Twins and Early Detective Fiction

Twins appear remarkably often in the earliest examples of Victorian detective fiction. However, they do not merely stand for simple ‘cop-outs’ in the sense of unlikely final-act resolutions. As a reading of Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) illustrates, twins always run the risk of exceeding the grasp of the detective’s (as well as contemporary science’s) comprehension and were thus integral as heuristic aids in the formation of the genre.