Industrial Sprawl and Crime Rates

The social and industrial growth of England during the Victorian period is generally well known, cottage industry and small mercantile ventures were replaced with industrialisation and manufacturing on a massive, and previously unprecedented, scale. The growth in employment opportunities in towns and cities prompted a mass exodus from rural areas into the rapidly industrialising towns. 

The social problem novel permeates the literary output of the Victorian period, whether a literary scholar or not, most people are familiar with at least one novel of the period which can be said to fall into the category of 'social problem' -from Oliver Twist to North and South the social condition of England as a result of industrialisation and urban expansion was firmly on the fore front of public consciousness.

By 1851 half of the population of Britain lived in towns, and by 1901 this had risen to 3/4, and it was this rapid growth which was considered the major cause of crime, as population density in cities caused the over crowding of slum areas and a concentration of poverty and subsistence living.  The anonymity and isolationist nature of sprawling slums precipitated and facilitated the rise of crime levels within the jurisdiction.  Without the careful scrutiny of a smaller, and more intimately acquainted, society these masses of the poor were inclined towards lawlessness and illegal behaviour - they were free of what was termed 'natural policing.' 

In 1852, M.D Hill (1792-1872), brother of Rowland Hill, the postal reformer, who had been a judge in Birmingham for 30 years, was examined by a House of Commons Committee on Juvenile crime and reported that:

A century and a half ago...there was scarcely a large town in this island...[by a] large town I mean [one]  where an inhabitant of the humbler classes is unknown to the majority of inhabitants...by a small town, I mean a town where...every inhabitant is more or less known to the mass of the people of the town...in small towns there must be a sort of natural police...operating upon the conduct of each individual who lives, as it were, under the public eye; but in a large town, he lives...in absolute obscurity...which to a certain extent gives impunity.

When this is viewed in light of the content of the social problem novel, we see it all but born out.  For example in Oliver Twist, we see a young man who's very name implies the operation of social determinism which will make him a criminal, the name Twist, referring to the hangman's noose which his namers believe he will ultimately meet, and when he is exposed to the slums of London, and their many inhabitants, he is capable of disappearing from his former masters and later being hidden from those friends who would seek to protect him from the criminal masses which are presented as thriving in those impoverished parts of the city.  

The social determinism, which Oliver overcomes with the revelation that his birth and parentage are not as abject as he had been led to believe, was considered a major motivation factor behind crime in urban London.  The poor, and ill educated, by virtue of their class of birth or parentage were more inclined than the wealthy towards acts of criminal behaviour because of the operation of biology and that it slum areas it was almost impossible to keep the honest poor from being exposed to the criminal poor, who were already acting upon their inborn, and here to fore, latent criminal proclivities, which their entire class possessed.  Andrew Mearns (1837- 1925) the chief author of The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor(1883) wrote:

Few who will read these pages have any conception of what these pestilential human rookeries [the worst housing districts] are, where tens of thousands are crowded together amidst horrors which call to mind what we have learned...of the slave ship...One of the saddest results of this over-crowding is the inevitable association of honest people with criminals...Who can wonder that every evil flourishes in such hotbeds of vice and disease. 

As already mentioned, Contemporary analysts did not believe that it was poverty alone that caused crime, rather it was a motivating factor which allowed latent criminal tendencies to surface.  In the Report of the Royal Commission on a Constabulary Force [1839] the social reformer Edwin Chadwick wrote:

We have investigated the origin of the great mass of crime committed for the sake of property, and we find the whole ascribable to one common cause, namely, the temptations of the profit of a career of depredation [theft], as compared with the profits of honest and even well paid industry...the notion that any considerable proportion of the crimes against property are cased by blameless poverty...we find disproved at every step. 

A narrow view, certainly, and an almost echoing, in tone, of Scrooge's interrogation of the charity workers demanding 'Are there no prisons, no poorhouses?' Assured in the expectation that the poor should voluntarily enter such places, but it was well known to Dickens, and his socially minded contemporaries, that these placed were often worse than the streets; with living conditions and hygiene so poor that death and

disease were rampant.  While these social institutions were in place to 'care' for the poor and prevent them from having to turn to crime as a means of survival, it should be noted that they might have been more honest, but they were certainly no safer.

'High Culture and Good Literature'

In the arts you often find yourself at events and conferences with speakers and attendees from other disciplines; sometimes history, or language studies, and sometimes it is a discipline like Media.

There has, historically, been a presentation of Media studies as something which is somehow easier or less worthy than the study of history or literature.  It has been designated as the 'soft' option or somehow easier than literary engagement because it related to a field of study which constitutes 'low culture.' 

Despite the fact that I fall within what is arguably one of the most stereotypically 'academic' fields, engaging with the classical English canon of Dickens et al, I whole heartily disagree with the disparagement of media and related fields as somehow constituting 'low' culture. 

Despite the current opinion of the Victorian novel, of Doyle and Dicken's constituting some of the highest forms of cultural exposition, the fact is that few of those who wrote novels that are now considered canonically significant were attempting to write in some effort to create 'high' culture.  They were written for the general public and serialised in papers and magazines for mass consumption.  In much the same way that Shakespeare's plays were of contemporaneous universal appeal, so Dicken's in his own time was 'Mister Popular Sentiment.'  They wrote mysteries, intrigues, thrillers, and bildunsgromen meant for the delectation of the public and their perennial appeal is testimony to the skill of their writers.  In the 1996 film Shakespeare in Love which, although fictional, expressed the opinion of the period when playwrites were considered 'vegrants and peddlers of bombast' - and given the number of bawdy jokes in Shakespeare's plays it is hardly surprising.  

Literature was the 'media' of the past, they are ways of representing the human experience in a way that it accessible to the common man, and so it is perhaps time to re-imagine the definition of the 'canon of literature' as the expression of imaginative culture to a 'canon of human experience' which can encompass the new and adaptive media world in which we now live.  It is a world in which internet fictions and collective story telling are as legitimate a representation of writing talent as anything which is released from a publishing house or where serialised television shows imagine the ideal human future in the way that Star Trek or Doctor Who present man kinds engagement with the universe in the same way that Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World or 1984 expose the hopes and frailties of human kind. 

However, that is not to say that television and film, which constitute the modern equivalent, have no way of entering the modern consciousness in the same manner that Sherlock Holmes, Oliver Twist or even Macbeth have become committed to the annals of history.  If canonicity if based upon the volume of contemporaneous uptake then television shows like Seinfeld, Dallas, and friends will become part of the TV age's cultural legacy; film series like Bat Man, Avatar, and Titanic will represent the theatrical contribution of the digital generation.  I do worry about the future literature classes that will call for historical commentary on a generation which has 50 Shades of Grey and Twilight as top selling literary works but to turn up your nose at the study of the Media and related fields is to prove yourself as short sighted as those who burnt books or banned plays - they are the modern expression of imagination, as new and innovative as plays or 3 volume novels were in their own times. 

While not every play or book ever written is remembered; those which best reflect human experiences have become the canon, we must be careful not to lose a powerful tool of cultural examination, that will be used by future generations, due to our own intellectual snobbery by consigning television, film and games to the cultural scrape heap simply because we do not see their immediate cultural significance.  

It's Almost Time...

I appreciate that it has been some time since last I made a post and to be honest it's entirely my own fault.  I've been working my butt off trying to get my first chapter...or rather technically second chapter completed and I guess this is more an update than a proper post.  I do promise a proper full length post on my dear A.C.D at some point in the near future.  

 I decided against writing my first chapter for a myriad of reasons but really it's because I felt that it would be easiest to write at the end of this process since it sort of chronicles the entirety of the Victorian period rather than a distinct idea as the rest of the chapters.  So the second chapter it was! It is an examination of the expression legal procedural ideologies in 3 Victorian novels.  I was a little iffy on it at the start but it really gathered pace and I think is a long over looked reading of the Victorian novel. 

The Chapter's title is an adaptive process, since the thrust of the argument has developed as I wrote it the original title of 'A Trying Situation: The Writer and the Legislative Process' no longer applies and I am searching for a new one -although it is proving more elusive than originally anticipated. 

 

To say that I was nervous about feedback was something of an understatement, I've been climbing the walls for three days over it, waiting for someone to tell me it's terrible that I really need to reconsider my life choices and that KFC is still hiring.  In the end however, it was no where near as bad as anticipated, in fact, it was really rather affirming, with my supervisor, who is a George Eliot specialist telling me that he found my argument excellent and my topic 'brilliantly unique.' *cue excited blush*  From him, at least, it's high praise, a bit like Andrea Bochelli telling you that you can sing.   

My chapter in the end is 18,000 words in length, which seems over long as I intended to make each chapter between 10-12,000.  It seems overlong but I have assurances from my supervisor that there is nothing he would remove and that the length issue will sort itself out as I write other chapters, since there is room for cross over which will facilitate trimming the fat later. 

So my confirmation of registration Viva is in a few weeks, the 25th of be precise and while my feedback has calmed me somewhat I am still as nervous as heck about it.  I anticipate spending the next fortnight like a rabid dog, killing dead things and with rapidly diminishing sanity and patience.  In final news I got my studentship, 18k a year to help my research, including a fee waiver and a £1,000 budget for conferences and academic facilities I might need.  Very excited by that!

The Means Justifying the Ends

At this stage of my PhD I am getting used to justifying my academic existence to those around me, people who question the exact purpose or meaning behind blue sky research like mine and while someone researching cancer may find it easy to explain to others why their research is important it is much harder for those of us who are engaged with topics of a slightly more esoteric nature. 

When a ‘layman’ reads the title of my project it immediately seems like something which should be an academic hobby rather than something upon which to pin a career.  For me a pithy title is still someway off but for those interested my research is focused around the idea that Victorian Novelists were influenced by the action of the legal system and the judicial decisions which made up the common law: and they expressed their opinions on that law through the themes and narrative of their novels.  I intend to examine to what extent were writers influenced by the actions of the court, where they got this information, what exactly were they were presented with, how they understood/interpreted that action and it’s accuracy, what their interpretation portrays of their opinions on the legislative/common law changes,  and did this tally with/run counter to public opinion?...This is usually around the time people are sorry that they asked. 

I am sure many are wondering what the heck relevance that could possibly have –old books are antiquarian curiosities and old law is largely irrelevant but I am inclined to disagree.  Law, like much of literature, is contextual and it is my conjecture that one feeds into the context of the other.  The law is a social barometer of sorts and a society is defined by that which it criminalises and marginalises, so a novel which purports to reflect a given society must take into account the rules which bind the lives of the characters.  I will spare the blog audience an in-depth analysis of this for the moment because for the present the conclusion rather than the process through which I came by it is important. 

At this stage most people say ‘Well that’s all well and good, it’s even interesting but it is still merely blue sky content and is largely useless!’  However, what I intend to present is an examination of how the writers perceived the law, it’s interpretations, and how far these were correct because it is all well and good having righteous legal intentions created in the best interests of the people but if the perception or operation of legislative and common law are not in line with this then the legislative begins to loose touch with those who it intends to protect. 

If a cogent argument can be made of the interaction between the law and literary expression 100 years ago then now, in an age of greater social awareness this interaction may still hold true.  In which case both legislative and judicial bodies may be able to observe the way in which their judicial opinions and legislative decisions are expressed and interpreted by the masses who live with them through modern literature. 

This is generally the point when people ask why I am using Victorian Literature to create the connection rather than modern texts if my final assertion is that modern texts speak to the operation of the legal system.  Well in the words of Julie Andrews ‘Let's start at the very beginning A very good place to start When you read you begin with A-B-C’ and the Victorian period was a time of massive legal upheaval in which arguably the modern legal system was born and in order to ascertain the connections depth it would seem a good idea to go back to a time when the common persons legal interactions were limited and their knowledge of the system was more limited again but increased standards of education meant that access to newspapers, books and early forms of ‘mass media’ were on the rise. 

If the connection I purport to prove is present then, then now, when mass media assists the common man in understanding the effect of legislative decisions on his life, it should be a much more straight forward connection to make. 

Well! That’s the theory anyway. 

Courtesy of PhD



Getting Serious!

Okay! So I have been keeping a vague sort of thing on the go for ages now and thought it best to composite it all in one place and make it all a bit more focused - after all I have started my Phd which is all about Victorian law and it's affect on the literature of the age.  So I get to spend the next few years up to my eyes in the worst travesties of the Victorian legal system and lots of books - great right!?


The literature in question is a lot of the stuff you might expect really -Sherlock Holmes, Wilkie Collins, even a bit of Dickens for the civil law stuff.  I would have tried to cram in a bit of Poe but it might have been a touch too ambitious since the general focus is the operation of the UK legal system rather than the US one- although I am still in two minds over the inclusion of some traditionally 'Irish' Victorian writers since it was pre-1921 and as such they would have been subject to English law and as such fall under the auspices of the researches wider umbrella.

To say that it's not motivated by an overwhelming desire to hide from the job market while getting to read Sherlock Holmes over and over again and the rest of the canon of early detective fiction.  I might also be something of a creep for looking forward to trawling through the rather florid articles in The Illustrated Police News and the like - they shouldn't be amusing because they are depictions of actual events and incidents involving real people but the little drawings are so overly dramatic that I can't help but smirk at them.

Basically the purpose of this blog will be largely the same as the old postings but with a bit more focus, Ill be throwing things up that relate to Victorian law, Victorian literature or any sort of related bits and pieces that take my fancy - so it won't be changing that much just with a little more focus than before.  Granted I still might go off on tangents and post random things that seems totally unrelated, the truth is that they might well be but they have taken my fancy or have been sparked by some crazy thought process relating to my research.  So here we go!