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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Outlaws, Outcasts, and Criminals of the British Novel, 1800-1850 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7zd212gr Author Baldwin, Ruth Elizabeth Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Outlaws, Outcasts, and Criminals of the British Novel, 1800-1850 By Ruth Elizabeth Baldwin A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Ian Duncan, Chair Professor Janet Sorensen Professor David Lieberman Spring 2013 Abstract Outlaws, Outcasts, and Criminals of the British Novel, 1800-1850 By Ruth Elizabeth Baldwin Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Ian Duncan, Chair “Outlaws, Outcasts, and Criminals” provides a new account of the nineteenth-century historical novel by using the category of outlawry to illuminate the transitional period between Romantic and Victorian literary regimes. I argue that any account of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth- century novel must theorize the crucial link between outlawry and the novel form. Far from being a product of history, crime in these novels activates the category of history on which they depend. As the novel develops, the link between crime and history becomes an essential structural part of the genre. This recognition enables me to forge new and surprising connections between the Romantic outlaw as instituted by Schiller’s The Robbers, the outlaw anti-heroes of Walter Scott’s historical novels, the historical criminals of W.H. Ainsworth’s “Newgate” novels, the female social climbers of Jane Austen’s novels, and the scandalous anti-heroines of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and of M.E. Braddon’s sensation novels. Key to the developments I am tracing is a new kind of anti-hero made possible by the early nineteenth-century novel’s incorporation of other, non-novelistic genres. During a period when the novel was becoming a force of cultural normativity, outlaw figures emerged from the margins of the plot to assume a central role. Unlike the Gothic villain or Byronic anti-hero, who are solitary outcasts, these anti-heroes represent an alternative, rival, outlaw society, from which they colonize the central plot. I examine the structural tension between the ostensible hero, the outlaw anti-hero, and the actual antagonists in Scott’s Ivanhoe and Rob Roy. These cases are particularly telling, as Scott’s system of history almost always focuses on groups that are, in some sense, outside of the law: Jacobites and members of the proscribed clan MacGregor in Rob Roy; Robin Hood’s band, the disinherited Ivanhoe, the Jews Isaac and Rebecca, and even the illegitimate regime of Prince John and his knights in Ivanhoe. The dynamic outlaw energy that originates with Rob Roy and with Robin Hood infects the entire narrative and symbolic system. In my final chapter, I examine the transformation of the new anti-hero into an anti-heroine—a rival to the protagonist of the traditional marriage plot. Ambitious lower-class women threaten the social order in their attempts to maneuver into high society through marriage. As the anti- hero becomes feminized and infects the domestic novel, novelists change their narrative strategies in subtle and unexpected ways. Through the development of free indirect style, affective withdrawal, and strategic reticence, Austen, Thackeray, and Braddon develop new 1 ways of dealing with the anti-social threats to their novel’s marriage plots. The outlawry that I argue is so crucial to the development of the novel form thus brings about important changes in narrative technique. Between Scott’s death and the establishment of the novel as the dominant literary form by mid century, the genre was in flux: novelists interpolated non-canonical historical sources, ballads, broadsides, chapbooks, plays, and other ephemera, while collaborating with illustrators and engaging with theatrical and other adaptations of their work, to an unprecedented degree. This experimentation develops out of Scott’s use of ballads and other popular forms in his historical novels. In this decade or so of generic instability the novel is actively reimagined as a locus of cultural consolidation. The past becomes intelligible through the medium of the historical novel, rather than through primary historical materials and artifacts, or historiography itself. Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839), with its many unacknowledged allusions to and incorporation of earlier renditions of the eighteenth-century criminal’s biography, marks a turning point in the long history of Sheppard narratives. Echoing the seriality of Sheppard’s crimes and escapes, the novel’s serial form provides a mechanism through which his crimes pervade not only the story world of the novel but the real social world of Ainsworth’s readers. 2 For Maggie i Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: The 18th-Century Roots of 19th-Century 1 Literary Outlaws, Outcasts, and Criminals Chapter 2: Character Structure and Outlawry in Ivanhoe 12 and Rob Roy Chapter 3: Serial Criminal: The Proliferation of Jack Sheppard 40 and the Structure of the Early Victorian Novel Chapter 4: History, the Gothic, and the “Wandering Race”: 68 The Place and Time of Gypsies in Rookwood and Guy Mannering Chapter 5: Strategic Reticence: Narrating Social Criminals 95 Bibliography 124 Appendix 1: Primary sources on Jack Sheppard 132 ii Chapter 1: The 18th-Century Roots of 19th-Century Literary Outlaws, Outcasts, and Criminals In 1834, while enjoying the success of his first historical novel, Rookwood, in which the eighteenth-century highwayman Dick Turpin plays a prominent role, William Harrison Ainsworth described his future literary ambitions to a friend: Turpin… is only part of a plan, as this work is part of a more extensive edifice, which, in time, I may be able to construct…. The portrait of the robber is not, I am free to admit, complete in all its details. But, though I have not yet found canvass enough for it, the tablet exists fully wrought out in my imagination. In Turpin, the reader will find him upon the road…. In Du-Val… he shall find him at the theatres …. In Sheppard… he shall discover him in Newgate…and marvel at his extraordinary escapes. The character of the robber to be complete, should be presented in all these phases. And it shall be my business to perfect it. (qtd. in Ellis 1.285) Although Ainsworth never completed his project—after the furor following the publication of Jack Sheppard in 1839, he abandoned his plan to write a novel featuring Claude Duval and never wrote another “Newgate novel”— imagining a “fully wrought” “portrait of the robber” remained a project central not only to his ambitions but to those of many authors as the novel developed in the early nineteenth century. Social transgressors, including pickpockets and highwaymen, but also political outlaws, wandering gypsies, and even ambitious social climbers, came to permeate the novel’s plot and redefine the novel form. There are, as yet, no full length accounts of the early nineteenth-century novel that examine the relationship between these different agents of social transgression and their relation to the development of the novel during this period. My project connects the criminal anti-heroes of the Newgate novel with the political outlaws and outcasts of Walter Scott’s historical novels and with Jane Austen’s social climbers, in the generation preceding, as well as the scandalous anti-heroines of the mid-Victorian sensation novel. I argue that history, in the early nineteenth-century historical novel, is activated through the category of outlawry that I describe. I offer a new account of developments in the early nineteenth-century novel—particularly the changing place of the outlaw in the novel’s character system—that illuminates the traditionally difficult transitional period between “Romantic” and “Victorian” literary regimes. This study has two related, intersecting arguments. In the first, I examine the function of historical sources and artifacts in novels by the two most popular historical novelists of the first half of the nineteenth century, Walter Scott and W.H. Ainsworth, arguing that during the period of generic flux in the early nineteenth-century, novelists experimented with the form by interpolating other genres and discourses to an unprecedented degree1, troubling the relationship 1 Although both Sterne and Fielding (among other eighteenth-century novelists) often toyed with generic expectations by incorporating other rhetorical modes or genres, neither did so to the extent or with the persistence of Ainsworth, who, as I will show, collaborated with his illustrators and theatrical adapters, apparently composing his historical novels with the understanding and expectation that they would then be deconstructed and recompiled through theatrical adaptation or imitation. 1 between fiction and history that had remained relatively stable through the latter half of the eighteenth century.2 In the second, I consider the new kinds of anti-hero made available by those novelists’ various innovations with the form and the impact this new protagonist has on the novel’s character field. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 develop these two arguments through close readings of the outlaws, criminals, and Gypsies of Scott’s Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, and Guy
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