Criminal certainties: Knowable, unknowable and transformable criminals in nineteenth-century cultural representations (original) (raw)

2023, A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Age of Empire

The nineteenth century saw a plethora of cultural representations of criminals and criminality in Britain and its colonies. Newspapers, memoirs, autobiographies, scientific and pseudo-scientific treatises, and writings from new experts such as police detectives and social reformers expressed consternation and fascination with criminality. These writings presented various theories on crime and criminality’s prevalence in society, its causes, and its challenges. Many authors proposed that criminals were distinguishable from the regular population. The criminal was ‘knowable’ in various ways: distinct in their bodies, background and behaviour from other people. This body of thinking, however, rested uneasily with other aspects of criminal theories that were popular at the time. It was also postulated that criminals were deceitful, could conceal their identities, and were thus unknowable and outwardly unrecognisable. And further, some thought criminality was not a definite state, but one capable of change through the reformative possibilities offered by the new penal state. In our chapter we analyse the relationship between these contrasting strands of nineteenth-century thought on criminal cultures, examining the known, unknown and transformable criminal in nineteenth-century thought.