FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA DEPARTAMENTO DE LITERATURA INGLESA Y NORTEAMERICANA Universidad de Sevilla TESIS DOCTORAL CRIMINAL LITERATURE AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL PILAR DE LOS ÁNGELES PEÑA GIL DIRECTORA: DRA. DÑA. MERCEDES SALVADOR BELLO Sevilla, Octubre de 2015 1 2 To the very many who gave me oxygen when I was breathless. With a special thanks to Mercedes and Oisín for their unconditional support. 3 Contents Conventions 6 Introduction 7 Theoretical Aspects 15 1. Defining the Novel …………...………………………………..…………………………………………….. 15 2. The Rise of the English Novel Reconsidered……….…................................................ 28 2.1. The Romance and the Novel. From Clara Reeve to Michael McKeon ……………. 30 2.2. The Eighteenth Century and the Sociological Changes Giving Way to the Rise of the Novel. Ian Watt……………………...……………………………………………………………………..37 2.3. Innovation through Tradition. John Richetti and Lennard Davis. Northrop Frye and the Theory of the Modes …………………………………………………………………………….. 45 2.4. Theories Relating the Rise of the Novel with Criminality and the Broadside Tradition ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………... 50 3. Criminal Literature, a Historical Perspective…..…………………………………………………… 53 3.1. Criminal Writings in the Middle Ages…………………………….….………………………….57 3.2. Robin Hood and the Criminal as a Sympathetic Character………..……………………60 3.3. Chapbooks and Jest-books…………………………………………………………………………….63 3.4. Spanish Picaresque Narrative and Rogue Literature……………………………………...71 3.5. The Rise of a Native Criminal Genre ……………………………………………………...........79 3.5.1. Conny-cathing Pamphlets ………………………………………………………………….80 3.5.2. The Domestic Tragedy………………………………………………………………………..87 3.5.2.1. Drama and Executions……………………………….……………………………………..94 4 3.6. Early Criminal Biographies……………………………………………………………………………101 4. The Eighteenth Century and the Rise of Crime………………………………………………….107 5. The Female Criminal ……………………………………………………………………………………….…115 Text Analysis 122 1. Proto-journalistic and Legal Writings ………………………………….…….........................123 1.1. Ballads and Broadsides …………………..…………………………………….…………….………124 1.2. The pamphlet………………………………………………………………………………………………138 1.3. Old Bailey Session Papers and the Ordinary’s Accounts……………………………..…145 2. From the Gallows to the Stage. Dramatic Works..................................................163 2.1. The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham………………………………………………...166 2.2. The Roaring Girl…………………………………………………………………………………………...196 3. Criminal Biographies……………………………………………………………………………………..…213 3.1 Long Meg of Westminster…………………………………………………………………………...213 3.2 Multiple Versions of a Life. The German Princess ………………….……………………222 4. The Fair Jilt……………………………………………………..…………….…….……………………………234 5. Moll Flanders……………………………………………………………………………………………………256 Conclusions 277 Works Cited 288 5 Conventions Due to the length of most of the primary sources titles, they have been named as such in footnotes the first time they are mentioned. In order to avoid an excess of footnotes, the parenthetical citation has been preferred for in-text citation. For a number of reasons—variety of texts, several works by the same author, similarity of some of the titles—the year of the quoted work has been included so as to add clarity. In dramatic works, however, the year has not been incorporated to reduce the length of the in-text citation. For electronic sources, only the URL has been written down in footnotes, since most of the quoted texts belong to two online collections, the Word on the Street, from the National Library of Scotland, and the Proceedings of the Old Bailey. Their references have not been repeated in the Works Cited section. 6 Introduction This project arises after the consideration that in the twenty first century there is still no definite theory on the origins of the English novel in spite of the many attempts that have been carried out to trace them. Such a complex subject has given rise to many studies, with no conclusive hypothesis so far. After comprehensive reading and analysis, I have realised that it is not possible to establish the origins of the English novel as such, since it stemmed from a complex mesh of genres and subgenres. For this reason, the present thesis is going to focus on a particular subgenre of the novel: the one that offers a criminal as a protagonist, which has been given here the name of the criminal novel. There has been necessary to apply a new term to works prior to the rise of crime fiction with Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), since the novels by Daniel Defoe or Henry Fielding which narrate the story of an offender do not fit into the category of crime fiction. They are precursors, but, at the same time, they are inherently different. The main protagonist is a criminal, who is neither purely a hero nor a villain, but a figure whose main aim is to teach the readership a moral lesson. This subgenre of the early novel presents very limited specimens—mainly limited to the production of Defoe—yet it has a huge repercussion in present day literature and culture in the English language. Since it is a relatively new concept, my first goal is to try to delimit the object of analysis and propose a valid theory of its origins. In order to confirm my theory, I will establish a logical connection between the sociology, history and literature of a crucial time for the development of the novel, the period encompassed between the end of the sixteenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century. Thus, I will try to 7 prove that the criminal novel derives from a native oral and written literature which, even though it was influenced by picaresque narrative, it relies mostly in a long- tradition of criminals’ adventures that permeated the popular British culture. This dissertation intends to shed some light in how such a widely read genre nowadays as it is crime fiction might have unfolded from criminal narrative, from the relationship between criminality and its representation in literature. I have taken Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders as the first instance of this type of novel and drawn a line back as to establish the corpus of works as well as the circumstances which exercised an influence on the writer to create such a work. As it will be explained further on, this type of novel is mostly derivative of early forms of journalism, represented by broadsides, pamphlets and other similar documents that spread the news prior to the emergence of the newspaper in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, fact and fiction are difficult to discern in both novels and their non- literary ancestors as writers’ imagination permeated these proto-journalistic1 documents. Ernest Bernbaum writes that “in the field of journalism, in that of literature, and in the twilight zone between them, we find from the days of Elizabeth 1 Journalism as such does not take place until the eighteenth century. However, it is obvious that before the emergence of the newspaper with the format that we nowadays attribute to it, there were other ways of spreading written information. Even if it is not proper journalism according to today’s standards, it will be referred as such, as proto-journalism or pseudo-journalism. Nevertheless, none of the three terms are really accurate, since the writers did not consider themselves journalists. Besides, the aim was both to inform and entertain at the same time, leaving as much space for true facts as for invented additions. In any case, the different types of documents had to be delimited. To distinguish legal or administrative writings from the ones complying with a more informative nature, the second ones will be referred to as “proto-journalistic” writings. 8 to those of the Georges the flourishing of imposture” (1914: 79).2 Therefore, the fact that Defoe’s production encompasses both news and novels, facts and fiction, is not haphazard. Just as nowadays authors combine their contributions to newspapers with the production of their own fictions, some of the early novelists were hybrid writers, half way between journalists and novelists. Defoe made a very intelligent move, masking his invention as reality. In a world overpopulated by imagined fabrications that claimed to be authentic, it was difficult to sell a “true historie” as a real one. But Defoe managed to succeed with his Moll Flanders, probably because journalistic writings were as tainted of falsehood as his novel was of truth. Thus, the origins of journalism are tightly linked to the origins of the English criminal novel. Therefore, the hypothesis here proposed is that criminal novels sprang from a non-literary source which gradually moved into the literary sphere. These proto-journalistic documents were mostly broadsides, but there were also other types of news and crime-related papers, such as ballads, pamphlets, sermons and court proceedings. Before any novel sprang from their influence, they had already been adapted into literature in a variety of forms, from conny-catching pamphlets to dramatic works, with tragedies and comedies that had a criminal as the main character. For that reason, even if this dissertation is concerned with the origins of the criminal novel, a wide range of texts need to be examined in order to establish a sound theory. But before text analysis is carried out, it is necessary to devote some pages to theoretical aspects, the main one being the attempt to define what a novel is. Thus, 2 Ernest Bernbaum, The Mary Carleton Narratives. 1663-1673. A Missing Chapter in the History of the English Novel.