The Invention of Murder
How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime
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- €8.99
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- €8.99
Publisher Description
“We are a trading community, a commercial people. Murder is doubtless a very shocking offence, nevertheless as what is done is not to be undone, let us make our money out of it.” Punch.
Murder in nineteenth-century Britain was ubiquitous – not necessarily in quantity but in quality. This was the era of penny-bloods, early crime fiction and melodramas for the masses. This was a time when murder and entertainment were firmly entwined.
In this meticulously researched and compelling book, Judith Flanders, author of Consuming Passions, takes us back in time to explore some of the most gripping, gruesome and mind-boggling murders of the nineteenth-century. Covering the crimes (and myths) of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper, as well as the lesser known but equally shocking acts of Burke and Hare, and Thurtell and Hunt, Flanders looks at how murder was regarded by the wider British population – and how it became a form of popular entertainment.
Filled to the brim with rich source material – ranging from studies of plays, novels and contemporary newspaper articles, A Social History of Murder brings to life a neglected dimension of British social history in a completely new and exciting way.
About the author
Judith Flanders is the author of the bestselling ‘The Victorian House’ (2003) and ‘Consuming Passions’ (2006), as well as the critically acclaimed ‘A Circle of Sisters’ (2001) – a biography of Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynder and Louisa Baldwin – which was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. She is a frequent contributor to the ‘Daily Telegraph’, the ‘Guardian’, the ‘Evening Standard’, and the ‘Times Literary Supplement’. She lives in London.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Social historian Flanders (Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England) does a superb job of demonstrating the role that the press and fiction writers played in shaping the British public's attitudes toward crime during the 19th century. She captures perfectly the appeal of bloody fiction and macabre news stories: "Crime, especially murder, is very pleasant to think about in the abstract: it is like hearing blustery rain on the windowpane when sitting indoors." But it's unlikely that the British thought of murder much at all during the first decade of the 19th century in 1810, there were a mere 15 murder convictions in England and Wales combined. The public's perception of random lethal violence changed with the horrific 1811 Ratcliffe Highway killings, brutal mass murders in London's East End that coincided with technological advances that enabled swifter and cheaper production of broadsheets describing the crimes. Flanders's convincing and smart synthesis of the evolution of an official police force, fictional detectives, and real-life cause c l bres will appeal to devotees of true crime and detective fiction alike. B&w illus. throughout.
