Violent Victorians: Popular entertainment in nineteenth-century London

by Rosalind Crone

We are often told that the Victorians were far less violent than their forebears: over the course of the nineteenth century, violent sports were mostly outlawed, violent crime, including homicide, began to decline, and bodily punishments, including hanging, were increasingly hidden from public view. They were also much more respectable, and actively sought orderly, uplifting, domestic and refined pastimes. Yet these were the very same people who celebrated the exceptionally violent careers of anti-heroes such as the brutal puppet Punch and the murderous barber Sweeney Todd.

Violent Victorians tackles this incongruity head on, drawing attention to the wide range of gruesome, bloody and confronting amusements and pastimes, patronised by ordinary Londoners, that did not conform to the values of respectability which we so often claim characterised Victorian culture. From the turn of the nineteenth century, graphic, yet orderly, 're-enactments' of high-level violence, with foundations in fact and fiction, flourished in travelling entertainments, penny broadsides, popular theatres, cheap instalment fiction and Sunday newspapers. This book explores the ways in which violent representations siphoned off much of the actual violence that had hitherto been expressed in all manner of social and political dealings, thus providing a crucial accompaniment to schemes for the reformation of manners and the taming of the streets, while also serving as a check on the growing cultural hegemony of the middle class.

Violent Victorians will appeal to scholars in a range of disciplines, from history and literature, to cultural studies, media studies and criminology, as well as anyone with an interest in the Victorian period or in the function of violent entertainments.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Research, True Crime, 19th Century, Academic

320 pages, Paperback

First published April 10, 2012

Reviews

[Janice Liedl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fabulous work of cultural history that tackles all sorts of popular Victorian entertainments from melodramas to newspapers and more. If you want to know what ordinary Londoners saw, enjoyed and explored in their off hours, Crone's book is a great introduction that lays out not only the major types of popular culture available, but also how they intersected with the world of elites, with the burgeoning regulation of a respectable-minded middle class and the occasionally crass economic engines that drove the markets of mass culture.

I learned a lot from this book, particularly regarding theatrical history (even the origins of the term "legitimate theatre"). There's a great focus on the gruesome, bloody and sensational stories that drove a lot of popular culture in the era, such as the story of Sweeney Todd and a host of real life atrocities that fuelled a reality-obsessed culture that will read in familiar ways to our reality-television modernity.

Great research, great analysis and great writing - a history that will appeal to readers who want to know more about Victorian culture, Victorian crime, Victorian class history and London's changing media experiences of the time.

[sophus · Rating 3 out of 5]

I promise I don’t like murder