Detecting the Victorians

Abstract

Neo-Victorian fiction presents the process of recovering the Victorian past as similar to that of a detective solving a case; ‘clues’ from the past need to be interpreted in order to make sense of ‘what really happened’. Many neo-Victorian texts adopt the trope of detective fiction, most obviously in encouraging the reader to identify the intertextual traces of Victorian fictions. In A. S. Byatt’s Possession, the reader is further encouraged to take on the role of the detective as they, like the questing academics within the novel, interpret the textual remains of the past in order to uncover what happened between the two nineteenth-century poets. In dealing with how we can know and narrate the Victorian past, most neo-Victorian fictions adopt the analogy of the historian as a detective, but in those novels that explicitly adopt the forms and conventions of detective fiction, an analogy is also drawn between the detective and the historical novelist.¹ Colin Dexter’s The Wench is Dead (1989) and Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George (2005) both work within the established conventions of detective fiction, although their approaches to the genre differ, as do the nature of the crimes they investigate. Detective fiction provides a way for these neo-Victorian novelists to explore questions not only of the possibility of knowing the past but also of the responsibility that the present owes to the past.