1st Edition

The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction

By Samuel Saunders Copyright 2021
256 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

256 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

256 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book re-imagines nineteenth-century detective fiction as a literary genre that was connected to, and nurtured by, contemporary periodical journalism. Whilst ‘detective fiction’ is almost universally-accepted to have originated in the nineteenth century, a variety of widely-accepted scholarly narratives of the genre’s evolution neglect to connect it with the development of a free press. The... Read more

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Victorian Policing and Victorian Periodicals

Part 1: Policing and Crime in Periodicals

Chapter 1: Periodical Discourse on Policing: c. 1850-1875

Chapter 2: ‘A Condemned Cell with a View’: Crime Journalism c. 1750-1880

Part 2: Memoirs and Sensations

Chapter 3: ‘"Detective" literature, if it may be so called’: The Police Officer and the Police Memoir

Chapter 4: ‘The Romance of the Detective’: Police Memoir Fiction and Sensation Fiction

Part 3: From Scandal to the Strand Magazine

Chapter 5: ‘...people are naturally distrustful of its future working’: The 1877 Detective Scandal in the Victorian Mass Media

Chapter 6: From ‘Handsaw’ to Holmes: Police Officers and Detectives in Late-Victorian Journalism

Conclusion

Index

Biography

Samuel Saunders holds a PhD in English from Liverpool John Moores University, which he obtained in 2018 after defending a thesis that examined nineteenth-century crime and detective fiction and its connections with Victorian journalism and print culture. He has published research in numerous peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Popular Culture, the Wilkie Collins Journal, Law, Crime and History, and the journal of the Open Library of the Humanities, and has co-edited a collection on sidekicks in crime fiction. Samuel has taught English at both LJMU and the Unviersity of Chester, has acted as a guest professor for the Ohio State University, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).