She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Unsound Empire: Civilization and Madness in Late-Victorian Law, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Unsound Empire offers three brief portraits of people involved in a grisly 1892 murder case: a Melbourne police detective, Harry Cawsey; a young woman whose corpse had recently been discovered under the hearthstones of a rented suburban house, Emily Mather; and her suspected killer, Frederick Bailey Deeming. Australian police were working to trace Deeming’s movements as he traveled under a series of assumed names from Rainhill, Lancashire to Sydney and onward to Melbourne. The page describes witnesses’ impressions of Deeming, whose love of gaudy jewelry and habit of boasting about his supposed military exploits in imperial campaigns in Egypt or Bengal made him both memorable and ridiculous. It also describes how police in Australia and England collaborated to unmask Deeming, ultimately revealing his identity and that of his unfortunate victim.Learn more about Unsound Empire at the Yale University Press website.
The page 99 test captures Unsound Empire’s emphasis on the quirks and travails of individuals involved in late-Victorian homicide cases where the accused’s responsibility or sanity was in question. The sketches of the policeman, the victim, and the killer represent three of the groups involved in murder cases in the nineteenth century; a more complete cast of characters would include a psychiatrist (alienist or ‘mad doctor’), a lawyer or judge, and a government official. Page 99 also hints at another theme of the book: the networks that drew the Victorian empire together. The page tells us that Deeming sailed from England to Australia, as many Britons did during this period. Deeming’s lies about his military service evoke the geography of the empire and its violence, from North Africa to the Indian subcontinent. The collaboration between the Melbourne police, New Scotland Yard in London, and the Lancashire police also shows how law enforcement agencies could cooperate across vast distances. English authorities eventually sent photographs of Emily Mather, Deeming’s second wife, to Australia, where they can today be found in Deeming’s capital case file in the archives of the State Government of Victoria.
However, a major facet of Unsound Empire is missing from page 99. In the late-nineteenth century, British medicine and science were developing quickly, complicating the problem of assessing defendants’ responsibility in criminal cases. The line between evil and illness blurred. The Victorian belief in a global hierarchy of civilizations – with white Britons at the top – also led many to conflate concepts of mental illness and ‘primitivism.’ Deeming’s case attracted huge publicity in Australia and beyond in part because of the brutality of his crimes (he is thought to have murdered two of his wives and four of his children, with plans to kill again), but also because his lawyers argued that he was insane. His defence at trial rested on the claim that Deeming suffered from ‘moral insanity,’ a precursor of psychopathy in which those afflicted experienced profound emotional impairments but no delusions or hallucinations. Then as now, doctors, lawyers and members of the public debated whether this type of insanity, if it even existed, should excuse the accused from criminal punishment. Did Deeming belong on the gallows or in a hospital? Unsound Empire traces the question of how to assess criminal responsibility, and its implications for Victorian accounts of human nature and just governance, around the British empire.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
