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Victorian Murderesses investigates the politics of female violence in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897). The controversial figure of the murderess in these four novels challenges the assumption that women are essentially nurturing and passive and that violence and aggression are exclusively male traits. By focusing on the representations of murder committed by women, this book demonstrates how legal and even medical discourses endorsed Victorian domestic ideology, as female criminals were often locked up in asylums and publicly executed without substantial evidence. While paying close attention to the social, economic, judicial, and political dynamics of Victorian England, this interdisciplinary study also tackles the question of female agency, as the novels simultaneously portray women as perpetrators of murder and excuse their socially unacceptable traits of anger and violence by invoking heredity and madness. Although the four novels tend to undercut female power and attribute violence to adulterous women, they are revolutionary enough to deploy female characters who rebel against male sovereignty and their domestic roles by stabbing their rapists and even killing their newborns. Victorian studies on gender and violence focus primarily on female victims of sexual harassment, and real and fictional male killers like Dracula and Jack the Ripper. Victorian Murderesses contributes to the field by investigating how literary representations of female violence counter the idealisation of women as angelic housewives.
Riveting combination of true crime and social history examines a dozen famous cases, offering illuminating details of the accused women's backgrounds, deeds, and trials. "Vividly written, meticulously researched." — Choice.
The Victorian belief that women were the ‘weaker sex’ who were expected to devote themselves entirely to family life, made it almost inconceivable that they could ever be capable of committing murder. What drove a woman to murder her husband, lover or even her own child? Were they tragic, mad or just plain evil? Using various sources including court records, newspaper accounts and letters, this book explores some of the most notorious murder cases committed by seven women in nineteenth century Britain and America. It delves into each of the women’s lives, the circumstances that led to their crimes, their committal and trial and the various reasons why they resorted to murder: the fear of destitution led Mary Ann Brough to murder her own children; desperation to keep her job drove Sarah Drake to her crime. Money was the motive in the case of Mary Ann Cotton, who is believed to have poisoned as many as twenty-one people. Kate Bender lured her unsuspecting victims to their death in ‘The Slaughter Pen’ before stripping them of their valuables; Kate Webster’s temper got the better of her when she brutally murdered and decapitated her employer; nurse Jane Toppan admitted she derived sexual pleasure from watching her victims die slowly and Lizzie Borden was suspected of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe, so that she could live on the affluent area known as ‘the hill’ in Fall River, Massachusetts.
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores Victorian representations of femininity in fairy tales and sensation novels by authors such as George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens. In the clash between fantasy and reality, these authors create a new type of realism that exposes the normative constraints imposed to contain the female body, and illuminates the tensions underlying the representation of the Victorian ideal.
Gender, Crime, and Murder in Victorian England seeks to provide a comprehensive examination of the notorious Mannings' ‘Bermondsey murder’, and its wider implications in Victorian criminal narrative and popular culture. Exploring the ongoing textual afterlife of Maria Manning, including significant literary contributions by Charles Dickens through his characters Mademoiselle Hortense and Madame Defarge, this volume illuminates representations both echoed and challenged in mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of gender, sexuality, class, nationality, religion, and criminality. This volume also examines the five largely forgotten cases of female homicide from the same year and the imagined discourse perpetuated in fictional personifications. Utilising a wide breadth of literary and historical research, this volume provides readers with a thorough understanding of the various cultural implications of crime and gender in the Victorian period to be read, remembered, and reinterpreted today. Located simultaneously in the fields of feminist, historical, and literary criticism, this volume is invaluable to students of nineteenth-century literature and culture, and researchers with an interest in criminology and media culture.
Why did certain domestic murders fire the Victorian imagination? In her analysis of literary and cultural representations of this phenomenon across genres, Bridget Walsh traces how the perception of the domestic murderer changed across the nineteenth century and suggests ways in which the public appetite for such crimes was representative of wider social concerns. She argues that the portrayal of domestic murder did not signal a consensus of opinion regarding the domestic space, but rather reflected significant discontent with the cultural and social codes of behaviour circulating in society, particularly around issues of gender and class. Examining novels, trial transcripts, medico-legal documents, broadsides, criminal and scientific writing, illustration and, notably, Victorian melodrama, Walsh focuses on the relationship between the domestic sphere, so central to Victorian values, and the desecration of that space by the act of murder. Her book encompasses the gendered representation of domestic murder for both men and women as it tackles crucial questions related to Victorian ideas of nationhood, national health, political and social inequality, newspaper coverage of murder, unstable and contested models of masculinity and the ambivalent portrayal of the female domestic murderer at the fin de siècle.
"Superb... Flanders's convincing and smart synthesis of the evolution of an official police force, fictional detectives, and real-life cause célèbres will appeal to devotees of true crime and detective fiction alike." -Publishers Weekly, starred review In this fascinating exploration of murder in nineteenth century England, Judith Flanders examines some of the most gripping cases that captivated the Victorians and gave rise to the first detective fiction Murder in the nineteenth century was rare. But murder as sensation and entertainment became ubiquitous, with cold-blooded killings transformed into novels, broadsides, ballads, opera, and melodrama-even into puppet shows and performing dog-acts. Detective fiction and the new police force developed in parallel, each imitating the other-the founders of Scotland Yard gave rise to Dickens's Inspector Bucket, the first fictional police detective, who in turn influenced Sherlock Holmes and, ultimately, even P.D. James and Patricia Cornwell. In this meticulously researched and engrossing book, Judith Flanders retells the gruesome stories of many different types of murder in Great Britain, both famous and obscure: from Greenacre, who transported his dismembered fiancée around town by omnibus, to Burke and Hare's bodysnatching business in Edinburgh; from the crimes (and myths) of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper, to the tragedy of the murdered Marr family in London's East End. Through these stories of murder-from the brutal to the pathetic-Flanders builds a rich and multi-faceted portrait of Victorian society in Great Britain. With an irresistible cast of swindlers, forgers, and poisoners, the mad, the bad and the utterly dangerous, The Invention of Murder is both a mesmerizing tale of crime and punishment, and history at its most readable.
Murder—a dark, shameful deed, the last resort of the desperate or a vile tool of the greedy. And a very strange obsession. But where did this fixation develop? And what does it tell us about ourselves?Our fascination with crimes like these became a form of national entertainment, inspiring novels and plays, prose and paintings, poetry and true-crime journalism. At a point during the birth of the modern era, murder entered the popular psyche, and it’s been a part of us ever since.The Art of the English Murder is a unique exploration of the art of crime—and a riveting investigation into the English criminal soul by one of our finest historians.
First published in 1978, this multi-disciplinary study embraces a wide selection of topics ranging from family intimacy and authoritarianism to the family as a unit for launching social reforms. Subjects treated in the nine essays include the Victorian attitude to childbirth, the role of the nanny, the power of the upper-class paterfamilias, the pattern of family work and fertility, and incest among the Victorian working classes. The book is introduced by a critical survey of the state of family history and the need for new studies. From the essays, the Victorian family emerges as both a refuge from society and a springboard into it, and as an important unit for the study of the repression and exploitation of women and children in Victorian society. This book will be of interest to those studying Victorian history and society.
McLaren develops a historiographical survey on Victorian attitudes toward sexuality and morality, and their relation to violence as he describes the story of Dr. Thomas Cream. Cream murdered prostitutes and women seeking abortions in England and North America between 1877 and 1892.