Anderson’s Twisted Words examines the many ways in which torture featured as a tool of public and private governance in mid- and late-Victorian Britain and the British Empire. Anderson draws from critical terrorism studies to argue that the use of torture was not an extreme and anomalous practice that contravened liberal ideals of citizenship but rather a “state-sanctioned, physical or mental means of compulsion that [was] inflicted to elicit a specific response” from victim and perpetrator alike (5). She interweaves literary analysis with investigations of British-government reports to build her case, focusing on the many bodily and sensory experiences of those who suffered torture and those who inflicted it. At its core, the book argues that the use and experience of torture in the Victorian world was ordinary and normative, not a barbarous anomaly.
The book begins with a reading of Victorian martyrological novels. Anderson posits that this genre reflected...