Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries / White-Collar Crime in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Britain.

Common law; Crime; Nineteenth century; Eighteenth century; Imagination; Collective memory; Twentieth century

For Sheley, the pardon is central to Victorian fictions of childhood punishment that employ fairy tale to distance themselves from depicting actual criminality, as seen in George MacDonald's I The Lost Princess i (1875), which "simultaneously aestheticizes... punishment and challenges the earthly procedures for inflicting it" (111). The contrasting methodologies of Sheley and Benson are evident in their treatment of law and historical time. Next Sheley argues that mid-Victorian discourse around child criminality drew on the traumatic murder of a five-year-old girl by the ten-year-old William York in 1748. [Extracted from the article]