Theatre of the macabre

Sam Leith marvels at Victorian Britain’s appetite for crime, where a public hanging was considered a family day out and murder became a lurid industry in itself

On my satellite TV box, murder is being committed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I could probably live out the rest of my life watching the three CSIs, Bones, Criminal Minds and Waking the Dead without ever once breaking for a cup of tea or having to set the video to record.

Is this a new thing? Sky Plus may be, but the obsession with murder? Not a bit. It all kicked off with the Victorians, as Judith Flanders’s winningly cheerful new book (aimed squarely at The Suspicions of Mr Whicher market) sets out to demonstrate. From the early 19th century onwards, the British public thrilled to tales of murder, detection, confession and execution — garlanded then as now with bogus pieties and tenuously drawn social morals.

No sooner had a murder caught the public imagination than it became an industry, with every stratum of society catered for. Newspapers were crammed with tutting copy, while lurid broadsides and penny-bloods (later known as penny-dreadfuls), melodramas and sensation novels, ballads, puppet-shows, waxworks and reliquaries, magic-lantern presentations and Staffordshire pottery figurines proliferated. Racehorses, greyhounds, and in one case a ship, were named after murderers.

A German traveller was advised by an Englishwoman that if he wanted to see ‘our popular festivals … go to Newgate on a hanging day.’ Courtrooms became theatres and executions were a family day out, catered by roving snack-vendors selling biscuits and peppermints named after the condemned. When, in the case of the poisoner William Palmer, the defence moved to have the proceedings in another county where he’d be more likely to receive a fair trial, the loudest objections raised were by Staffordshire’s ‘victualling interest’.