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This paper examines the historical context of the publication and reception of three dramas related to the murder of a gardener‘s daughter, Mary Ashford in Sutton Coldfield in 1817. George Ludlam‘s The Mysterious Murder was countered by a play called The Murdered Maid whose anonymous author is likely to have been a local clergyman. Both plays were locally written and published. When the case reached a national arena, John Kerr‘s Presumptive Guilt provided a London-based comment on the case. The paper examines the relationship between these metropolitan and provincial print cultures and the way in which dramatic form was used as a mode of mediation between public and legal discourse.
Murder Capital is a historical study of suspicious deaths, unexpected deaths whose circumstances required official investigation, in mid-twentieth-century London. Suspicious deaths – murders in the family and by strangers, infanticides and deaths from illegal abortions – reveal moments of personal and communal crisis in the social fabric of the city. The intimate details of these crimes revealed in police investigation files, newspaper reports and crime scene photographs hint at the fears and desires of people in London before, during and after the profound changes brought by the dislocations of the Second World War. By setting the institutional ordering of the city against the hidden intimate spaces where crimes occurred and were discovered, the book presents a new popular history of the city, in which urban space circumscribed the investigation, classification and public perceptions of crime.
3 Concini’s murder The Mercure françois reported that Concini was killed while resisting arrest for treason. He was killed in the courtyard of the Louvre at about ten o’clock on the morning of Monday 24 April 1617 by Nicolas de l’Hôpital, marquis de Vitry, a captain in the royal bodyguards. Concini, the maréchal d’Ancre, was the favorite of the Queen Mother, who was still acting as if she were regent for the young king, although he had come of age three years earlier.The newspaper account quoted the brash, unpopular Concini as saying, “I’ll bite off the fingers
London lies today under the spell of a great terror. A nameless reprobate – half-beast, half-man – is at large, who is daily gratifying his murderous instincts on the most miserable and defenceless of classes of the community. There can be no shadow of a doubt that … the Whitechapel murderer, who
From 1922 until 1964, 292 women were prosecuted for murder. Of these, only 22 were convicted on this charge, and of these 22, only one was executed. Of the total number prosecuted, the case involved an infant victim in 253 cases, a child in 5 cases and in 34 cases an adult. Table 1.1 gives an overview of prosecutions by year and victim status. Through the 1920s, the 1930s and the 1940s, the most remarkable trend was the stability of the numbers of women before the courts on a murder charge. The Infanticide Act
150 11 The murder of Gromek: theme and variations Tomas Williams M any of Alfred Hitchcock’s most memorable cinematic moments are inseparable for audiences from the music which accompanied them. Be it the piercing violins and the piercing of Marion Crane in Psycho (1960), or instances in which musical motifs played an integral part of a film’s narrative, such as the tune whistled in The 39 Steps (1935), or the Albert Hall sequences in both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956), music was of utmost importance to Hitchcock, and has been
another major aristocratic wedding, sponsored and funded by King James. But to get to that moment on 26 December, the participants had to pass through a messy divorce and an even messier murder in the Tower. Participating in the festivities for this wedding of Robert Carr and Frances Howard, Lennox had much reason to think about and recall the events that constituted the narrative trajectory of 1613, as
Democratic Party that they kicked him out years before he turned his mind to murder. Still, the scattered applause directed at the would-be assassins by ex-Communards, Bakunin’s anarchists and some IWMA members was enough for Stieber to feel confident that, despite the evidence, some form of conspiracy lay behind these seemingly unrelated acts of terrorism. 2 Stieber’s assumption exemplified a wider problem with counter-terrorist thinking in the years after the Commune. What the Berlin police, the Paris police
22 Incest, penance and a murdered bishop: the legend of Frederic of Utrecht Bram van den Hoven van Genderen The title of this contribution refers to the early-eleventh-century Passio Friderici.1 In this saint’s life bishop Frederic of Utrecht (fl. c. 822/26–34) is murdered by a couple of minions of Empress Judith, wife of Emperor Louis the Pious, out of revenge for the bishop’s accusations of incest and adultery against her. Moreover, incest was involved in a double sense. Judith’s presumed lover, Count Bernard of Septimania, was, according to the Passio, also
3 From scaffold culture to the cult of the murderer P orta bl e th e atr e s a n d pu ppet shows were not the only entertainments from the pre-industrial world to survive and flourish in the nineteenth-century metropolis. As long as public execution persisted in London so did scaffold culture. However, changes in penal law, the shifting interests, motivations and abilities of audiences, and the development of new technologies meant that while some expressions of this culture fell into decline, others received new life, and more still came into existence