Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation

Andrew Maunder, Grace Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351875929
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Literature

Beginning with Victoria's enthronement and an exploration of sensationalist accounts of attacks on the Queen, and ending with the notorious case of a fin-de-siècle killer, Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation throws new light on nineteenth-century attitudes toward crime and 'deviance'. The essays, which draw on both canonical and liminal texts, examine the Victorian fascination with criminal psychology and pathology, engaging with real life cases alongside fictional accounts by writers as diverse as Ainsworth, Stevenson, and Stoker. Among the topics are shifting definitions of criminality and the ways in which discourses surrounding crime changed during the nineteenth century, the literal and social criminalization of particular sex acts, and the gendering of degeneration and insanity. As fascinated as they were with criminality, the Victorians were equally concerned with solving crime, and this collection also focuses on the forces of law enforcement and nineteenth-century attempts to "read" the criminal body as revealed in Victorian crime fiction and reportage. Contributors engage with the detective figure and his growing professionalization, while examining the role of science and technology - both at home and in the Empire - in solving cases.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor's Preface
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Regicide and Reginamania: G.W.M. Reynolds and The Mysteries of London
• 2 The Making of a Master Criminal: The ‘Chief of the Thugs’ in Victorian Writings on Crime
• 3 Black Markets and Cadaverous Pies: The Corpse, Urban Trade and Industrial Consumption in the Penny Blood
• 4 “Stepchildren of Nature”: East Lynne and the Spectre of Female Degeneracy, 1860-1861
• 5 Murder, Gender, and Popular Fiction by Women in the 1860s: Braddon, Oliphant, Yonge
• 6 Anatomy of a “Nine Days’ Wonder”: Sensational Journalism in the Decade of the Sensation Novel
• 7 The Inside Story: Crime, Convicts and Careers for Women
• 8 “The Truth of Midnight” and “The Truth of Noonday”: Sensation and Madness in James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night
• 9 Puffed Papers and Broken Promises: White-Collar Crime and Literary Justice in The Way We Live Now
• 10 Something to Hyde: The “Strange Preference” of Henry Jekyll
• 11 The Novelization of the Dreyfus Affair: Femininity and Sensation in Fin-de-Siècle France
• 12 “Furious Passions of the Celtic Race”: Ireland, Madness and Wilkie Collins’s Blind Love
• 13 Time’s Hand: Fingerprints, Empire, and Victorian Narratives of Crime
• 14 Vamping the Children: The “Bloofer Lady”, the “London Minotaur” and Child-Victimization in Late Nineteenth-Century England
• 15 Ballad of a Demon Barber: The Criminal Career of George Chapman
• Bibliography
• Index