Minds, acts and crimes: Charles Dickens, George Eliot, James Fitzjames Stephen and Victorian crime responsibility

This interdisciplinary dissertation explores representations of criminal responsibility in legal and literary narratives, and particularly representations of the relations between external and internal elements of crime. Apart from rare strict liability offenses, crimes consist of two elements: an actus reus and a mens rea. The actus reus , comprises the external element---the act and its consequences---the mens rea concerns the internal element---the actor's state of mind. I examine these elements and their relations in selected works of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and the eminent Victorian criminal law jurist James Fitzjames Stephen. These narratives both interrogate the elements of crime and reaffirm them.; My introduction presents legal and literary narratives as two principal discourses shaping cultural opinions about criminal responsibility. Though novels issue no legal verdicts, the Victorian novel's influence over matters of justice was significant. Its influence provoked Stephen, a severe critic of novels, to question the responsibilities of the novelist and the novel's representational practices. I consider here and throughout how the imaginary access that the Victorian novel in particular gives to the inner lives of its characters affects representations of responsibility. Chapter One examines the negotiations between elements of criminal responsibility in Dickens's Oliver Twist focussing on the crime of "accessory before the fact" for which Fagin is hanged; the chapter compares Dickens's efforts to exculpate Oliver and to inculpate Fagin and considers Dickens's challenge to the boundaries between the elements of crime. Chapters Two (on Adam Bede and Felix Holt and Three (on Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda move further into the mind of the accused. While Eliot's early work ambivalently locates responsibility in acts and consequences, the later work resituates responsibility more fully in the activity of desires and intentions. The final chapter examines Stephen's The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey, which criticizes Macaulay's essay on Warren Hastings. Stephen censures the fictionality of Macaulay's legal history and his representations of the motives and intentions of Impey and Hastings, accused of judicial murder.