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like Maisie Maidan would have heard and even used in India on a daily basis. And while it may sound like a name ‘of country parsonage origin’, it would normally be spelt ‘Maiden’ or ‘Madin’: ‘Maidan’ is unrecorded as an English surname.12 Like a number of Dowell’s American references, therefore, ‘Bramshaw Teleragh’, ‘Powys’, ‘Maidan’ and the Windsor Castle remark all seem designed to arouse the reader’s suspicions – though it is also true, conversely, that ‘Dowell’ is a surname which in the late nineteenth century had a specific association with Philadelphia and nowhere else in the United States.13 If Ford goes to the trouble of giving his narrator such an authentic Philadelphian surname, why does he also make him come across as an ‘imposter’ in some ways? And why do at least three of the novel’s other proper nouns sound questionable? A ‘dowel’ (while the dictionary is to hand) is ‘a headless wooden pin’ used to hold together the components of a structure, but because of his dubious nomenclature and a host of other problems, Dowell’s narrative does not hold together very tightly at all. Of course, whether this is because Dowell is constitutionally ‘headless’ and ‘wooden’, or because Ford was occasionally slapdash, is harder to say. But some of the elements of Dowell’s story are so inexplicably baffling or strange, the likelihood is that they were planted on him by the author in order to further encourage the reader to study everything Dowell says with the utmost care and circumspection, and to make us think even harder about what he might be keeping back. Dowell calls his trust of his wife ‘madness’, but there is plenty to suggest that it would be just as crazy for the reader wholly to trust him.

Dowell’s dubiousness is matched by his secretiveness. ‘I have a taste for good cookery and a watering tooth at the mere sound of the names of certain comestibles,’ he tells the reader. ‘If Florence had discovered this secret of mine I should have found her knowledge of it so unbearable that I never could have supported all the other privations of the regime that she extracted from me. I am bound to say that Florence never discovered this secret.’ And it is this same zest for concealment, presumably, which accounts for his reluctance to spell out the word ‘Marburg’ – there appears to be no other reason why he should refer to it as ‘M– ’ throughout his tale – providing further evidence that a man who frequently laments his inability to communicate may well actually relish non-communication.

Furthermore, although Dowell does his best to portray himself as a thin-blooded and undemonstrative man, we glimpse other sides of his character that are more disturbing. For example, the supposedly timid and genteel narrator tells us that when his old black valet dropped Florence’s ‘grip’ he attacked him: ‘I saw red, I saw purple. I flew at Julius… I filled up one of his eyes; I threatened to strangle him.’ Dowell has already admitted that he ‘hate[d Florence] with the hatred of the adder’ and that she lived in fear of him: ‘For that was really the mainspring of her fantastic actions. She was afraid that I should murder her.’ It is almost certainly this terror, Dowell is ‘convinced’, rather than the sight of Ashburnham kissing Nancy, which induces Florence to swallow prussic acid immediately after seeing her husband in conversation with Bagshawe, the man who once caught her leaving Jimmy’s bedroom in the early hours of the morning they (and old Mr Hurlbird) were guests at Bagshawe’s house in Herefordshire. It is, after all, in the event of this kind of exposure that she always has the prussic acid to hand. Dowell may wish to present himself as passionless, may even think of himself as passionless, but he is clearly a man with a great capacity for passion of one kind or another, a man more than capable of ‘the maddest kind of rage’.

Thinking hard about the reliability of Dowell’s narrative makes the reader chary of all acts of disclosure in the novel. Ashburnham’s goodness as a soldier, for example, looks distinctly less clear-cut when we bear