Capital Offenses:
Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London
|
| by Simon Joyce |
| 288 pages, 6 x 9 |
| Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2180-5 • $42.50 |
| Victorian Literature and Culture Series |
 |
"A good read for any serious student of Victorian literature
and culture. . . .Essential."
—CHOICE
As London became the first major city of the nineteenth century,
new models of representation emerged in the journalism, poetry,
fiction, and social commentary of the period. Simon Joyce argues
that such writing reflected a persistent worry about the problem
of crime but was never able to contain it. Such commentators as
Wordsworth, Dickens, Mayhew, Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Booth, and
Wilde all struggled with the same questions about how to represent
London and the relations among its varied populations, yet their
accounts often undermined one another.
Whereas Victorian social science presumed a correlation between
criminal activity, geographical residence, and social class, the
popular literature of the period often sought just as strenuously
to deny the link, giving rise to privileged and pathological offenders
like Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll. This in turn shifted attention
away from the urban slums that had been the setting for the so-called
Newgate novels of the 1830s and 1840s. By 1900, crime appears
as a distinctively modern problem, requiring large-scale solutions
and government intervention in place of an older approach that
was rooted in personal morality or philanthropic paternalism.
Illustrating “literary geography”—in which physical
space is not merely a backdrop for the plot but an integral element
in shaping textual meaning—Simon Joyce’s Capital
Offenses reveals how certain geographical patterns can not
only give weight to interpretive meanings already suggested in
the texts but also enable us to read them in a new and surprising
light.
Simon Joyce is Associate Professor of English and Director of Literary and Cultural Studies at the College of William and Mary.
