The treatment of class and sex is far more realistic than anything that either of those writers would have dared.
(Great Expectations excepted!) We’re encouraged to make assumptions about the characters that are suddenly revealed as unfounded and we have to re-interpret everything we’ve read up to that point. The world of Dickens is superbly evoked in this vivid excursion into thieves’ kitchens, grand houses, and lunatic asylums, but the great achievement is the brilliant plot twist that is much more like the sort of trick played on the reader by Wilkie Collins at his cleverest than Dickens’s generally clumsy plotting. Here are 10 of the best exercises in the “neo-Victorian” genre which, to varying degrees, don’t merely use the 19th-century setting but exploit readers’ knowledge of the fiction of that period: 1 Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
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