"How to Deal with Criminals—In Fiction"

The Illustrated Police News published an article entitled “How to Deal with Criminals—In Fiction” on April 2, 1881. Although the title of the work of fiction is not included anywhere in the article (unless I overlooked it), I recognized it immediately as Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables by the first sentence: “Jean Valjean, a man who has been sentenced to five years’ penal servitude for stealing a loaf, is resentenced several times for trying to make his escape from the hulks.” The article continues to recount the story of Valjean, from his long and painful journey on foot to his finding shelter at the bishop’s house to his attempt to steal the bishop’s silver, after which the bishop pardons him for his sins and permits him to take the silver to sell for money. The article ends by noting that this event is what sets Valjean on the path to becoming an “honest man.”

The article is interspersed with quotations from the text itself; many of which, including the following, serve to characterize Valjean as a weary, pitiable man: “Year by year his soul became more and more withered, slowly but fatally. A dry soul must have a dry eye, and on leaving the hulks nineteen years had elapsed since he had shed a tear.” This is, of course, the author’s perspective on Valjean, which seems to encourage pity and compassion. However, the language of the article itself, while for the most part rather neutral in tone, is often sanctimonious in its commentary on Valjean’s appearance and actions. Valjean is described as “savage-looking” and a “cowering wretch” who “wanders out into the world to find only too soon that liberation is not deliverance, that though he has left the gaol (jail) behind, he has not left condemnation”—an observation which is entirely independent of the author’s own narration (at least as far as we know). This (likely) unauthorized imposition of an outsider’s perspective on Hugo’s narrative raises the issue of ownership of art and the way in which art instantaneously and irrevocably belongs to the world once it is disseminated.

While this article is certainly not the most compelling of articles in and of itself, I was immediately curious as to why the Illustrated Police News deemed it necessary to publish an article that merely summarizes a small part of the plot of a French novel that was first published two decades earlier. (I did a quick search to see if there was a republication of the text in 1881, but there was no evidence of this.) A number of questions come to mind. Would the majority of readers have been familiar with the name Jean Valjean at the time the article was published, or would many have assumed that he was a real person? In either case, how would they have responded to or interpreted the article? Perhaps the editors included it as a sort of cautionary tale about the immorality of criminals. Or maybe it was simply for entertainment purposes. As a twenty first-century reader, I cannot figure out what its purpose is or why it appears in the Illustrated Police News. Anyhow, it is such inexplicable articles as this one that keep me endlessly fascinated by the Victorian media.