Hagar of the Pawn-shop was written by Fergus Hume. Hume (1859-1932) was born in England but grew up in New Zealand and moved to Australia to practice law. In 1886 he published The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which became the best-selling detective novel of the nineteenth century. But Hume did not retain the rights to Hansom Cab and did not become rich by it, and his later attempts to duplicate the success of Hansom Cab were not successful.

Hagar Stanley is a Romany. She is the niece of the miserly pawn shop owner Jacob Dix. While young Dix had taken a Romany wife, Hagar Stanley, and brought her to London. They had a son, Jimmy, but Stanley could not stand the air of London and died, and Jimmy grew up to be a brutal man and a scoundrel who left his father and took up with the Romany. Hagar Stanley was of the same Romany tribe as Dix’s wife, and was happy in the New Forest with the other Romany, but then Goliath appeared:

"He is half a Gorgio and half Romany—a red-haired villain, who chose to fall in love with me. I hated him. I hate him still!"—the woman's bosom rose and fell in short, hurried pantings—“and he would have forced me to be his wife. Pharaoh—our king, you know—would have forced me also to be this man's rani, so I had no one to protect me, and I was miserable. Then I recalled what the chal had told me about you who wed with one of us; so I fled hither for your protection, and to be your servant."¹

Dix is an awful person to be around, but he values her servitude and keeps her at his shop.

In a short time Hagar became as clever as Jacob himself, and he was never afraid to trust her with the task of making bargains, or with the care of the shop. She acquired a knowledge of pictures, gems, silverware, china—in fact, all the information about such things necessary to an expert. Without knowing it, the untaught gipsy girl became a connoisseur.²

Dix’s solicitor, the corrupt Vark, falls in love with Hagar and proposes marriage, but she sees that he is as much interested in Dix’s money as he is in her and declines the proposal. Vark believes that Hagar is as corrupt as he is, and he tries to get Dix to disinherit his son Jimmy so that Hagar will inherit Dix’s money. Vark has a letter forged which claims that Jimmy planned to kill Dix; as Vark planned, Dix has a fit when he reads the letter. The fit damages Dix’s health, but before he dies he alters his will to make Hagar his beneficiary. Hagar takes possession of the will before Vark can, intending to let Jimmy have his father’s money. Vark, stymied, then tells her that Jimmy is Goliath.

With Dix’s death Hagar takes charge of the pawn shop, and through the pawn shop she meets men and women in need of her talents at solving crimes and righting wrongs. Hagar’s first case involves Eustace Lorn, a “tall, slim, fair-haired and blue-eyed man”³ to whom Hagar is immediately attracted. She helps him track down the secret of his uncle’s wealth, and by the end of the story she has agreed to let him court her, but only if he finds Jimmy Dix for her. She wants to give the pawn shop to Jimmy Dix so that she can leave the city, but all her efforts to find him have failed, and she is stuck running the shop until he can be found.

In other cases she helps prove that an innocent woman did not commit murder; she deciphers a string of numbers, discovers a hidden painting, and secures a marriage; she uncovers the deception behind a ruined marriage; she stops a murderous diamond thief; and she defends a woman from blackmail. In some of the cases she is essentially an observer to the stories Hume wants to tell, including the revenge of some Chinese on Westerners who steal their sacred idols, and of a love triangle leading to murder.

In the final story Jimmy Dix escapes from prison and Eustace Lorn reappears, having become wealthy as a traveling bookseller. Dix saves Vark from a murderous convict, and Hagar gives him the pawn shop. She marries Lorn and the pair take to the roads as wandering booksellers.

Hagar Stanley is historically significant as the first major fictional female detective of color. There were a very few female Native American detectives in American dime novels, but Stanley was the first female detective in English literature who was not white, and appeared only three years after Headon Hill’s Kala Persad (see: The Divinations of Kala Persad), the first “ethnic detective” in English detective fiction. Stanley also “probably set the fashion for a touch of the bizarre in the field of twentieth-century female sleuthing.”⁴ Male detective characters during the 1900s and 1910s, before the advent of the pulps following the end of World War One, tended largely to imitate the major characters in the field, whether genteel men-of-action consulting detectives like Arthur B. Reeve’s Craig Kennedy (1910-1936, and ultimately derived from Nick Carter [see The Nick Carter Mysteries] rather than from Sherlock Holmes [see The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries]) or what Robert Sampson called the “Bent Heroes.”⁵ Female detectives, on the other hand, showed a degree of authorial creative variance unknown to their male counterparts, ranging from policewomen (like Baroness Orczy’s Lady Molly, 1909-1910) at a time when there were none–officially–to the superhuman (Richard Marsh’s incredible lip reader Judith Lee, 1911-1916).

The Stanley stories are also interesting as the culmination of the trend toward making Romany characters the heroes and protagonists of stories. Starting in the 1830s, with William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834) and G.P.R. James’ The Gipsey (1835), Romany were allowed to function in fiction both as villains–their traditional role–and as heroes, as in George Borrow’s The Romany Rye (1857) and eventually in Hagar of the Pawn-shop. Unusually, the Romany protagonist of Hagar is not only a woman, but she is allowed to remain both a Romany (rather than converting to Christianity) and a wanderer at the end of Hagar: “instead of Hagar being assimilated to conventional urban and commercial life, she and Lorn, who is not a gypsy, repudiate middle class existence for the pleasures of roaming. All other female detectives of the period remain in their social class during their investigations.”⁶ This rejection of middle-class assumptions about what a woman like Hagar Stanley would ultimately want was very rare in nineteenth century English mystery fiction. Similarly, by leaving the pawn shop for an itinerant life with a man of her choosing, Stanley, aware of the male oppression of the pawn shop life, “as her final decision she rejects the urban world predominantly populated by such males, choosing instead a freedom of definition beyond male constraints.”⁷ It’s true that the marriage plot (see: “The Lady Detective”) rears itself here, with Hagar leaving behind detecting for good: “I am Mrs. Lorn now, and Hagar of the Pawn-shop, with all her adventures, is a phantom of the past.”⁸ But Hagar, even as Mrs. Lorn, is in control of her destiny, is the active partner in the romantic relationship, and in general does things like abandon detection because it is her choice, not her husband’s.

But the modern reader will be most struck by Hume’s portrayal of London. In the 1890s the sentimentality with which writers like Dickens and Kingsley (see: The Water Babies) had treated London and its poor was being replaced by a new emphasis on objective realism and naturalism. Journalists like Henry Mayhew had told the truth about life en bas in London in the 1840s and 1850s, and their comments and complaints had been echoed by the casebook authors, but unvarnished fictional portrayals of London’s mean streets did not appear in mainstream literature, fiction and non-fiction, for several decades. George Gissing, in Thyrza (1887), was one of the first to do this, but it was in the 1890s, with Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1889-1903), Arthur Morrison’s Tales of the Mean Streets (1894) and Child of the Jago (1896), and W. Somerset Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth (1897) that the vogue for London at its filthiest and cruelest appears. Hume follows this trend, with the pawn shop acting as a metaphor for London as a whole:

The pawn-shop—situated in Carby's Crescent, Lambeth—furthermore resembled an ogre's castle inasmuch as, though not filled with dead men's bones, it contained the relics and wreckage, the flotsam and jetsam, of many lives, of many households. Placed in the center of the dingy crescent, it faced a small open space, and the entrance of the narrow lane which led therefrom to the adjacent thoroughfare. In its windows—begrimed with the dust of years—a heterogeneous mixture of articles was displayed, ranging from silver teapots to well-worn saucepans; from gold watches to rusty flatirons; from the chisel of a carpenter to the ivory framed mirror of a fashionable beauty. The contents of Dix's window typified in little the luxury, the meanness, the triviality and the decadence of latter-day civilization.

There was some irony, too, in the disposition of incongruous articles; for the useful and useless were placed significantly in proximity, and the trifles of frivolity were mingled with the necessaries of life. Here a Dresden china figure, bright-hued and dainty, simpered everlastingly at a copper warming-pan; there a silver-handled dagger of the Renaissance lay with a score of those cheap dinner-knives whose bluntness one execrates in third-rate restaurants. The bandaged hand of a Pharaonic mummy touched an agate saucer holding defaced coins of all ages, of all nations. Watches, in alternate rows of gold and silver, dangled over fantastic temples and ships of ivory carved by laborious Chinese artificers. On a square of rich brocade, woven of silks, multi-colored as a parrot's plumage, were piled in careless profusion medals, charms, old-fashioned rings set with dim gems, and the frail glass bangles of Indian nautch-girls. A small cabinet of Japanese lacquer, black, with grotesque gilded figures thereon; talismans of coral from Southern Italy, designed to avert the evil eye; jeweled pipes of Turkey, set roughly with blue turquoise stones; Georgian caps with embroideries of tarnished gold; amulets, earrings, bracelets, snuff-boxes and mosaic brooches from Florence— all these frivolities were thrown the one on top of the other, and all were overlaid with fine gray dust. Wreckage of many centuries; dry bones of a hundred social systems, dead or dying! What a commentary on the durability of empire—on the inherent pride of pigmy man!⁹

As Antonia Gîrmacea argues, the pawn-shop acts as a “mediator between the public and private spheres,”¹⁰ reflecting and negotiating the Victorian anxieties about the status of the domestic sphere, with the public sphere “seen as a place filled with danger and corruption which threatens the safety of the domestic space.”¹¹ The perceived degeneration of the public sphere ties in to Fin-de-Siècle Unease fears of the fate of the British Empire: as the public sphere was invading and corrupting the private, domestic sphere, so too would migration from the ends of Empire to its heart lead to reverse colonization, degeneracy, and the Empire’s eventual collapse.

Hagar of the Pawn-shop is moderately entertaining late-Victorian detective fiction, enlivened by Hagar Stanley’s attractive personality and by the collection’s historical importance.

¹ Fergus Hume, Hagar of the Pawn-shop (New York: F.M. Buckles, 1899), 19.

² Hume, Hagar of the Pawn-shop, 20.

³ Hume, Hagar of the Pawn-shop, 36.

⁴ Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan, The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University, 1986), 33.

⁵ Robert Sampson, Yesterday’s Faces: Glory Figures (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University, 1983), 96 ff.

⁶ Kestner, Sherlock’s Sisters, 119.

⁷ Kestner, Sherlock’s Sisters, 119.

⁸ Hume, Hagar of the Pawn-shop, 295-296.

⁹ Hume, Hagar of the Pawn-shop, 7-9.

¹⁰ Antonia Gîrmacea, “The Pawn-Shop as a Mediator Between the Public and the Private Sphere,” Studii si cercetari stiintifice. Seria Filologie 37 (2017): 167.

¹¹ Gîrmacea, “The Pawn-Shop as Mediator,” 169.