Love in Victorian London: Immigrant Histories and Intersecting Diversities in K. J. Charles’s Sins of the Cities

Here's the abstract:

This chapter examines the inclusion of racial minorities in K.J. Charles’ queer Victorian London-set romance fiction against historical record. It shows how novels like An Unseen Attraction (2017) reject the conventional historical romance chronotope of nineteenth-century London as exclusively white and instead reveal the British capital's true colours as an ethnically diverse colonial metropole. Far from resorting to anachronistic depictions of the city, as this historical contextualisation demonstrates, Charles’ work realistically accounts for the complex social fabric of the cosmopolitan hub of Empire, centring the lives and loves of Black and brown characters as active participants in shaping the history of the city.