Poetic Justice, Prosaic Crime (2024)

Early Crime Narrative

More than a century before the earliest Romantic crime narratives appeared, northern Europe witnessed a ‘huge expansion in the narration of crime’—a movement dominated not by crime fiction, but by ‘the recounting of real-life crime’.1 While the rise in literacy and spread of print technology contributed to this explosion of crime narratives, an often overlooked factor was the reconfiguration of the Catholic doctrine of sin as crime in the Reformation’s aftermath. This did not happen immediately, nor did it mean that the criminal was a reformed, tamed version of the sinner—quite the contrary. As Joy Wiltenburg observes, crime was ‘an extreme form of sin’, which as such always retained its ‘religious associations. … In the violent deeds that dominated discourses of crime’ in the seventeenth century, ‘the influence of the Devil could seem practically palpable’.2 By the century’s end, the individual condemned of a crime was no longer depicted as a ‘common sinner’, but was increasingly portrayed in criminal biographies and murder trials as a moral monster, an alien being no longer united to the community by sinfulness but isolated from it by a kind of disease, defect, or pathology. ‘Every Christian is a sinner, but the lay everyman is the antithesis of the criminal. This marks a real divergence between the discourse of sin and the discourse of crime.’3 We are all sinners, but criminals are in a class by themselves.

Besides the accounts of Protestant clerics which often presented the criminal as a penitent seeking absolution, and legal records which tended to focus more on the criminal’s confession and punishment than on the offence itself and its victims, the most popular form of early crime narrative were printed ‘news songs’, a kind of ‘street literature’ that continued into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.4 First appearing as ballad sheets in rhymed verse which were often composed as melodies, these ‘reports’ of actual crimes commonly detailed the (often imagined) plight of the victims of sensational acts of aggression and violence. The ballad sheets were soon supplemented by short prose pamphlets addressed to a general, barely literate audience, and broadsides—essentially illustrated posters in which the written text, typically the condemned individual’s confession, was accompanied by images of the crime and execution.

These precursors of today’s tabloids were intended to turn a profit by presenting a broad swath of readers with accounts of crimes that were more gripping and lurid than the depictions found in religious and legalistic narratives. Yet they also shaped the raw, disconnected events of the crimes themselves into credible, compelling stories. Whatever the type or purpose of these texts, their producers were all engaged in essentially the same activity of reshaping reported bits of sightings and statements into a coherent narrative culminating, quite literally, in that telling moment of the criminal’s confession. These public disclosures of personal pathos had a far more dramatic effect than the obscure investigative procedures used in early juridical proceedings ‘to establish the truth of a crime’, as Michel Foucault describes, and thereby to affirm the punishment as ‘just’.5 In contrast to this juridical preoccupation with just punishment and criminal truth, Wiltenburg suggests that writers of early crime narratives were primarily concerned with ‘put[ing] criminal violence to use’ by ‘invest[ing] crime with meaning’.6

Some of the most striking treatments of crime by Romantic prose writers turn out to be, and invite study as, fictionalized revisions of these early ‘true crime’ narratives—the real-life accounts and chronicles that provide the basis for the modern concept of crime itself.

Eighteenth-Century Crime Narratives

The genesis of Romantic crime narrative from its precursor forms in the sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries is notable in two respects: the gradual transition from verse and song to prose, and from journalistic reports and archival records of actual crimes to biographical and criminological studies, or ‘case histories’,7 which themselves evolved into increasingly fictional forms. In the eighteenth century, religious narratives focusing on the sinner’s offence, confession, and execution gave way to longer narratives with more detailed presentations of the accused individuals’ trials. Prison ‘calendars’ like those of Newgate and Tyburn were essentially criminal biographies, first compiled by prison chaplains as cautionary tales of sinful behaviour, but later drawn up by lawyers and medical practitioners as a record of, and supposedly also a deterrent against, sociopathic conduct. Two Newgate prisoners who received a degree of early literary recognition were Jack Sheppard in Daniel Defoe’s ‘History’ of the well-known ‘jail-breaker’, and Jonathan Wild in Defoe’s ‘True Account’ of the notorious thief-turned-thief-taker. Wild helped to recapture the escaped Sheppard before he was himself executed in 1725—the year Defoe’s book about him appeared, and eighteen years before he became a full-fledged literary subject in Henry Fielding’s novel, The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great.

Fielding, who became a stipendiary magistrate in 1749 and laid the groundwork for a functional police force in London amid the lawless turbulence then ravaging that city, did not merely fictionalize the history of a celebrated thief but turned it into biting satire. His Cervantine narrator presents the exploits and misadventures of a ‘hero’ who is less a sinner or criminal than a rogue, the exemplar not of virtue or honour but of ‘greatness’—pure, unfettered amorality. Not only is human sinfulness irrelevant to Fielding’s literary narrative of criminality, but his depiction of corruption extends well beyond Wild and any one individual to society as a whole, encompassing a cast of ne’er-do-wells from highwaymen to petty thieves, from card sharps to political figures—often each other’s victims, along with a scattering of virtuous characters who are their dupes.

Later in the century, an altogether different discourse of criminality emerged, focusing on issues of motivation, punishment, and justice—the science of criminology. This paradoxical discipline sought to make sense of human behaviour that otherwise seemed irrational and inexplicable, to find a logical explanation for pathological conduct which could then be appropriately punished. Two of the most influential studies in this new field were by an Italian and an English philosopher. Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 monograph On Crimes and Punishments (Dei delitti e delle pene) described crimes simply as ‘all those actions contrary to the public good’. The rationale behind any system of criminal justice was to ensure a proper ‘proportion between crimes and punishments’ so that the latter fit the former as closely as possible.8 And in his Introduction to the Principle of Morals and Legislation of 1789, Jeremy Bentham maintained that criminals as well as law-abiding citizens routinely engaged in utilitarian calculations of the consequences of their deeds before acting—or not acting—on them. The difference for criminals was that the pleasure they anticipated as a result of committing a prohibited act outweighed the pain they risked in being caught and punished.

Despite the sunny rationalism that early criminologists promised to bring to the perplexing issues associated with criminal behaviour, their insights had only limited impact on biographical and fictional narratives which probed the mysteries of transgression and the criminal mind. Authors of a political and literary bent were quick to find flaws in behavioural and theoretical analyses of criminality, and remained sceptical of attempts to move beyond long-standing inquisitorial approaches to crime derived from religious conceptions of human sinfulness. In attempting to rid criminal discourse of pseudo-explanations based on sin and Satan, scientific approaches to crime often tended to overlook such all too real and relevant factors as social injustice and inequality. In the process, supposedly debunked demonic agencies were allowed to renew and perpetuate themselves in the form of sublimated, secularized pathologies.

Lost Honour in Schiller and Godwin

One such pathology which provides a powerful motive in Romantic crime narrative, despite appearing to be the very antithesis of crime, is announced in the title of Friedrich Schiller’s 1792 tale ‘The Criminal of Lost Honour. A True Story’ (‘Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre. Eine wahre Geschichte’). Although ‘probably the best known’ of his literary works in prose, this tale has hardly achieved the renown of Schiller’s great verse dramas and poems.9 Yet despite its relative neglect, especially outside Germany, ‘The Criminal of Lost Honour’ has earned Schiller a reputation among literary historians as being ‘the father of the modern true crime story’.10 Specifically, he is credited for the insight offered at the opening of the tale that readers of such works ‘must become familiar with the protagonist before he acts; we need to see him not only perform his deeds, we have to see him want to do so’.11 The protagonist, in other words, must be provided with a psychological and sociological backstory.

In the case of this tale, Christian Wolf (loosely based on the notorious, real-life Swabian murderer Johann Friedrich Schwan, executed a year after Schiller’s birth) is a poor, unattractive innkeeper’s son who tries to win the woman he loves with gifts acquired by poaching in the sovereign’s nearby forest. These minor offences, seemingly little more than instances of ‘steal[ing] hononorably’, are nevertheless subject to severe punishment. Lacking the cunning of a Jack Sheppard or a Jonathan Wild, Christian is hampered in his thievery by ignorance and improvidence, and by the machinations of a rival, a huntsman named Robert. His exposure of Christian’s repeated ‘crimes’ leads the latter to lose his family’s inn (named, like Schwan’s, ‘The Sun’), and to be sentenced, first to one year in prison, and later to three years of hard labour in ‘the dungeon’. Christian describes this soul-killing experience in words echoing the sentiments of Enlightenment proponents of prison reform: ‘I entered the dungeon … as a lost soul, I left it as a criminal’.12 Finding no employment after his release, ‘the love-struck poacher’ turned ‘dangerous malefactor’13 returns to poaching in the woods, only to run into Robert whom he shoots and kills, overcome by a pent-up desire for vengeance. Christian seeks refuge deep in the woods where he becomes the leader of a murderous band of robbers—‘the only society in which he [can find] any kind of acceptance or honor’14—and, like Schwan, adopts the title of the Sonnenwirt, or Landlord of ‘The Sun’.

His triumph does not last, however. Tired of the quarrels between members of his band and guilt-ridden over his own deeds, Christian seeks redemption by setting out to become a soldier in the Prussian army. On the way, he is detained by a watchman and brought before a judge. After first concealing his identity, Christian is moved by the judge’s compassionate questioning to reveal himself as the hunted Sonnenwirt. By ending the tale at this point, and omitting Christian’s (and the real-life Schwan’s) trial and execution, Schiller follows his narrator’s introductory insight into the most accurate and effective way to present the criminal protagonist’s character: ‘His thoughts are endlessly more important to us than his deeds, and the inspiration of his thoughts even more so than the consequences of his deeds’.15 With its psychological emphasis, Schiller’s ‘True Story’ avoids any reference to Schwan’s contrition and remorse before his death, along with other ‘actual events’ reported to Schiller by his teacher, Jacob Friedrich Abel, and included in the latter’s 1787 biography of Schwan.16

A key issue for Schiller is the questionable legitimacy of the law in extreme cases and intolerable circ*mstances when, as an act of rebellion or vengeance against a corrupt and unjust society, crime is not merely a last resort but a form of poetic justice. By avoiding any sensationalism in depicting the criminal’s ‘deed’, and by omitting the banal, numbing details of his trial and execution, Schiller remains focused on what Wiltenburg calls the ‘common, everyday’, prosaic scenes of violence that arise from ‘conflicts over honor’, and that escalate ‘from words to blows and beyond’.17 What better example of such a scene than the chance encounter with Robert in the woods which literally triggers Christian’s act of violence—his unpremeditated expression of lost honour embodied in his lost inn? After the short-lived recovery of his self-respect as the leader of a band of robbers and as an aspiring soldier, he only achieves true honour in his voluntary, self-incriminating declaration to the judge that he is the notorious Innkeeper of ‘The Sun’.

Schiller’s depiction of ‘lost honour’ as a powerful, albeit largely unrecognized, motivating factor behind criminal conduct is developed in far greater detail two years later in William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams. In the intervening year of 1793, Godwin published his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, widely recognized as the philosophical rationale behind modern anarchism. By following up this nonfictional, non-narrative treatise with a work of narrative fiction, and specifically a ‘political Gothic’ novel,18 Godwin sought to reach a broader audience. Besides presenting ‘a catalogue of the crimes of aristocracy’,19 he dramatizes the inherent corruption of a government made up of privileged members of the landed gentry who—because of their exemption from their own laws which had the effect, if not the purpose, of exploiting and persecuting the working poor—believe themselves to be incapable of crime.

Caleb Williams depicts the utter failure of this system of social ‘justice’. The uncouth squire Barnabas Tyrrel, a typical Gothic villain, nurses a fanatical resentment against his gentlemanly neighbour, Ferdinando Falkland, who is widely admired as a paragon of virtue and ‘rectitude’, and who believes his ‘honour is in my own keeping, beyond the reach of all mankind’.20 After Tyrrel’s persecution of Emily, a poor cousin in his care, leads her to seek Falkland’s aid, her master confines her to his estate until a desperate escape attempt brings about her death. Appalled at her fate and enraged by his own inability to save her, Falkland takes Tyrrel’s life—not in a gentlemanly duel, but in a murderous fit (or crime) of passion.

The remainder of the novel is driven by Falkland’s obsession to preserve his vaunted reputation by concealing his deed at all costs, which only bolsters his criminality. After allowing an innocent huntsman and his son to be arrested and executed in his place, Falkland becomes wary of his young secretary Caleb who, despite the ardent admiration and awe he feels towards his employer, comes to suspect his wrongdoing. The increasingly tormented Falkland finally confesses his misdeeds to Caleb, whereupon the young sleuth finds himself first under house arrest (much as Tyrrel had done to Emily), and later as an actual prisoner, after Falkland, having caught him in the act of opening a locked chest in his bedroom, accuses him of robbery. Yet throughout all the suffering he subsequently endures at Falkland’s hands, Caleb maintains a bizarre ‘forbearance’ towards his master. He resolutely refuses to condemn Falkland publicly for the crimes he has privately confessed to him. For Caleb, it is essential to believe that his master’s sense of honour will prevail, that his lost virtue—and indeed, Virtue itself—will be restored if only he can be brought to make a clean breast of his crimes in a public confession. The novel is, after all, a ‘confessional memoir’.

This idealistic, almost preposterous belief in his master’s virtue is all that keeps Caleb—as a wrongfully accused, wanted man on the run—from himself turning to a life of crime. After a series of dramatic prison escapes harking back to Jack Sheppard’s exploits related in The Newgate Calendar, Caleb finds temporary safe haven in the company of a robber gang. There he encounters two other characters based on notorious figures in the Calendar—the band’s leader, Captain Raymond (inspired by ‘the justified criminal rebel’ Dick Turpin), and the unprincipled gang member Jones/Gines (an avatar of the ‘thief-taker’ Jonathan Wild).21 Although Caleb, like Schiller’s Christian, finds in this band of outlaws a last refuge of fidelity and honour in a thoroughly corrupt society, and although his belief in Falkland’s moral rectitude begins to falter under Captain Raymond’s tutelage, his awakening to ‘Things as They Are’ (the novel’s original title) is not enough to get him to cast his lot with the gang. In fact, Caleb, whom Falkland has falsely accused as a thief, unsuccessfully tries to persuade his new master, Raymond, to abandon his criminal calling and to end his war against society, however unjust, unlawful, and indefensible it has become.

If, despite their common recognition of society’s evils, Caleb and Raymond are at odds in their response, the problem from Caleb’s vantage is his unresolved relationship with Falkland. For the epic antagonism between these two men from different social classes is fuelled by their shared absolute commitment to honour—Falkland’s obsession with preserving his reputation at all costs by persecuting Caleb, and Caleb’s unwavering faith that Falkland, as a man of honour, will ultimately do the right thing and make a fulsome public, rather than merely private, confession of his crime. Only by freely and openly confessing himself to be a criminal as Christian does in Schiller’s tale—and as even Caleb does when he theatrically denounces himself, in his final, public confrontation with his sickly, corpse-like persecutor, to have been ‘a cool, deliberate, unfeeling murderer’22—will Falkland confirm Caleb’s persistent belief in him as a man of honour from first to last. Whether Godwin and his readers share this belief—endorsing both Caleb’s and Falkland’s steadfast commitment to, and faith in honour as a noble virtue and as a safeguard against corruption, criminality, and vice—is open to doubt.

Criminal Justice in Kleist and De Quincey

Crime narratives composed at the time of the French Revolution by writers like Schiller and Godwin may be expected to highlight systemic aristocratic abuses of the poor who all too often respond to their persecution and exploitation by resorting to minor crimes like poaching and thievery. Yet in histories and chronicles dating back to the late sixteenth century, we also find accounts of oppressed individuals throughout the less populous areas of Europe organizing themselves into roving robber bands which were sometimes accused of engaging in magic and other demonic activities under the Devil’s direction.23 Other early accounts describe the misdeeds of plunderers near the top of the social ladder. German chronicles from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries are replete with raids by nobles of declining fortune on wealthy burghers in the newly burgeoning cities. When warrants and rewards issued by the city fathers led to the capture of marauding nobles, they were executed as criminals. Others used their castles as bases to harry itinerant traders; when such a campaign was waged by nobles from Waldenfels in 1444, they were attacked by an alliance of imperial cities.24

These two criminal scenarios—roving bands of destitute outcasts who rob travellers and ransack towns, and rogue nobles who attack cities or detain enterprising tradesmen passing by their castles and strip them of their wares—are combined into one of the Romantic era’s most compelling literary prose narratives. Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1810; English translation, 1844) is based on one of the last instances of the feuding noble motif—a sixteenth-century incident recounted in a 1731 chronicle. After a tradesman named Hans Kohlhase has two of his horses confiscated by a country squire, he attempts to right this wrong through legal means. When this proves futile, he leads an uprising across the Saxon countryside which becomes increasingly destructive as he attracts ever more followers among the desperate, the poor, and the depraved. Ultimately, Kohlhase is captured and tortured by being broken on the wheel.

In the case of the fictionalized Kohlhaas, Kleist’s focus from the narrative’s first sentence is on his protagonist’s paradoxical nature: that he was ‘one of the most honourable as well as one of the most terrible men of his age’ whom the world would have revered ‘had he not pursued one of his virtues to excess’, and ‘his sense of justice [not] made him a robber and a murderer’. For Kleist, the key issue is Kohlhaas’s transformation from a fair and just man of virtue (despite his vocation as a horse trader) to a criminal, all stemming from an incident at the border of Brandenburg and Saxony. Stopped on a route he has often taken at a toll gate he has never seen before, he is requested to make a payment before he can proceed—a policy adopted by the adjoining castle’s new owner, the Junker Wenzel von Tronka whose father, known for his honesty, has just died. Kohlhaas pays the toll only to be told that as a dealer bringing horses across the border he must either buy a permit to transport the horses or return home. Angered by ‘these illegal and extortionate demands’, Kohlhaas seeks out the Junker, who expresses an interest in acquiring his two black horses. Despite his wealth, however, the Junker turns down the horse dealer’s very fair offer, and instead insists that the horses be left with him as surety while Kohlhaas proceeds to the Saxon capital of Dresden to purchase a permit.

So what happens after the law-abiding horse trader discovers not only that the Junker’s story about a permit was ‘a mere fabrication’,25 but that the horses he left behind have been abused, and his groom beaten and severely injured? Rather than take revenge, he seeks legal redress. But when all his efforts fail—including an attempt by his wife to intercede with the Elector of Brandenburg in which she tragically dies—he feels utterly abandoned by the law, calling himself an ‘outcast’ in a subsequent appeal to Martin Luther who rebukes him for his pride. By then, however, the tale’s dynamic has shifted from lawless nobles persecuting industrious burghers to the exploited underclass terrorizing the decadent nobility. Kohlhaas has organized an army (made up, for the most part, of opportunistic ruffians), and issued his first manifesto (Mandat) announcing his ‘just war’ (gerechte Krieg) against the Junker, and threatening anyone with death and destruction who fails to deliver him into his hands. Two more manifestos follow as Kohlhaas’s campaign escalates into a full-blown crusade. In his attack on Leipzig, he calls himself ‘an emissary of the Archangel Michael, who has come to punish with fire and sword all those who shall stand on the Junker’s side’. And after occupying a castle at Lützen, he signs, ‘with a touch of madness’, a final manifesto: ‘Given at the seat of our Provisional World Government’.

Having been ‘denied the protection of the law’,26 as he tells Martin Luther, Kohlhaas feels his only recourse is to act directly upon his own personal feeling of justice (Rechtgefühl) in a rhetorically driven spiral of violent revenge. He loses any sense of distinction between his own personal grievance and the universal mistreatment of all oppressed people; indeed, he identifies the two. But it is no less clear that while others may debate whether Kohlhaas is a revolutionary figure or political activist, a terrorist or ‘incendiary’ with no respect for the law, he would deny that any of these terms apply to him. Right up to his execution—which he willingly accepts after his horses are restored to him in their original condition and von Tronka is disgraced—Kohlhaas refuses to see himself as a rebel or criminal. He resolutely considers himself to be the most law-abiding of citizens upon whom it is incumbent, in the absence of a functioning system of legal justice, to represent and restore the law in an act of what could be called poetic justice, even if this means taking the law into his own hands.

As the tale of an aggrieved victim of social injustice who for a time achieves respect and honour as the leader of a gang of outlaws, and who in the end accepts the execution which awaits him for his misdeeds, Michael Kohlhaas bears a distinct resemblance to Schiller’s ‘The Criminal of Lost Honour’. And as a narrative of the virtuous individual forced to turn to crime in an effort to restore virtue and the law in an unjust society, Kleist’s tale echoes the theme explored by Godwin in Caleb Williams, and present to a lesser degree in his daughter Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). This theme also fully informs ‘The Avenger’, one of two tales of terror by Thomas De Quincey which appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1838, both of which belong to the most sensational of crime narrative scenarios—those concerning the macabre acts of household killings and parent–child murders.

Before considering ‘The Avenger’, we might briefly review its Blackwood’s counterpart. Although ‘The Household Wreck’, despite its title, does not depict an act of murderous violence inside the home, it describes an ‘appalling’ case of ‘family ruin wrought by crime’.27 After five years of untroubled pastoral bliss enjoyed by the narrator and his wife Agnes, a day comes when she is suddenly arrested while shopping in the city, and imprisoned on a false charge of theft. A harrowing escape leaves the family destitute and leads to the deaths of Agnes and her child. This devastation all stems from a scheme devised by a serial sexual predator who ruins the family from a distance, luring Agnes to his shop with the help of an accomplice who is already inside the supposedly inviolate home, embedded in it as a kind of parasite or pathology—one of the three maids in the host-household, the only one who is never named.

Published in the same year as ‘The Household Wreck’, ‘The Avenger’ more than makes up for the former’s lack of murders inside the home. A series of no less than ‘ten cases of total extermination, applied to separate households’,28 are committed in a German university town by a recent arrival, the Englishman Maximilian Wyndham who, along with several accomplices disguised as students, place themselves in various houses at different times and proceed to slaughter all the occupants. Although the killings seem random and unrelated, they turn out to be part of Maximilian’s elaborate plan to seek justice for his Jewish mother and sisters by exterminating the families of each of the town’s magistrates whom he holds responsible for their deaths years ago when he was a boy. In the process of carrying out his plan, however, Maximilian inadvertently brings about his beloved wife’s death which he regards, not as a horrific, thoroughly unnecessary blunder on his part for which he bears responsibility, but as what Robert Morrison calls ‘a final sacrifice that affirms the divinity of his mission’.29

The Fascination with What’s Criminal: Unjustified Sin in Hogg and Lytton Bulwer

Thirty years after the publication of Godwin’s ‘confessional memoir’ Caleb Williams, the Scottish writer James Hogg—the ‘Ettrick shepherd’ who turned from writing pastoral ballads to fictional prose works exploring psychological and theological themes—came out with his own far darker confessional, and more directly criminal, memoir. Whereas Godwin’s young protagonist narrates the persecution he endures after his master falsely accuses him of robbery in an effort to conceal his own crime of murder, the narrator of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner openly acknowledges murdering his favoured half-brother. Yet despite their differences, both works feature murderers whose public appearances as paragons of virtue—in the case of Caleb’s nemesis Falkland, a squire known for his absolute honour and moral rectitude, and in the case of Hogg’s fratricidal narrator Robert Wringhim, a man believing himself assured of salvation as one of God’s elect—place them above or beyond mere human law. Falkland’s and Robert’s privileged status affords them not merely motivation, but license or ‘justification’ to commit deeds which would otherwise be condemned as criminal, and in Robert’s case, sinful and unthinkable.

Hogg’s memoir draws on both the biblical Cain-and-Abel story in its portrayal of Robert’s murder of his half-brother George Colwan and the Faustian motif of incorporating the Devil himself as a character in the narrative, specifically as Robert’s companion and instigator. But Hogg also introduces two key elements which would be taken up by later prose writers: first, the inextricable link of extremist offshoots of Christianity to Evil; and second, the motif of the Devil as a double, a ‘second self’.30 Of particular interest is the timing of the Devil’s appearance. Shortly after turning 18, and after all his struggles with sinfulness and self-doubt during his strict Calvinist upbringing, Robert is ecstatic to learn one day from his spiritual (and presumably biological) father that he is predestined for salvation and has been admitted ‘into the society of the just made perfect’. Having ‘wrestled with God’, his father ‘had at last prevailed’ and ‘gained the long and earnestly desired assurance of [Robert’s] acceptance with the Almighty’, confirming him ‘now [as] a justified person, adopted among the number of God’s children’. But if Robert’s father is assured of his son’s ‘acceptance by the word and spirit of him who cannot err’, Robert rejoices at being ‘assured of my freedom from all sin, and of the impossibility of my ever again falling away from my new state’. He rejoices, in short, at being above the law of both man and God.31

It is hardly by chance that on the same day that Robert learns he is one of the elect and ‘an heir to all the privileges of the children of God’, he encounters a young man during a walk through a nearby field whom he perceives to be his exact double. Captivated by his new acquaintance who not only looks just like him but voices his own thoughts, Robert quickly falls under his influence. Through Gil-Martin, as the stranger calls himself, Robert is made aware of the divine mission for which his father has supposedly prepared him—to be not merely ‘a minister of the gospel, but a champion of it, to cut off the enemies of the Lord from the face of the earth’. As a divinely sanctioned scourge, he is ready to undertake ‘this great work of purification’, ‘the great work of reformation by blood’.32

When Robert is faced, however, with the actual assassination of the first two victims Gil-Martin assigns him—a pious minister and Robert’s own brother—he is beset by doubts about his infallibility as one of the elect, and only brings off the killings with Gil-Martin’s direct intervention. As Robert’s identity becomes increasingly entangled with that of his mentor-turned-tormentor, he finds himself accused of murders he is not even aware of, such as those of his mother and a young woman whom he has allegedly seduced. To Gil-Martin’s derision, Robert becomes ever more doubtful that his elect status can ever justify the mounting number of sins he has accrued on his murderous campaign. It is noteworthy in this regard that in the course of Robert’s confessional narrative, his use of the word ‘sin’ becomes less frequent and is increasingly replaced by the word ‘crime’. This narrative shift from what Wiltenburg calls ‘the discourse of sin’ to ‘the discourse of crime’ reflects the fact that as a justified sinner, he has ceased to be just a sinner like every other Christian, and has become a full-fledged criminal—‘the antithesis of … the lay everyman’.33 Robert may believe that despite the murders he has committed under his double’s direction, he is not only still a Christian but one of the highest order because of those murders. In the process, however, he has put himself beyond humanity which condemns such acts as unpardonable crimes rather than as justifiable sins committed by a supposedly infallible member of the ‘elect’.

From Hogg’s Private Memoirs with its antinomian premise that the elect are not subject to moral law, we move on in the space of a decade to the literary re-examination, if not rehabilitation, of criminals in the so-called ‘Newgate novels’ of the 1830s and 1840s. A particularly notable example of this subgenre is Edward Lytton Bulwer’s Eugene Aram (1832), based on The Newgate Calendar’s account of a schoolmaster-philologist executed in 1759 for killing a friend whom he claimed had an affair with his wife. Bulwer extensively reworked Aram’s history into the ‘tale’ of a learned scholar who is sentenced to death after his involvement in a swindler’s murder fourteen years earlier comes to light. In 1849, after Eugene Aram ‘provoked an intense critical debate about the ethical implications of basing a novel on the life of a real criminal’, Bulwer recast Aram as an accomplice to the murder rather than its sole perpetrator—a revision that has itself been criticized as ‘an alteration of immense ethical significance that contradicted the historical record’.34 Yet despite ameliorating his earlier depiction of Aram as a murderer, and having him express ‘remorse for his crime’,35 Bulwer also added several noteworthy passages in which Aram justifies his deed as an attempt to advance society’s interest by ‘rid[ding] the earth of a thing at once base and venomous’, and by using the stolen booty taken from his victim to pursue his selfless, high-minded research on society’s behalf. At the time of the murder, Aram ‘looked on the deed I was about to commit as a great and solemn sacrifice to Knowledge, whose Priest I was’, and ‘would not allow the act of crushing one worthless life, but without crushing one virtue—one feeling—one thought that could benefit others … to be a crime’. But when that ‘worthless life’ is discovered to be his fiancée Madeline’s uncle, Aram’s arrest on the day of their marriage, and his imminent execution which brings about her death and devastates her family, leads him to a different view: having for years ‘acknowledged no crime … now crime seemed the essence itself of my soul’.36

Like Caleb Williams’ Falkland, Aram is revealed as a hypocrite who allowed himself to be esteemed as a man of virtue while concealing his crime. (At his trial, he bases his defence on his character and exemplary life which he depicts as being completely at odds with the sudden, brutal murder for which he stands accused—essentially the same defence Falkland used when charged with having killed Tyrrel). Yet regarding his reputation as a superior intellect, Aram is not a fraud; since he was 13, he had succumbed to ‘the deep and intense Passion that has made … the love of knowledge … the Demon of my life’. All too often, Aram admits, he sought refuge and cover in ‘the lofty height of Philosophy, from which he had … looked down on the peril and the ills below’. But it wasn’t just his knowledge that won him the admiration of so many; rather, as the narrator avers, it was ‘the nature of his eloquence [that] was peculiarly calculated to render [his discourses] solemn and impressive’.37 And at no time is he more in need of this eloquence than after his arrest when he uses it to console Madeline and her family, and to defend himself by denying his guilt.

Indeed, for all his professed love of knowledge and nature (in contrast to his fellow humans whom ‘in his heart he despised’),38 Aram’s greatest asset is his ability to impress and fascinate others, much in the manner that Falkland and Gil-Martin enthralled such impressionable dupes as Caleb and Robert—the latter writing that there was ‘fascination in [Gil-Martin’s] look and manner, that drew me back toward him in spite of myself’.39 Early in Bulwer’s novel, Madeline’s cousin Walter cautions her that as ‘wise, learned, [and] gentle’ as he may be, Aram ‘bear[s] about him a spell, a fascination, by which he softens, or awes at will, and which even I cannot resist’. But for Walter, the spell ends once and for all after his discovery that his long-lost father has been Aram’s victim, whereas Madeline and her father—Aram’s victim’s brother—find it impossible to believe Walter’s charge of murder against the scholar, ‘so strong and deep had been the fascination which Eugene Aram had exercised over the hearts of all once drawn within the near circle of his attraction’. All that the exasperated Walter can do is to exclaim to his family, ‘How that strange man seems to have fascinated you all!’40

Readers are left to wonder whether the family’s steadfast yet unjustified devotion to Aram, to the point that Madeline is unable or unwilling to outlive him, is based on its admiration of his vaunted intellect, knowledge, and apparent gentleness, or on its fascination with his eloquence and his air of mystery and profundity which appears to stem from his secret criminality. The paradox here is that what critics ‘most objected to’ in the novel, ‘the fact that a scholarly man could commit murder’, was one of the ways that Romanticism tapped into the biblical link between knowledge and sin, and as such was what ‘made the real Aram a figure of general and continual fascination’,41 and what no doubt drew Bulwer to him as a literary subject. One suspects that his exposé of the ‘fascination with crime’42—rather than an overt glorification of crime for its own sake—was the real scandal of this and other Newgate novels.

Aestheticizing Crime: De Quincey and Foucault

Crime narratives are only one manifestation of a much larger and complex discourse of crime. For Michel Foucault, it is a ‘two-sided discourse’ which, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, entailed a ‘confrontation’ between ‘the posthumous proclamation’ of crimes that ‘justified justice’ and those that ‘glorified the criminal’.43 As for crime narratives themselves, they are similarly informed by a dynamic involving two opposed orientations: one, concerned with the pursuit of justice; the other, with the impulse to crime. In the case of a work like Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, these orientations are almost perfectly balanced: Kohlhaas’s persistent quest for justice shifts, with the death of his wife, into a relentless campaign of criminal violence and revenge which he only abandons when he is satisfied that justice once again prevails. In narratives with a more direct focus on murder, such a balance is harder to achieve: the dynamic boils down to the alternative experiences either of ‘sympathy for the murder victim’ or ‘fascination with the murderer’.44 In the Romantic era, the latter response becomes increasingly prevalent, as in the fascination that Eugene Aram evokes in other characters—both before and even after he is suspected of being a murderer. This response is already evident in the case of Caleb Williams, who hardly sympathizes with Falkland’s victim Tyrrel but who is enthralled by his killer—viewing Falkland, in Philip Shaw’s words, as ‘the sublime “artist” whose genius is manifested in the execution and concealment of transgression’.45

This description of Caleb’s fascination with Falkland credits Godwin with anticipating (by 33 years) De Quincey’s 1827 essay, ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’—widely regarded as the earliest work to explicitly articulate the programme Foucault called ‘the whole aesthetic rewriting of crime’.46 For a narrative enactment of this approach, however, we must turn to De Quincey’s 1854 ‘Postscript’ to his ‘Murder’ essays in which he relates two sensational household killings based on actual incidents from 1811 which obsessed him for the rest of his life. These were the midnight murders in East London, first, of Timothy Marr in his lace warehouse on the Ratcliffe Highway along with his wife, three-month-old son, and an apprentice, and then twelve days later, of John Williamson, his wife, and the maid in a nearby home. One of the suspects, John Williams, was considered the assailant after apparently hanging himself in his prison cell four days after his arrest.

Over the years, the mystery of Williams’s identity and of the motive behind these horrific acts of violence only grew in De Quincey’s mind, giving rise to several provocative publications culminating in the ‘Postscript’, his most extended and probing treatment of the subject. Drawing on police reports and journalistic accounts of the murders, De Quincey used this work, as Robert Morrison suggests, to ‘plumb the particular horror of unknown assailants descending on an urban household which is surrounded by unsuspecting neighbours’, and of ‘the strange and aesthetic allure of a clean and catastrophic fell swoop’.47 From the murderer’s perspective, the artistic aim and satisfaction appears to lie not only in the completion, but in the completeness of the act, epitomized in Williams’s need to include the Marr’s servant, Mary, in his butchery. (She had been out buying oysters but when no one responds to her ringing of the bell on her return, she senses the murderer’s presence on the other side of the front door; despite being seized with terror, she manages to run off.) As ‘an individual, Mary was worth nothing at all’ to Williams.

Here, then, is a vivid instance of the reader’s ‘sympathy for the murder victim[s]’ giving way to ‘a fascination with the murderer’ as experienced through an intermediary figure. De Quincey takes a crucial step beyond the poetically rendered Byronic criminal-hero, employing his signature medium of ‘impassioned prose’49 to portray the utterly dispassionate artist-criminal. Yet this figure’s obsession with making a clean sweep of all the victims in the household is linked to an even deeper mystery—the apparent absence of any explanation for the gruesome murders. Without the culminating, clarifying moment of the killer’s confession, De Quincey’s ‘Postscript’ debunks the longstanding, rationalist assumption that crime is rooted in some evil or pathological motive, and that narratives about criminals have a redeeming social purpose: to deter and contain crime by delivering the message that it is ‘wrong’ and does not ‘pay’. Far from having this aim, or any sense of ‘purposiveness’ such as Immanuel Kant associated with aesthetic judgments of the beautiful in human encounters with nature, the murders in the ‘Postscript’ are presented as manifestations of the sublime as experienced by humans when confronted by nature in all its brute, inhuman, unrestrained, annihilating, supernatural power—as unmotivated, inexplicable actes gratuits.

The culmination of the ‘aesthetic rewriting of crime’ is the sublimation of crime from an act of wilful sinfulness and criminal pathology to a form of pure artistic expression and aesthetic experience. The ‘notion of the artist qua criminal’ is now generally recognized as ‘a standard topic of Romantic theory’: the ‘affinity of crime … to art … as an unmotivated acte gratuit’.50 This ‘standard’, but still quite scandalous, Romantic theme is less likely to be found in the writings of poets than prose writers of the period—writers like De Quincey who alternated between the modes of a prosaic and an ‘impassioned’ prose style. For all their mysteriousness and monstrosity, the later Romantics’ writings about the affinity between art and crime are not mere fictions, but—as in the earliest period of crime narrative—are often based on nonfictional characters and all-too-real events as demonstrated in the ‘Postscript’, and as such can be considered works of ‘true crime’. The pretence of historical realism served to promote De Quincey’s and like-minded Romantic prose writers’ scandalous project of presenting criminal narratives not as a means to deter, explain, or justify crime, but to confront readers with the possibility of a sublime act committed for no known or intelligible reason other than the law itself that defines it as a crime—the prohibition which provokes the act by forbidding it, thereby rendering it irresistible.

At least aestheticizing crime is one way of breaking the vicious circle of crime and punishment epitomized in St Paul’s dictum—‘I had not known sin, but by the law’ (Romans, VII, 7). In the dialectical dance between crime and the Law, what is poetic justice, metaphorically speaking, if not the poetry of justice triumphing over the prose of crime? And yet, is it not also this vaunted poetics of justice that is ultimately unmasked and exposed as the fiction it is by the all-too-real, prosaic nature of crime, most fittingly expressed in prose?

Notes

Further Reading