As London became the first major city of the nineteenth century,
new models of representation emerged in the journalism, poetry,
fiction, and social commentary of the period. Simon Joyce argues
that such writing reflected a persistent worry about the problem of
crime but was never able to contain it. Such commentators as
Wordsworth, Dickens, Mayhew, Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Booth, and
Wilde all struggled with the same questions about how to represent
London and the relations among its varied populations, yet their
accounts often undermined one another.
Whereas Victorian social science presumed a correlation between
criminal activity, geographical residence, and social class, the
popular literature of the period often sought just as strenuously
to deny the link, giving rise to privileged and pathological
offenders like Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll. This in turn shifted
attention away from the urban slums that had been the setting for
the so-called Newgate novels of the 1830s and 1840s. By 1900, crime
appears as a distinctively modern problem, requiring large-scale
solutions and government intervention in place of an older approach
that was rooted in personal morality or philanthropic
paternalism.
Illustrating "literary geography" -- in which physical space is
not merely a backdrop for the plot but an integral element in
shaping textual meaning -- Simon Joyce's Capital Offenses reveals
how certain geographical patterns can not only give weight to
interpretive meanings already suggested in the texts but also
enable us to read them in a new and surprising light.
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