The sensation novel teems with “ladies in peril”, vulnerable women and girls who are victims on a grand scale. Mayhew’s interviewees include hawkers, vagrants, orphaned children: figures on the edges of mainstream culture but with a complex culture of their own. What appealed to me about these worlds was the room they give to marginalised voices, the way they overturn our stereotypes of Victorian gentility. The first was that of working-class life as it emerges from the interviews carried out by journalist Henry Mayhew for his brilliantly evocative book London Labour and the London Poor the second was that of “sensation” fiction, the blockbuster genre established in the 1860s by novelists such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, whose tales of gothic melodrama revel in themes of domestic violence, secrets, and lost and shifting identities. It shares their 19th-century setting, but it was inspired by two particular Victorian worlds. F ingersmith was my third novel, after Tipping the Velvet and Affinity.
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