I began this investigation of disability and narrative form in Victorian fiction with Notre-Dame de Paris, an early nineteenth-century novel that rarely adopts the perspective of Quasimodo, the disabled character who provides the story's impetus. Instead, the novel primarily displays Quasimodo as a spectacle: on a platform as ‘The Pope of Fools,’ embodying the crowd's Platonic ideal of the ‘grotesque’ (43); on the wheel of a pillory, jeered at while he is publicly tortured, then cheered for when Esmeralda gives him water (193–94); in the porch of the cathedral, shouting ‘Sanctuary!’ (310); and in the crypt, where his remains crumble (466). In this final chapter, I conclude with two late Victorian works that, like Notre-Dame de Paris, rarely adopt the perspective of the characters whose freakish bodies incite their narratives, but where the early Victorian Gothic novel treats the disabled body as a spectacle, the late Victorian mystery overtly makes it fully specimen by placing great faith in the professional discourses of medicine, science, and law, granting the purveyors of those discourses the authority for somatic interpretation that in previous decades had also belonged to the layman.

Indeed, by the turn of the century, the professional skill of interpreting the body often replaced the body itself as the site of spectacle in popular fiction, as Arthur Conan Doyle's novella The Sign of Four (1890) illustrates. In the chapter significantly titled ‘Sherlock Holmes Gives a Demonstration,’ Holmes deciphers a crime scene ‘with something of the air of a clinical professor expounding to his class’ (110), reading the signs of the disabled, criminalized body with scientific precision. From marks such as ‘well-defined muddy disks’ that show ‘the impression of a wooden stump’ and blood stains left on a rope, he can tell that the criminal ‘is a poorly educated man, small, active, with his right leg off, and wearing a wooden stump which is worn away upon the inner side,’ that ‘His left boot has a coarse, square-toed sole, with an iron band round the heel,’ that ‘He is a middle-aged man, much sunburned, and has been a convict,’ and that ‘there is a good deal of skin missing from the palm of his hand’ (118).