Pleasant it is, no doubt, to drink tea with your sweetheart, but most disagreeable to find her bubbling in the tea-urn- Thomas de Quincey
Judith Flanders spans the crime of the period, from the body snatching/murdering days of Burke and Hare to the joys of Harriet Lowe and “Sweet Fanny Addams” (two dismemberment victims whose names were used to sell of all things, canned meat), to of course, seeing as this is a book about Victorian crime, the entire chapter on Jack the Ripper. I am reasonably well informed about Jack the Ripper (him, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the Black Death were the three things that made me want to get my degree in English History), and I still learned several new things. (Such as that people blamed his crimes on the recent staging of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; I suppose as there were no video games at the time to blame, people had to look at other entertainment options as scapegoats. Or that several people thought the just punishment shouldn’t be jail, it should be letting the women of Whitechapel at him, a la M or Perfume: the Story of a Murderer.) She also points out how many Victorian men dismembered their wives in an attempt to get rid of them so as to move on to a new tootsie, and how infrequently that worked out well.
This is an incredibly fact-filled book (I filled up six 3×5 note cards front and back with things I found interesting), and I never found it dry or boring. It was also incredibly well-researched, with something I consider a definite plus: her literary tastes aside (more on them later) , I can not tell what her bias is; the book seems to be written in a purely factual way, with no coloring of personal opinion. (Other than, as I said, her taste in literature; and everyone is allowed to have an opinion about that. It’s basically the entire point of this website, isn’t it?) Flanders is one of the good historical authors; she educates without being so dry that you want to drink the Atacama desert for the moisture. She’s written several other books about the Victorian era (including one about Alice Kipling, Rudyard’s wife, and her sisters) that I’ll probably pick up sometime as I wouldn’t mind reading more by her. So if you want a book about true crime, the Victorian Era, or just want to know how truly incestously connected the literary/true crime worlds were (people range from Charles Dickens to John Tenniel, to Herman Melville to Anthony Trollope to Robert Louis Stevenson to Henry Irving to Charles Algernon Swinburne being a Jack the Ripper suspect), I would definitely recommend this book.
26 AUGUST– “Tonight it broke through the Vampire Trap!” (stage diary about a steamer prop)
However, there are a few things I would deduct points for. The end notes aren’t numbered; you have to remember the word on the page to go back and look up the note, though they don’t always line up exactly. Also, the title of book has “Victorian” in title, yet the book starts off with George IV on the throne. (Yes, the book is mainly set during the Victorian era and I’m just being pedantic, but still.) And “only covers what the public was interested in”; does not include either the assassination of a Prime Minister, or seven separate attempts on Victoria’s life, as she says they weren’t that important. (I suppose the public wasn’t too interested in losing a member of the government, or potentially losing a ruler; wow, that’s cold.) And she’s the type of person that uses the word “authoress” (I despise the use of -enne or -ess suffixes), never mind that for a female author she seems to be somewhat dismissive of female authors. But only sometimes, as she calls Mary Elizabeth Braddon an “author”; consistency is truly the hobgoblin of little minds. Flanders tends to write confusingly; I read a few paragraphs several times and they still didn’t make sense. Or when she says a landlord has the same name as his gardener, but not his (the landlord’s) cousin (and yes, I know cousins frequently have different last names, but it still seems odd.) Ping-pongs around chronologically depending on stream of consciousness and method of murder. And boy, does she seem to hate Wilkie Collins with the heat of a thousand suns; she can’t mention his name (and being the Victorian era he’s mentioned a lot) without discussing how much she thinks he’s a hack writer. Meanwhile Charles Dickens, who was paid by the word, is apparently one of the greatest writers to ever exist in the history of literature. On that literary note, I am sorry time travel has not been invented so I could go back and attend the dinner party where Oscar Wilde decided to write The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker decided to write Dracula, and Arthur Conan Doyle decided to write The Sign of the Four; either the literary genius or the rampant egos in that room would make it worth the price of admission.
Still, it’s a worthwhile book to pick up. If for nothing else (and there is so much else), you’ll get this gem:
Even in a size-zero world, I don’t think anyone has defended themselves against a charge of murder by claiming they were too thin to have done it.
