Abstract
Keith Ducklin strides onto the stage, darkly clad in Victorian garb. He looks every inch the gentleman about town. As he tells us, he is about to give his friend Rob Temple a few lessons in an exciting new style of self-defence. But Rob is already feeling the heat inside his tweed jacket and when Keith lunges at him with his walking-stick, he catches him unawares in a manoeuvre called ‘Guard by Distance’. The audience is dazzled by a flash of scarlet; the lining of Keith’s coat shimmers flamboyantly as it catches the light. In another moment, Rob finds himself felled to the ground when his ankle is trapped in the crook of Keith’s Alpenstock.
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Notes
Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900, rev. edn (London: Longman/Pearson, 2005), p. 42.
See Jan Bondeson, The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale (Cambridge: University of Pennsylvania Press/Da Capo Press, 2002), p. 44 and Jennifer Westwood, The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends from Spring-Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 343.
Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 10.
Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and its People (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 16.
Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History (London: Longman/Pearson, 1996), p. 62.
Colin Greenwood, Firearms Control: A Study of Armed Crime and Firearms Control in England and Wales (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 18–25; and Joyce Lee Malcolm, Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 111.
Karen Volland Waters, The Perfect Gentleman: Masculine Control in Victorian Men’s Fiction, 1870–1901 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), pp. 39–40
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: State Formation and Civilization, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), p. 229.
Jennifer Davis, ‘The London Garotting Panic of 1862: A Moral Panic and the Creation of a Criminal Class in Mid-Victorian England’, in V.A. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker (eds), Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe Since 1500 (London: Europa, 1980), pp. 190–213.
Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (London: Macmillan, 1983).
See Sindall, ‘Garotting 1856 and 1862’ and his subsequent publication Street Violence (1990).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 164.
James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 195.
Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914 (Manchester University Press, 1999) and John Harvey, Men in Black (London: Reaktion Books, 1997).
See Mike Huggins, The Victorians and Sport (London: Hambledon, 2004), p. 31.
Antony E. Simpson, ‘Dandelions on the Field of Honor: Duelling, the Middle Classes and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England’, Criminal Justice History, 9 (1988), 99–155 (p. 108).
Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), pp. 81–99.
Douglas M. Catron, ‘“Jiu-Jitsu” in Lawrence’s “Gladiatorial”’, South Central Bulletin, 43 (1983), 92–94 (p. 94).
Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001), 1–22.
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© 2011 Emelyne Godfrey
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Godfrey, E. (2011). Introduction. In: Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294998_1
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