ABSTRACT
The nature of ‘discipline’ in the Victorian period, who exercised it, who was subject to it, how was it achieved and who resisted it, has been the focus for academics across a broad theoretical range from Marxist theorists to Foucauldians (with historians struggling to steady the ship with some rigorous empirical research designed, in part, to give ‘bottom’ to the flightier structures erected by theoreti cians). William Laurence Burn, whose 1964 study of British society a century earlier remains one of the most well-regarded and well-read studies of mid-Victorian society, explored concepts of liberty, authority, power, individuality, and collectivism. He considered that alongside social factors such as family, workplace relations, the educational realm, publicity, and reputation, discipline was also induced in individuals through the operation of legal mechanisms and their agents. The police, prisons, courts, and other forms of regulatory authority seemed necessary to Burn, to bound, or provide a cordon, around the unregulated freedoms of the 1850s and 1860s. The contest between the possibilities for new forms of living, entertainment, and social relationships offered by the fast growing Victorian economy and the rapidly growing imperial project, and the new disciplinary forms felt necessary to control, protect, and rule over subject populations at home and abroad, are open to many perspectives. This chapter therefore concentrates on just two issues: what new disciplinary apparatus were introduced in this period; and what was distinc tively ‘Victorian’ about them and the way they operated?
