cambridge-crime-fiction

lyn pykett
London criminals and dashing highwaymen. Observing Paul’s avid consumption
of Newgate chronicles of highwaymen such as Dick Turpin, Mrs Lobkins
diverts his literary interests by putting him to work with Peter McGrawler,
editor of the ‘Asinaeum’, who teaches him to write ‘tickling’, ‘slashing’ or
‘plastering’ (i.e. flattering) reviews. 8 (This attack on the Athenaeum which
had been critical of Bulwer’s earlier attempts at fiction is the beginning of
the literary wrangling and in-fighting which marked the construction and
reception of the Newgate novel.) At the age of sixteen Paul is sent to the
‘house of correction’ for pick-pocketing, despite his innocence of the offence.
Alienated from society by this injustice, and schooled in crime by
his prison experience, Paul escapes, joins a band of highwaymen and becomes
their leader. Subsequently, as ‘Captain Clifford’, Paul enters society
(ostensibly to make his fortune through a calculated marriage) and falls in
love with the heiress Lucy Brandon. At this point the plot becomes complicated
in a manner typical of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel.
Lucy is also being pursued by Lord Mauleverer, assisted by her uncle – the
ambitious lawyer William Brandon – whom Mauleverer helps to a judgeship.
Paul joins his highwayman companions on one last exploit – to rob
Mauleverer – is apprehended (after helping them to escape), and tried before
Judge Brandon. Meanwhile numerous twists and turns of the plot reveal
that the mysteries of Paul’s parentage are connected with the murky pasts of
Judge Brandon and Mauleverer and, in a thrilling climax to the trial scene,
Judge Brandon learns that he is Paul’s father. He is obliged to pronounce the
death sentence on his newly discovered son, but subsequently commutes it
to one of transportation to Australia. The novel ends with a brief account of
Paul and Lucy’s happy life in America where they have lived as good citizens
for many years since Paul’s escape from the penal colony.
Paul’s career as a highwayman and his speech at his trial owe something to
the Newgate Calendars which Bulwer read in preparation for his novel, but
Paul’s eloquence, his education, daring and honour make him (paradoxically
perhaps) both the stuff of legend and boys’ own adventures, and the vehicle
of a reforming message. For this prototypical Newgate novel is also, as Louis
Cazamian noted, a prototype of the Victorian ‘social novel with a purpose’,
which addressed ‘the grave problems which concerned the whole of society,
discussed them in their entirety, and proposed formulas or vague aspirations
for the total reform of human relations’. 9 Paul Clifford is, among other
things, an investigation of crime and punishment, and an attack on the unreformed
legal and penal code. It seeks to challenge its readers’ assumptions
about the nature and causes of crime and their prescriptions for punishment
by demonstrating that the legal and penal systems of Clifford’s day were
oppressive, corrupt, inhumane and ineffective. In a Preface added in 1840,
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