Fingersmith

Cover of the U.S. edition of Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (Riverhead, 2002). Image source: Underground Books on Abebooks.com

The story may sound familiar to anyone who has seen Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden (2016): a man plots to cheat a sheltered heiress out of her inheritance by marrying her, getting control of her money, and then committing her to an insane asylum. To further his scheme he recruits a young woman, a thief, to go to work under a false identity as the heiress's maid and become her confidant and advisor. Contrary to plan, the maid falls in love with the heiress. But who will wind up betraying whom?

Park's film was based on Sarah Waters' third novel, Fingersmith (2002). "Finger-smith" is 19th-century slang for pickpocket or petty thief, but it has the broader connotation of someone adept with their fingers, which can also be interpreted sexually (as Waters, whose first novel also had a Victorian slang title with a sexual meaning, Tipping the Velvet (1998), surely intended).

From Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1937, p. 277. [1] Image source: Internet Archive

Fingersmith is set around the time of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860), from which, along with his Fallen Leaves (1879) and The Dead Secret (1857), as well as Dickens' Oliver Twist (1838), the novel draws elements of its plot.

Sue Trinker, an orphan who has just turned 17, has been raised in Mrs. Sucksby's Lant Street lodging-house in London's gritty Southwark. Lant Street existed at the time the novel is set, and still does. In the 1860 map below, it is outlined in blue.

Smith's New Map of London (detail) showing Lant Street, by C. Smith & Son, 1860. Image source: Library of Congress

Lant Street was where, in the mid-1820s, an impoverished 12-year-old boy lodged in an attic room so that he could visit his father in Marshalsea Prison, just a few hundred yards away across the Borough High Street next to St. George the Martyr Church. [2] His father was imprisoned for debt—a sentence that could end only after the debt was paid—and the boy sustained himself as far as he was able by working grueling hours in Warren's Blacking Factory across the River Thames at Hungerford Stairs. As you may have realized, the boy was named Charles Dickens. He would later write a novel, Little Dorrit (1857), which features a father imprisoned in Marshalsea for debt and a child, his youngest daughter Amy, who works long days as a seamstress to support both herself and him.

Illustration by Phiz (H[ablot]. K[night]. Browne) on the title page of Dickens' Little Dorrit showing Amy leaving Marshalsea Prison. The Chapman & Hall edition has no date, but the illustration is from the first edition published by Bradbury & Evans in 1857. Image source: HathiTrust

So Waters does not choose Lant Street at random as the location for Mrs. Sucksby's house. And as her Dickensian name suggests, Mrs. Sucksby is a baby-farmer, a woman who takes in other women's (often illegitimate) children for a fee. Sue herself was one; her mother never returned because, as Mrs. Sucksby has told her, her mother was a thief, and was arrested, convicted and hanged for a stabbing death that took place during a robbery.

As Sue relates of her life in Lant Street in Part One of the novel,

All about me other infants came, and stayed a little, then were claimed by their mothers, or found new mothers, or perished; and of course, no-one claimed me, I did not perish, and instead I grew up, until at last I was old enough to go among the cradles with the bottle of gin and the silver spoon, myself. (pp. 11–12)

Gin, laudanum or paregoric (both of the latter were solutions of opium in alcohol) were often used by baby-farmers to quieten a baby's cries of hunger. It's an early hint to the reader of what lies beneath Mrs. Sucksby's genial and matronly demeanor.

"Baby-Farming," British Medical Journal, 21 December 1867. [3] Image source: HathiTrust.org

Sue has not only survived, she has become a favorite of Mrs. Sucksby's. Like her compatriots in the household, the lodger couple Jack and Dainty, she has been trained from childhood as a beggar and pickpocket and sent out into the streets of London. The money, handkerchiefs, rings, and watches they bring home to Mrs. Sucksby are sold on to Mr. Ibbs, a dealer in stolen goods whose locksmith shop occupies the ground floor of the lodging-house. Stealing is a dangerous business: in the 1850s and -60s children caught stealing could be sentenced to months of hard labor, while as they grew older the penalties could stretch into years. (For children, hard labor and reformatories had replaced the punishment of confinement to prison hulks and transportation to a penal colony that were common in the 1830s, when adult thieves could be hanged.)

"Oliver amazed at the Dodger's mode of going to work." Illustration by George Cruikshank for Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837–39). Image source: Internet Archive

Richard Rivers, a thief, card-sharp and con man known as "Gentleman" because he claims to be the disowned son of a lord, is also part of Mrs. Sucksby's criminal family. One night he comes to Lant Street with some news. He's discovered the existence of an orphaned young woman, Maud Lilly, who lives on the crumbling estate of Briar as the ward of her uncle. The uncle collects books and prints, and has hired Gentleman, who has certain artistic talents, to come live at Briar and prepare his precious prints to be bound into albums. While there, Gentleman has discovered that Maud stands to inherit £15,000 if she marries—but will be left penniless if she remains unwed.

Back at Lant Street Gentleman outlines his plan: on his recommendation, Sue will be hired as a lady's maid to Maud; once she gains Maud's confidence, she will encourage her to trust in Gentleman's assurances and agree to his plan to elope. After they are married, Gentleman will dispose of Maud by committing her to an insane asylum, pay Sue £2000 (or so he says), and keep the rest of Maud's inheritance for himself.

Dainty looked at him then. . .She said, in a whisper:

"Ain't it terribly wicked, Gentleman, what you mean to do?"

I don't believe any of us had thought it, before that moment. Now Dainty said it, and I gazed about me, and nobody would catch my eye. (p. 28)

But after bargaining her share up to £3000, Sue agrees—an early sign to the reader, along with her dosing the babies with gin, that Sue has been in training to become another Mrs. Sucksby.

Once Sue agrees to play a role in Gentleman's scheme, things move rapidly. For the first time in her life she travels out of London, arriving at looming mansion of Briar on a cold, dark, windswept night (Waters employs the Gothic tropes effectively and knowingly). Sue has come to serve Maud with the intention of betraying her, but as time passes she discovers a sympathy for a fellow orphan that grows into a stronger emotion. One night in bed together the innocent Maud asks Sue to instruct her in a wife's duties to her husband on her wedding night. An embrace leads to a kiss that leads to another, and the women spend an impassioned night together.

But unbeknownst to Sue, Maud is not quite as pure a lily as her name implies. Her uncle's books are pornographic, and since the age of 12 she has been made to read them aloud to gatherings of his fellow aficionados. Now, at 17, Maud sees Gentleman as her first means of escape from her uncle's obsessions; but at the same time she also perceives his essentially fraudulent nature. So while Gentleman spends his time with Maud trying to seduce her, she pretends to be a demure, naïve girl who is hesitant to accede to his wishes.

Title page of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure Vol. I [by John Cleland], "From the original corrected edition with a set of elegant engravings," London, 1766. Image source: Internet Archive

After her night with Sue, which was initially part of this charade, Maud is torn. But she realizes that her newly awakened feelings for Sue will have to be suppressed if she is to elope with Gentleman and claim her inheritance. Sue is also deeply conflicted, but to escape her own prison of poverty and danger she steels herself to carry out Gentleman's plot and help him condemn Maud to spend the rest of her life in a madhouse.

Waters writes energetically and vividly about life in mid-Victorian London, the vitality of the teeming city contrasting with the hunger and poverty of so many living there. Among those who must eke out an existence on the margins, Waters portrays camaraderie and solidarity, but also duplicity and treachery, and a casualness about human life perhaps to be expected in those for whom it is generally nasty, brutish and short.

She has mastered the art of the dramatic dilemma and the startling plot twist as well as any of her Victorian models: deceptions abound, and none of the main characters turns out to be quite what they seem. She also provides her characters with comprehensible, if criminal, motives for their often-abhorrent actions in the brutal struggle for survival. Waters' deployment of tropes from sensationalist novels is expert, and shows her deep immersion in and profound enjoyment of her Victorian predecessors. Fingersmith is highly recommended, and sure to be one of my favorite books of 2025.

Coda: The 2005 BBC TV series

Sally Hawkins (Sue), Elaine Cassidy (Maud), and the back-silhouette of Rupert Evans (Gentleman) in Fingersmith.

In 2005, Fingersmith was adapted as a three-episode BBC TV series starring Sally Hawkins (Zena Blake in Tipping the Velvet, 2002) as Sue Trinker, Elaine Cassidy (Katherine Glendenning in The Paradise, 2012–13) as Maud Lilly, Rupert Evans (Frank Churchill in Emma, 2008) as Gentleman, Charles Dance (Mr. Tulkinghorn in Bleak House, 2005) as Maud's uncle Christopher Lilly, and Imelda Staunton (Miss Pole in Cranford and Return to Cranford, 2007–09) as Mrs. Sucksby. It was adapted by Peter Ransley and directed by Aisling Walsh (Miss Austen, 2025).

As this list suggests, the casting is spot-on. Hawkins is a superb actress, of course, but everyone is perfectly suited to their roles. (Charles Dance is an even creepier and more domineering Uncle Christopher than in the novel, where he is a somewhat shadowy character.) The locations evoke almost too viscerally the crowded slums of Victorian London and the decaying grandeur of Briar. And Aisling Walsh's direction brings out many fleeting subtleties and nuances in the interactions among the characters. Brilliant work all around—but I recommend seeing it after you've read the novel.

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1. Abbreviations used in Partridge's Dictionary of Slang: C: century; low: low slang; Vaux: sourced from J.H. Vaux's "Glossary of Cant, 1812"; c: cant, or underworld slang; — 1823: in use before 1823; ob: obsolescent; Egan's Grose: sourced from Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, edited by Pierce Egan, 1823. For a definition of "tipping the velvet," see "velvet, tip the" in Partridge.
2. On the map St. George the Martyr is the black rectangle just above the word "Church" (for Church Street) to the right of the blue highlight box on the map; Marshalsea was the building just north of the church that begins at the first "R" in Borough High Street.
3. Mrs. Jagger was a baby farmer exposed in late 1867 under whose care during the previous three years several dozen infants had died of starvation. Charlotte Windsor or Winsor was convicted in 1865 of taking in and murdering an infant boy for a fee; "testimony revealed that Mrs. Winsor conducted a steady trade of boarding illegitimate infants for a few shillings a week or putting them away for a set fee of 3 to 5 pounds." From "Bastardy and Baby Farming in Victorian England" by Dorothy L. Haller, p. [6].