Dr. Phillips: a Maida Vale idyll (1887)

FRANK DANBY, Dr Phillips: a Maida Vale idyll (1887), with an introduction by Stephen Lock, London, Keynes Press, British Medical Association, 1989, 8vo, pp. xii, 285, illus., £45.00, abroad £49.00, incl. (air) postage from BMJ (Keynes Press), PO Box 295, London WC1H 9TE. Few Victorian novels come as directly to the point as Frank Danby's story about Dr Benjamin Phillips, a Jewish doctor with a large and profitable practice in Maida Vale. "He made money, bought a carriage for his wife, and Mrs Cameron for himself." Fat, stupid, German Clothilde gets her carriage, her emblem of respectability. He gets blonde, blue-eyed Mary Cameron. From then on, it's downhill all the way ("his character retrograded"). Adultery is compounded by feuds, remorses, a great deal of cheerful bitching, and, eventually, murder. First published in 1887, Dr Phillips has been reprinted-handsomely-by the Keynes Press because it is at once racy and a source of speculation about the career of Ernest Hart, editor of the British Medical Journal from 1866 to 1898 and supposedly the model for Phillips. Like Phillips, Hart was Jewish, and combined his editorial duties with a fashionable London practice. His first wife, Rosetta, died in mysterious circumstances. This, and other episodes, created plenty of scope for rumour. (Danby didn't have to invent all the cheerful bitching.) "Danby" was the pseudonym ofJulia Frankau, who specialized in sensational descriptions of Jewish or Bohemian life. Meeting her in 1911, Arnold Bennett found her "very chic"-and thoroughly ashamed of her novels. This one is notable chiefly for its portrayal of the medical profession. Phillips ends up as the prophet of a "new school" of surgeons whose "curiosity to unveil the mysteries ofnature" has bred an "absolute disregard for human life". They sound like an interesting bunch.