‘A Touch of In’nard Fever’: Illness and Moral Decline in Elster’s Folly (1866)

The important relationship between illness and morality in the fiction of Mrs Henry Wood looms large in her 1866 novel Elster’s Folly. This article argues that Wood’s apparently conservative sensationalism, suggested by the presence of a moralizing narrator in many of her works, as well as by the conclusions to her novels, in which order is almost inevitably restored, in fact conceals a more subversive element in her fiction. In Elster’s Folly, transgression, and specifically sexual transgression, is figured as contagious (a common ploy in Victorian fiction), and a superficial reading would seem to reinforce the notion of Wood as a conservative sensation writer: a number of characters whose morality is in question fall ill and die, while moral health is clearly linked to physical health through Wood’s portrayal of the Countess Dowager, an immoral woman who suffers from an obsessive phobia of illness. However, the conclusion of the novel undermines this reading: the illegitimate daughter, unlike the illegitimate son, is not only permitted to live, but also retains the title to which she is not, in fact, legally entitled. In this way, Wood subtly undermines conventional Victorian morality through her representation of sin, illness and the family. Representations of illness proliferate in Victorian fiction, as a number of recent studies illustrate. In her work Somatic Fictions, Athene Vrettos notes ‘It is difficult to find many Victorian novels that do not participate in a general dialogue about sickness and health, whether through sustained representations of physical affliction and exertion or passing metaphors of bodily sensitivity and threat’. 1 This essay explores the association between illness and immorality in Mrs Henry Wood’s 1866 novel, Elster’s Folly, in an attempt to identify both the subversive and conservative elements of Wood’s work that mark her particular brand of sensationalism. Physical and mental illnesses are used in a variety of ways in nineteenth-century fiction: frequently associated with idealised images of femininity, in novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) illness and subsequent death highlights the self-sacrificing nature of women through the