ABSTRACT
The early to mid-nineteenth century was a turbulent period for the cities of an expanding America. The 1830s were a time of "epic homicidal riots", which prompted the creation of the first urban police force. The explosion of real-life crime was accompanied by a new enthusiasm for gothic storytelling, focusing largely on the wily criminal and the internal dialogues of the guilty. Subtler forms of linkage exist between nineteenth-century crime-focused fiction and the intellectual development of nineteenth-century American criminal law. This chapter explores the similarities and cross-pollination between the American gothic and American criminal law. The development of an objective standard for criminal wrongdoing in nineteenth-century American law was mirrored in the popular American literature at the time, including Gothic fiction. Writers of American gothic fiction such as Poe, Hawthorne, and Charles Brockden Brown explored the knotty problem of criminal intent from a psychological point of view, which neatly paralleled increasingly complex thinking about the architecture of mens rea.
