Sex Crime And Literature In Victorian England

Author : Ian Ward
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2014-11-01
Category : Law
ISBN : 9781782253693

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Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England by Ian Ward Pdf

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.

Author : Ian Ward
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 189 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2014-11-01
Category : Law
ISBN : 9781782253709

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Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England by Ian Ward Pdf

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.

Author : Anthea Trodd
Publisher : Springer
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 1988-12-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781349196388

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Domestic Crime In The Victorian Novel by Anthea Trodd Pdf

Author : Judith Rowbotham,Kim Stevenson
Publisher : Ohio State University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 9780814209738

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Criminal Conversations by Judith Rowbotham,Kim Stevenson Pdf

"The essays in this book set out to explore the ways in which Victorians used newspapers to identify the causes of bad behavior and its impacts, and the ways in which they tried to "distance" criminals and those guilty of "bad" behavior from the ordinary members of society, including identification of them as different according to race of sexual orientation. It also explores how threats from within "normal" society were depicted and the panic that issues like "baby-farming" caused." "Victorian alarm was about crimes and bad behavior which they saw as new or unique to their period - but which were not new then and which, in slightly different dress, are still causing panic today. What is striking about the essays in this collection are the ways in which they echo contemporary concerns about crime and bad behavior, including panics about "new" types of crime. This has implications for modern understandings of how society needs to understand crime, demonstrating that while there are changes over time, there are also important continuities."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author : Lucia Zedner
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:1154967554

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Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England by Lucia Zedner Pdf

Author : William Cornish,Stephen Banks,Charles Mitchell,Paul Mitchell,Rebecca Probert
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 672 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2019-10-31
Category : Law
ISBN : 9781509931262

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Law and Society in England 1750-1950 by William Cornish,Stephen Banks,Charles Mitchell,Paul Mitchell,Rebecca Probert Pdf

Law and Society in England 1750–1950 is an indispensable text for those wishing to study English legal history and to understand the foundations of the modern British state. In this new updated edition the authors explore the complex relationship between legal and social change. They consider the ways in which those in power themselves imagined and initiated reform and the ways in which they were obliged to respond to demands for change from outside the legal and political classes. What emerges is a lively and critical account of the evolution of modern rights and expectations, and an engaging study of the formation of contemporary social, administrative and legal institutions and ideas, and the road that was travelled to create them. The book is divided into eight chapters: Institutions and Ideas; Land; Commerce and Industry; Labour Relations; The Family; Poverty and Education; Accidents; and Crime. This extensively referenced analysis of modern social and legal history will be invaluable to students and teachers of English law, political science, and social history.

Author : Ian Ward
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 492 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2020-01-09
Category : Law
ISBN : 9781509912315

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English Legal Histories by Ian Ward Pdf

English Legal Histories is an exciting and innovative approach to the study of English law. Written in an accessible style intended for students as well as a broader audience, it takes the reader beyond the narrower confines of legal doctrines and cases, and invites them to consider the myriad contexts within which English law has been shaped: the politics, the economics, the art, the poetry. Reaching from the Reformation through to the age of Reform, it tells stories, the 'histories', of English law. Histories of the constitution and government, of crime and contracts, tort and trespass, property and equity. Of the people who made that law, those who wrote it, and those who suffered it. For it is in the end a human story, of justice and injustice, of success and failure, good luck and bad. The law is full of statutes and instruments, cases and precedent, but its history is full of people and peculiarity. Which is what, of course, makes it so endlessly fascinating.

Author : John Benson
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 141 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2022-09-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000688931

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Respectability, Bankruptcy and Bigamy in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain by John Benson Pdf

Respectability, Bankruptcy and Bigamy in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Britain explores the vexed question of middle-class respectability in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It focuses upon the life of London solicitor Hamilton Pawley (1860–1936), who was barred from working by the Law Society, twice declared bankrupt, and in 1919 was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment with hard labour for bigamously marrying a woman practically forty years his junior. If Pawley did not suffer the revenge of respectable society, it is difficult to think who would. Drawing upon the fact that the disgraced and the disreputable have always tended to attract a disproportionate amount of attention, the book ranges widely, exploring such important issues as middle-class education, career choices, the dynamics of family life, and the workings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century legal system. It shows that Pawley was able to hold on to his professional – and even gentlemanly – status for far longer than seemed likely. This all suggests, the book concludes, that although respectability was as important to the middle class as we have always been told, it was both easier to acquire and easier to retain than we have generally been led to believe. This book will appeal to all those interested in British society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Author : Marco Wan
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2016-11-10
Category : Law
ISBN : 9781134843879

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Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction by Marco Wan Pdf

How do lawyers, judges and jurors read novels? And what is at stake when literature and law confront each other in the courtroom? Nineteenth-century England and France are remembered for their active legal prosecution of literature, and this book examines the ways in which five novels were interpreted in the courtroom: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Paul Bonnetain’s Charlot s’amuse, Henry Vizetelly’s English translation of Émile Zola’s La Terre, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. It argues that each of these novels attracted legal censure because they presented figures of sexual dissidence – the androgyne, the onanist or masturbator, the patricide, the homosexual and the lesbian – that called into question an increasingly fragile normative, middleclass masculinity. Offering close readings of the novels themselves, and of legal material from the proceedings, such as the trial transcripts and judicial opinions, the book addresses both the doctrinal dimensions of Victorian obscenity and censorship, as well as the reading practices at work in the courtroom. It situates the cases in their historical context, and highlights how each trial constitutes a scene of reading – an encounter between literature and the law – through which different forms of masculinity were shaped, bolstered or challenged.

Author : Henry Kha
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2020-11-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000286687

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A History of Divorce Law by Henry Kha Pdf

The book explores the rise of civil divorce in Victorian England, the subsequent operation of a fault system of divorce based solely on the ground of adultery, and the eventual piecemeal repeal of the Victorian-era divorce law during the Interwar years. The legal history of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 is at the heart of the book. The Act had a transformative impact on English law and society by introducing a secular judicial system of civil divorce. This swept aside the old system of divorce that was only obtainable from the House of Lords and inadvertently led to the creation of the modern family justice system. The book argues that only through understanding the legal doctrine in its wider cultural, political, religious, and social context is it possible to fully analyse and assess the changes brought about by the Act. The major developments included the end of any pretence of the indissolubility of marriage, the statutory enshrinement of a double standard based on gender in the grounds for divorce, and the growth of divorce across all spectrums of English society. The Act was a product of political and legal compromise between conservative forces resisting the legal introduction of civil divorce and the reformers, who demanded married women receive equal access to the grounds of divorce. Changing attitudes towards divorce that began in the Edwardian period led to a gradual rejection of Victorian moral values and the repeal of the Act after 80 years of existence in the Interwar years. The book will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers with an interest in legal history, family law, and Victorian studies.

Author : Joshua G. Stuart-Bennett
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 167 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2022-11-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000642445

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Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London by Joshua G. Stuart-Bennett Pdf

Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London explores a largely obscured marketplace of motherhood that provided ways for women to manage the stigma of illegitimacy and their respectable identities within Victorian and Edwardian society. It focuses on the extent of women’s ‘dirty work’, when maternal problem management was fundamental to the general maintenance of respectability and, by extension, to Empire and Civilisation. Despite its intrigue, history has struggled to understand and represent an uncomfortable but significant artefact of Western modernising society: ‘baby-farming’. During a period when ideologies of respectability and civilisation arguably mattered most, the ‘right’ kind of parenthood – especially motherhood – became paramount. As the ‘wrong’ offspring could jeopardise a woman’s chances of being respectable, a wholesale, informal, and somewhat clandestine marketplace emerged that catered to various maternal difficulties. Within this marketplace, a pregnancy or newborn child who may have compromised a woman’s respectability could be ‘disposed’ of through different means, for a fee. From the Victorian period to the present, the commercialised maternal practices associated with baby-farming have become firmly established within collective consciousness as being synonymous with child murder, female pathology, and ‘infanticide for hire’. This book provides a revised, far more complex, and nuanced narrative history which reveals all that was associated with baby-farming – including all possible outcomes – to be entirely natural, rational, and even necessary products of their time; an understandable outcome of the period’s ‘civilising offensive’. Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, history, and gender studies.

Author : Kathryn Hughes
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 441 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2018-02
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781421425702

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Victorians Undone by Kathryn Hughes Pdf

In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.

Author : Kate Morrison
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2020-05-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781476639758

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Morality and the Law in British Detective and Spy Fiction, 1880-1920 by Kate Morrison Pdf

Who decides what is right or wrong, ethical or immoral, just or unjust? In the world of crime and spy fiction between 1880 and 1920, the boundaries of the law were blurred and justice called into question humanity's moral code. As fictional detectives mutated into spies near the turn of the century, the waning influence of morality on decision-making signaled a shift in behavior from idealistic principles towards a pragmatic outlook taken in the national interest. Taking a fresh approach to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's popular protagonist, Sherlock Holmes, this book examines how Holmes and his rival maverick literary detectives and spies manipulated the law to deliver a fairer form of justice than that ordained by parliament. Multidisciplinary, this work views detective fiction through the lenses of law, moral philosophy, and history, and incorporates issues of gender, equality, and race. By studying popular publications of the time, it provides a glimpse into public attitudes towards crime and morality and how those shifting opinions helped reconstruct the hero in a new image.

Author : Nancy E. Johnson
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 199 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2015-06-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781611486766

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Impassioned Jurisprudence by Nancy E. Johnson Pdf

In this volume of essays, scholars of the interdisciplinary field of law and literature write about the role of emotion in English law and legal theory in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The law’s claims to reason provided a growing citizenry that was beginning to establish its rights with an assurance of fairness and equity. Yet, an investigation of the rational discourse of the law reveals at its core the processes of emotion, and a study of literature that engages with the law exposes the potency of emotion in the practice and understanding of the law. Examining both legal and literary texts, the authors in this collection consider the emotion that infuses the law and find that feeling, sentiment and passion are integral to juridical thought as well as to specific legislation.

Author : Erin Sheley
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2020-04-02
Category : Law
ISBN : 9781474450126

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Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the 18th and 19th Centuries by Erin Sheley Pdf

Through interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period, this book uncovers how the cultural narrative affected the development of the law itself in the 18th and 19th centuries in three case studies: adultery, child criminality and rape testimony.