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, 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. 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.
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Praise for “The Invention of Murder”
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 célèbres will appeal to devotees of true crime and detective fiction alike.
Publishers Weekly (Starred review)
‘This is much more than a compendium of famous crimes. As such books as The Victorian House and Consuming Passions have demonstrated, Flanders’s knowledge of the period is both wide and extraordinarily deep. She writes incisively and often with dark wit. Best of all, she has a wonderful ability to make connections and to show us familiar sights from unexpected angles. All of these qualities are displayed to the full in The Invention of Murder.’
Independent (full review)
‘Judith Flanders displays a profound understanding of the Victorian age, encyclopaedic knowledge of crime and criminals, and the popular reactions towards both. Further, she presents it with a sly, wry humour that is a perfect complement to the subject. Dare I say it would be a crime not to read this book?’
Donna Leon
‘an entertaining excursion into the Victorians’ taste for murder…The cast is full of swindlers and forgers and other doubtful characters’
The Telegraph
‘Flanders has written a book rather like one of the great, rambling Victorian novels that she discusses, though most readers will find her work a lot easier, and a lot more fun […] the sheer sumptuousness of Flanders’s book leaves the reader wanting still more’
Clive Emsley, BBC History Magazine (full review)
‘Flanders’s book is more than a catalogue of crimes … it builds into an alternative history of the Victorian age, its narrow, purposeful focus providing a means of seeing, from an oblique perspective, terrain which might previously have seemed familiar.’
Jonathan Barnes, Times Literary Supplement (full review)
‘Judith Flanders has produced a compelling study of how crime, and crime prevention, emerged as a popular obsession in 19th-century Britain, and came to dominate its literature …The Invention of Murder is mesmerizing.’
Charlotte Gray, Globe and Mail (full review)
‘…part social history, part literary history, and part penny-blood itself. In the fine tradition of its subject it both has its cake and eats it. Yum. Strychnine’
Sam Leith, Spectator (full review)
‘Flanders brings to her writing a vivid storyteller’s and nicely understated gallows humour […] More important though, and far more impressive, is her tenacity in stripping away the gaudy layers of folktale and legend around the period’s most notorious murders and revealing how often these inventions obscured lives of heartbreaking ordinariness.’
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Telegraph (full review)
‘…plenty of gruesome detail, but also a dry humour… The Invention of Murder is a valuable and well-researched account of Victorian society in Britain and its growing fascination with the ultimate crime. […] All human death is here.’
The Irish Times (full review)
‘This excellent, well-written and hugely well-informed history of Victorian murder will also provide you with plenty of appalling enjoyment of the Fine Art Of Murder.’
Peter Lewis, Daily Mail (full review)
‘[a] remarkable history […] To suggest that the Victorians invented murder may sound like a stretch too far. But like a detective, forensic expert and barrister rolled into one, Flanders has marshalled her clues, scrutinised her evidence and proved her case beyond reasonable doubt.’
Wendy Moore, Sunday Telegraph (full review)
‘a book jam-packed with fascinating details, not only about the Victorian attitude to murder, but much else besides…’
Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday (full review)
‘a penetrating study of the way in which murder can take hold of the creative imagination.’
DJ Taylor, Independent on Sunday (full review)
A study of the roots of our fascination with violent crime fascinates Andrew Motion
Andrew Motion, Guardian (read review)
‘a book that should be on the shelves of every crime novel reader and crime novel writer’
Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday (read full review)
‘The Invention Of Murder is what great non-fiction should be; as erudite as it is entertaining, as gripping as fiction…’
The Scotsman (read full review)
‘Flanders’s engrossing new history book … peeps under the rug at a far less salubrious side of Georgian and Victorian manners…’
Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times (read full review)