D.A. Miller; In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (1988) by Jenny Bourne Taylor; 'What is 'Sensational' About the Sensation Novel?' by Patrick Brantlinger in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37 (1982).
220 Joseph Stapleton's book . . . Rowland Rodway. It cost 7s.6d. a copy.
220 It was as if the domestic angel . . . bloodthirsty ghoul. Other writers had noticed women's enthusiasm for brutal crimes. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, for instance, argued in England and the English (1833) that it was women who showed 'the deepest interest over a tale or a play of tragic or gloomy interest . . . If you observed a balladvender hawking his wares, it is the bloodiest murders that the women purchase.'
221 Stapleton suggested that . . . corrupting sins'. As a physician, Stapleton would have been familiar with essays like Benedict Morel's Treatise on the Degeneration of the Human Species, serialised in the Medical Circular in 18 57, which argued that the sins of parents were visited on their children in the form of physical weaknesses.
221 Mansel, too, cited the Road Hill murder . . . and adultery. In 'Manners & Morals', Fraser's magazine, September 1861.
221 Its influence was evident . . . Aurora Floyd (1863). 'I think of a quiet Somersetshire house-hold in which a dreadful deed was done,' says the narrator of Aurora Floyd, 'the secret of which has never yet been brought to light, and perhaps never will be revealed until the Day of Judgement. What must have been suffered by each member of that family? What slow agonies, what everincreasing tortures, while that cruel mystery was the 'sensation' topic of conversation in a thousand happy home-circles, in a thousand tavern-parlours and pleasant club-rooms.'
In the 1950s the popular historian Elizabeth Jenkins wrote an essay on the ways in which the Kent family story influenced Charlotte Yonge's novel The Young Step-Mother; Or, A Chronicle of Mistakes (1861). The stepmother of the title marries into the Kendal family, and faces resistance from a sulky adolescent stepdaughter, four of whose siblings have died in childhood. The stepdaughter accidentally knocks unconscious her half-brother, a three-year-old who is 'a marvel of fair stateliness, size and intelligence'. Jenkins subsequently discovered that most of the novel was published in serial form in the first half of 1860, before the Road Hill murder. Her mistake serves as a caution against seeing the influence of Road Hill everywhere; though Jenkins pointed out that the fact that the novel preceded the murder could make the similarities seem stranger still.
222 The novelist Margaret Oliphant . . . taste or morals.' From 'Sensation Novels', an unsigned review in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine of May 1862.
222 A year later she complained . . . modern fiction'. In the Quarterly Review of April 1863.
222 bestsellers in 1861. Curiosities of Crime in Edinburgh and The Sliding Scale of Life, both published in 18 61 – the first sold 20,000 copies in three months, according to an article in The Times in July that year.
223 'The modern detective is generally at fault . . . low and mean.' From 'Crime and its Detection', an unsigned article by Thomas Donnelly in the Dublin Review of May 1861.
223 The word 'clueless' . . . in 1862. The phrase was 'clueless wanderings in the labyrinth of scepticism', according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
223 'a cowardly and clumsy giant. . . who comes in his way'. Published on 25 October 1863 and quoted in Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830–1870 (1999) by Wilbur R. Miller.
223 In the Saturday Review . . . middle-class crimes. In 'Detectives in Fiction and in Real Life', Saturday Review, June 1864.
224 This establishment . . . Anglican Church. See Wagner of Brighton: The Centenary Book of St Paul's Church, Brighton (1949) by H. Hamilton Maughan.
224 His friend Detective-Inspector . . . in charge of the department. From the census of 18 61, Thornton's death certificate, MEPO 4/2 (a register of deaths in the Metropolitan Police) and MEPO 4/333 (a register of admissions and promotions). The detective division had expanded a little but was still only about twelve men strong, in a force that now boasted some seven thousand officers.
224 In September 1862 . . . the Tsar's family. See MEPO 2/23, the Metropolitan Police file of 1862 on aid given to the Russian government to reorganise the Warsaw police. Joseph Conrad's father, Apollo, had been a leader of this insurgency until 1861, when he was arrested and exiled to Russia.
224 Superintendent Walker. Walker was with the detectives when they met Dickens in 1850 – Dickens dubbed him 'Stalker'. He was not himself a detective but a member of the Commissioner's office.
225 On 18 March 1864 . . . 'congestion of the brain. See MEPO 21/7, Metropolitan Police retirement papers.
225 'protracted mental tension.' From A Practical Treatise on Apoplexy (with essay on congestion of the brain) (1866) by William Boyd Mushet.
