Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I - Cultural and artistic professionals -- Chapter 1. Serving God and Mammon: Victorian art, sensation and market imperatives -- Cultural challenges and artistic preoccupations -- An open forum for professional debates: the sensation novel -- Chapter 2. The trials of periodical-press occupations -- The "laborious duties" of a Victorian editor -- (Im)moral censure and professional criticism -- The "young Buccaniers" of Victorian journalism -- Chapter 3. The professional dilemmas of literati -- Wo/men of letters: writing and identity -- "I'm a scamp and a scoundrel": the professional ascent of a bohemian -- Profit-oriented and respectable: the contradictions of the bourgeois writer -- Chapter 4. Sensational virtuosi of the brush -- Vocation, labour and the temptations of customized art -- Roguery and artistry: incompatible notions? -- A respectable bohemian: towards a new model -- Chapter 5. Venal, playful, charming: the hallmarks of professional performers -- Going on the stage in the mid-nineteenth century -- Braddon's sensational actresses -- An amiable swindler: acting and cheating in No Name -- Part II - Tradition and innovation: medicine and the legal world -- Chapter 6. Victorian lawyering and the novel -- The "homo ethicus" and the redefinition of the old professions -- The legal world and literature: Victorian intersections -- The golden slavery of professionalism: three sensational models -- Chapter 7. Agents of law and order -- The rise of detectives: from history to fiction -- Variations of amateur detection -- Professionals in a quandary: career prospects and moral puzzles -- Chapter 8. Challenging the Hippocratic Oath: ethics and the medical profession -- Nineteenth-century medicine and the spirit of reform.

Sensational intersections: literature, medical practice and deontology -- Doctoring in the world of capitalist economy -- The new frontiers of gender: she-doctors and nurses -- References -- Index.