In this era of orange-suited victims beheaded or buried alive en masse by jihadist fanatics, Michael Knox Beran would like to take us back to an earlier era of shocking horrors, the “classical age of murder” that reigned, as he sees it, in England in the quarter century from 1811 to 1837. He calls upon court testimony, contemporary news accounts, and especially the writings of the Romantic prose masters Thomas De Quincey and Thomas Carlyle to reexamine, in all their ghastliness, a series of murders that transfixed, delighted, and terrified the English public of the day.
And what is a “classical murder”? One that is not clinical or bloodless, Beran says — not death by poison, for instance. A classical murder carries with it a strong whiff of “deviltry” and mystery that cannot be explained away by means of forensics or social science. The word “conditions” came into vogue, Beran tells us, in the age of Queen Victoria. Murderers, increasingly accepted as an unfortunate fact of life in the newly crowded metropolises of Europe, were supposedly driven to their deeds by the deplorable conditions in which they lived: inadequate plumbing, poor hygiene and diet, a lack of schooling. (Beran labels this the “Whig theory of crime.”) Experts in various fields could study and remedy these conditions, the theory went. Acts of Parliament could be passed to improve the physical and mental health of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens; thus treated with compassion, potential killers would turn a deaf ear to the demonic whispers that urged them toward depravity.
Comments