It’s not deep lit crit, or a totally in depth micro-history, but there’s interesting stuff and it’s entertainingly written. A very early contribution was 'The Adventures of Susan Hopley, or Circumstantial Evidence' of 1841 in which the heroine solves a murder and then there was 'The Female Detective' and 'Revelations of a Female Detective' by Andrew Forrester and WS Hayward, both books starring a professional heroine who was employed purely to solve crimes. The public interest in murder was at its height and they devoured such offerings. Ever since the Ratcliffe Highway Murders caused a nation-wide panic in Regency England, the British have taken an almost ghoulish pleasure in 'a good murder'. This fascination helped create a whole new world of entertainment, inspiring novels, plays and films, puppet shows, paintings and true-crime journalism - as well as an army of fictional detectives who still enthrall us today. A Very British Murder is Lucy Worsley's captivating account of this curious national obsession. It is a tale of dark deeds and guilty pleasures, a riveting investigation into the British soul by one of our finest historians.

A Very British Murder - Penguin Books UK

Spencer, Charles (26 August 2007). "Cavalier:ataleofchivalry,passionandgreathouses,byLucyWorsley". The Independent on Sunday . Retrieved 24 September 2013. Worsley is Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces but is best known as a presenter of BBC Television series on historical topics, including Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency (2011), Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: A 17th Century History for Girls (2012), The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain (2014), A Very British Romance (2015), Lucy Worsley: Mozart’s London Odyssey (2016), and Six Wives with Lucy Worsley (2016).Related Posts In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile by Dan Davies → Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness by Lisa Appignanesi → Did She Kill Him?: A Victorian Tale of Deception, Adultery and Arsenic by Kate Colquhoun →

A Very British Murder: The Story of a National Obsession by

If you are interested in Crime, both as fiction and as reality, especially in how it affects the public psyche, then you will certainly find a lot to appreciate here. The latest book by popular historian and British television presenter Lucy Worsley is A Very British Murder: The Story of a National Obsession (2013), which details, in about 80, 000 words, Britain's remarkable fascination with murder in fact and fiction since around 1800 into the mid-twentieth century. It is the companion volume to a 2013 three-part British television program. Worsley has published a number of books, many guides to houses and the like. Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (2011) is her most recent work on history. In 2014, BBCBooks published her book, A Very British Murder, which was based on the series. [23] I've been dipping in and out of this one as I like to do with Non Fiction and as a reader interested in true crime and indeed crime fiction this was a great little read. As the government’s national archive for England, Wales and the United Kingdom, The National Archives hold over 1,000 years of the nation’s records for everyone to discover and use.Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Old_pallet IA19364 Openlibrary_edition Worsley’s book is stuffed with interesting insights into our love of crime, although sometimes the pacing can be a little uneven, no doubt because of its inception as a television programme. A chapter each on Christie and Sayers, but none on Marsh, seems slightly strange. However, as a guilty pleasure or a pleasant pastime, murder removed from reality still thrills us (one in three books sold today is a crime novel), and Worsley captures this bloody love affair very well.” Owen, Pamela (22 September 2013). "AVeryBritishMurder:Howwebecamehookedonmorbidmysteries". The Mirror . Retrieved 24 September 2013. Lucy Worsley has set out to trace the roots of the British obsession with murder – as consumers, rather than participants. She makes the case that the fascination with murder corresponded to the increasing urbanisation of Britain during the nineteenth century which, because neighbours no longer knew each other as they had done in a more rural age, meant that murders could be much harder to detect. And what could be more thrilling than knowing that a murderer might be on the loose? Combine that with the rise of affordable printed material, such as the Penny Dreadfuls that became available during the Victorian era, and suddenly the commercial potential of murder, real or fictional, was huge. Judith Flanders' The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (2010); Rosalind Crone's Violent Victorians (2012); Matthew Sweet's Inventing the Victorians(2001) ; P. D. James' Talking about Detective Fiction (2009); and Julian Symons' Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (1972).