Victorians Loved a Good Murder

Victorian aficionado and British historian Judith Flanders begins her book on murder with some wise words from Thomas De Quincey: “Pleasant it is, no doubt, to drink tea with your sweetheart, but most disagreeable to find her bubbling in the tea-urn.” Even more enjoyable, though, he surmises, is to read about someone else’s sweetheart bubbling away. As Flanders demonstrates in her book, the Victorians loved to read about murder, and the newspapers took great pains to give the public what they wanted; even “prosperous, middle-class readers were avid for crime stories.” Indeed, murder so captured the public imagination that stories of dastardly crimes dominated popular entertainment in all its guises—from plays to poems and even the races, where greyhounds and horses were named after famous felons. Given the success of Flanders’s book in the U.K. and other recent histories like it (Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, for example), it would also appear that the tastes of modern audiences are similarly inclined.