“I SHALL BE MY OWN POLICE”: LITERARY REFLECTIONS OF VICTORIAN CRIME AND SOCIAL SURVEILLANCE IN DICKENS AND DOYLE

Abstract

Depictions of the criminal figure in Victorian literature and the visual arts and their relation
to surveillance and social geography played a salient role in the literal and social construction and
maintenance of the nineteenth-century English city. With industrialization and the resulting influx of
population to urban centers such as London and Manchester rose debates over sanitary conditions, social
statistics, probability and urban risk. This paper will address literary representations of the urban criminal
in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens to compare changing conceptions of crime in the
Victorian metropolis and the industrial city, respectively. Through juxtaposing literary reflections of the
cityscape, social geography and crime in Dickens‟s Hard Times and Doyle‟s Sherlock Holmes stories, I
will examine the Victorian compulsion toward surveillance in light of the industrial novel, narratives of
urban exploration and the detective story. The analysis will encompass conceptions of geographic and
social continuity and address shifting perspectives on urban living conditions and social statistics occurring
between the 1850s and the fin-de-siècle. Emphasis will fall specifically on the history of the Ordnance map
and the hegemonic functions of urban architecture to compare in these works the capacity to mediate social
anxieties and to write and re-write the Victorian city.