Barbara Hughes-Moore
The Criminal in Gothic Fiction and Contemporary Law: Literary and Legal Doubles was published by Routledge in June 2026.
What is the book about?
The book encourages us to think about the ways in which law has characterised people as ‘criminal’, ‘monstrous’, or ‘deviant’. These are socially constructed terms with complex histories and difficult legacies; facets of a shared past which is often uncomfortable, even painful, to address. Law has a very particular means of marginalising people: it absorbs and perpetuates intersecting biases relating to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. Law has historically been used to justify and authorise war, slavery, genocide, and myriad other social harms; it has also been the means of reforming such policies, by engaging in the slow work of unravelling old stories and repairing intergenerational wounds. It can however be difficult to examine the extent of the damage by looking to law alone.
In the book, I make the case that Gothic fiction is our ideal guide through these frightening legal landscapes. The ‘Gothic’ as a genre can be tricky to categorise, but you know it when you see it: combining elements of horror, melodrama, and Romance, Gothic works plunge us into the depths of folkloric dread and the twisted channels of the human heart. Early Gothic tales are populated by nefarious priests and predatory patriarchs, by terrorised heroines and brooding antiheroes. The stories are also haunted by a cadre of supernatural beings like ghosts, vampires and werewolves. From The Castle of Otranto to Frankenstein, Carmilla to Dracula, authors and readers have drawn on Gothic modes, means and aesthetics to chart the murky depths of the human mind.
Law, too, is invested in looking within to the why, and not merely the how, of crime. How we assess and assign responsibility matters. A very particular formula for assessing a person’s guilt has been assembled over many centuries. Since at least the times of the Anglo-Saxons, customary law looked to settle the ‘debt’ of violence inflicted on another person, and to equate the amount of compensation to the harm suffered. The method for ‘righting’ for such wrongs has changed and evolved over time, from payment to imprisonment to execution – and back again. Over time these customs have absorbed quasi-religious, particularly Christian, mores about sin and ‘wickedness’ – with one’s character being considered ‘stained’ by sin and purified through confession and moral absolution. By the close of the nineteenth century, criminology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis were starting to bloom, and courts were taking notice, increasingly drawing on these sources as evidence in criminal trials.
It is at this time, around the close of the nineteenth century, that the encounters between Gothic law and Gothic lore become even more entangled – and that’s where my book begins. I focus on three notable examples of late-Victorian Gothic novels that continue to influence how we think about law and the Gothic to this day: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Dracula (1897). These are stories that wormed their way into the blood and marrow of modern consciousness. Dracula reinvented the literary vampire, ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ became a shorthand for duality and duplicity, and we still flatter those who age gracefully by claiming they must have a portrait in the attic a la Dorian Gray. There are interesting connections between the authors of these texts, too: Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker both qualified as lawyers but never really went into practise, while Stoker and Wilde were contemporaries in Dublin and loved the same woman (Florence Balcombe, who ended up becoming Stoker’s wife and executor of his estate and literary legacy). Gothic is entwined with legal history in ways we have only just begun to explore – sometimes rather literally. Think, for example, of how excerpts from Dorian Gray were used to convict Oscar Wilde for ‘gross indecency’ in 1895. This homophobic trial, and the bigoted legislation which drove it, is a central part of my analysis in chapter three.
Why did I write it?
Law is scary! It can terrify and threaten, it can strip you of your rights, your liberty, and your life. It can lock you up, exile you, and even execute you. When I began to teach Law, I found myself feeling increasingly frightened of law and increasingly dislocated from it. And so I turned to the Gothic, not just because is a genre which has always made me feel less alone, but because it is a genre which makes me feel. The Gothic provides a safe space in which to be scared, to explore, and to question: reality, sexuality, identity. It is a literature of body and soul; it can make your heart pound, it can make you shudder and sweat. It can raise the hairs on the back of your neck. Think of the last time you read a scary story or watched a horror film with an audience or looked at an unsettling painting. The Gothic reaches out and takes hold of us in a way that other genres do not. It is also an excellent teacher for confronting and processing fear.
The Gothic had been part of my emotional makeup since I first saw The Nightmare Before Christmas as a kid, and it has only become even more inextricable to my identity as time has passed. My PhD hadn’t started out ultra-Goth, though. It originally focused on doubles and Doppelgängers in a broader sense – so while Jekyll/Hyde naturally got a ticket to the show, its original band mates were Dostoyevsky’s The Double, and a couple of Isaac Asimov’s robots. It was only through exploring instances of doubling in literature and folklore (clones, fetches, and evil twins) that the Gothic began to grow in my mind as an ideal space in which to interrogate criminality, responsibility, and identity using the double as a prism.
This book started out as my PhD thesis, and I was always keen to turn it into a book because I wanted to be in conversation with the writers whose work I was invoking. To be part of that great, ongoing Gothic conversation about the mysteries of the human mind, was too alluring a chance to pass up. I wanted to give the monograph a tighter historical focus, narrowing in on the close of the nineteenth century: a time which saw the release of Jekyll and Dorian, coupled with significant changes in criminal law and related disciplines of psychoanalysis, psychiatry and criminology. I cut up my Frankenstein chapter and turned it into an article for the Journal of Law and Society (more on How I Did It here). For the monograph, I subbed in a pretty great replacement: Dracula, of whom I was a longtime fan and first-time chronicler.
How did I do the research and what further research is needed in this field?
Most of the heavy theoretical, methodological stuff was carried out during the PhD. Writing the monograph was primarily a case of revisiting the sources, reshaping the work into something new with the spirit of the original, and bringing in a new double (Dracula). Most of the new research I conducted was about Dracula, working out where and how he fit into and expanded on the methodology I had developed in the thesis. I also revisited a number of the key cases I discuss in the book, particularly the recklessness cases, to get a stronger sense of the people involved in them and the principles they laid down.
I also knew that I wanted to develop a typology of Doubles fiction. This typology is neither closed nor conclusive: as I say in the book, it is a jumping-off point. But conceptualising it helped me fill a gap that I found while writing my PhD: it seemed to me that there were lots of different doubles in fiction, but no real sense of the various purposes and functions they serve in a given narrative. It’s what makes the figure so fascinating, so flighty, and so frightening: that they can appear in many different guises, for many different reasons. There is no one way to wrap up a double’s narrative arc. Ironically, no two are ever quite the same.
Although the book focuses on literary doubles, the number three is an equally important figure for me here. The book is structured around three novels, three areas of criminal law, and also builds its typology around three ‘modes’ of literary double: firstly, the double as revelation; secondly, the double as disruption; and thirdly, the double as union (or synthesis). These are not mutually exclusive and indeed all three examples of doubles examined in the book touch on all three ‘types’ (particularly when you start looking into adaptations and reimaginings of the source material).
The first mode is double as revelation. The double in these tales arrives in a character’s life because there is something that they must discover or which cannot admit to themselves. Think of Jekyll and Hyde, where we learn that Hyde is the valve which allows Jekyll to release long-repressed (but never named) desires. A double may also show the protagonist what they are not, as with Dostoyevsky’s beleaguered clerk Golyadkin Sr., whose self-concept is shaken by a man who looks and sounds exactly like him but who has the confidence and popularity that he lacks.
The second mode is double as disruption. We see this in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), when – spoiler alert! – we realise that the Adelaide we have been watching has been the original Adelaide’s ‘Tethered’ Doppelgänger all along. Her double quite literally ‘stole’ her life. She instantiates the fear of many Doppelganger narratives: the fear of being replaced someone who looks and sounds like you. It’s a fear that goes back at least as far as Dostoyevsky, and can be seen also in Dracula, where the titular count swoops into the lives of Jonathan, Mina and company and disrupts their previously-stable conceptions of morality, sexuality, and reality.
The third mode is double as union. This means the disparate selves that make up the ‘doubled’ self fuse and synthesise. This is less prevalent in early Gothic narratives through to the late-Victorian revival, as one or both characters involved in the ‘double’ relationship tend to cop it by the final page. But modern reimaginings often culminate in self-acceptance and synthesis. We see this, for example, when Marvel’s Dr Bruce Banner (Jekyll’s spiritual successor) works alongside his alter ego Hulk (his ‘Hyde’ side) as a founding member of the Avengers, a team of superheroes tasked with saving the world. The first tantalising example of double as union, I suggest, can be found in Dracula, in which protagonist Mina (though restored to a mortal human life by Dracula’s destruction), essentially absorbssymbolically takes on his power and status as a new kind of vampire altogether.
I would love to see scholars challenge, expand on, and disrupt this typology in future work. To bring it to bear on other areas of law, other genres and modes of literature and film, and explore the visual, psychological, and legal manifestations of doubleness across disciplines. Over the last year or so in particular we are seeing lots of media that features doubles, twins and ‘shadow selves’, such as Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17. These stories draw on doubling to examine feelings of disenfranchisement and oppression, ideology and identity. We are also seeing a new wave of Gothic adaptations: Dave Eggers’ Nosferatu, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. We reach for the Gothic when we are scared, at individual, collective, and global levels.
As for further research, Gothic is, perhaps fittingly, no angel. As progressive and subversive as many of its modes and stories are, it is a product of its time and culture. It is bound up with colonialist and Imperialist ideas, and contains regressive stereotypes relating to race, gender, class and disability. Law is a multiform, many-headed monster – and yet at the same time it can be a beacon of truth, justice, and freedom. It is marked by duality: in this way, law is its own double. And we need to keep interrogating law and Gothic – even, and perhaps especially, when it frightens us.