CHAPTER 7 The Socially Mobile Female in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Mysteries Meghan P. Nolan Introduction As with all great cities, the dichotomous nature of Victorian London easily lends itself to the mystery genre, because it is simultaneously vast and condensed in landscape, diverging construction, ideals and people abut and overlap within its many warrens. While socioeconomic borders and hierarchal standards abound in this environment, the upper and lower classes remain intertwined and mutually dependent. Thus, it is often through social mobility or ambiguity that criminal motives in Victorian mysteries can be fully unearthed, and this is as true for pieces written during the nineteenth century as for those composed today. There are many ways to view social mobility in this context, but as Tim Cresswell indicates, “mobility exists in the same relation to movement as place does to location (Cresswell, 2006) and … involves a fragile entanglement of physical movement, representations, and practices. Furthermore, these entanglements have broadly traceable histories and geographies” (18). Although social mobility is traditionally viewed as moving between class M. P. Nolan (B ) Rockland Community College, State University of New York, Suffern, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2020 M. Piipponen et al. (eds.), Transnational Crime Fiction, Crime Files, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53413-4_7 135