Victorian Realism and Crime

Dear Colleagues,

The definition of literary realism and the key features of Victorian realist novels have long been the subject of debate. However, most would agree that Victorian realist texts have traditionally focused on the lived experience of everyday people, representing the observable world and embracing literal representation of it, and using it to present social commentary prescient to the real world it is designed to reflect.

Victorian and Golden Age crime fiction, meanwhile, has historically been tied to the sensational, the allegorical, the formulaic, and (in broader terms) the willing suspension of disbelief. Readers accept, and in some ways are almost expected to predict, the formula and conclusion to the story, and are content in the knowledge that the story will reach a predictable conclusion.

However, crime is in and of itself a reality of life, and any tale that purports to be realist should accept this premise; indeed, many canonical realist texts in the Victorian period involve crimes that rival those of sensation fiction in terms of their depiction and narrative impact in spite of the very different critical responses to the genres. With this in mind, we invite abstracts for a Special Issue of Humanities to look at the connections between Victorian realism and depictions of, commentaries on or engagement with crime and criminality. Topics for submission could include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Realist fiction and representations of criminality;
• Realist fiction and crime as social commentary;
• The realism of Victorian/nineteenth-century crime and sensation fiction;
• Representations or depictions of true crime in fiction;
• Critiques of ideas of realism using crime as a lens for discussion;
• The historical and social realities of Victorian crime;
• The psychology of Victorian crime;
• Victorian detectives and detection;
• Adaptations and neo-Victorian engagement with crime;
• Theoretical approaches to Victorian crime;
• Comparative approaches to crime in realist and sensationalist/crime fiction of the period.

Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to [email protected] and/or [email protected] by [31 October 2023]. Please also feel free to contact either editor for an informal discussion about the project.

Dr. Melissa Raines
Dr. Sam Saunders
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Title: “Any Resemblance … is Entirely Coincidental”: Alan M. Clark’s Jack the Ripper Victims Series

Abstract: Regardless of their aim, the Jack the Ripper fictions tend to be realist in mode. Mark Jones categorised them as some of “the most scrupulously factual of historical reconstructions” (2017: 166), and the texts make frequent use of Victorian press and archives to depict the 1888 murders. Concurrently, they marginalise and exploit the victims, defining them as silent testimonies to the power of the elusive perpetrator. In contrast, Alan M. Clark’s Jack the Ripper Victims Series (2011-2018) consisting of five novels devoted to each canonical victim shifts the focus and depicts their lives, not deaths. Ostensibly, the author opens the books with a disclaimer about the fictitiousness of the characters, and yet, the novels are deeply rooted in a social commentary and draw parallels between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century lives. I will outline the way the fictionalisations of the five women’s lives bring to the fore five other ‘crimes’ or transgressions: alcoholism, domestic violence, homelessness, sex work, and unemployment, but also the way they replace the sensational and formulaic in Ripperature with something more that mundane and gritty in the lived experience of everyday people, such as moments of personal joy or professional accomplishments. Drawing on Kate Mitchell’s approach to history, cultural memory, and neo-Victorian fiction (published in 2010, just before the series started), the paper will argue that pre-dating the publication of The Five (2019), Clark manages to realistically re-present (make present) and represent (create a portrayal of) the late-Victorian crime of dismissing the predominantly working-class women who were murdered.

Title: Colonial Catharsis: Romantic-Realism and the Imperial Gaze in Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug

Abstract: An 1839 Confessions of a Thug review in The Spectator suggests its straddling of realism and romanticism: ‘We suspect that . . . many of the incidents . . . though drawn from reality, have no relation to the actual life of Ameer Ali’. At a momentary pause in the revelation of crimes, the auditor comments on Ali’s impenitence: ‘Reader, these thoughts were passing in my mind, when at last I cried aloud, “Pshaw! ‘tis vain to attempt to account for it, but Thugee seems to be the offspring of fatalism and superstition, cherished and perfected by the wildest excitement that ever urged human beings to deeds at which humanity shudders”’ (Taylor 253). When the servant fanning him interrupts, ‘Did the Sahib call?’ he replies, ‘Bid some one bring me a chillum. My nerves require to be composed’. If a man of his experience is so rattled by Ali’s apparent amorality to the point that his nerves need composing, what are the psychological implications for readers back home? How does such a romantic-realist narrative of sensational lawlessness from colonised lands and people function for the colonising nation? In 2016, regarding an excerpt from Louise Linton’s memoir published in The Telegraph, Hassan Ghedi Santur observed, ‘For many westerners, Africa has long been a faraway place of romantic adventures and self-discovery; a place to test their inner strength and reaffirm their humanity. But their stories of Africa often have nothing to do with Africans’ (Santur). He could easily have substituted India and Indian among such faraway places and people for the nineteenth-century British. This essay explores what romantic-realism underlying the imperial gaze in Confessions of a Thug allows the gazers to realise and restore about themselves.

Title: The Law and the Lordly: Examining the Limits of the Legal System in Victorian Realist Fiction

Abstract: In The Novel and the Police, D. A. Miller famously describes the almost hypnotic effect of reading Anthony Trollope: In much the same way as one [...] sinks into the half-slumber in which his pages [...] may be safely skimmed, so one falls into the usual appreciation of [Trollope’s] appreciation of the usual. (107) While Miller’s assessment makes Trollope’s novels seem relatively innocuous, if dull, his analysis builds to an argument for ‘the terroristic effects’ of Trollope’s version of realism (108). Using Barchester Towers (1857) his sole example, Miller posits that the ‘cohesiveness and stability’ of the middle-class world of the text turn the police itself into a metaphor and lull the ‘universally sedated’ reader into an unexamined conviction of the rightness of the fictional world-view (110, 145). While Miller’s argument is convincing, by his own admission he exclusively focuses on a novel that does not engage with the police or the criminal courts (107). In contrast, Trollope’s 1873-4 Phineas Redux presents the reader with a protagonist who is almost murdered and then himself becomes suspected of a murder. By examining the experience of Phineas Finn as accused murderer, Trollope raises questions about the limits of the legal system and the problematic aspects of the social support and censure of those accused of crimes within the Victorian middle- and upper-classes. This censure of the accused within the middle- and upper-classes might be termed a literary ‘echo’ of the ‘hue and cry’ – a pre-Victorian system of public criminal pursuit that predated the police. It is not only in Phineas Redux where this idea emerges; both Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens – two authors with whom Miller also choosingly engages – point out that the law itself, which in many ways was consciously designed to protect the interests of the middle class, cannot touch them. It is therefore up to ‘middle-class’ society itself to self-regulate. By engaging with the ways in which the realist novel becomes a literary echo of the practice of hue and cry, this essay will demonstrate that the content and form of this particular kind of novel present readers with anything but easy acceptance of a cohesive and stable world-view. Reference Miller, D. A. (1988). ‘The Novel as Usual: Trollope’s Barchester Towers.’ The Novel and the Police. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 107-45.

Title: Ouida’s ‘Toxin’ (1895) and Medical Criminality

Abstract: In 1895, Ouida published a short story called “Toxin” in the Illustrated London News which prompted an outraged response from the British medical establishment. In their words, this tale of an English surgeon who decides to murder his patient depicts ‘the search after scientific truth as naturally leading to crime’. The British Medical Journal considered Ouida’s story ‘an attack – feeble and futile, it is true, but most malignant in intention – on the medical profession’. They argued that Ouida ‘has a perfect right to represent a doctor as a murderer, but she has no right to imply that he is a murderer because he is a doctor’. The BMJ’s response implies the threat of fiction’s perceived entanglement with the real. While dismissing the story as foolish, feeble, futile, 'an infamous falsehood', and a mere 'shocker', the journal is clearly concerned that Ouida's depiction of an (English) doctor might be read as not only literal, but representative of all (English) doctors. Ouida was often criticised for producing a questionable form of realism, though she countered that the fantastical occurred in daily life. Perhaps as a pre-emptive riposte to such critics, this story’s dedication to medical realism is notable; it includes carefully specific descriptions of the ‘false membrane’ or ‘fungus growth’ of diphtheria. The surgeon’s god-complex accords with accounts of real medical crimes, a reality in the nineteenth century as they still are today. This article will analyse ‘Toxin’, alongside reports of medical crimes in the early 1890s in both medical journals and the popular press, to consider medicine and criminality in relation to realism and readers.

Title: Beyond Anything Realism Can Represent? Monstrous Crime in Marx’s Victorian Novel

Abstract: Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 (1867) put their readers ‘right into the crimes of the capitalist mode of production as revealed in the Blue Books’ (Linebaugh 2014); Factory Reports, especially, evidence the ‘conventionalization’ of ‘factory crime’ (Carson 1979). Engels appropriates the Chartist concept-metaphor ‘social murder’, declaring: ‘I accuse the English bourgeoisie before the entire world of murder, robbery and other crimes on a massive scale’. Marx systematically updates Engels’s accusation in his detection of Capital’s mass social murder. Their writerly strategies adapt fictive modalities to depict true crimes. Condition can be read as a mash-up of the Nacht-Märchen, the city-mystery tale and ‘the documentary gothic’ (Kehler 2008) and Capital ‘as a Victorian novel’: ‘Like the triple-deckers of English realism, it endeavors to describe the world in order to change it’ (Kornbluh 2010). Yet Marx’s key informants include ‘factory inspectors whose reports furnish a testimony beyond anything the realisms or naturalisms are able to convey’ (Jameson 2011). How, then, does Marx’s novelistic ‘realism’ convey, let alone prove, Capital’s criminogenic drive? This article discusses Marx’s admiration for Balzac, Dickens and other literary realists apropos ‘grotesque realism’ (Bakhtin 1968) and contemporary studies of ‘Gothic Marx’, to posit Marx’s ‘Gothic realism’. Its argues that as actuality is structurally and monstrously criminal under the rule of Capital – contra, in Marx’s words, bourgeois ‘make-believe that there are no monsters’ in bourgeois society – his Gothic constitutes a realistic medium to represent criminal monsters and structures.