«НЬЮГЕЙТСКИЙ КАЛЕНДАРЬ»: ПСИХОЛОГИЧЕСКАЯ РЕКОНСТРУКЦИЯ АНГЛИЙСКОЙ КРИМИНАЛЬНОЙ БИОГРАФИИ XVIII СТОЛЕТИЯ

Abstract

The author of the article refers to one of the intellectual aspects of the genesis of English penitentiary reforms of the 18th century. The progressive increase in crime rate, which English society faced in the 18th century, became a popular trend in social discourse, being left off “board” of historical penology that developed till the middle of the 20th century in the line of the normativism approach. Historiographic schools traditionally treated the evolution of English criminal justice system of the 18th century as the history of sanctions and led complicated social processes to forming severe “vertical of subordination”. The dislocation of the vector of historical researches to interdisciplinary anthropological field led to the emergence of new methods of reconstructions of historical world. The author applied theoretical aspects and tools of “cultural-intellectual and new social history” and it helped to consider imperious relationships in the epoch of the reforming of criminal justice system in the mirror of representation in historical narratives in social-cultural context and reality of Great Britain in the 18th century. The aim of the following research is to analyze criminal biographies from the Newgate Calendar for comprehension of the psychology of a crime both in the point of view of its direct subjects and through the prism of literary and personal interpretation. To reach the goal the author solves the following tasks: - considers the phenomenon of crime from the point of view of their subjects, on the one hand, and the public in the search for universal forms of neutralization of criminal aggression and ways of realization of the punishment in the stated period, on the other; - analyzes the criminals’ psychological state and emotional reactions taking into account classical studies in criminal psychology; - shows the specifics of the manifestation and perception of violence and “crime and retribution” interpretation in the social and spiritual-intellectual contexts of the period In the framework of the study, the author resorts to both special historical and source study methods (biographical, historical synthesis, discursive analysis, interpretation of texts and sources), as well as to the tools of related humanitarian disciplines such as psychological anthropology (reconstruction of a criminal biography involving fundamental works of Z. Freud, E. Fromm, Yu.M. Antonyan). We conclude the following: First of all, Newgate histories performed the edifying function, reminding us of the inevitability of punishment and compulsory repentance of a criminal. Moralistic component helped the “Calendar” to create the reputation of reading, elevating the spirit and it frequently held pride of place on the bookshelves near the Bible. Secondly, The Newgate Calendar made the attitude to the essence of violence in human nature as a part of public discourse. It was a successful commercial project of replication of the examples of antisocial behavior: violence, fraud, adultery, sexual inversions were boldly included into the sphere of public representation. In fact, the combination of didactic discourses and narrative passages created compositional structure of every biography in proportion, fitting such criteria as provocativeness of the material, eccentricity of a criminal’s personality and the degree of his discrepancy to conventional social norms.