Keywords: Criminal justice, Victorian EnglandKeywords: Criminal justice, Victorian Englan

Nye, Robert A.

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   [Review of the book Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England]             Journal of Modern History                                          2007      Nye, Robert A. *Reviewing Author                  Originally published by The University of Chicago Press and can be found at: http://www.jstor.org/page/journal/jmodernhistory/about.html  Citation: Nye, R. A. (2007, March). [Review of the book Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England]. Journal of Modern History, 79(1), 184-185. Available from JSTOR website: http://www.jstor.org/stable/full/10.1086/517559   184 Book Reviewscompetitive business. But insofar as the British moral reform movement and its leadershipis concerned, Roberts has written a valuable, heavily researched survey that will last asthe standard account for many years.PETERCLARKUniversity of HelsinkiMen of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England.By Martin J. Wiener.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi296. $70.00.In the last few decades, criminal justice history has come of age. It has escaped the ghettosof legal and social history, which for a long time were dominated by the technical analysisof criminal law and criminal statistics and by other narrow disciplinary concerns thatprecluded any ambitious agenda or broad generalization. Criminal justice history nowencompasses the broadest range of cultural, political, and gender history, as Martin Wie-ner’s study of criminal violence in Victorian Britain impressively demonstrates. Wienerhas assembled a broad array of the relevant criminal statistics and legal and proceduralinnovations of the nineteenth century and interprets this traditional material against thebackground of evolving male and female gender ideals, the history of violence, and theadvance of the civilizing ideal in England. The result is a sweeping account of the emer-gence of the modern English temperament, which is often remarked upon in theory but inthis study is supported by scrupulous attention to the practice of punishment in the Vic-torian justice system.Wiener accomplishes this task by careful study of the language used by assizes judges,magistrates, lawyers, grand jurors, coroners, Home Office bureaucrats, highbrow com-mentators, and the authors of popular broadsides and periodicals. By examining in detailthe discourse used by the chief participants in criminal investigations and trials, Wienerreaches conclusions about the ascriptive assumptions that guided contemporaries whenthey speculated on the intent, the nature, and the proper punishment of violent criminals.He then connects this discourse, which evolved over the course of the century, with atti-tudes and developments in Victorian society that shaped and were shaped in turn by thebloody drama of criminal violence, including ideals of womanhood, temperance andmoralimprovement movements, legal reform, and the gradual substitution of personal self-re-straint for the rule of force. Though he offers case study upon case study that plumb thedepths of human desperation and depravity, his basic narrative is about how English man-hood underwent a sea change in the course of a century. In telling this tale, Wiener em-phasizes the positive side of the gender revolution that made middle-class women intoprotected and helpless domestic angels, the passive helpmates to husband-fathers. As heparaphrases E. P. Thompson, “If protecting women became a justification for exercisingpower over other peoples, in the process the justification became a force in itself” (34).This “force” took the form of a rising judicial and popular intolerance for violence,especially violence against women but also all the forms of casual violence between menthat had fallen, in the early modern era, into the category of private conflict. As legalreformers in the early part of the century were lightening the punishments for propertycrimes, violent acts of all kinds against the person were criminalized according to newlegal gradations of intent and harm and punished with a new array of sentencing optionsfrom fine and imprisonment to transportation and hanging. It is Wiener’s point that theprincipal impulse behind these reforms was a perception that the Victorian incarnation ofwomanhood needed a complementary manhood that was self-regulating and respectful ofthe weaker sex and that society as a whole eventually benefited from the battery of reformsthe penal establishment put in place to achieve this result. In explicating these develop-ments in the reconstruction of manhood, Wiener shows that a variety of the misogynisticprejudices that had attached to womankind before the Victorian era—in effect, that womenBook Reviews 185were highly sexed, shrewish, passionate creatures—gradually atrophied when confrontedby the ideal standard of womanhood embodied in the practice of criminal law, to whichnot only men but also, in practice, their female victims were now obliged to conform.Effectively, as the century progressed, a man who had beaten or killed his wife wasjudged and punished according to an ever-increasing standard of strictness that acknowl-edged fewer mitigating circumstances: a woman’s drunkenness; her verbal abuse or herinfidelity, real or imagined; even her prostitution. But these female failings nonethelessremained in the law as circumstances justifying a man’s acquittal or lessened punishmentand so continued to serve as an incentive for women to actually perform the exemplarywomanhood protected by the law. Thus, in Wiener’s account, did criminal law and pun-ishment shape the behavior and expectations of middle-class Victorians and, over the longrun, the popular classes as well.Wiener’s argument, if it rested solely on the reformative capacity of the criminal law,would have been far less weighty, but he adduces a wide array of cultural evidence thatclearly indicates this gendered development in the law was accompanied by a host ofparallel changes in public attitudes toward violence. The extraordinary social unrest andupper-class fear of popular uprisings that characterized the early industrial era were surelythe inspiration for much of the era’s legal reform: to punish disorder less harshly but moreconsistently and effectively. Furthermore, these anxieties also inspired political advocatesfor a broader franchise (such as John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor), evangelicals whoundertook the reformation of working-class morality, and a host of temperance and purityreformers who saw drunkenness or sexual vice as the root of society’s ills. For all thesegroups, criminal violence was perhaps the most dangerous, and surely the most dramati-cally visible, product of all these social and moral defects and the one most amenable toa combination of moral uplift, new personal responsibilities, and strict punishment. AsWiener demonstrates, men who failed to restrict their violent or sexually predatory im-pulses received harsher and more certain punishments over the course of the century. Lessand less could they count on their wife’s or lover’s bad behavior, their own misery ordrunkenness, or old assumptions about men’s stronger sex drive or ancient right to engagein violence to resolve personal differences. Victorian reformers marked out the violentsexual predator as public enemy number one. As Wiener shows, the campaign to eliminatethe traditional version of masculinity that underlay such violence helped in the long runto reduce the incidence of all forms of violence in English society.From time to time, Wiener draws attention to the apparent paradox of the increasinglydocile Englishman and the dominating “imperial man” for whom violence was an occa-sionally necessary obligation. Are these the same men, drawing on their existential cir-cumstances to find the quality of their masculinity? Are they Victorian rejects or simplyin rebellion against the increasingly pacific nature of civilian life? Wiener could have saidmore about the fate of the “civilizing influence” on men (and women) in the colonialdomain, about which a good deal has been written concerning European colonialism anda great deal more concerning British exceptionalism in general. He includes a brief sectionon the differences between the French and the English in punishing crimes of passion butnothing else that would enlighten us further about the differential histories of violence,male honor, and gender relations in European societies in this era.Notwithstanding the lack of such a comparative and imperial perspective, this is a deeplyinformed and imaginative study, beautifully written in the bargain. It is an added bonusthat Wiener’s painstaking attention to documenting his claims, drawn from case law, trialtranscripts, Home Office documents, newspapers, and a myriad of other printed sources,is richly displayed in the abundant footnotes that Cambridge University Press, practicallyalone among scholarly publishers, continues to employ in its historical publications. Thenotes are full of fascinating material for the interested scholar, and much would have beenlost had this information been abridged or confined to endnotes.ROBERTA. NYEOregon State University

Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (review)

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Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (review)

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