Unfolding ostensibly as a Bildungsroman, Tipping the Velvet in fact charts Nancy Astley’s picaresque vagaries through London in an episodic, non-teleological narrative framework: the only form of character development we encounter, if any, is the result of a theatrical apprenticeship, rather than a genuine sentimental education. The scope of this article is the natural development of my earlier study of the city space in Tipping the Velvet, a narrative which foregrounds the fluid and performative nature of identity through a sustained portrayal of London as a stage it is the exploration of Waters’s deliberate use of the Victorian metropolis as a carnivalesque space, where it is possible to be an actor and a spectator at the same time, that first sparked my interest in the relationship between the literary genres revisited by Waters and her characterization of the city.

This analysis, however, centres on Waters’s recuperation and reinterpretation of Victorian narrative strategies and physical locations: it is therefore limited to Waters’s “quasi-trilogy” and its engagement with the literary devices of domestic melodrama, gothic fiction and the sensation novel, as well as with the literal and metaphorical geography of late nineteenth century London. Before this foray into the twentieth century, Waters’s atmospheric chronicles of forbidden, and forgotten, passions against the backdrop of the Victorian capital had become the trademark of her fiction –- and The Night Watch continues this legacy in its preoccupation with notions of marginality and illegitimacy and in the exploration of the narrative and critical possibilities offered by the vibrant metropolitan setting.

Sarah Waters is without a doubt one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary British writers, as well as one of the most commercially successful: her reputation as a gifted and prolific storyteller is firmly grounded in her neo-Victorian beginnings with Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002), and has been recently confirmed by the publication of her fourth novel, The Night Watch (2006), set in the war-ravaged London of the 1940s.

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