Theatrical crime and the dramatised conscience

Abstract

What, when it comes down to it, is a ‘conscience’? Is it a secretion of neurons inconveniently housed in the brain, and, historically speaking, peculiarly prominent in the Protestant brain? Is it our way of measuring internally what we actually are against what, but for that rash moment, we might have been? Or is it, for dramatic purposes, a disused mine-shaft, a red barn, an iron chest? This essay explores the matter of the Victorian conscience and its uncertain relationship with the consciousness of guilt.