Crime, Control, and Power in the MidVictorian Novel Collins, Dickens, and Reade

Sercan Öztekin performs a critical investigation into the notions of crime, criminality, and the legal system in mid-nineteenth century England, and the reflections of these concepts in the works of Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Charles Reade in the 1850s. In this study, Öztekin explores Victorian culture, society, institutions, and literature in relation to crime along with the representations of criminal behavior and penal laws as social constructs in mid-Victorian novel. Drawing on cultural studies of law and literature, and Michel Foucault’s theories of crime and punishment, this book argues that crime was a social construct that was used to control the working class by exerting state and legal power over citizens. Using Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859-60), Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-53), and Charles Reade’s It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) as focal novels of examination, Crime, Control, and Power in the Mid-Victorian Novel delves into the historical, cultural, and social perspectives of the Victorian period, illustrating how these writers attempt to challenge conventional Victorian perceptions of crime and criminal behavior in their novels .