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A review by annacttn
The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders
2.0
2.5 stars.
I feel like the author’s entire thesis—how the Victorians reveled in death and detection and created modern crime—is severely undermined by all the instances the author gives of the Victorians copying French sensationalist plays and stories concerning murder. Much more interesting was the author’s recount of the modern police’s formation in England and how, at its core, it has always been an tryannical, incompetent force. To quote, “...to many of the city’s population, the police were not simply preventing crimes, but enforcing new middle-class norms of behavior on every class, a pattern emerging across the country. In 1843 The Manchester council charged the police with enforcing laws against dogfighting and bear-baiting; they were also expected to prevent Sunday drinking. In Leeds, the council wanted the police to give evidence against all who ‘profane [sic] the Lord’s day’. Changing expectations were turning what had been really unpleasant actions—or even merely working-class pastimes—into criminal ones. Hawking without a license, musical performances in unlicensed premises, being drunk and disorderly, perpetrating low-level violence—all this was now not simply undesirable, but illegal. In the slang of the time, the police were now ‘blue drones’, ‘blue idlers’, ‘blue locusts’—they were parasites, living off the working classes” (149).
I feel like the author’s entire thesis—how the Victorians reveled in death and detection and created modern crime—is severely undermined by all the instances the author gives of the Victorians copying French sensationalist plays and stories concerning murder. Much more interesting was the author’s recount of the modern police’s formation in England and how, at its core, it has always been an tryannical, incompetent force. To quote, “...to many of the city’s population, the police were not simply preventing crimes, but enforcing new middle-class norms of behavior on every class, a pattern emerging across the country. In 1843 The Manchester council charged the police with enforcing laws against dogfighting and bear-baiting; they were also expected to prevent Sunday drinking. In Leeds, the council wanted the police to give evidence against all who ‘profane [sic] the Lord’s day’. Changing expectations were turning what had been really unpleasant actions—or even merely working-class pastimes—into criminal ones. Hawking without a license, musical performances in unlicensed premises, being drunk and disorderly, perpetrating low-level violence—all this was now not simply undesirable, but illegal. In the slang of the time, the police were now ‘blue drones’, ‘blue idlers’, ‘blue locusts’—they were parasites, living off the working classes” (149).