Macmillan studies in Victorian literature
1 total work
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".