Ian
Ward
The Victorians worried about
many things, prominent among their worries being the 'condition' of England and
the 'question' of its women. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England
revisits these particular anxieties, concentrating more closely upon four
'crimes' which generated especial concern amongst contemporaries: adultery,
bigamy, infanticide and prostitution. Each engaged questions of sexuality and
its regulation, legal, moral and cultural, for which reason each attracted the
considerable interest not just of lawyers and parliamentarians, but also
novelists and poets and perhaps most importantly those who, in ever-larger
numbers, liked to pass their leisure hours reading about sex and crime.
Alongside statutes such as the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act and the 1864
Contagious Diseases Act, Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England
contemplates those texts which shaped Victorian attitudes towards England's
'condition' and the 'question' of its women: the novels of Dickens, Thackeray
and Eliot, the works of sensationalists such as Ellen Wood and Mary Braddon,
and the poetry of Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. Sex, Crime and Literature
in Victorian England is a richly contextual commentary on a critical period
in the evolution of modern legal and cultural attitudes to the relation of
crime, sexuality and the family.
Ian Ward is Professor of Law at
Newcastle University, and the author of a number of books on law, literature
and history including 'Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives'
(Cambridge University Press, 1995), 'Shakespeare and the Legal Imagination' (Cambridge
University Press, 1999), ‘The English Constitution: Myths and Realities' (Hart
Publishing, 2004), 'Law, Text, Terror' (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and
most recently 'Law and the Brontes' (Palgrave, 2011).
CONTENTS
Introduction:
Dark Shapes 1
Angels in
the House 4
At Home
with the Dombeys 9
The
Disease of Reading 16
Pleasing
and Teaching 24
1 Criminal
Conversations 29
One Person
in Law 32
Newcome v
Lord Highgate 38
Carlyle v
Carlyle 46
Oh Reader!
51
2
Fashionable Crimes 58
The
Sensational Moment 61
Fashionable
Crimes 66
Mrs
Mellish’s Marriages 73
The Shame
of Miss Braddon 81
3
Unnatural Mothers 88
The
Precious Quality of Truthfulness 90
Hardwicke’s
Children 95
R v Sorrel
101
The Lost
and the Saved 108
4 Fallen
Angels 118
Walking
the Streets 121
The Murder
of Nancy Sikes 127
Contemplating
Jenny 134
Because
Men Made the Laws 142
Index
149
Hart Publishing (2014) (available in hardcover and various ebook formats)
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