Cosmopolitan Criminality in Modern British Literature
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MOREHEAD, CRAIG RES, Ph.D. Cosmopolitan Criminality in Modern British Literature. (2015) Directed by Dr. Keith Cushman. 328pp. Advances in cosmopolitan mobility, hybridity, and transnationalism during the modern age contributed to new criminal identity formations and classifications of crimes. This dissertation examines modern British fiction’s construction of cosmopolitan criminality at a time of increased awareness of the intensifying influences outlaws and foreigners had on English culture. Cosmopolitan criminals populated new genres of crime fiction such as Victorian slum literature, Edwardian and late-modernist thrillers, detective fiction, and anarcho-terrorist narratives. I demonstrate how this crime fiction shaped cultural, legislative, and public reactions to criminal outsiders and rendered new types of foreign and international crimes visible to an anxious British public. This study advances our understanding of how cosmopolitan criminality became an important literary subject for indicating symbolic and material threats of transnational modernization and tested legal and cultural standards of normalcy couched as Englishness. I recover the many iterations and uses of cosmopolitan criminality from the mid-Victorian to late-modernist periods in order to show that foreign crime was a central concern for modern British authors. Chapter one examines the cosmopolitan criminal’s emergence as an atavistic, foreign menace comprising a “criminal race” in Victorian slum literature, such as in Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago. I read slum literature’s association of cosmopolitan features with criminality as a way English authors distinguished an honest, English working-poor under threat from degenerate cosmopolitan criminals in the slums. Chapter two focuses on cosmopolitan crimes carried out by anarchists and terrorists in late-Victorian and Edwardian crime narratives by Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and G. K. Chesterton. Against the legislative backdrop of new anti-Aliens Bills and a general suspicion of cosmopolitanism these authors satirize cosmopolitan criminals and crimes to critique anti-cosmopolitan fervor in England. Chapter three reads Graham Greene’s late-modernist thrillers of the 1930s as foregrounding poetic justice as an alternate means for thinking about social justice. Subverting classic thriller tropes, Greene dramatizes the social imbalances that thwart justice for the economically disadvantaged and protect the crimes of the social and economic elite. COSMOPOLITAN CRIMINALITY IN MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE by Craig Res Morehead A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2015 Approved by ______________________________ Committee Chair © 2015 Craig Res Morehead APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Craig Res Morehead has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair ____________________________________ Committee Members _____________________________________ _____________________________________ ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee __________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For their encouragement, advice, and careful readings of the dissertation I wish to thank Tony Cuda and Ben Clarke. I am particularly grateful to Keith Cushman for his dedication to me and for his guidance and insight through the completion of the project. His influence is present throughout. The support of my friends and peers has inspired me and enlivened my work in meaningful ways. I am indebted to my extraordinary parents and my brother and sister who have provided every kind of support possible, long before the first page was written. This dissertation is dedicated to them with loving gratitude. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................1 Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Period ...................................................14 II. SLUMMING THE METROPOLIS: THE EMERGENCE OF THE COSMOPOLITAN CRIMINAL IN EAST END LONDON ........................25 Victorian Criminology and Theories of Civilization .................................38 Victorian Urban Cosmopolitanisms and Illegibility ..................................45 East End Slums and the Rise of Slum Literature and Slum Fiction ..........50 Criminals Distinguished from the Poor and Working Classes ..................59 Racial Criminality and Cosmopolitan Mobility .........................................68 Henry Mayhew and the Cosmopolitan Criminal .......................................73 Slum Literature at Work: Arthur Morrison’s A Tale of the Jago ...................................................................................80 The Decline of Slum Literature .................................................................99 III. ANARCHISTS, ALIENS, AND COSMOPOLITAN CRIMINALITY IN EDWARDIAN FICTION ...........................................106 The Edwardian Turn: Cosmopolitan Urbanization and the Pastoral Tradition ....................................................................108 Edwardian Criminology Theory ..............................................................120 Aliens, Anarchists, and Cosmopolitan Criminality .................................125 The Literary Formation of Anarchist and Terrorist Narratives in British Fiction.................................................................140 Homo Duplex: Joseph Conrad, Doublings, and The Secret Agent ..........................................................................151 G. K. Chesterton’s Anarchic Vision ........................................................181 Cosmopolitan Criminal Excess and Edwardian Law...............................188 IV. POETIC JUSTICE IN GRAHAM GREENE’S LATE-MODERNIST THRILLERS .............................................................196 The Late-Modernist Political Turn in British Fiction ..............................196 Origins of the British Thriller ..................................................................201 iv Graham Greene’s Thrillers and Cosmopolitan Crimes of Injustice ...............................................................................210 Stamboul Train (1932) .............................................................................234 It’s A Battlefield (1934) ...........................................................................243 England Made Me (1935) ........................................................................256 A Gun for Sale (1936) ..............................................................................265 The Confidential Agent (1939).................................................................275 The Ministry of Fear (1943) ....................................................................282 V. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................291 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................308 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new criminological concepts shaped British political and cultural narratives about the heightened dangers of foreigners and international crime. In this study I examine the literary, cultural, and political formations that materialized around conceptions of cosmopolitan criminality. I build my argument on a broad range of sources composed between 1851and 1945.1 I read canonized novels, lesser-known and forgotten novels, criminological studies, essays, letters, and a variety of journalistic, scientific, and sociological studies and texts in order to offer a full account of the cultural resonance of crime in the British literature of the period.2 The increasing importance of cosmopolitan crime and criminals as a literary subject builds on and transforms earlier traditions of crime narratives. The new focus on 1 In their summary of New Modernist studies Rebecca L. Walkowitz and Douglas Mao identify three trends in Modernist criticism: temporal, vertical, and spatial expansion. They argue that temporal expansion “has certainly been important in the study of literary modernism: the purview of modernist scholarship now encompasses, sometimes tendentiously but often illuminatingly, artifacts from the middle of the nineteenth century and the years after the middle of the twentieth as well as works from the core period of about 1890 to 1945” (738). The “modernization” of the English courts occurred during the nineteenth century. The 1800s saw a formalization of the judicial hearing practices in numerous reforms and standardization of the three major kinds of sitting court: petty sessions, quarter sessions, and assizes. The indictable offenses were updated and increased with the passage of the Juvenile Offenders Acts of 1847 and 1850 and the Criminal Justices Acts of 1855 and 1879. 1851 holds as an important starting date for this study because most of the texts I consider are London-centric, and we can say that “modern” London got its start when London became a full census division in 1851, essentially establishing its modern boundaries. Tb he first criminal statistics were also collected by the police and courts during the 1850s in London. 2 I adhere to