Read Online A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley - Free Book Online
Authors: Lucy Worsley
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achieved by the newspapers, as one of the chief ways that people consumed murder was through print.
The easiest and cheapest way to find out about murder was the broadside. This very simple kind of newspaper, often just one piece of paper, was printed on one side only. It lay just within the financial reach of even the working man or woman.
Though only just. The rise in prosperity and living standards that one could have expected the Industrial Revolution to provide for everybody in Britain from the eighteenth century onwards failed to filter down to the workers until about halfway through the nineteenth century. The 1840s were known as ‘the Hungry Forties’ and it’s no surprise that in the first few decades of the 1800s Britain teetered on the edge of riot and disorder. The people who provided the manpower to operate the new factories and cities found themselves being employed in new ways, but still living in the old squalor and poverty.
The notion that a man’s wages could support a stay-at-home wife and family would only really hold true from the 1850s onwards. Until then, low-paid urban workers lived in crowded conditions, ate poorly, and often, when times were hard, dipped temporarily into criminal pursuits such as thieving or prostitution. When times were good, they enjoyed watching cockfights, betting on prizefights, or attending melodrama at the huge and illegal theatres of east London.
Despite their low and precarious standards of living, these people had higher standards of literacy than their agricultural forbears. Exactly how many of them could read is difficult to ascertain, but in 1840, 60 per cent of the people getting married were able to signtheir own names in the parish register. This figure – a very basic indicator of writing skills – had remained the same for the previous hundred years. As historian Rosalind Crone tells us, reading was taught
before
children moved on to writing, leading us to believe the figure for readers must have been much higher.
The beginning of the nineteenth century also saw a great increase in the educational opportunities available to the children of working people. There were Sunday Schools, and National Schools, many of them set up by evangelists who promoted reading skills alongside new and unconventional forms of religion.
It also seems very likely – if hard to prove – that the range and variety of cheap printed materials now becoming available to these people spurred them on to read more. For example, the hugely popular
Penny Magazine
, covering topics from art, history and society, and illustrated with attractive engravings, sold 200,000 copies a week by 1832. If you consider that each copy must have been passed on among friends and neighbours, it probably had a readership of about a million.
Broadsides, the basic way in which you could read about current affairs, developed out of a tradition of scurrilous, subversive and sometimes even radical pamphlets, which had long kept up a commentary of catcalls on the doings of the rich and respectable. By the nineteenth century, though, broadsides were dwelling more and more often on violent crimes like murder. In some ways this seems paradoxical, because the number of executions was in decline. The historian V. A. C. Gatrell, however, argues that as hangings became rarer, they became more relished as not-to-be-missed events, and therefore caused more significant spikes in sales.
A ‘stunning good murder’, as it was called, would be covered by the broadsides in a certain predictable way. The first reports of the crime would appear, briefly, on a quarter-sheet of paper, or the smallest possible edition of this particular form of journalism. Soon, bigger half-sheets would appear, with more details of the crime itself, and also of its investigation. The climax would be the day of the execution, when a proper ‘broadsheet’, a whole piece of paper, would be printed, summarizing everything so far, plus an
The easiest and cheapest way to find out about murder was the broadside. This very simple kind of newspaper, often just one piece of paper, was printed on one side only. It lay just within the financial reach of even the working man or woman.
Though only just. The rise in prosperity and living standards that one could have expected the Industrial Revolution to provide for everybody in Britain from the eighteenth century onwards failed to filter down to the workers until about halfway through the nineteenth century. The 1840s were known as ‘the Hungry Forties’ and it’s no surprise that in the first few decades of the 1800s Britain teetered on the edge of riot and disorder. The people who provided the manpower to operate the new factories and cities found themselves being employed in new ways, but still living in the old squalor and poverty.
The notion that a man’s wages could support a stay-at-home wife and family would only really hold true from the 1850s onwards. Until then, low-paid urban workers lived in crowded conditions, ate poorly, and often, when times were hard, dipped temporarily into criminal pursuits such as thieving or prostitution. When times were good, they enjoyed watching cockfights, betting on prizefights, or attending melodrama at the huge and illegal theatres of east London.
Despite their low and precarious standards of living, these people had higher standards of literacy than their agricultural forbears. Exactly how many of them could read is difficult to ascertain, but in 1840, 60 per cent of the people getting married were able to signtheir own names in the parish register. This figure – a very basic indicator of writing skills – had remained the same for the previous hundred years. As historian Rosalind Crone tells us, reading was taught
before
children moved on to writing, leading us to believe the figure for readers must have been much higher.
The beginning of the nineteenth century also saw a great increase in the educational opportunities available to the children of working people. There were Sunday Schools, and National Schools, many of them set up by evangelists who promoted reading skills alongside new and unconventional forms of religion.
It also seems very likely – if hard to prove – that the range and variety of cheap printed materials now becoming available to these people spurred them on to read more. For example, the hugely popular
Penny Magazine
, covering topics from art, history and society, and illustrated with attractive engravings, sold 200,000 copies a week by 1832. If you consider that each copy must have been passed on among friends and neighbours, it probably had a readership of about a million.
Broadsides, the basic way in which you could read about current affairs, developed out of a tradition of scurrilous, subversive and sometimes even radical pamphlets, which had long kept up a commentary of catcalls on the doings of the rich and respectable. By the nineteenth century, though, broadsides were dwelling more and more often on violent crimes like murder. In some ways this seems paradoxical, because the number of executions was in decline. The historian V. A. C. Gatrell, however, argues that as hangings became rarer, they became more relished as not-to-be-missed events, and therefore caused more significant spikes in sales.
A ‘stunning good murder’, as it was called, would be covered by the broadsides in a certain predictable way. The first reports of the crime would appear, briefly, on a quarter-sheet of paper, or the smallest possible edition of this particular form of journalism. Soon, bigger half-sheets would appear, with more details of the crime itself, and also of its investigation. The climax would be the day of the execution, when a proper ‘broadsheet’, a whole piece of paper, would be printed, summarizing everything so far, plus an
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