Analysis of Caroline Clive’s Paul Ferroll

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 13, 2025

Caroline Clive’s popular novel Paul Ferroll was likely published at Clive’s expense, first advertised for sale in Publisher’s Circular. While Clive (1801–73) had published poetry, the novel was her first, and ultimately most successful, attempt at fiction. By March 1856, Paul Ferroll had gone into a fourth edition, and by 1859 had been translated into both French and Russian. It continued repeat editions through 1929 in the United States, then lost favor until its revival by certain academic courses and publishers in the late 20th century. A precursor of the 1860s wildly popular sensation fiction, it remains of interest in that respect, but also for its own merits, which include Clive’s unique dealings with the topic of murder and her inclusion of erotic male imagery.

The plot proves simple. A man named Paul Ferroll murders his first wife, Anne, lives a free and happy existence as a fine citizen for years, and only confesses his crime when another is accused of it. Even then, he escapes imprisonment and disappears into self-exile, never suffering punishment for his crime. Clive’s style is what proves of special interest, in that her narrative never moralizes about the murder, nor does Ferroll ever suffer any of the remorse or guilt that Victorian readers expected. Nor did he suffer the consequences his crime demanded. Other murderers in fiction of the day did suffer, leading readers to expect the same of Ferroll.

According to critic Charlotte Mitchell, William Makepeace Thackeray confessed to Clive that Becky Sharp, the notorious female protagonist of his novel Vanity Fair (1848), did murder Jos Sedley, although that fact was not expressed in overt terms for readers. However, they could surmise she had added murder to her long list of crimes against her fellow man, and they saw her ultimate fall from wealth and power as a fitting result. Other murder novels featuring punishment for murder that may have influenced Clive included William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1749) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram (1832). Like the protagonists of those novels, Ferroll commits a vicious murder that remains long concealed, but Clive includes no discussion about ethics, retribution, justice, remorse, or guilt as do Godwin and Bulwer-Lytton.

Another big difference, as Mitchell notes, is that the victims in the other novels proved detestable and, if not deserving of murder, at least were undesirables who would not be missed. But Ferroll’s victim remains not only an innocent but also one trusted to his care and protection.

Many reviewers expressed outrage over the novel, which seemed not only to excuse murder but also invite readers to admire the criminal. He did, after all, not profit from the murder, signing over his dead wife’s considerable fortune to her brother. Naysayers chastised Clive for apparently arguing that a man may plan and execute a ghastly murder but later live an exemplary and virtuous life. Some may have wondered at the degree of irony intended by Clive when she fashions Ferroll for a short time a writer, and also why she gave him a name she herself adopted in her early writing.

Also of interest to psychoanalytic critics is that Ferroll expresses an extreme male erotic energy with some sexual transference. He remains extremely possessive of Elinor, his second wife, a woman he had loved previous to his first marriage. He engages in bizarre fantasies, wondering, for instance, if his wife’s excessive kissing was on purpose to try to transmit cholera, something the two might share. Elinor understands that Ferroll craves danger “for stimulation,” and while waiting for his trial, he engages in extreme amounts of physical exercise. He enjoys contrasting his wife’s beauty and allure with the physical attributes of the ill, cannot stand children, ignoring even his own daughter, Janet, and during Elinor’s absence, once plunges his horse under a waterfall to help relieve his tensions.

While he does not abuse Janet, he neglects her: “the whole tenderness” of his “nature was centred on his wife; and anything that interfered with that passion he put aside.” He demands that Elinor devote herself entirely to him to the total exclusion of Janet: “He would have no nursing, no teaching, no summer day’s expedition. The nursery was Janet’s place, a governess her teacher; she came to her mother when her mother was alone.”

Clive’s diaries and collections of various newspaper articles reflect her interest in the macabre. She also took a great interest in letters her husband collected as governor of a lunatic asylum. The outburst against Paul Ferroll put Clive on the defensive, and she felt inclined to try to defend her character, later publishing a not-nearly-so-successful sequel titled Why Paul Ferroll Killed His Wife (1860). Readers of later generations would find nothing unusual in Clive’s interests or in a book not reflecting the Victorian belief that loss of one’s reputation equaled a loss of social status, a devastating effect of transgressions in that age.

The late 20th century observed a phenomenon in which much of English-speaking society began to celebrate fraud and even some types of violence if they led to monetary success. This change in moral outlook may make Paul Ferroll easier to accept as a representative human being today, particularly in a century that celebrates the antihero, a perfect fictional example being the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter created by Thomas Harris.

Bibliography
Mitchell, Charlotte. Introduction to Paul Ferroll, by Caroline Clive. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, ix–xx.