Crime And Horror In Victorian Literature And Culture-Volume Ii

In nineteenth-century Britain, newspaper accounts of abnormality and transgression titillated and repelled middle-class readers: stories of Jack the Ripper, the Elephant Man, venereal disease, infanticide, and self-murder. In an era marked by unprecedented prosperity and widespread poverty, by a combustible blend of moralism and materialism, the Victorians aggressively policed—and clandestinely crossed—increasingly porous and unstable boundaries. Organized around eight topics, including “The Slum,” “Streetwalking,” “Monstrosity,” and “Death,” the two volumes that comprise this anthology map the Victorian obsession with crime and horror, with phenomena that rattle one’s sense of self.

This collection brings together fifty-nine texts, canonical as well as lesser-known works, from a wide range of genres. Fully annotated, Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and Culture supplies readers with useful biographical details, editorial commentary, and historical context. It contains one novel, Arthur Morrison’s slum narrative A Child of the Jago, two melodramas, three novellas, including Margaret Oliphant’s A Beleaguered City and Vernon Lee’s A Phantom Lover, nine short stories, twenty-two poems, and numerous examples of Victorian journalism, social criticism, criminology, memoir-writing, and government reports.

Matthew Kaiser is Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of the forthcoming The World in Play: A Portrait of a Victorian Concept. His writings on Victorian literature and culture have appeared in a variety of scholarly journals and essay collections. This anthology was inspired by his award-winning lecture course, “Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and Culture,” the largest Victorian literature course ever taught at Harvard.