Not only did class privilege stratify society, but it also percolated into popular detective fiction to provide vistas of comfort and luxury as vicarious pleasure to the reading public from all classes, most often the lower. This paper is an attempt to unravel the materialist nature of the fiction of Dorothy Sayers from such a standpoint that views the fiction as a strategy to entice the readership with visions of leisure and plenty, and to establish the upper-class protagonist as the only possible saviour of his society. Lord Peter Wimsey becomes the archetypal rich genius with an Oxbridge education, an affluent and charming charisma, delightful wit, and incredible intelligence that was beyond the means of the working classes. The paper sets about this examination by beginning with historical context to move into a closer examination of the Wimsey fiction by Sayers, drawing some comparisons with P. G. Wodehouse’s fiction.
In 1936 two thirds of Britain’s private property was owned by 1.8% of the population (Watson 106). In fact even as late …show more content…
What Raffles says could have been also been said about the disseminators of this traditionally feudal, hegemonic culture of the British peers, among them not the weakest being most of the Golden-Age Detective Fiction writers. The only difference is that unlike Raffles they wouldn’t have themselves been conscious of the ‘wrong(s)’ they committed. They were no moralists in their own conduct or their profession of writing, even if seemingly so in the content of their texts.
Dorothy Sayers, along with her Lord Peter Bredon Death Wimsey, was at the vanguard of such writing. This paper interrogates the various ways in which her writing worked towards maintaining this status quo and establishing the noble peer as the subject worthy of all attentions, and the only one with his good breeding as capable of bringing sanity to the increasingly insane and unsafe