Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London Caroline Reitz (bio) Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London, by Simon Joyce; pp. viii + 267. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003, $39.50. Simon Joyce's Capital Offenses is one of a recent crop of very welcome books that takes another look at the question of crime and punishment in Victorian culture, a question that since the late 1980s has come to be dominated by Foucauldian readings of power, such as D. A. Miller's influential The Novel and the Police (1987). Such readings, according to Joyce, display a "fondness for premature totalization and theoretical conspiracy in which power and discipline always triumph in the end" (77). Joyce's book joins works such as Ronald Thomas's Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (1999) and Lauren Goodlad's Victorian Literature and the Victorian State (2003) which ask the reader to challenge the "containment thesis" of a certain kind of Foucauldian reading of culture and to explore more complicated, less "unidirectional" ideas about power. Joyce's book takes part in another revisionary conversation, as well, and here Capital Offenses joins recent works in urban studies, such as John Plotz's The Crowd (2000) and Joseph McLaughlin's Writing the Urban Jungle (2000), which ask us to question our assumptions about the problems and possibilities of representing the Victorian city. In addition to addressing questions currently central to Victorian studies, Capital Offenses is also the kind of erudite and thorough argument that comes from being a long time in the making; several sections of the book appeared as articles in major journals. It is thick with interesting associations between literary production and cultural events, such as, for example, Walter Besant's "Palace of Delight" in his All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and the real People's Palace, based on Besant's idea, which opened a year before and less than a mile away from where Jack the Ripper would commit his murders. Joyce reads a range of literary sources, from William Wordsworth to Arthur Morrison; covers a broad period of political history, from Chartism to Liberalism (and in the conclusion, even Thatcherism); and illustrates as well how literary movements are also political movements, as in his reading of an urban naturalism emerging at the end of the Victorian era. Capital Offenses blends different disciplinary perspectives throughout: "London, then, is mapped: in literal ways by surveyors, architects, builders, cartographers; and in more figurative ways by novelists, journalists, sociologists, government investigators. I am primarily concerned here with that latter group of texts, as cultural artifacts that are both distinct from and also an extension of the former" (4). Joyce's use of the word [End Page 100] "geographies" in the subtitle is, then, both literal and literary. He explores both how metaphors work to "shrink the city back to the size of a knowable totality" (26) and how they may return to literary analysis a "precise attention to geographical specificities" (11). Thus the St. James-St. Giles opposition, for example, is a trope that organizes the way we think of urban spaces and their populations while also asserting that those are two real places on the map that have specific histories—even if these histories don't always neatly fit into the binaries they would appear to symbolize. Joyce begins with an overview of treatments of the city in the first half of the nineteenth century, including chapters on reading and crime in Newgate novels, and on the emergent urban sociology of Henry Mayhew in the context of the creation of the new police. In this chapter on the police, Joyce addresses one of the main oversights of contemporary literary considerations of crime: a tendency to follow Whiggish accounts holding that the police personify English principles and steadily gain public acceptance over the century. Joyce's reading of Mayhew instead emphasizes resistance and argues that underclass groups, such as Mayhew's costermongers, "embody a kind of constitutive limit on the potential operations of the new police" (118). Joyce keeps the reality of cultural antagonism toward state authority in view even as he suggests that...