Martin J. Wiener

Reconstructing the criminal : culture, law, and policy in England, 1830-1914

Introduction: criminal policy as cultural change 1. The origins of Victorianism: impulse and motivation 2. Victorian criminal policy I: reforming the law 3. Victorian criminal policy II: reformed punishment 4. A changing human image 5. Late Victorian social policy - a changing context 6. The demoralizing of criminality 7. Prosecution and sentencing: the erosion of moral discourse 8. Disillusion with the prison 9. The outcome: social debility and positive punishment Index

Judges v. Jurors: Courtroom Tensions in Murder Trials and the Law of Criminal Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century England

Although it is well known that the criminal laws administration in nineteenth-century England altered decisively, little important change has been noted in the substantive criminal law. Yet change there was, but produced less through legislation (as was much administrative change) or even appeals court rulings than through everyday criminal justice practice. In particular, the effective meanings of legal terms central to the prosecution of homicide—terms such as provocation, intention, and insanity—were in motion during the nineteenth century as part of a broader redefining and reimagining of liability and responsibility. To grasp these often subtle shifts of meaning, we must look to the sites in which they occurred, the most important of which were the courtrooms of the assize courts, where the most serious offenses were tried.

An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935

1. On the high seas 2. Queensland, 1869-1889 3. Fiji, 1875-1885 4. Trinidad and the Bahamas, 1886-1897 5. India: the setting 6. India: in the legal arena, 1889-1922 7. Kenya, 1905-1934 8. British Honduras 1934.Martin J. Wiener set out to test the theory that people of all races were equal before the law throughout the British Empire by examining inter-racial homicide trials, notably those where whites killed non-Europeans. Not surprisingly, he finds that the principle broke down wherever settlers were in control or Europeans found themselves in a threatened minority. Murders on the high seas were tried in London where there was some attempt at equitable treatment. Wiener then ranges through Queensland, Fiji, Trinidad and the Bahamas to India and on to Kenya, with a final tailpiece in British Honduras, where an American killed a Belizean in 1934 and the United States government was not all impressed by the idea that he should be locked up. Wiener’s contention that his material ‘exposes dissonances within the ranks of colonizers that made British colonialism . . . a deeply contested enterprise’ (p. 19) seems a touch overblown. Rather, and hardly surprisingly, the general picture is that court-room charades of fairness masked a very one-sided approach to inter-racial violence. If there was any range of subtlety in settler tactics, it ranged from intimidation to low cunning. The former included campaigns to deter governors from confirming death sentences on whites in Queensland, to demands in Kenya for public execution of Africans, complete with compulsory attendance of their kin. The latter is well exemplified in the Bahamas where, in 1895, the Colonial Office hoped to block the appointment of a local lawyer as chief justice because he was related to too many members of the small white community. Although the colony was not selfgoverning, the legislature determined judicial salaries. In 1895, they imposed a steep cut, to take effect on the next incumbent. When the post fell vacant in 1897, no outside candidate was prepared to take the job, and the local man was promoted. In 1898, the salary was restored. My confidence in this book would have been increased had the presentation been more impressive. One quotation is repeated (pp. 17, 134), while allusion is similarly made twice to a minor episode (pp. 7, 132). The Colonial Laws Validity Act, a piece of legislation of some importance to the story, is misdated by nine years. Queensland was not a state in the 19th century, nor should Premier Griffith be styled ‘Prime Minister’. Macaulay drafted the law code for India in 1835–37, not during the The Round Table Vol. 101, No. 02, 181–197, April 2012

Treating “Historical” Sources as Literary Texts: Literary Historicism and Modern British History*

In recent years, a new form of historical writing, produced in growing quantities by members of English departments, has emerged, and professional historians have been for the most part not quite sure how to respond. On the one hand, one wants to welcome the “rediscovery of history” by literary scholars; on the other, the history being rediscovered does not look quite like what most professional historians have thought history to be. Should one welcome the infusion of new energies and new perspectives into historical study, or should one be wary of an intellectual Trojan horse? Will the influence of this mode of scholarship lead historians to neglect the fidelity to fact, the belief in the existence of an ultimately objective “past”—the whole “scientific” side of our famously ambiguous discipline? Will the “new historicism” in literary studies enrich or undermine the historical enterprise?

Homicide and ‘Englishness’: Criminal Justice and National Identity in Victorian England

One venue for the formation of national identity that has received comparatively little attention in recent years, is that of the courtroom. In particular, the treatment of serious crimes in Victorian England involved a good deal of reference to notions of Englishness. In the course of their routine work, Victorian criminal courts promulgated particular and generally coherent views as to how ‘an Englishman’, as opposed to a foreigner, was expected to behave. This article examines how the judicial treatment of three types of nineteenth‐century violence – the duel, knife‐fighting and the killing of an adulterous spouse or his or her lover – contributed to reshaping the contours of male English national identity.

Evolution and History Writing

John Carter Wood has made a most important contribution that should be widely heeded.1 It is high time for historians to take note of the intellectual revolution that the rapid advance of the biological sciences has created around them. From a theoretical standpoint, the historical profession might be said to be still living in the 1960s, when the distinctiveness and autonomy of culture and society were taken for granted, and all significant questions revolved around the relations between the two concepts. This was a time when any reference to Darwin marked one as at best ‘unprofessional’ and at worst a crypto-Nazi. Similarly, the self-isolation of cultural history needs to be broken; the notion of culture needs to rediscover its connections to both society and psychology. Evolutionary psychology is especially well suited for this project. It brings our attention back to the root of all human behaviour – individual psychology in interaction with its environment. ‘Culture’ is after all a construct, if undeniably a most useful one. It has been usefully defined as ‘information [understood broadly] capable of affecting individuals’ behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission’.2 Such a definition reminds us that it is, first, natural, emerging as, we might say, the most important evolutionary adaptation in human development,3 and, second, a property of individual minds – minds, evolutionary psychologists argue, that have evolved over time in response to selective pressures arising from the wider environment individuals find themselves in. The work of historians in recent years has perhaps overstressed the unique and the particular; this is part of the human story, certainly, but only part. The study of human beings in time would benefit from reconnecting, as Wood proposes, with other fields

England Is The Country: Modernization and the National Self-image

In the last hundred years the British initiators of the Industrial Revolution have fallen behind one after another of their imitators. As a consequence, the issue of “modernization” has moved to the head of the political agenda in a nation that was for the nineteenth century world the very model of “modernity.” Much of this change in world position was inevitable — yet not all of it. Why, historians have recently been asking, did Britain between 1870 and 1900 lose the economic dynamism that had been her hallmark? Why, further, did the British fail to recover this lost dynamism in the twentieth century? The British experience ought to be of particular interest to Americans today, for recently we have become aware of the costs as well as the benefits of economic growth. Our faith in material progress is dimming. At the same time, our former economic dynamism seems now in question. Indeed, we may be repeating the experience of Britain. To understand the change in British economic behavior, we must look at more than solely economic history. As Max Weber argued as far back as 1904, economic activity takes place in a wider social context. Attitudes and values play a vital role in shaping economic behavior. Development economists have discovered in the last two decades that economic change is not produced solely by economic means — by introducing technology and capital alone. To some degree at least, societies “choose” their economic futures by the values they hold. Because of this, intellectual and social history may tell us much about the difficulties of continuing modernization in twentieth century Britain.

Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth‐Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood. By Stephanie L. Barczewski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. viii+274.

Nineteenth-century English nationalism has been a neglected area of research, as Gerald Newman pointed out in his seminal study,The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740-1830 (1987). The scholarly preoccupations of the last decade have been with British national identity and its interaction or suppression of divergent Celtic nationalisms. The publication of Linda Colleys Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (1992) perhaps rightly focused academic attention on the creation of a sense of Britishness which in the eighteenthand early-nineteenthcenturies at least served to bind the disparate parts of the British Isles together. This book explores the relationship between British and English national identities in the nineteenth-century. David Cannadine has suggested that Colleys sense of Britishness had dwindled, by the end of Victorias reign, to an interpretation of Britain as England alone, so that British history was essentially English history writ large.(1) Barczewksis study of nineteenth-century perceptions and representations of the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood offers a case study of the development of this Anglicization of the British identity. By the end of Victorias reign, she argues, Britishness of the inclusive variety Colley pictured was under challenge: a more dominant and racialist form of English national identity was emerging. This was a definition of Britain as England which left no room for the inclusion of Celtic national identities. You could not longer be British and Scottish, Welsh, or Irish; you were British and not Scottish, Welsh or Irish.

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An exploration of the cultural background of modern Britains economic malaise. Traces the development of a pervasive middle and upper class frame of mind hostile to industrialism and economic growth from the mid-19th century to the present.

English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980

England was the world’s first great industrial nation. Yet the English have never been comfortable with industrialism. Drawing upon a wide array of sources, Martin Wiener explores the English ambivalence to modern industrial society. His work reveals a pervasive middleand upper-class frame of mind hostile to industrialism and economic growth. From the middle of the nineteenth century to the present, this frame of mind shaped a broad spectrum of cultural expression, including literature, journalism, and architecture, as well as social, historical, and economic thought. Now in a new edition, Wiener reflects on the original debate surrounding the work and examines the historiography of the last twenty years. Written in a graceful and accessible style, with reference to a broad range of people and ideas, this book will be of interest to all readers who wish to understand the development – and predicament – of modern England.