scholarly journals From Moll Flanders to Tess of the D'Urbervilles: Women, Autonomy and Criminal Responsibility in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century England

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Lacey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
Moll Flanders

Clothing in Context — Nineteenth-Century Dress and Textiles in the Thomas Hardy Archive

Costume ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Famous People ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
Textiles And Clothing ◽  
Insight Into

This article will consider how dress, textiles, manuscripts and images in the Thomas Hardy Archive illuminate his writing and reveal the accuracy of his descriptions of clothing in novels including Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Rural clothing, fashionable styles, drawings and illustrations will shed new light on his writing through providing an insight into the people's dress he described so eloquently in his writing. The textiles and clothing in the Archive are also significant as nineteenth-century working-class dress is relatively rare. Everyday rural clothing does not tend to survive, so a collection belonging to Hardy's family of country stonemasons provides new opportunities for research in this area. Even more unusual is clothing reliably provenanced to famous people or writers, and such garments that do exist tend to be from the middle or upper classes. This article will show how the combination of surviving dress, biographical context and literary framework enriches understanding of Hardy's words and informs research into nineteenth-century rural dress.

The Telegraphic Principle in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-52
Author(s):  
David Trotter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Effective Implementation ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
System P ◽  
Blue Eyes ◽  
Jude The Obscure

This chapter concerns the attitudes, practices, and figures of speech that during the course of the nineteenth century prepared the way for the eventual separation of the idea of the signal from that of the sign. It has to do with the emergence of the telegraphic principle (initially by means of the Napoleonic-era optical telegraph) as a thrillingly effective implementation of remote intimacy. Its main focus is on the intimacies developed remotely, by signal rather than sign, in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and in novels by Thomas Hardy: in particular, A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Return of the Native, A Laodicean, Two on a Tower, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and The Well-Beloved. In Hardy’s fiction, sexual desire expresses itself in, or as, an adjustment of signal-to-noise ratio. The Wessex the novels map is at times less a terrain than the basis for a telecommunications system.

Wondrous Depths: Judging the Mind in Nineteenth-Century America

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (03) ◽  
pp. 828-849
Author(s):  
Catherine L. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
The Self ◽  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind

Susanna L. Blumenthal’sLaw and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture(2016) is a history of the self in nineteenth-century America. When judges considered a person’s criminal responsibility or civil capacity in court, they created a body of legal and political thought about the self, society, the economy, and American democracy. This essay uses Blumenthal’s book to explore recent work on law and the mind in Britain and North America, and argues that abstract questions about free will, the self, and the mind were part of the everyday jurisprudence of the nineteenth century. Debates about responsibility were also debates about the psychological consequences of capitalism and the borders of personhood and citizenship at a time of rapid economic, political, and social change.

Mental disorder, criminal responsibility and the social history of theories of volition

1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Disorder ◽  
Social History ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

SYNOPSISNineteenth-century theories of human volition are discussed in relation to ideas on insanity and responsibility. Attention is drawn to the importance of accounts of volition for medical psychologists and to the implications of these accounts for medical and lay discussion of criminal responsibility.

Responsibility, Criminalization, and Political Economy

2021 ◽  
pp. 193-216
Author(s):  
Lindsay Farmer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
Legal Analysis ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Impact

One of the most important and distinctive themes of Lacey’s recent work has been the analysis of penal practices from the perspective of political economy. However, it is arguably the case that ‘political economy’ is primarily viewed as a dimension of the context in which the criminal law develops rather than as a method of legal analysis. In this chapter I explore the meaning and critical potential of the concept of political economy—how it is used by Lacey, the different traditions that she draws on—and what the perspective and theory of political economy contributes to our understanding of criminal law. I seek to deepen the relevance of political economy to the analysis of criminal responsibility by exploring how the development of the modern conception of English criminal law in the early nineteenth century was itself shaped by contemporary understandings of political economy. Most historical work on the development of the modern criminal law has focused on the impact of utilitarianism to show how changes in penal laws and institutions were linked to new efforts to shape individual conduct in society. However, equally important to the intellectual and political culture of the early nineteenth century were understandings of the new ‘science’ of political economy. This chapter explores the ways in which theories of political economy shaped the modern criminal law in this period and thereby to open up new possibilities for exploring connections between criminal law, criminal responsibility, and political economy—and thus for critical criminal law theory.

Insanity and the Capacity for Criminal Responsibility

2001 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Tadros
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Disorder ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
Mens Rea ◽  
Capacity Responsibility

There are two different ways in which the insanity defence could he constructed. These relate to different ways in which the insanity defence might question the responsibility of the accused. Either the defence might show that the act in question was not performed in the appropriate way (that the accused lacks attribution-responsibility) or it might show that the agent was not an appropriate subject for criminal responsibility (that he or she lacks capacity-responsibility). Sometimes it is thought that these possibilities collapse into each other: it is only those that cannot perform their acts in the appropriate way that lack the capacity to be criminally responsible. This essay shows three things: first, that Scots criminal law, at least since the nineteenth century, is in a state of confusion between a capacity-responsibility conception of the defence and an attribution-responsibility conception. Second, that capacity-responsibility does not collapse into attribution-responsibility: there are some agents who are capable of forming mens rea but who ought not to be made criminally responsible due to their mental disorder. Third, that a sophisticated account of the capacity-responsibility conception can provide a version of the insanity defence that is both theoretically more elegant and practically more advantageous than the attribution-responsibility conception that has found favour in England and in some Scots decisions.

Expertise, procedure and the possibility of a comparative history of forensic psychiatry in the nineteenth century

1989 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Forensic Psychiatry ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
Mentally Disordered ◽  
Administrative Procedure ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Interests ◽  
History Of

SynopsisThe comparative history of forensic psychiatry may help unravel relations between legal and administrative procedure, medical knowledge and expertise, and social interests, as they determine judgements about the criminal responsibility of the mentally disordered. But little has been done to compare the past or the present under different jurisdictions. This paper, therefore, suggests some points which would encourage such comparisons, and particularly a comparison between France and England in the nineteenth century, for both of which countries there is now a valuable historical literature. It also illustrates the complex interaction of procedure and medical expertise by reference to the case of George Victor Townley (1863).

Judges v. Jurors: Courtroom Tensions in Murder Trials and the Law of Criminal Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century England

1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 467-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin J. Wiener
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
Important Change ◽  
Administrative Change ◽  
The Law ◽  
Murder Trials ◽  
Appeals Court ◽  
Justice Practice

Although it is well known that the criminal law's administration in nineteenth-century England altered decisively, little important change has been noted in the substantive criminal law. Yet change there was, but produced less through legislation (as was much administrative change) or even appeals court rulings than through everyday criminal justice practice. In particular, the effective meanings of legal terms central to the prosecution of homicide—terms such as provocation, intention, and insanity—were in motion during the nineteenth century as part of a broader redefining and reimagining of liability and responsibility. To grasp these often subtle shifts of meaning, we must look to the sites in which they occurred, the most important of which were the courtrooms of the assize courts, where the most serious offenses were tried.

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