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Crime Poetry - Coggle Diagram

- - - - The lack of judicial punishment to Peter from the court emphasises this, and Peter finds himself more punished by nature and himself than by society which turns a blind eye to the working class.
        
        He kills three before being ostracised from society
        
        The judge even says "free thou art now," highlighting the reluctance of society to enforce legal punishment, creating the condition that Peter merely isolate HIMSELF as punishment. This is reminiscent of the Georgian legal system which often made individuals/ victims solve and investigate their own crimes. Crabbe criticises the inadequacy and negligence of the Georgian penal system, which enables further crimes to develop. (Peter's murdering of 3).
        
        "much they suspected, but little they proved"
        
        indicates society was perfectly capable of legally punishing Peter, as well as being suspicious of his crimes. The negligence of society to serve justice results in the death of three, as they perpetuate his crime further.
      - Society is also to blame as they are the reason the boys are thrown out of the overpopulated workhouses and carelessly placed in Peter's callous hands. Their fates are sealed by the roles of class structure and the ills of society as they face life in the dire conditions of the workhouses and subsequently when they are no longer of use, to Peter.
        
        "the slave-shop"
        
        "workhouse clearing men"
      - Peter Grimes has an innate desire to free himself from the restricting and oppressive conventions of society: the rules of religion and the constraints of class structure, which imposes a "life laborious" onto Peter just like his father. It is a ceaseless cycle, and Peter's sheer determination to avoid this leads him to reject the traditional conventions and follow a drastically immoral and unorthodox way of life: murdering his father, ("with a sacrilegious blow" symbolising his denouncing of religious constraints), and his murdering of his young apprentices. Although the boys have done no wrong to Peter, he desires to subject a "feeling creature" "to his power," alluding to the powerless stature those in the working class are subject to, and the injustices of society, which create such an intense desire in Peter to harm innocent people to feel a sense of superiority reflects the hopelessness and injustices of both society and class structures.
- - - - Wilde further revokes the severity of all crimes in the poem through the notion of the collective experience of prisoners. Although Wooldridge is the sole prisoner to be so heavily mistreated in the poem as he is killed and his corspe laughed at, and refused to be repented, however, all prisoners are treated like animals, and made to tramp around endlessly in circles. They are also dehumanised by not being recognised by their names, and rather as their cell numbers.
        E.g., Wilde originally published the poem under the alias 'C.3.3,' as that is what he was referred to in his imprisonment.