Gender, Crime, and Murder in Victorian England

Gender, Crime, and Murder in Victorian England
Author: Anna Kay
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2023-09-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000933075

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.

Victorian Murderesses

Victorian Murderesses
Author: Mary S. Hartman
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2014-06-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0486780473

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.

Victorian Murderesses

Victorian Murderesses
Author: Naz Bulamur
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2016-02-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1443888672

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.

The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime

The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime
Author: Michael Sims
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2011-01-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101486171

A wonderfully wicked new anthology from the editor of The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime It is the Victorian era and society is both entranced by and fearful of that suspicious character known as the New Woman. She rides those new- fangled bicycles and doesn't like to be told what to do. And, in crime fiction, such female detectives as Loveday Brooke, Dorcas Dene, and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard are out there shadowing suspects, crawling through secret passages, fingerprinting corpses, and sometimes committing a lesser crime in order to solve a murder. In The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, Michael Sims has brought together all of the era's great crime-fighting females- plus a few choice crooks, including Four Square Jane and the Sorceress of the Strand.

Men of Blood

Men of Blood
Author: Martin J. Wiener
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2004-01-12
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0521831989

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Criminal Conversations

Criminal Conversations
Author: Judith Rowbotham
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814209734

"The essays in this book set out to explore the ways in which Victorians used newspapers to identify the causes of bad behavior and its impacts, and the ways in which they tried to "distance" criminals and those guilty of "bad" behavior from the ordinary members of society, including identification of them as different according to race of sexual orientation. It also explores how threats from within "normal" society were depicted and the panic that issues like "baby-farming" caused." "Victorian alarm was about crimes and bad behavior which they saw as new or unique to their period - but which were not new then and which, in slightly different dress, are still causing panic today. What is striking about the essays in this collection are the ways in which they echo contemporary concerns about crime and bad behavior, including panics about "new" types of crime. This has implications for modern understandings of how society needs to understand crime, demonstrating that while there are changes over time, there are also important continuities."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Black Widows of Liverpool

The Black Widows of Liverpool
Author: Angela Brabin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2009-03
Genre: Murder
ISBN: 9781874181606

This text tells the story of the murderous activities of an infamous killing syndicate operating in the heart of the Victorian city. The money-making enterprise involved a complicated 'web' of ordinary women from a poor area of Liverpool who conspired to insure & then poison their victims for the insurance pay out.

Death at the Priory

Death at the Priory
Author: James Ruddick
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2002
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780802139740

Details the unsolved murder of successful attorney Charles Bravo, a cruel man who tormented his wife Florence, in a mystery that paints a portrait of Victorian culture and one woman's fight to exist in this repressive society.

Binding Men

Binding Men
Author: Lois S. Bibbings
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2014-03-26
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1135309698

Binding Men tells stories about men, violence and law in late Victorian England. It does so by focusing upon five important legal cases, all of which were binding not only upon the males involved but also upon future courts and the men who appeared before them. The subject matter of Prince (1875), Coney (1882), Dudley and Stephens (1884), Clarence (1888) and Jackson (1891) ranged from child abduction, prize-fighting, murder and cannibalism to transmitting gonorrhoea and the capture and imprisonment of a wife by her husband. Each case has its own chapter, depicting the events which led the protagonists into the courtroom, the legal outcome and the judicial pronouncements made to justify this, as well as exploring the broader setting in which the proceedings took place. In so doing, Binding Men describes how a particular case can be seen as being a part of attempts to legally limit male behaviour. The book is essential reading for scholars and students of crime, criminal law, violence, and gender. It will be of interest to those working on the use of narrative in academic writing as well as legal methods. Binding Men’s subject matter and accessible style also make it a must for those with a general interest in crime, history and, in particular, male criminality.