Book Review

This is a meandering and intriguing book. The author declares at the outset that it is as much about posing questions as formulating answers, and the first chapter closes by warning that the study's conclusions will be "contingent, speculative, and lacking closure." A cynical reader might conclude that this is the postmodernist way of saying that one has given up making any sense out of one's research and is grateful to find a publisher willing to pretend otherwise. But Crimes of Outrage, in spite or because of its contingencies and speculations, is worthwhile and provocative.	1
The book's boundaries are clear enough. D'Cruze is concerned with violence and sex involving Victorian working women of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Its central chapters treat violence in the home, violence in the work place, violence and courtship, women's neighborhood surveillance networks, how women used and were used by the courts, and the nature of newspaper coverage of court cases. The great majority of evidence comes from legal records from Lancashire, Cheshire, and Suffolk Counties. The analysis is, with a few exceptions, qualitative rather than quantitative.	2
D'Cruze generally does a good job of putting this material in context. The nature and weakness of each type of legal record is assessed at the outset. The reader also gets a good feel of the artifacts large and small that the subjects of this book lived with, from the paths they wore across vacant lots to the contents of their kitchens. D'Cruze unfortunately does not supply much in the way of more conventional background material, such as the demography of the three counties.	3
The author makes extensive and effective use of other people's work. The scholarship of Anna Clark and A. James Hammerton, also historians of gender and violence in England, is repeatedly utilized. Much of the analysis is highly theoretical: Bakhtin on "authorship," Foucault and his legion of interpreters on violence and disciplinary power, and a number of social historians on working-class festivals as "carnival." Some of this theorizing struck me as strained—or at least beside the point. But most generalizations are backed up and illustrated by concrete examples.	4
The result is a series of interesting insights. In discussing spousal violence, for example, D'Cruze argues that violent husbands often literally put their wives out of the house because doing so illustrated "their total dominance of domestic space." Blows to a woman's upper body were apt to be spontaneous, those to her lower body more calculated and forceful. The details of violent attacks or exchanges were never incidental, and in mapping them D'Cruze reveals much that would otherwise remain hidden.	5
Indeed, Crimes of Outrage might be termed a geographic treatment of gender and violence. D'Cruze is very sensitive to space: private or public, marginal or hidden, and the liminal places in between, such as the dark doorways that separated the secluded recesses of the home from the very visible street. Some spaces were flexible. The highly surveyed factory floor could become, after work, operatives' leisure space. This sensitivity to material culture and spatial relations informs the book in less obvious ways, from the use of dirt and blood to signify pollution to how newspaper editors juxtaposed stories on the page to shape readers' reactions.	6
These ideas are usually conveyed in lucid prose, though it at times breaks down at critical junctures. I am not sure, for example, what this means: "the underlying concern of this book is to look at the ways that sexual and physical violence impinged on mid- and late-nineteenth-century working women's social identities as these were configured in very differently produced, though I would argue not entirely unrelated, narratives produced by the operation of courts (particularly lower courts) and police records."	7
Crimes of Outrage will disappoint some readers. Those hostile to or completely unfamiliar with postmodern theory will be quickly put off. Those searching for a coherent and sustained argument will not find one. But those willing to read the book on the author's terms will be repaid for their trouble.	8
David Peterson del Mar Portland, Oregon

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.