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Emily Colette Wilkinson

Emily Colette Wilkinson recently received her PhD from Stanford University in British literature. She is a writer for the literature blog The Millions and has also written book reviews for the Washington Times.

Author

Intimate Objects

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, by Leanne Shapton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2009. $18 paper In the realm of art the [...]

<i>The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective</i>, by Kate Summerscale. Walker, April 2008. $24.95

A Murder Most Mysterious

Winter 2009 | Criticism

In 1827, Thomas de Quincey suggested that murder was becoming a new medium for the artist: “People begin to see,” he wrote, “that something more goes into the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed, a knife, a purse, and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable in attempts of this nature.” In spite of its irony, de Quincey’s essay, “Murder Considered as a Fine Art,” offers a certain truth about the age of Victoria: crime—both as an art in itself and as the subject of the art of fiction—was achieving a new complexity.