The Great Train Robbery

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of pedophilia.

Nearly every aspect of The Great Train Robbery demonstrates Victorian concepts of crime, from the background of the perpetrators and their reasons for committing crimes to how those crimes should be punished. Crichton displays a particularly intense focus on discerning which crimes are punished and which are overlooked. He also describes in great detail the various characters that make up the criminal underworld. Crichton’s overarching assessment is that it is a mistake to believe that crime doesn’t pay, and he uses his novel to demonstrate that those who commit crimes often benefit enormously.

Crichton describes Victorian England as being characterized by a persistent faith in the inevitability of societal progress. The people of the time commonly believed that this progress as manifested in new technologies such as trains, would inevitably lead to a reduction in crime. The key impediment to this process, in the Victorian view, was the criminal underclass of petty thieves, sex workers, and others who were forced to live on the margins of society and made their living with underhanded methods. This dynamic is shown through the actions of the main co-conspirators as well as their various associates, such as the “swell” Teddy Burke who pickpockets from the wealthy.