The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

"In a Cellar" (1859)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

“In a Cellar” was written by Harriet Prescott Spofford and first appeared in Atlantic Monthly (Feb 1859). Spofford (1835-1921) was, for some decades, one of the most respected writers in America, although today she is remembered only by obscurists and scholars. “In a Cellar” was her first non-pseudonymical work, and is an early detective story.

“In a Cellar” follows the efforts of the nameless main character to recover a “diamond of wonderful size and beauty.”1 The stone had “wandered from the East”2 and passed through a variety of hands before being stolen from a jeweler by his assistant. The main character tracks it to an antique store and frightens the store owner into surrendering the diamond. But the diamond was due to be passed on to a suave foreign diplomat, the Baron Stahl, and when the time comes to deliver the diamond to its rightful owner the narrator discovers that the stone was stolen out of his waistcoat pocket. The stone appears on a ring on Baron Stahl’s finger, but the narrator knows who the Baron’s co-conspirators are, and eventually recovers the stone.

“In a Cellar” is an entertaining story, though it falls far short of the subtle enchantment of “The Amber Gods.” “In a Cellar” is written in the thick style of the mid-Victorians, which is slightly dated and has longer descriptions and more philosophical and speculative digressions than would appear in stories later in the century. But those are more than offset by the witty banter of the Parisian haut ton and the unraveling of the plot.

“In a Cellar,” famous in its time–Spofford “intrigued the nation” with it3–is most notable as a mystery. The main character is a retired diplomat, but in “In a Cellar” he acts as a detective, and the story makes clear that he has both done this before and that he is familiar with the Parisian police. The plot of the story involves the theft and recovery of a diamond. “In a Cellar” is not a pure mystery–it has a political conspiracy subplot, and the narrator is an amateur detective rather than a professional–but it is a departure from its predecessors. When Spofford wrote “In a Cellar” American writers of mysteries were most influenced by the casebook writers. There was the occasional haunted, aristocratic recluse in the style of Edgar Allan Poe (see: The C. Auguste Dupin Mysteries), but creating professional policemen who worked city streets was the common trend. The narrator of “In a Cellar” is different. He is of the upper class–not an aristocrat, but a gentleman of the world. He had formerly been sent on a "special mission"4 to the Parisian government, and after completing the assignment had resigned his post and stayed in Paris, finding it "the only place on earth where one can live."5 He is "old friends" with the police, having often done favors for them (and vice versa) and being willing to call them in when necessary. The detective is a cool man, intelligent and educated, and capable of gliding through the Parisian salons and underworld with equal ease. In “In a Cellar” he functions as a consulting detective, anticipating the type of character who would become popular later in the century (See: The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries). As a diplomat dabbling in the resolution of conspiracy–essentially espionage–he is a precursor to the thriller heroes of E. Phillips Oppenheim (see: The Mysterious Monsieur Sabin).

Spofford’s influences are various. The idea of the plot is ultimately from Poe, but the contempt for the intellectual abilities of the Parisian police and the thriller/political conspiracy elements are taken from the romans feuilleton; it is possible that Spofford was familiar with the work of Ponson du Terrail (see: The Rocambole Adventures). And the panoptical look at the crime, tracing its roots far beyond the detective’s initial involvement in it, is one of the hallmarks of the German kriminalgeschichte (see: Detectives, The Jew’s Beech Tree). Unfortunately, American writers and critics did not take note of “In a Cellar,” despite its immediate success, and Spofford’s mysteries were not obviously influential and were not imitated. This is a pity, as if they had been the American reading public would have been spared the work of later, much less enjoyable mystery writers (see: The Leavenworth Case).

“In a Cellar” has only been given the critical attention it deserves in the last twenty years, and it is now seen as arguably the first detective story written by a woman: “In British fiction, detectives exist in works by both male and female authors from the 1850s on—the work of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon comes most readily to mind—but these detectives are players in another genre instead of defining their own.”6 Interestingly, “In a Cellar” and “Mr. Furbush” both appeared in prestigious literary journals, meaning that the mainstream American literary audience in 1859 and 1865 were exposed to detective stories–this, years after the last C. Auguste Dupin story had appeared. It might be argued that Spofford did as much as the detective dime novels did to create a taste in the American reading audience for detective fiction; there were no detective dime novels published in 1859, when “In a Cellar” appeared, but detective stories were a mainstay in the dime novels in 1865, when “Mr. Furbush” appeared.

Of course,

Spofford did not create her detective stories in literary isolation. Aspects of her approach, such as making the perpetrator of the crime female, as she does in “Mr. Furbush,” are close to patterns in the sensation novels. The issue of Harper’s that published “Mr. Furbush” was also carrying an installment of Collins’s Armadale, with its focus on the psychology of crime and its depiction of one of sensation fiction’s most ill-famed female criminals in the character of Lydia Gwilt. The early appearance of “In a Cellar” and the two Mr. Furbush stories suggests that Spofford is not so much playing with detective story formulas and conventions as helping to establish and develop them.7 

“In a Cellar” is typical Spofford, which is to say entertaining and well-written, and worth reading for more than historical reasons.

Recommended Edition

Print: Harriet Prescott Spofford, The Amber Gods and Other Stories. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Online: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009952264

 

1 Harriet Prescott Spofford, “In a Cellar,” The Amber Gods and Other Stories (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 75.

2 Spofford, “In a Cellar,” 75.

3 Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1990), 3.

4 Spofford, “In a Cellar,” 71.

5 Spofford, “In a Cellar,” 71.

6 Rita Bode, “A Case for the Re-covered Writer: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Early Contributions to Detective Fiction,” Clues 26, no. 1 (Sept. 1, 2007): 24.

7 Bode, “A Case for the Re-covered Writer,” 25.