Class conflict and penny crime fiction: 1840-1850
Abstract
This dissertation examines penny crime fiction of the 1840s, exploring relationships among stories, their readers, and contemporary social attitudes. I situate the texts in Victorian debates over working-class literacy and penny fiction, examine the material conditions and attitudes informing the texts, investigate the conditions under which the texts were produced and consumed, and highlight such theoretical considerations as the constructedness of texts and the location of "textual" meaning. In textual analyses, I emphasize reader positioning and readers' interpretations, and highlight contemporary efforts to shape working-class attitudes about themselves and their "superiors." I set G. W. M. Reynolds's Mysteries of London (1844-46) and Herbert Thornley's Life in London (1846) against efforts by moral reformers to render the laboring classes respectable, examining the ways in which the texts' narrative structures orient the reader and construct boundaries between the "normal" and the "deviant." I view the anonymous "Forged Acceptance; Or, The Double Crime" (1845), a tale serialized in Lloyd's Entertaining Journal, in light of the contemporary railway mania, exploring the ways in which it voices and ultimately contains tensions about the encroachment of the bourgeoisie into the ranks of the gentlemanly elite. Investigating multiple deceptions and exposures in the story, I gauge the extent to which the story encourages deference in readers--deference to the text and deference to the (new) social hierarchy it describes. I conclude that interpellative textual structures in the stories both reinforce and undermine hegemonic values, forge and dissolve reader-criminal connections--in short, that the stories offer conflicting portraits of crime, and position readers equivocally. The tales challenge the dominant ideologies of respectability and unregulated markets but also encourage submission to bourgeois leadership, acceptance of stagnant wage labor, and renunciation of common but increasingly censured behaviors such as gambling and cohabitation. The texts' positioning in contemporary ideological debates reinforces the "respectable" positionings effected by the texts.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Palmer, Purdue University.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
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