The Lodger

"Marie Belloc Lowndes is the sister of Hilaire Belloc. She wrote many, many novels. The only one we really know of now is The Lodger . This is because it’s been filmed about four times. The most famous film is Hitchcock’s silent film from 1927, where Ivor Novello starred as the suspected murderer. The book focusses on Mrs Bunting, who owns a house with her husband. They’re both ex-domestic servants and they’re struggling financially. They are desperate to keep their own house, but they haven’t been able to get many lodgers in. You see this from the opening scene, where there’s fog outside: they’ve closed their curtains to keep the heat in but also to hide from public gaze the fact they can hardly afford a fire. They are very fortunate because suddenly someone arrives to take the room. He’s a rather suspicious-looking man, called Sleuth. Very quickly, Mrs Bunting begins to think that he may be responsible for a series of murders of women that have been happening over the previous few months. They always happen on foggy nights. Her suspicions are raised because he always wants to go out in the fog, whereas most of us would want to stay in. The author is saying, “If you think someone is in your house who is responsible for these hideous crimes”—they’re loosely based on the Jack the Ripper murders—”what do you do?” Especially if you need his money. Mrs Bunting thinks her lodger is a gentleman, so he can’t possibly be responsible for these hideous crimes. But when it becomes obvious that he probably is, she wants to protect him from going out into the fog, to stop him from committing these murders. She sees him as part of her household. Mr Bunting, who’s a bit slower on the uptake, starts putting two and two together eventually, but they can’t discuss their suspicions openly that their lodger, who in the newspapers is named ‘The Avenger,’ might actually be responsible for these crimes. In the end, he disappears mysteriously, leaving some money which they agree to leave to the Foundling Hospital as they don’t want to be sullied by these crimes. The author was a reporter for W. T. Stead for the Pall Mall Gazette, which covered the Jack the Ripper crimes. The crimes were in the 1880s, and it seems that idea was always at the back of her mind. She was sitting at a dinner party and someone said, “I knew someone who was a butler who took in lodgers and he swore that one of his lodgers was Jack the Ripper.” So that’s where the story comes from. Every page is wreathed with fog, it just drips with fog. She uses it to create this atmosphere of suspense, suspicion, murder, mystery. Of course, this has set up the template for any depiction of Jack the Ripper, and so we almost inevitably see him emerging from a fog. But in reality, none of his crimes took place on a foggy night, and on only one night was it raining! This is all manufactured in people’s imaginations, it has no basis in fact. Yes. Most women wouldn’t have gone out on a foggy night because they couldn’t possibly know who was round the corner. An unaccompanied women was always in danger of being seen as a woman of the street. Especially if she was from the middle and upper classes, a woman would not be seen unaccompanied. In some ways, the fog provides a cover for women who want to try to pretend they’re independent. There’s a wonderful scene in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady where Isabel Archer decides to walk back to her hotel room in a fog. This is seen in terms of her being bold, being courageous. James describes it in very mock-heroic terms. She feels she’s really taking a risk. For other women, for other stories written about women in the fog, it provides them with a chance to perhaps meet the loves of their lives. Many couples might meet in a fog because they didn’t have a home where they could meet. A bench in a fog would conceal the fact that they were in love. Absolutely! When you read about it on the page, you can definitely get the reasons why the author is using the fog, what kinds of metaphors he or she is using the fog for. As I said with Dickens, it relates to corruption by money. In film it simply adds to the mystery and the suspense. It has now become an automatic signifier of a film or TV series set in Victorian London. Almost as soon as the gas lamps are shown on a foggy night, we know exactly where we are: a nineteenth-century street. I think authors use it in a much more complex way. If we want to go to the visual medium, let’s look at Monet. He came over to paint London fog, and he did many many versions of it. About thirty three to thirty five canvasses still exist. He painted it in many different colours as he saw it as different each time. He has views of Charing Cross Bridge in the fog and there’s a purple sheen, or there’s a green, or there’s a yellow. He treats it in a much more visually complex way. Many English artists living in London just saw it as a nuisance. Monet and Whistler came over to paint the fog, whereas all the English artists where trying to get over to the Mediterranean to paint with clear skies."