Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies Vol. 14, n°2 | 2010 Varia Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/chs/1181 DOI : 10.4000/chs.1181 ISSN : 1663-4837 Éditeur Librairie Droz Édition imprimée Date de publication : 1 décembre 2010 ISBN : 978-2-600-01470-0 ISSN : 1422-0857 Référence électronique Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, Vol. 14, n°2 | 2010 [En ligne], mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2013, consulté le 28 septembre 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/chs/1181 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/chs.1181 Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 28 septembre 2020. © Droz 1 SOMMAIRE Articles Urban Heroes versus Folk Devils: Civilian Self-Defence in London (1880-1914) Emelyne Godfrey The ‘Non-Criminal’ Class: Wife-beating in Scotland (c. 1800-1949) Annmarie Hughes “But we Will Always Have to Individualise”. Police Supervision of Released Prisoners, its ‘Crisis’ and Reform in Prussia (1880-1914) Philipp Müller The Life of an Unknown Assassin: Leon Czolgosz and the Death of William McKinley Cary Federman Dreaming about the prison: Édouard Ducpétiaux and Prison Reform in Belgium (1830-1848) Bert Vanhulle Comptes rendus / Reviews Jäger (Jens), Verfolgung durch Verwaltung: Internationales Verbrechen und internationale Polizeikooperation 1880-1933 Konstanz, UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2006, 424 pp., ISBN 3-89669-568-1 Anja Johansen Kidambi (Prashant), The Making of an Indian Metropolis. Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890-1920 Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, 268 pp., ISBN 978-0-7546-5612-8 Emmanuel Blanchard Critchley (David), The Origin of Organized Crime in America. The New York City Mafia (1891-1931) New York, London, Routledge, 2009, 347 pp., ISBN 9780415 990301 Laurence Montel Bergère (Marc), Le Bihan (Jean), Fonctionnaires dans la tourmente. Épurations administratives et transitions politiques à l’époque contemporaine Genève, Georg, 2009, 299 pp., ISBN 978 2 8257 0976 4 Jonas Campion McRorie Higgins (Peter), Punish or Treat ? Medical Care in English Prisons 1770-1850 Oxford, Trafford Publishing, 2007, 283 pp. , 32 illustrations, ISBN 4251 01534 Michel Porret Chauvaud (Frédéric), Justice et déviance l’époque contemporaine. L’imaginaire, l’enquête et le scandale Rennes, PUR, « Histoire », 2007, 392 pp. Dominique Kalifa Rafter (Nicole), The Origins of Criminology. A Reader Edited by Nicole Rafter, Oxon, New York, Routledge, 2009, 348 pp., avec quelques illustrations, ISBN 980415 451123 Michel Porret Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, Vol. 14, n°2 | 2010 2 Nootens (Thierry), Fous, prodigues et ivrognes. Familles et déviance à Montréal au XIXe siècle Montréal et Kingston, London, Ithaca, McGill-Quenn’s University Press, 2007, 308 pp. , 12 tableaux statistiques, ISBN 9780773 531840 Michel Porret Cicchini (Marco) et Porret (Michel), Les sphères du pénal avec Michel Foucault. Histoire et sociologie du droit de punir Lausanne, Antipodes, 2007, 303 pp., ISBN 9782940 146864 David Niget Fijnaut (Cyrille), A history of the Dutch police Amsterdam, Boom Publishers, 2009, 203 pp. , ISBN 9 789085 064565 Jonas Campion Gauvard (Claude), Violence et ordre public au Moyen Âge (Les médiévistes français, 5) Paris, Picard, 2005, 288 pp., ISBN 27084 07392 Philippe Genequand Rigakos (George S.), McMullan (John L.), Johnson (Joshua), Ozcan (Gulden) (eds), A General Police System: Political Economy and Security in the Age of the Enlightenment Ottawa, Red Quill Books, 2009, 302 pp., ISBN 978 0 9812807 0 7 Clive Emsley « Norbert Elias et le XXe siècle. Le processus de civilisation à l’épreuve » Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire, 2010, n° 106, avril-juin Emmanuel Blanchard Bethencourt (Francisco), The Inquisition. A Global History, 1478-1834 translated by Jean Birrell, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009, Xii+491pp., including 40 b&w Plates, ISBN 978-0-521-74823-0 (pb) Christopher F. Black Becker (Peter) and Wetzell (Richard F.), Criminals and their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 492 pp., ISBN 0-521-81012-4 (PB); 978-0-521-81012-8 (HB) Anja Johansen Informations diverses Livres reçus Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, Vol. 14, n°2 | 2010 3 Articles Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, Vol. 14, n°2 | 2010 4 Urban Heroes versus Folk Devils: Civilian Self-Defence in London (1880-1914) Emelyne Godfrey Introduction 1 The publication of Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ (1903; hereafter AEH) coincided with the increasing movement against the use of offensive weapons and the development of martial arts in Britain. In ‘AEH’, Doyle not only recounts Sherlock Holmes’s resurrection from his supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls, but also describes his defeat of Professor Moriarty’s bastardly associate, Colonel Moran. Martin Wiener has promoted the use of literature alongside other sources for the purpose of studying nineteenth-century crime, arguing that ‘the cultural imagination of great crimes offers historians rich texts for interpretation’2. The Sherlock Holmes canon and AEH in particular is not only inspired by and reflects contemporary crimes and methods of detection but was also directly influenced by trends in urban self-defence and, together with textual and material sources, is pertinent to an analysis of the shift in attitudes to the limits of violence and what constituted acceptable methods of self-defence. 2 This article responds to Martin Wiener’s important study, Men of Blood, and seeks to build on his work on the ‘civilizing offensive’ as it related to attitudes towards personal protection. There is much to say on the proliferation of women’s self-defence during the 1900s; however, due to space constraints, I have focussed on exploring the masculine response to street violence. As Wiener demonstrates, throughout the nineteenth century property crimes were treated more leniently than previously while acts of violence, particularly those committed by men, were increasingly harshly punished. The growing interest in personal protection from the late-Victorian era onwards coincided curiously with what Clive Emsley has observed as a downturn in the reported cases of violence and theft, most notably homicide, from the 1850s until well Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, Vol. 14, n°2 | 2010 5 into the twentieth century3. However, an apprehension of violence, committed by the inhabitants of what Dr Watson terms the ‘dark jungle of criminal London’4 remained. At the same time, concerns over and interest in the tension between civilisation and aggression were manifested in a growing cultural obsession at the fin de siècle with the figure of the gentleman-villain. R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1885) is one of the most famous examples of novels and plays in which the respectable man with a dark side played a dominant role. The gentleman-villain also featured in bestsellers such as the Holmes adventures, Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895), and The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) by Anthony Hope. This fascination with the darker side of the civilized exterior was likely informed by shifts in attitudes towards crime and criminals so that the focus shifted from linking whole classes to particular crimes to studying individual cases5. 3 Wiener has classified nineteenth-century manliness in terms of the ‘man of blood’, who could be the gentleman-villain of melodrama or the violent criminal, and the violence- averse ‘reasonable man’, who was resolved on ‘exercising greater restraint and settling more disputes non-violently’6. This dichotomy is useful in interpreting attitudes that informed the public imagination. However, Wiener’s dichotomy does not take into account other masculinities and a study of attitudes towards self-defence tells us that there was a third type, which I will call the ‘assertive’ model. As this article will demonstrate, this model of middle-class masculinity was restrained by the ethos of the civilizing offensive but at the same time informed by turn-of-the-century interpretations of traditional forms of male gallantry. Furthermore, this new culture of self-defence offered a way of negotiating the tension between self-restraint and violence. Crime and the city 4 The way in which the rapidly expanding city was imagined influenced perceptions of the self, and informed attitudes towards physical threat. At the turn of the century, over 1 million pedestrians, including employers, employees (both female and male) and visitors, entered the City of London on a daily basis7, forcing commuters into packed spaces. As Georg Simmel observed in Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), for the city-goer, emotions must be switched off in order to comprehend the hectic surroundings, forcing an ‘intellectualism of existence’. Amid the jostle, the pedestrian shrinks into himself and there is no room for individuality, only reserve. However, behind the eyes of the commuter lies the emotional need for self-differentiation, to stand out from the crowd. At the same time, Simmel argues that the façade of indifference masked anxiety: ‘The inner side of this external reserve is not only indifference but more frequently than we believe, it is a slight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion which, in a close contact which has arisen any way whatever, can break out into hatred and conflict’8. The daily commute was represented as a potentially