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Anne Perry: Victorian 'Istorian and Murdermonger Linda J. Holland-Toll In Daily Life in Victorian England, Sally Mitchell makes many cogent points, among the most interesting of which is: Many of us have vivid mental pictures of Victorian England: a Charles Dickens Christmas with a large happy family surrounding a table crammed with food [and] the dark and terrifying slums.... "Victorianism" remains a living concept in social and political debates, although its meanings are contradictory; it is used to describe exploitation and class division, sexual repression, hypocrisy, values of hard work and self help, moral certainties about family life, and a wide variety of arrangements intended to solve public problems. There is some truth in all of these ideas. (Mitchell xiii) If this description sounds very much like the setting of Anne Perry's Thomas and Charlotte Pitt detective series, there is good reason. The series accurately portrays the Victorian era after the War (1856) with the action occurring between April 1881 and March 1891. Anne Perry's main detective, Inspector Thomas Pitt, is assigned to investigate murders that take place in an artificial world of social privilege, where appearance is all that matters. Appearance is, quite literally, to die for. Charlotte's and her sister Emily's access to and understanding of this tightly circumscribed social world frequently provide Inspector Thomas Pitt with the necessary domestic and social knowledge he would otherwise lack to solve the crime, which is quite often an attempt to preserve appearances at the expense of any morality or common decency whatsoever. For this series to engage the reader, several plot constructions must be believable. The reader must accept the absolute importance of appearance, family, blood and position, the inability of the police to penetrate the facade erected by High Society, and most importantly of all, the actions of Charlotte Pitt and Emily, Lady Ashworth, her sister-in-sleuthing. To accomplish these rules of engagement, Perry has carefully grounded this detective series in late Victorian times, in the middle and upper classes, and speaks, in skillfully woven detective narratives, not only of issues extant in Victorian times but also to contemporary issues. She is extremely conscientious in following the historical chronology; each novel is carefully placed in an identifiable time frame, and each sequential novel reflects not 265 266 The Detective as Historian only changes in the Pitts' lives but also in the culture they inhabit. As Pitt gains promotion, their domestic life improves, and Perry's fiction makes the changes perfectly clear; the novels also faithfully record such changes in transportation, communication, politics, and daily living as occurred. Even a historically unaware reader can follow the narrative and understand the basic tenets of Perry's Victorian setting. One of the problems for a historically unknowledgeable reader, one steeped in the mores of twentieth-century American life, lies in accepting that a world so artificial and superficial could be important enough to commit murder to preserve. Is syphilis really the end of the world or someone 's sexual orientation an issue of enough importance over which to kill several people? Is owning slums really social ruin? To many contemporary Americans, no. In order, therefore, to engage the reader in the text, Perry must re-create the times vibrantly enough so that a reader who lacks a historical base and who simply enjoys mysteries can engage Perry's world. Thus, Perry not only details everyday life with a very sharp eye, but also privileges the private sphere enjoyed over the public sphere. We may, for example, be indifferent to the plight of the long-dead slum dwellers of Victorian England in Highgate Rise (1991), the eleventh novel of the series, but Charlotte's admiration for Clemency Shaw, ostensibly a victim of the monied and landed interests who wish neither to disgorge nor acknowledge their ill-gotten gains, and her determination to capture Clemency's murderer does engage us. In order to invite the reader into her characters' world, Perry employs several strategies. Most importantly, she carefully sets up the class distinctions by which the Victorians ordered their lives; she accurately depicts the gradations within each rank, the very well understood but unarticulated cultural models by which Victorians understood class ranking to occur. Perry also articulates a keen awareness that class stratification is not as rigid as the standardly accepted three-tiered structure would indicate. "The middle class," as Mitchell notes, "included successful industrialists and extremely wealthy bankers ... it also included such poor clerks as Bob Cratchit...

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