The mid-Victorian period saw the emergence of fiction in which the respectable middle-class home was the scene of crime. The book argues that domestic crime plots offered novelists a dramatic means of discussing the tensions resulting from the emphatic Victorian distinction between public and private spheres. Three major figures emerge as significant in this fiction: the policeman, the servant and the "lady". Their roles and modes of interaction are explored to reveal a repertoire of concerns about domestic privacy, and class and gender conflict. The landscape of domestic crime inherited by the Sherlock Holmes stories and later crime fiction, argues the author, originated in the use of crime plots by major novelists (such as Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope and Henry James) as well as those of sensation novelists which explore household tensions. Anthea Trodd has published articles on Victorian fiction and editions of "The Woman in White" (with Kathleen Tillotson) and "The Moonstone".
- ISBN10 0333452895
- ISBN13 9780333452899
- Publish Date 15 December 1988 (first published 1 December 1988)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 15 January 1993
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Palgrave Macmillan
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 192
- Language English