"VICTORIAN PULP!" offers information on cheap Victorian fiction and its connection to other literary and visual works of the century.  So far it has been particularly for my students at Ryerson University that I have put together much of this information.  Ideally, however, this site will prove useful to other scholars and to those who have a general interest in pulp fiction or in the more specific topics addressed by the research connected to this project.  This web-site is primarily a scholarly document, but hopefully its design and format catch some of the entertaining luridness that characterizes pulp fiction itself.  It is, after all, the sensationalism of Victorian pulp that fostered its profound impact on current popular culture.  My research for this web-site is made possible through the generous funding of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.  The other major researchers for this project are Jason Haslam and Holly Crumpton.

    The web-site's sampling of stories from such publications as the Newgate Calendar and the "Penny Dreadfuls" is intended to reflect the broad range of topics addressed by Victorian pulp literature.  That said, my own research - and thus this web-site - emphasises the function of pulp fiction in normalizing particular notions regarding criminality in relation to sexuality, gender, and class.  I have included a number of examples of pulp fiction that raise questions regarding the way in which these categories were conceived and articulated prior to the invention of criminology and sexology later in the nineteenth century, and prior to the impact of these institutions on crime-, sex-, gender- and class-based identities.

     "VICTORIAN PULP!" is part of a larger research project involving a historicised analysis of the relation of Victorian pulp fiction to the construction of criminality and sexuality as identity categories.  In recent years, there have been a number of changes to western European laws that appear to be encouraging greater tolerance and support for some less common models for human relations such as same-sex monogamy, cross-sex polygamy, and internet bonding.  These changes have also intensified concerns about the impact of such relations on the foundations of western legal systems themselves.  Rigid support for established laws is based on the assumption that, when it comes to sexual rights, our current legal systems already have the best possible foundation.  Of course, nobody can knowledgeably make this claim without first analysing the language with which these systems were constructed.  A primary goal of this web-site is to contribute to this field of analysis.

     If we are to understand, develop, and modify our current laws regarding rights based on models of human bonding, it is not only useful but necessary for us to recognize that sexual diversity existed prior to the formation and entrenchment of our current criminological views.  In my current program of research, I am exploring the construction of sex- and gender-based practices and identities through the language of the courts and especially the journalists and other writers who communicated the crimes to society at large.  My main objective is to analyse texts that precede the mid-Victorian creation of the sciences of sexology and criminology, and that have contributed to who we are while also questioning many current assumptions about gender, sexuality, and criminal identity.  In fact, it is often descriptions of nonsexual crimes that most effectively highlight the illogical sexualization of social transgressions; therefore, I am especially interested in cases where either sexual terminology or the image of sexuality appears unexpectedly in mainstream depictions of criminality.  It is here that many of our current assumptions about the immorality and criminality of various sexualities were initiated and, therefore, it is also where the construction of legalized essentialist values is most apparent.

     My objective is not simply to offer a historical report of the ways in which the institutions of law and science constructed certain affections as illegitimate.  Rather, my main contribution to this area of research will be an analysis of the ways in which, during the first half of the nineteenth century, a growing working class was to some degree undermining such infringements on sexual freedom by taking official records and revising them for what were the era’s equivalent of today’s sensationalist tabloids.  That is, while the courts were developing a language that suggested that certain sexual interests were inherently evil and inadmissible and others–such as bigamy and heterosexual rape–warranted greater tolerance, a growing audience of readers was using its limited income to voice its interest in those sexualities that institutions were trying to silence.  I believe that this suggestion of tolerance on the part of the working class offers important insights into the benefits and difficulties that can arise as our contemporary society's continue to challenge and revise the sex- and gender-based assumptions in their own legal systems.  By gaining knowledge about past notions of what signified criminality, as well as attitudes toward different criminalities, we can enhance our understanding of the limitations and hazards of not simply our own current legal system, but also our popular notions of criminality's relation to class, sexuality, and gender.