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Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation (review)

VICTORIAN STUDIES All three of these sections clearly concern respectability, and all seem deeply concerned about threats from things or people perceived to be “other” within the domestic ordering of the Victorians’ world. The editors, in fact, use very similar language to describe the perceived “threats” in their prefaces to each section, which does not help to clarify the differences between the sections. There is a lot of familiar ground here, but the material is held together in some new ways, and it is engaging to read about these diverse manifestations of crime and bad behavior through the lens of print media, as well as to consider the relationships between moral panics and social change. These analyses are at their best when they provide a conversation between discourse and social practice. This collection should be read as a whole: what is often missing in the individual pieces is wider context. Moses’s essay on the moral panics engendered by Anglican clergy regarding rural hiring fairs, for example, resonates with simultaneous moral panics concerning the sexual mixing of laboring populations more generally—most obviously those “uncovered” by the factory and public health commissions—yet there is no conversation linking these debates. This case exemplifies a general trend in the collection: overall, the newspaper and legal research is strong, but the secondary references are somewhat thin. While there is good conversation between the collection authors, there is not a lot of conversation externally. Martin Wiener’s work, for example, floats on the surface of the volume, but is never engaged. Several authors cite either his articles or his recent book Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (2004), but the challenges he poses to the legal system’s support of male violence toward women need to be probed much more directly by the authors in the third section especially. Additionally, Clive Emsley’s new book Hard Men: Violence in England since 1750 (2005), addresses many themes similar to those in this collection, drawing on a different set of “outrages” (although these are not his focus) and a notably different literature. The editors have included an appendix of typescript excerpts and reproductions from Victorian newspapers to give readers the flavor of Victorian reporting on crime. The typescript entries and images provide wonderful examples, but the reproduced print is of surprisingly poor quality. This is a shame. It is also unfortunate that in a collection with this much to offer there should be so many typographical errors and lapses in proofreading. Despite these problems, the authors are very good at reminding us that the boundaries around respectability, acceptability, and indeed criminality are flexible historical ones, and that these are messages we should keep in mind as we evaluate our own criminal conversations. Marjorie Levine-Clark University of Colorado at Denver