This chapter traces how the sensation fiction of Dickens, Collins, and Braddon reveals a central mechanism by which the mystery genre moves from the unruly urban Mysteries narrative to the tighter, more single-stranded detective story. Each of these writers personify the Mysteries ¬in master-plotting characters who are then sensationally killed off. In Dickens’s Mr. Tulkinghorn, Collins’s Count Fosco, and Braddon’s Jabez North we can see caricatures of what, by the 1850s, would have been easily recognized as the urban mysteries’ excesses. These writers’ allegorical murdering of the urban Mysteries, however, allows for the rise of initially-minor detecting characters Mr. Bucket, Marian Halcombe, and Joseph Peters and provides new ways to think about mystery’s radical politics. As fictional mysteries begin to focus more on singular, heroic detectives, the genre’s social kaleidoscope moves inward to refocus on the words on the page in ways that encourage readers to exercise their close reading skills so as to better mind read characters. Also, as specific, unique detective characters triumph – despite their often initially-marginal textual and social positions – they too become powerfully allegorical.

November 1859 saw the publication and initial serialisation of some of the most influential and enduring books of the nineteenth century, including The Woman in White, which began serialisation in November; the first parts of Beeton’s Book of Household Management; Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help; and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The chapter considers the reception of Darwin’s work before looking at how each of these texts is centrally concerned with modes of change, and history. It argues that Beeton and Smiles show how custom can enable change, and that Darwin and Collins share an interest in a non-religious world-view that might in itself force change. All these texts also provoke questions of originality and adaptation, and raise the question of how far originality is actually a possibility. A Shakespeare burlesque shows how texts, along with custom itself, mutate over time.

Collins’s fiction often exposes the constructed nature of class and social identity by demonstrating how unstable such supposedly ’fixed’ identifiers are, most notably in The Woman in White and No Name.

An analysis of The Woman in White, arguing it presents a central ethical dilemma for both its characters and readers to resolve, and therefore the novel acts as an excellent example of ethical criticism

Collins focused on the experience and meaning of disability in a number of his novels