, the authors may have been inspired in part by earlier accounts of the Carbonari, one of a number of secret political societies that emerged in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Carbonari (“charcoal burners”) developed an extensive international network promoting a “popular mix of revolution, mysticism and democracy” (Sweet 669). Wilkie Collins referred to the Carbonari as the “Brotherhood” in The Woman in White (Sweet 575); the buffoonish Professor Pesca and the villainous Count Fosco are both members of this powerful secret society whose real-life member included some of the founders of the modern Italian state. Additionally, Meade and Eustace may have been influenced by Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensational series The Black Band: Or, The Mysteries of Midnight (1861-62; rpt. 1876-77), which featured a secret political organization engaged in robbery around the world. Braddon derived some of her information from newspaper accounts of Italian political societies that financed their activities through extortion, robbery, and murder.⁴

By the time The Black Band was written, the idea of the Mafia as a specifically Italian, specifically money-oriented criminal organization had already taken hold of the American and European imagination. The liberation of Sicily from Bourbon rule in May, 1860, and the assumption of rule of the island and newly-unified Italy by the government of King Vittorio Emanuele, had led directly to the imposition of new taxes on the Sicilians, who were not welcoming of the taxes or of government’s new law requiring military conscription.

Rebellion against taxation and desertion from military duty quickly grew in the Italian South. The situation was particularly bad in the countryside: peasants, who had expected at least the redistribution of aristocratic and ecclesiastical estates, felt betrayed by the new nation. They had no intention of sacrificing the meagre revenues from their crops or the labour force of their youth to it. They preferred to evade taxes. They preferred to desert.⁵

By 1861 a “war” had begun between the Italian army, the tax collectors, and the tax-avoiders in the countryside, who were dubbed “outlaws” and “brigands” by the government. Over the next four years almost two-thirds of the entire Italian army was used in trying to maintain order in southern Italy. “The South was now under military siege and, in the new ‘war’ against brigandage, civil rights were suspended. The houses of alleged outlaws were burnt with no due process and their families imprisoned. Deserters were tortured and hanged and photos of their bodies were published in newspapers all over the nation to show the implacable might of the State.”⁶ 

The result of this was predictable: the swelling of the ranks of “outlaws” and “brigands,” the formation of a crude organization of the “brigands,” and national and then international attention being paid to the situation in southern Italy, which thanks to the press, “the criminology of Giuseppe Sergi and¼the anthropology of Cesare Lombroso¼[proclaimed] the existence of an essential racial difference between (normal) Italians and (criminally prone) southerners.”⁷ This racist perception of southern Italians and especially Sicilians was given a one-word hook to hang all of its assumptions and fears upon in 1863, when a successful play, Giuseppe Rizzotto and Gaspare Mosca’s The Mafiosi of the Vicaria, “was single-handedly ‘responsible’ for allowing the word ‘mafia’ to enter into circulation with the precise meaning of a set of behavioural practices that were against the law.”⁸ Braddon may not have heard the word “mafia” when she wrote The Black Band—Collins undoubtedly would have when he wrote The Woman in White—but in all likelihood she had heard of the organized “brigands” of southern Italy when she began writing the serial. Three decades later, when Meade and Eustace began writing The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, a number of books had been written, in Italy and internationally, on the Mafia—the first, Turrisi Colonna’s Public Security in Sicily, was published in 1863—and an 1887 French translation of an Italian book on the Mafia, Giovanni Verga’s Life in the Fields (original: Via dei Campi), translated by no less than Guy de Maupassant (see: “The Horla”), had become an international sensation--the subject had become a common trope, if not a cliché. So Meade and Eustace’s use of the Mafia should not be seen as an innovation, but rather as a continuation of a popular literary tradition.

Madame Koluchy herself is of note. Martha Hailey Dubose writes that Koluchy is “the first female master criminal,”⁹ a claim seemingly incredible but which is hard to rebut. Certainly Koluchy is the direct descendant of the women villains of the Gothics, characters like Victoria de Loredani (see: Zofloya: Or, The Moor), and of the women villains of sensation novels, characters like Lydia Gwilt (see: Armadale). But none of those were female master criminals. When female criminals appeared in the nineteenth century, most often they were either petty criminals, anarchists like Madame Felician (see: Rufin’s Legacy), monsters like Carmilla (see: “Carmilla”), or Fatal Women. Koluchy is, as Dubose wrote, the first female master criminal—no doubt inspired by the relatively recent appearance of male master criminals like Professor Moriarty (see: “The Adventure of the Final Problem”) and Dr. Nikola (see: A Bid for Fortune), but an innovation nonetheless for its use of a female rather than male criminal mastermind.

Too, Meade and Eustace made Koluchy medically knowledgeable, which added an extra menace to her threats and ties into

the late Victorian contest for medical authority between the figures of the doctor and the nurse¼the challenge of the female nurse to the authority of the male doctor was reflected in the challenge of the antivivisectionist campaign (often based in a feminist politics of identification whereby the animal on the operating table became the woman subject to the indignities of the Contagious Diseases Act) to a masculinist experimental physiology.¹⁰ 

As with a large number of commercial works of the Victorian age, The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings is of more interest historically than as prose.

Recommended Edition 

Print: L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings. Gloucester, UK: Dodo Press, 2009.

Online: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606121h.html