cambridge-crime-fiction

The Newgate novel and sensation fiction, 1830–1868
at the height of the Newgate controversy (and thus possibly a post hoc rationalisation
and sanitisation of his aims in the light of the moral furore
directed at Newgate fiction), Bulwer claimed that one of his objects in Paul
Clifford had been ‘to draw attention to two errors in our penal institutions,
viz., a vicious Prison-discipline and a sanguinary Criminal Code’. It should
be remembered that Paul Clifford looks back to a time when there were over
200 capital offences on the statute book, for crimes ranging from murder and
highway robbery to sheep-stealing and impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner
(an inmate of the Chelsea Royal Hospital for old or infirm soldiers), and
when policing was haphazard and corrupt and prisons brutal and insanitary.
It was published at a time when there had already been a twenty-year
campaign for the reform of the criminal code and the prison system, and
when Peel’s campaigns for police reform had begun to bear fruit with the
establishment of the Metropolitan Police Office in 1829. Prison reform took
rather longer: it was only in 1835 that the Prison Act established inspectors
of prisons on the model of the factory inspectorate.
Paul Clifford encourages its readers to ask, as Paul Clifford does of Lucy
Brandon, ‘What is Crime?’ Paul’s answer suggests that crime is both a social
construct and the product of inequitable social conditions:
Men embody their worst prejudices, their most evil passions, in a heterogeneous
and contradictory code; and whatever breaks this code they term a
crime. When they make no distinction in the penalty – that is to say, in the
estimation – awarded both to murder and to a petty theft imposed on the
weak will by famine, we ask nothing else to convince us that they are ignorant
of the very nature of guilt, and that they make up in ferocity for the want of
wisdom. 10
If Paul is the criminal-as-victim, he is also an eloquent spokesman for social
and legal reform. Thus in the speech which he makes in his own defence
(felons did not have the right to a defence counsel before 1836), he attacks
the system that has made him and which is about to condemn him.
Your laws are but of two classes; the one makes criminals, the other punishes
them. I have suffered by the one – I am about to perish by the other. . . .
Seven years ago I was sent to the house of correction for an offence which I
did not commit; I went thither, a boy who had never infringed a single law –
I came forth, in a few weeks, a man who was prepared to break all laws! . . .
your legislation made me what I am! and it now destroys me, as it destroys
thousands, for being what it made me! ...Let those whom the law protects
consider it a protector; when did it ever protect me? When did it ever protect
the poor man? The government of a state, the institutions of law, profess to
provide for all those who ‘obey.’ Mark! A man hungers – do you feed him? He
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