Victorian crime
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Read All About It: Victorian Crime News
Just wanted to share some interesting bits from what I’m reading now: The Art of the English Murder by Lucy Worsley. It’s a very entertaining account of nineteenth-century attitudes towards crime and violence, and the enduring fascination that lawlessness holds for human beings. She traces the relationship between crime and entertainment, from word of mouth gossip to broadsheets (printed accounts of a murderer’s crimes and confessions). Literacy was spreading among the people of Britain, but this didn’t prevent those who couldn’t read from enjoying a vicarious thrill. Often their friends would read the broadsheets aloud, and some street sellers of crime news had interesting ways of enticing their customers. Worsley…
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W.S. Gilbert – Kidnapped!
Sometimes real life imitates art. Or it inspires art. William S. Gilbert’s plots involving stolen babies were inspired by his own life: As a baby, he was kidnapped by bandits. When Gilbert was not yet 2 years old (as the story goes), and a few months before his sister Jane was born in October 1838, his parents were traveling around the Continent and they stopped in Naples, Italy. In Naples, his parents had hired a maid to look after their young son. As the maid and baby were out on a walk, a couple of men approached her and said that the “English gentleman” wanted his child returned to him right…
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30 Victorian Mystery Novel Series to Read Now!
The following books are some of the best Victorian-set historical mysteries that I know about. The books named are the first in each series – the sleuth named appears in all the books. Most are set in Victorian England, but a few are set in the USA and some others (particularly the Sherlock Holmes-related ones) spill over into the Edwardian period. You can read more about them on Goodreads and Amazon. I’ll include links to Goodreads so you can find out more about the ones that interest you. For even more historical mysteries, you can check out this amazingly comprehensive list (just watch out for the pop-ups): http://brerfox.tripod.com/historicalmystery.html Enjoy…
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Victorian Time Travel: H G Wells vs. Jack the Ripper
So on New Year’s Day, I traveled back in time. To be accurate, I watched the 1979 movie “Time after Time,” starring Malcolm MacDowell, David Warner and Mary Steenburgen. It was mind-blowing, being flung 37 years into the past, all the way back to the late 70s. Well, back to the late 1800s as well. In the movie, the late Victorian era is portrayed as gritty and dangerous, the gaslit alleyways hiding the specter of hideous death in the form of disease, deprivation, and Jack the Ripper. H.G. Wells is portrayed not as a fantastic storyteller bur as an actual Victorian inventor who built a working time machine. When his…
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15 Victorian-set Movies and TV shows to Watch
If you’re looking for visual and aural inspiration about the clothing, manners and day-to-day activities of Victorian people, the following movies and TV miniseries will help you! Here are fifteen of my favorite choices. The painting at left is so typical of the Aesthetic period, with the blue and white china, the color scheme, and the young woman’s distinctively pre-Raphaelite eyebrows, that I thought I’d just add it here. 1. North & South (2004 TV mini-series) BBC production starring Richard Armitage and Daniela Denby-Ashe. Based on the novel by Elizabet Gaskell, this is the story of Margaret Hale, a gently-bred parson’s daughter from the pastoral South of England who is…