Murder Ballads: Crime and Society in Victorian Literature

Abstract

The Victorian age is a period known not only for its rich literary tradition, but also
for the high number of crimes, specifically homicides, registered in England in those years.
As well as in real life, crime was one of the main issues in poetic and fictional writings. The
aim of this paper is to analyse the ways in which the theme of murder in literature reflects
moral changes in Victorian society, and to what extent this extreme criminal act represents a
response to stifling restrictions imposed in that period. First, I will provide a broad view of
the panorama in which those crimes took place and try to establish the introduction of this
theme in literature with the social background of Victorian culture. I will then explore the
psychological aspect of criminals as described in the dramatic monologue Porphyria’s Lover
by Robert Browning, in the novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, and in the
poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde. The three literary works will be approached
individually in each of the sections of this essay, in order to demonstrate the influence of the
social background of the era upon the distorted psychology of the characters of these works