Christopher Pittard is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth, UK.

'... much to relish in a work that is both theoretically informed and rigorously grounded in primary research.' Times Literary Supplement '[This] extremely readable, wide-ranging text explores late-Victorian detective fiction’s engagement with nineteenth-century issues such as poverty, prostitution, vivisection, criminal anthropology, eugenics, medicine, and with criminality as moral pollution, atavism and disease... Pittard concludes that although the late-Victorian detectives are now largely forgotten, their influence remains; his masterly revisioning of their narratives, though, recognises the importance of these agents of purity and restores them to their proper place.' Review of English Studies '... this book is both a valuable account of its own period and a strong basis for further studies of the processes of detection, whether factual or fictional.' Literature and History

• (Mrs.) Hudson’s Soap: Reading Purity in Detective Fiction; Chapter 1 ‘A strange, inverted world’: Sensation and Social Purity in The Mystery of a Hansom Cab; Chapter 2 ‘Cheap, Healthful Literature’: The Strand Magazine, Fictions of Crime, and Purified Reading Communities; Chapter 3 A Criminal Man of Many Faces: Grant Allen and the Delinquent Body; Chapter 4 Studies in Scarlet: Detection, Medicine, Vivisection; Chapter 5 Tales of the Unintended: Reinventing Victorian Criminality; Chapter 101 The Eugenics of Genre;

Christopher Pittard is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth, UK.

'... much to relish in a work that is both theoretically informed and rigorously grounded in primary research.' Times Literary Supplement '[This] extremely readable, wide-ranging text explores late-Victorian detective fiction’s engagement with nineteenth-century issues such as poverty, prostitution, vivisection, criminal anthropology, eugenics, medicine, and with criminality as moral pollution, atavism and disease... Pittard concludes that although the late-Victorian detectives are now largely forgotten, their influence remains; his masterly revisioning of their narratives, though, recognises the importance of these agents of purity and restores them to their proper place.' Review of English Studies '... this book is both a valuable account of its own period and a strong basis for further studies of the processes of detection, whether factual or fictional.' Literature and History

• (Mrs.) Hudson’s Soap: Reading Purity in Detective Fiction; Chapter 1 ‘A strange, inverted world’: Sensation and Social Purity in The Mystery of a Hansom Cab; Chapter 2 ‘Cheap, Healthful Literature’: The Strand Magazine, Fictions of Crime, and Purified Reading Communities; Chapter 3 A Criminal Man of Many Faces: Grant Allen and the Delinquent Body; Chapter 4 Studies in Scarlet: Detection, Medicine, Vivisection; Chapter 5 Tales of the Unintended: Reinventing Victorian Criminality; Chapter 101 The Eugenics of Genre;

Christopher Pittard is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth, UK.

'... much to relish in a work that is both theoretically informed and rigorously grounded in primary research.' Times Literary Supplement '[This] extremely readable, wide-ranging text explores late-Victorian detective fiction’s engagement with nineteenth-century issues such as poverty, prostitution, vivisection, criminal anthropology, eugenics, medicine, and with criminality as moral pollution, atavism and disease... Pittard concludes that although the late-Victorian detectives are now largely forgotten, their influence remains; his masterly revisioning of their narratives, though, recognises the importance of these agents of purity and restores them to their proper place.' Review of English Studies '... this book is both a valuable account of its own period and a strong basis for further studies of the processes of detection, whether factual or fictional.' Literature and History

• (Mrs.) Hudson’s Soap: Reading Purity in Detective Fiction; Chapter 1 ‘A strange, inverted world’: Sensation and Social Purity in The Mystery of a Hansom Cab; Chapter 2 ‘Cheap, Healthful Literature’: The Strand Magazine, Fictions of Crime, and Purified Reading Communities; Chapter 3 A Criminal Man of Many Faces: Grant Allen and the Delinquent Body; Chapter 4 Studies in Scarlet: Detection, Medicine, Vivisection; Chapter 5 Tales of the Unintended: Reinventing Victorian Criminality; Chapter 101 The Eugenics of Genre;