Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties

At the center of G. K. Chesterton's The Man who was Thursday (1908) is a band of master anarchists, each named for one of the days of the week, all of whom are ultimately revealed in the course of the novel to be undercover detectives. One of them explains what they think they are fighting against:

This new movement of ours is a very different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more properly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. ¹

This passage usefully introduces my essay, because I will be arguing that the idea of the criminal as an intellectual or artistic genius (which had seemed so radical when Thomas De Quincey first offered it in his 1827 essay, "On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts") had become a conservative and reassuring notion by the end of the nineteenth century—quite literally in this case, since there are ultimately no philosopher criminals in Chesterton's book, only philosopher policemen.

The idea of an aesthetic of crime had begun to pick up steam again about 40 years after De Quincey, in part as a response to falling crime rates. By 1869, Leslie Stephen (writing under the pseudonym of "A Cynic") was bemoaning the "perceptible decline" in the style of murder, while The Spectator echoed the same theme thirteen years later, predicting a more prosaic era in the history of crime, "in which evil is stolid, and careful, and prudent, and obtuse." ² Late Victorian readers could of course look to popular fiction—to Gothic novels, sensation fiction, and the Sherlock Holmes detective stories—for a more elevated style of criminality, or to newspaper accounts of Jack the Ripper: indeed, it became a commonplace of contemporary commentary to highlight how strikingly literary these murders appeared, with noticeable parallels to Poe, Sade, and especially to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). ³ Stevenson's earliest critics and reviewers had mainly praised his formal construction and prose style, while advancing mild concerns about the text's possible impact on popular audiences. Two years later, though, the five murders ascribed to Jack the Ripper seemed to correlate closely with the recorded actions of Mr. Hyde, and thus incited a retroactive rereading. Soon after the second victim, Annie Chapman, was discovered, the East London Advertiser speculated that "a murderous lunatic [is] concealed in the slums of Whitechapel, who issues forth at night like another Hyde, to prey upon the defenceless women of the 'unfortunate' class"; a month (and two deaths) later, the same paper looked for parallels in Gothic fables and vampire legends, noting that "the most morbid imagination can conceive nothing worse than this terrible reality; for what can be more appalling than the thought that there is a being in human shape stealthily moving about a great city, burning with the thirst for human blood, and endowed with such diabolical astuteness, as to enable him to gratify his fiendish lust with absolute impunity?" ⁴

At its most literal level, the connection between Jekyll and Jack the Ripper was made in September 1888 after the second murder, when a sensationalistic dramatization of Stevenson's story was closed down. Indeed, some newspaper correspondents even suspected the actor Richard Mansfield for the murders, because he performed the role of Hyde so well. ⁵ Other high profile figures were also...