Gothic Criminology: a rambling intro (as befits the subject) and some thoughts on the dark side of the dark side

This picture is of an interior at Strawberry Hill House.  Here is some introductory material from their website.

Created by Horace Walpole in the 18th century, Strawberry Hill is internationally famous as Britain’s finest example of Georgian Gothic revival architecture. It also inspired the first gothic novel The Castle of Otranto.

The Castle of Otranto suggests a gloomier place than the current exterior of the House shows.  The picture below left taken was during the restoration and that on the right more recently.  The House is in the grounds of my University and we used to use the rooms for meetings and events. Its shabbiness adding to the effect.  Our remaining access is to the Senior Common Room and Waldegrave Drawing Room.

I may work at St Mary’s University College but have yet to read the Castle of Otranto.  Most of my knowledge of the gothic comes from Jane Austen’s parody Northanger Abbey, popular culture and Goth sub-culture.

Strawberry Hill House can be seen in the bottom left hand corner of this picture from the college website.

I identify as criminologist (with all the baggage that brings) but teach squarely within a sociology programme.  In my teaching I point out that criminology may have a history but not a neat and tidy time line or chronology.  In popular, if not academic, criminology its not so much the ‘return of the repressed’ but a general failure to kill off any theory, to repress or suppress it.  No sooner than you think you’ve screwed down the coffin lid it rises zombie/vampire like (forgive me if I’m mixing my genres - must talk to my Screen Media and English colleagues).

Within criminology there is a difficulty of where to start on ‘our’ history.  With the pre-modern, theocratic, demonological, ‘common-sensical’ criminology (all refusing to be killed off) of ‘evil’ or ‘possession’ and extremes of violence by offenders and the Authorities (local, religious, monarchical or State)?  Or the Enlightenment, the Classical, the rationality of which informs the Law (it and neo-classical versions too have their ongoing life)? Or yet with the ‘father’ of criminology Cesare Lombroso (whose gruesome collection of criminal skins - for their tattoos has been called gothic)?

I know that there are a number of books and articles about Gothic Criminology and these are listed below.  But the main focus of those items is that the subject matter of criminology is Gothic.  Gonzalez even speaks of crypto-criminology (Crypto-criminology refers to the dark, devious and dangerous side of human nature.)

My contention is that the subject itself is Gothic.  Some of its practitioners might see themselves as Classicists.  It is this commonly used reference to Classicism architectural metaphor for crime control - or a criminology that supports/houses it - and the surroundings of Strawberry Hill that lead me in lectures to call most criminology Gothic.  Not only the early, ‘medieval’ or barbaric but the very convoluted structure of the discipline with its left and right Wings and very ‘sub’ basement.

This blog signals my intention to engage more fully with this for presentation as a paper at a Conference this year.

Blackwell’s Online Reference on ‘Crime and the Gothic’

Picart Caroline Joan and Greek Cecil THE COMPULSION OF REAL/REEL SERIAL KILLERS AND VAMPIRES: TOWARD A GOTHIC CRIMINOLOGY 2003 School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 10 (1): 39-68

Picart Caroline Joan (Kay) and Greek Cecil (eds) (2004) Monsters In and Among Us: towards a Gothic Criminology Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Rafter Nicole, Ystehede Per (2010), Here be dragons: Lombroso, the gothic, and social control, in Mathieu Deflem (ed.) Popular Culture, Crime and Social Control (Sociology of Crime Law and Deviance, Volume 14), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.263-284

‘Floral chancers’ and ‘tea leaves’: a green criminological speculation

I first heard about the theft of a species of water lily from Kew Gardens through twitter when @JackieLeonard01 posted the item and asked what sort of person would do such a thing.  I jestingly responded a ‘floral chancer’ and later ‘a tea leaf’ before seeing the criminological, indeed the green criminological, potential of such a story.  Hence this brief blog.

This Guardian article sets out the bare facts: that on 9 January 2014 sometime during the day, one of Kew’s 50 samples of Nymphaea thermarum, the smallest water lily in the world, had been stolen.  Some of the coverage - and it received global coverage - might stem from the plant’s cuteness, rarity and therefore value.  Some incredulity might be involved in its newsworthiness.  Who or why would anyone steal such a small, precious thing?  Put like that it starts to become more obvious even to the non-criminologist why.  Small, so easily done.  Precious, nuff said? And where was the ever present (in UK society) CCTV?  Also as a criminologist I’m rarely surprised by any crime.

Also as an occasional gardener and listener to BBC’s Gardeners’ Question Time and visitor to stately homes and gardens I was aware of the issue of people acquiring/taking/stealing cuttings from gardens and nurseries.  The Guardian Gardening Blog posed this question in 2010 ‘Green collar crime - do you take plant cuttings without permission?’

The comments on the blog contain many justifications and admissions of crime (including possible border or transnational crime!) and occasional twinges of guilt.  Was the floral chancer just one such person?  Is that water lily now in someone’s green house?  Or the collection of some baddie Greenfinger?  Do they aim to propagate from it?  Possibly even to repopulate the hot spring in Rwanda from where it originates but is now extinct?

Any green crime to be studied by green criminology is not the theft in Kew but the un-explained, unexplored ‘over-exploitation’ that lead to its demise.  Well some green criminologists might think that but for me green criminology is an attitude, a perspective.  The root of the crime and the extent of the victimisation lies in that over-exploitation.  Or, perhaps, they were just a plant rights activist freeing the lily?