Neo-Victorian Wasted Lives and Detection in Lee Jackson’s A Metropolitan Murder (2004).

Abstract

In one of his seminal works, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Oucasts (2004), Zygmunt Bauman defines the idea of “wasted lives” as a ripple of modernity creating the figure of “the outcast”. According to him, the production of “human waste” - or more precisely, wasted lives, the “superfluous” populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts - is an inevitable outcome of modernisation. On the other hand, stigma has become an outstanding marker of contemporary and past populations that have suffered discrimination for various social and political reasons. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, stigma can be defined as “a mark of disgrace or infamy; a sign of severe censure or condemnation, regarded as impressed on a person or thing; a ‘brand’”. In the light of this concept, Imogan Tyler in his work Stigma, The Machinery of Inequality (2020) reflects on how stigma changes the ways in which people think about themselves and others, and on how this concept represents an assault on human dignity through its technologies of division and dehumanisation. Neo-Victorianism has come to re-write the Victorian past, focusing on recovering the gaps in the traces and the archives and hearing the voices of those people whose lives were considered wasted and whose bodies had stigma inscribed as a scar of their lack of humanity. A Metropolitan Murder (2004) is part of Lee Jackson’s neo-Victorian trilogy whose protagonist Inspector Decimus Webb has as his aim to solve mysteries associated with the dark side of Victorian London. Also, he tries to restore order in the metropolis and clean it of the contamination and pollution that poverty and depravity convey. These characteristics find their echo in our current societies in the wasted lives of individuals who belong to the category of the “outcasts”.