Making Meaning of a Murder Mystery

1. Murder Collages, or How to Kill Your Wife in Victorian Britain: The Mystery of The Notting Hill Mystery The text itself is actually a collage of miscellaneous texts and images, with many layers of repackaging and curation. The story begins with a note from the periodical’s editors explaining that “the following papers came into our hands” and that “illustrations are simply added to make the reader’s task more agreeable, but, of course, it is not pretended that they were made simultaneously with the events they represent” (617). At the start, the readers are presented with the illusion that we are not reading a fiction, but that there has been some assembly, curation, and packaging of the texts and illustrations that are given to us. The author is not referred to as an “author,” but instead as a “compiler” (617), and indeed it is strongly hinted that said “compiler” has actually “discovered a new species or description of crime” in investigating this case.

2. Making Meaning of a Murder Mystery • The story itself is a fragmented collage of document types, authors, and even levels of literacy and writing quality: letters to insurance offices, personal correspondence and letters from a variety of writers, newspaper extracts, memorandums, witness statements, journal excerpts, and marriage records. The guiding voice of the narrative and common thread to making meaning of these documents comes from occasional memorandums from the insurance investigator, Mr. R. Henderson, interspersed throughout the story; the final chapter is devoted solely to his voice explaining his complete findings in the case.