A Very British Murder

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It was not clear what each chapter was intended to deal with and subjects often seemed to reappear in the middle of a chapter that appeared to be about something else, connections were not made clear. From Jack the Ripper to the cosy crimes of the Golden Age, renowned historian Lucy Worsley explores the evolution of the typical British murder. A Very British Murder investigates this phenomenon, revisiting notorious crimes like the Ratcliff Highway Murders, which caused a nation-wide panic in the early nineteenth century, and the case of Frederick and Maria Manning, the suburban couple who were hanged after killing Maria’s lover and burying him under their kitchen floor. This is not really about crime, as such, although many crimes are discussed - it is about how, especially since the nineteenth century, the British began to "enjoy and consume the idea of a murder.

In this book, which accompanies her TV series, historian Lucy Worsley explores the nation’s interest in both true crime, and its fictional representations, between 1800 and 1946. Worsley’s book is stuffed with interesting insights into our love of crime, although sometimes the pacing can be a little uneven, no doubt because of its inception as a television programme.

After discussion of Arthur Conan Doyle's, Charles Dickens' and Wilkie Collins' contributions to the fictional portrayal of detectives, the book considers the Four Queens of Crime of the interwar period, which has become known as the Golden Age of crime fiction. An interesting point made by the author was that the unsolved 'Jack the Ripper' murders followed close on the opening of a stage adaptation of Robert Louis Stephenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.

The book begins and ends with discussion of an essay - the first being, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" by Thomas De Quincey and finishes with an appraisal of "The Decline of the English Murder" by George Orwell.If you are interested in Crime, both as fiction and as reality, especially in how it affects the public psyche, then you will certainly find a lot to appreciate here. Since this book is about our obsession with crime (mostly true but also fictional), the emphasis here is not on the various cases. The Art of the English Murder by Lucy Worsley is written to accompany a BBC television series on which she is a presenter. If this book does nothing else it will introduce you to some classic crime fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth century and give you an understanding of how, and why, it exists. In this book she looks at how murder became entertainment; involving sensational journalism, the theatre, tourism and detective fiction.

Combine that with the rise of affordable printed material, such as the Penny Dreadfuls that became available during the Victorian era, and suddenly the commercial potential of murder, real or fictional, was huge. This makes an excellent introduction to the morbid fascination with real-life murder that gripped nineteenth century Britain. Lucy has also written numerous other books, including Cavalier: A Tale of Chivalry, Passion and Great Houses. It’s wonderful to see and listen to someone present a program with such ease, naturalness, and with a sense of humour like you have. This was an interesting exploration into the fascination of the English with murder and real life crime and of the development of the mystery genre in English literature.

While this book is a history of the English murder mystery, Worsley's style is not pedantic, but engaging with some humor along the way and informative of new knowledge and insights gained by this reader. The book opens in 1811 with the famous Ratcliffe Highway murders in London and the public outcry that followed when it became evident that there was no mechanism to investigate such a terrible crime effectively. In the early nineteenth century, violent death was the new obsession that would come to dominate the British entertainment industry. As this thrilling true crime documentary on BBC Select concludes, historian Lucy Worsley looks at the Golden Age of crime fiction at the start of the 20th Century.