ABSTRACT
White-collar crimes committed or concealed within the confines of the Victorian home propel some of the most complex narratives of detection. The sensation novel's Domestic Gothic notoriously capitalizes on such incursions of the public into the private, of business into the intimacies of the family, quickly establishing plotlines that realist domestic novels of the mid-century then critically revaluate. The redirection of narrative strategies in Victorian popular fiction, in fact, was by no means a one-way infiltration of sensationalism into domestic fiction. The classic exponents of mid-Victorian sensation fiction, after all, allow the reader to partake of a fictional scandal that is revealed in the course of the narrative. Chase and Levenson suggest that in a climate of publicized scandal, "the Victorian investment in family life unfolds in the awareness that at any moment it can turn into the antifamily of popular sensation".
