Discussing the Criminal and Criminal Anthropology at Victorian Broadmoor
July 10, 2015
‘It really is astounding the vogue that this puerile nonsense has obtained’: Discussing the Criminal and Criminal Anthropology at Victorian Broadmoor
The publication of Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s The Criminal (1876) established criminal anthropology as an independent science. Lombroso believed that there existed a criminal type: a man or a woman with a specific anatomical configuration.[i] Criminal anthropology had a limited following in Britain. In his The Criminal, Henry Havelock Ellis criticised Lombroso for his style, impetuosity, and lack of critical analysis, but believed that it would be ‘idle to attempt to deny [the] importance of a ‘morbid element’ in criminality’.[ii] He wrote of the size and shape of criminals’ heads, of their cranial abnormalities, prominent jaws and cheekbones, of their receding chins, and of their teeth, nose, ears and beards.[iii] Prison chaplain W. D. Morrison asked:...