After reading The Quaker City (1845) by George Lippard (1822-1854), which I blogged about earlier this year, I was intrigued to find at Amazon a novel titled The Mysteries of Florence by Lippard. I was surprised an American author would choose a foreign city as the subject for a city mysteries novel. However, it turns out The Mysteries of Florence is not a city mysteries novel at all. The first city mysteries novel was Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris (1842-3), and that was the work Lippard was imitating in writing The Quaker City. However, The Mysteries of Florence was probably written or at least begun before Sue began or finished The Mysteries of Paris, so the novel could not be influenced by the city mysteries genre. Further investigation revealed the novel was retitled from its original title The Ladye Annabel, or The Doom of the Poisoner: A Romance by an Unknown Author.
Who changed the title, whether for the ebook version I read published by Good Press in 2022 or an earlier edition, I do not know. But the novel is not at all aligned with the city mysteries genre, which is always set in a contemporary urban setting. Instead, The Ladye Annabel, as I’ll refer to it going forward, is set in medieval Florence circa 1200. The date is not given, but we can estimate the time period because the Count of Albarone in the novel has been on crusade with Richard the Lionheart, who died in 1199. The novel’s style is more akin to that of Mrs. Radcliffe, especially her earlier works like The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) or even Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), given its medieval setting. It is also mostly devoid of anything supernatural, with believed supernatural events later explained rationally, as was Mrs. Radcliffe’s method. That said, the novel contains plenty of seeds that would point toward Lippard learning his craft and later developing his masterpiece, The Quaker City.
According to Emilia de Grazia’s 1969 dissertation The Life and Works of George Lippard, The Ladye Annabel was Lippard’s first full-length novel. He published it anonymously, and to divert criticism, he claimed it was based on an ancient chronicle. The novel was serialized beginning November 29, 1843 in the journal Citizen Soldier; Lippard was its editor (p. 112). This conflict of interest explains his decision to publish the work anonymously, since he was then free to praise it and claim a large sum of money—$350—was paid for the rights to print it. It was later published in book form in early 1844 (p. 125).
Lippard actually wrote four works (per Wikipedia) before The Quaker City. I have not read them, but I would consider The Ladye Annabel, because of its flaws compared to the mature The Quaker City, a work all the more remarkable because Lippard was only twenty-three when it was published. He was only twenty-one when he began publishing The Ladye Annabel.
I consider The Ladye Annabel as juvenilia because the plot is weak and largely predictable, but mainly because some of it is not well developed. The book goes in directions we don’t expect at times and then gives us information we should have known much earlier. Sometimes the book suffers from wordiness and lack of clarity, yet there are some stunning moments.
The plot is rather complicated because of the large cast of characters. It begins when we are introduced to the Castle of Albarone near Florence. The castle has been owned for centuries by the Counts of Albarone. The current count, Julian, has just returned from Crusade where he served with Richard the Lionheart. He has a wife and a son, Adrian. He also has a brother, Aldarin, who is a scholar of the occult mysteries and the villain. Aldarin has a daughter, Annabel.
Early in the novel, Aldarin poisons his brother and frames Adrian for the murder. He does this so he can become count and marry his daughter, Annabel, to the Duke of Florence rather than have her marry Adrian, whom she loves. Aldarin also seeks to become immortal. He has been working on a formula for twenty-one years that will make him immortal, and he is just days away from completing his experiment when he murders his brother. Not long after, the eastern sage Ibrahim arrives to tell him the final secrets he must know to become immortal. But Ibrahim is really a monk in disguise, Albertine, who is part of the secret order of the Monks of the Holy Steel. He has befriended Adrian, but in disguise, he tricks Aldarin into believing he is helping him. In the end, Aldarin’s efforts fail, though for a short time he believes he is immortal. Eventually, he dies but proclaims he will still be part of the “Awful Soul” and live forever in spirit form. His ashes are spread throughout the earth by the wind so that he is unable to regain physical form.
Aldarin is definitely the most interesting figure in a novel filled with undeveloped characters. He is very much a typical Gothic wanderer, one seeking immortality and wealth, a Rosicrucian transgressor centuries before Rosicrucianism was founded, and while he does not specifically discuss the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone, those are what he seems intent on. He is interested in esoteric knowledge, having traveled to Palestine with his brother on crusade and there acquired occult knowledge. Of course, in the end, his quest is his downfall; his eagerness for knowledge to become immortal is what allows the protagonists to trick him.
The only other character of any real interest is the monk Albertine who leads the Order of the Holy Steel (or Monks of the Holy Steel), and we get the sense he is manipulating events behind the scenes, though it is not always clear what his motives or processes are.
Oddly, Aldarin dies at the end of Book 3 but the novel goes on with Book 4, in which we catch up mainly with what happened to Adrian after being arrested by the Duke of Florence for parricide. The Duke, who is Aldarin’s conspirator, plans to have Adrian murdered so he can wed Annabel. However, the Duke ends up tricked by Albertine and meets his own death. Adrian is supposedly murdered but is actually only drugged and buried alive in a coffin. The most powerful scene in the novel occurs when Adrian dreams while drugged that he awakes a century later to join a dance of the dead. He sees skeletons dancing in the tomb, including that of Annabel, whom he dances with.
Following his dream, Adrian tries to escape from the tomb. He has been locked up for days and is ravenous, and he is also surprised to find his arm wounded and bleeding. To nourish himself, he resorts to sucking his own blood. He also hears the groans of another, the man sent to kill him and who had wounded him but found himself also locked in the vault. Adrian does not save this man, but refreshed by his own blood, he gains the strength to figure out how to escape from the vault.
Adrian is soon reunited with Annabel. They are wed and crowned Duke and Duchess of Florence, but as the novel closes, the sky grows dark and Annabel hears a mysterious voice she recognizes as her father’s. He says all is now fulfilled since his daughter is Duchess of Florence. Annabel then says to Adrian:
“The corse, Adrian, the corse of my father—where doth it rest?”
“It hath no place of repose on earth,” was the solemn answer. “Given to the invisible air, the mortal frame finds nor home, nor resting place in sacred chapel, or in wild wood glade; but mingled with the unseen winds, floating in the atmosphere of heaven; on, and on forever wanders the earthly dust of the Scholar, denied repose on earth, refused judgment by heaven, condemned to the eternal solitudes of the disembodied spirit; on, and on it wanders seeking companionship with the mighty soul of Aldarin!”
The novel ends with an invisible voice saying, “It is finished.”
This odd ending plays off Christ’s last words after he is crucified. However, Aldarin is a reverse Christ figure. He has also become spirit like Christ, but he remains a Gothic Wanderer figure akin to the Wandering Jew since his earthly dust continues to wander.
The Ladye Annabel has many faults, its greatest being its clumsy structure and dragging on too long. Once Aldarin dies, the reader expects a quick resolution that is not provided, and yet the most powerful moments occur in Book 4.
Another fault is Lippard’s failure to foreshadow properly or give us reason for events in the proper place. For example, not until Chapter 10 of Book 4 are we informed that Florence has experienced bloodshed for three years, which is why the Monks of the Holy Steel formed—so they can overthrow the Duke. It is rather late then to tell us the Duke has been a bad person for years since we only see him acting in an evil manner because he wants to wed Annabel.
Given that the novel was renamed The Mysteries of Florence, it does not live up to the level of mystery one might expect. We almost always know the characters’ motives and actions with few surprises along the way. There were a few, such as when Aldarin reveals to the page Guiseppo that he is his illegitimate son only to get him to stab the returned crusader Geoffrey the Longsword, and then have Guiseppo learn that Geoffrey is his real father. Fortunately, Geoffrey is saved from Guiseppo’s dagger by a piece of the True Cross he keeps on his person.
Another fault of the novel is that it is only in the footnotes that Lippard starts to suggest, and then well into the novel, that he is working from an ancient manuscript and retelling the story. He references a “Romancer” in the beginning of the book, but it is not clear there that the Romancer is his source for the story.
Such flaws are why I consider the novel Lippard’s juvenilia. A more accomplished author would have gone back and revised as they developed the story or would have planned it out better to begin with. Of course, part of the problem is the novel’s serialization, which prevented Lippard from rewriting earlier scenes, but that is all the more reason to have a strong outline worked out to write from, though in all fairness, even more accomplished serial writers like Sue, Dumas, and Dickens made things up as they went along.
Regardless of its faults, The Ladye Annabel is a very readable book, and while its plot is fairly complicated, it is not overly long, taking only about ten hours to read, compared to the typically one-thousand-page-plus city mystery novels. Fans of Lippard will want to read it to see the author of The Quaker City learning his craft. Truly, given the novel’s flaws, the far more polished The Quaker City is all the remarkable for being written immediately after The Ladye Annabel.
I remain astonished that I only recently learned of George Lippard, given his popularity in American literature at the time. Partly, his obscurity may be due to his untimely death at thirty-one, partly because his extremely popular sensational works were considered not really literature by later literary critics, but he was the friend of Edgar Allan Poe, who praised his work. I can understand that Poe’s works are shorter and, therefore, more accessible to students in American literature survey classes, but frankly, with a few exceptions, I’ve always found Poe’s works somewhat boring and lacking in purpose. Furthermore, Poe usually had European settings for his tales while Lippard was more revolutionary by using American settings—The Ladye Annabel being the one exception. I look forward to reading more by the author of The Quaker City, perhaps the greatest novel written between Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850).
I also hope to learn more about Lippard. Unfortunately, no full-length biographies or published studies of Lippard exist. Emilia de Grazia’s 1969 dissertation The Life and Works of George Lippard appears to be the most complete critical work on Lippard. It can be downloaded online. Like George W. M. Reynolds and many other nineteenth-century authors of Gothic and city mysteries novels, Lippard deserves far more attention than he has received. According to Wikipedia, he wrote more than two dozens books, an enormous achievement for someone who died of tuberculosis two months before his thirty-second birthday.
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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition, Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City, and many other fiction and nonfiction titles. Visit Tyler at http://www.GothicWanderer.com, http://www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and http://www.MarquetteFiction.com.
The Gothic Wanderer 
It sounds like it partly belongs to the novels you discuss in Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides — so there were American
versions of this kind of book.
Yes, there are many American versions of the City Mysteries Novels. Lippard’s The Quaker City was the first. Ned Buntline wrote one about New York and later ones followed. I haven’t read Ned Buntline’s yet, but plan to in the near future.