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Unconscious Crime

Mental Absence and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian London

Joel Peter Eigen

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A sleepwalking, homicidal nursemaid; a "morally vacant" juvenile poisoner; a man driven to arson by a "lesion of the will"; an articulate and poised man on trial for assault who, while conducting his own defense, undergoes a profound personality change and becomes a wild and delusional "alter." These people are not characters from a mystery novelist's vivid imagination, but rather defendants who were tried at the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, in the mid-nineteenth century. In Unconscious Crime, Joel Peter Eigen explores these and other cases in which defendants did not conform...

A sleepwalking, homicidal nursemaid; a "morally vacant" juvenile poisoner; a man driven to arson by a "lesion of the will"; an articulate and poised man on trial for assault who, while conducting his own defense, undergoes a profound personality change and becomes a wild and delusional "alter." These people are not characters from a mystery novelist's vivid imagination, but rather defendants who were tried at the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, in the mid-nineteenth century. In Unconscious Crime, Joel Peter Eigen explores these and other cases in which defendants did not conform to any of the Victorian legal system's existing definitions of insanity yet displayed convincing evidence of mental aberration. Instead, they were—or claimed to be—"missing," "absent," or "unconscious": lucid, though unaware of their actions.

Based on extensive research in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers (verbatim courtroom narratives taken down in shorthand during the trial and sold on the street the following day), Eigen's book reveals a growing estrangement between law and medicine over the legal concept of the Person as a rational and purposeful actor with a clear understanding of consequences. The McNaughtan Rules of l843 had formalized the Victorian insanity plea, guiding the courts in cases of alleged delusion and derangement. But as Eigen makes clear in the cases he discovered, even though defense attorneys attempted to broaden the definition of insanity to include mental absence, the courts and physicians who testified as experts were wary of these novel challenges to the idea of human agency and responsibility. Combining the colorful intrigue of courtroom drama and the keen insights of social history, Unconscious Crime depicts Victorian England's legal and medical cultures confronting a new understanding of human behavior, and provocatively suggests these trials represent the earliest incarnation of double consciousness and multiple personality disorder.

Reviews

Reviews

Riveting... A fascinating, if grim, analysis of an overlooked aspect of Victorian medico-legal history.

Eigen has interwoven... complex psychological, legal, and social issues in a fabric of compelling historical events, addressing timeless questions of the self, mind, memory, and what it means to be conscious or, simply, to be.

The stand alone chapters make it ideal for course reading. Eigen has accomplished the rare mix of combining academic rigour with a colourfully written, thumping good read.

Eigen should definitely be praised for offering an overly ambitious but abridged medico-legal history that is both narratively engaging for a general readership and adhering rigidly to scholarly methods or academic canons of intellectual history.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
248
ISBN
9780801874284
Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
1. Double Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century
2. "Do You Remember Cardiff?"
3. "I Mean She Was Quite Absent"
4. The Princess and the Cherry Juice
5. An Unconscious Poisoning
6

Preface
Introduction
1. Double Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century
2. "Do You Remember Cardiff?"
3. "I Mean She Was Quite Absent"
4. The Princess and the Cherry Juice
5. An Unconscious Poisoning
6. Crimes of an Automaton
Conclusion
Appendix
Notes
Index

Author Bio
Featured Contributor

Joel Peter Eigen, Ph.D.

Joel Peter Eigen (LANCASTER, PA) is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Franklin and Marshall College and Principal Fellow (Honorary) at the University of Melbourne. Mad-Doctors in the Dock is the final volume in his trilogy examining the insanity defense in the British courtroom. The first two volumes are Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court and Unconscious...