SOURCE: Thomas, Ronald R. “Victorian Detective Fiction and Legitimate Literature: Recent Directions in the Criticism.” Victorian Literature and Culture 24 (1996): 367-79.

In the following essay, Thomas asserts that Victorian attitudes toward crime fiction persist in twentieth-century criticism.

From its first appearance—usually traced to Edgar Allan Poe in America and to Charles Dickens in England—critics have viewed detective fiction with a suspicious eye. Anthony Trollope condemned its unrealistic preoccupation with plots that were too complex and characters that were too simple. Mrs. Oliphant warned about the dangers of its implicit celebration of criminality and rebelliousness. Henry James regarded it and its twin, the sensation novel, as “not so much works of art as works of science.” Indeed, some of the most ardent articulations of the aesthetic and moral attributes of high Victorian realism were occasioned by anxiety over the cheap effects and immense popularity of nineteenth-century detective and...