Late Victorian Crime Fiction In The Shadows Of Sherlock C Clarke by C. Clarke 9780230390546, 9781349351305, 0230390544, 134935130X instant download after payment.

This book examines crime fiction in the years 1886–1900, a formative and fascinating period in the history of the genre. The 1880s and 1890s have been termed the ‘First Golden Age of Detective Fiction’ (Smith, Golden iii). These were the years in which detective fiction firmly established itself as a genre and sealed its popularity with the reading public.1 At this time the very first print article to refer to detective fiction as a separate genre was also published. The piece — entitled simply ‘Detective Fiction’ — informed readers that the ‘demand’ for detective fiction was ‘great and increasing’, and that the genre was one of ‘the greatest successes of the day’ (749). Indeed, thousands of detective stories and novels were produced in these years, eagerly consumed by the new mass literate readership brought about by the passing of Forster’s Elementary Education Act in 1870. As a clerk employed at one of London’s many W.H. Smith railway book stalls told an interviewer for the Speaker magazine in 1893, ‘Any detective story, whatever its merits might be, I could sell from morning till night’ (‘A Literary Causerie’ 383). Chapter 1 focuses on Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), 1 a ‘Christmas crawler’ produced by Robert Louis Stevenson in answer to his publisher’s request for something sensational for the 1885 Christmas literary marketplace (Stevenson, Jekyll and Hyde xvii). The novel, recounting a respectable doctor’s transformation into a hideous criminal, was published in January 1886. Early reviews were extremely  positive — writing in the Saturday Review, Andrew Lang called the novel ‘excellent and horrific and captivating’; likewise, for The Times it was a ‘finished study in the art of the fantastic’ comparable to classic works such as ‘the sombre masterpieces of Poe’ (Lang, ‘Stevenson’s New Story’; ‘Strange’). Indeed, it created an immediate sensation — selling over 40,000 copies in its first few months and running to seven...