Empire's Dry Bones: Fergus Hume's Gypsy Detective

In Hagar of the Pawn-shop, Gypsy Detective (1897), Fergus Hume’s gypsy detective unravels the criminal histories of hocked goods from her Lambeth pawnshop. How do her investigations expose the circulation of capital, commodities, and criminality that is the mainstay of Empire? How are notions of British superiority, reified in White bodies and the metropolitan space, destabilized by her cross-country enquiries? Finally, as the text travels the globe through the channels of the periodical press, how does it bring home the flawed nature of social hierarchies of gender, class, and race?