Crime and Punishment in Victorian England

Crime and Punishment in Victorian England

Author Name : Sunita Ramchandani

ABSTRACT

The Victorian were very worried about increasing level of crimes in society. The increase in crime rates of Victorian England was mainly attributed to industrial revolution. The relationship between crime and individualism emerges most clearly in nineteenth-century fiction. Crime frequently enters Victorian novels in the form of murder, infanticide, blackmail, adultery etc. the penalty for the most serious crimes would be death by hanging, sometimes in public. From the discovery of Mr. Rochester’s secret imprisonment of his wife in Jane Eyre, to the tracking down of Tess Durbeyfield for the brutal stabbing of her ex-lover in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, almost every Victorian novel has at its heart some crime that must be uncovered, some false identity that must be unmasked, some secret that must be revealed or some clandestine plot that must be exposed.

Keywords: victimization, Victorian crime, infanticide, industrial revolution, adultery.