Mary S. Hartman's trenchant 1976 sociological study of women who were tried for murder in the Victorian era fostered something of an academic cottage industry in female criminal Victoriana over the following 25 years. Typically, analysis of women criminals and of behavior that was criminalized for women but not for men points up the social handicaps that women suffered if they were in the dock, and it is a useful back-story corrective to the fiction of unitary affirmation of mainstream Victorian manners and mores. Michel Foucault develops a critique along similar lines, using examples from Continental Europe, in Discipline and Punish.
The importance of narrative fiction to the identity of Victorian culture is so obvious as to be a commonplace. Yet it is instructive to realize that the appearance of such classic Victorian fiction as Vanity Fair (1848) and David Copperfield (1849) was backgrounded by such world-roiling events as the Revolution of 1848 and promulgation of the Communist Manifesto. Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles was published in 1891, when Jack the Ripper furor was page-one news throughout London. Then there was the ongoing Woman Question, which vexed England in one way or another throughout the Victorian period. Hartman's thesis about the Victorian murderesses she describes is that they were motivated chiefly by desperation at the dislocation of the domestic life that was the only respectable option for women of any class. In her study of prostitution in Victorian London, meanwhile, Walkowitz argues that women's alienation from productive life in the city and the fact that opportunities for respectable domestication were limited help explain how prostitution criminalized so many women in the marginal classes. Toward the end of the 19th century there emerged noncriminally threatening New Women as well: "platform women [suffragettes], girls in business, and Glorified Spinsters appeared as telling and disturbing signs o...