‘A Criminal in Disguise’: Class and Empire in Guy Boothby’s A Prince of Swindlers (1897)

Abstract

In this chapter, I concentrate on Guy Boothby’s A Prince of Swindlers¹ — a contemporarily popular, yet now critically overlooked, collection of six short crime stories set in Calcutta and London, which appeared in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.² Boothby’s collection was serialised from January to September 1897 in Pearson’s Magazine, one of the many Strand-inspired family magazines that grew up in the 1890s. The following year it was issued in book form by Ward, Lock, and Co., the publisher renowned for The Windsor Magazine (where Arthur Morrison’s Dorrington stories appeared), as well as popular late Victorian crime novels such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Boothby’s stories detail the adventures of Simon Carne, an English master-criminal and master-of-disguise based in India, who travels to London at the time of the city’s Jubilee celebrations to commit a series of high-profile robberies.

The London criminal is certainly a dull fellow … This great and sombre stage is set for something more worthy than that.

Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’, 1146