A grisly detail of a ballad is quoted in Valle-Inclán's historical trilogy about Spain at the time of the 1868 revolution, in which banditry at the lowest social levels reflects the supposed ‘banditry’ at the level of government, and a boundary of decency is crossed. A woman serves up the fried livers of innocent victims to their killers. Like is reported as consuming like, and there is care in the preparation of the meal (ironically intimated through the diminutive of livers, ‘higadillos’) (Valle-Inclán 1969: 219). Here the boundary between excess and seemliness is crossed with delicate intent. Eating the body parts of another human being is, of course, not universally shocking nor necessarily considered excessive. Endo-cannibalism can denote respect for the dead (Conklin 2001), and cannibalism can indicate the desire to gain strength through eating one's enemy (Sanday 1986). Cannibalism occurs in some of the examples discussed below, marking the extreme end of the expression of excess in terms of what can happen to the body in the framework of wrongdoing, but it will be only one such marker.

This chapter sets out to explore the fine relation between seemliness and excess in wrongdoing, both in the commission and the reporting, and how it is presented in Spanish popular literature. There is no record elsewhere of the romance (ballad) that appears in Valle-Inclán's text. In its excesses it does not go beyond some of the more extreme examples we shall see from authentic pliegos sueltos, although its placing in the novel, as a comment on the nature of wrongdoing which is arguably one that spans the entire class system in Spain, has particular point. This chapter moves away from the literary text to look at popular literature, and argues that in this genre we are given a far from simple view of the wrongs done, and whether they are intended to shock or to be savoured is unclear. The discussion is not confined to what is conceived of as excess in the example given above, and we might generalize that if excess tends to be presented in simple terms, seemliness is more complex, even more elusive.

This book is not a history of wrongdoing in Spain between 1800 and 1936, or even of its more narrowly defined form, crime. Its concern is with something akin, albeit different, namely the cultural construction of wrongdoing, and its legally defined manifestation, crime; and with the way in which such phenomena were experienced and understood in Spain of this period.

One of the most striking features of the cultural construction of wrongdoing in academic and criminological circles in Spain during this period is that there has been a predominant focus on the violent manifestations of wrongdoing. Constancio Bernaldo de Quirós, an early criminologist, in 1906 cited Spain as one of the highest on the list in Europe for the occurrence of violent crime (Bernaldo de Quirós 1906: 21). In intellectual terms, Bernaldo de Quirós was in dialogue with Durkheim, as evidenced by his 1904 pamphlet, ‘Una polémica sobre la normalidad del delito’, which was sparked off by Durkheim's Les règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris: Alcan, 1895) (Bernaldo de Quirós 1904: 9). In line with what is put forward in that text, Bernaldo de Quirós argues for crime being understood as ‘una inmoralidad’ which has incurred a penalty (Bernaldo de Quirós 1904: 11). As J. Carter Wood has noted (Wood 2004: ix): ‘law is only one of the social institutions that set the boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable, and these lines are continuously contested and shifting’.

The focus on violence shown in the example of Bernaldo de Quirós was far from an isolated occurrence. The recent historical survey by Gutmaro Gómez Bravo in a collection of essays on ‘Heroes of Wrongdoing’ demonstrates that the focus has fallen less on wrongdoing in itself than on its manifestations through violence. Gómez Bravo's essay in that collection is a bold historiographical review, reflecting not simply the violence that existed in Spain's history, but the changing and evolving attitudes to how it should be represented, discussed and formulated in academic study. In his article ‘De las costumbres violentas de la sociedad española’ (Gómez Bravo 2017), he surveys the thematic importance of violence as a means of understanding Spanish history, but always with an eye to those constructing as well as to the object under (re)construction.

There is no doubt of the fundamentally ethical preoccupations of Unamuno. What is less clear is the degree to which he was ever concerned with the difference between right and wrong in any conventional sense, still less with the importance of acting upon it. His writings, whether fictional or non-fictional (and all variations in between), effectively challenge us – with unrelenting consistency – to think about right and wrong. Ethical or moral decisions are not necessarily central in his texts, but may emerge in ways that are consequential to other concerns of plot or argument. At times, as with the subplots of Niebla (Olson 1984: 68–75) they will be dealt with, or brought in as deliberately inconsequential matter, rather than being focused upon as the major issue. As far as the reader is concerned, it is deliberately not made clear what we are to do, or indeed to think, in the face of Unamuno's provocative drawing of new lines. His work is designed to push the reader into his or her own decisions about what is or is not ethical, or ‘good’, or ‘wrong’. There is no such easy thing as ‘telling’ in the sense of informing and guiding. Instead there is the presentation of painful and complex situations to which we are invited to react. His concern, at least if we are to believe him, is not that we should think a particular thing, but rather that we should think.

Unamuno's concern with the individual as free-standing, responsible for taking his or her own decisions in life, follows in a broad European existentialist tradition. Most specifically we might contextualize his framing of the burden of individual choice within the work of two writers: Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. In the case of Nietzsche, an inevitable cornerstone of the intellectual formación of Unamuno and his contemporaries in Europe (not just in Spain), we find emphasis on those beliefs formerly held as absolute as being no more than human constructs. This forms part of the intellectual basis for Unamuno's philosophical approach with its focus upon the requirement that we all think for ourselves (see Guignon 1998).

What does it signify to be an anglophile? More specifically, what did it signify to be an anglophile in Spain in the early twentieth century? Some pointers to the significance of England for Spain in this period have been given. What Collini has to say on the nature and functioning of the intellectual, as discussed in Chapter 1, is relevant here, given that he envisages the intellectual as having a ‘qualifying performance’ that subsequently endows him with authority to pronounce on topics outside his field (Collini 2006: 52–6). This apparent championing of amateurism, in contradistinction to the concept of authority, which might be conveyed in academic systems where a more acute sense of hierarchy obtains than in the English one, suggests a number of key skills that might be valued. Simplifying Spain's love-affair with England, we could posit it as consisting in an identification with individuality. Of the key skills valued one is the prioritization of mind or judgement over simple knowledge (in terms of the possession of facts, or of a corpus of knowledge). Another is the implied belief in the need to go beyond the capacity of the intellectual to pronounce on that which is not, strictly speaking, always within his original narrow academic or professional field. That is, it entails a sense that there could be a similar capacity in those who receive such pronouncements and to judge them accordingly, a capacity to understand, to make their own and thence to move on their own intellectual track.

A driving force in writing this book was the conviction that there was a wealth of intellectual history that risked being lost through a process of cultural desmemoria. It was coupled with another conviction, namely that if we only looked at the histories of individuals, or those of institutions, we missed something. The interactive nature of individuals with one another, and with their institutions, is as significant an element in the trafficking of knowledge as is any single interaction of either with the outside world.

These interactions are challenging to map, but the preceding chapters have aimed to capture different areas of a complex landscape. This has varied and developed along the chronological trajectory from the turn of the century to the Civil War, but it has also been variable geographically, not least in the divide between city and country, and most prominently between Madrid and the rest of Spain. One of the most striking features of the cultural panorama in Spain through these years is not simply the richness of activity that can be perceived in some areas of the population, with the undoubted capacity to reach out, to import and to receive that which is foreign to Spain.