Suspicious Identities in the Victorian Age: from Children’s Weeklies to Criminal Cases in Kate Summerscale’s The Wicked Boy

Abstract

Kate Summerscale’s docufictions investigate the disruption of stable individual identity in the later Victorian era. By investigating notorious trials, she underlines issues of cultural change in the context of the period’s social practices and the emerging complexity of the individual in the context of law, medicine and popular culture. The Wicked Boy (2016) focusses in particular on a renowned case of moral deviance with a child culprit, which leads to a consideration of the Victorian literary market for working class boys and the pernicious influence of the penny dreadfuls with their glorification of criminal protagonists. The close relationship between textual consumption and identity at the basis of Robert Coombe’s trial foregrounds the suspicion of literature as being responsible for moral degeneration. Reflections also include the illustrated newspapers and the reports from the Old Bailey, which offer examples of visual storytelling and mediatic attention towards crime and deviant behavior.