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What it argues
In 1860, three-year-old Saville Kent was found murdered in the privy of his family's comfortable Somerset home. The crime gripped Victorian England: it was intimate, domestic, and horribly inexplicable. Detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher of Scotland Yard — one of the Yard's first detective inspectors and a man of unusual gifts — was sent to investigate and quickly formed a theory. The problem was that acting on his theory would require accusing a member of the respectable middle-class family, in the full glare of press attention, on evidence that felt to the public like presumption rather than proof. Kate Summerscale follows Whicher's investigation, its failure, and its long aftermath.
The book's argument is that the Road Hill House murder was the template for the Victorian detective novel — and not coincidentally, because Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens were both writing during the case. Summerscale traces the feedback loop between the actual detective work, the newspaper coverage, and the explosion of detective fiction in the 1860s. Mr. Whicher is himself part of that history: the methodical, observant, class-defying detective who sees through social pretension is a type that the Road Hill case helped crystallize.
What it gets right
- 1.
The Road Hill House murder directly influenced the explosion of Victorian detective fiction: Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens both drew on it, and Summerscale traces this influence with care.
- 2.
Whicher's failure was not a failure of reasoning but a failure of class politics — the jury, the press, and the public refused to believe that a respectable middle-class household could contain the crime he described.
- 3.
The Victorian obsession with privacy — the home as sanctuary, the inner life as inviolable — was precisely what made crimes like this so disturbing and so resistant to investigation.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Kate Summerscale is a British journalist and author who was editor of the Daily Telegraph's books section before becoming a full-time writer. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, published in 2008, won the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction and the Galaxy British Book of the Year award, and was adapted for television in 2011. Her other books include Mrs Robinson's Disgrace (2012), about a Victorian divorce scandal, and The Haunting of Alma Fielding (2020), about psychical research in the 1930s. She lives in London.
