ABSTRACT
In the history of nineteenth-century social novels Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris is of crucial importance. Through Sue’s text readers came into contact with Parisian slums. Nowadays, it tells us more about nineteenth-century citizens’ fear of an unknown underworld and of an unsafe city than about the daily life of that period. As almost everywhere else in the West, Sue’s example was followed in the Netherlands. In this essay, I analyse how Sue’s representation of a Parisian underworld was transferred to a Dutch context in Johan de Vries’ The Mysteries of Amsterdam (1844). How did this adaptation relate to the debate on criminality and prostitution? And what does it tell us about the discourse on safety in nineteenth-century cities?
