As Elaine Showalter, Paul Gilroy, Mary Louise Pratt, and R. C. J. Young have suggested, the late nineteenth century was a time when Englishness was fraught with difference, even in a state of racial and sexual anarchy. This suggests not only that Englishness (or indeed to be “Western”) was a less homogeneous and stable position than assumed by the British at the time. In addition to this, this anarchy and flux led to new hybrid forms of Englishness that transformed British society.

This process was recorded by, and is often studied through, literature. Thus, the writings of Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad can be perceived as attempts at resolving the constantly changing category of Englishness by either completely rejecting the Other (Stoker), or by finding (arguably failed) ways of including the Other in new forms of Englishness (Kipling, Conrad). However, some writers, such as Richard Marsh, seem to both reject and embrace the possibility of the Other. Thus, this paper seeks to demonstrate how Marsh’s fiction resonates with several concurrent yet conflicting voices through a reading of his gothic melodrama The Surprising Husband (1908). In the novel, which discusses miscegenation in early nineteenth century Britain in surprising ways, Marsh attempts to translate the racial anarchy that was prevalent in his society into a coherent narrative, but the text fails to hybridize on any level. Instead, I argue, Marsh negotiates the racial challenge to Englishness through a heterogeneous but not hybrid text where English and subaltern voices speak simultaneously. Marsh’s text thus maps the rifts that occurred in English society rather than the hybrid states that these rifts eventually produced.