ABSTRACT
In this chapter I begin with the classic style of conspiracy-two or more people secretly united for an illegal or morally dubious act-and focus on one of its more popular nineteenth-century configurations, what I call the Conspiracy to Defraud. On the surface the Conspiracy to Defraud is a simple phenomenon, and, in the narratives I consider, its key elements vary little: A young woman inherits or prepares to inherit a fortune; two men (or a man and a woman), one of whom courts the young woman, conspire to defraud her of her fortune. Sometimes the men work alone; sometimes they use henchmen. The degree of conspiratorial success depends on the narrative in which the Conspiracy to Defraud appears. That said, in this chapter I shall not be concerned with the permutations of the conspiracy itself, but rather with the psychological and emotional responses that the Conspiracy to Defraud elicits from its victims, from its conspirators, and (in one special case) from the reader. Further, although I will look at this Conspiracy to Defraud in three nineteenth-century novels-Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady-I shall concentrate almost exclusively on The Woman in White.
