Theories of the Violent Criminal

Theories were constructed about criminals as different from ordinary people; they were trapped in an earlier stage of evolution or were possessed of something different, more primitive, in their make-up.

Criminal Violence and Culture in Europe suggesting ‘not the sublimity of the primate, but the lower level of the rodent or lemur, or the brain of a human fetus of three or four months'.^[970] Moreover, while he considered that novelists overemphasised the appearance of crim­inals, in his first edition Lombroso explained that, after studying offenders in various prisons,

one has to conclude that while offenders may not look fierce, there is nearly always something strange about their appearance...

In general, thieves are notable for their expressive faces and manual dexterity, small wandering eyes that are often oblique in form. Like rapists, they often have jug ears. Rapists, however, nearly always have sparkling eyes, delicate features, and swollen lips and eyelids.

Habitual murderers have a cold, glassy stare and eyes that are sometimes bloodshot and filmy; the nose is often hawklike and always large; the jaw is strong, the cheekbones broad... ^[971]

Such descriptions were ideal for novelists, but it is also true that novelists such as Harrison Ainsworth and Eugene Sue had been portraying crim­inal offenders in this way long before Lombroso's earliest theorising provided what appeared to be a scientific underpinning.

Gender played a major role in the idea of the criminal, especially the violent criminal. The violent offender was perceived as male; generally the female equivalent of such men was the prostitute. Again Lombroso out­lined this in his criminological theorising; in 1893, between the fourth and fifth editions of his Criminal Man, he published The Delinquent Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman. Generally women appeared in European courts charged with criminal offences in far fewer numbers than men. Among them there were some women accused of violent acts, and these were often doubly stigmatised: first, they had committed violence but second, and more importantly, their action appeared a denial of what was seen as natural to their sex. Abortion was an obvious example, though for the offender it may simply have been an attempt to preserve an element of respectability and avoid the stigma of illegitimacy. Poison was popularly

seen as a means by which women, in another perversion of their domestic role, killed family members. Yet the evidence does not suggest that women used poison to any greater degree than men in acts of homicide. In the context of fin-de-siecle France it has been forcefully argued that female criminality, which at the time hit the headlines with a series of vitriol attacks on unfaithful husbands and lovers, became linked with debates about women's role in the public sphere. Notable in highlighting the problem was Alexandre Dumas fils who, in 1880, published an essay Les femmes qui tuent et les femmes qui votent [WomenWho Kill and Women Who Vote).^[973]

In the same way that violent female offenders were considered to be part of a movement challenging the natural social order, so it was a relatively easy step to describe an especially violent individual who supposedly had the visual appearance of a ‘criminal' as a ‘monster' - someone or something not entirely human.

It is of a Monster I mean for to write, Who in stabbing of Ladies took great delight; If he caught them alone in the street after dark, In their Hips, or their Thighs, he'd be sure cut a mark.^[974]

One hundred years later the front pages of Le Petit Journal and Le Petit Parisien regularly carried vivid and violent representations of murderous monstres and ogresses setting about their victims - especially tragic when they were poor little enfants martyrs. Albert Soleilland, for example, was described as both a ‘monster' and a ‘satyr'. London's mid-century garrotters seem to have been given their label to imply a foreign or alien nature - garrotting, for example, was a Spanish method of public execution; they were also labelled ‘thugs', which linked them with the Indian bandits who had strangled travellers using a Rumal (a scarf, usually coloured some sort of yellow, which might be worn as a turban or a cummerbund). The horrors of Thugee had recently been exposed and supposedly suppressed by the East India Company; the events had been described and popularised in the accounts of Captain W. H.

Sleeman, who was personally involved in the suppression, and Colonel Philip Meadows Taylor.^[975]