cambridge-crime-fiction

ian a. bell
Virginia seeming otherwise anachronistic, making it an account of crime as
contemporary as that offered by John Gay in Trivia; or, The Art of Walking
the Streets in London (1716) and in The Beggar’s Opera. Bybeing made
so mundane, so immediate and (if I may) so in-your-face, crime became for
readers and writers alike the defining literary feature of contemporary urban
life.
An example of the centrality of crime and the attendant sense of immediate
crisis can be found in Samuel Johnson’s poem, London (1738):
A single Jail, in Alfred’s golden Reign,
Could half the Nation’s Criminals contain;
Fair Justice then, without Constraint ador’d
Held high the steady Scale, but sheath’d the Sword;
No Spies were paid, no Special Juries known,
Blest Age! but ah! How diff’rent from our own! 12
These are not Johnson’s own words, of course, but part of the embittered
farewell from ‘injur’d Thales’, who is so horrified by the conditions of contemporary
urban life that he is preparing for voluntary exile on ‘Cambria’s
solitary shore’. Convinced that since the days of King Alfred one thousand
years earlier things have been going steadily downhill all the way, Thales –
like Henry Fielding’s Man of the Hill in TomJones or like Alexander Pope
himself in his Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot – sees no way out other than by
turning his back on urban life and becoming a recluse.
The central point in Thales’s account seems to be the flourishing condition
of criminality, and the effete impotence of the law in response. In fact, the
speaker seems to point to a kind of similitude between crime and the law –
instead of being in opposition to each other, they are ‘here’ in complicity:
‘Their Ambush here relentless Ruffians lay,/ And here the fell Attorney prowls
for prey’. 13 By using the persona of Thales, Johnson may distance himself
slightly from these sentiments, but by voicing them at all – by erasing the
moral difference between ruffians and attornies – he distances himself further
from the Whiggish progressivist accounts of the role of law in the development
of civilisation, such as that most powerfully and publicly expressed in
William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1766).
And here Johnson, otherwise a famous enthusiast for the pleasures of
urban life, articulates the contradiction which lies at the heart of the discourse
of eighteenth-century crime writing – the ideological conflict between the
atavistic and the ameliorist.
The atavistic account of crime – expressing the sense that these ‘Ruffians’
are indeed ‘relentless’, and that they are ‘here’ – has already been dwelt on.
For many commentators in the first half of the eighteenth century, specifically
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