Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-995ml Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T11:08:37.583Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 2 - The Social Life of Crime

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug

from Part I - Criminality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2021

Leila Neti
Affiliation:
Occidental College, Los Angeles
Get access

Summary

Chapter Two, “The Social Life of Crime: Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug” reads the oppositional evolution of criminal justice in England and India by comparing the two novels. I begin with the observation that the movement toward rehabilitation and the humanization of the criminal in nineteenth century England occurs in tandem with the rise of corporal punishment and penal transportation in India. Taking the two novels as instances of this contradictory impulse, I examine the figure of the thug as a cipher for racialized fears of Indian criminality. In particular, I look at representations of paternity and masculinity within both novels. I show that Abel Magwitch becomes humanized in Dickens’s novel by taking on the mantle of fatherhood for Pip. By contrast, Ameer Ali is condemned for his paradigmatic inability to foster a viable childhood. I argue that criminality emerges within a Victorian matrix of race and patriarchy in which to be a father, or father figure, is to be properly human.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • The Social Life of Crime
  • Leila Neti, Occidental College, Los Angeles
  • Book: Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination
  • Online publication: 02 April 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938280.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • The Social Life of Crime
  • Leila Neti, Occidental College, Los Angeles
  • Book: Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination
  • Online publication: 02 April 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938280.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Social Life of Crime
  • Leila Neti, Occidental College, Los Angeles
  • Book: Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination
  • Online publication: 02 April 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938280.004
Available formats
×