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Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation, edited by Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore; pp. xiii + 259. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004, £47.50, $89.95.
This fascinating collection of essays traverses the century and ranges across Victorian criminal activity and social aberrance from regicide and serial murder to sensation and child sexual abuse. Focusing on bodies, moral and physical decay, exploitative journalism, and abusive commercialism, the collection never fails to be engaging, though some essays are stronger than others. Even for those less interested in the seamy underside of Victorian England, the book provides insights into the relationship between the mainstream and the marginal in Victorian culture. While a clearer framework would have been valuable, this carnival of Victorian deviance is a worthwhile read.
Three of the collection's best essays deal with the politics of empire. Máire ní Fhlathúin's engaging discussion of the murderous Thugee cult in India reports that these criminals inspired rhetoric about the colonial salvation of India. The Thugees were "categorized as 'extraordinary' criminals-thugs-in order to facilitate the sanctioning of harsh legal and political moves against them" (35) and to rationalize empire itself. Her essay points to one of the volume's most compelling themes: the obsession with crime that produced both crime and culture in general. Maria Bachman's essay presents the critique of the Irish as passionate and irrational in Wilkie Collins's Blind Love (1890) as a justification for empire and English rule. Gita Punjabi Trelease's essay on India, fingerprinting, and crime analyzes both imperialist notions of Indian identity and evolving technologies of crime and detection, arguing that fiction like Arthur Conan Doyle's offers...