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Notes -
A quick bit of Googling and comparing modern UK homicide numbers compared to modern UK attempted homicide numbers shows that about 69% of the reported attempted homicides end up with actual homicides, which I think indicates that in this context the difference made by better medical technology is not that large. It is possible that Victorian England was a bit less homicidal than modern England, but that would not demonstrate that Victorian England was necessarily more high-trust than modern England. As for the improvement in policing between then and now, sure, but this has implications both ways. To what extent can we really call a society high-trust if the people in charge of it do not care to provide the lower classes with adequate policing? Sure, the Victorians did not have modern forensic and surveillance technology, but they were perfectly capable of flooding the slums with cops if they had wished to do it. They easily could have afforded to put enough cops in the streets to massively crack down on crime. But they did not do it. Well, we have a similar situation now in the West, don't we. Maybe things have not changed that much after all. I am still not convinced that their society was significantly higher-trust than ours, if you look at their society as a whole and not just selected elements of it.
At least in London, they did do it. The Metropolitan Police is founded in 1829 and expanded in 1839 - the low crime in Victorian London was the result of effective policing. By the time Arthur Conan Doyle was writing, his readers could assume that Lestrade had ordinary crime under sufficient control that Holmes could focus on weird stuff, and it was entirely plausible that the leader of organised crime in London was a man like Professor Moriarty and not the sort of person who ends up as a gang leader in places where crime is less well controlled.
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