Criminal Respectability: The Nineteenth-Century British Bigamy Novel

Abstract

In this project, I work to establish a wider understanding of the bigamy novel as a nineteenth-century genre, moving beyond the classification of the novel as a mere subgenre of sensation fiction. I will also explore the way that bigamy novels responded to the complex and real anxieties about respectability and marriage in Britain over the course of the nineteenth century. One of the objectives of this project is to expand the lens through which scholars view the genre itself, moving beyond the common categorization of the bigamy novel as merely a sub-genre of sensation fiction and toward an understanding of the genre as a longer-ranging phenomenon that responded and engaged with anxieties about marriage and respectability at different points during the period. While Victorians viewed a complex and conflicted concept like respectability as a central and even crucial part of their public lives, they also took much about respectability for granted. Along with asking important questions about what respectability really was during the nineteenth century, the bigamy novels that I have selected for this project form a significant body of work within the history of the concept of respectability itself. To critique the concept, all of these texts also must confront it head on; this results in a series of frank discussions about how to be respectable in British society. The bigamy novel may seem like a strange, sudden phenomenon when viewed solely in the context of sensation fiction, but when the scope of the genre is enlarged to take into account bigamy texts from throughout the century, their true importance both in the history of the novel and in the history of British respectability is revealed.