Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction: Contexts

   1. Introduction: Contexts

      • Lawrence Frank

      Pages 1-26

3. Edgar Allan Poe

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 27-28

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   2. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”: Edgar Allan Poe’s Evolutionary Reverie

      • Lawrence Frank

      Pages 29-43

   3. “The Gold-Bug,” Hieroglyphics, and the Historical Imagination

      • Lawrence Frank

      Pages 44-67

4. Charles Dickens

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 69-70

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   2. Bleak House, the Nebular Hypothesis, and a Crisis in Narrative

      • Lawrence Frank

      Pages 71-98

   3. News from the Dead: Archaeology, Detection, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood

      • Lawrence Frank

      Pages 99-130

5. Arthur Conan Doyle

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 131-132

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   2. Sherlock Holmes and “The Book of Life”

      • Lawrence Frank

      Pages 133-153

   3. Reading the Gravel Page: Lyell, Darwin, and Doyle

      • Lawrence Frank

      Pages 154-175

   4. The Hound of the Baskervilles, the Man on the Tor, and a Metaphor for the Mind

      • Lawrence Frank

      Pages 176-201

   5. Epilogue: A Retrospection

      • Lawrence Frank

      Pages 202-207

6. Back Matter

   Pages 208-249

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Frank investigates an intertextual exchange between nineteenth-century historical disciplines (philology, cosmology, geology archaeology and evolutionary biology) and the detective fictions of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle. In responding to the writings of figures like Lyell, Darwin and E.B. Taylor, detective fiction initiated a transition from scriptural literalism and a prevailing Natural Theology to a naturalistic, secular worldview. In the process, detective fiction sceptically examined both the evidence such disciplines used and their narrative rendering of the world.

• Arthur Conan Doyle
• Charles Dickens
• detective fiction
• fiction
• Victorian era
• British and Irish Literature

'Frank's Victorian Detective Fiction will appeal to historians of science and literary scholars... His analysis is extremely skilful, well written and convincingly argued'

- Anne Schwan, Journal of Victorian Culture

LAWRENCE FRANK is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oklahoma, USA. He is the author of Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self and of essays on nineteenth-century British and American literature and culture that have appeared in various collections and journals, including American Imago, the Dickens Studies Annual, Essays in Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Signs.

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