'A little colony there of roughs and vagabonds': The literary, social, and legal constructions of child criminals in Victorian England

This dissertation discusses the intersections of legal and literary narratives of child criminality, highlighting the relationship, distinction between, and mutually defining nature of the child and adult citizen. The Victorian imagination inscribed itself similarly onto criminals and children, and an analysis of child criminals in several Victorian texts illuminates the evolving constructions of childhood and criminality in that era. Victorian England saw itself as the core of civilization and had a general, openly stated goal of spreading civilization and civilized thought; the child criminal represents the opposite of civilization. Investigating the literary and legal treatment of child criminality reveals how Victorian thinkers defined and revised their conceptions of "children," "criminals," and "child criminals." This project, which adopts the interdisciplinary framework of Law and Literature, examines both canonical and lesser-known Victorian texts. I argue that these works of literature reflect legal discussions of child criminality in the Victorian era, such as the evolving legal narratives of childhood behind laws like the 1847 Juvenile Offences Act and the 1870 Education Act. The Introduction to this dissertation takes Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist as a test case. This project then extends scholarship about Victorian child criminals beyond that famous novel in four chapters and an epilogue on other texts of various generic kinds. Chapter 1 discusses the debate about the origins and causes of criminality, before considering the child criminals in Thomas Hardy's 1895 Jude the Obscure and Arthur Morrison's 1895 A Child of the Jago. Chapter 2 looks at the role of education in relation to child criminality in R. M. Ballantyne's 1857 The Coral Island and Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 Treasure Island. In Chapter 3, I investigate policing and detection of child criminality in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1887 A Study in Scarlet and 1890 The Sign of Four. Chapter 4 analyzes a novel for children and adults about a girl child, Lewis Carroll's 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , and a long poem, Robert Browning's 1868--1869 The Ring and the Book, about an adolescent, maturing girl's murder case amid all the legal, personal, social, and historical perspectives that such a case entails.