Capital offenses
Subtitle: geographies of class and crime in Victorian London
By: Simon Joyce.
Series: Victorian literature and culture series
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Charlottesville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 267
Subjects: English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Crime in literature.; English fiction -- England -- London -- History and criticism.; Literature and society -- England -- London -- History -- 19th century.; Detective and mystery stories, English -- History and criticism.; Social classes -- England -- London -- History -- 19th century.; Crime -- England -- London -- History -- 19th century.; Place (Philosophy) in literature.; Geography in literature.; Criminals in literature.; London (England) -- Social conditions.; London (England) -- In literature.
Description: "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. Commentators such 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 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 - Joyce's Capital Offenses reveals how certain geographical patterns 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."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.