Victorian Imagery: Creating Identities

Institutionalist histories of crime and punishment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England are narrated through changes in categories of criminal legislation, in policing, and in penal structures. More critical perspectives focus on the object of that legal reaction, arguing that such controls were designed to deal with a generalized dangerousness, covering fears of both crime and social disorder, rather than specific criminality. Form rather than substance characterized Whig histories. Far from criminal justice form being progressive, it simply perpetuated in different guises the summary justice meted out to the poor. The process of criminalizing the lower strata in the early nineteenth century drew upon key images of morality and of pathology, revealing the ambivalence that pervades the creation of identities in law. Law was aimed as much at the social, cultural and epidemiological attributes of the lower classes as at the physical threat they presented. Consequently, legislation focused on the assumed collective attributes, rather than directly on individual actions. The crime problem was not one of deed but of vicarious character. Reforms of criminal law aimed to contain this notion of threatening character and dispel by intervention its associated criminal images. Criminal classes were defined in terms of their communal propensity to undermine social harmony. Such a stratum, as in the parallel process in India amongst the criminal tribes, was anxiously understood through a proliferation of stereotypes and labels imbued with this threatening menace. The production of images in Western discourse of the non-Western of the Orient was expressed through the latter's sickness and criminal tendencies, being more corrupt and licentious than the Europeans. The dangerous and threatening required control and regulation.

Colonial officials shared information with their counterparts in the imperial centre, especially over the need to deploy harsh regulation and regimes against the natives in response to their wayward habits in relation imperial discipline.