CoursesVictorian

UNIVERSITY OF CARDIFF ~ Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: From the Newgate Calendar to Sherlock Holmes

Course Description: Stories concerned with crime have circulated, in oral and then in written form, throughout Western society since its inception, but it was in the nineteenth century that what we recognise as the literary genre of crime fiction came into being. Criminal narratives owe their longevity in part to their perennial popularity: all levels of society, it seems, are fascinated by crime. Responding to this popularity, much criminography was, and is, to be found in the contemporary popular and populist literature, the literature of the streets. Over time, elements of this mass of material were appropriated and refined by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle and made into the accounts of crime that are now recognised as the canon of crime fiction. This course explores the early, non-canonical material as well as the well-known masters-and mistresses-of mystery in the nineteenth century, tracing the development of the genre from the criminal confessions of the Newgate Calendars and Ordinary's Accounts, via the gory execution broadsides and the sensational periodical press to the fully-formed and archetypal detective stories featuring Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

The course considers the construction of the genre and the different textual and narrative forms that contributed to that construction. The material will be analysed in relation to the cultural and literary contexts. Students are expected to read a wide variety of texts including short stories, full-length novels and extracts from collections of crime narrative. The set texts will be supported by appropriate secondary material. Students will gain a critical understanding of the history, range and changing nature of the genre and the questions it both poses and responds to at different moments in the period.

Programme of Study

1. Introduction Early Crime Narratives I: The Newgate Calendars and the Ordinary's Accounts

2. Early Crime Narratives II: Broadsides and the Memoirs of Vidocq

3. Reliable Witness? William Godwin's Caleb Williams

4. The Periodical Press: Samuel Warren's Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician and 'My First Circuit: Law and Facts from the North'; Experiences of a Barrister (Anon); 'The Murderess' (Anon)

5. The Puzzle of Poe

6. READING WEEK

7. The Police in the Periodicals: 'Waters's' Recollections of a Police Officer; Charles Dickens's 'Detective Police'; Hayward's The Experiences of a Lady Detective

8. Crime and Sensation: Mary E. Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret

9. The First Detective Novel? Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone

10. The Master Detective: Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet

11. Overview and Discussion of Issues

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL ~ Pen, Pencil and Poison: Victorian Crime Fiction

Unit Director: Grace Moore

Scope and aims of the unit:: The nineteenth century heralded a new type of fiction, which demonized the villain and elevated the detective to heroic status. This unit will introduce you to the study of crime fiction as a literary genre. The course will examine the development of the crime novel in the nineteenth century—largely in response to the establishment of a police force in 1829 and the subsequent rise of detection as a science. Although the unit will focus primarily on British crime novels and short stories of the Victorian age, we shall begin by looking at early influential representations of the master criminal and detective by the likes of Balzac and Poe and we shall, of course, examine Dostoevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment.
The course will address the social, political and economic changes which led to a middle-class (and later in the century a working-class) readership and we will consider how these new audiences influenced constructions of crime and criminality. We shall examine the serialization and circulation of crime fiction, sensation fiction, scientific discourses surrounding the criminal mind, and technological advancements that aided detection. Consideration will also be given to why the genre has, until recently, been neglected by literary scholarship.

Main works to be studied:
Honoré de Balzac. Old Goriot (1834). (Penguin)
M.E. Braddon. Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). (Penguin)
Arthur Conan Doyle. The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. (Penguin)
Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White (1860). (Oxford World’s Classics)
---. The Moonstone (1868). (Penguin)
Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist (1837-8). (Penguin)
---. Barnaby Rudge (1841). (Penguin)
---. Bleak House (1852-3). (Everyman)
Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment. (1866). (Penguin)
Edgar Allan Poe. "The Man of the Crowd" (1840), "The Murders in the rue Morgue" (1841), "The Purloined Letter" (1845). (Any edition)
Robert Louis Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1887). (Broadview Press)
Anthony Trollope. The Way We Live Now (1875). (Oxford World’s Classics)
*Please endeavour to purchase the editions indicated if at all possible.
Your weekly reading will also be supplemented from time to time with handouts from Victorian crime theorists, periodicals and scientific reports.

Course Description: From urban underworlds to middle-class drawing rooms, this senior seminar will examine the ways in which nineteenth-century detective and crime narratives reveal their secrets, whether they be corpses, codes, or clues. Our survey of the ‘origins’ of the detective and crime genres will briefly include cultural material on murder and execution broadsides; the Newgate Calendars; the emergence of the detective figure; the penny dreadfuls; and Strand Magazine in the 1890s. Of particular interest will be the intersections of memoirs and murders (where the author of a crime is also the author of the text); the presentation of puzzles and their solutions; narrative structures; the rhetoric and figures of disguise; violence and affect; the insistence of the letter; addiction; traumatic cultures; and the intense voyeuristic fascination with the urban underworld and public spectacles of crime and punishment. The three conceptual lines of inquiry for this course will be theoretical, literary-historical, and generic.