In 1988, DA Miller made an influential diagnosis of ‘a radical entanglement between the nature of the novel and the practice of the police’. His book, The Novel and the Police, was designed to challenge what he saw as a politically conservative ‘consensus’ in departments of English that ‘literature exercises a destabilising function in our culture’. In opposition to that ‘consensus’ a new school of critics, authors of books with valiant titles like Resisting Novels, set themselves to argue that the function of literature was to act as vehicle for ideological control. The irresistible conclusion was that this was particularly true of literary forms distinctive of the bourgeois era, and thus of the Victorian novel above all.