One was the fact that many Victorian trials were farcical. You can read a review of the whole volume here. Rather than going through the whole book systematically, I thought I’d just pass on a few things that particularly struck me as I read it. Crowds still gathered even then, to watch the black flag being hoisted to indicate the end of a life.
These grisly spectacles carried on until 1868, after which time they were held inside prisons out of the public gaze. And then of course there were the public hangings, regularly attended by tens of thousands of people. The detective story had its birth in this era too, fuelling public fascination with crime and detection. High profile murders spawned a host of bizarre cultural phenomena in the Victorian age, including stage melodramas and puppet shows in which crimes were re-enacted for the public, cheap publications called penny-dreadfuls, and the infamous “broadsides” -cheap unregulated newspapers which were the ultimate in gutter-press, reporting the gory details in grotesquely lurid details. Murder casts a particularly garish and disturbing light on Victorian culture, as it was in that period that violent crime became a form of entertainment, which it remains today with shows like CSI. This isn’t just one of those “true crime” shockers – although there is plenty of shocking material in it, as will become obvious – it’s about the insight that crime gives into how society works. The latest is a hefty tome by Judith Flanders, entitled The Invention of Murder, a detailed, scholarly, meticulously researched but highly readable discussion of “how the Victorians revelled in death and detection”. I’ve been travelling more than usual recently and have been taking the opportunity to catch up with a stack of books I bought but haven’t had time to read.
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