Great Porter Square: A Mystery by Benjamin Leopold Farjeon

Whilst contemporary reviews may have compared him to Dickens, the report of his death, reproduced above, suggest that he followed in the footsteps of two other writers, lesser known to modern readers: Emile Gaboriau (1832-1873) and Fortune du Boisgobey (-a nom de plume for Fortune Abraham-Dubois). Gaboriau and Boisgobey were writers of popular detective fiction. One might say that sensation fiction had paved the way for other genres of the novel where events are character-driven, such as detective fiction. From this small fact, it may be speculated that Farjeon developed his style to accommodate new popular trends. Michelle Perselle describes Farjeon as “at best a novelist of middling abilities, who achieved a modicum of success working in the sentimental realist tradition”, but she places her focus on: “how he partook of an incipient opportunity to construct a position for Jews as Englishmen in economic terms” (1999, p.203).  I am drawn to this author of sensation fiction and detective fiction, who was capable of promoting the standpoint of a discriminated against minority, without detracting from his popular appeal. It would be an interesting project to read his books in chronological order, the better to trace his authorial development against the various genres he utilised.

Self-identifying as a Jew, though non-practicing, Perselle describes him as seeking “a religious and ethnic neutrality” (1999. p.203) during a period of British history when this was not acceptable. She goes on to explore the manner in which Farjeon used the economics of empire and social ambition to make himself acceptable to society and help to pave the way for British-Jewishness to also fit the mould of being a Briton, generally, rather than as the ‘Other’. Where Jewish characters appear in his novels, such as Aaron the Jew (1894), he unashamedly promotes the propaganda of equality and value in objection to the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Aaron says, for example “the Jew, fairly treated, is a good citizen, obedient to the law and loyal to the head of state” (Perselle, 1999, p.205).  Farjeon wrote novels in which good triumphs over evil and (charity features as strongly as in Dickens’s work), and showing himself and his characters to be affirmatively patriotic, in opposition to the perpetuated antisemitic image of the Jew as dark, dangerous, and insidious.