Criminal Biography Research Articles

A Cult of Dependence: The Social Context of The London Merchant

In his pathbreaking study of effects of Industrial Revolution on English society, Peter Laslett has argued that the removal of economic function of patriarchal family at point of industrialization created mass society; further, he contends that this new society turned people who worked into mass of undifferentiated equals, . . . bereft for ever of feeling that work was family affair, done within family.! The primary economic unit of pre-industrial England was extended household, consisting of married couple, their young children, and any journeymen, apprentices, laborers, relatives, or servants who could also contribute to and be supported by family business. When this system worked properly, its benefits were immediate and concrete, and they provided an implicit justification for power structure which produced them; emotional security, social acceptance, and economic success could all be traced to same source. However, when new methods of achieving social and economic success began to compete with old system, drawbacks of that system became more troubling, if only because possibility of circumventing it had finally presented itself. Although by no means industrialized, London during first half of eighteenth century was, as Laslett puts it, a city on an industrial scale,2 and as such it was full of such possibilities. One option available to disaffected workers in eighteenthcentury London was life of crime, and one reason for widespread popularity of criminal biographies during this period may have been that some members of literary public saw

La biographie criminelle anglaise. Formes narratives et circuits de diffusion

Françoise du Sorbier : English criminal biographies. In the 18th Century, criminals were the subject of a large number of writings aimed at a very wide readership. This study takes two typical examples, a real-life criminal, James Hind, and Moll Flanders, the heroine of Defoe's autobiographical fiction ; it follows the careers of these two characters, from press accounts to novel, via chap literature. We discover that the stories of criminals to be found in the chapbooks tend to be conformist, while the accounts aimed at a better-soff readership are more subversive. Nevertheless the relations existing between classical and popular literature and their influence on each other show that the traditional distinction made between ' popular 'and' classical ' is purely arbitrary.

'Appearances of Truth': The Literature of Crime as a Narrative System (1660-1841)

A glance at the sale catalogues of private libraries in England during the Restoration and eighteenth century reveals a broad range of taste in fiction, old and recent, foreign and domestic. Much of the foreign literature, particularly French romances and novels, appears in translation, perhaps under the general principle that such light reading should not be burdened with the labour of having to search after unfamiliar words. Such records provide sufficient evidence for a fiction-reading public at the dawn of the modern period. But in these catalogues fiction exists alongside other forms of entertaining reading voyages, histories, and memoirs; and the formal relationships between fiction and what might be regarded as other narrative systems have received wide attention, with writers like Hayden White and C. Wright Mills claiming literary values and structures for history and sociology, and with Frank Kermode suggesting that a larger theory of narrative structures might be invented to replace the present narrow consideration of 'literary' fictions like the novel or romance.1 One type of narrative which has not received as much attention as it deserves is the body of materials related to crimes of various kinds. I do not mean that there have not been studies of criminal accounts as sources for fiction, but that such accounts seem not to have been examined as a self-contained system of narrative with its own genres: reports on the crimes committed, accounts of the capture of the criminals, trials, descriptions of prisons, speeches from the cell or at the gallows, reports from attending clergymen on the psychological and spiritual state of the criminal at his or her death, and finally a criminal biography incorporating a summary of the entire career of the malefactor. The reason for this omission is obvious: whereas there existed a considerable