Victorian Realism and Crime

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 February 2025) | Viewed by 5795

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of English, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZG, UK
Interests: Victorian realist prose; literature and psychology; crime fiction (especially representations of criminal psychology and psychopathy); horror, and film and television adaptation

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Guest Editor
Centre for Innovation in Education, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3GW, UK
Interests: concepts of assessment and feedback; decolonising pedagogy/assessment; programme development/learning design; communities of practice; access, participation and progression

Special Issue Information

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 maraines@liverpool.ac.uk and/or samuel.saunders@liverpool.ac.uk 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

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Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 711 KiB  
Article
Medicine, Crime and Realism in Ouida’s ‘Toxin’ (1895)
by Louise Benson James
Humanities 2025, 14(2), 31; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020031 - 12 Feb 2025
Viewed by 521
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 [...] Read more.
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 […] on the medical profession’. This article analyses the story and the BMJ’s response, considering it in relation to crime fiction and realism. It further looks at reports of medical crimes in the late-nineteenth century, and considers Ouida’s deployment of diphtheria, a virulent epidemic of its time, through reports of the recently discovered cure in medical journals and the popular press. I argue that the reason the BMJ felt so threatened by her depiction of a murderous doctor is in great part due to Ouida’s attention to medical realism: the threat of fiction’s entanglement with the real. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Victorian Realism and Crime)
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18 pages, 247 KiB  
Article
Colonial Catharsis: Romantic-Realism and the Imperial Gaze in Confessions of a Thug
by Kevin Frank
Humanities 2025, 14(2), 24; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020024 - 4 Feb 2025
Viewed by 504
Abstract
This article is situated in the context of Victorian imaginations saturated with stories of crime and punishment and influenced by Romantic horror and terror aesthetics involving the sublime. The author delineates how the novel’s realism is affixed to an inherent romanticism and argues [...] Read more.
This article is situated in the context of Victorian imaginations saturated with stories of crime and punishment and influenced by Romantic horror and terror aesthetics involving the sublime. The author delineates how the novel’s realism is affixed to an inherent romanticism and argues that the affect and effect of terror and horror resulting from colonial crimes exhibited in the novel allow readers to experience catharsis and to reassert their humanity through the imperial gaze. Additionally, readers may confirm the values of the ‘home’ nation and the justification of British colonisation through the trope of ‘bringing order out of chaos’. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Victorian Realism and Crime)
17 pages, 254 KiB  
Article
Framing Deaths, Embracing Lives: Alan M. Clark’s Jack the Ripper Victims Series
by Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
Humanities 2025, 14(1), 14; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010014 - 16 Jan 2025
Viewed by 842
Abstract
Jack the Ripper fictions tend to be realist in mode, making frequent use of the Victorian press and archives to depict the 1888 murders. At the same time, they marginalise and exploit the victims, defining them as silent testimonies to the power of [...] Read more.
Jack the Ripper fictions tend to be realist in mode, making frequent use of the Victorian press and archives to depict the 1888 murders. At the same time, 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 one canonical victim each, shifts the focus and depicts their lives. This article outlines the way the fictionalisations of the five women’s lives bring to the fore five other ‘crimes’ or transgressions: addiction, domestic violence, unemployment, sex work, and homelessness, but also the way these texts replace what is sensational and formulaic in Ripperature with something more than 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, it argues that pre-dating the publication of The Five (2019), Clark managed to realistically re-present (make present) and represent (create a portrayal of) the late-Victorian crime of dismissing the women who were murdered. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Victorian Realism and Crime)
24 pages, 368 KiB  
Article
Beyond Anything Realism Can Represent? Monstrous Crime in Marx’s Victorian Novel
by Jayson Althofer
Humanities 2025, 14(1), 9; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010009 - 14 Jan 2025
Viewed by 968
Abstract
This article reads Karl Marx’s Capital (volume 1, 1867) as the Bildungsroman of a congenital criminal: its eponymous character, Capital. Following Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Marx detects and dissects capitalism’s crimes. Capital has been called Marx’s [...] Read more.
This article reads Karl Marx’s Capital (volume 1, 1867) as the Bildungsroman of a congenital criminal: its eponymous character, Capital. Following Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Marx detects and dissects capitalism’s crimes. Capital has been called Marx’s ‘Victorian novel’ and compared to English realism’s triple-deckers. Yet his indispensable informants include factory inspectors whose reports, according to Fredric Jameson, provide testimony beyond anything realism can represent. How, then, does Marx’s apparently realist aesthetic convey Capital’s criminal deeds and criminogenic drive? To address this matter, the article examines the Gothicism of Marx’s realism. It highlights his development of Engels’s Gothic realism, demonstrates how Capital begins in media res—its first sentence presenting an immense, monstrous collection of evidence of Capital’s cannibalism—and links this opening crime scene to Marx’s portrayal of the 1863 case of Mary Anne Walkley. Murdered in her workplace, Walkley inhabits an underworld overpopulated by fellow workers killed by wage-labour. The article argues that, because actuality under the rule of Capital is structurally and monstrously criminal, Marx’s Gothic constitutes a realistic medium to represent criminal monsters and structures. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Victorian Realism and Crime)
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