MEN OF BLOOD: VIOLENCE, MANLINESS AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND

This Book Examines far more thoroughly than ever before the treatment of serious violence by men against women in nineteenth-century England. During Victoria's reign the criminal law came to punish such violence more systematically and heavily, while propagating a new, more pacific ideal of manliness. Yet this apparently progressive legal development called forth strong resistance, not only from violent men themselves but from others who drew upon discourses of democracy, humanitarianism, and patriarchy to establish sympathy with "men of blood." In exploring this development and the contest it generated, Professor Wiener, author of several important works in British history, analyzes the cultural logic underlying shifting practices in nineteenth-century courts and Whitehall and locates competing cultural discourses in the everyday life of criminal justice. The tensions and dilemmas highlighted by this book are more than simply "Victorian" ones; to an important degree they remain with us. Consequently this work speaks not only to historians and to students of gender but also to criminologists and legal theorists.