The Art of the English Murder by Lucy Worsley

 

Reviewed by Jeanne

Historian Worsley sets out to do an exploration of famous murders and the literature they inspired.  She begins by telling the reader about Thomas De Quincey’s 1827 essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” which purports to be the thoughts of a member of the imaginary “Society of Connoisseurs in Murder” who explain what makes a good murder and rates them according to their qualities.  De Quincey is actually commenting on a cultural phenomenon of the time: murder as something exciting and entertaining.

Worsley pinpoints the start of this fascination with the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway murders.  A married couple, their three-month-old son, and their apprentice were discovered brutally murdered in their shop/home; twelve days later, another merchant, his wife, and a serving girl were slaughtered.  Public interest was intense; Worsley says that it created a new class of journalism, murder reporting.  It seemed that the British public could not get enough of such stories.  Newspapers, cheap publications with vivid (and often invented) details of sensational stories, and even puppet shows pandered to this new form of entertainment.

During the course of the book, she discusses how writers helped this obsession and how over time, real cases were given fictional treatments.  All this was to help satisfy the public appetite for crime.  Early writers such as Wilkie Collins helped pave the way for later authors, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.

Along with the development of this murder mania, England was beginning to develop a police force.  At first these fledgling officers of the law were viewed with deep suspicion as busybodies and unreliable, but writers helped to turn the tide of public opinion.  Charles Dickens was one of the early proponents of the police; he wrote glowing articles about the new detective branch and even used real officer Inspector Field as a model for his Bleak House character Inspector Branch.

Readers of both true crime and fictional crime will find much of interest in this book, written with Worsley’s breezy charm.

Note: There was a TV series hosted by Worsley on this topic under the title “A Very British Murder.”