Rich in drama and romance, this deftly plotted 1859 historical novel bristles with suspense and culminates in a daring prison escape in the shadow of the guillotine.

Richard Maxwell uses nineteenth-century urban fiction-particularly the novels of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens-to define a genre, the novel of urban mysteries. His title comes from the ""mystery mania"" that captured both sides of the channel with the runaway success of Eugene Sue's Les mysteres de Paris and G. W. M. Reynold's Mysteries of London. Maxwell's approach to the nature and evolution of the mysteries genre includes examinations of allegorical theory, journalistic practice, the conventions of scientific inquiry, popular psychiatry, illustration, and modernized wonder tales (such as...