Alongside the classic realist novel of the 19th century there developed a range of genres which seemed to subvert the formal and ideological characteristics of literary fiction committed to plausibility and truthfulness. One of these is sensation fiction, inaugurated by Wilkie Collins with The Woman in White (1860) and flourishing mostly in the 1860s (other famous examples are M E Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861). Sensation novels live on in several forms of popular culture, especially in modern mystery, detective and suspense fiction and films. Such novels always contain a secret solved by one or more of the protagonists, and this is echoed in a parallel development from the 1840s onwards: the emergence of the detective as a literary figure.
The Victorian period was one of ever-increasing prosperity and power for the British, but it was also characterised by social problems arising from the new industrial conditions, by doubts and hopes inspired by the new science and by debates about what constitutes crime and what punishment. Sir Robert Peel as Home Secretary brought in measures which developed a modern police force and created a modern bureaucratic state, and it was in this context that detective fiction as a literary form originated. With the introduction of the detective (whether policeman or civilian) as a literary figure, the representative of society who enforces the law on its behalf becomes the central protagonist of much narrative fiction. In Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) we encounter a professional detective, Sergeant Cuff, as well as several amateur sleuths, and it is not the professional who solves the mystery! The world’s most famous ‘consulting detective’, Sherlock Holmes, represents a unique type: he does not work for (though often with) the police force, but is very much a “professional”, who solves crimes according with the “science of deduction”. As a rule, he operates from the domestic interior of 221B Baker Street and the London streets, but in Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic story The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) the location is Dartmoor.
