Histories and Historiographies of Juvenile Delinquency in Nineteenth-Century England

This thesis explores the history of juvenile delinquency in England during the decades bracketing the nineteenth century’s turn and how modern historians have analyzed this period. The purported birth of juvenile delinquency during this tumultuous period is widely attributed by both historians and Victorians to the explosive growth in England’s urban population. Contemporary statistics of criminal prosecutions confirmed emergent literary tropes that viewed childhoods spent on city streets as inevitably corrupting. Public policy and private charity for more than a century thereafter would recommend removal from the city’s corrupting cultural influences to a highly romanticized vision of rural space as healing innocence. This thesis challenges the juxtaposition of country and city on which such explanations of juvenile delinquency rest. Utilizing the neglected testimony of magistrates, constables, rural residents, and juvenile criminals themselves, it will demonstrate that rural England also suffered from increasing juvenile crime in this period. It will illuminate the complex social, economic, and political dynamics responsible for the oft-cited statistical gap between rural and urban arrest rates, showing that the latter were in neither case transparent measures of criminal activity. Crime was on the rise in English rural counties as transformed by industrial capitalism as were England’s booming cities, suggesting that historians who continue to emphasize the dichotomy between the city and the country have not only recycled a Victorian narrative but also limited their own understandings of the time.

Ink Under the Fingernails: Making Print in Nineteenth-Century Mexico City

This dissertation examines Mexico City’s material politics of print—the central actors engaged in making print, their activities and relationships, and the legal, business, and social dimensions of production—across the nineteenth century. Inside urban printshops, a socially diverse group of men ranging from manual laborers to educated editors collaborated to make the printed items that fueled political debates and partisan struggles in the new republic. By investigating how print was produced, regulated, and consumed, this dissertation argues that printers shaped some of the most pressing conflicts that marked Mexico’s first formative century: over freedom of expression, the role of religion in government, and the emergence of liberalism. Printers shaped debates not only because they issued texts that fueled elite politics but precisely because they operated at the nexus where new liberal guarantees like freedom of the press and intellectual property intersected with politics and patronage, the regulatory efforts of the emerging state, and the harsh realities of a post-colonial economy.

Historians of Mexico have typically approached print as a vehicle for texts written by elites, which they argue contributed to the development of a national public sphere or print culture in spite of low literacy levels. By shifting the focus to print’s production, my work instead reveals that a range of urban residents—from prominent printshop owners to government ministers to street vendors—produced, engaged, and deployed printed items in contests unfolding in the urban environment. As print increasingly functioned as a political weapon in the decades after independence, print production itself became an arena in struggles over the emerging contours of politics and state formation, even as printing technologies remained relatively unchanged over time.

This work examines previously unexplored archival documents, including official correspondence, legal cases, business transactions, and printshop labor records, to shed new light on Mexico City printers’ interactions with the emerging national government, and reveal the degree to which heated ideological debates emerged intertwined with the most basic concerns over the tangible practices of print. By delving into the rich social and cultural world of printing—described by intellectuals and workers alike in memoirs, fiction, caricatures and periodicals— it also considers how printers’ particular status straddling elite and working worlds led them to challenge boundaries drawn by elites that separated manual and intellectual labors. Finally, this study engages the full range of printed documents made in Mexico City printshops not just as texts but also as objects with particular visual and material qualities whose uses and meanings were shaped not only by emergent republicanism but also by powerful colonial legacies that generated ambivalent attitudes towards print’s transformative power.

The Diary of Mary McKeon, an Irish American Domestic Servant in Nineteenth Century America

What did young, single, unaccompanied Irish women experience when immigrating to the United States in the late nineteenth century? In this final project, I will explore primary and secondary sources that address their experiences, focusing on a diary written in 1883 by a young Irish domestic servant working in New Haven, Connecticut. Mary McKeon, a sixteen-year-old girl from County Leitrim, Ireland, recorded her experiences as a domestic servant for two different families, as well as her own personal thoughts. Mary wrote down her personal experiences, providing a glimpse of what her life was like both inside and outside of her employer’s home. Though much of my research will show that many young women like Mary would be subjected to prejudice and discrimination due to their lack of understanding middle-class American values, which would give rise to the “Bridget” stereotype of a brutish, ill-mannered and incompetent domestic servant, not all Irish women experienced that discrimination and prejudice. Mary is one example of a domestic servant that was treated kindly by her employers and her story documents a more positive and supportive environment for this newly arrived young, single immigrant. Her diary also reveals her to be a young woman who worked to improve her language skills and her situation. And, through her diary, we get a glimpse of her strategies for ensuring an active social life, including access to courtship and marriage. By analyzing Mary’s diary and sharing my results in this final project, I hope to provide a more comprehensive view into the lives of these young women.

The Enlightening Supernatural: Ghost Stories in the Late Eighteenth-Century Germany

This dissertation explores the place of ghosts in late eighteenth-century German texts, where they appear with surprising frequency despite widespread disbelief in their ontological reality. These ghosts could simply be lingering remnants of superstition in an age where they no longer belong, but my project argues that they play a central role in the Enlightenment and its ideal of progress. The key texts analyzed in this context include three versions of the story of the Weiße Frau, as well as works by Immanuel Kant, Karl Philipp Moritz, Friedrich Schiller, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In various ways, these texts demonstrate how the presentation of a ghost creates new possibilities in philosophy and aesthetics, as well as opportunities for critique. For some, the ghostly encounter produces an “Enlightening” suspense, disrupting the normal conditions of one’s understanding and creating a demand for resolution that propels one towards the future. Some recognized a dangerous manipulative potential in such suspense, and they used ghost stories to critique Enlightenment thought or imagine alternative aesthetic models. In all of these works, the ghost does not function simply as a relic of the past that needs to be left behind; it features prominently as a means of considering the present and imagining the future.

The relationship between the Enlightenment and superstitious beliefs has either been oversimplified as a basic opposition, or complicated by the recognition that the commitment to reason works as a new form of superstition. Prior scholarship has recognized the German ghost story as a primarily nineteenth-century phenomenon. This dissertation uncovers the roots of the German ghost story in unlikely texts from the eighteenth century and suggests that the relationship between ghostly apparitions and the Enlightenment was more complementary than oppositional. Ghosts do not only represent the persistence of the past, they also disrupt the normal conditions of the present in a way that enables progress towards new possibilities in aesthetics and thought.

Minor Moves: Growth, Fugitivity, and Children's Physical Movement

From tendencies to reduce the Underground Railroad to the imperative "follow the north star" to the iconic images of Ruby Bridges' 1960 "step forward" on the stairs of William Frantz Elementary School, America prefers to picture freedom as an upwardly mobile development. This preoccupation with the subtractive and linear force of development makes it hard to hear the palpable steps of so many truant children marching in the Movement and renders illegible the nonlinear movements of minors in the Underground. Yet a black fugitive hugging a tree, a white boy walking alone in a field, or even pieces of a discarded raft floating downstream like remnants of child's play are constitutive gestures of the Underground's networks of care and escape. Responding to 19th-century Americanists and cultural studies scholars' important illumination of the child as central to national narratives of development and freedom, "Minor Moves" reads major literary narratives not for the child and development but for the fugitive trace of minor and growth.

In four chapters, I trace the physical gestures of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Pearl, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy, Harriet Wilson's Frado, and Mark Twain's Huck against the historical backdrop of the Fugitive Slave Act and the passing of the first compulsory education bills that made truancy illegal. I ask how, within a discourse of independence that fails to imagine any serious movements in the minor, we might understand the depictions of moving children as interrupting a U.S. preoccupation with normative development and recognize in them the emergence of an alternative imaginary. To attend to the movement of the minor is to attend to what the discursive order of a development-centered imaginary deems inconsequential and what its grammar can render only as mistakes. Engaging the insights of performance studies, I regard what these narratives depict as childish missteps (Topsy's spins, Frado's climbing the roof) as dances that trouble the narrative's discursive order. At the same time, drawing upon the observations of black studies and literary theory, I take note of the pressure these "minor moves" put on the literal grammar of the text (Stowe's run-on sentences and Hawthorne's shaky subject-verb agreements). I regard these ungrammatical moves as poetic ruptures from which emerges an alternative and prior force of the imaginary at work in these narratives--a force I call "growth."

Reading these "minor moves" holds open the possibility of thinking about a generative association between blackness and childishness, one that neither supports racist ideas of biological inferiority nor mandates in the name of political uplift the subsequent repudiation of childishness. I argue that recognizing the fugitive force of growth indicated in the interplay between the conceptual and grammatical disjunctures of these minor moves opens a deeper understanding of agency and dependency that exceeds notions of arrested development and social death. For once we interrupt the desire to picture development (which is to say the desire to picture), dependency is no longer a state (of social death or arrested development) of what does not belong, but rather it is what Édouard Glissant might have called a "departure" (from "be[ing] a single being"). Topsy's hard-to-see pick-pocketing and Pearl's running amok with brown men in the market are not moves out of dependency but indeed social turns (a dance) by way of dependency. Dependent, moving and ungrammatical, the growth evidenced in these childish ruptures enables different stories about slavery, freedom, and childishness--ones that do not necessitate a repudiation of childishness in the name of freedom, but recognize in such minor moves a fugitive way out.

Akrasia and the Aesthetic: Human Agency and the Site of Literature, 1760-1820

This study focuses on a series of foundational stylistic and formal innovations in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, and argues that they can be cumulatively attributed to the distinct challenges authors faced in representing human action and the will. The study focuses in particular on cases of “acting against better judgment” or “failing to do what one knows one ought to do” – concepts originally theorized as “akrasia” and “weakness of the will” in ancient Greek and Scholastic thought. During the Enlightenment, philosophy increasingly conceives of human minds and bodies like systems and machines, and consequently fails to address such cases except as intractable or incoherent. Yet eighteenth-century and Romantic narratives and poetry consistently engage the paradoxes and ambiguities of action and volition in representations of akrasia. As a result, literature develops representational strategies that distinguish the epistemic capacities of literature as privileged over those of philosophy.

The study begins by centering on narratives of distempered selves from the 1760s. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey narrate cases of knowingly and weakly acting against better judgment, and in so doing, reveal the limitations of the “philosophy of the passions” that famously informed sentimental literature at the time. These texts find that the interpretive difficulties of action demand a non-systematic and hermeneutic approach to interpreting a self through the genre of narrative. Rousseau’s narrative in particular informs William Godwin’s realist novels of distempered subjects. Departing from his mechanistic philosophy of mind and action, Godwin develops the technique of free indirect discourse in his third novel Fleetwood (1805) as a means of evoking the ironies and self-deceptions in how we talk about willing.

Romantic poetry employs the literary trope of weakness of will primarily through the problem of regretted inaction – a problem which I argue motivates the major poetic innovations of William Wordsworth and John Keats. While Samuel Taylor Coleridge sought to characterize his weakness of will in philosophical writing, Wordsworth turns to poetry with The Prelude (1805), revealing poetry itself to be a self-deceiving and disappointing form of procrastination. More explicitly than Wordsworth, John Keats identifies indolence as the prime symbol and basis of what he calls “negative capability.” In his letters and poems such as “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817) and “Ode on Indolence” (1819), Keats reveals how the irreducibly contradictory qualities of human agency speak to the particular privilege of “disinterested aesthetics” – a genre fitted for the modern era for its ability to disclose contradictions without seeking to resolve or explain them in terms of component parts.

Police is Dead: On the Birth of Economism

Police is Dead is an historiographic analysis whose objective is to change the terms by which contemporary humanist scholarship assesses the phenomenon currently termed neoliberalism. It proceeds by building an archeology of legal thought in the United States that spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My approach assumes that the decline of certain paradigms of political consciousness set historical conditions that enable the emergence of what is to follow. The particular historical form of political consciousness I seek to reintroduce to the present is what I call “police:” a counter-liberal way of understanding social relations that I claim has particular visibility within a legal archive, but that has been largely ignored by humanist theory on account of two tendencies: first, an over-valuation of liberalism as Western history’s master signifier; and second, inconsistent and selective attention to law as a cultural artifact. The first part of my dissertation reconstructs an anatomy of police through close studies of court opinions, legal treatises, and legal scholarship. I focus in particular on juridical descriptions of intimate relationality—which police configured as a public phenomenon—and slave society apologetics, which projected the notion of community as an affective and embodied structure. The second part of this dissertation demonstrates that the dissolution of police was critical to emergence of a paradigm I call economism: an originally progressive economic framework for understanding social relations that I argue developed at the nexus of law and economics at the turn of the twentieth century. Economism is a way of understanding sociality that collapses ontological distinctions between formally distinct political subjects—i.e., the state, the individual, the collective—by reducing them to the perspective of economic force. Insofar as it was taken up and reoriented by neoliberal theory, this paradigm has become a hegemonic form of political consciousness. This project concludes by encouraging a disarticulation of economism—insofar as it is a form of knowledge—from neoliberalism as its contemporary doctrinal manifestation. I suggest that this is one way progressive scholarship can think about moving forward in the development of economic knowledge, rather than desiring to move backwards to a time before the rise of neoliberalism. Disciplinarily, I aim to show that understanding the legal historiography informing our present moment is crucial to this task.

Common Bound: The Small Groups of Methodism

The system of small groups John Wesley established to promote a proper life of discipleship in early Methodist converts was, in many respects, the strength of the Methodist movement. Those who responded to Wesley’s initial invitation to “flee the wrath to come” were organized into large gatherings called “societies,” which were then subdivided into smaller bands, class meetings, select societies, and penitent bands. The smaller groups gave Wesley the opportunity, through a system of appointed leaders, to keep track of the spiritual progress of every member in his movement, which grew to tens of thousands by the time of his death in 1791. As Methodism shifted from renewal movement to institutional church in the nineteenth century, however, growth slowed, and participation in such groups declined rapidly. By the early twentieth century, classes and bands were virtually extinct in every sector of Methodism save the African-American tradition. In recent years, scholars in various sectors of the Wesleyan tradition, particularly David Lowes Watson and Kevin Watson, have called for a recovery of these small groups for purposes of renewal in the church. There is no consensus, however, concerning what exactly contributed to the vitality of these groups during Wesley’s ministry.

Over the last century, sociological studies of group dynamics have revealed three common traits that are crucial to highly functioning groups: interdependence created by the existence of a common goal, interaction among group members that is “promotive” or cooperative in nature, and high levels of feedback associated with personal responsibility and individual accountability. All three of these were prevalent in the early Methodist groups. Interdependence existed around a shared goal, which for Wesley and the Methodists was holiness. That interdependence was cooperative in nature; individuals experienced the empowering grace of God as they each pursued the goal in the company of fellow pilgrims. Finally, the groups existed for purposes of feedback and accountability as individuals took responsibility both for themselves and others as they progressed together toward the goal of holy living. Wesley seemed to instinctively understand the essential nature of each of these characteristics in maintaining the vitality of the movement when he spoke of the importance of preserving the “doctrine, spirit and discipline” of early Methodism. Analysis of some of the present-day attempts to restore Wesley’s groups reveals frequent neglect to one or more of these three components. Perhaps most critical to recovering the vitality of the early Methodist groups will be reclaiming the goal of sanctification and coming to a consensus on what its pursuit means in the present day.