Victorian Crime Stoppers

Who were the crime stoppers of the nineteenth century, a century marked by the establishment of the police force? In 1829, Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel founded the Metropolitan Police, giving rise to the slang nicknames “Bobbies” for constables in England and “Peelers” in Ireland, terms that are still recognized today. In this course we move from the seemingly absent institutionalized justice system in representations of crime in fiction (Oliver Twist) to its codification in the press (The Illustrated Police News, Penny Dreadfuls, and the infamous case of Jack the Ripper). This leads us to look in depth at the rise of detective fiction, sensation fiction, and the gothic in the long 19th century. From medicine, psychology, criminology to phrenology, mesmerism, and studies on hysteria, we examine scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses that framed and questioned the nature of crime, morality, policing, and the boundaries of good and evil. We consider how Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle pioneered the detective genre, but also how crime appeared, not just as theft or murder, but as (proto-)crimes against humanity (The Island of Doctor Moreau and the question of vivisection) or the denunciations of the crimes of the British empire (Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). We also examine gothic and sensational reactions to crime alongside the rise of psychoanalysis, spiritualism, and questions of gender and sexuality. Throughout, the course asks students to consider moral, ethical, and cultural questions in Victorian literature: how do literature and science construct notions of good and evil? How are race, gender, class, empire, and sexuality implicated in ideas of crime and criminality? Why were the Victorians and why are we still drawn to stories of transgression and detection?